Sep 4, 2026
Donald Trump has renamed Lake Ontario “Lake America” for federal purposes—but can a president actually rename a place, or only change what the government calls it? Andrew Heaton traces the strange history of who gets to control language, from ancient river names that survived Romans and Normans, to Cardinal...
Jul 10, 2026
Brian Dunning of the Skeptoid podcast returns to The Political Orphanage for a spirited pushback episode on the modern non-profit industry. In a previous conversation, we argued that sprawling tax-exempt organizations can become bloated, unaccountable, and more interested in perpetuating themselves than solving...
Jun 10, 2026
What if your landlord was also your boss, mayor, bartender, and moral hall monitor? This week, Andrew Heaton talks with Brian Brushwood about the strange history of company towns—from industrial utopias to corporate feudalism—and the thin line between benevolent planning and creepy social engineering. Then they...
Jun 3, 2026
Mike is a twenty-year police officer and current sergeant supervising a squad of violent crime detectives. After Andrew’s recent conversation with Naomi Brockwell about surveillance, encryption, and the slow erosion of privacy in the digital age, he reached out to offer respectful pushback from the other side of...
May 27, 2026
“Leftwing” and “Rightwing” don’t mean the same thing anymore–the battle lines are redrawing. The twentieth century was about economics: low taxes or big government. The twenty-first century will be a fight over something else.
Historian and political theorist Stephen Davies joins to discuss his book “The...