The Sauce with Maya Gurantz and Rebecca Cohen
A culture & politics podcast where we drink cocktails and ruin the stuff you love.
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Who is Pete Hegseth, how in hell did he end up Secretary of Defense, why is he renaming it the Department of War, and what were he and Trump doing calling 600 top generals into a room for a Big Boy Pep Talk? Very Special Guest John Armenta–an army vet and communications professor who studies masculinity and patriotism in VetBro culture, explains it all to us.
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Why were flags at half mast for a grifting podcaster? In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, Rebecca and Maya break down his life and the aftermath of his death–along the way noting flagrant political opportunism, right wing abuses of “free speech”, and key differences between various terminally online young male subcultures.
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Bob Dylan is many things. A basic bitch isn’t one of them. We welcome brilliant lifelong Dylan-ologists Elizabeth Nelson and Jeff Jackson to pull apart what Dylan means, why music biopics suck, and everything James Mangold missed in the most recent filmic attempt to contain Dylan’s legacy, the nostalgia-fest A Complete Unknown.
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Rebecca and Maya watched Fit For TV, the recent streaming Netflix docu-series on The Biggest Loser, and talk fat-shaming, abuse as motivation, fake therapeutic breakthroughs after which nothing changes, and why it takes a decade and a documentary for us to publicly acknowledge that the thing that seemed so fucked up back then was, indeed, fucked up.
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Will the Epstein Files put the final dagger into the rise of fascism? Rebecca and Maya are here to ruin any hopes you have. We’ve known for DECADES that Donald Trump was a creepy-buddy with mysterious financier-pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Is this going to trigger a MAGA-Trump breakup? Might the administration be hoist on its own conspiracy theory petard? Or will this all turn out to be the Mueller Report Redux?
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Maya and Rebecca ride the down elevator into Apple TV’s hit Severance. Identity. Work-life balance. Bullshit jobs. Setting good boundaries. The toxic rot and unremitting evil at the very heart of Capitalism. Is this show hitting the BIG GESTALT BUTTON of THIS MOMENT?
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As Trump deploys National Guard and Marines to LA in the face of widespread civilian protests against ICE raids, we talk Martial Law and autocratic use of force (and drink!) with Dr. Carrie Lee, an expert in civil-military relations who concisely breaks down the specifics of what we should be looking for in this Administrations’s language and actions: why to worry, why to be hopeful, and what to do next.
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For years, right wingers have loudly decried supposed attacks on free speech. Yet now those free speech warriors are strangely silent as Trump punishes universities and ICE arrests students for expressing dissent. Maya and Rebecca explain how this turnabout is not simple hypocrisy, uncovering how right wing discourse about free speech paved the way for the totalitarian suppression which was their goal all along.
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With Trump and Musk trampling American democracy, why aren’t elected Democrats doing more to stop the carnage? Maya and Rebecca piece together why the opposition party can’t seem to get its shit together and draw unexpected insight from the Drake and Kendrick Lamar feud to figure out what Democrats should be doing differently,
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Let’s ruin the Great American Novel. Maya and Rebecca are joined by Artist (and longtime Sauce listener!) Marcus Kwame Anderson and writer David F. Walker to discuss their new book– Big Jim and the White Boy, an audacious (and inspired) retelling of Huck Finn. Listeners may remember Marcus and David from the last time we spoke about their Eisner Award-winning The Black Panther Party: A Graphic Novel History. In this episode, we dig into the question of what gets revealed when difficult histories get told by different main characters.
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How are we going to survive the fascist takeover of our government? Through a delicate balance of activism and avoidance. Maya and Rebecca introduce a new ongoing feature, BREAD AND CIRCUSES with Cirque du Soleil’s insane Michael Jackson show, and unpack what it teaches us about how to make a spectacle out of a very bad man. Wait, I thought we were trying to do denial?
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After a nice long stretch of denial, Maya and Rebecca dip our toes back into political waters with Very Special Guests Guy Branum and Grace Freud, who bring queer and trans perspectives to the transphobic messaging the Trump campaign relied on so heavily this past election season. Why was it so effective? How did it connect to anti-immigration messaging? Is there any good way to respond to these right wing demonologies?
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Welp, America has chosen fascism. But the rejection of liberal democracy didn’t start with Donald Trump; it’s been taking shape for decades. Maya and Rebecca sort out how things went so horribly wrong, both this election cycle and over the last 40 years of American politics. Is our political system broken? And what do we do now?
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So we’re all freaking out in this final stretch before Election Day 2024. Rebecca and Maya revisit our episode on the Trump Cult from four years ago, recorded right before Biden’s inauguration, which we then thought—perhaps naively—would be the last one we’d have to do. We listen to it again and ask: why are we still here?— finding answers in Trump’s Nazi Rally at Madison Square Garden, Steve Hassan’s BITE Model of authoritarian control, and the basement incels who’ve grown up and now gotten jobs in the Republican Party.
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On the one hand, a demented felon on a cross country tour, swaying and screaming nonsense into the void. But on the other hand–wait, HOW IS THERE ANOTHER HAND? Rebecca and Maya assess Trump’s increasingly fascist language, rapidly deteriorating coherence, and try to wrap our heads around how this can even be close. And the JD Vance Self Owns JUST KEEP COMING.