Burning Down the House
Radio Free Dogpatch
You think we’re shipping the wrong people to Guantanamo? I’m old enough to remember a time when, if some civilian loudmouth waltzed through your front door barking orders, you could kick him in the plums, give him the old heave and also the ho, and get back to whatever it was you were doing before all the bad noise started. Yet somehow, in the Year of Our Lard 2025, we’ve allowed this porcelain pissant from South Africa to start rearranging the national furniture, to say nothing of the org chart, without so much as a “Just who the hell elected you to anything, anyway, Fisheyes?”...
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On Thin ICE
Radio Free Dogpatch
The ICE boyos have brought a chill to Chicago, Aurora, and even the desert Southwest as Jesus Hitler starts making good on his promise of mass deportations. Round up the usual suspects. A little song and war dance for the TV cameras. “Dr. Phil” even got in on the act in Chicago. Shock and awe, baby. It works, for a while. But some folks just don’t take kindly to being shoved around. Soon even the fanboys will find the price of admission to the Dingaling Bros-Barnum & Beelzebozo Circus ("There's One Born Every Minute!) just keeps going up, as honest immigrant workers vanish alongside...
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Howling at an Orange Moon
Radio Free Dogpatch
Blame the Wolf Moon. A vacationing wife. An acid flashback. Whatever. But when I blinked myself awake in the dark on Tuesday morning I had no idea where I was. If dementia runs in your family, as it does in mine, this can freak you right the hell out. But I found it oddly exhilarating. “Where am I? Who knows? Who cares? This is great!" And then I remembered. “Aw, shit. Trumpsylvania.” We're just a few all-too-short days away from the sequel to a movie I never wanted to see in the first place. "Mr. Hyde Goes to Washington" should've been a one-off. But nooooooo. Everything has to be a...
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Highway 666 Revisited
Radio Free Dogpatch
Another Jan. 6 has come and gone. This time we managed to skip the armed-insurrection part of the program, so yay for us. Turns out that when they win a presidential election, The System works. Who knew? Watching Vice President Kamala Harris preside over the certification of the 2024 election results this week sent me careening down Memory Lane, revisiting a night in the sneezer in 1977, a Louis C.K. dramedy from 2016, and the last three pestilential erections. Background music comes from , , , and , all thanks to YouTube. The 2016 dramedy remains available on Louis C.K.'s website. Audio of...
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Doing It Old School, or 'Yeah! Science (Fiction)!'
Radio Free Dogpatch
I always liked science fiction. Science, not so much. Science always seemed rigid and impersonal. But science fiction, or speculative fiction, if you prefer — especially of the apocalyptic variety — spoke to the gloomy bog-trotter in my DNA. So I studied the fiction instead of the science, with predictable results. When it came time for me to go to college, there was only one in the state that would accept me with my miserable GPA. However, I was excused from freshman comp because I was a fool for words, as long as there were no equations to solve. SF seems best to me when the future isn't...
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The Nanofesto: Writing a Wrong
Radio Free Dogpatch
When the John Laws collared their suspect in the CEO assassination he was said to have had in his possession a ghost gun, some fake I.D., and a 262-word "manifesto." By the ghosts of Marx and Engels! That's what I call phoning it in. Except our man didn't use a phone to compose it. Or a laptop. It was handwritten. Whether on papyrus, stone tablets, or a shithouse wall was not made clear. What is abundantly clear, however, is that 262 words do not a manifesto make. And let me tell you why. and both come from YouTube. comes from The police siren, screeching tires, ballpoint scribbling, and...
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The Winter of Our Dissed Content
Radio Free Dogpatch
At The Atlantic magazine, Noah "Fargo" Hawley says too many reporters these days. Meanwhile, in a email from Mother Jones magazine, David Corn warns that the legacy media's value-neutral, highly inaccurate reviews of the various hams auditioning for parts in the Pestilence-Erect's latest play constitutes a form of “sanewashing." Hey, our little purse pooch of a podcast may not lift the biggest leg on the journalistical block, but it dearly loves a good pissing contest. While the big dogs go high we'll squeak in a little squirt down low. The music, "Black Fedora" and "On the Job," and...
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Bigger Even Than I Had Feared
Radio Free Dogpatch
The headline is an inside joke among family and friends, a line of dialogue lifted from the 1978 novel by Thomas McGuane. And now it's the title of a Radio Free Dogpatch podcast, a unsubtle bit of misdirection concerning an oversized orange turd that has proven impossible for a confused and bilious nation to flush. My apologies to Mr. McGuane. Sly and The Family Stone contributed a few seconds of from their YouTube channel. Freesound kicked in , a , an , a , and an And Judge Dredd from YouTube. All the other racket comes courtesy of The Proprietor.
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Orange Julius Seizure
Radio Free Dogpatch
Wherever shalt thou see a man on horseback, there also shalt thou see a horse's ass. And sometimes more than one of them, too. That's Scripture, son! There would be less pearl-clutching in the national media over Orange Julius Caesar doing exactly what we all expected he would do had some button-down editors worn their family jewels to the Big Dance. Alas, they did not, and now they are shocked — shocked! — that a circus needs clowns. and from Freesound. "Out of Step" from Folding chair to the skull from Everything else is the fault of the proprietor.
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Infected, Neglected and Elected
Radio Free Dogpatch
There's nothing like getting the old one-two, a bacterial sock to the snotlocker followed by an electoral blow to the breadbasket. For treatment we visit the witch doctors of , SNL's and that sniffling eejit behind the mic at Infernal Hound Sound. The background music, "Abandoned," comes from
info_outlineThe ICE boyos have brought a chill to Chicago, Aurora, and even the desert Southwest as Jesus Hitler starts making good on his promise of mass deportations.
Round up the usual suspects. A little song and war dance for the TV cameras. “Dr. Phil” even got in on the act in Chicago.
Shock and awe, baby. It works, for a while. But some folks just don’t take kindly to being shoved around.
Soon even the fanboys will find the price of admission to the Dingaling Bros-Barnum & Beelzebozo Circus ("There's One Born Every Minute!) just keeps going up, as honest immigrant workers vanish alongside the bad guys, citizens decline to take their jobs in agriculture, construction, manufacturing, food processing and service industries, and goods and services get more expensive and/or harder to find.
But never fear. We'll be annexing Canada! And Greenland! And the Sudetenland (whoops, wrong fascists, never mind). The Circus will roll on a Road of Bones until the world is under One Big Red White and Blue Tent (handmade by skilled artisans in border internment camps)!
While you await your own personal invitation to assist the authorities with this project (and their inquiries) you might as well listen to the latest All-American Episode of — yes, yes, yes — Radio Free Dogpatch. Could be the last one. You never know who's lending us an ear, or why.
• Technical notes: RFD favors the Ethos mic from Earthworks Audio; Audio-Technica ATH-M50X headphones; Zoom H5 Handy Recorder; Apple's GarageBand, and Auphonic for a wash and brushup.
The trailer theme from "Fort Apache" comes from YouTube, as do Rick's conversations with Major Strasser and Sam in "Casablanca." Bob and Doug McKenzie say "Good day" from SCTV's YouTube page. The drum-heavy martial music (by Gregor Quendel) and “Out of Step” are both courtesy of Zapsplat. The Mescalero Apache tribe's take on a member's run-in with an ICE agent can be found here. The Guardian reports on a Navajo experience. The Associated Press covered immigration raids in Chicago. At The Atlantic Mark Leibovich had some fun visiting Greenland, soon to be our 52nd state. And at the New Republic Matt Ford shredded the pestilential ordure dropped on birthright citizenship.