The popularity of HGTV house-flipping TV shows can’t be overstated: In the second week of July, HGTV was the fourth highest rated cable network, behind only Fox News, MSNBC and CNN, making it the highest rated entertainment network in the United States. Its most prominent programming: the reliable, risk free formula of home flipping shows. All of these shows—Flip or Flop and its many regional spinoffs, Good Bones, Flipping 101, to name just a few—share a basic formula: house-flippers, usually a family business in the form of a husband and wife team or parent and child with a folksy rapport, buy a neglected house on the cheap—cue zoom-ins on mold, water damage, decaying wood, dust and dead bugs—that’s often in a relatively poor or gentrifying neighborhood.

They then turn it into something they describe as "beautiful", to be sold at a much higher price to, most likely, young white people looking for a "funky" home in an "up-and-coming" neighborhood. But at what cost do these glossy, get-rich-quick reality shows entertain us?  What ideologies do they promote, and how do they erase the working class black and brown families whose housing was condemned, and communities were systemically neglected, before the camera’s even began rolling?

On this episode—our  Season 3 finale—we take a look at these shows to understand how and why HGTV became a glorified commercial for house-flipping and gentrification, examining its indifference to housing instability and its dead-eyed cheerleading of “middle-class” bourgeois aspirationalism, no matter the social cost. 

Our guests are culture writer Ann-Derrick Gaillot and Atlanta-based community organizer Kamau Franklin.

Episode 116: The Pro-Gentrification Aspirationalism of HGTV's House-Flipping Shows

Writer and director Adam McKay (Vice, The Big Short, every movie you quoted endlessly with your homies ~2004-2012) stops by to talk film, the giant sucking memory hole of the Bush presidency, balancing humor with anger, and wrangling with SNL censors. Be on the lookout for a new season of Adam’s Jeffrey Epstein podcast coming up this September.

Chapo Trap House

UNLOCKED: 441 - Orange Julius or Hi-C and Turkey? feat. Adam McKay (7/30/20)

WE ARE BACK -- and laden with information about Ghislaine Maxwell's post-arrest machinations, and new terrible details about her pre-arrest sprees

Episode 90: Docudump

Subscribe today for access to all premium episodes!

www.patreon.com/chapotraphouse

449 Teaser - Felix WILL Move to Minnesota for a Debate

We’re joined by Foreign Exchanges’ Derek Davison and Daniel Bessner to discuss Trump’s troop-disrespecting, Austrian domination of the Balkans, who the REAL losers and suckers are, and the roll of the military in America’s declining empire.

Please subscribe to Foreign Exchanges on substack: https://fx.substack.com/

452 - Sucker-Bait feat. Derek Davison & Daniel Bessner (9/7/20)

Will talks to Jess Scarane, who is challenging incumbent Chris Coons for a U.S. Senate seat in Delaware. They discuss Delaware’s unique importance as a state, the limits of “compromise,” building power for progressive policies, and how to lift voters’ expectations for what they can demand from their politicians.  

Get involved with Jess’ campaign here: https://www.jessfordelaware.com/

BONUS: Will interviews Delaware Senate candidate Jessica Scarane

UNLOCKED SUBSCRIBER EPISODE 81
We are joined by the legal galaxy brains from the ALAB podcast to disrobe the criminals on the Supreme Court, shed light on the dark ecosystem of legislation mills and demystify the perverted institutions of Big Law

UNLOCKED! Episode 81: SCROTUS

This week we figure out why everyone thinks antifa trying to kill smoky the bear. We also talk about a haunted statue of Melania.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/16/world/europe/melania-trump-sculpture-slovenia.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/09/18/scapegoating-antifa-starting-wildfires-distracts-real-causes/

MERCH:
PodDamnAmerica.BigCartel.com

PATREON:
Patreon.com/PodDamnAmerica

West Coast... You're Fired

By now, it's largely taken for granted that country music is a racialized signifier, interchangeable with right-wing politics. And it’s not such an unreasonable generalization: the political currents of twanged and drawled patriotic paeans like Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA," Toby Keith's "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American)," and Brooks & Dunn's "Only In America" leave little to the imagination.

But how, exactly, did this come to be? After all, country music, a descendant of the blues, folk, Tejano, and other genres, with connections to labor organizations like the Industrial Workers of the World and social-justice movements, has historically attracted musicians spanning the political spectrum, and didn’t necessarily emerge from such a staunchly right-wing political tradition.

Rather, popular conceptions of country music have long been deliberately shaped by a series of broader ideological projects. Throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries, conservative politicians and other right-wing forces have exploited the genre to promote illiberalism, racism, revanchist politics, and runaway anti-intellectualism where not giving a shit about the world beyond one’s own cold beer, pickup truck, old lady is not only acceptable, but actively encouraged and flaunted. 

On this episode, we examine how the genre of country music has been wielded as a tool of reactionary politicking in the US, from the machinations of Henry Ford in the 1920s to the Nixon administration’s Southern Strategy in the 1960s and ‘70s to the heady Shock and Y’all days of the Bush years, and how a once working-class tradition became a cultural cul de sac of worn-out tropes and middle-class, white grievance politics.  

Our guest is writer, editor and artist Alexander Billet.

Episode 119: How the Right Shaped Pop Country Music

We're joined by historian and author Aaron Leonard to discuss his book The Folk Singers and the Bureau, which details the rise of the Communist-adjacent folk scene in America alongside the CPUSA, and the intense (and underreported) repression that followed.

Link to buy the book: 
penguinrandomhouse.com/books/651913/the-folk-singers-and-the-bureau-by-aaron-leonard/


Companion playlist by Aaron: 
youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHCUjL6Jr73FNc_ak3MyOV_V-6Khic2u4

Songs: "Root Hog and Die" -- Woody Guthrie
"You've Got to Go Down and Join the Union" -- Pete Seeger
"Song of Choice" -- Peggy Seeger