You Don't Have to Yell

As with our puzzling aversion to the metric system and our lack of enthusiasm for soccer, America’s two party system makes it an outlier in the world. While most democracies have large center-left and center-right parties that garner most of the votes and seats in government, they also have viable...

Last week’s episode of YDHTY featured Christian Onuoha, who was undertaking the herculean task of running as a Republican in New Jersey’s 6th congressional district - one of the more heavily gerrymandered districts in one of the more heavily gerrymandered states in the nation. For this week’s...

New Jersey's 6th congressional district is an artfully carved piece of territory that sits like a balloon animal just to the southwest of Staten Island. Whether it's carved that way because Democrats have been the historical majority in that state or whether Democrats have been the historical...

Since the end of World War 2, Soviet style communism has served as the antithesis to the freedom and prosperity promised through American capitalism. It's been such an effective boogeyman, that politicians still bring it up, despite the fact it hasn't existed for the past 30 years. Soviet-era...

Depending on your partisan bent, Nathaniel Lane, Chair for the Green Party of Ohio, bears many descriptions. To Republicans, he's a socialist, Antifa sympathizing tree-hugger hell bent on destroying the economy with a radical green agenda. To Democrats, he's an embittered idealist hell bent on...

In February, I kicked off Black History Month speaking with Nikki Brown of the University of Kentucky for episode 27 of YDHTY (full recording below). We began the conversation discussing Forrest Gump - title character of the novel and then film by the same name. In the novel, Gump’s mother explains...

On October, 7, 1780, Brigadier General Isaac Gregory led a bayonet charge into a numerically superior Loyalist militia in the Battle of Kings Mountain. After a string of humiliating defeats by the British, the battle boosted the morale of Patriot militias, being noted by Thomas Jefferson as the...

(The following post was also published as a bonus episode to the You Don't Have to Yell podcast, which you can listen to below, on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts)   In 2001, I embarked on what would be a relatively unremarkable career in stand-up comedy, the...

Every decade, the North Carolina General Assembly engages in the process of redrawing the boundaries of the state’s congressional districts, as required by law. Going above and beyond the minimum requirements, the majority party has historically engaged in the almost punitive practice of carving...

At an age when I was asking my mom for guitar lessons, Wacey Alpha Cody - Libertarian candidate for Texas's 11th congressional district - was asking his mom if he could enter the rodeo. Cody paid his way through college riding bucking horses, earning his masters in counseling psychology before...