Hey folks—I know not everyone gets a chance to catch Rush Hour live, so I’m going to start including a link to each episode right here in the blast. That way, if you missed the show or just want to hear it again, it’s only a click away – or check out my thoughts below.

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There is something fascinating happening inside the Democratic Party right now, and Tuesday’s Rush Hour gave us a pretty good look at it.

The old Democratic establishment is increasingly being challenged by a younger, louder, unapologetically socialist wing that doesn’t merely want to move the party left. It thinks the old Democrats aren’t left enough.

And if you want a preview of the argument taking place inside that party, you could hardly find a better example than Hasan Piker.

We opened the show with Piker once again lecturing Americans about how little we supposedly understand about our own country and the world. This time he was defending Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, calling them “lions” and becoming furious at Americans who dare describe Castro as a butcher and a murderer.

According to Piker, Americans just don’t understand the history. Oh, I think we understand enough. We understand that Cuba went from being promised a workers’ paradise to becoming a communist dictatorship from which generations of people have risked their lives to escape. We understand political imprisonment. We understand the suppression of dissent. And we have a pretty good idea why people don’t usually build homemade rafts to flee toward communist countries.

But what interests me about Piker isn’t merely Piker. It is his proximity to a political movement that keeps insisting these ideas are outside the Democratic mainstream while some of the biggest progressive politicians in America continue appearing in the same ideological ecosystem. That’s why I jokingly called him the unofficial spokesman for the Democratic Party.

And then Florida supplied the perfect illustration of the problem. Primary day brought Democratic incumbents face to face with challenges from the Democratic Socialist wing, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s battle with Elijah Manley in a newly drawn district with a substantial Black population.

This one had enough contradictions to keep Rush Hour supplied for a week. Manley attacked Wasserman Schultz as an establishment politician who had been in Washington for more than two decades and argued that the district deserved new representation. But he went considerably further, declaring it “unacceptable” that one of the South’s remaining Black opportunity districts might be represented by a white Democrat.

Even Hasan Piker jumped into the race, accusing Wasserman Schultz of “carpet-bagging” into the district and criticizing the Congressional Black Caucus for not rallying behind Manley.

So now you’ve got progressives arguing that a longtime Democratic congresswoman should step aside partly because of her race.

I would merely like somebody to send me the latest rulebook. The rules change so frequently that I can’t keep up. The same people who lecture the rest of America endlessly about racial identity suddenly find themselves using racial identity against one another when control of a congressional seat is on the line.

But Manley’s comments on illegal immigration were even more revealing. He argued that Americans aren’t frightened by illegal immigrants committing crimes and said policy shouldn’t be based on “anecdotes” or “one-off incidents.” That phrase caught my attention. Anecdotes. That’s an awfully sterile word when the “anecdote” is somebody’s dead son, daughter, mother, father, husband or wife.

The argument isn’t that every illegal immigrant is a criminal. Of course not. The argument is that when somebody enters this country illegally and then commits a violent crime, the crime was preventable in the most basic sense: the perpetrator had no legal right to be here in the first place.

You can debate immigration policy. You can debate enforcement priorities. You can debate statistics. But don’t tell the grieving family that their loved one is a “one-off incident.” People aren’t statistics when they’re alive, and they don’t become anecdotes when they’re dead.

There was another delicious bit of political irony Tuesday involving Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Minnesota, a state with sanctuary policies and officials who have spent years resisting federal immigration enforcement, now wants Texas to honor federal extradition requirements in a case involving an ICE operative.

Perhaps the legal argument is completely correct. Courts will decide that. But the irony deserves its own marching band. Suddenly federal law is federal law.

When Washington demands cooperation on immigration enforcement, we’re told about states’ rights, local discretion and sanctuary protections. When Minnesota wants something from Texas, somebody dusts off the Constitution and discovers the Supremacy Clause. Welcome to American politics, where federalism frequently depends upon whose ox is being gored.

We also spent some time on ABC and Disney suing the Trump administration over the FCC’s scrutiny of broadcast licenses.

Broadcasters using public airwaves aren’t operating in exactly the same environment as somebody publishing a newspaper or standing on a street corner. Broadcast licenses come with public-interest obligations. Broadcasters shouldn’t behave as though their licenses are royal property handed down from Mickey Mouse himself.

ABC is entitled to make its case. The FCC is entitled to conduct lawful oversight. And if the evidence ultimately shows ABC satisfied its obligations, fine. What I reject is the notion that asking questions about how enormously powerful media institutions use public airwaves is somehow automatically illegitimate. For decades conservatives have watched supposedly objective institutions become increasingly comfortable presenting one ideological worldview as simply “the news.”

George Stephanopoulos didn’t descend from Mount Olympus as a neutral observer of American politics. He worked in the Clinton White House. The View isn’t exactly holding emergency meetings trying to figure out how to get more MAGA voters represented at the table. And yet the attitude from much of establishment media remains: How dare anybody question us?

That attitude may be one reason alternative media has exploded in the first place. Americans got tired of being told that bias only exists on the other guy’s channel.

And that brings us right back to Piker, the Democratic Socialists and the political fight happening inside the Democratic Party. The establishment spent years moving left while insisting conservatives were imagining it. Now a generation further left is showing up and telling establishment Democrats to get out of the way.

Debbie Wasserman Schultz is suddenly the insufficiently progressive establishment. Think about that for a minute.

The political left spent years telling America that Republicans were exaggerating when we warned where some of these movements were heading.

Now the socialists aren’t hiding. They’re talking openly about capitalism, race, immigration and American power in ways that would have been politically radioactive not very long ago. And they believe momentum is on their side.

I think Americans ought to pay attention. Not because every Democrat is Hasan Piker. They aren’t. Not because every progressive believes Fidel Castro was a hero. They don’t.

But because political movements should be judged partly by which ideas are moving toward the center of their coalition and which ideas are being pushed out.

Something is moving inside the Democratic Party. Florida gave us another snapshot of it Tuesday.

And as always, there was much more packed into the fastest hour in American media — the ABC-FCC fight, Minnesota versus Texas, the strange spectacle of judges and outside groups attempting to dictate executive-branch decisions, immigration, Florida’s Republican contests and even a moment to remember ZZ Top drummer Frank Beard.

That’s Rush Hour.

Politics, culture, hypocrisy, a little music and occasionally me wondering aloud whether everybody in Washington has lost his mind.

If you only have time to read, that’s the heart of Tuesday’s show.

But if you want the soundbites, the reactions, the things that made Carlos look at me sideways and all the stuff that doesn’t quite translate onto a page, listen to the full edition of Bo Snerdley’s Rush Hour on the Red Apple Podcast Network.

An hour goes quickly when the news is this crazy.

Rush Hour airs Monday through Friday and moves quickly through the day’s hottest political stories, breaking developments and media absurdities. It is the fastest hour in American media because there is always more happening than the legacy media has time—or desire—to explain.

And if you want my daily stack of news and commentary delivered directly to you, sign up for The Daily BS here. It is free, arrives daily and, unlike a New York Democratic event, questions are not removed for exceeding ideological capacity.