Alex goes through the week's political events, and looks forward to next week, both here and across the Atlantic, with special guest Zoe Williams.

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Zoe: “I don’t want to get lectures from the right of manifesto promises, when the 2019 manifesto was insulting in its lack of detail. I mean what possible impact did ‘levelling up’ have? Does anyone even know what it meant? And yet lectures are what we’re going to get. And I don’t want to roll over to the idea that all politicians are the same - there is no conceivable comparison.”  

Zoe: “Everything [about the coming Budget] is about ‘don’t expect too much; don’t think we can help’ and that just strikes me as an incredibly sad and dangerous place to start. If you’re swept in on a wind of change and hope and the first thing you say is: ‘abandon hope’.”

Alex: “Imagine living there. Imagine being a woman in America right now. Imagine being a muslim woman or a trans woman. This is existential stuff.”

Zoe: “I do think there’s a kind of misogynistic groupthink [in polling], which just doesn’t take the things that women take seriously, seriously.”

Alex: “What makes [the Republican attack on women’s reproductive rights] doubly frightening is that it doesn’t feel random. It’s strategic. Because if you buy into notions like the Great Replacement Theory, it follows - although rarely articulated - that you need white women to stay home and have lots of babies. And that doesn’t happen with their consent.”

LINKS:

Vanity Fair interview with Stuart Stevens.

ABC report of Musk's contact with Putin.

The Bulwark on Washington Post spiking its endorsement of Harris.

NPR on the LA Times pulling its endorsement of Harris.

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With Naomi Smith, Alex Andreou, and Kenny Campbell - in cahoots with Sandstone Global.

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