Common Sense with Chad Law | Political Commentary

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  Flock Cameras, Fetterman and Firefighting Goats | Wacky Wednesday 16.09.2026 36min

  Text the show! A Senate candidate shoots a Flock surveillance camera for a campaign ad. John Fetterman spends the weekend at Rupert Murdoch’s Montana retreat. Diesel reaches a record $6.27 per gallon. Twenty-two states sue over a new green-card rule. And the government finally discovers that goats are surprisingly good at fighting wildfires. Welcome to Wacky Wednesday, where Chad Law digs through the week’s strangest headlines, finds the part everyone else walked past, and delivers the final...
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  The People Warning You About AI Are Already Using It | Tech Tuesday 15.09.2026 37min

  Text the show! Who told Americans to be afraid of artificial intelligence—and what are those people protecting? Washington, Hollywood, and the news media publicly warn Americans about AI while quietly using it themselves. Congressional offices use it to summarize legislation. Movie studios are hiring AI specialists. Journalists increasingly use it for news gathering. The people selling the fear have already decided the technology is useful enough for them. In this episode, Chad examines: &nb...
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  You Don't Hate Capitalism. You Hate This. | Monologue Monday 14.09.2026 44min

  Text the show! Americans still overwhelmingly like free enterprise. So why are they rapidly souring on capitalism? Chad argues that the anger behind America's “cost of life” crisis is real — but we're giving it the wrong name. Housing, healthcare, insurance, prescriptions and utilities consume enormous portions of American household budgets, yet many of these markets fail a basic test of competition: Can you walk away? Can you switch? Can a new competitor enter? And does losing your business...
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  Make America Gay Again: Grindr Goes Down at the RNC | Satire Saturday 12.09.2026 6min

  Text the show! Grindr goes down. The Republican convention comes to town. Coincidence? Dallas is hosting the Republican convention, and reports of problems with Grindr put the city at the top of Downdetector’s map. But Dallas isn’t the first convention city to generate headlines about Grindr activity. Cleveland. Milwaukee. Now Dallas. Ten years. Three cities. One very awkward pattern. Chad has spent years attending conservative conventions as The Last Gay Conservative, carrying a pocket Cons...
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  What the Hell Happened to Jelly Roll? | Satire Saturday 12.09.2026 8min

  Text the show! Country star Jelly Roll lost nearly 300 pounds. Then came the divorce, the Jimmy Kimmel guest-hosting gig, the Trump jokes, the fan backlash—and now the skin-removal surgery. So Chad has a theory: somewhere along the way, somebody accidentally removed part of his soul. The lawsuit isn't real. Everything else in this episode is—and that's the problem. On this Satire Saturday edition of Common Sense with Chad Law, Chad takes on the incredible shrinking Jelly Roll: what happened ...
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  Conservatives Are Wrong About Marijuana | Freedom Friday 11.09.2026 40min

  Text the show! Should conservatives support banning marijuana — or regulate it the same way we regulate alcohol? In this Freedom Friday episode of Common Sense, Chad takes the strongest arguments against marijuana seriously: today's dramatically higher THC potency, addiction and daily use, risks to young people, and the consequences of legalization. Then he asks the question the prohibition argument has trouble answering: If alcohol and tobacco remain legal despite enormous documented harms,...
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  FENTANYL IS DOWN. SO WHY DOES THE DRUG CRISIS FEEL WORSE? | Thursday Special 10.09.2026 40min

  Text the show! 📉 Fentanyl deaths are falling. That's not spin. That's good news. But if America is finally "winning" the fight against fentanyl, why does the drug crisis Americans experience in their neighborhoods still look so familiar? Tonight, Chad introduces THE MONDAY MORNING TEST. Imagine every gram of fentanyl in America disappears at midnight. Nobody ever dies from it again. Now walk outside Monday morning. What's still there? Methamphetamine. Addiction. Encampments. Theft. Public di...
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  THIS WEEK IN ATTENTION-SEEKING: Politics, Protests & the WNBA | Wacky Wednesday 09.09.2026 48min

  Text the show! 🎙️ Somewhere along the way, America started rewarding people for CAUSING THE BIGGEST SCENE instead of accomplishing the mission. This week’s pile of Wacky Wednesday stories proves it. Chad runs eight stories through one simple test: 🎯 DID IT WORK? A 13-year-old inventor turns discarded orange peels into biodegradable seed pods. Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed spoofs Love Island to sell his campaign. A father walking with his six-year-old daughter is accused of traffic...
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  The Lindsay Clancy Trial Exposed a Mental Health Problem Nobody Is Talking About | Monologue Monday 07.09.2026 47min

  Text the show! The Lindsay Clancy trial reignited America's argument over postpartum mental health and access to psychiatric care. Chad thinks we're arguing about the wrong thing. During cross-examination, Clancy's psychiatrist was questioned about testing she did not use—including pharmacogenomic, or PGx, testing. That testimony raises a much larger question: What happens after a patient gets access to mental health care? Because access and quality are not the same thing. In this Monologue ...
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  The Polls Aren’t Wrong. The People Reading Them Are. | Freedom Friday 04.09.2026 47min

  Text the show! 📊 There’s no such thing as a wrong poll. Yeah, I know. Stay with me. A poll is a measurement. It records what a group of people said at a particular moment. A prediction is something else entirely. So when an election doesn't turn out the way television forecasters expected, why do we blame the measuring instrument instead of the people who turned that measurement into a prediction? This Freedom Friday, Chad goes back through the polling “disasters” Americans think they rememb...
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  Tech Companies Skipped One Step. It Cost Them $130 Billion. | Thursday Special 03.09.2026 58min

  Text the show! America is supposedly turning against artificial intelligence. But the numbers tell a stranger story. Americans are adopting AI while simultaneously fighting the data centers being built to power it. Meanwhile, cities are removing Flock license-plate cameras even though evidence suggests the technology can actually help solve vehicle theft. So Chad asks a different question: What if the backlash isn't about the technology at all? In this Thursday Special, Chad traces $130 bill...
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  Oregon Put a Fee on Your Groceries. You Can't See What You're Paying. | Taxation Tuesday 01.09.2026 41min

  Text the show! Oregon put a packaging fee on thousands of companies. There's just one problem: when you buy the product, you can't see what you're paying. And Oregon already knows how to do this differently. Buy a mattress and the recycling fee appears on your receipt. Buy paint and the fee is disclosed. Return a bottle and there's a dime attached to it — a dime that helped Oregon's bottle bill automatically correct itself when return rates fell. Then you get to groceries. Dozens of packagin...
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  Why Beef Prices Keep Rising — And Ranchers Aren’t Getting Rich | Monologue Monday 31.08.2026 53min

  Text the show! Beef is more expensive than ever. So why aren't America's ranchers getting rich? Because here's the part almost nobody tells you: The rancher doesn't really set the price. And neither do you. In today's Monologue Monday, Chad follows the American food system from the meat case backward — through cattle processors, patented seeds, tractor software, poultry contracts, government regulation and the $390 billion Farm Bill. And the same pattern keeps appearing. The farmer owns the ...
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  The $319 Billion Nonprofit Problem Nobody Is Measuring | Sequel Sunday 30.08.2026 42min

  Text the show! The government sends nonprofits roughly $319 billion in taxpayer money. But what exactly are taxpayers buying? Chad starts with homelessness programs and discovers an accountability problem much larger than any one organization: nonprofits and governments frequently measure activity rather than outcomes—and sometimes the available data can't establish whether programs succeeded at all. But this isn't an attack on nonprofits. Private philanthropy already has a powerful accounta...
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  Politicians Should Have to Live Under Their Own Laws | Satire Saturday 29.08.2026 11min

  Text the show! Before pilots fly a plane, they train in a simulator. Surgeons practice before operating. Police officers run scenarios before hitting the street. Politicians? We apparently just hand them the keys to the country. On this Satire Saturday, Chad has one request for the same tech industry that gave us Bluetooth toothbrushes, Wi-Fi egg trays and refrigerators with opinions: build the Politician Simulator. The rules are simple. Politicians enter without their staff, wallet, car, ti...
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  Five People Just Decided What Tires You Can Buy | Freedom Friday 28.08.2026 1t 3min

  Text the show! California’s tire controversy looks like another weird California story. Chad argues it’s something much more important. This episode follows one tire regulation backward through the system that produced it: appointed commissioners, decades-old laws, regulatory modeling, industry stakeholders, appliance standards, rising energy costs, and agencies whose authority can continue long after the political moment that created them disappears. But this isn’t an anti-regulation rant. ...
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  America Can’t Handle Two Truths Anymore | Wacky Wednesday 26.08.2026 37min

  Text the show! When did believing one true thing require pretending another true thing doesn't exist? The Lindsay Clancy trial puts twelve Massachusetts jurors in an almost impossible position: everyone agrees on what happened. The fight is over criminal responsibility and what was happening inside her mind when it happened. Two forensic psychiatrists can examine the same case and reach opposing conclusions — while much of the internet seems absolutely certain. Then Chad follows the sa...
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  Oregon’s Governor Race Is Everything Wrong With Politics | Tuesday Special 25.08.2026 43min

  Text the show! Oregon’s governor race may be one of the cleanest examples of what has gone wrong with American politics. Two candidates have roughly 70 pages of actual policy plans between them. Yet the campaign keeps drifting toward Washington, D.C., national political enemies, and issues increasingly removed from the job Oregon’s next governor will actually have to perform. So Chad asks a much simpler question: Are Oregonians better off? This Tuesday Special builds a scoreboard from Oregon...
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  Jason Arday Had Two Jobs. Cambridge Only Told Him About One. | Monologue Monday 24.08.2026 49min

  Text the show! Jason Arday was hired by Cambridge University as a professor of sociology. Chad argues that he was also given another job—one Cambridge never put in his contract. He became a symbol. That distinction is at the center of today's Monologue Monday. Rather than joining the argument over whether Arday's downfall proves DEI is corrupt or whether his treatment proves the media is racist, Chad follows the institutions that surrounded him: Cambridge, Harvard, academia, publishing, and ...
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  They Want $200 Billion From Meta. Look What Happened Last Time. 24.08.2026 40min

  Text the show! Twenty-nine attorneys general are asking for as much as $200 billion from Meta, and the comparison they desperately want you to make is Big Tobacco. Chad has a problem with that comparison. Tobacco companies concealed studies showing their products caused cancer and publicly said the opposite. Meta faces a fundamentally different accusation: criminals used its platforms, kids became hooked on its products, and the company allegedly failed to do enough about it. But there is on...