Khiara Bridges: You Can’t Buy Your Way Out of Dying in Childbirth

Khiara Bridges: You Can’t Buy Your Way Out of Dying in Childbirth

In this episode of He’s Not Wrong, we’re joined by Khiara M. Bridges, author of Expecting Inequity, to unpack why Black women are still dying at alarming rates during pregnancy and childbirth regardless of income, education, or insurance. We connect the national maternal health crisis to Alabama’s devastating outcomes, healthcare segregation, Medicaid policy, and the rollback of voting rights and civil protections. Our conversation makes clear that maternal mortality is not a medical mystery, it’s the predictable result of political and structural decisions. Got a hot take? Think you’re not wrong about something? I want to hear it. Call me and leave a voicemail at (205)538-3202 and follow along on Instagram @HesNotWrongPodcast, and let’s keep the conversation going. Make sure to subscribe, leave a review, and join me every Sunday morning - grab your coffee, and let’s talk. Follow on YouTube, Instagram, & TikTok: @HesNotWrongPodcast Subscribe on Subtack: https://substack.com/@hesnotwrong Contact: chad@hesnotwrongpodcast.com www.HesNotWrongPodcast.Com

Sami Sage: BETCH, WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON

Sami Sage has been telling women the truth, about politics, pop culture, and everything in between, since 2011, when she and two college friends started an anonymous blog in a Cornell apartment. That blog became Betches Media, one of the most influential women's media brands on the internet, and Sami became one of the most recognizable voices in news and political commentary for millennial and Gen Z women. In this episode, we sit down with the co-founder and Chief Brand Officer of Betches Media, host of the award-winning daily news podcast Morning Announcements, co-host of American Fever Dream with V. Spehar, and NYT bestselling author of Democracy in Retrograde. We get into all of it, how Betches went from a WordPress blog to a $24 million acquisition, why she pushed one of the internet's funniest brands into politics, and what it actually takes to wake up every single morning and make sense of the chaos for millions of people who are counting on you. We also dig into her book, Democracy in Retrograde, co-written with former Senate counsel Emily Amick, and what civic engagement looks like right now, in a political moment that has tested even the most engaged among us. Plus, we get into the news stories that she has covered extensively: the Trump and the US-Iran conflict, Eric Swalwell and the Democratic media ecosystem.  Got a hot take? Think you’re not wrong about something? I want to hear it. Call me and leave a voicemail at (205)538-3202 and follow along on Instagram @HesNotWrongPodcast, and let’s keep the conversation going. Make sure to subscribe, leave a review, and join me every Sunday morning - grab your coffee, and let’s talk. Sami on Insta: https://www.instagram.com/sami/?hl=en Sami on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@samisagesays Sami on Substack: https://samisagesays.substack.com/ Betches News: https://www.betches.com/ Follow on YouTube, Instagram, & TikTok: @HesNotWrongPodcast Subscribe on Subtack: https://substack.com/@hesnotwrong Contact: chad@hesnotwrongpodcast.com www.HesNotWrongPodcast.Com

Dr. Demetre Daskalakis: Gold Standard Science Is Dead at the CDC

Dr. Demetre Daskalakis spent five years at the highest levels of the CDC leading HIV prevention, running the White House mpox response, and eventually directing the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, the division responsible for the entire country's vaccine policy. He watched RFK Jr. take over the Department of Health and Human Services and begin dismantling the scientific infrastructure of one of the most respected public health institutions in the world. He stayed as long as he could. When he hit his line in the sand, he walked out and said publicly what most people inside were too afraid to say - that the CDC you knew is over, that his former colleagues are hostages, and that the nation's health security is in the hands of people driven by ideology instead of evidence. Today he is here to tell the full story from his early days testing men for HIV in New York City bathhouses, to the halls of the CDC, to the moment he decided enough was enough. This is the inside account of how American public health was broken on purpose, and what it means for every single one of us. Got a hot take? Think you’re not wrong about something? I want to hear it. Call me and leave a voicemail at (205)538-3202 and follow along on Instagram @HesNotWrongPodcast, and let’s keep the conversation going. Make sure to subscribe, leave a review, and join me every Sunday morning - grab your coffee, and let’s talk. Follow on YouTube, Instagram, & TikTok: @HesNotWrongPodcast Subscribe on Subtack: https://substack.com/@hesnotwrong Contact: chad@hesnotwrongpodcast.com www.HesNotWrongPodcast.Com

Maggie Gehlsen-Burnett: What It's Actually Like to Be Pregnant in Trump's America

Maggie Gelson Burnett's Instagram bio says pregnant in Trump's America, and this episode is about what that actually means. She is 26 weeks along, she is having a girl, and she has been watching this country come apart in real time while her body builds a human being inside of it.  We start in Alabama, where the fight over the Public Service Commission just took a serious hit. The people killed the first bill, Alabama Power came back with a different one, passed it through both chambers, and handed agenda-setting power to an unelected energy secretary appointed by the governor. Four of the seven commission seats will be appointed, not elected, through 2031, which means the three people Alabamians elect in November will be outvoted by people the governor put there. The lesson Alabama Power keeps teaching is that they do not stop — they just get more creative. From there the conversation moves to what is happening at the federal level, because the same logic is running through all of it. Trump uses primetime addresses not to inform the public but to tell his base how to feel, the women in his administration are being pushed out first, and the federal government is spending eleven thousand dollars a second on an illegal war while standing at a podium saying it cannot afford daycare. Delivery drivers are cutting time with their kids because gas is four dollars a gallon, Uber drivers have no idea what their passengers paid, and the student loan emails that went out sent people into full-blown panic attacks. The SAVE Act, the voter roll purges in Georgia, TSA showing up at airports, and the executive order on mail-in ballots can each be explained away individually, but together they are a strategy, and it is not subtle once you see it. Maggie brings all of it back to what it actually feels like to be pregnant right now, to be carrying a daughter inside a country that is actively debating whether women should be allowed to vote, and to have made the deliberate choice to bring a child into this moment anyway. This episode covers: Why Trump's primetime speeches are about feeling, not information The Alabama Public Service Commission and Alabama Power  The Illegal war in Iran and how much it is costing the American tax-payer The SAVE Act, voter roll purges, and ICE in airports What it actually means to be pregnant and progressive in Trump's America Got a hot take? Think you’re not wrong about something? I want to hear it. Call me and leave a voicemail at (205)538-3202 and follow along on Instagram @HesNotWrongPodcast, and let’s keep the conversation going. Make sure to subscribe, leave a review, and join me every Sunday morning - grab your coffee, and let’s talk. Maggie on Insta: https://www.instagram.com/itsmaggieburnett/ Maggie on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@itsmaggieburnett Maggie on Substack: https://substack.com/@itsmaggieburnett Pretty Furious: https://prettyfuriouspod.substack.com/ Follow on YouTube, Instagram, & TikTok: @HesNotWrongPodcast Subscribe on Subtack: https://substack.com/@hesnotwrong Contact: chad@hesnotwrongpodcast.com www.HesNotWrongPodcast.Com

Gloria J. Browne-Marshall: The Slave Bible, Book Bans, and the Long History of Controlling What Americans Know

What if everything you were taught about American history was edited, the same way the Slave Bible was edited? In 1807, enslavers produced a version of scripture with every passage about liberation, equality, and resistance removed. Of the original 1,189 chapters, only 232 remained. Today, books are being pulled from school libraries and state legislatures are passing laws to restrict what history students are allowed to learn. Gloria J. Browne-Marshall wants you to understand that these are not separate phenomena. Browne-Marshall is a constitutional law professor at John Jay College and the author of A Protest History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2025), a sweeping 500-year account of American resistance, from Chief Powhatan's warnings to the English at Jamestown in 1607, to Standing Rock in 2016, to the Amazon Labor Union in 2022. She is also the great-great-granddaughter of Eliza Broadnax Bradshaw, an enslaved woman in Kentucky who threw a pot of boiling water at the man who beat her. They never touched her again. That story opens the book. This conversation builds on it. In this episode, we get into the distinction Browne-Marshall draws between America and the United States, the idealistic promise versus the coercive machinery that has always worked to suppress anyone who tries to collect on it. We talk about Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, when poor White farmers and enslaved Black people fought together against the colonial elite, and what the wealthy did immediately afterward to make sure that alliance never formed again. We talk about the legal architecture of land theft, the agency of enslaved people that mainstream history has systematically erased, and the trifecta - litigation, legislation, and protest, that Browne-Marshall argues is the only combination that has ever produced durable change. Gloria states that this is not a history book orlesson. It is a toolkit. A Protest History of the United States by Gloria J. Browne-Marshall is available now from Beacon Press. As Audre Lorde said: your silence will not protect you. This book is the evidence. This episode covers: * Why protest is not anti-American, it is America fighting its other half * The 1676 moment that invented divide-and-conquer politics in America * What Standing Rock actually accomplished, even though the pipeline was built * How the Slave Bible connects directly to book bans happening right now * The strategic framework Browne-Marshall calls the trifecta, and where it's working today Got a hot take? Think you’re not wrong about something? I want to hear it. Call me and leave a voicemail at (205)538-3202 and follow along on Instagram @HesNotWrongPodcast, and let’s keep the conversation going. Make sure to subscribe, leave a review, and join me every Sunday morning - grab your coffee, and let’s talk. Follow on YouTube, Instagram, & TikTok: @HesNotWrongPodcast Subscribe on Subtack: https://substack.com/@hesnotwrong Contact: chad@hesnotwrongpodcast.com www.HesNotWrongPodcast.Com