Underground USA's Corner of the Bar Podcast cover art

Underground USA's Corner of the Bar Podcast

Underground USA's Corner of the Bar Podcast

Written by: Underground USA
Listen for free

About this listen

 No Fear. No Political Correctness. No Wokeism. An irreverent fact-based podcast heard and read across 50 US states and 44 countries, featuring critical thinking and common sense interviews on the topics of the day.

www.undergroundusa.comFrank Salvato Political Science Politics & Government Social Sciences
Episodes
  • How Far to the Marxist Left Has Minnesota—and Minneapolis—Gone?

    How Far to the Marxist Left Has Minnesota—and Minneapolis—Gone?
    Jan 12 2026
    When people used to speak of America’s Marxist drift, they pointed their fingers at New York City, Portland, San Francisco, maybe Los Angeles. Today, however, one state—and one city within it—outflanks them all in ideological extremism: Minnesota, and its capital of chaos, Minneapolis.What was once the image of quiet Midwestern moderation has become the epicenter of a radically left-wing, grievance-driven, soft-authoritarian culture, anchored not in reason or responsibility, but in resentment and pseudo-revolution.The political and cultural degeneration of Minnesota isn’t an isolated phenomenon—it’s a cautionary tale of how quickly a seemingly well-meaning state can descend into institutional capture by the radical Left, the bureaucratic Marxists masquerading as “progressives,” and their coalition of street agitators, racial entrepreneurs, and NGO-dependent “activists.”The eruption of violence in Minneapolis in 2020 following the death of George Floyd was not an “uprising,” as revisionist politicians later branded it—it was an abdication of governance. What began as legitimate outrage over perceived police use of force spiraled, within hours, into an urban warzone. Police precincts were torched. Small businesses—many minority-owned—were looted and burned to ashes. Residents were terrorized. And in the backdrop, Mayor Jacob Frey and Governor Tim Walz watched with deer-in-headlights paralysis, delivering press conferences filled with hollow rhetoric about “listening” and “healing” while their city spiraled into anarchy.Rather than enforce order, these leaders appeared more afraid of offending the mob than of failing their citizens. Their capitulation wasn’t just cowardice—it was the ideological decay of postmodern Marxism at work. The revolutionary Left thrives on chaos; order and law are “instruments of oppression.” In Minneapolis, for the first time in modern American history, we saw local government essentially side with the forces of disorder, under the guise of “justice.”Fast-forward and you find another scandal, one quieter but every bit as grotesque: the massive theft of public funds under the watch of Minnesota’s political leaders—particularly Tim Walz and Jacob Frey.The Feeding Our Future scandal is only the surface of this crime. State agencies allowed (and, by some accounts, even facilitated) massive fraud schemes by politically connected groups—some composed of recently arrived Somali-instituted “nonprofits” and others by “indigenous” organizations—who exploited federal COVID relief and welfare contracts. The eventual revelation that hundreds of millions of dollars had been siphoned off for luxury purchases, property empires, and overseas transfers–potentially to terror organizations–barely dented the political shield protecting these scam artists.The Walz administration, rather than aggressively pursuing accountability, downplayed and deflected. The rhetoric was predictable: any attempt to investigate was painted as “Islamophobic” or “racist.” In other words: identity politics as cover for criminal corruption.Yet the scale dwarfs even that understatement—when you add up unrelated fraud streams across child care, food programs, and COVID relief distribution, some have estimated that the state may have lost tens if not hundreds of billions in cumulative graft over the last decade. That’s not mere incompetence; it is systemic decay reinforced by arrogant and ignorant ideology.Then came the shocking recent attack on ICE officers by an anti-ICE activist—a woman radicalized by her “wife,” who–by all accounts, and validated by video–goaded her into action. Video evidence, from a variety of angles, shows that she used her car as a weapon, nearly dragging an officer and striking another. The federal agents, representing national law enforcement, were villainized; the attacker, lionized.What followed was a grotesque display of moral inversion: protesters flooded Minneapolis streets, chanting slogans defending the perpetrator and casting federal immigration enforcement as the villain. And Walz and Frey? Instead of condemning a violent attack against federal officers, they mouthed sympathetic talking points about “intense community emotion” and “federal overreach.”Make no mistake: this is the logical endpoint of Marxist moral arithmetic. To the far-Left, federal law enforcement represents “the system.” Anyone who opposes it, regardless of violence or criminality, becomes a “freedom fighter.” Minneapolis now serves as a test case for the nullification of federal authority, conducted not by states’ rights conservatives but by radical progressives seeking a sanctuary for dysfunction.What’s perhaps most galling is the industrialization of protest in Minnesota (of course, this isn’t exclusive to Minnesota or Minneapolis, but they are potent spots in the rash). The so-called “activist community...
    Show More Show Less
    42 mins
  • The Myth of the Progressive Majority: How the Radical Left Hijacked the Democrat Party

    The Myth of the Progressive Majority: How the Radical Left Hijacked the Democrat Party
    Jan 9 2026
    For years, Americans have been told by the media that the Democrat Party’s far-Left drift merely reflects the will of its “base.” We’re told that socialism, identity radicalism, and authoritarian “equity” programs are what Democrat voters truly want—an act of obedience dressed up as journalism. But this narrative is worse than false; it’s a deliberately engineered myth meant to conceal a hostile ideological takeover.The Democrat Party, as it exists today, has not become extreme because most Democrats are Marxists or radicals. It has become extreme because a small but organized faction of Progressive-Marxist ideologues leveraged institutional capture while the great majority of ordinary Democrats remained culturally docile, trusting, and perhaps a bit too patient.Let’s dispense with platitudes and talk numbers. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)—the flagship organization of the Marxist-progressive faction—claims barely 100,000 members nationwide. Even if you generously double that number to account for unaffiliated sympathizers who share their ideology but not the label, you’re looking at roughly 200,000 to 250,000 people.Compare that to the 50 million-plus registered Democrats in the United States. That means self-identified Democratic Socialists make up around 0.4–0.5% of the party, maybe one-half of one percent at the outside. Even adding in sympathetic progressive activists and “anti-capitalist” organizers from adjacent groups, perhaps 5–8% of the total Democrat constituency holds genuinely radical ideological commitments based in neo-Marxist or postmodern thought.Yet these individuals dominate the party’s cultural, rhetorical, and policy direction. How? Through the same mechanism that every radical minority throughout history has used when seizing power in a complacent establishment: discipline, manipulation, and infiltration of institutions.They occupied universities; then journalism schools; then legacy media; then the party’s policy committees; then the congressional staff structure; and finally, through relentless activism and fear tactics, they cowed senior party officials into compliance. The result is a party that looks far more like an imported political religion than a coalition of liberal voters seeking fairness and pragmatism.The media’s claim that the Democrat Party’s leaders are merely “playing to their base” is propaganda wrapped in pseudo-analysis. When Democrat officials push hardline climate mandates, “equity” redistribution, censorship of dissent, transgender policy radicalism in schools, and a never-ending stream of race essentialism, this isn’t reflective of a grassroots demand. It’s a top-down imposition directed by think tanks, activist NGOs, and donors in Silicon Valley, academia, and global finance (think Soros, Singham, and Lewis).The “base” in question is not democratic—it’s bureaucratic. It consists of professional activists, social media mobs, and ideologically captured institutions that operate as enforcement arms for a small minority. In that sense, “playing to their base” is really “appeasing their enforcers.”Rank-and-file Democrats are not sitting in living rooms discussing Marxism or class dialectics. They are small-business owners, teachers, first responders, parents–the disappearing American middle class–who want stability, fairness, and affordable living. Yet somehow, their party obsesses over race quotas, gender identity, and climate catastrophism. How does the activism of the Chicago Teachers Union, taking to the streets to protest Nicolás Maduro’s capture, help their children learn to read? These issues and actions alienate millions of disillusioned working-class Democrats who feel politically homelessThe invasive Progressive-Marxist wing thrives on language manipulation. “Equality” becomes “equity,” which becomes state-enforced outcome control. “Tolerance” becomes compelled speech. “Justice” becomes a permanent social war. They use the moral lexicon of compassion as camouflage for coercion.And mainstream Democrats, for all their virtues, have not had the will to resist. Every time a moderate pushes back—even lightly—they are accused of being “racist,” “transphobic,” or “centrist sellouts.” And the intimidation works. Silent disagreement yields to public conformity, and before long, policies once considered unthinkable—like teaching children that gender is a spectrum detached from biology—become mainstream party dogma.This drift was not accidental; it was designed. Marxist theory explicitly directs adherents to infiltrate cultural institutions first, politics second. What we’re witnessing is not grassroots populism—it’s institutional Marxism disguised as progress.The radicals have mastered a specific formula:* Narrative Control: They dominate the language of public morality. Disagreeing with them is presented not as a political ...
    Show More Show Less
    42 mins
  • MAGA: America First — Strategic Strength, Not Isolationism

    MAGA: America First — Strategic Strength, Not Isolationism
    Jan 5 2026
    With all the hyper-partisan, ideologically contrived “blah-blah” going on after the Meduro “get,” it seems that now is as good a time as any to clear up a purposefully crafted misconception, manufactured by the Deep State and the American Marxist movement.Many who oppose the MAGA movement—globalists on the Left and neocon remnants of the old Republican establishment alike—have spent years trying to brand it as “anti-war.” They’ve painted Trump supporters as retreatists and anti-intervention pacifists. They’ve done this deliberately, to fracture the conservative base ahead of the midterms and 2026. But here’s the truth: The MAGA movement has never been anti-war—it has been anti-stupid war. It rejects endless, special-interest-driven foreign entanglements that bleed American lives and treasure, while doing nothing to advance our actual national interests.In fairness, there were some early voices within the MAGA camp who misunderstood the core meaning of “America First.” They mistook it for “America Alone.” Figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene and others who argued for total disengagement from the world’s strategic hotspots revealed, over time, that they were never truly understood or aligned with the founding spirit of the movement.Isolationism is not America First—it’s America abandoned. The roots of MAGA don’t lie in retreat or withdrawal—they lie in reasserting American leadership on our terms, not the global elite’s. Those who preach total non-engagement, who see any use of military or economic power abroad as betrayal, are not defending American sovereignty—they’re surrendering it to those who would happily fill the vacuum left behind, like China, Russia, Iran, North Lorea and the rest of the usual suspects.The MAGA movement rejects what we might call the “military industrial forever loop”—the endless feed of troops and tax dollars into foreign wars orchestrated by career bureaucrats, Beltway consultants, and defense lobbyists: Major players in the Deep State. These wars have no constitutionally defined mission, no concrete objectives, and no exit strategy.Trump’s foreign policy revolution brought clarity: military force is a tool for defense, deterrence, and direct national interest—not for global social experiments or permanent occupations. MAGA does not dismantle American power—it redirects it. It refuses to repeat the moral and logistical blunders of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but it also refuses to abandon the world stage to tyrants, cartels, and ideologues.MAGA means the US throwing off the global elite’s unilaterally mandated idea that the United States exists as the world’s policeman.America’s armed forces should not be used as the enforcement mechanism for UN bureaucrats or NATO technocrats trying to sustain their multilateral illusions. Washington spent decades letting unelected committees dictate where our troops were sent and why—and the results speak for themselves: trillions spent, allies emboldened, and Americans forgotten.America is not the world’s policeman, but those of the MAGA movement recognize the difference between servitude and strength. Restraint is not weakness—but absence of resolve is.MAGA is the belief that America has a sacred duty to protect its citizens, property, and interests anywhere in the world. That’s not “interventionism”—it’s sovereignty extended beyond our borders to shield our people from harm.Take Venezuela: the Chávez and Maduro regimes didn’t just strangle their own population—they waged a soft war on the United States. They facilitated narcotics and human trafficking networks that directly targeted the American heartland. These networks, along with their Mexican cartel partners, have killed more Americans annually than any conflict since World War II.Standing up to such regimes—seizing their illegally attained assets, supporting legitimate liberation movements, and repatriating stolen US wealth—is self-defense, not meddling. It’s about protecting Americans from the slow-kill of narcotic and economic warfare.Where the MAGA mindset differs sharply from the old establishment is in its understanding of partnership. True allies are those who take the initiative and assume responsibility for their own defense. Our support should reinforce their will, not replace it, creating dependency.Israel provides the clearest example. Facing Iranian aggression both directly and through proxies like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, Israel didn’t and isn’t asking America to fight its wars—it’s fighting them itself. Under Trump, America’s role was to equip, deter, and support—not to occupy. MAGA stands firmly behind allies who stand firmly for themselves.The MAGA foreign policy vision extends beyond mere military posturing—it’s about strengthening independent nations that share our commitment to sovereignty, order, and liberty. In Europe, MAGA-supported leaders ...
    Show More Show Less
    42 mins
No reviews yet