Tony Rocky Horror guides you through the cutting-edge sounds of noise rock, grunge, hardcore, metal, and alternative from around the world! This week featuring new album material by Great Falls.

“The American people want serious people to solve serious challenges,“ declares former Texas Congressman Will Hurd in this season finale on the U.S. House of Representatives. “That’s the lesson we should take away from 2022.” 

But he is quick to add, “I don’t think that lesson is going to be implemented in this new Congress.”

Having served three terms in the House, Hurd then dissects the GOP factionalism at work in the currently contested speaker’s election, a position that traditionally goes to the party leader. And he confirms the disappointing fact that most House members are more interested in “messaging bills” with no chance of passage than progress on tough, important issues like immigration, climate change and support for Ukraine. 

TPP’s Rob Pease and Dylan Nicholls discuss each of these important issues in detail with former Congressman Hurd, paying special attention to immigration. His South Texas district shares an 800-mile border with Mexico, bearing the initial burden of huge numbers of migrants. But he’s not optimistic about any major immigration reform passing in these next two years of divided government.

The Purple Principle covered the U.S. Senate in our previous episode with former centrist Senators Doug Jones and Bob Corker. This episode we turn to the unruly chamber next door in our discussion with repeat guest Will B. Hurd, former CIA officer, three-term Texas Congressman and author of one the best recent reads on U.S. politics, American Reboot: An Idealist’s Guide to Getting Big Things Done (Simon & Schuster, 2022)

The Purple Principle is a Fluent Knowledge production. Original music by Ryan Adair Rooney.

The Vienna Circle was a group of early twentieth-century philosophers, mathematicians, logicians, and scientists, best known for developing the theory of scientific knowledge called logical positivism. Although positivism as a project has been largely abandoned, the group's ideas continue to have profound influence on contemporary philosophy of science. So what philosophical theories were proposed by the Vienna Circle? How might the socio-political circumstances of their time have shaped their radical ideas? And how did their ideas aim to shape politics? Josh and Ray ask David Edmonds from the University of Oxford, author of The Murder of Professor Schlick: The Rise and Fall of the Vienna Circle.