Civics, history, and bureaucracy with jokes attached.
Let's Get Civical treats public life like a kitchen-table argument with footnotes. Lizzie Stewart and Arden Walentowski move from USDA nutrition guidance to Supreme Court procedure, congressional spending, and Alaska history with quick jokes and plain-language explanations.
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Let's Get Civical is a rapid, irreverent civics show about the systems people usually pretend to understand. It is built around Lizzie Stewart and Arden Walentowski talking through government, law, public policy, and American history with a mix of curiosity, side-eye, and practical explanation. The comedy comes first often enough to keep the pace light. The substance follows close behind. Recent episodes show the range clearly: the USDA food pyramid, Cruzan v. Director, Missouri Department of Health, the appropriations process, the purchase of the Alaskan territory, and the Great Alaska Earthquake. A nutrition-guide episode becomes a look at how public health advice can collide with support for American agriculture. A court case about Nancy Cruzan becomes a sober conversation about end-of-life decisions, evidence, living wills, and the legal problem of knowing what someone wanted. The appropriations episode turns congressional funding into something concrete, with budget requests, oversight hearings, subcommittees, and 302(a) allocations getting translated out of procedural fog. The Alaska purchase gives the show room for territorial history and geopolitical curiosity. The earthquake episode moves into disaster scale, tsunamis, Anchorage damage, and the unnerving limits of infrastructure. The hosts do not hide when a subject is confusing. That is part of the appeal. They ask the obvious questions, make the stray joke, then circle back to the thing that matters. The result is informal without being empty. It has a live, slightly messy rhythm, but the mess usually points toward understanding. The show is especially good at making institutions feel human-sized. Court standards, agency mandates, budget processes, and historical turning points become less abstract because the hosts keep dragging them back to ordinary speech. It is not a detached lecture. It is not pure comedy either. It sits in the charged middle, where public life is absurd, consequential, and still worth learning.
Made for: For listeners who want American government, legal history, and public policy explained without classroom stiffness. It especially fits people who like fast banter, practical takeaways, and a little chaos around serious topics.
What sets it apart: The show turns procedural subjects into conversational stories without sanding off their complexity. Its edge is the contrast between loose comic chemistry and genuinely useful explanations of institutions, cases, and policy machinery.
Let’s Get Civical is part civics class and part comedy show. Join Lizzie Stewart and Arden Walentowski as they unpack and repack those political and government structures that have driven us to the cry for help we’re in today. This stuff is confusing and we’ve made it our mission to break it down so we all understand what the FDR is going on. It’s like being in American Government class with your BFFs! But no exams. We promise! Lizzie is an NYC based comedian who performs regularly all over the city and headlines all of her family functions as the "one from New York". Arden is a politics and civics buff who’s worked on local, state, and national campaigns.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Lizzie Stewart and Arden Walentowski make American institutions understandable through prepared history, persistent questions, and an unusually lively conversational rhythm.
Let's Get Civical turns civics and American history into a running conversation between Lizzie Stewart and Arden Walentowski. The pair move comfortably from Alcatraz and the Great Alaska Earthquake to the USDA food pyramid, congressional appropriations, and a consequential…
Alcatraz gets a warden joke, and you get history with Lizzie and Arden's side chatter intact.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
The food pyramid gets a history lesson in farm policy, wartime nutrition, and single-layer cake.
The USDA food pyramid becomes a window onto a durable tension: the same agency charged with promoting a reliable, healthy food supply also had to look out for American farmers.
A plainspoken, practical look at a major right-to-die case.
Cruzan v. Director of Missouri's Department of Health is presented as a major right-to-die case, and the piece keeps its focus on the legal question of how a person's wishes are treated when they were never set down in a formal way.
A brisk, funny map of how Congress decides what gets funded.
Appropriations starts dry and ends up showing how money, power, and blame move through government. The hosts keep the process clear: who asks for funding, who hears the pitch, how the budget resolution sets the top line, and why 302(a) matters.
A bantering look at the Great Alaska Earthquake that keeps the disaster clear while letting the hosts stay loose.
The Great Alaska Earthquake episode keeps its banter moving, but it stays grounded in the essentials. Lizzie Stewart and Arden Walentowski start with a quick Richter-scale check and widen out to the disaster’s reach: ground fissures, environmental damage, major structural damage…
A 9.2 quake, a tsunami, and a conversational history lesson that makes the scale clear.
Let's Get Civical frames the Great Alaska Earthquake as a compact disaster history, tracing the 9.2 shaking, the tsunamis that followed, and the damage across Anchorage and coastal communities.
A dark morning opens onto the messy civic history behind America's clocks.
Daylight saving time starts here as a familiar nuisance: the dark, cold 7:30 a.m. that makes a normal morning feel slightly rigged. Let's Get Civical uses that irritation to open up the civic backstory of the Uniform Time Act of 1966, then widens the frame to a North America…
A ferry ride, a prison island, and a first warden who came out of retirement.
Let's Get Civical turns Alcatraz into a tidy study in geography, punishment, and federal practicality. It keeps returning to the island's isolation, from the San Francisco Bay to the ferry ride and the government's search for a high-security prison site, so the setting matters…
Radical history, argued in public.
Overlooked lives, read from the sources, talked through warmly.
A comedic and educational deep dive into the causes and consequences of the 1929 stock market crash, focusing on bad banking practices.
Lizzie Stewart and Arden Walentowski re-air an episode exploring Alcatraz's history, prompted by Trump's proposal to reopen it.
Comedian Lizzie Stewart and political strategist Arden Walentowski break down the Uniform Time Act of 1966, which standardized time zones and established daylight saving time in the U.S.
["Let's Get Civical tracks the USDA food pyramid from Wilbur Atwater's 1894 guidelines to the January 7, 2026 update on added sugar and protein.", "Lizzie Stewart and Arden Walnotowski use Caroline Hunt's 1916 food groups, World War I, and Victory Gardens to show how the USDA mixed nutrition and farm policy.", "The episode follows the 1977 McGovern report, the 1992 Food Guide Pyramid, My Pyramid in 2005, and My Plate in 2011, including criticism that the pyramid overemphasized refined carbohydrates.", "It closes with the current advice to cut added sugars and highly processed foods while raising protein to 1.2 to 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight."]
Let's Get Civical covers Cruzan v.
Lizzie and Arden introduce the appropriations process in a fun, accessible way on their political podcast.
["Congress can only spend money when law authorizes it, and the episode opens with the Constitution's line that no money shall be drawn from the treasury without an appropriation.", "Lizzie Stewart, a comedian and political junkie, and Arden Walnotowski, a former Senate intern, campaign staffer, and political strategist, break down the split between authorization and appropriation.", "They trace the House and Senate Appropriations Committees through 12 subcommittees, 302(a) and 302(b) allocations, hearings, markups, and conference negotiations.", "The closing section turns to mandatory spending, the projected 2051 crossover where interest on the national debt overtakes defense spending, and the shutdown politics that keep resurfacing."]
Lizzie and Arden discuss the historical purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867, exploring its context and legacy.
The episode covers the 1964 Alaska earthquake, also called the Great Alaska Earthquake and the Good Friday Earthquake, which began at 5:36 PM on March 27, 1964 and measured 9.2.
Let's Get Civical covers the 1964 Alaska earthquake, also called the Great Alaska Earthquake and the Good Friday Earthquake, with Lizzie Stewart and Arden Walentowski describing it as a 9.2 megathrust quake that began at 5:36 PM Alaska Standard Time on March 27, 1964.
This episode of Let's Get Civic discusses the Great Postal Strike of 1970, a major labor action by postal workers.
This episode of Let's Get Civical discusses the Great Postal Strike of 1970, a major labor action by postal workers.
Lizzie and Arden introduce the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill on their political podcast, noting it's a heavy topic before Halloween.
The hosts of Let's Get Civical introduce an episode about the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, a historical anti-lynching legislation.