The Lonely Liberal Podcast

Two days before the midterms, Nick and Rick break down the final week of the campaign. Haley Stevens reopens her feud with Abdul El-Sayed over Cenk Uygur’s controversial anti-Israel grocery ad, and her fiancé says he’s voting for Mike Rogers. Kid Rock compares El-Sayed to the 9/11 hijackers on Bill Maher. A New York Times report says Mary Peltola’s campaign helped recruit a second “Dan Sullivan” in Alaska. Chuck Schumer launches an election “war room,” and a federal judge bars DOJ and DHS from intimidating election workers. A judge tosses Trump’s $10 billion Wall Street Journal lawsuit over the Epstein...

Vivek Ramaswamy spends $4 million on an ad featuring Democrat Amy Acton’s estranged mother, and Trump and JD Vance defend it. Plus: the H3 Podcast blowup, as Hila Klein reveals Ethan’s affair and the crew walks away; the Justice Department suing to block Alaska from certifying a Mary Peltola win because two candidates are named Dan Sullivan; a Vanity Fair report that Saudi and Emirati rulers put $2 billion in accounts for Jared Kushner; Trump using “Shylock” in Kansas; Mike Rogers asking Abdul El-Sayed if he’s “for these terrorist groups”; Steve Witkoff calling Putin “a humanitarian”; plans to resume Iran strike...

Investigative climate journalist Amy Westervelt, host of Drilled, joins The Lonely Liberal to talk about her new book Brought to You By: How Corporations Warped the Truth, Conned the Public, and Broke Democracy, and the century-long corporate propaganda machine behind today’s disinformation.

Amy argues disinformation isn’t a social media problem. It’s the result of more than 100 years of PR men, think tanks, and oil companies working to shape what we believe so they could avoid regulation, taxes, and accountability. We get into the PR pioneer who pushed the “crisis actor” myth in 1914, the oil industry m...

Homeland Security agents raid Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home and seize her passport in a push to strip her citizenship, and Nick and Rick ask whether this happens to any other member of Congress. Plus: Shane Gillis’s SNL monologue, and whether it was offensive or just bad stand-up; Ken Paxton’s New Year’s Eve in Dubai with two indicted fugitives as James Talarico pulls ahead in Texas; Press Secretary Katie Zacharia out after five days (we play her one and only briefing); Kimberly Guilfoyle resigns as ambassador to Greece over a $100,000 Amex bill; Pete Hegseth’s firing-squad livestream...

Back from a week off, we start with a wedding, a blazer put on trial, and why a man who's never set foot on the US mainland gets a federal holiday. Then a rough week: Trump says the US won’t strike Iran until after the midterms, cuts a diesel deal with Putin while Ukraine’s allies sit in peace talks, and tells rallies, “let them hit San Diego, let them hit Los Angeles” — we play the clip and argue about how charitable to be. We get into why Israel dominates so much of the conversation on the left, the Kraft–...

Conventional wisdom says a swing district demands a candidate who runs to the center. Matt Little did the opposite, and won his primary in the most evenly divided district in Minnesota running unapologetically to the left. Nick sits down with him to figure out how.

They get into the story that made Matt political in the first place (watching his mom fight her employer, her doctors, and her insurance company all at once), why he thinks conviction beats calculation in this moment, and what it's like to run in the state that's been at the center of...

Trump bans CNN, MS NOW and Politico from the White House, launches a 24-hour Trump TV stream his own company then tries to trademark, and runs taxpayer-funded ads of himself set to the song "Love Me." We get into the chilling effect, ProPublica's reporting on Susan Collins and a defense contractor, a Putin-linked oligarch paying for Don Jr.'s wedding, RFK Jr.'s $4 million in book advances, John Fetterman casting the deciding vote to keep the Iran war going, and the Houthis hitting Riyadh. Then the UN: Netanyahu name-drops Hasan Piker from the podium, and Trump tells the world...

Chris Harris is one of the most popular voices in fantasy football — but he's also five novels deep into a whole other life as a writer, and his newest, Pound Foolish, is a murder mystery set inside an NFL team. Nick sits down with him for a relaxed, wide-ranging hang that turns out to be about something bigger than football: how you keep loving something when you know exactly what's wrong with it.

They get into why Chris built his own publishing company to put the book out, the con of getting fans to side with billionaire ow...

Good news, for once. The Supreme Court killed Trump's mail-in voting order 7-2, ending a fight we've been tracking on this show since July. Kavanaugh sided with the majority. Alito and Thomas dissented. And the thing worth pausing on: this is the third court ruling in a row rejecting it, which suggests the guardrails are bending but not breaking.

Then Thomas Massie filed eight articles of impeachment against Pete Hegseth — war powers violations in Iran, the school strike a UN committee now says was likely a war crime, the Caribbean boat strikes, kidnapping Maduro. He filed it as...

There's a good chance there's a camera on your street logging every car that passes, including yours. It's probably made by Flock Safety, a company most people have never heard of that's now worth $8.4 billion and makes roughly four out of every five license plate readers in the country. Nick breaks down what these cameras actually are — and why "Flock camera" describes three different products, not one: the plate readers you've seen on poles, the Condor cameras that pan, tilt, zoom and auto-focus on people, and Nova, the software that turns a license plate into a person and then li...

Nick is back from France with a grievance about trains, and the news did not wait for him. At the first-ever Republican midterm convention in Dallas, Trump had the crowd raise their right hands and pledge to him — including a pledge to "cheat like hell" and vote whether or not they're registered. Then he promised every American adult $5,000 if Republicans hold Congress. We play both clips in full, because neither of us could do them justice.

Also from Dallas: an attendee screams "he should be shot" while Ted Cruz attacks Mamdani from the stage, Abbott and Cruz ma...

Everyone calls Trump a populist. Sociologist Charles Derber thinks that's exactly the con.

Nick sits down with Derber — professor at Boston College and author of Fighting Oligarchy: How Positive Populism Can Reclaim America — for a conversation that lays out something most people never hear said clearly: there are two kinds of populism, and they're opposites. One points people's anger at the billionaires and corporations running the show. The other keeps all the anger but redirects it — at immigrants, at "the deep state," at cultural elites — so the billionaires walk free. Trump ran the second kind. And it worked b...

Nick went to the Ed Markey rally in Boston — front row, with Bernie, Warren, and Ayanna Pressley. What Bernie Sanders still sounds like at 85, why the crowd was two-thirds seniors and one-third teenagers with almost nobody in between, and the question Hannah asked on the drive home that neither of us can shake: if this is a fascist takeover, why does the fight only start two years in?

Then the news. Trump announced what he's calling the biggest oil deal in world history — an unnamed private company gets hundred-year rights to 65 billion barrels of Venezuelan reserves, with the...

Angie Nixon beat Alex Vindman in Florida's Senate primary while being outraised sixteen to one. Abdul was eight to one. Then ten. Then twelve. The number keeps climbing and the outspent candidate keeps winning — which starts to put to bed the idea, popular with Democratic consultants, that you have to take the money because everyone else is on steroids too.

That leads into a longer argument about the DSA label itself: why candidates run under a banner whose platform they don't fully endorse, why "abolish" is doing so much work in these debates, and why most of th...

Everyone says the economy is broken — but economist Dean Baker thinks almost everyone, left and right, is misdiagnosing why. In one of our wonkiest and most fun conversations yet, Nick sits down with the co-founder of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of Rigged to take the whole thing apart.

They start with a word you can't escape right now: affordability. Is it even real, or just a new way to say "I feel poor"? Baker walks through why wages actually outpaced inflation for years, why the squeeze people feel now is real anyway, an...

Peggy Flanagan won Minnesota's Senate primary by nineteen points while being outspent four to one, and almost nobody covered it. Francesca Hong lost Wisconsin by four tenths of a point to a man who had dropped out of the race a month earlier. Same week, same movement, opposite results — so we get into what actually separated them, and why Republicans have decided to destroy Abdul El-Sayed while leaving Flanagan almost entirely alone.

That leads into the argument at the center of this episode: AOC's "Woke 1 was crazy" comment. Nick makes the case that it isn't a betrayal, it...

Who is Hasan Piker? It's the question Nick keeps getting — and this week it became the question every progressive candidate in America has to answer. Piker is a Twitch streamer with three million followers who ranked fifth on the platform in 2026, and who spent this midterm cycle campaigning with insurgent progressives like Abdul El-Sayed, Avila Chevalier, and Francesca Hong. Suddenly his back catalog is everywhere: Meet the Press pressing El-Sayed on a 2019 comment about 9/11, Jonathan Karl asking AOC whether Piker belongs in the movement, Sean Hannity capping a segment on Chris Rabb with "to top it all off," and Jo...

Abdul El-Sayed won the Michigan Senate primary by a single point, beating roughly $60 million in outside money — most of it from AIPAC — in the most expensive Democratic primary in history. Nick cracked open a Moët mini at eleven in the morning. Donovan McKinney unseated an incumbent in Michigan's 13th, and Sunrise co-founder William Lawrence won a swing district. So we get into what actually beat the money, and why the establishment endorsements that showed up afterward were so unbelievably tepid.

Then the bad news: Todd Blanche was confirmed attorney general at 4:33 in the morning, with Bill Cassi...

Chris Rabb just did something that wasn't supposed to be possible: he beat the Philadelphia Democratic machine — a sitting mayor, a former state party chair, the whole institutional apparatus — by 15 points, in a race with no incumbent, on his way to Congress. He's spent a decade in the Pennsylvania statehouse as what he calls an "insurgent incumbent," and in January he joins a small but growing bloc of the Democratic left.

Nick sits down with Rabb the same week Abdul El-Sayed (a past guest of the show) won his Michigan Senate primary, and the two of them get...

Ukraine struck an Iranian ship in the Caspian Sea this week, and two wars that have defined the last five years started to look like one. So we asked the question we've always answered no to: is this World War III? Then the US paused bombing Iran — not for diplomacy, but because it ran out of munitions.

Also this week: Trump's approval hits a record low across four polls with 60% opposing the war, Netanyahu gets a White House welcome one week after Mamdani called for his arrest, the Wall Street Journal reveals Trump has raised more than $800 mi...

Ed Markey has been in Congress for nearly 50 years, running on the Green New Deal, Medicare for All, and a higher minimum wage. Joe Tache — the Party for Socialism and Liberation's candidate in this year's Massachusetts Senate race — argues that 50 years is long enough to judge whether that approach delivers, and that it hasn't.

This week, Nick sits down with Tache for a wide-ranging conversation about what's actually broken in American politics. They get into the difference between the PSL and the DSA and why Tache runs against Democrats instead of inside the party; whether the U.S. i...

The Energy Department admitted in court this week that it canceled 284 clean energy grants — $7.5 billion worth — based solely on whether the state voted for Kamala Harris. Not cost. Not performance. Just the election result. Meanwhile, Marco Rubio's State Department released a 100-page report naming DSA, CodePink, Hasan Piker, and Ilhan Omar as instruments of Cuban influence, and Troy Jackson won the Maine Democratic Senate nomination 566 to 5.

Also this week: Zohran Mamdani asks the federal government to arrest Netanyahu, Trump bombs at the Correspondents' Dinner, measles hits a 35-year high, a judge freezes the $110 billion Paramount–Warner Bros. merger...

Nick sits down with Stephen Lacey — co-founder and executive editor of Latitude Media, host of Open Circuit, and former Editor-in-Chief of Greentech Media — for a conversation about what it actually takes to make trustworthy media in a "fake news" world.

They get into why Stephen thinks the "legacy media is biased" argument is mostly BS (it's really hyper-partisanship coloring how people read otherwise solid reporting), why data centers exploded overnight into a 2026 midterm litmus test before anyone had time to figure out what's actually true, and why the popular narrative blaming data centers for your electric bill isn...

Month five of the Iran war and there's still no end in sight. Two U.S. service members were killed in Jordan on Friday with a third missing, the first American deaths from Iranian fire since March, and the U.S. struck back within hours. It came days after Senate Democrats blocked the $1.15 trillion NDAA over a war Congress has now voted to end twice and watched continue anyway. Then JD Vance spent three hours on Joe Rogan's podcast, where the conversation ranged from the Epstein files to Iran to a heavy dose of election fraud nonsense that deserves...

Nick sits down in person with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Michigan, at a campaign stop in Warren. They get into the misconception that he's "just a socialist," why distrust in public health traces back to a healthcare system stuck behind a paywall, and his case for Medicare for All. El-Sayed makes his electability argument head-on: outspent 8-to-1 by AIPAC-backed money, he argues that message and work ethic — not cash — are how you beat Mike Rogers in November, and that every general-election poll backs him up. Plus: the AIPAC money fight, Thomas Massie's amendment to c...

Graham Platner is out — and nobody knows what happens next in the most important Senate race of the midterms. Last time, I called him the right candidate but the wrong person. This week, that prediction cashed out. So what now? I break down how the campaign actually ended (hint: it was Schumer's money, not the allegation), the two-week scramble to replace him, the 600-delegate convention Maine Democrats chose over an actual election — two years almost to the day after Biden handed the nomination to Harris without a vote — and the Bernie vs. Schumer proxy war that created this mess and is...

Nick and Rick break down America's 250th anniversary week — and the chaos that came with it. They open on the America 250 meltdown: the DC Independence Day Parade was canceled Friday night due to a 115-degree heat dome; Philadelphia's parade was canceled the day before; the Great American State Fair on the National Mall temporarily closed after 44 attendees needed medical attention for heat-related illness; Mt. Olive Pickle Company withdrew from the fair over Confederate flag displays at Southern state booths; and Trump used his July 4 White House speech to complain that he "wasn't treated that well" by the media. Then Tr...

In February, the Supreme Court ruled Trump's tariffs illegal — all $166 billion of them. The refunds are flowing right now, with interest. But they're going to Walmart, Target, and the importers, not to you — even though the Fed's own research shows American consumers paid nearly all of it, about $1,000 per household. Nick breaks down the triple-charge: you paid the illegal tax at the register, corporations get your refund, and the prices companies raised 'because of tariffs' are never coming back down. Meanwhile, Trump's DOJ is in court fighting to keep as much of the money as possible — and a new 15% tariff...

Nick and Rick break down 10 days of chaos in American politics. They open on Trump's Iran deal: at Versailles during the G7 summit, Trump signed a 14-point memorandum of understanding with Iran's foreign minister — Strait of Hormuz reopens, sanctions lifted, $42 billion in frozen Iranian assets unfrozen, US forces removed from Iran's borders. Senators Cassidy and Tillis called it "the worst American foreign policy blunder in decades" — $100 billion spent, 13 Americans dead, two F-18s lost, and Iran got everything it wanted. The deal was already cracking by Friday: a cargo ship was hit on a UN-backed route in the Strait, Iran...

Maine should be the easiest Democratic Senate pickup of 2026. Susan Collins is uniquely vulnerable, Trump has never won the state, and it’s a midterm with an unpopular Republican president. So why is it a nightmare? Nick endorsed Graham Platner early — an anti-PAC, Bernie-backed, working class Marine veteran running the exact campaign Democrats say they want. Then came the scandals. The Reddit posts. The tattoo. The sexting. The NYT relationship story. Nick goes through all of it honestly — what’s real, what’s overblown, and what’s genuinely troubling — and lands on the harder question: what do you do when the right...

The Iran deal text is finally out — all 14 points. Nick reads every one of them, ranked from least to most egregious, so you can hear exactly what was traded away and what wasn't. Iran gets immediate oil exports, $24 billion in frozen assets with no restrictions on use, and a $300 billion reconstruction commitment — before a single nuclear concession is verified. The nuclear program? Still standing. Enrichment? Deferred. Hormuz? Toll-free for 60 days, after which Iran negotiates the fees. Trump called Obama a traitor for a deal that involved returning Iran's own money. He just signed something twice as expensive with fewer cond...

Nick and Rick break down a chaotic week in American politics — recorded as the UFC fight unfolds on the White House South Lawn. They open on Trump's 80th birthday UFC spectacle: seven mixed martial arts matches with 4,000 spectators, including 1,000 servicemembers required to attend in uniform on their own dime and meet a waist-to-height ratio standard, plus a 120,000-person fan fest at the Ellipse and a federal lawsuit that lost on Friday — and Trump joking he might never take "The Claw" cage down. Days before the fight, a massive "86 47" mural appeared etched into the National Mall grass. Then to the weal...

Trump just did something FDR tried and failed to do: he purged his own party. Three sitting members of Congress — Sen. John Cornyn, Sen. Bill Cassidy, and Rep. Thomas Massie — crossed him, and all three are gone. So why does a president polling at 38% have this much power? Nick breaks down the math trick behind Trump's grip on the GOP, why the same anti-establishment fever just nominated an oyster farmer over Chuck Schumer's hand-picked recruit in Maine, who MAGA actually blames for $20 breakfasts, and the receipts showing Democrats are turning out at 2018-wave levels. Trump purged his party's shock abso...

Nick and Rick break down a chaotic week in American politics. They open on the Trump-Israel rupture: Trump cursed out Netanyahu in a Monday phone call — "You're f***ing crazy. You'd be in prison if it weren't for me. Everybody hates you. Everybody hates Israel because of this" — and then confirmed it on the record to the New York Post. Days later the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency raised Israel's counterintelligence threat to "critical" — the highest level, same as Russia and China — after Israel was caught spying on Trump's top Iran negotiators to learn his negotiating positions. Then to Maine, where th...

Is Trump a fascist? Nick's guest says: wrong question. Dr. Eric Grube is a historian at Boston College who specializes in fascism, nationalism, and the far-right movements of interwar Europe — and he's back on the show six months after his last appearance to update his verdict. His answer has shifted: Trump isn't a fascist in the historical sense so much as a selfish egomaniac being driven by the Heritage Foundation's policy machine. But here's what Eric wants you to take away — fascism was never easy to categorize in the moment either. The bigger problem with forcing the label is that...

Trump threatened to "blow up" Oman over the Strait of Hormuz while a tentative Iran deal sits unsigned. Ken Paxton crushed John Cornyn in Texas — the first GOP senator ever primaried out — and immediately started attacking his Democratic opponent's testosterone levels. Federal courts blocked two Republican gerrymanders in Alabama and South Carolina, taking a chunk out of the GOP's redistricting math. Plus: government-wide NDAs for federal workers, the DOJ unmasking ICE critics on Reddit, and Trump wants his face on a $250 bill and the National Mall's horses covered in gold. Nick and Rick cover the week.

Last week the Democratic Party released its official autopsy of the 2024 election. 192 pages. No mention of Gaza. No mention of Biden's age. No mention of the debate. Not once. Nick breaks down what the document actually reveals — not about 2024, but about a Democratic establishment that preaches getting money out of politics while backing Cuomo over Mamdani, that cried about losing young men and then tried to cancel the one media figure reaching millions of them, and that tried to do exactly what MAGA Inc. does — pick winners, freeze out insurgents, enforce conformity — and lost to its own voters every time...

Nick and Rick break down a chaotic week in American politics. They open on Trump's revenge tour: Trump-endorsed Ed Gallrein ousted Thomas Massie in the most expensive House primary in history ($32 million spent), Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth campaigned in-district against Massie in apparent violation of the Hatch Act, and Trump endorsed Ken Paxton over John Cornyn in the Texas Senate runoff. Then to the GOP response to Trump's $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization" fund: Mitch McConnell called it "utterly stupid, morally wrong," Tillis called it "beyond the pale," Capitol Police officers sued to block it, and Senate Republicans went home for Memorial...

Trump sued his own government for $10 billion, was about to lose in court, and settled with himself — walking away with a $1.8 billion taxpayer-funded fund he controls, a board he can fire, zero court oversight, and his personal IRS audit liability quietly erased on the side. Nick breaks down exactly what the Anti-Weaponization Fund is, who gets the money, who's running it, and why calling it a slush fund isn't a political attack — it's just reading the definition.

Nick and Rick break down a chaotic week in American politics. They open on Trump's two-day state visit to Beijing, where Xi warned that mishandling Taiwan would put the relationship in "great jeopardy" and Trump returned with a vague Iran commitment and a Boeing order — plus Pete Hegseth visibly sweating through the welcome handshake with Xi on Chinese state TV. Then to the quote of the week: Trump told reporters he doesn't think about Americans' financial situation as gas hit $4.50 a gallon and inflation hit a three-year high, and when given the chance to walk it back on Fox Ne...