The Lonely Liberal

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” i...

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 $...

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, t...

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 Kati...

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...

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 insuran...

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 Fe...

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...

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 impeachm...

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, n...

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,...

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 billi...

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 new...

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...

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...

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 le...

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 cat...

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...

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 b...

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,...

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...

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...

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 othe...

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...

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 mo...