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 into what's actually driving this wave. Why do establishment Democrats keep asking progressives how they'll win over Republicans, but never ask centrists how they'll win over their own base? Why did the Harris campaign bury the IRA and run toward fracking? And here's the disagreement at the center of the episode: Nick, who spent a decade in renewables, argues the clean-energy transition should be the affordability pitch and that the data-center boom could be leveraged to build it — Rabb makes the case for a moratorium instead, because he sees the whole project as oligarchs building server farms to replace human beings.

Plus: the "insurgent incumbent" model, John Fetterman's heel turn, why a dozen socialists in Congress terrify a caucus of 535, and Rabb's own read on what separates a public servant from a politician. A genuinely wide-ranging one — two people who mostly agree, arguing hard about the part where they don't.

Rabb's book is Invisible Capital. His district covers the left side of Philadelphia; he's sworn in on January 3rd.

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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 million from corporations through a fundraiser he calls "the princess of darkness," and the Commerce Department takes minority stakes in seven more private companies. Comrade Trump strikes again.

Plus the Supreme Court rules on mail-in voting Monday, Michigan votes Tuesday in the most expensive AIPAC primary in history, Chuck Schumer begs John Fetterman to stay a Democrat and we explain why he shouldn't, Haitian TPS ends, and RFK Jr. launches a cooking show during an active foodborne illness outbreak.

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. is really a free market or just "bad socialism" propped up by $38 billion in subsidies to companies like Elon Musk's; how you keep corruption out of any system built by people; and why Tache believes real change has always come from movements in the street, not senators in a chamber.

Plus: Seth Moulton's flip-flops, the rigged math of third-party ballot access, and a Charles Sumner history lesson that ties it all together. Nick and Joe agree on maybe 85% of the diagnosis — it's the other 15% that makes this one worth your time.

Follow the show and drop us a line at [email protected], or on Instagram @thelonelyliberal.

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, and the Pentagon quietly subtracts four dead service members from the Iran war to reset the War Powers clock. Plus Rahm Emanuel and Gretchen Whitmer both pick a side in the Democratic Party's fight over its own future — and a question nobody asks centrist Democrats.

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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't backed by the numbers Stephen's actually watching. Plus: the real difference between "I'm just asking questions" podcasters like Rogan and Tucker Carlson versus actual journalism, a live case study of the NYT/Politico flip-flop on the Graham Platner story, and Stephen's pitch for the one unsexy fix that could actually rebuild trust — local news.

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 to be taken apart. And in Maine, Troy Jackson — a fifth-generation logger, former state Senate President, and Bernie-backed Platner ally — swept more than 460 of 500 delegate slots in a single weekend, pushing Shenna Bellows and Nirav Shah out of the race and effectively locking up the nomination to face Susan Collins. The party built a 601-delegate convention instead of a caucus, and the union guy won it anyway.

Also this week: Trump went primetime to declassify documents claiming elections are "vulnerable to being rigged and stolen," offering no evidence of a single fraudulent vote, four months before the midterms. His DNI nominee Jay Clayton wouldn't tell senators Biden won the 2020 election. Todd Blanche's attorney general nomination stalled after Epstein survivors came out of a forced meeting more opposed than before, with John Cornyn and Thom Tillis still holding out over a $1.776 billion DOJ slush fund. Lindsey Graham died and his sister was sworn into his Senate seat 72 hours later on Trump's recommendation. ICE halted traffic stops after a string of killings and reinstated them days later, with zero agents charged and two more men dead. Trump's teleprompter operator got caught allegedly betting on which words Trump would say. Plus New York's data center moratorium, Cuba's grid collapse, and a tuberculosis outbreak in a Colorado immigration jail.

Nick and Rick cover the week.

Iran war, JD Vance, Joe Rogan, Troy Jackson, Maine Senate, Susan Collins, Graham Platner, election fraud, Epstein files, Todd Blanche, Lindsey Graham, ICE, NDAA, 2026 midterms.

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 cut Israel funding, and a bench-press cameo. A sharp, funny, substantive conversation with one of the most nuanced progressives in the country.

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 already restarting. Plus: the contenders, whether Susan Collins just won by default, and how Patrick Dempsey briefly became a Senate prospect.

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 Trump's dark Mount Rushmore speech Friday night, where he called communism "the greatest threat to our country, including WWI, WWII, Pearl Harbor, or even 9/11" — aimed at DSA-aligned Democrats — while Pope Leo XIV counterprogrammed from the Vatican, calling America a "byword for freedom" because it "opened its doors to successive waves of immigrants." Then to SCOTUS's blockbuster final week: the Court upheld birthright citizenship 6-3 in Trump v. Barbara, with Chief Justice Roberts writing the majority and Kavanaugh and Barrett joining the liberals to strike down Trump's day-one executive order; the Court also killed the 91-year-old Humphrey's Executor precedent 6-3 in Trump v. Slaughter, giving Trump the power to fire commissioners at approximately 24 previously-independent federal agencies — from the FTC and FCC to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the NTSB — with Justice Sotomayor reading her dissent from the bench; a separate 5-4 ruling blocked Trump from firing Fed Governor Lisa Cook, leaving the Fed as the sole exception; SCOTUS also protected cellphone location data under the 4th Amendment, declined to hear Trump's appeal of the $5 million E. Jean Carroll verdict, and agreed to consider Arizona's proof-of-citizenship voter law next term.

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 already replaced the old one. Nobody in Washington is even pretending you should be made whole.