The Lonely Liberal Podcast

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 strikes after the midterms; Trump wanting the briefing room turned into a pool; Wedgewood’s fake polls fooling the poll aggregators; and Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary.

Ethan Klein, Hila Klein, H3 Podcast, Vivek Ramaswamy, Amy Acton, Ohio governor race, Jared Kushner, Mary Peltola, Dan Sullivan, Alaska Senate race, Shylock, Abdul El-Sayed, Mike Rogers, Steve Witkoff, Putin, Iran war, Wedgewood polls, Nate Silver, Nathan Fielder, Elizabeth Holmes, midterms 2026, Lonely Liberal Podcast

Chapters

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 money that paid a Catholic priest to preach free-market capitalism, how Mobil invented the advertorial, and where the “offshore wind kills whales” story really came from. We also talk about Michael Shellenberger, Elon Musk and X, whether the left needs its own propaganda machine, AI and data centers, and whether we can still have a Silent Spring moment.

📖 Brought to You By (Bloomsbury): https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/brought-to-you-by-9781639736331/

Chapters

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 gets canceled; the $333 million list of Trump ballroom donors, including Apple, Nvidia and Google; Trump waives the new Russia sanctions as Starlink goes dark in Ukraine; and Trump’s dinner with Kid Rock, Bill Maher and Stephen A. Smith.

Ilhan Omar, Shane Gillis, SNL monologue, Ken Paxton, James Talarico, Texas Senate race, Katie Zacharia, White House press secretary, Kimberly Guilfoyle, Pete Hegseth, Trump ballroom donors, Russia sanctions, Starlink Ukraine, Zelensky, Bill Maher, Kid Rock, Stephen A. Smith, Iran war, midterms 2026, ICE, Lonely Liberal Podcast

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–Macklemore mess, and Rubio vowing to dismantle the ICC hours after a former ICC judge wins the Nobel Peace Prize. Plus the Senate debates in Georgia, Michigan and Maine — Ossoff putting Mike Collins “on trial,” Mike Rogers going after Abdul El-Sayed’s mom, and Susan Collins versus Troy Jackson — the Pentagon’s plan to livestream the firing-squad execution of the Fort Hood shooter, Susan Dell’s viral Oval Office appearance, a plague death in Siberia, Trump’s SpaceX bonds, and the Paramount–Warner Bros. merger. #Trump #IranWar #Putin #Russia #ICC #NobelPeacePrize #NaviPillay #Ossoff #AbdulElSayed #MikeRogers #SusanCollins #TroyJackson #Hegseth #FortHood #DeathPenalty #Execution #SusanDell #Paramount #CNN #Midterms2026

Chapters

(00:00) The wedding and the blazer trial

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 every national story, from George Floyd to the assassination of a colleague he knew. Plus a genuinely eye-opening look at prediction markets from someone who watched people bet on his own race, and why he thinks "boring enough to win" isn't the flex his opponent thinks it is.

Find the show at thelonelyliberal.com or @thelonelyliberal.

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 AI fears are the same hoax as climate change and that AI should be renamed "SI" — while Xi talks about keeping AI under human control and walks away looking like the adult in the room. Plus the Sanders–Casar superintelligence ban, whether the AI "race" with China is even real, Hegseth's get-out-the-vote video, and why China doesn't work as a campaign villain anymore. #Trump #PressFreedom #CNN #TrumpTV #SusanCollins #TroyJackson #DonJr #RFKJr #Fetterman #IranWar #Netanyahu #HasanPiker #Mamdani #UNGA #AI #Superintelligence #China #XiJinping #Hegseth #Midterms2026

(00:00) The nor'easter that wasn't, and our small-talk crutches

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 owners over players, and the tension at the heart of it all — as Chris puts it, you love this sport and it just doesn't love you back. From there it opens up to the thing this whole show circles: the NFL as maybe the last real "town square" we've got, why we stay fans of broken things, and how all of it rhymes with loving a country you're not always proud of.

Plus fantasy talk, the "sin eater," and why meaning is where you make it.

Pound Foolish is out now.

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 a privileged resolution, forcing a vote within two days. So Mike Johnson canceled Congress. The House won't return until after the midterms. We count how many times Johnson has now used a vacation to avoid a vote he doesn't want.

Congress also left town days after nearly every major tech executive asked to be regulated on AI, with a kill-switch bill and a development pause both dying in the oven. We get into AOC's argument about refusing to bail out the AI bubble when it pops, and why "Congress is less qualified to understand it" is a strange thing for a Speaker to say out loud.

Also: the Fed raises rates for the first time since 2023 and Trump's own hand-picked chairman admits the Fed can't fix energy prices, JD Vance asks voters to "give us another chance," the EPA guts carbon standards and a new Fish and Wildlife memo makes killing endangered animals legal as long as you weren't aiming at them, thousands form a human chain around the Kennedy Center, and Gavin Newsom says from the middle of a Montana river that he won't run against Kamala Harris.

And then Kash Patel, under oath, explains why bestiality is no longer an automatic disqualifier for FBI applicants. We play the clip. It does not get better.

(00:00) Flight talk with Rick and Nick

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 links that person to their relatives and associates. He traces how a 2017 Atlanta startup founded by two Georgia Tech guys sold its first cameras not to police but to homeowners associations, where there are no public hearings, no council votes and no surveillance ordinances — and how those neighborhoods unknowingly joined a national network. Then the backlash: the Texas sheriff's office that searched more than 83,000 cameras with the reason "had an abortion, search for female," the Border Patrol back doors, the Texas school district whose eight cameras were searched 733,000 times in a single month, the officers looking up their exes, and the sixty Condor cameras left livestreaming on the open internet with no password — one of them pointed at a playground. Plus the bipartisan No FLOCK Act introduced this week, why it doesn't go far enough, and Nick's verdict: the cameras aren't the problem. The network is.

Flock Safety, license plate readers, ALPR, surveillance, privacy, Condor, Nova, No FLOCK Act, ICE, Border Patrol, 404 Media, Andreessen Horowitz, HOA, data brokers, police surveillance, civil liberties, Fourth Amendment

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 make banning Sharia law a convention plank, Turning Point USA lines up behind Vance for 2028, and Mike Rogers calls Hasan Piker Abdul El-Sayed's running mate.

John Fetterman shows up by surprise video at the Republican convention to introduce a Republican senator and pledge to work with Trump. He's now more popular with Pennsylvania Republicans than the actual Republican is, and only 22% of Pennsylvania Democrats view him favorably.

Then RFK Jr.'s week: he personally ordered the CDC to delete Pennsylvania's two measles deaths from the national tally, suggested they were fabricated by the governor's office, and the official 2026 American measles death toll now stands at zero. He's also been flying to Republican campaign events on $9,000-an-hour military jets — the exact thing Trump fired his first-term health secretary for. And the new Surgeon General nominee holds stock in McDonald's, Coca-Cola, and Philip Morris.

Plus: the Supreme Court blocks Missouri's gerrymander twice in a week, Denver sues to keep armed ICE agents out of polling places, a federal court rules there's no constitutional right to clean drinking water, Trump says the Iran war lasts until November, Gloria Steinem dies at 92, Hunter Biden launches a laptop meme coin, and a robot in Russia roundhouse kicks a customer.