The Lonely Liberal Podcast

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 because the Democrats abandoned the first.

They get into how a billionaire convinced working people he was their champion, why the old robber barons at least built libraries while the new ones just want to leave for Mars, and the question Nick keeps pressing: are these really "hard times"? America is historically rich — so is the anger about real hardship, or about precarity and the sheer visible gap between ordinary people and a trillionaire class?

Plus: why so many Americans now say they're done with big corporations, what a "positive populism" would actually look like, and whether the wave of insurgent candidates Nick's been interviewing all month is the real thing finally arriving.

Charlie's book Fighting Oligarchy is out now. 

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 US taking 55% of output and the right to buy at cost. Nobody will say who the partners are. We also get into Don Jr. quietly lobbying Republican attorneys general to leave prediction markets alone, a business he happens to be paid by.

Canada becomes the first US ally to take the tariff hit rather than fold, and Trump responds by signing an executive order renaming Lake Ontario to "Lake America." That leads into a game: how many things has Trump renamed this term? Rick guesses. The real number is worse.

Hasan Piker's comments about American Jews draw condemnation from Jeffries, Booker, and Gottheimer — and Abdul El-Sayed distances himself three weeks after they campaigned together. We get into where the phrasing went wrong, why the sentiment underneath it isn't crazy, and why the Democratic response was exactly what Republicans were hoping for.

Also: the first US measles deaths of 2026 with a county coroner disputing the state's finding, congressional Democrats quietly tracking a hundred election-interference scenarios ahead of November, nine activists sentenced to between thirty and a hundred years over an anti-ICE protest in Texas under a terrorism enhancement, and Milo Yiannopoulos — a loud supporter of Trump's immigration crackdown — gets arrested by ICE for overstaying his visa and deported.

(00:00) Rick and Nick at Progressive Palooza

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 these people are social democrats rather than socialists. Plus what Dean Baker told us about why an entire generation decided to accept a word that was only ever meant as an insult.

Also this week: Aisha Wahab becomes the first Afghan American in Congress, Peltola turns Alaska into a toss-up, Debbie Wasserman Schultz survives yet again, and Darline Graham admits at her first debate that she isn't informed on national security while running for her late brother's seat — the seat of a man whose entire career was foreign policy.

Then the corruption story almost nobody is covering: Trump Media is charging Wall Street up to a hundred thousand dollars a month for early access to Truth Social posts that move markets, while his own Justice Department argues in court that those posts are official presidential statements. We make the case it's the most corrupt thing he's done.

And we close on vice signaling — the mirror image of virtue signaling, and possibly the single best explanation of MAGA politics we've come across.

(00:00) Chair talk with Rick and Nick

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, and the surprisingly simple metric he uses to track it — how much people are spending at fast-food restaurants.

From there it opens up: why prescription drugs that cost a few hundred dollars to make sell for tens of thousands (and how patents, not "the free market," are the reason), why finance is largely "parasitic," how private equity is built to strip and walk away — and Nick's favorite thread, why blaming everything on "late-stage capitalism" might be the laziest thing the left does. As Baker puts it, there was a book called Late Capitalism fifty years ago. It's been late for a while.

Plus: the AI bubble, why nationalizing the AI companies makes no sense, and what the fight over data centers reveals about who the rules really get written for.

Dean's book Rigged is free to download.

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's a hierarchy of needs — you can't ask someone to care about climate change when they can't make rent. Rick brings the Latinx and unhoused debates, and we land on why the loudest voices in that era were often white people speaking for communities they never talked to.

Also this week: Todd Blanche's DOJ, the USS Abraham Lincoln and 250 days at sea with sailors going overboard while Trump says it hasn't been "nearly long enough," the National Guard occupying DC through 2029 at a billion and a half dollars, an executive order cutting childhood vaccines from seventeen diseases to eleven, Karoline Leavitt's resignation and the question of whether it was worth it, and Trump escaping Turkey inside a catering container while leaving half his cabinet on a decoy plane.

Plus: who we're endorsing in Markey vs. Moulton, why AOC should primary Schumer, Ossoff's generational lock-in, and a Filipino martial arts master who may or may not be able to knock people unconscious by touching their ear.

(00:00) Halloween is overrated

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 John Fetterman going on Fox to dare Democrats to keep campaigning with him. Nick isn't here to defend what Piker said — he's here to ask why a Senate nominee has to answer for it at all, when a man streaming seven hours a day for eight years has an archive nobody could survive. He walks through the double standard: Joe Rogan survived 1,300 doctors and an n-word compilation and now texts the President into signing executive orders, half a dozen Trump officials stayed friendly with Jeffrey Epstein after his conviction, JD Vance called it pearl-clutching to condemn a Young Republican group chat, and Donald Trump hosted a former al-Qaeda commander at the White House and called him a tough guy he liked. Meanwhile only four House Republicans signed the Epstein discharge petition, and Thomas Massie got primaried out for forcing the vote. The litmus test isn't a moral standard. It's a way to decide who gets to pick Democratic candidates.

Hasan Piker, Abdul El-Sayed, Chris Rabb, Joe Rogan, Francesca Hong, John Fetterman, Thomas Massie, Epstein files, JD Vance, 2026 midterms, progressive politics, Twitch, cancel culture, litmus test, Democratic primary, Sean Hannity, AOC, Ro Khanna

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 Cassidy choking up while casting the deciding vote. Trump's personal defense lawyer from the Stormy Daniels case now runs the Justice Department — and no one has done more to bury the Epstein files. We make the case that this effectively ends any chance of prosecution for anyone connected to Epstein, and that Blanche is worse on this than the people who merely deny Trump's involvement.

Also: Capital One says in court it closed 300+ Trump Organization accounts over money laundering concerns, Mitch McConnell has missed 51 floor votes and nobody in the press seems to care, Rand Paul's Fauci theater and what the actual fair criticism is, the US ran out of bombs in Iran, two more birthright citizenship orders, and Max Miller's abuse allegations — including why Republicans suddenly care about this one.

Plus Chris Rabb trolling Sean Hannity, a Politico reporter who appears to be twelve beers and fifteen chicken nuggets deep during an interview with Pete Buttigieg, and a Japanese precision walking competition that Nick needs the audience to validate is funny.

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.