The Muckrake Political Podcast

Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman are back together and open on Monday's ICE and DHS raid of Ilhan Omar's Washington home, a warrant tied to her immigration status that came with no charges and arrived right on schedule for October. Next up is Trump easing restrictions on Russian oil and diesel just before demanding Ukraine swap out Zelensky for someone more willing to deal, while drone strikes on Russian data centers appear to have taken a chunk of the right's online bot army down with them. Jared and Nick then work their way down the corruption nesting doll to its smallest figure, Kimberly Guilfoyle, the ambassador to Greece accused of asking a GOP donor to cover her $100,000 Amex bill in exchange for favors that apparently included booking him on Tucker Carlson and getting Kid Rock to sing his song. They close on the fake story, built from AI-doctored phone calls and boosted by Elon Musk, that James Talarico spent his flu in an Ohio mental hospital, a smear so flimsy even The Blaze passed on it.

Support the show by signing up to our Patreon to hear the full Weekender episode each Friday as well as special Live Shows and access to our community discord: http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast

This is a preview of The Weekender. Sign up for our Patreon and get access to the full episode each Friday as well as special Live Shows and access to our community discord: http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast

Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman reunite after two weeks apart to get into reports that the Pentagon has ordered Central Command to finalize new plans against Iran. Meanwhile the president is musing out loud that Iran should go ahead and hit San Diego or Los Angeles if people want to see a horror show. Jared explains why the false flag question can't be answered from inside an environment built to keep everyone guessing. Then it's Ken Paxton trailing in Texas while trashing Trump on tape, and a woman at a Byron Donalds rally who wants a federal law forcing her family to let her see her grandson.

Nick Hauselman is fighting through some travel issues, so it's one more solo Jared Yates Sexton episode until the boys are back in town. In this episode, Jared moves through breaking news, including reports that Trump and cronies are getting their beaks wet while negotiating a ceasefire in Ukraine, the outbreak of pneumonic plague in Russia, the strange case of B1 bombers being pulled in a hurry from a British airbase, and the disturbing election results out of Brazil, where the Bolsanaro family is just cleaning up.

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One last solo show from Jared Yates Sexton before Nick Hauselman returns. In this episode, Jared sifts through developing stories, including the preposterous "Super Intelligence" summit at the White House, Pete Hegseth laying off generals and admirals and trusting "the future of war" to a committee including Elon Musk, Palmer Luckey, and Newt Gingrich, and the Department of Education rolling back Title IX protections because, well, cruelty and fascist barbarism.

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Nick Hauselman is still out of pocket, leaving Jared Yates Sexton to record another Professor Jared episode. Here, he begins with a look at climate change as a historical El Niño churns in the Pacific, then brings the issue into a larger context with breaking news that OpenAI meddled with governmental data (putting the blame where it belongs there), and the very sinister trend of tech oligarchs becoming weapons developers as democracy erodes. Oh, and there's a real big deep dive into the history of the military-industrial complex thrown in for good measure.

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Nick Hauselman is still out of country, leaving Jared Yates Sexton to tackle the Paramount acquisition of Warner Bros., the monopolistic environment, the denial of journalists in the White House, and the economic system blinking in warning that the whole thing could come down at any moment.

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Nick Hauselman is out for the next two weeks, so Jared Yates Sexton takes the opportunity to draw together the plethora of breaking news stories and connect the dots. This is a table-setting episode dissecting how geopolitical chaos and U.S. decline is tied together in an agenda to destroy liberal democracy and create a techno-feudal, authoritarian order.

If you haven't already, head over to http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast to support the show and gain access to the patreon-exclusive Weekender episodes on Friday.

This is a preview of The Weekender. Sign up for our Patreon and get access to the full episode each Friday as well as special Live Shows and access to our community discord: http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast

Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman open on Kevin Warsh raising interest rates when Trump appointed him to cut them, and why a rate hike can't do a thing about: record diesel prices, the war in Iran, or an economy already flirting with stagflation (not necessarily in that order).

The Supreme Court keeps the Postal Service's mail ballot rule on hold through the midterms, with Thomas and Alito still on board (because of course) and a whistleblower alleging the USPS built the system anyway. Jared predicts November is headed for a mess no matter what the courts say.

Speaking of a mess, Mitch McConnell returned to the Senate looking a lot like Grandpa at the dinner table in The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, which Jared and Nick see as proof of a machine that grinds the humanity out of everyone who serves it. A new report that JD Vance tried to advise the Clinton campaign in 2016 shows exactly who he is: a striver (on a couch) with no principles who could just as easily have ended up a Democrat, and Hillary's own 9/11 essay in The Atlantic proves the striver class is bipartisan (good times).

In What We're Watching, Nick catches The Odyssey a second time to get ready for his trip, and Jared is slowly working through For Whom the Bell Tolls and finally watched season one of The Rehearsal. Nick is off to Greece for two weeks, so Jared will hold down the fort until he's back in October.

Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman open on Dario Amodei's call to slow down AI development and why we should be worried when both Sam Altman and Elon Musk agree with him. Donald Trump responded that the whole thing is a sick conspiracy because, of course he did. They work through who actually benefits when an industry starts begging to be regulated, why a bubble this size might need to become a national security emergency to survive, and what it means that the quickest way to get what you want is to frighten people out of thinking.

Then the Middle East, where the Houthis took Mayun island and closed the Red Sea route that was supposed to be the answer to the Strait of Hormuz, while drones launched out of Iraq and tore up the East-West pipeline .

From there, the BRICS nations met in New Delhi and called for a multipolar world while Donald Trump blames Volodymyr Zelensky for diesel prices: good times. They make the case that the alternative order arriving now isn't better, only newer, and that the United States has spent the past year assembling it on the other side's behalf.

Support the show by signing up to our Patreon to hear the full Weekender episode each Friday as well as special Live Shows and access to our community discord: http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast

This is a preview of The Weekender. Sign up for our Patreon and get access to the full episode each Friday as well as special Live Shows and access to our community discord: http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast

Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman open on the 25th anniversary of September 11th and the question running through the whole episode: who knew what, and what were they willing to ignore? Nick wonders whether the conspiracy theories are the attack's real legacy, while Jared argues the distrust behind them was earned by generations of leaders and that the true winner of the war on terror was the class that profited from it, a point Nick drives home with Palantir's founding date. Mayor Zohran Mamdani's release of 170,000 pages shows the Giuliani administration knew the air around Ground Zero wasn't safe while telling people it was, and successive mayors kept the records locked away, which Jared chalks up to honor among thieves. A new book reports that Benjamin Netanyahu was warned by the UAE and Egypt ten days before October 7th and never told his own security chiefs, which makes his "they didn't wake me up" defense look even worse. Then it's off to the half-empty GOP midterm convention in Dallas, where Trump promised every adult $5,000 if Republicans keep Congress, a pledge Nick holds up against 18 U.S.C. 600, and John Fetterman sent a video endorsing Dave McCormick that Jared is convinced took several takes. On what we're watching, Nick shrugs his way through Ted Lasso's unnecessary new season and gives Lanterns a lukewarm endorsement, while Jared recommends the horror film It Ends, grinds through For Whom the Bell Tolls, and cannot let go of a commercial VHS tape getting taped over on The Paper.