The Muckrake Political Podcast

Jared and Nick go live with Muckrake's election night coverage Tuesday, November 3 at 10pm Eastern. Join them for results, reaction, and analysis you won't get on cable news by becoming a patron at http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast, which also gets you the full Weekender episode each Friday and access to our community discord.

Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman open the midterm preview on Haley Stevens, who lost the Michigan primary to Abdul El-Sayed and then endorsed Republican Mike Rogers from a church parking lot two days before the election. Jared reads it as the Democratic leadership's power struggle with its own left wing rather than one woman's breakdown, and wonders what plum job turns up for her in a few months. Nick figures AIPAC simply called in its marker, and notes El-Sayed has raised a fortune off the stunt.

Then they work through the Senate races that will decide the night: Michigan, Maine, Texas, Ohio, Kansas, Alaska, Iowa, and South Carolina. Jared is nervous about El-Sayed and a coin flip on James Talarico, but confident about Sherrod Brown and surprisingly bullish on a Democrat in Kansas, thanks in part to Roger Marshall's closing ad about his own patients' debt collections. They close on why the polls can't be trusted, what Todd Blanche and ICE might do on election day, and the scenario that hurts Nick's soul: Democrats reach 51 and John Fetterman announces he's an independent... or worse.

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 Flavio Bolsonaro, who lost to Lula on Sunday and landed in Miami on Wednesday aboard a private jet the Trump administration helped arrange. He left Brazil in defiance of a Supreme Court order to surrender his passports, and the money laundering probe chasing him reportedly runs through JD Vance's Rockbridge Network. Then it's Israel's deadlocked election and a Wired report on ICE running COINTELPRO-style surveillance against its critics.

Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman open on the Vanity Fair excerpt from Matthew Cole's new book, which claims Dutch intelligence spent months watching Jared Kushner's hacked iPhone. What they allegedly saw was Kushner logging into a Gulf-funded account holding hundreds of millions of dollars. Jared calls Kushner what he is, an intelligence asset, and asks why the same handful of countries show up every time a Trump official gets bought. Then it's the report that the US, Russia, and China want Viktor Orban running the United Nations, and the boys game out whether France or the UK will be the veto that stops it. Lula's comeback win in Brazil over Flavio Bolsonaro gets a look as a preview of midterm fuckery, since the losing side is already refusing to accept the results. They close on Israel's election and the growing drumbeat of a renewed war with Iran, with the military told to prepare for 90 days without civilian power and British officials telling people to stock up on food and water.

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 Vivek Ramaswamy's $4 million attack ad against Amy Acton, which puts her estranged mother on camera to call her a liar and forces a survivor of childhood abuse to relive it on the campaign trail, with JD Vance applauding from the sidelines. Then it's the rat fuckery in Texas, where Elon Musk has dropped $138 million and Russia is pitching in, and FEMA's new message to the states: you're on your own.

Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman open on Trump waiving the Russia sanctions passed in Lindsey Graham's name, two days before they took effect and three months after Graham died. Jared reads it as a thank-you note for the diesel deal and a warm-up for a rumored summit with Putin and Xi, a new Yalta for the authoritarian order replacing the American one. Then it's the riots in France, where Macron is rolling back civil liberties while Marine Le Pen waits in the wings promising law and order, and Albania, where protests against the Kushner resort keep growing, as Jared lays out the cycle in which liberals do the crackdown and fascists collect the reward. They close on the former Josh Hawley staffer who showed up at an Abdul El-Sayed event demanding he disavow the Muslim Brotherhood, and why the dual loyalty smear was run on Thomas Jefferson in 1800 and JFK in 1960 long before anyone aimed it at a Muslim running for Senate in Michigan.

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 Ukraine's drones losing their Starlink connection mid-flight, with Elon Musk insisting it wasn't him and pointing at Trump, whose "energy ceasefire" Russia honored by bombing Ukraine's power grid. Jared has a reminder about what happens to American proxies once a better deal comes along, and then it's on to the Pentagon sending troops south to "fight drug trafficking" while cocaine gets cheaper in Miami, and the hack that cooked the fridges in 400 French supermarkets, which looks a lot like somebody testing the next theater of war.

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.

As always, if you want to support the show AND gain full access to the Weekender episodes on Friday, head over to http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast and become a patreon. We desperately need your support and every little bit helps.

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.

This is a preview of the Friday Weekender episode. To gain full access to this and all Weekender editions, as well as special live shows and mailbags, head over to http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast

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.

If you haven't already, head to http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast and become a patron. You'll get the bonus Weekender episode every Friday, as well as access to specials and livestreams, which will come in handy during the Midterm season.

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.

To support the show and also listen to the entire episode, head over to http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast and become a patron.

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.

Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman open on Germany, where Alternative für Deutschland just took over 43 percent in Saxony-Anhalt and the famous firewall is starting to look less like a wall and more like a formality. The guys get into why decades of neoliberal austerity left the far right as the only people making anybody an offer, and why the conservatives currently swearing they'd never work with the AfD are exactly the people history says eventually will.

Then it's Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, two private citizens holding no position in the United States government, flying to Moscow to tell Vladimir Putin that his retirement stories are going to be the best ones in the room. Back stateside, the Fifth Circuit informed the residents of Jackson, Mississippi that there's no constitutional right to clean drinking water and no right to truthful information from officials during a public health crisis, which does raise the question of what anybody is paying taxes for.

And to close it out, Third Way took fifty million dollars and came back with a twenty point New Economic Bargain featuring federally backed used car loans, because if you can't afford a house you're going to need somewhere to sleep.

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, frequent live shows, and the Muckrake Discord community at http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast.

Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman open on Army Secretary Dan Driscoll resigning directly to Trump's face after telling him that Pete Hegseth is doing 'generational damage' to the armed forces. Driscoll is the 25th senior military departure in a war that six generals have formally dissented from while the Defense Secretary shops for a presidential campaign. From there they unpack ICE's $5 million voter database, built on a 'crisis' that produced 14 convictions out of tens of thousands of leads, and how red states are handing over unredacted voter rolls while blue states get sued for refusing. The longest segment digs into what really happened when Jared Golden and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez rescued Mike Johnson's entire floor agenda from a Freedom Caucus revolt, clearing the path for Democrats to vote on a bill that condemned the DSA by name and stripped federal funding from colleges boycotting Israel. Jared argues this wasn't incompetence from Jeffries but choreography, the same Kirsten Manchinism that always picks which Democrats will cross the line when Republicans need the votes. They close with what they're watching, including Steve Carell's Rooster and the anxiety inducing of Silo.

Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman open on the Iran war flaring back up after a month of quiet, with new strikes exchanged, a missile wiping out a base in Jordan, and Trump posting AI-generated videos of Kharg Island being obliterated while the real military runs out of interceptors. Meanwhile, leaked Pentagon documents reveal six four-star generals filed formal dissent against extending the campaign, and Defense Secretary Hegseth's response to the worst military crisis in a generation is to start visiting Iowa and South Carolina for a 2028 presidential run. They trace the Venezuela oil grab for what it is: the U.S. overthrew a government, installed a puppet, and that puppet just signed over 100 years of oil rights to an unnamed private company while 80% of Venezuelan households live in poverty. From there they connect the collapsing food supply, where blueberries are killing people and Trump is deregulating meat processing live on Glenn Beck's radio show, to the Project 2025 blueprint that laid all of this out in black and white. They close on Jim Clyburn going on Meet the Press to announce that impeachment is not a Democratic priority, which tells you everything about why Hakeem Jeffries was meeting with Jared Kushner last week: the captured resistance has no plans and no platform two months before the midterms.

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

Nick Hauselman is out, so Jared Yates Sexton mans the fort on this preview of The Weekender. To start, Jared reluctantly discusses the Democratic Party's choreographed focused on streamer Hasan Piker in order to examine how a party machine fights against insurgents. Then, China has hacked into...well, everything, economic threats against Iran reveal just how weak the U.S. is right now, and, in some good news, Meta settles for $18 billion dollars for preying on kids.

This is a preview of the regular show. To listen to the whole episode and support The Muckrake Podcast, head over to http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast and become a patron.