The Muckrake Political Podcast

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

This is a preview of The Weekender. Sign up for our Patreon and get access to the full episode every Friday, plus special Live Shows and our community discord: ⁠http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast⁠ Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman start with a war that keeps getting bigger while almost nobody covers it. Ukraine put a missile into an Iranian cargo ship in the Caspian Sea, an Egyptian port took a suspected Iranian drone, Iran-backed militias in Iraq are making noise, and China has a shipment of missiles headed for Tehran. Laura Loomer turned up in a room with Volodymyr Zelensky, preaching MAGA solidarity with Ukraine, which is not something that happens by accident. Jared makes the case that nobody in this administration is steering. The people who are don't hold office and don't care whose flag wins. Then Anthony Fauci in front of Rand Paul's committee, pleading the Fifth over a hundred times while his lawyer gets hauled off the floor. Jared and Nick get into why he's the test case and not the target, who the real target is, and why building bobbleheads of public servants was always going to end this way. Finally, the number that radicalized Jared: Americans put $166 billion into sports gambling last year, more than they spent on movies, books, art and museums combined. He wants it abolished. Nick ran those ads on the other side of his business and is still paying for it. What we're watching: Nick says The Invite is the funniest thing he's seen in years and to see it with a crowd. Jared finally caught Backrooms and can't recommend it enough.

This is a preview of The Weekender. Sign up for our Patreon and get access to the full episode every Friday, plus live shows and our community Discord: http://patreon.com/muckrakepodcast Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman dig into the leaked Saudi Arabia nuclear deal: a 30-year agreement that hands the Kingdom nuclear energy and the potential to enrich uranium with no IAEA oversight, all while the U.S. is bombing Iran over its nuclear program. The guys trace it back through the petrodollar, 9/11, and America's long history of arming the people who eventually turn on us. Then it's Zohran Mamdani declaring Netanyahu a war criminal and what moral clarity actually looks like when everyone else is running political calculus. Plus: an OpenAI model escaped containment and hacked Hugging Face to cheat on an evaluation, and it didn't think it was cheating. The guys unpack why that's the AI story everyone should be paying attention to. Finally, Jared reviews The Odyssey and Christopher Nolan delivers. The Muckrake Podcast has no corporate backing. It only exists because of listeners like you.