The Lonely Liberal

Nick Zenkin
  • 5.0 (13)
  • Society & Culture
  • Updated Weekly

The Lonely Liberal Podcast is a comedy and politics podcast hosted by Nick Zenkin. Every Sunday, Nick and co-host Rick break down the week's biggest stories in American politics — Congress, elections, the Trump administration, and whatever chaos the news cycle brings — with humor and a healthy dose of absurdity. Every Wednesday, Nick goes solo with a deep-dive episode, taking a sharp, funny, anti-establishment look at both Republican governance and Democratic Party timidity. Politics is depressing; this show makes it bearable.

  1. 2d ago

    Peggy Flanagan Crushes in Minnesota, Hong Loses by 0.4, and AOC Says Woke 1 Was Crazy

    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 (04:07) Flanagan crushes it in Minnesota (14:08) Hong loses Wisconsin by 0.4 (21:20) AOC and whether Woke 1 was crazy (36:41) Who Will You Endorse: Markey vs. Moulton (51:40) Florida votes tomorrow (52:45) AOC, egg freezing, and primarying Schumer (57:35) The USS Abraham Lincoln (01:01:05) Ossoff is generationally locked in (01:06:47) The National Guard owns DC until 2029 (01:07:19) Vaccines cut from seventeen to eleven (01:08:08) Karoline Leavitt taps out (01:13:40) Trump threatens Oman (01:14:20) The catering container escape (01:18:51) Snopes, Türkiye, and Filipino martial arts

  2. 6d ago

    Who Is Hasan Piker, and Why Does Everyone Have to Denounce Him?

    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

  3. Aug 10

    Abdul El-Sayed Wins, Todd Blanche Buries Epstein, and Mitch McConnell Has Vanished

    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.

  4. Aug 7

    Chris Rabb on How a Handful of Progressives Can Bend the Whole Party

    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. Follow the show and reach us at media@thelonelyliberal.com or @thelonelyliberal on Instagram

  5. Aug 2

    Ukraine Strikes Iran, Trump Raises $800 Million, and Schumer Begs Fetterman to Stay

    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.

  6. Jul 31

    Ed Markey, Seth Moulton, and the Socialist Running Against Them Both

    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 thelonelyliberalpodcast@gmail.com, or on Instagram @thelonelyliberal.

  7. Jul 26

    Trump Defunds Blue States, Rubio Hunts Communists, and Trump Bombs at the WHCD

    The Energy Department admitted in court this week that it canceled 284 clean energy grants — $7.5 billion worth — based solely on whether the state voted for Kamala Harris. Not cost. Not performance. Just the election result. Meanwhile, Marco Rubio's State Department released a 100-page report naming DSA, CodePink, Hasan Piker, and Ilhan Omar as instruments of Cuban influence, and Troy Jackson won the Maine Democratic Senate nomination 566 to 5. Also this week: Zohran Mamdani asks the federal government to arrest Netanyahu, Trump bombs at the Correspondents' Dinner, measles hits a 35-year high, a judge freezes the $110 billion Paramount–Warner Bros. merger, and the Pentagon quietly subtracts four dead service members from the Iran war to reset the War Powers clock. Plus Rahm Emanuel and Gretchen Whitmer both pick a side in the Democratic Party's fight over its own future — and a question nobody asks centrist Democrats.   Get your MillRat Pack here!!

  8. Jul 24

    Doing Journalism in a Fake News World, with Stephen Lacey

    Nick sits down with Stephen Lacey — co-founder and executive editor of Latitude Media, host of Open Circuit, and former Editor-in-Chief of Greentech Media — for a conversation about what it actually takes to make trustworthy media in a "fake news" world. They get into why Stephen thinks the "legacy media is biased" argument is mostly BS (it's really hyper-partisanship coloring how people read otherwise solid reporting), why data centers exploded overnight into a 2026 midterm litmus test before anyone had time to figure out what's actually true, and why the popular narrative blaming data centers for your electric bill isn't backed by the numbers Stephen's actually watching. Plus: the real difference between "I'm just asking questions" podcasters like Rogan and Tucker Carlson versus actual journalism, a live case study of the NYT/Politico flip-flop on the Graham Platner story, and Stephen's pitch for the one unsexy fix that could actually rebuild trust — local news.

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5
out of 5
13 Ratings

About

The Lonely Liberal Podcast is a comedy and politics podcast hosted by Nick Zenkin. Every Sunday, Nick and co-host Rick break down the week's biggest stories in American politics — Congress, elections, the Trump administration, and whatever chaos the news cycle brings — with humor and a healthy dose of absurdity. Every Wednesday, Nick goes solo with a deep-dive episode, taking a sharp, funny, anti-establishment look at both Republican governance and Democratic Party timidity. Politics is depressing; this show makes it bearable.

Information

  • Creator
    Nick Zenkin
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    100
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2025 All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    The Lonely Liberal

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