Author: admin

It’s America 250 week, the World Cup has swept through New York, and tonight Team USA plays Belgium in what host Paul Rieckhoff calls the biggest US soccer match in his lifetime. Naturally, Donald Trump has already elbowed his way into the story — publicly pressuring FIFA over Folarin Balogun’s red card, then taking credit for the reversal, and floating that if the US loses, the match might be rigged. Paul draws the contrast that matters: a young Brooklyn-born striker handling injustice with grace versus an authoritarian president trying to suck the oxygen out of a rare unifying moment. 

Paul Rieckhoff sits down with his longtime friend and returning champion for a July 4th conversation about leadership, patriotism, independent voters, Maryland’s closed primaries, Baltimore’s comeback, the power of joy, and why the future belongs to people willing to disrupt the status quo. Moore talks about his Leave No One Behind slate, the fastest-growing political force in America, and why the two-party system needs to make room for independents before November, not after the race is already over.

Paul Rieckhoff is taking a couple days off at the beach with the kids, so we’re replaying one of our all-time favorite Independent Americans conversations. Ken Burns joins Paul for a sweeping, urgent, deeply American talk about the Revolution, George Washington, baseball, real patriotism, Congress abdicating its constitutional duty, the danger of “us vs. them,” and why the American experiment is still worth fighting for.

Gen. Barry McCaffrey doesn’t do polite. In this replay conversation from the Independent Americans vault, the retired four-star general and MSNOW national security analyst sits down with Paul Rieckhoff to name what almost nobody in Washington will say out loud: the U.S. armed forces — the most trusted institution in American life — are being politicized from the top down, federal law enforcement is being militarized to the point of being indistinguishable from an infantry assault, and the guardrails that once separated a constitutional republic from a government of gangsters are cracking in real time. McCaffrey brings the receipts of a lifetime — Vietnam as a young lieutenant, the Joint Staff, three administrations on the National Security Council, and a hard-won view of what happens when political leadership sends troops into fights it doesn’t understand.

War is chaotic and complex. You really never know which way it’s going to go — and you especially don’t know if you go in without a strategy. That’s the line General Mark Hertling keeps coming back to in this no-BS conversation with Paul Rieckhoff, recorded as the Trump administration careens deeper into a war with Iran that Congress never authorized and the American people never signed off on. Hertling — former commanding general of US Army Europe, 36 months in combat, and author of the new book If I Don’t Return: A Father’s Wartime Journal — lays out exactly why this moment feels more like Vietnam than anything we’ve seen in a generation, and why the silence from both parties is its own kind of sucking chest wound.

Paul sits down with retired Admiral Bill McRaven — Navy SEAL, former SOCOM commander, former University of Texas system chancellor, and one of the clearest voices in American public life — for a conversation built for this moment. McRaven doesn’t flinch. He calls K-12 education the number one national security threat facing the country, lays out exactly where the administration’s 28-point Ukraine plan goes wrong, and walks troops through the moral and legal architecture of what an illegal order really is. In a week when the commander in chief is calling combat-veteran senators traitors and floating executions, McRaven offers something different: dignity, decorum, and ground-truth analysis from a man who has actually carried the weight.

Pete Hegseth has been quietly purging the Pentagon of anyone who might outshine him, contradict him, or threaten his grip on power. This week he came for General Chris Donahue — a West Point graduate, 75th Ranger Regiment veteran, former commander of the military’s most elite special missions unit, the architect of the Afghanistan airlift that saved 124,000 allies, and the builder of NATO’s Eastern Flank Deterrence Initiative against Russia. Paul Rieckhoff is joined by former FBI special agent and national security analyst Christopher O’Leary, who worked alongside Donahue, to explain why this is the purge that finally goes too far.

America has a primary problem, and New York City is ground zero. Less than 500,000 voters showed up to decide who runs a city of five million, while a million independents — Paul included — were shut out by the most closed primary in the country. That’s not democracy. That’s a rigged two-party system handing the keys to whichever faction can mobilize the most insiders, while the angry middle stands on the sidelines watching the country drift.

Mamdani is the new king of the Democratic Socialists, and he didn’t get there by accident. He understood that closed primaries are a rigged game where the players are also the referees — and he played that game to perfection while more than a million New York City independents were locked out of the vote that actually decides who represents them. Paul Rieckhoff breaks down what happened in NYC, in Maryland, and in Utah, why Brad Lander worked so hard to kill the open primaries ballot initiative, and what the rise of the far left in safe-blue cities means for the angry middle that has nowhere left to go.

The MAGA machine is cracking. Tucker Carlson — a 35-year Republican defender — just announced he won’t support the GOP in the midterms. Marjorie Taylor Greene piggybacked within hours. Shawn Ryan, Joe Rogan, and others have already signaled the same. So what comes next? A more extreme Republican spinoff? A fake-independent rebrand in the RFK Jr. mold? A Tucker run with Tulsi Gabbard? Paul Rieckhoff delivers a hardcore Tuesday solo briefing on what the fractures inside Trump’s base actually mean heading into the midterms — and why the angry middle has to be ready for what’s coming.