Category: Episodes

Pete Hegseth is on thin ice, and the reason should worry every American with a family member in uniform. U.S. commanders are reportedly picking and choosing which Iranian missiles to intercept and which to let fall. Our stockpiles of Tomahawks, ATACMS, and Patriots are draining. Ukraine’s civilians are dying for lack of munitions. And the response from the White House is to hunt down leakers, blame subordinates, and ask Congress for another $67 billion — roughly $20 billion of it for weapons the administration should have planned for in the first place. This is what happens when leadership refuses to take responsibility and gets way ahead of its skis.

The rigged two-party system delivered another round of primary results this week, and the pattern is impossible to miss: the extremes keep winning the nominations while roughly 44% of Americans who identify as independent get shoved further to the margins. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed squeaked past Haley Stevens in a race that was supposed to be close and somehow got closer — and now Democrats have ninety days to figure out whether a DSA-aligned progressive can hold a battleground state they cannot afford to lose. Paul Rieckhoff joins the news desk from Detroit alongside Lauren Wright and former Congressman Conor Lamb to lay out the stakes with no spin and no jersey.

The independent movement is surging — and the machine is fighting back. In episode 594, Paul Rieckhoff breaks down the biggest under-covered story of the week: Mayor Mamdani’s Board of Elections quietly rejected 42,000 petitions from New Yorkers demanding open primaries, a direct shot at the one million independents disenfranchised by New York’s rigged partisan system. Paul also digs into the Politico report that Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Thomas Massie and Joe Kent are sowing the seeds of a new third-party project at Carlson’s Maine compound — and why a third party is not the same thing as being independent.

Michigan is not Manhattan. That’s the through-line of this one. The Democratic primary in Michigan handed the U.S. Senate nomination to Abdul El-Sayed, a far-left progressive in a state where roughly 17% of voters are independent and Mike Rogers is waiting on the Republican side. Paul Rieckhoff calls it what it is: another gift from a rigged two-party primary system to the MAGA machine, and one more reason the Democrats will not save you. The Bernie-vs-Schumer civil war is nominating candidates who can’t galvanize independents or win general elections — and it’s happening on the biggest stages in the country.

Spokane is burning. Three wildfires have merged into the Spokane Complex, torching more than 8,000 acres, destroying over 700 structures with a final count that could top a thousand, and forcing 65,000 people under evacuation orders. The Mann-Grandstaff VA Medical Center sits inside the evacuation zone and has been shuttered, its veteran patients moved to partner hospitals. And in the middle of that inferno, an election. Four IVA-endorsed independent veterans were on the ballot — Nate Powell, Danny Tarkington, Erin Croft, and Ronald McCoy — three of them running to serve the county that is on fire right now. Paul Rieckhoff walks through what a real open primary looks like, what it means when veterans meet the moment, and why Washington state’s top-two system is what right looks like.

Trump says he’s close to an Iran deal. He’s been saying he’s a week away from a Putin deal for a year and a half. Paul Rieckhoff calls the head fake for what it is, warns the media not to fall for it again, and lays out the chaos Congress is trying to jam through before its six-week recess — including Todd Blanche’s nomination and the weaponization fund built to compensate January 6th insurrectionists. The forever wars don’t take August off, and neither do we.

Governor John Kasich went on national TV and told Paul Rieckhoff, to his face, that independents aren’t really independent — that come November they’ll just go back to the bench and put the old jersey back on. Paul’s response is the spine of this episode: that’s an antiquated way of looking at America in 2026. Sixty percent of young people are unaffiliated. Fifty percent of veterans are unaffiliated. Ten thousand Americans are walking out of the Republican and Democratic parties every single week. Trump is sitting at a 22% approval with independents and a 32-34% approval overall — the Bush line — with an unpopular Iran war, tariffs jacking prices, and a party heading into the midterms with 96 days on the clock.

Trump’s approval with independents just hit 24%. Republicans are going home to their districts and getting an earful about an unauthorized, unconstitutional, and wildly unpopular war with Iran that is now pulling in the Saudis, the Egyptians, and Iranian proxies from Iraq to Yemen. Paul Rieckhoff calls it what it is — a sucking chest wound — and lays out why Senate Republicans are finally breaking, why Lindsey Graham comparing Trump and Netanyahu to Roosevelt and Churchill isn’t landing, and why supporting the troops means demanding a coherent plan, not a blank check for one man’s war.

The Iran war is overflowing. Saudi Arabia is now actively engaged. Egypt is getting hit with drone strikes. Roughly 50,000 American sons and daughters are in harm’s way — and Congress has authorized none of it. In this episode, Paul Rieckhoff broadcasts from the Huntsville, Madison County Veterans Memorial to lay out exactly how bad it’s gotten, why the president’s expletive-laced tough talk is a sign of desperation rather than strategy, and how this war is dragging vulnerable Republicans down with it heading into 2026.

The Democrat is out in Idaho. That single sentence rewrites the 2026 Senate map. Independent veteran Todd Achilles is now in a one-on-one race against three-term incumbent Jim Risch — chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the third most powerful voice on American foreign policy, and a man who has rubber-stamped an unauthorized Iran war while public lands go up for sale and 160,000 Idaho veterans wait on understaffed VA clinics. Paul Rieckhoff gets Achilles on the line for a national exclusive from Space City, USA, and the message is blunt: this is the most competitive Senate race in the country, and almost nobody in the corporate or partisan media is telling you about it.