New Year, Same Fear

The Muckrake Political Podcast

CLNS Media Network

News, Politics

4.6 • 530 Ratings

🗓️ 2 January 2026

⏱️ 8 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

This is a preview of our regular Weekender show released in full every Friday on our Patreon at patreon.com/muckrakepodcast Please support the show by subscribing and unlocking special content as well as access to our discord and live shows. Co-hosts Jared Yates Sexton and Nick Hauselman ring in 2026 with resolutions, sugar hangovers, and a hard look at how a viral YouTube stunt and JD Vance’s megaphone spiraled into a federal freeze on Minnesota child-care funds. They break down the racist scapegoating of Somali communities, which plays right into the right’s conspiracy theories, and why this is political retribution dressed up as oversight. Then it’s the latest Epstein revelations implicating Mar-a-Lago’s spa pipeline and how it connects to Trump even more deeply before focuing on the Supreme Court's refusal to bless federal troop deployments that might turn into a roadmap for even more law-breaking. "What We're Watching" looks at the Stranger Things finale and why nostalgia is starting to feel like content slurry.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Happy New Year, you political sickos.
0:04.6	Welcome to the Weekender edition of the Muckrake podcast.
0:07.1	I'm Jared Y. Sacksland here, Nick Houseman.
0:08.6	How you doing, bud?
0:09.3	How's 2026 treating you already?
0:12.2	Well, I'm a little sluggish, I've got to say, but it's all I can keep saying to myself is that 2026 must be better than 2025.
0:21.0	Has to be better.
0:22.7	It must. It has to be. It will.
0:24.8	Whatever you want to say.
0:26.0	No choice in the matter. The damn thing. It has to be better.
0:30.1	We got a full show before we get going. I think because it's the weekend or because we're
0:35.6	recording this on Thursday, January 1st,
0:39.5	I think, Nick, it would behoove us to share to the, what are, what are we doing in the
0:45.2	new year? What are we, how are we trying to grow? How are we trying to better ourselves? What,
0:51.1	what are our, what are our resolutions in 2020? It's a really great question.
0:55.5	It's something that we should all do probably like every day.
0:58.3	Yeah, ideally. Yeah. Just check in every day and figure out what the resolution is going to be.
1:04.3	It's exhausting to do, which is why we dissociate through large portions of our lives.
1:08.7	Yeah, that's right. But it's a good, it's a good thing to do.
1:11.8	Sure.
1:12.5	Well, you know, the current feeling I have notwithstanding, I'm thinking that maybe I should, you know, drink and do drugs more than I do, which is really very little now. I think that might make me a happier person. What do you think, Jared? Well, I, I, I, to pull the curtain back, um, we, we were talking, you know, and it is the weekend.
1:31.4	You're, you think, Jared? Well, I, I, to pull the curtain back, we were talking, you know, and it is the weekend.
	...

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