Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 3/25/25: Journo Added To Trump War Plans Chat, Israelis Lynch Oscar Winner, JFK Revelations & MORE!

Episode Date: March 25, 2025

Saagar and Ryan discuss Trump team adds journalist to top secret war plans chat, Ryan Grim colleague killed by Israel, Oscar winner lynched by Israelis, conservative influencers caught in big soda op, 23&me bankrupt as dna samples for sale, iShowSpeed shocked by Chinese EVs, JFK expert reveals new info on doc release.   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.com   Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. voices, and the perspectives that matter 24-7 because our stories deserve to be heard. Listen to the BIN News This Hour podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I also want to address the Tonys. On a recent episode of Checking In with Michelle Williams, I open up about feeling snubbed by the Tony Awards. Do I?

I was never mad. I was disappointed because I had high hopes. To hear this and more on disappointment and protecting your peace, listen to Checking In with Michelle Williams from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You say you'd never give in to a meltdown. Never let kids' toys take over the house. And never fill your feed with kid photos.

You'd never plan your life around their schedule. Never lick your thumb to clean their face. And you'd never let them leave the house looking like, uh, less than their best. You say you'd never put a pacifier in your mouth to clean it. Never let them stay up too late. And never let them run wild through the grocery store. We have one aisle today.

And aisle three. So when you say you'd never let them get into through the grocery store. We have one aisle six. And aisle three. So when you say you'd never let them get into a car without you there, no, it can happen. One in four hot car deaths happen when a kid gets into an unlocked car and can't get out. Never happens. Before you leave the car, always stop, look, lock. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council.

Hey guys, Sagar and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election, and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you, please go to BreakingPoints.com, become a member today, and you'll get access to our full shows, unedited, ad-free, and all put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media, and we hope to see you at BreakingPoints.com.

Good morning, everybody. Happy Tuesday. Have an amazing show for everybody today. There it is, Ryan Broshow. People live for the pound. I have to say it now at this point. You do amazing show for everybody today. There it is. Ryan Brough Show. People live for the pound. I have to say it now at this point. You do. It's a mantra.

It's religion. That's what people want out there. We need to do one of those videos about our self-care routine in the morning. Our self-care routine. We're journaling. Our self-care routine is not nearly Andrew Huberman approval. Waking up in the dark. You're taking care of your kids. I'm locked in. I'm listening to clips from The Departed,

drinking Diet Coke. That's how I start every day. The opening monologue of The Departed from Jack Nicholson. Just love it, all right? Okay, let's talk about what we have on the show today. We've got the group chat story. This is just unbelievable. Broke yesterday. Literally, the National Security Advisor of the United States, Mike Waltz, accidentally adds Jeffrey Goldberg, one of the most prolific neoconservative journalists in the United States, to a group chat where secret war plans to strike Yemen are discussed. And you also see some dissent and internal decision-making inside the Trump administration, possibly one of the largest breaches in national security in, what do you think, Ryan, decades in terms of accidental

breach? It's not saying it's causing longstanding damage, but in terms of an own goal, I mean, this is as big as it gets. It's as comical as it gets. It's unbelievable. And now they're circling the wagons around this guy, which definitely tells us a lot. We're going to talk about Israel. Man, this is a really just horrible story. One of Ryan's colleagues over at Dropsite was killed by the IDF just yesterday. He's going to break down all the details for that. We're going to talk about soda. That's a story that we did not get to yesterday, but is, again, unbelievable, just showing a bunch of conservative influencers online, allegedly taking money to pump Big Soda and its inclusion in the food stamp program. We're gonna talk about 23andMe.

This is a absolutely crazy story. 23andMe, the company which has some 15 million DNA samples filing for bankruptcy, and its samples are basically now available to the highest bidder. Huge privacy implications, regulatory implications, all of that. Then we got to talk about BYD. As people know, I'm obsessed with these Chinese EVs and the competition and basically what it says about our market here in America. More and more,

I'm just watching this social media revolution happen where YouTubers and other car influencers are showing people the basically astounding performance capabilities of these EVs. And it's showing up now in BYD data. It also shows us a lot in their profits, shows us a lot about how far behind we are here in the United States. And then finally, Jefferson Morley, one of the most preeminent journalists on the JFK assassination, he's going to join us. He's had several days now to digest the JFK file. So we can say there's no, quote, smoking gun. There probably never will be. But he has done the best job that there is of putting all the breadcrumbs together. And he can tell us a cohesive narrative. So I'm really excited to talk to him.

I was talking to him last night, and he thinks, and I agree with him, the most interesting things to come out of this are the fully declassified Schlesinger memo and also the Angleton testimony that he gave in 1975. This was a guy who was basically handling the Israel file. He was working on the Castro assassinations. And now we have his full testimony from the 75 hearings. There you go. It's not going to tell us exactly who shot Kennedy, but it's interesting stuff about our history. Right. Well, it's funny. There's a conservative influencer, YouTuber out there who recently went viral for saying, I don't care who killed JFK. He's like,

yeah, it's interesting. I'll just say it's Ben Shapiro. So he's like, yeah, I think it's interesting. But he was shot in 1963. And it's like yeah but you know something Oliver Stone when we had him here on the show really hit home for me it's like yeah it is history but the reason it matters

is because the knife's turn of that history led us down a catastrophic path and the one that we can still rediscover

of JFK's basic the American University speech the peace speech effectively the one that got him killed if you believe that is really a legacy of somebody who himself had seen the inside of the deep state. He had seen how it almost destroyed him, his presidency, wanted to take

a different path for after the devastation of the Cuban Missile Crisis and how that mentally affected him. A man who literally swam miles with a life vest strap in his teeth with a broken back trying to save people who saw the face of what war actually means. And instead, his murder leads to the war in Vietnam, I mean, Rick Nixon, a decade of millions dead in Southeast Asia, the prolongation of the Cold War for multiple decades. So, yeah, I think, sorry, Mr. Shapiro, I do think it still matters. Yeah. It matters a lot.

And people will weigh that history and say that it's just a fairy tale about Camelot, but it's plausible. There's great evidence. No one's saying the guy was Jesus Christ, okay? He had a lot of issues. You can go – actually, some of the best parts of the JFK files for me is going and reading all those South Vietnam assessments and how deeply they are. They're like, oh, Nguyen Dinh, whatever, is doing this and pre the assassination. And they're like, oh, in this province, this governor is saying, and you're like, oh, my God. I mean, it's worse than I even imagined in terms of the puppet mastery of trying to, you know, this fake experiment of South Vietnam the entire time. And they just would not give up.

If anything, it showed us how ideological it really was. So, sure, he was responsible for that. But he was starting to have different thoughts there near the end. And I think that's what got him killed. So, anyway, let's get to the group chat, shall we? This is just unbelievable. Like I said, Jeffrey Goldberg, the most preeminent neoconservative journalist in the United States, there's no question. Beat the drums for the Iraq War, beat the drums for Obama bombing Iran. I actually believe that might be his most shameful episode, is whenever he basically was a cutout for the Netanyahu government to try to put pressure on Obama to bomb.

He wrote a cover story within six months. That's right. We're going to bomb Iran. This was all designed, you know, basically to push in the Obama administration in a direction of wanting to bomb Iran. That's not even me saying it. Ben Rhodes and others basically said the same thing at the time. They're like, this is ludicrous. Some of us don't forget here, Jeff. Of course, he's also written all these stories since

the suckers and losers hoax, if you will. He could believe it if he want to. I don't know what to tell you if you do. But if you want to believe that, that's the person who wrote it. He did some famous interviews there with Obama. But Trump in particular hates Jeffrey Goldberg, specifically because of this whole suckers and losers story. That's where he said a bunch of, like, that Trump called some veterans. That's right. Grieving veterans. World War I.

Yeah, he said that the people were killed during World War I. Allegedly said that, according to John Kelly. And everybody involved says that he didn't say that. Except for John Kelly, who was the chief of staff, who also hates Trump and can't get against him. So, okay. And he decided not to go on the record about it until three years later. So you can decide. Trump's saying something crass about veterans though? Yeah. I mean, it's possible. I'm not saying it's not possible, but it's one of those where,

look, I just think it would have come out. The point is Trump hates him. Trump hates him. All right. And so there's really no good reason for a national security advisor to have this guy's cell phone number. And here's the inside story from Jeffrey Goldberg about how this all went down. He was all over television last night. Let's take a listen. The Houthis are not going to know about this for another couple of hours. And you know about it. Well, and I know about it. And I'm thinking to myself, I mean, honestly, I'm thinking to myself, well, I'm glad that

Mike Waltz didn't invite a Houthi into the group or a Russian spy or an adversary of the United States. But put that aside. I'm reading this and I'm wondering, not only why am I reading this, but why would the Secretary of the Treasury need to know the precise attack sequence of this upcoming operation? Again, I don't want to talk about weapons systems, packages, targets in any specificity because, you know, I just I'm trying to be I want to be a responsible person and I'm more interested in the decision making anyway than I am in the actual

technical details of it. But I think it's just a very flummoxing to me because I haven't seen this kind of unserious behavior before. And, you know, and the Secretary of Defense, all due respect, in that presentation seems like a person who's unserious and is trying to deflect from the fact that he participated in a conversation on an unclassified commercial messaging app that he probably shouldn't have participated in. And there are receipts for it, which is always a danger of that. So the receipts, as we said,

let's go ahead and put these up there on the screen. You can't make this shit up. You really can't. So Goldberg gets added to this group chat. This group chat ends up having J.D. Vance, Pete Hegseth, Marco Rubio, Tulsi Gabbard, Steve Witkoff, Stephen Miller, Mike Waltz. Mike Waltz, by the way, according to Goldberg,

and this is not disputed by the White House, who says this is an authentic chain where decisions were made, adds Jeffrey Goldberg here, where the full discussion and debate around bombing Yemen and the Houthis is all taking place. So the first message here is from J.D. Vance. At Pete Hegseth, if you think we should do it, let's go. I just hate bailing Europe out again. Let's just make sure our messaging is tight here. If there are things that we can do up front to minimize risk to Saudi oil

facilities, we should do so. Let's go to the next one, please. Pete Hegseth, VP, I fully share your loathing of European freeloading. It's pathetic. But Mike is correct. We are the only ones on the planet on our side of the ledger who can do this. Nobody else is even close is timing i feel like now is as good a time as any given potus directive to reopen shipping lanes i think we should go but potus still retains 24 hours of decision space stephen miller quote as i heard it the president was clear green light but we soon make clear egypt and europe what we expect in return we need to figure out how do we enforce such a requirement e.g if europe doesn't remunerate, then what? If the U.S. successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost, there needs to be some further

economic gain extracted in return. And what we did not have here is that before these messages, there was actually some dissent from J.D. Vance, where he said, quote, 3% of U.S. trade runs through Suez, 40% of European does. There is a real risk the public does not understand this or why it's necessary. The strongest reason to do this, as POTUS said, is to send a message. Vance continues, I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There is a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil. I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself,

but there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, et cetera. So a lot of things being revealed there behind the scenes. Number one, there's only one voice actually in the group chat, Ryan, who seems to have any sense or reason. He's like, hey, why does this matter actually for us? It seems to matter a lot for Europe. There's a little country with the name I, whose name is also not mentioned there, about who it's super important to. But not all that important for us, right? Why are we doing this? Could it shoot up oil prices?

It's not consistent with the Europe message. And the best part is that Mike Waltz in the chat is the one who's like some brain-dead neoliberal being like, but freedom of navigation is so important. You know, like really like empire or unipolar moment type stuff. So you get ideological divisions very clearly happening in the group chat. You get also though, just the sheer incompetence and idiocy

of a person who adds accidentally a journalist to a group chat. And it was Mike Waltz. And it was Mike Waltz. There's no disputing this. That's why I want people to understand. NSC has come out and said this is an authentic chain, and the chain of events in which it happened is how it happened.

Mike Waltz accidentally adds Jeffrey Goldberg to this chat where he's basically lurking and watching this debate happen, and then, according to Goldberg, sharing the war plans or the strike package or whatever. Pete Hegseth has disputed that, and we're going to get to that in a little bit. But let's say even if there was no classified information that was being discussed there, to add accidentally a journalist to highly sensitive internal deliberations over a wartime maneuver, a bombing of foreign country, is just insane. In any normal administration, he's fired yesterday.

Not even fired, he resigns for the good of the president. And yet, this is where we are, Ryan. So it's a clown show. And it'd be one thing if he's like U.S. trade representative. Right, yeah, that's right. Who was apparently who he was trying to add. Yes. He's national security advisor.

He's the national security advisor. You got to be good at that stuff. Right. Especially when he's in the thread talking about how his OPSEC is on point. Yes. It's like, bro, you just tweeted to a journalist or you just DMed to a journalist. You accidentally DMed a journalist. That your OPSEC is tight.

Your OPSEC is tight. But I will give J.D. Vance credit. I think his argument is a little bit silly. Right. You got to understand who we're talking to. Exactly. Okay? Exactly. This is consistent within the MAG framework. If I were making the argument to not bomb Yemen. Right. You've got to understand who we're talking to. Exactly. This is consistent

within the MAG framework. If I were making the argument to not bomb Yemen, I would make the same argument because this is to those guys. That's right. I wouldn't come in and be like, well, actually, the Houthis are correct here in the sense that it is their right under the Geneva, and their obligation under the Geneva Conventions to stop a genocide that they see unfolding. They have told Israel to continue to allow the flow of medicine, food, and water into Gaza, and that is their obligation under the Geneva Conventions, therefore we should not bomb. That's not the argument I would make to this gang of warmongers. I would say exactly what J.D. Vance said.

Let's couch this in the America first. We hate Europe stuff. Which, and the one reason I say it's such a silly argument, I understand tactically why he made it. But from the silliness perspective, two things. A, Europe didn't really have anything to do with the crisis. Like, Europe passively supports the anything to do with the crisis. Like, Europe passively supports the U.S.'s support of Israel, and half or more of those countries send weapons and diplomatic support to Israel.

So they're on the hook, but they're not driving this train. The United States and Israel are driving this train. But the more important point, which never got discussed in this conversation over Signal, is that their plan has no intention of even working. Right. Their plan, the missiles they send will blow up. They will hit buildings. They will kill people. So that part of it will work. But the idea that it was going to get the Houthis to stop the blockade was never discussed because it wasn't going to happen. It's literally impossible. Today, the blockade is still happening. That's right. And if it was possible to bomb them out of existence, then Biden would have done it. And then the Saudis would have done it before them.

We're not the first people to make this argument. Amazing quote from Biden when he was bombing Yemen, a reporter asked him about it. He said, are the strikes working? No. Will they continue? Yes. Yeah. Okay. Got it. I mean, you know, in his dementia addled mind, he was actually honest for once. So here's the first reaction here from Pete Hegseth after he lands on the ground in Hawaii immediately after the story breaks. Let's take a listen. You're talking about a deceitful and highly discredited so-called journalist who's made a profession of peddling hoaxes time and time again to include the, I don't know, the hoaxes of Russia, Russia, Russia, or the fine people on both sides hoax, or suckers and losers hoax. So this is the guy that pedals in garbage. This is what he does.

I would love to comment on the Houthi campaign because of the skill and courage of our troops. I've monitored it very closely from the beginning. And you see, we've been managing four years of deferred maintenance under the Trump administration. Our troops, our sailors were getting shot at as targets. Our ships couldn't sail through. And when they did shoot back, it was purely defensively or at shacks in Yemen. President Trump said no more. We will reestablish deterrence. We will open freedom of navigation and we will ultimately decimate the Houthis, which is exactly what we're

doing as we speak from the beginning, overwhelmingly. So that's basically all he had. You can tell he's pretty upset about all this. He's playing to Trump. He's playing. He's reminding Trump who Jeffrey Goldberg is. Well, actually, that's a great point is that on television, he's like, hey, by the way, you know, their person who Mike Walsh had this phone number for was the guy who made up this story or at least reported this story who you believe is made up. And, yeah, he's messaging there. But I can tell you this. Inside the administration, people are furious with Mike Walsh. It's basic competence.

Like it's one thing if you accidentally do it, you know, with your friends or whatever. What we are told from this administration is what? We're firing tens of thousands of federal workers. We're dozing the government to make it more efficient and only the best of the best will survive. Meritocracy. Meritocracy. I believe in meritocracy. I believe in excellence.

Nothing about this screams meritocracy or excellence. It just screams absolute stupidity. And there's a different word I could use, but I won't right now. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast hell and gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her and it haunts me to this day. The murderer is

still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into,

call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You say you'd never give in to a meltdown, never let kids' toys take over the house, and never fill your feed with kid photos. You'd never plan your life around their schedule, never lick your thumb to clean their face, and you'd never let them leave the house looking like less than their best.

You'd say you'd never put a pacifier in your mouth to clean it, never let them stay up too late, and never let them run wild through the grocery store. We have one aisle six and aisle three. So when you say you'd never let them get into a car

without you there, no, it can happen. One in four hot car deaths happen when a kid gets into an unlocked car and can't get out. Never happens. Before you leave the car,

always stop, look, lock. Brought to you by NHTSA and the car, always stop, look, lock. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council. This Pride Month, we are not just celebrating. We're fighting back. I'm George M. Johnson, and my book, All Boys Aren't Blue, was just named the most banned book in America.

If the culture wars have taught me anything, it's that pride is protest. And on my podcast, Fighting Words, we talk to people who use their voices to resist, disrupt, and make our community stronger. This year, we are showing up and showing out. You need people being like, no, you're not going to tell us what to do. This regime is coming down on us. And I don't want to just survive. I want to do. This regime is coming down on us. And I don't want to just survive. I want to thrive. You'll hear from trailblazers like Bob the Drag Queen. To freedom!

Angelica Ross. We ready to fight? I'm ready to fight. And Gabrielle Yoon. Hi, George. And storytellers with wisdom to spare. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Here's Donald Trump's reaction, pulling the old RBG, you're telling me for the first time here.

Let's take a listen. Mr. President, your reaction to the story of the Atlantic that said that some of your top cabinet officials and aides have been discussing very sensitive material through Signal and included an Atlantic reporter for that. What is your response to that? I don't know anything about it. I'm not a big fan of the Atlantic. To me, it's a magazine that's going out of business.

I think it's not much of a magazine, but I know nothing about it. You're saying that they had what? They were using Signal to coordinate on sensitive materials. Having to do with what? Having to do with what? to do with what what were they talking about with the hooties the hooties you mean the attack on the hooties well it couldn't have been very effective because the attack was very effective i can tell you that i don't know anything about it you're telling me about it for the first time you tell me about it for the first

time and by the way can we get a definition for the word effective? Yeah. That somehow doesn't include accomplishing its mission. That's what, and nobody in the media is talking about that either. Why would they? Cause they like bombs to go off, right? The strike didn't do the thing they said it was going to. He's like, oh, it's going to create a deterrent. It's going to, it's going to decimate the Houthis and it's going to restore freedom of navigation. Strike one, strike two, strike three. None of those things happen. All you did is share your signal chat with Jeffrey Goldberg. Let me tell you something. And blew up the construction of an oncology center. Right. There is a secondary story here where Goldberg is like a confirmed CIA spook because what kind of a journalist gets added to the secret chat? Okay. Gets added to a secret chat, refuses to publish or even report on the specifics of the strike, voluntarily leaves

the chat and then alerts the people being like, hey, was this real? You don't leave, bro. You stay forever until they kick your ass out because then who knows what better information that you could get. Yeah. And you let your colleague, Shane Harris. That's right, your colleague, yeah. Shane Harris writes, sorry, according to a source with direct knowledge. Source with direct knowledge. In the meetings. Yeah, plans reviewed by the Atlantic tell us this, this, and then, by the way,

the people in the administration are going to freak out. And then make them figure out. Yeah, and they're going to be like, how did this happen? And it's going to be a knife-fight inside. It would be glorious, to be honest. And then, actually, they probably discuss leaking in the chat, and you get even more information about it. That's what somebody who's actually good at their job does. Somebody who's not.

Not competent. Yeah, you're right. It's not about competence. It's basically, like, even the way he's like, I'm not going to disclose the strike package or whatever. I'm like, why not? Okay. I mean, look, they literally brag about this shit on video. They publish a video showing the ship that, or the, yeah, the guided missile destroyer that's launching the missile. You think I can't go on Wikipedia and see what kind of armaments

they have over there? It's not difficult. And like, if the Houthis find out what brand of missile is flying at them, they're going to be able to, oh. Right. Yeah. I forgot that the Houthis have a very sophisticated anti-missile detection technology. What are we doing here? So Goldberg is an idiot. And you're still attacking Sheds, by the way. Yeah, he's just such an obvious, just like, just such an obvious, like, CIA cutout. This is, Ken Klippenstein's been going off on this. I mean, everybody's praising Jeffrey Goldberg, but oh, he didn't publish the war plans. I'm like, what are you doing, bro? You know, when we had those Discord files, I got my hands on those over here at Breaking Points. Yeah, I didn't publish them word for word until later, but we did

all the reporting on the inside in the way that Glenn covered the Snowden documents. You want to do it responsibly. Okay, you don't want anybody. And even then, I think you would be within your rights to just upload it if you want to. I actually would not criticize anybody for doing that. But you don't want to take any of the hits about, oh, you're endangering national security or whatever. So you just, what do you do, Ryan, whenever you publish classified information? You take it, you review it, and then you publish whatever's newsworthy within it. They're still going to scream that it's dangerous to national security. But as long as you take some responsible stuff here, I actually do think it's in the public interest to tell us how exactly they went this down. According to

Goldberg, they had the specific names of the people they wanted to target. I would go, hey, maybe you should publish those names. And then did they kill them or not? Because if they didn't, with a $200 million bombardment, that's pretty interesting, isn't it? It'll tell us a lot about our military. There's a good chance they didn't. And there's a very good chance that they didn't. Exactly.

So that's just a lot to say there about journalism itself. Our own Emily cracked the case. She's the first person to do so about how exactly Jeffrey Goldberg got into this group chat in the first place. Let's put her tweet up here on the screen. Quote, my soft theory is that Walsh thought he was adding the US trade representative, Jameson Greer, who had the name JG in his contacts. And that has now been confirmed by the New York Post. So let me explain. The U.S. Trade Representative is a member of the National Security Council. It's called the Principals Committee. It's everybody but the President of the United States. Which Mike Walsh spelled wrong. Which, yeah, which, by the way,

Mike Walsh spelled wrong. That's a whole other level. Thank you for reminding me of that. We're dealing with the best and the brightest here, folks. So JG, he clearly, in his phone, has Jameson Greer, who is the U.S. trade representative, saved as JG. He also, according to Jeffrey Goldberg, recently got into contact with Jeffrey Goldberg. Now, why? Why would you recently get into contact with Jeffrey Goldberg? You're a neocon who is now Mr. America First National Security Advisor, and you're now having the phone number of Mr. Goldberg? That's interesting. And so you accidentally add said JG to the group chat. Nobody checks. You've got

Marco Ruh, you've got the Secretary of State, you've got the entire national security, you've got Scott Besson, you've got Steve Witkoff in there. I mean, this is the highest, highest level of national security decision making. And the level of incompetence here from Walsh is, again, just unbelievable, especially when you are firing tens of thousands of people under the assumption that they're dead weight. I'm looking at the deadest weight I've ever seen here at the top of the principles committee, not to mention somebody who is genuinely stupid, not just for doing this, but listen to his messages. Mike Walls is sitting there. Like I said, he's like repeating some religious mantra about freedom of navigation.

This guy doesn't have a single original thought in his entire head. It's crazy to watch. There's a lot of people kind of pearl clutching about the nature of the security breach, but it turns out there may actually have been like an actual breach. So Witkoff, who is a real estate developer. Yes. So this guy, not a guy that you can imagine has even two factor on his phone, you know, on his phone, let alone his phone on lockdown mode or taking the types of OPSEC that you would need to be doing as somebody in his position of power. He was in Moscow when he got added to this signal check. Right. So if the Russians were anywhere near him, hitting him with one of those little, you know, there's like I was in Doha once and somebody's going around with a backpack and they're like, oh, there's one of those backpacks that like gobbles up that data.

Oh, wow. And I didn't, when I went to Doha, I didn't bring my phone. Smart. I brought a burner phone and left my laptop at home. Because just being in proximity to some of this stuff that you don't know about. Plus, Pegasus can just drop on your phone. All they need is your phone number. They don't need anything else.

Drop on. You don't even have to click the link. And then they're in, and then they can read everything you read. So, yes, Signal is secure from the NSA from the outside. Right, but your iPhone's not secure. But if they're on your phone, so did they get in? I don't know. They legitimately actually might have gotten in.

It would have to have been good spycraft on the part of the Russians to, like, go after Witkoff immediately. But if they did, then they got in. Wouldn't you assume that they're doing that? You would think. Yeah, you would think. And by the way, this is another thing. This is all on their personal devices, just so everybody knows. You're not even allowed to have signal.

It's not allowed. You can't download signal on your government phone. I confirmed this with multiple people who have had top secret security clearances. And I was like, hey, tell me how this is all supposed to work. And they're like, dude, if I was, you know, I remember I covered the Hillary email scandal back in 2016. I actually wrote a story about a Navy sailor who accidentally had shared photos when he was on a nuclear submarine. He didn't even reveal any classified. They threw his ass literally in the brig. He was prosecuted. He

served time in the brig. So the people I spoke to were like, yeah, if I was at whatever, E3, in the Navy, and I did this, I would be prosecuted. And these guys are doing it at the highest level of government. And then even if you're going to do it, be subtle about it. Okay? Let's also be honest, as you and I know. Half the government's run on Signal. Why? To get around the Freedom of Information Act and the Presidential Records Act.

And it's more convenient. It is. Let's be honest. It's more convenient. Everybody going to a Skiff. It's great. Right. Yeah, exactly.

Who wants to go on a Skiff? They've got a kid's birthday party to go to. It's the weekend. Right, yeah. Send email on your, it's called Highside. That's how it works. The Highside phone. You can only access it. You can only access it inside of a skiff. Probably giving away too much here. Whatever. I don't care. I don't have a security clearance. It's one of those where, and people do have a right to know about how this stuff

actually works in the backside. So the reason why they do it is because, like you said, it's more convenient. It's got disappearing messages, et cetera. But the downside of that is, as usual, what does the hacker do whenever the system is impenetrable? You do, you find the weakest link. And here, he didn't even have to find anything. He just let his own stupidity and incompetence give all of this away. It's just too much.

The savvy cybersecurity guys will always say that the problem with a system is when it becomes too inconvenient for users. Yes, that's right. And, you know, so you'll have like, you know, so two-factor people have figured that out. Authenticator codes, people are basically figuring that out. But back in the day when you used to have like, you know, PGP and downloading keys and uploading this, and it became so cumbersome that people basically stopped using it and went back to insecure channels.

So the government has these, you have to be on a particular laptop or you have to leave your cell phone and go into a room that has lead walls around it. And people are like, well, I can't do that. Yeah, I'm busy. I like to do war on a weekend, and I'm going to the Eastern Shore. Right, exactly. So sorry, I'm just going to do war on a weekend. Yeah. And I'm going to the Eastern Shore. Right. Exactly. So, sorry. I'm just going to do it on signal.

Right. Won't somebody think about Mike Wallace and his ability to go to his kid's birthday party? I mean, you know, somebody's got to speak up for those folks. Not like the war can wait for Monday. It's especially ironic. Look, you know, it don't have to be a shit lib to say this. Like, did we not forget about the whole but her emails thing? Yes.

I mean, the email thing was bad. We did an entire presidential campaign on that. The email thing was bad. It was bad. I wrote about it. I know you wrote about it too. Let's go and put this up there on the screen. Here's a tweet from Mr. Wallace, June 12th, 2023. Biden sitting national security advisor sent top secret messages to Hillary Clinton's private account. What did the DOJ do about it? Not a damn thing. Oh, okay. Let's go to the next one. It's from Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence. Any unauthorized release of classified information is a violation of law. It will be treated as such. I look forward to that. Exceptions apply. I look forward to that. A9, this is even better. So inside the Pentagon,

there's a witch hunt right now for people who are leaking classified information. Nancy Youssef covers the Pentagon for the Wall Street Journal. She's a great reporter. She says, this seems like a good time to point out DOD just released a memo saying they were going to use polygraphs to find unauthorized disclosures. And then finally, of course, what do we have right now? Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt releases a statement. As President Trump said, the attacks on the Houthis have been highly successful and effective. President Trump continues to have the utmost confidence in his national security team, including National Security Advisor Mike Walz. Now, does that mean that he is golden? Is he safe? I don't know. I wouldn't go that far yet. There's a lot of discussion right now here in Washington. The

group chats, the actual group chats, the secure ones that we're not in are flying. From what I'm told, people inside the White House are absolutely furious with Mike Walsh. But they may, and what I'm watching right now is a downplaying of this by MAGA. Fox News' Jesse Waters is defending him, being like, yeah, it's bad. It was a mistake. It won't happen again. But it's not like having a private email server or classified documents next to your Corvette in your garage. I'm like, no, dude, it's kind of the same. It's kind of way worse. Yeah.

If anything, it might be worse. If they found war plans in Hillary's email, are you kidding me? Right. Oh, my God. It was just like appointments with ambassadors or whatever. With whom I have a deal. Yeah. And just so people understand the context here of

this internal battle and why it's playing out, Mike Waltz is the, what do you call it, anti-America First coalition. He's in the faction of the administration that is more hawkish, more pro-war than the America First section that is organized around, say, Pete Haglund and J.B. Vance, who are more skeptical of war. And so that's why you're going to see, by an effort to weaponize this in a way that, in the past, you wouldn't even have to weaponize it. Like you said, the guy would just resign. Yeah, in the past, people who screw up like this understand, last thought here. A, they're going to get charged. This is even just, take the ideology out of all of this. In Washington, there is a creed.

The creed is the staffer is never the story. And when the staffer becomes the story, you have violated the sacred creed. So here you have a staffer who has breached national security classified information. Strike one. That's immediately fireable assent. Two, done something so stupid, you now create a problem for your boss, okay? And then three, you're actually caught having been in communication and obviously leaking to a reporter who your boss hates. Any one of those three is completely a fireable offense. And I tweeted this yesterday,

but a source who's familiar with what's going on here inside the administration said that that is the running understanding, that he was in regular communication with Goldberg. And that Goldberg then, so then people are like, well, why would Goldberg out him? It's like, this is what a journalist does. Yeah, it's a good story. It's a good story, and he has other sources.

Yeah, that's right. He doesn't need you. He also, at this point, he'd done something so dumb, he would assume that no one would be dumb enough to keep him around, so he can just cultivate the next national story. And also, he had no choice, also. Yeah. What's he going to not report this?

I agree. You have to do it. If you have it, you've got to do it. Okay, let's get over to the Israel block. Ryan, tell us what's going on. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend.

I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. I've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case,

bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother.

She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145.

Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You say you'd never give in to a meltdown. Never let kids' toys take over the house. Apple Podcasts, or, less than their best. You say you'd never put a pacifier in your mouth to clean it. Never let them stay up too late. And never let them run wild through the grocery store.

So when you say you'd never let them get into a car without you there, no, it can happen. One in four hot car deaths happen when a kid gets into an unlocked car and can't get out. Never happens. Before you leave the car, always stop, look, lock. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council. This Pride Month, we are not just celebrating. We're fighting back. I'm George M. Johnson, and my book, All Boys Aren't Blue, was just named the most banned book in America. If the culture wars have taught me anything, it's that pride is protest.

And on my podcast, Fighting Words, we talk to people who use their voices to resist, disrupt, and make our community stronger. This year, we are showing up and showing out. You need people being like, no, you're not going to tell us what to do. This regime is coming down on us. And I don't want to just survive. I want to thrive. You'll hear from trailblazers like Bob the Drag Queen. To freedom! Angelica Ross. We ready to fight? I'm ready to fight. And Gabrielle Yoon. Hi, George.

And storytellers with wisdom to spare. Listen on iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The Israeli military killed two journalists yesterday in what were both deliberate targeted strikes. One, Mahmoud Mansour, was killed with his family in his home. The other, Hossam Shabbat, was killed while driving in his car. Hossam Shabbat was a contributor for Dropsite. He had been in communication with Sharif Abdel-Kadous, his editor at Dropsite, within just hours of having been assassinated, going over edits for his latest story, which we published yesterday afternoon. We can put this up on the screen, and we'll have Sharif on the program tomorrow to talk more about Hossam's life and death. Sharif is joining Democracy Now! where he previously worked as a correspondent. So you can check out his interview, which should be up later this morning. We'll also

have him on tomorrow. Hossam is from northern Gaza and was only 23 when he was assassinated. If you remember, northern Gaza suffered the worst of the genocidal assault by Israel throughout the war. It was the first place where people were displaced down to the south. And Shabbat was one of the very few journalists who both refused to leave and refused until yesterday to die so that he could bear witness to the ongoing assault on his people there. We can put up this element. There's been a lot of images that have been going around of Hossam. This is the moment when the ceasefire was finally implemented back in January, the feeling of euphoria to have survived this genocidal assault. Because he had become a true hero to so many throughout Gaza for his relentless willingness to run toward the fire, to report what was going on. And so here is this young girl who's telling him that she had heard that he had been martyred.

And it was devastating to her that hope had drained from her when she had heard that rumor because, you know, there would be a lot of rumors that he had been killed because he was put on a literal hit list by the IDF that he was still there, still steadfast, still reporting, she was telling him it was giving her hope that she could pursue her dream of becoming a journalist so she could speak the truth. And underneath it all is this poignant belief that if the world only understood what was happening in Gaza, that the world, whatever the world is, that the world would step in, that there's no way that we live on a planet that would allow this to happen,

that the only explanation, the only way that you can rationalize the decency of humanity is that people just don't know. And so therefore you go out and you risk your life to make sure that people know. And then people will step in and say, this is wrong. This has to stop. I think a lot of people, Hossam, I think towards the end, have come to the conclusion that that may not be true, that the world does know, and nobody's going to stop it. Yeah. In your discussions with him, was he aware that he was going to be targeted

by the Israeli military? Oh, yes. Oh, yes. They publicly announced that they intended to target him and five other journalists. And what's the justification? They were saying that the same justification that they use, that he's a terrorist. Right. Which is like, he's 23 years old. He's been live streaming his life since October 7th.

When did he have time to do this secret terrorism? Yeah, so yesterday they say, over six months ago, he was role within Hamas, was exposed to us here on X. He carried out all of his actions under the cover as an Al Jazeera journalist. And yesterday he was eliminated by the IDF.

Don't let the press fest confuse you. He was a terrorist. Here's a document published in October of 2024 proving his participation in Hamas. Yeah, utter absurdity. Yeah, what is this dossier? They just make stuff up.

They just constantly make things up. With other journalists, they've said that they were terrorists when they were seven years old. None of it makes any sense. And it doesn't have to make sense. Like any journalist who gets any level None of it makes any sense, and it doesn't have to make sense. Like, any journalist who gets any level of international attention is a target.

And they have actually tried to put up some evidence, and it just all falls apart. Yeah, my friend Trey Yinkst over at Fox News ironically has been, well, let's say what, the only American mainstream video voice who's been speaking out for Palestinian journalists? Yes, he's a Fox News reporter. Yes. He deserves enormous credit. Consistently. Yeah. Well, there you go. Yeah, we cover the White House together. Good for him. Yeah, he very consistently speaks out. Yeah, he said, you know, Palestinian journalists Mohamed Matour and Hassan Shabbat were killed by Israel today in Gaza. 124 journalists were killed around the world in 2024. Two-thirds of them were Palestinian. As he says, journalists must be protected amid war.

You know, look, he has very little power. He can't really do anything about it. But people need to understand he's a Jerusalem-based correspondent for Fox News. The Israeli military can kick his ass out any time that they want or not invite him on their little press tours inside of Gaza. So he's doing this at literal risk to his life inside of Israel considering the animosity and the way that you'll have government-sanctioned violence if they want to against any American who's inside of the country and basically just hoping there's enough of us out here in the world superpower who might speak up for him or for people like...

And including 2023 and also 2025, you're now at 208 media workers, which includes camera people and others, who have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war. And yes, Trey has been criticized every time he stands up and he continues to do it. I wish that more journalists would do so because Israel feels a deep sense of impunity, but not a complete and total sense of impunity. And so their ability to kill more than 200 members of the media over the past year and a half plus

and only get criticism from us here and from Trey has emboldened them to continue to do it. You're right. And to put people on a list and say, we're going to kill them, to then kill them, and then to announce that they killed them and say that they did it because they're terrorists. At the very same time, Ryan, we got this from the Financial Times. I'm curious for what your reaction is. Quote, Israel ready.

Let's put it up there on the screen. Israel ready's plans for the occupation of Gaza. So what is military, like what is distinctive of this as opposed to previous, quote, occupations? Is this like settlement or is this, you know, they've had invasion. They've had troops on the ground, obviously. I forget the name of the corridor that they've occupied. What makes this like a next step in the military campaign? So what they are saying is they're going to clear out huge areas of it and keep everybody in the

Selma-Wasee corridor, which would, cannot hold the number of people that they're saying would fit in there. They have, but they have also created a basically Department of Ethnic Cleansing, a Ministry of Ethnic Cleansing, that is going to facilitate, this is what the agency says it's going to do, facilitate the removal of Palestinians from Gaza. So the idea would be that maybe you can't fit all of the Palestinians who are there now. Well, they're going to continue killing them for some period of time. They're going to continue dying of malnourishment. There has been no food that has gotten in since March 2nd. And then they're going to keep the rest cramped in here. Now, this does not account for how they plan on eliminating Hamas, which they failed to do after a year and a half long campaign. It doesn't account for the tunnels.

It doesn't account for the lack of kind of reservists and manpower. Which they are having major problems with. And it doesn't account for ammunition. Like they fired off so much, you know, so many tank shells and so many 155-millimeter shells in this genocide so far that they've been able to replenish in the meantime. But our production capacity is not unlimited. Right. And they're firing it off at a pace that is higher than we can produce and that Pakistan and anybody else can secretly produce for them. So it's a sketch. It's an idea. And it's closer to a plan than the Israeli government has put out so far, which previously has been zero plan,

just going to continue this until America tells them to stop. But it has so many gaping holes in it that the only way you could see it be successful is with a massive-scale depopulation of the area, which obviously is the vision, but whether or not they can achieve that remains to be seen. Why don't you tell us now about this no other land situation? Yeah, my God. Yeah, put this next element up. And this news came out within, you know, it felt like an hour or two. It was within hours. Of a learning that our dropside colleague had been killed. So Hamdan Bilal, the co-director of No Other Land,

as reported by Yuval Abraham, his co-director was lynched by a group of settlers. Now, it appears that they did not kill him, beat him ruthlessly. He was able to get into an ambulance. The IDF then, or some security forces, stopped the ambulance and dragged him out and took him to detention. And as often happens, the victim of this attack becomes the one that then literally gets interrogated and charged with something related to the attack. Yeah, so can we put the image of him up on the screen? Just identify for people who aren't familiar with the documentary. So that's Yuval on the far right. Yeah. And that's Hamdan there to his left there, bald headed gentleman there. This is in the United States of America. This was Los Angeles. So he was here a few weeks ago on the stage of the Oscars.

Accepting his Oscar. Accepting this. For a documentary making the case that these violent settlers are illegally uprooting people from their land. And then he goes back to his land and the violent settlers continue trying to uproot him from his land, which goes to the point we're making about impunity that this this there because there used to be at least this sense that okay this is a person that the West cares about there are millions of Palestinians you know that we could that we can kill or disappear but there's a handful that the West has heard of, so we're going to leave them alone.

To not even follow that norm anymore suggests how far the society is going. And the settler society is leading. That's the leading edge of this kind of... And we have a video of this attack. This was released by Yuval Abraham, the co-director of the film. Guys, why don't we go ahead and play some of that so people can see? I mean, it's like out of a movie.

You have a group of these settlers that literally are throwing stones and attacking him. As you said, after he's attacked, he is then arrested in the ambulance by the Israeli security forces, right? And then taken into custody for basically no reason. What was the justification? They didn't even give one. There were some allegations that there were some Palestinians who were throwing some stones back. And so that maybe would be the...

I mean, being Palestinian and getting attacked is enough to get you arrested. Here is the latest update from Yuval as we are filming. He says he is now free and is about to go home with his family. But, I mean, it's a pretty insane ordeal. And it's very likely, as you said, Ryan, that he was likely only freed because of the international attention he had on his case. This is just minutes ago. According to Yuval Abraham, he says, after being handcuffed all night and beaten in a military base, Hamdan is now free and is about to go home to his family.

So that's the update. We've partnered with Yuval too, Dropsite. Yuval's had an absolutely incredible run of journalism broken some of the biggest stories on IDF war crimes, the use of AI to choose and then execute on targets,

which is as dystopian a thing as you can imagine. Like you just feed information into this AI and it looks at names and then with a vague sign-off, you see a building collapse. Okay, and then final thing, because I know you've talked about the film, but you watched this film. I haven't seen it yet.

Oh, sorry. At the very least. It's hard to see here in the United States. It won an Oscar and you can barely see it. I was going to ask you about that. So why don't you tell us about the difficulty of being able to see this high-profile, Oscar-winning documentary that is at least half produced by Jewish Israelis. So think about it.

Right, and then remember the mayor of Miami Beach tried to shut down a theater that played the documentary. Not block the theater from playing it. Yeah, shut down the theater. Shut the documentary. Not block the theater from playing it. Yeah. Shut down the theater. Shut the theater down. And he has backed off of that at the very end. Well, it took a while. It took a long time. It was weeks later he backed down. It's like, he's like, that's the kind of thing you back down from within five minutes in a civilized society. He, he, he for weeks was like, yeah, I'm gonna get this theater. It's unbelievable.

And, is it available on streaming? Do you know? That's a good question. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm sure you can find it.

Right. I remember talking, I forgot, I totally forgot his name. The person who did, it's Brian something. He did the, the,

the documentary on Jamal Khashoggi, if you'll recall. And he also did Icarus. So he was an Oscar winner. He did Icarus. Huge hit. Then he did his next movie on Jamal Khashoggi.

And he couldn't get Netflix or anybody to distribute it. Because Saudi Arabia owns all of it. Because Amazon and Netflix, all these other people, have all this business in Saudi Arabia. And people had to go and pay $19.99 or whatever on Amazon Prime just to rent the movie, right? Just to be able to watch it. Looks like you may be able to pay $8.99 on Prime to get it. It's a little different as compared to being able to watch it free.

What that means is that they did not license it. It's not included in your Prime video. You have to spend on top of it. Yeah. Well, insane story. Our producers brought it to light. One of our producers, Griffin, made a good point here. It's going to be, will anyone in Hollywood,

will the Academy speak up for one of their Oscar winners? Will anyone in Hollywood who ostensibly met this man, was on a stage with him, probably it, probably went to a party. I mean, he's a literal Oscar winner here. So, yeah, insane situation that this all happened. Adam McKay and Hasan Piker are the only Los Angeles residents we'll hear from, I'm sure. Good point. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast,

hell and gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Catherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country, begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband. I had to call case.

I've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother.

She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You say you'd never give in to a meltdown. Never let kids' toys take over the house. And never fill your feed with kid photos.

You'd never plan your life around their schedule. Never lick your thumb to clean their face. And you'd never let them leave the house looking like, uh, less than their best. You say you'd never put a pacifier in your mouth to clean it. Never let them stay up too late. And never let them run wild through the grocery store. So when you say you'd never let them get into a car without you there, no, it can happen. One in four hot car deaths happen when a kid gets into an unlocked car and can't get out.

Never happens. Before you leave the car, always stop, look, lock. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council. This Pride Month, we are not just celebrating. We're fighting back. I'm George M. Johnson, and my book, All Boys Aren't Blue, was just named the most banned book in America. If the culture wars have taught me anything, it's that pride is protest. And on my podcast, Fighting Words, we talk to people who use their voices to resist, disrupt, and make our community stronger.

This year, we are showing up and showing out. You need people being like, no, you're not going to tell us what to do. This regime is coming down on us. And I don't want to just survive. I want to thrive. You'll hear from trailblazers like Bob the Drag Queen. To freedom! Angelica Ross.

We ready to fight? I'm ready to fight. And Gabrielle Yoon. Hi, George. And storytellers with wisdom to spare. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, let's turn to soda now. We wanted to cover this yesterday, but we just talked too long with Glenn Greenwald. So we got to get this in here.

Let's put it up there on the screen. A little mini scandal erupting. This is from N-Tribalism in Politics. Great account, actually, by the way. And he says, conservative and influenced are selling their souls. I'm going to add a allegedly there to Soda lobbyists for a few extra bucks. They allegedly have souls. Yeah, there you go.ists for a few extra bucks. They allegedly have sold. Yeah, there you go. To keep soda on snap. Anyone backing this is not Maha or Make America Healthy

Again. They're anti-health, anti-truth, and anti-kids. It's time to expose the grifters trying to hijack the Maha movement. Oh, so who is he talking about here? Let's go and put these up there on this screen. And what you guys can see in front of you are a series of tweets made by some pretty big conservative accounts. Let's go to the next part, please, just to show people, where they basically all boil down to the same talking points. Quote, efforts to restrict snap purchases takes away the autonomy of the consumer to make their own decisions. This is an example of government overreach, but an example of why people should strive not to be dependent on the government at all. Go to the next one. So these are all like pretty large accounts, actually,

which, you know, significant following, etc. And all of them just all seem to have the same language. Government overreach. They want to restrict. A new war on soda has begun. Targeting purchases made through Snap. This is from Ian Miles Chong. I don't believe it's the government's role to decide what people should or shouldn't eat. Now, look. Why did you say the government? Yeah, right. It does not live here. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Good point. What government? Yeah, we need to make America a place where right-wing influencers just live in America. Is it too much to ask? Is it too much to ask? All right, I guess, I mean, it fits with my nationalist beliefs,

so I'm glad you agree with me there. Let me have a little light xenophobia with that guy. It's not xenophobic to just say, bro, you don't live here. You live in an Islamic theocracy, bro. Like, what are you, why are you telling me about Snap? All right, go find Jolo.

That's what you should be focused on. The government. Yeah, yeah. The government is your government. You're Malaysian. Yeah, go and find Jolo. That's what you should be focused on. The government. Yeah, yeah. The government is your government. You're Malaysian. Yeah, go and find Jolo. Return him to us. When you find Jolo, talk to me. That's right. We'll give you citizenship. Give us Jolo. All right, that's my demand. If you don't know what I'm talking about.

Jolo can buy it for five million. Yeah, that's right. For people who don't know what we're talking about, Billion Dollar Whale. Isn't there a documentary on this? Yes. Yeah, watch the documentary. More importantly. Man on the Run, I'm in it. The book is, oh, that's right, You are in it. Cause I texted you about it. And I was like, Oh my God, Ryan's in this Jolo documentary. Guys have to watch it. The book

is unbelievable. It's genuinely unbelievable. That's just a side note. So, uh, Nick Sorter, great journalist. He, uh, uncovered what this all is. So let's put this up there on the screen. He shows us direct screenshots, uh, quote, these influencers were given a couple of templates to use by, quote, influenceable. One of those templates specifically tells them to mention Trump's diet Coke habit. This was done to invoke an emotional response from loyal Trump supporters, making them feel as if banning soda from SNAP, SNAP is the food stamps program, would be anti-Trump. This is an incredibly dirty tactic

meant to manipulate loyal followers. And you can actually see there's these soda bans and government over-regulation. And it says up at the top, the campaign highlights the dangers of government over-regulation. The narrative emphasizes how such regulation is an overreach that unfairly targets consumer choice. Key resources,

Trump with Diet Coke image. And he goes on to say that these influencers were texted by Influensible telling them to help push back against government overreach and told that they would be paid between several hundred and even $1,000 for each post attempting to turn MAGA folks against RFK Jr. and Maha. Now, again, whatever you think about this whole soda thing, you might even agree, right? I suspect that you do agree. I don't fear that you're getting paid $1,000 by the big soda lobby to say what you think. And you would think, you know, maybe I'm naive. I've never been paid to post literally anything in my entire life. And so, you know, I just thought that we all just post what we're thinking, you know, and then we

all make our money in the way that we do our job. But for some people, this is their job. And, you know, I just thought that at least in politics, again, naively, you usually do it by building up an audience, telling people what you think, criticize, naively, you usually do it by building up an audience, telling people what you think, criticize, whatever. But it's not like fashion. It makes sense that a fashion influencer would be paid by fashion companies. But here, you're literally watching under-the-table deals to post political opinions and advocacy specifically for the purpose of trying to shape government regulation. So it actually tells us a lot, both about the right-wing ecosystem, where so many of these people are genuinely for sale. Also, $1,000, what a, come on, you know?

You guys make that. It goes a long way in Malaysia. Yeah, it goes a long way in Malaysia. Not for the rest. It's like, really? You're not making money elsewhere? I know all of you people. I know how you're making money.

You're making money doing speaking fees and all this other stuff. So I guess this fits into that. But it's like, is it really worth it being outed as a joke like this? Because why should anybody ever trust any of you ever again? And now, you just can't help but notice and continue about how many of these campaigns are so obviously organized behind the scenes. Maybe whenever it applies to a foreign country, you know, might be noticing some of that as well. Very interesting. Everybody always seems to be on script. Sometimes the script is real and they actually believe it, but it's pretty, it's just obvious in this case. And again, allegedly

for some of those people, it hasn't been confirmed, but they haven't denied it either, that they're being paid to do this. The policy implications of it are actually important because there is an ongoing fight within the Maha movement to try and remove unhealthy food and soda from the food stamp program. And again, we can have a big political fight about it if we want to, but we should at least have some good faith, I would think, online that these people aren't getting paid to post their opinions, and they obviously are. So anyway, if you saw any of those accounts, you should ask them questions. Ask them some questions.

Yeah, like, right. Which other of your opinions have you been paid for? Right. What do you believe? Literally. And then there's going to be a troll farm underneath all of these paid for by the Soda Lob lobby that will be like, Ian is so right. Oh, Ian is based. Yes.

Great take. Yeah, on the policy itself, I have an unpopular opinion on this probably. I grew up on food stamps, and I hate any nanny state humiliation of the poor. I just hate it. I want poor people to be treated like human beings, like everybody else, and that if other people are allowed to buy terrible things, they should be able to buy terrible things. Now, I would say let's start with— I mean, you can buy terrible things with your own money.

You can buy anything you want with your own money. I know, because America just cares so deeply about the poor. Okay, but that's a separate argument, right, which is we can care more about the poor, which we ought to. It's just about—well, yeah, then increase the SNAP benefit. You know, help, actually help people out. I don't know. I feel very torn about it. The food system is obviously the number one culprit here. The people who designed all of this in the first place to make it ultra unhealthy. Yes. So stop the subsidies of the sugar industry. Right. Well, why don't we do both, right? That's what I would say. I would say, okay,

we'll send the subsidies. Let's make it so that these soda programs and others aren't even available in, what, high schools and others. I remember reading about the war to keep soda in high school. It's the craziest thing I've ever seen. Yes. Yeah. That's completely insane. Yeah. Right.

I think if you want to use government policy to make America healthy, do it for everybody. Yeah, I agree with that. And so then tax, you know, put a tax on sugar stuff and take this literally because Florida is so important to our politics, sugar gets massive amounts of subsidies. And it's not just because Florida is important. It's also because the sugar lobby then uses the money and buys off politicians. Just literally get rid of the subsidy and make sugar compete. Like, why do we, like, flip the box over and look at added sugars. Oh, I know. It's like, really?

Cheez-Its needs added sugars? Like, Cheez-Its will be fine without the added sugars. Good luck. Go through the grocery store and try to find something that doesn't have added sugars. Like, whole wheat bread. Flip the whole wheat bread over. It's like added sugars. Like, oh my God, why are you adding sugar to wheat bread? It is. Look, it's because you're subsidized to do it. It's not just subsidy though. This is where it's on the consumer as well. And I don't blame the

consumer. It's on, they go into a lab and they figure out what makes your brain go bing. Yes and no. But I mean, the thing is, is that if you just look at the amount of processed food that we consume now, it is just exponential compared to the past. In fact, I think that's the main reason people are fat. Right, but that's not because consumers led a movement and were like, what we need is more processed food. But they were responding a bit to consumer choice. Like, the truth is you can eat healthy if you want to. You just need time. And what people don't have is time.

And it's very inconvenient to cook. And access to fresh food. Cooking is a pain you want to. You just need time. And what people don't have is time. And it's very inconvenient to cook. And access to fresh food. Cooking is a pain in the ass. You can do it. It's actually quite cheap if you want to. But the problem is that it takes a lot of time. People are busy. You've got the crock pot.

Yeah, you can crock pot it up. I mean, it's not that hard. But again, it's about intention and brain space, which most people are busy and they don't have the time. Or you have two-parent households who are working. I don't blame anybody out there. If you put something in the microwave and you've been working for 12 hours a day, and let's say your husband's on a night shift and you're on the day shift and you're the sole caregiver, listen, I'm here. I'm here for you. I'm with you. I'm not going to lecture you and tell you, oh, it's so easy or whatever. I totally agree. We should design the system to change things a little bit. Also, SNAP should cover diapers. It should cover medicine. SNAP should be able to cover

things that you really need. Are there not other programs that cover that? Well, diapers, I know. That's a big one. How about Tylenol? Your kid's got a 104 fever, and they want $15 for this bottle of Tylenol that they keep behind the lock and key and you can't use your benefits for it, what good is being able to- But you can use soda. See, that's where I am. The things that are included in that are very obviously part of, they're very obviously included as part of a lobbying campaign that has been very successful over the last several years. So we'll return to the story. There's like a hot food thing, you can't get hot food.

But there's a loophole where- I've seen them in 7-Eleven before. Well, there's various loopholes where if you can buy it cold, but then it's heated up. Oh, that's right, that's right. So like, I used to be able to get shrimp because you'd get the shrimp cold, but then they'll steam it for you.

Yes, that's right. Publix will do that, I think. People always say about how great Publix is. So that would be covered. But if it's already steamed, forget it. That's not for you poor. That's just foolish. Over the past six years

of making my true crime podcast hell and gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder. I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case.

They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. Police really didn't care to even try. She was still somebody's mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many

questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You say you'd never give in to a meltdown, never let kids' toys take over the house, and never fill your feed with kid photos. You'd never plan your life around their schedule, never lick your thumb to clean their face, and you'd never let them leave the house looking like less than their best.

You'd say you'd never put a pacifier in your mouth to clean it, never let them stay up too late. And never let them run wild through the grocery store. So when you say you'd never let them get into a car without you there, no, it can happen. One in four hot car deaths happen when a kid gets into an unlocked car and can't get out. Never happens.

Before you leave the car, always stop, look, lock. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council. This Pride Month, we are not just celebrating. We're fighting back. I'm George M. Johnson, and my book, All Boys Aren't Blue, was just named the most banned book in America. If the culture wars have taught me anything, it's that pride is protest.

And on my podcast, Fighting Words, we talk to people who use their voices to resist, disrupt, and make our community stronger. This year, we are showing up and showing out. You need people being like, no, you're not going to tell us what to do.

This regime is coming down on us. And I don't want to just survive. I want to thrive. You'll hear from trailblazers like Bob the Drag Queen. To freedom! Angelica Ross. We ready to fight? I'm ready to fight. And Gabrielle Yoon.

Hi, George. And storytellers with wisdom to spare. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get over to 23andMe. I definitely wanted to include this story in here. This has touched a nerve everywhere. So 23andMe, the company, obviously very famous. It popularized the whole DNA testing thing to see your heritage.

People found lost relatives, and there were great stories. Ancestry.com, well, now we're seeing the downside of some decades long of voluntarily millions of people just giving DNA samples to private companies. Private companies have the ability to just sell it off if they want. They don't necessarily keep your data all that secure. They claim that you can have your data deleted. Is it really deleted? Well, now the company is going into bankruptcy and its bankruptcy means that its assets, the only valuable thing on its balance sheet is what? Your DNA. If you submitted your DNA there, our own James Lee did a video about it. Let's take a listen. Heads up. If you've ever given your DNA to 23andMe, you should probably go and delete that right now. This morning, it was

announced that 23andMe filed for bankruptcy and that its CEO, Ann Wojcicki, was resigning. 23andMe is, of course, the DNA testing company. They said that this morning, 23andMe shares dropped more than 50% in early trading after the company filed for bankruptcy late Sunday, blah, blah, blah, shareholder value, whatever. Here is what's actually alarming. Quote, 23andMe's global database has grown into a virtually unprecedented repository of human genetic information that can now be sold in bankruptcy proceedings. That's right. The privacy statement of 23andMe says that, quote, if they are involved in a bankruptcy merger, acquisition, reorganization, or sale of assets, your personal information may be accessed, sold, or transferred as part of that transaction. So what does that mean? Well,

it means that the DNA that you've given them could be scooped up by whoever and used in all sorts of crazy ways. Things like maybe cloning you without your permission. Your DNA could be sold to malicious actors who could then use that DNA and leave it at crime scenes that you were never at. Of course, bioweapons is always a possibility. I mean, OK, those are admittedly kind of crazy examples. Maybe they won't happen. But then there are those mundane use cases that probably will happen, one of which is

insurance companies using that DNA data to deny you coverage, which is something they definitely love to do. So if you don't want that, here are the instructions on how you can delete your data from 23andMe. Pause to read. Yeah, so actually yesterday after the news broke, the 23andMe website was experiencing problems because so many people were trying to delete their data. But that's a drop in the bucket if we're being real of the 15 million DNA samples that they have. Regulators are starting to take notice. The government of California, let's put this up there, the attorney general is now urgently issuing a consumer alert for 23andMe customers asking them to take down their genetic data. One point somebody made to me, Ryan, is that this is actually really scary

because the worst, this is the most mundane but dystopian use case. Let's say you're a healthcare company and you want to decide whether to insure somebody or not or how to adjust their premiums. What would you do? Me, I would buy, let's say, a genetic repository of 15 million people, and then I would cross-reference your name with any of the

samples of your relatives and see what you are genetically predisposed to. Pre-diabetic, oh, let's add five more dollars a month to your premium. You won't even notice it. You'll just think that that's your quote. You also have something called an LLM, which would easily be able to use AI and others to scrub those and flag, let's say, the top 10% of the most unsurable people and then do everything you can bureaucratically to make sure that those people never become a customer of yours and give them a sky-high premium whenever they apply or, let's say, deny some coverage here or there, and you can move things in a direction. And if you're, let's say, UnitedHealth Group or Blue Cross or any of these other people, you have market caps in the hundreds of billions, this ain't going to cost anything to be able to buy this. And the potential savings for you in the future, sky high.

Rare moment to be a tiny bit grateful to Obamacare. Oh, really? Because before Obamacare, there was no ceiling on what you could charge for somebody with a preexisting condition. And in fact, if you were a cancer survivor, you could be straight up told, no, we're actually not going to insure you. Obamacare said, you basically have to keep it within this range and you can't move it much. And so, but what they will do is they would use this data and move the people that they can all the way up to here. And you'd be like, oh, gee, how'd that happen? And you don't even know because it wasn't even your DNA that got tested

with somebody else's. Well, that's what people need to understand. I mean, the craziest thing, and I really have complicated feelings about this one, right?

Because we all love when the Golden State Killer gets caught. Oh, that's fantastic. It's like, well, how did they do it? Well, they took his DNA and they uploaded it

to like 10 different websites and they found his fourth cousin and they worked his way down from the fourth cousin down this tree and then we figured out this was the only guy who could have done it and you're like i don't know man that's pretty creepy that's weird he was just the first there's been multiple killers actually who or rapists who have been caught because of by using this dna database since 2020 they're

fascinating stories to read but they do raise a lot of questions about privacy, et cetera. And here, it's a private company. They can do whatever they want with this, Ryan. Yes, they have to abide by some regulation. You have regulators who have to approve any said sale. But, I mean, that healthcare one I just gave, there's nothing technically that violates your privacy about that one, right? It's just that it would be used for super dystopian ends. So it's one of those where, look, I never participated in one of these specifically because I was always afraid of things

like this. And so I guess if they really will delete your data, it's worth trying, you know, right now, because this is scary stuff. And don't forget that already 23andMe had been hacked previously. Let's put it up there on the screen. This was just a few years ago, February of 2024. Hackers got nearly 7 million people's data from 23andMe, and the firm blamed users, quote, for not securing it enough. This was, I believe it was sold on the dark web or others. There's apparently been allegations that the Chinese government and other large data brokerages have been trying and stealing this stuff now for years and years.

So this is just a wake-up call, really, about the entire industry. And I hope that everybody pays attention. If you did submit your data to one of these, maybe try and go and delete it after they've given what it is, or alert your relatives. I know a lot of elderly people were doing it. People were giving it as gifts because they thought it was fun. And I totally get it for looking back into it. But the real downside here in terms of what this could all become, especially in the age of AI, I think it's very scary. Don't think of it as being flagged to me by multiple different people. And I have noticed this one hit a nerve, the 23andMe. People are really upset at the idea that their most intimate thing about themselves and their bodies, their genetics,

their family could be used for such nefarious purposes. They were assured that this was just about ancestry. And now that the company's in bankruptcy, it literally, they have a fiduciary responsibility to seek the highest bidder. I think that we should trust whatever company chairman she sends out to buy this data to use it in a way that is best for- Beneficial for mankind. For mankind and our collective betterment. All right. Yeah, maybe you're right, Ryan.

Maybe we should just surrender to our Chinese overlords, which is a good transition to, of course, something that we near and dear here to the show's heart, which is the state of the electric vehicle market. It's just unbelievable that the world's greatest electric vehicles are not here in the United States. And we are being lapped and crushed so deeply that influencers and others who are really into cars, who don't even think about geopolitics or any of that, are experiencing them and posting videos for nerds like me to be able to watch and lust after these. Look, I say this with no—it gives me no pleasure.

You know, what did Louise Mendez say? She was like, it gives me no pleasure to report this. They were getting destroyed. They were getting destroyed here. Here's a video of a very popular streamer, iShowSpeed, otherwise known as Speed, apparently. Very popular guy here in America experiencing a Chinese vehicle for the first time, blown away by how fast it is. Let's take a listen.

Car cost? Retail is about $70,000. 70,000? Yeah, yeah. And it's faster than my Lamborghini? Unfortunately, it is. And it's electric? All right, so I'm gonna do a little bit of acceleration.

Let me see, let me see. Oh! Damn! So that's all. Whoa! i won't do any faster than that bro ain't no way yo maybe a little more i'm up to 70. bro hold on wait wait wait please yo ain't no way right ready yeah i'm ready yeah so and it costs 70 000 70 000 that's it so my lamborghini costs 250 000 dollars model s planning china costs about uh

a hundred a bit more 120 what the hell it's just funny to watch him react there. I mean, I guess it's comparable to a Tesla Model S Plaid in terms of its 0-60 speed, but the cost differential there is pretty significant. I'm not sure what a Model S Plaid would run you these days. Probably like $100,000, $120,000, $50,000 cheaper. The order of magnitude more. I wanted to highlight this because the sales numbers out of BYD are insane. Let's go ahead and put this up there. Just came out yesterday. The annual sales have now topped $100 billion as of yesterday. This is the 29%

increase in overall BYD revenue just from last year. I can't even think of a car company in the United States because 29% increase year over year in its sales. Domination at $100 billion level. Huge percentage of those compared to last year actually being exported across the world. It says, quote, unlike its U.S. rival Tesla, which sells only fully electric vehicles and reported revenue of $98 billion, China has benefited from the resurgent demand in China for hybrid vehicles. This is BYD specifically. And I actually thought that's the most interesting thing that I've learned about all of this is their plug-in hybrid market is just so fundamentally different than ours. I looked into it. The farthest range of plug-in hybrid you can get in the United States

is something like 400 or so miles. We're talking here about cars that have 1,300. Put the next one up there, just to show people. Plugging in with 1,300 miles of total range. And we're talking, this is like a sedan. Right. Now, look, let me put all the- Apparently, there's a Lexus that can get 600 or 700 now. Oh, is there? Yeah. I didn't, I don't, that may not be available in the US though, from what I saw. I just looked at a car driver or whatever. And, you know, Toyota RAV4 Prime is good. It's got a 40-mile electric battery. It's like, okay, cool. These guys have 300 electric mile battery plus an 800-mile tank of gas. That's incredible. I mean, you don't even have to stop.

It's awesome. The point, first of all, I'll put the caveats from a lot of the America firsters, like, oh, they're lying about their range. EPA range is very different than the Chinese range. You have to chop 35%. I'm like, okay, I'll chop 35% off. It's still double than whatever we get over here. It is just obvious now, every serious industrial person I speak to, every serious car spokesperson I speak to, every serious car reviewer and all that, if you are interested at all in electric vehicles, the Chinese are kicking our ass. There's just no question about it. And their ability to have sales and export all across the global market is disrupting a core part of American industry. And we just have no capability yet for catch up, no plan, nothing. It just directly shows the difference in our two economic models. My friend Joe Weisenthal

has a great statistic. So I actually want to read it to all of you. It is, let's see here. Here we go. One of the most important facts about the world is that in the last 15 years, China has become the global manufacturing powerhouse at the cutting edge of multiple industries, but the Shanghai Composite Stock Index is scarcely above where it was in 2009. So our stocks are way up, but is our material life all that better? You should ask that question for yourself. Our meme stocks are way up. Yeah, that's right. And let's look at how we got here. In the 1960s, LBJ gave a speech about climate change. In the 1970s, Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the roof of the White House. Reagan Reagan took them off amid a massive disinformation and lobbying campaign from big oil and big auto. And big oil and big auto spent the next three decades saying,

at first, there was no climate change. And also, what we need to do is block the EPA from even raising mileage standards. So like for a while in the 90s, you started to actually see mileage standards go up. So we weren't getting electric vehicles, but at least like you were getting a little bit more per gallon. And that was even too much of a threat to the oil companies. And so they roll that back and then we do an entire war in the Middle East to make sure we have more oil. Like that is our that was the American strategic approach to this recognition that a transition was coming. China is like, let's build up a manufacturing base using American know-how and and then build up this dominant electric vehicle manufacturing capacity. And here we are. They can now sell these dope cars for like $13,000.

Even with 100% tariff, they would be able to sell them here in the U.S. So they're going to have to do a 200% or 300% tariff. Well, no, they're just going to block it completely. I actually looked into it because I'm curious. By the way, yeah, let me do this announcement now. I would like – I think it's time. I need to drive one of these things. I've got a – so if you have a line –

Buckle up. If you know anybody out there who has a connection to a BYD, to a Xiaomi – Can you drive them in the U.S. or do you have to – People do have them here. I forget exactly legally the loophole that they're able to import them. I think maybe car companies and others. I've seen car YouTubers, you know, people who have been able to get their hands on. I want to see this video too. At this time, it's now time. My specifically, I'm in love with the Yang Wang 8. It's like a Land Rover Defender style BYD

luxury vehicle. It's awesome. I need to drive it. I need to get my hands on any BYD. Maybe I can produce one of these videos for the Breaking Points channel. So anybody out there, please reach out to us. If you have a line on a BYD, a Xiaomi, I'll drive anything if it's an electric vehicle made in China. I just want to see what the competition is like and not just have to watch other people's videos. But with that, we've got a great guest standing by, Jefferson Morley, one of the most preeminent journalists on the JFK assassination. He was going to break down the files for us. Over the past six years of making my true crime podcast, Hell and Gone, I've learned one thing. No town is too small for murder.

I'm Katherine Townsend. I've received hundreds of messages from people across the country begging for help with unsolved murders. I was calling about the murder of my husband at the cold case. They've never found her. And it haunts me to this day. The murderer is still out there. Every week on Hell and Gone Murder Line, I dig into a new case, bringing the skills I've learned as a journalist and private investigator to ask the questions no one else is asking. mother. She was still somebody's daughter. She was still somebody's sister. There's so many questions that we've never gotten any kind of answers for. If you have a case you'd like me to look into, call the Hell and Gone Murder Line at 678-744-6145. Listen to Hell and Gone

Murder Line on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You say you'd never give in to a meltdown. Never let kids' toys take over the house. And never fill your feed with kid photos. You'd never plan your life around their schedule. Never lick your thumb to clean their face. And you'd never let them leave the house looking like less than their best. You say you'd never put a pacifier in your mouth to clean it.

Never let them stay up too late. And never let them run wild through the grocery store. So when you say you'd never let them get into a car without you there, no, it can happen. One in four hot car deaths happen when a kid gets into an unlocked car and can't get out. Never happens before you leave the car. Always stop. Look, lock. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council.

This five months, we are not just celebrating. We're fighting back. I'm George M. Johnson, and my book, All Boys Aren't Blue, was just named the most banned book in America. If the culture wars have taught me anything, it's that pride is protest. And on my podcast, Fighting Words, we talk to people who use their voices to resist, disrupt, and make our community stronger.

This year, we are showing up and showing out. You need people being like, no, you're not going to tell us what to do. This regime is coming down on us. And I don't want to just survive. I want to thrive. You'll hear from trailblazers like Bob the Drag Queen. To freedom! Angelica Ross. We ready to fight? I'm ready just survive. I want to thrive. You'll hear from trailblazers like Bob the Drag Queen. To freedom! Angelica Ross.

We ready to fight? I'm ready to fight. And Gabrielle Yoon. Hi, George. And storytellers with wisdom to spare. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. One week ago today, there was a large release from the JFK Archive, and you all know who we're going to ask to come on to talk about it. It's our friend of the show, Jefferson Morley,

veteran journalist who has been going through these records for many decades now. Yeah. We don't want to date you. Thank you. It's been a couple of years. Yeah. It's been a few months at least. And we wanted to wait to have you on so that you had time to kind of digest. Because, you know, when stuff

first comes out, you're like, oh, wow, look at this. You're like, oh, wait, they already released this. They just put a different date on it and kind of did a different kind of redaction. I had that familiar dismal experience. Fifteen minutes after the 60,000 pages of material drop, I get a call and somebody say, is there a smoking gun? And I say, well, I'm only reading the third document of the 60. So yes, after a week, we've had a chance to absorb and figure out what's important here. So there's a couple of things, you know, we need to step back. We're not going to get the answer in a day. People want a smoking gun. I say don't look for a smoking gun.

Look for a fact pattern. Yes. Okay? Don't push the string of a theory. Look for a fact pattern and let the fact pattern tell you what's really going on here. And after 60 years with this very significant disclosure that we got last week, the story of what happened in 1963 is becoming clearer. Two documents came out that I think are really important.

And they kind of set the stage for what we're gonna learn and what we have learned. And I wanna caution people, this is a very complicated story. We're talking about covert operations. So they're wrapped in official secrecy. They're wrapped in deceptive statements. And we're only learning about them many years later.

But as we learn about them, we do see a new fact pattern. So that's one thing. What are the important documents? The first, I think, is one that really sets the stage. It's a memo that Arthur Schlesinger wrote to President Kennedy. This is F2, if we can put this up. Yeah, let's put it up on the screen. Yeah.

A whole page of this document had been secret for 62 years. Arthur Schlesinger wrote to President Kennedy. This is F2, if we can put this up here. Yeah, let's put it up on the screen. Yeah. A whole page of this document had been secret for 62 years. You can see that on the left. And on the right, it was what we got last week. And this is a very significant chapter because what's this memo? Kennedy is furious after the Bay of Pigs. He felt that the CIA was trying to impose their foreign policy on him. And he said, how could I have been so dumb? And he raged, there's a quote that you'll see all the time.

I wanna split the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter to the winds. He said that to a New York Times reporter who reported it later. But when Kennedy calmed down, he said, well, what can I do? And Arthur Schlesinger, a liberal advisor said, well, what you could do is you could reorganize the CIA.

And he writes a long memo. Here's if you want to do that, Mr. President, here's how you do it. And here's why you do it. And this page that was kept secret for 60 years really tells the why of what Kennedy wanted to do. Now, ultimately, Kennedy didn't didn't do it. Right. It's a big job to reorganize the CIA. He had other priorities.

He decided not to do it. But this It was a big job to reorganize the CIA. He had other priorities. He decided not to do it. But this is an insight into his thinking, and it's an insight into his thinking that the CIA didn't want anybody to know about. Why? What does it tell us? It tells us a bunch of things. What Schlesinger is talking about in this passage is what's called controlled American sources. These are American sources that we totally control, CIA officers who work for the U.S. government in official cover positions. And Schlesinger says, you know, the CIA is encroaching on your foreign policy. And he says, at the time of your inauguration, 47 percent of the State Department political officers around the world were in fact CIA officers.

47%. We knew a lot of CIA officers took those cover positions. Right. We didn't know half of them. They had half of them. That's in 1960. I mean, and it made me wonder, what's that figure today? Yeah.

And you know what? That's the deep state. It's probably just as high. Yeah. You know what? It's a classified secret. Right. Right. It's probably just as high. Yeah, you know what? To be honest. It's a classified secret. Right, right. So this is very sensitive stuff.

123 people working in the Paris embassy were with the CIA. And in there, Schlesinger tells a very telling anecdote. In 1961, there was an attempted coup against French President Charles de Gaulle. He was trying to pull out of Algeria. Algeria was kind of like Vietnam for America. It was like this intractable foreign involvement and just ultimately we just had to get out, but very divisive at home.

And so divisive, in fact, that the right wing in the French government went after de Gaulle and they were gonna overthrow him. And the story was that it was known that the CIA station in Paris was on the top floor of the US Embassy and the story was the lights in the embassy were on all night on that on the night of the coup and de Gaulle always thought that the CIA was behind that coup a Year later when a group of assassins from the same right-wing faction try and ambush

de Gaulle onulle when he's going to his country house and almost succeed. Unlike Kennedy, De Gaulle had a very good driver. And when the shots rang out, he did exactly the right thing and evaded the gunfire. And De Gaulle escaped. But De Gaulle thought the CIA knew about that attempt on his life. And De Gaulle never believed the official story of the assassination. So that story, this memo, that page is the origin story of the mistrust between the CIA, between Kennedy and the CIA that would endure for the rest of his presidency. Right.

I think that's so important for you to lay that out in that way. The suspicion that the CIA might assassinate a... Right. So what is the decision tree that flows from this memo? How do we then get to characters like Angleton and the organization of an eventual alleged plot? Right. So the second most important document that came out is actually not one document. It was nine documents about-

It's put up at four. Yeah, about nine documents about James Angleton. And so I don't go looking for one document that's going to tell me the whole thing. When you look at these documents taken together, and documents that have been released in recent years, you understand something that I just don't think people, I mean, I know no one knows, and the mainstream media organizations just don't want to talk about it. Lee Harvey Oswald was not a lone nut. He was a known quantity to a small group of CIA counterintelligence officers for four years. Between November 1959 and November 1963,

we now have all of the information that the CIA had on Oswald. 42 documents, 180 pages of material. Okay. And, you know, he was followed from beginning to end. There was no point in those four years, or very few points in those four years, where top people in the CIA did not have Lee Harvey Oswald's home address. Wow. Between November 1915, and the guy's moving all the time. He goes to Moscow, to Minsk, he comes back to Fort Worth, he moves to New Orleans, he comes back to Dallas, he goes to Mexico, he comes back to Dallas. Every step of the way, top people in the CIA knew about it.

So that alone is, that's another thing that sets the context. Now, I have a lot of arguments with mainstream media journalists who say, you know, they were just incompetent. You know, they just missed him. Okay, well, a couple of things. And this is what's important about the document that came out last week. Angleton, this new document shows, lied under oath to JFK investigators. And there's a very stark exchange in the new document, which shows very clearly

so that he lied about Oswald's involvement in one CIA project. But Oswald tripped many CIA. So what Angleton was hiding and what the CIA was hiding was and what the story of the quote unquote lone gunman hides is this extraordinary level of interest at the top of the CIA in this alleged pathetic sociopathic loser who nobody would ever care about, or so we are often told. And yet James Angleton, one of the smartest, most capable intelligence officers of his generation, regarded as the premier counterintelligence officer in the Western world, is paying attention to Lee Harvey Oswald for four years. The CIA has never explained this.

Because they don't have to, because reporters from the New York Times don't go and say, what is this? And you have this weird cognitive dissonance going on where people won't look at this new evidence. They won't talk about it. They won't cover it because it works like this. Well, you know, that's a piece of evidence that's, you know, that's of interest to Morley. And we know he's a conspiracy theorist. So that's kind of tainted evidence. And we don't need to think about it because we know for sure that Oswald killed the president. Right. You know, it's like, and so that's been going on for years.

And so, you know, nobody knows the story that's just coming into view. So, you know, I'm saying somehow this is part of the JFK story. You can't say, one question was, does this change the narrative? No one document changes the narrative. But the entire Oswald file that James Angleton had on his desk when Kennedy left for Dallas, that changes the narrative. What the file shows, there were two FBI reports on Oswald, everything he had been doing recently. He'd gotten arrested, he'd gone to Mexico City,

he'd come back, two FBI reports saying Oswald's in Dallas. They land on Angleton's desk on November 14th and 15th, 1963. Never been explained. Wow. So that's where we're at. And, you know, will they, will the CIA explain? You know, unlike the FBI, the CIA has not turned over any new documents as a result of Trump's order. The CIA, I would say, is not in compliance with Trump's order. They have JFK documents in their possession. So what happens with the CIA? Are they going to turn over the JFK documents they have in their hands? That's a big question.

But with these two documents, I mean, I think we see kind of the big picture of Kennedy in conflict with his national security establishment and CIA officers paying close attention to the man who supposedly killed him. And we're going to learn more about that. And it is complicated, but I'll tell you a little bit of good news. I am going to testify before Representative Luna's hearing on JFK on April 1st. Excellent. And I'm going to talk about this. And you need to slow down. And I'm hoping that I'll have the time to explain to the task force, you know, what this story is and how we can get the rest of it. You know, what's interesting about this story is, you know, I'm so happy to be here because right now requests for interviews are running about two to one, three to one in favor of conservative sites. Oh, really?

Yeah. Jesse Waters called me up. Jesse is my new best friend. I go on his show and he's like, those Democrats, they're burning down the Teslas all over the world. And I'm sitting there, man, I can't afford a Tesla. I drive a Nissan Rogue.

I wasn't asking you about the things. Yeah, right. No, he didn't ask. He's probably in the lead in. No, no, no, no, so no, that was the show the show before and I'm thinking I'm gonna say something to this guy I'm gonna say something to this guy and then he comes on and he does like a four-minute introduction to JFK story and it's like I pretty much agree with that. No, you know, and you know what I realized I think what the JFK issue does is it's unites the anti-war base. Yes of both sides

That's right. On the left, you know, people remember Kennedy as an inspiring leader, wants to end the Cold War, wants to take the American empire in a new direction, and are anti-war today, right? Like, whatever the details of Ukraine and Gaza, we're against those wars, because we're against war in general, you know? We don't think there's good wars. Those wars could have been prevented. And on the right, there you have a similar sentiment. It's more about we don't want to spend our blood and treasure on foreigners.

Okay. But it's anti-war also. It's an abhorrence of war. That's what's driving the JFK story. And that's what brings people together. And that's why I have no problem going on Jesse Watt. Right. And Angleton's relationship with Israeli intelligence has also been getting

a lot of attention. Can you unpack some of that? Yeah. So I talked about don't look at one document, look at nine documents. So the nine documents about Angleton tell two stories that are important. One is about the birth of COINTELPRO. COINTELPRO is typically thought of as an FBI program, J. Edgar Hoover. It's associated with J. Edgar Hoover. But COINTELPRO is typically thought of as an FBI program, right? J. Edgar Hoover. It's associated with J. Edgar Hoover. But COINTELPRO was really a joint CIA-FBI program, which Angleton, as counterintelligence chief, had a lot of influence on a counterintelligence program of the FBI. So that's one thing. And we can talk about how that emerged. That's a very interesting story that doesn't take you into

the history of JFK's assassination, but takes you into the history of the repression of the left in the 60s. Very important story. Yes. And the stuff about the Fair Play for Cuba committee that's in here, that's another story that's coming.

And I've got another good story about CIA spies in New Orleans. It's very cool. Oh, this will be fun. So I'm gonna tease that for you. But the other thing that the nine Angleton documents that came in was his very close relations with the Israelis. And he gave testimony, Angleton gave testimony to the church committee in June 1975. He'd just been fired from the CIA. He's eager to justify himself

and say, look, I'm really, I was doing good. And he explains his extraordinary relationship with the Israeli security services, going back to 1951 when he and David Ben-Gurion come over and make a deal with Alan Dulles about how the two intelligence services will share information. That story of Angleton and the Israeli services, which I talk about in my book about Angleton, The Ghost,

and let me plug that right now. Sure, go to the link in the description. Yes, The Ghost, The Secret Life of James Jesus Angleton tells this story, and I had read a lot of these documents, I'd read all of these documents when I did my book, and now for the first time I see them, and we understand the Angleton story with new clarity. The birth of COINTELPRO and the birth

of US-Israeli strategic relationship. Angleton, like him or not, people told me, people who liked him said, "'This guy's a world historic figure. "'And you can say he's sinister "'and he did bad things and all that, "'but that is not an unfair estimation of James Angleton. "'And he's at the center of what we're learning

about the JFK story. This is where my brain always gets so tickled too about the COINTELPRO, like you were saying. And so I was curious if we shed even more light. This gets to a bigger question. Ben Shapiro recently had a viral clip. I talked about it in your introduction before you were here about where he was like,

who cares who killed JFK? And he's like, I think it's interesting, but it's, you know, what happened in 1963, we're in 2025. And so I talked to Oliver Stone about this and he gave me such a poetic answer, but I want to ask you the same thing. Why does it matter who killed JFK? Because when JFK was killed and there was no accountability, the American empire took a turn. Kennedy was trying to steer the ship one way and when Kennedy was killed and there was no accountability the ship was steered another way and we never had a course correction after that because the faction that avoided accountability with with Kennedy's murder and avoided responsibility for it

they had impunity and they could dominate all the policy debates that followed but and also because they had the secrecy of apparatus, the apparatus of secrecy around them. You know, why does it matter? Here we are attacking the Houthis, okay? A people who, you know, pose no threat to the American people. As our vice president says secretly in his chat, we only have 3% of the trade that moves through this. Why are we doing this?

Yeah. And so, you know, I imagine a young John F. Kennedy running for president. And here we're bombing the hell out of these people 7,000 miles away. And I remember what JFK said at American University. We do not want a Pax Americana. We are not the world's policeman. That would be JFK's message to us today. Yes.

And that's the relevance for Ben Shapiro. Right there. Yeah. We do's the relevance for Ben Shapiro. Right there. We do not want a Pax Americana. Imagine a Democratic presidential candidate saying that today. I think if one did, they would find a lot of success. Right. And I think the fact that there was no accountability led to what to me is the most salient fact about JFK's assassination. That pretty much every president after him, definitely Johnson, definitely Nixon, you can talk about whether it's every

single one, whether or not the CIA or the security services killed Kennedy, those presidents believed that they did or probably did. And as the person now occupying that chair, that changes your calculation when you're in the room with them talking about how many covered agents they've got in the embassy and whether or not you're going to reduce that. You can hear it in Johnson's phone calls. He's terrified.

Like Chuck Schumer said, Trump is going to find out that the CIA has... That's right. Yeah, he's like, oh, they're going to find... It's like, oh my God, we're just saying this stuff out loud. You can hear it with Nixon. You know, Nixon, I mean, not that he was a great guy or whatever, but you could hear the terror in him

and in Haldeman's voice. They got you. They're like, listen, with Hoover, like we got a bunch of- No, no, I tell the story in my book. Nixon calls Helms into the Oval Office. Dick, I want that report on the pigs, God damn it. Right.

And Helms is like, Mr. President, why do you need that? And you hear Nixon say it, the who shot John angle. Nixon thought. He knew, yeah, exactly. Johnson told Walter, one of his aides, that he thought the CIA was involved. He didn't believe the Warren Commission. And I always ask people, you know, if Lyndon Johnson, who appointed the Warren Commission, didn't believe the Warren Commission. And I always ask people, you know,

if Lyndon Johnson, who appointed the Warren Commission, didn't believe its conclusions, like, why should I? Right. Right? Like, why is that irrational? Yes. Where do you come down, by the way, on Johnson's knowledge or anything? I think the most telling thing about Lyndon Johnson is that within two days, he said, we have to prove Oswald acted alone.

Right? I mean, he's ordered his finding before the investigation has begun. What was he afraid of? He was afraid that he would have to investigate his own government and tear his own government apart, or he would have to go to war with the Soviet Union or Cuba. And he didn't wanna do either one of those things.

So Oswald was the perfect solution, the patsy, the fall guy. It's all his fault, nothing's wrong, let's move along, people. And that was the political solution. And it held. And a lot of people bought it. And a lot of people bought it for the best reasons. You know, we believe in our government. And, you know, there's a terrible tragedy and we have to cope with it somehow. And there's this story. It's hard to believe, but, you know, let's get on with it. And people's trust was really abused. And, you know, and believe but you know, let's get on with it and people's trust was really abused And you know and now you know, here's where the CIA inherits the whirlwind right because their bogus story about Lee Harvey Oswald

Has bred has bred a conspiratorial culture Yes, you know that that thrives on suspicion of government and undermines it and you know That's it, you know And that's a terrible thing. And so when I go on these shows, the right-wingers, they wanted to use this story to kind of beat up on what they call the deep state and help Trump do that. And the liberal media is kind of like,

we hope that there's nothing in there that supports conspiracy theorists because they're so irrational and stuff like that. We got to get past that. I agree with you. And with getting this record, and kudos to Trump, right? I don't agree with him on practically anything, but he definitely did the right thing on this. And you see it. We see it now, and we're going to get the benefits of it. Once people are a little patient, stop looking for the smoking gun and start looking for the fact pattern.

Jeff, while I have you, let's talk about Jack Ruby. That's where it all falls apart for me. Not falls apart per se, but that's where the ultra conspiracy starts. You're like, yeah, you're not even trying. Yeah, it's like, what are we doing here? He shoots this guy on live television.

He says he's a patsy. Jolly West is involved. I mean, like, I mean, after reading the chaos book, I'm like, oh, they literally, mind control is real. I'm like, they prohibited, you know, this is the CIA operation. Actually, there's a new chaos documentary out now. So about Jack Ruby. I mean, you go read the Warren Commission. They tried really, really hard, and they were successful in avoiding the fact that Jack Ruby was an organized crime figure.

Yes, right. And they bought this ridiculous story that he killed him because he— Zygote. What, he's a super patriot? What? Yeah. I talked to one of the women who worked for Jack Ruby in the club, and I asked her. She was close to Ruby, and I said, you know, why did he kill Oswald?

And she said, I don't know, but she said Jack worked for people, and I don't think he had a choice. I thought that was very interesting. And I said, did he ever say anything good or bad about President Kennedy? She said, I never heard anything, but he hated Bobby Kennedy with a purple passion, something the Warren Commission also totally omitted. Because he was trying to go after all the organized crime. He did the test, yeah, he brought them, exactly. So, you know, people say, was there an organized crime plot?

We know the organized crime role and what happened, and that was to eliminate the most important witness in Oswald. I was on Piers Morgan and Michael Franzine, who was kind of a made guy in the mafia. I know he is, yeah. He's a big YouTuber. Yeah, he's a talking head now.

And he said, you know, when I was in the mob and we talked to these guys, it was common knowledge, totally accepted. You know, we were asked to get rid of Oswald and we did it. That was our part, you know. And they were very matter of fact about it. You know, and I thought, this guy knows, you know, he was in that world. So that's the organized crime part of it. Jack Ruby is the organized crime component of what happened You know, we can talk about like what really happened that day, but you know, clearly Oswald was not supposed to be captured alive Yes, and when Oswald was captured alive, you know those people in the CIA who'd been watching him for four years

They had big problem because Oswald was not unaware that, you know, he had friends, you know, he had people who assisted him and he was a capable, you know, he's a smart guy, enterprising guy. So he took advantage of those contacts that he had. But that's the story that's coming out is Angleton's role around Oswald, the surveillance of Oswald and what was really going on there. My friends in the mainstream media said, they were just incompetent. When top CIA officials lie in a homicide investigation, I can't take that as evidence of incompetence. To me, that looks more like complicity.

That's where we're at now. Okay, all right. Man, I always love talking to you, Jeff. Plug, what else you got to plug? So if you want to follow me, JFKFacts on Substack, JFKFacts.substack.com. And more to come.

All right, excellent. We'll have a link down in the description. Everybody go watch his testimony too, April 1st. All right, well, I'll be looking forward to that. And we will see you all later. Stay informed, empowered, and ahead of the curve with the BIN News This Hour podcast. Updated hourly to bring you the latest stories shaping the Black community. From breaking headlines to cultural milestones,

the Black Information Network delivers the facts, the voices, and the perspectives that matter 24-7 because our stories deserve to be heard. Listen to the BIN News This Hour podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I also want to address the Tonys. On a recent episode of Checking In with Michelle Williams,

I open up about feeling snubbed by the Tony Awards. Do I? I was never mad. I was disappointed because I had high hopes. To hear this and more on disappointment and protecting your peace, listen to Checking In with Michelle Williams from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You say you'd never give in to a meltdown.

Never let kids' toys take over the house. And never fill your feed with kid photos. You'd never plan your life around their schedule, never lick your thumb to clean their face, and you'd never let them leave the house looking like less than their best. You'd say you'd never put a pacifier in your mouth to clean it, never let them stay up too late. And never let them run wild through the grocery store.

So when you say you'd never let them get into a car without you there, no, it can happen. One in four hot car deaths happen when a kid gets into an unlocked car and can't get out. Never happens. Before you leave the car, always stop, look, lock. Brought to you by NHTSA and the Ad Council. This is an iHeart Podcast.