Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - Thanksgiving Special: CNN Shakeup, Fauci's Lies, Malcolm X, MSNBC Elitism, Worker Power, FBI Informants, and More!

Episode Date: November 25, 2021

Krystal and Saagar discuss the CNN shakeup, Fauci's gaslighting, Malcolm X murder case, MSNBC's out of touch Thanksgiving tips, workers getting Thanksgiving off, millions spent on FBI informants, and more! Enjoy the holiday and we will see you Monday!To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy, but to me, voiceover is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now. Let me hear it. Listen to voiceover on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. A lot of times, big economic forces show up in our lives in small ways. Four days a week, I would buy two cups of banana pudding, but the price has gone up,

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They could lose their family and millions of dollars? Yep. Find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, thanks for listening to Breaking Points with Crystal and Sagar. We're going to be totally upfront with you. We took a big risk going independent. To make this work, we need your support to beat the corporate media. CNN, Fox, MSNBC, they are ripping this country apart. They are making millions of dollars doing it. To help support our mission of making all of us hate each other less, hate the corrupt ruling class more, support the show. Become a Breaking Points

premium member today, where you get to watch and listen to the entire show ad-free and uncut an hour early before everyone else. You get to hear our reactions to each other's monologues. You get to participate in weekly Ask Me Anythings, and you don't need to hear our annoying voices pitching you like I am right now. So what are you waiting for? Go to BreakingPoints.com, become a premium member today, which is available in the show notes. Enjoy the show, guys. Lots happening in the world of cable news. So the business of the news side is important to understand. CNN, which was owned by Time Warner, is now being moved into Discovery, Discovery being the overall umbrella company, which is going to have control over CNN, the news network. And there

are some very interesting signs, Crystal, from the very top of Discovery that CNN's days could be numbered in the annoying and terrible way that it's currently structured. The top shareholder of Discovery making some real news when he was interviewed on CNBC. Let's take a listen. I would like to see CNN evolve back to the kind of journalism that it started with and actually have journalists, which would be unique and refreshing. I think a coward's way out would be to sell it or spin it off and then sell it. So John Malone there is a billionaire businessman.

He's the largest investor in Discovery. And there have been some very interesting signs. The head of Discovery himself moving to Los Angeles. He wants to revamp the entire thing, the studio process, Warner Media, HBO, all of that, but meeting Jeff Zucker and saying that there could be new plans for the network. Zucker is the person currently in charge of CNN. He's on his way out in 2021. So as this reorganization all continues, you're going to see pressure from the shareholders

themselves in order to push CNN in a different direction. And they have a new CEO of Discovery who is willing and perhaps able to make these changes. Zucker, by all accounts, was a very big protector of his talent. He loved Chris Cuomo and Jake Tapper, which is cringe, but listen, it's his business, not mine. And he went out of his way in order to protect them from network hierarchy, especially Time Warner Company and all of that. In the Trump years, obviously, they probably couldn't have retaliated against them without something happening to them.

In the Biden years, though, their ratings continue to go down and down and down. As Glenn always likes to remind us, let's put this up there on the screen. The lights and pointing out. Three different shows on Newsmax right now beat the CNN morning show. And Greg Kelly's show is closer to surpassing Don Lemon's primetime CNN show for total viewers. Total joke, CNN is a complete failure whenever it comes to an actual news company in terms of getting people to watch them. But you guys should remember, they don't make their money that way. The vast majority of it comes through subscription cable fees. So they have billions of dollars in profits, whether people

watch them or not. That's how the business is structured. But this could be an indication, Crystal, that things are moving in a totally different direction at the very, very top of the organization. It's interesting. So a couple things to say about the business model. First of all, you're correct that they get more of their money from the carrier fees. Right. And part of why CNN and Fox and others, though, CNN in particular, are able to get high carrier fees

is because people basically feel like, oh, we have to have CNN. Gotta have the news. Have to have CNN as part of our lineup. Right. So you could imagine over time if CNN becomes increasingly viewed as just sort of like partisan media,

well, then it becomes a little bit more dispensable. I mean, they also have huge problems. All the cable news networks were effectively saved by the Trump era because the writing was on the wall for them in terms of cord cutters. And if you look at all of these networks, their audiences are extremely old. What they're getting in the demo is wildly less than what they're getting overall because most of their demographic is aging. So young people are not watching any of these networks.

CNN is plowing a whole bunch of money into their streaming service bringing over Casey Hunt. CNN Plus. They wanted to hire Rachel Maddow. You could make worse moves than that yeah because at least rachel does have a real audience like put the the moral and ethical judgments

aside there are people who actually show up for her and it's it's um that's very different than the cable news network model is that everybody's interchangeable nobody's really stand down it's on in the background as sort of a default. So to then switch gears and think in terms of who will actually people pay to show up for and intentionally choose to watch is very different from what they've ultimately been doing. But, you know, having lived through one of these

or gotten fired during one of these transitions at MSNBC, there's a responsiveness to ratings, even if, because it hurts their pride, even if it's not that determinative from a revenue level. So when I was fired at MSNBC, this was pre-Trump winning the election. And their thought was, oh, we're going to shift back. We're going to be more like CNN.

We're going to do more hard news. We're going to lean into our NBC News persona rather than these people who have opinions. Well, once Trump gets elected, then they turn on a dime and change that because the people who are getting the most ratings were the ones who were willing to be the most opinionated and say the most outlandish things that they possibly could and lean the most into the Russia conspiracies and all of that. So then they completely changed their model. So anything that's a plan right now in the Biden era could be easily flipped around again, you know, when it comes to if Trump gets back in the White House or whatever happens in the next election or some other big story breaks in America that really ultimately

drives ratings. These things are all ephemeral. And this dude who's the shareholder, I'm sure, is just looking at the ratings and thinking this is not good ultimately from my bottom line. Not good at all ephemeral. And this dude who's the shareholder, I'm sure, is just looking at the ratings and thinking, this is not good, ultimately, from my bottom line. Not good at all. So we'll see. Interesting new comments. Dr. Anthony Fauci, after he was basically debased by Senator Rand Paul and has continually tried to redefine gain of function, has a new response when he's asked about it. Let's put this up there on the screen, which is that Fauci now says gain of function is now a, quote, completely meaningless term as he defends the NIH actions. Now, that's pretty important, Crystal, because gain of function was explicitly defined under his term in the United States government to mean something so that they did not do it. And NIH has now admitted to Congress

in a recent letter that they did in fact fund gain of function research. They did not know, or they claim they did not know that it was happening and they had to correct the record after Fauci had gone and testified there. So according to them, they did actually fund it. It does have a meaning. It had a meaning for a reason because we banned it. Fauci actually circumvented and eventually removed that ban under the Trump administration. And look, why does it all matter? I know it is tiresome in order to get into all of these debates. Technically, anything that enhances a virus is gain of function. So I get it. I've even heard from some people in the scientific

community saying, hey, it's not all bad. I totally understand. What we're pointing to is that in this particular instance at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, they were studying these bat coronaviruses, enhancing them in some cases, doing it with U.S. government-provided dollars. And eventually, it's very likely that what we currently know is COVID-19 leaked from that lab as a result of this type of risky and dangerous research of which that lab was cited for safety violations multiple times. We know all of this. It's totally public record. And it's all just about, did it come from the lab or did it not? It's very basic. And if it did, let's have a discussion around gain of function. Let's set some new safety standards. Let's maybe not do it at all. Maybe. I know the scientists will get mad whenever I say that. But it turns out, Crystal, that the

reason Fauci doesn't want to admit any of this is because it would disrupt his role as the funneller of billions of dollars in scientific aid dollars, which if you talk to people in the community, scientific community, which I have, the NIH is like the kingmaker. They can make your lab or break your lab. A grant to them employs you. It employs all your people. If you're a tenured professor at one of these universities, you need the NIH or you need the National Science Foundation. These are the major granting institutions. So that's why a lot of people in the scientific community are also remaining silent about all of this. So his claim on this is ridiculous. And we should just pair it with the latest document leak at this point.

Put this up there on the screen, please. New documents show that the Wuhan lab was studying a viral strain found in bats, which is, quote, near identical to COVID-19 in latest lab leak. I'm sure that has nothing to do with it, Sagar. Don't be preposterous. And Crystal, as you and I have pointed to, the natural explanation for COVID

is that this bat flew a thousand miles from Laos. Well, it turns out that the people who were investigating or doing gain-of-function research on bats got some of their bats from Laos, which is exactly where something called Banal 52, a Laotian bat virus, which shares 97% of its genome with SARS-CoV-2, just happens to be from. So now we even have evidence linking the Laotian 1,000-mile-away bat

to the actual research, which was happening at the lab. I mean, do you need much more people? It's pretty clear. Roll the clip of Jon Stewart. Roll Jon Stewart. I mean, the Fauci thing is just, it's just obviously he doesn't want to get blamed for a pandemic. He's trying to cover his ass.

Like, that's obviously what's going on. And his new comments, which credit to Mehdi Hassan for pushing him on this. And bringing up, this was based on an Intercept report. They got their hands on linked documents. And so he was pushing him on, you know, what those documents revealed about the type of research that was going on, the type of experiments that they are considering doing. And this is different than what Fauci has said in the past. In those exchanges with Rand Paul,

he has tried to craft his own definition of gain of function and then say, therefore, what we were doing was not gain of function. So now to just say, well, it's a meaningless term. Let's just not even talk about it at all. As you point out, I mean, it is a term that has a definition. It does have meaning. It is specified in terms of the regulatory code about what it is and what it isn't, what's permissible and what's not. So it does, in fact, have meaning. You just don't want to acknowledge that it has meaning because it's very inconvenient for you

and it makes you look kind of bad. So it's very obvious what's going on here, but you don't hear a lot of willingness to question St. Fauci in a lot of corners of the media. Right, yeah. We should ask him about this bat and see what he thinks. See if the natural origin still makes a whole lot of sense. I would be interested in hearing that.

Okay. So some fairly major developments in the ongoing mystery of who actually killed Malcolm X. So for a long time now, scholars and his family have not believed the official story of the two men that were ultimately convicted that they actually killed him. And now those two men, Khalil Islam and Muhammad Aziz, have been officially exonerated.

This is after the Manhattan DA's 22-month reinvestigation of the case. And there's a few reasons why no one ever thought that these were the two guys that actually did it. The biggest one is that one of the actual assassins was caught by Malcolm X's security detail on the way out. And he always said, and so they knew that that guy did it. And he always said that there were other assailants and that these two guys had nothing to do with it. And he was consistent about that the whole time. Eventually, even giving an interview,

giving the names of those who he said had actually perpetrated the crime. So that's one thing. There were a lot of also suspicious things regarding the government's involvement. Of course, the FBI, very interested in Malcolm X, trying to foment tension and division amongst members of the Nation of Islam.

And then on that particular night, when he is murdered, normally there would be massive police security because there had been previous threats on his life and attempts on his life. Very minimal police security. And then what they found here is that exculpatory evidence was hidden both by the FBI and the NYPD. So nobody for a long time had really believed that these two guys who were wrongfully convicted and served many, many years in prison were the actual assassins. Getting to those root questions of how involved was the government, because I think there's little doubt that the government was involved at least in a cover up, if not, you know, directly fomenting this assassination, those questions of how much the FBI and the NYPD were involved, still, you know, still a big question mark. And the actual identities of the real killers,

still unknown. Most scholars believe they came from a mosque in Newark is what they think. Yeah, I did not know the NYPD literally had an undercover agent inside Malcolm X's security team in the ballroom at the time of the assassination, and that the FBI had blanket surveillance on Nation of Islam and Malcolm X, and actually fomented hostility between Malcolm X and Nation of Islam leaders at Chicago headquarters. I mean, look, I watched the Malcolm X movie with Denzel Washington, amazing movie. I actually highly recommend you guys ever watch it. I think it's American Airlines, which has it for the in-flight. So if you're ever on your way to California, like I was, sit back and enjoy the ride.

Highly recommend it. That actually led to me reading a little bit more about Malcolm X and the, you know, break of him and the Nation of Islam and Elijah Muhammad and, you know, the alleged, you know, by Muhammad, exploitation of young girls. And that's kind of what led him to speak out and eventually break with the organization, which obviously caused major incentive because Elijah Muhammad was considered the prophet within the Nation of Islam. And that schism was considered really problematic for a lot of the movement back in the 1960s. But what has always remained unclear is about the actual who pulled the trigger, the amount of planning that actually happened, how much the Nation of Islam was involved in that, how much of it was stoked by the FBI, and then also with the NYPD. And there really remains

no real, you know, there's no closure on any of this. I think it's very important. I think Malcolm and his life is one of the most extraordinary Americans who's ever lived. I mean, his, the autobiography of Malcolm X is one of the craziest things they'll ever read. It's very accessible. I really recommend anybody out there, especially if you're a young guy, go out and read that. Malcolm had some real struggles in his early youth. And if you're trying to get discipline or try to change your life, reading that book, no matter how you feel about racial issues, because it's really not what he's been about at all, is going to be really important to you. So his story and kind of the lack of closure that we ever got on it in many ways with a lot of these assassinations, yeah, it's still like an open wound in U.S. history. Yeah, and I mean it also really matters just in terms of what the hell was the U.S. federal government doing.

I mean we know – That was some really – And this was under J. Edgar Hoover, we know he had this fear of a black messiah who could unite all of the black militants, black nationalist movements, and lead some sort of an insurrection or a revolution. And so the aggressive lengths that they went to, they had people reportedly

highest levels undercover within the organization, phones tapped. I mean, they followed what he was doing and what he was saying and the conversations he was having every single day, worked to foment these divisions, which were over both the allegations of sexual improprieties, but also over politics, and also potentially over corruption and grift within Nation of Islam as well. So in any case, the biggest question for me is how involved was the government? Did they just look the other way? Did they actually give the okay? You know, did they help craft the plot? What did the cover-up look like? Those questions still largely unanswered, but at least, you know, a modicum of progress here in the official exoneration of the two men that people have long known really had nothing to do with

this plot. And one of the things that people at the scene said at the time is that, listen, they immediately, the NYPD wanted to point the finger at members from the Harlem mosque. And they said, these people didn't come from New York because we would know them. We would have known who it was if it was people who came from New York. So people who were there never bought the official narrative. The family never bought the official narrative. And scholars who have looked into this never bought the official narrative either. So the fact that these two men have been exonerated, one small step forward, but a million questions still remain, which are important for how all of us understand our history.

And, of course, Malcolm X serving as a hero and an icon for millions throughout his life and also throughout his death. That's true. We've had some pretty hilarious cringe moments on MSNBC and NBC News lately. Stephanie Ruhle, of course, just saying inflation's fine. You know, these people all got a raise. They can afford it. Who cares? Actually, inflation's not even a real problem.

My favorite is inflation is actually good, the best take. Now they've got some new advice to families out there who are dealing with higher prices, specifically a higher food cost for Thanksgiving dinner on how to avoid the perils of inflation. Let's take a listen to this Today Show segment. And while we are on the topic of something that could be controversial, perhaps forego the turkey. Bear with me. I know that is the staple of the Thanksgiving meal. However, some people think turkey is overrated. And so it tends to be the most expensive thing on the table. Maybe you do an Italian feast instead. And I will say this. If you tell everyone you're having a Thanksgiving without turkey,

some guests may drop off the list and that's a way to cut costs too. The way to cut costs! The kicker there. Don't have the turkey and also disincentivize people from coming from your house. Pray that your family doesn't actually show up. Pray your family doesn't come. Make it

unpleasant enough of a meal that your family doesn't actually come. I hate turkey, so cards on the table. I was going to say, yeah, low-key she is right that turkey is overrated. I agree. I mean, I don't like it. But I'm also, you know, look, people like it. It's tradition. All of that deep fry is the only way it seemed permissible to me. But it's like the way that they offer this is some sort of, like, family-friendly mom advice.

Like, Pinterest is just, oh, just don't have the turkey. That's an easy way to cut costs. And that way, it'll actually deter people from coming. That's the part that's the most amazing to me. I have actually never had a fried turkey, so I don't know how that is. It's pretty dangerous. I was going to say, I think you're the one who's shown me a bunch of the people blowing themselves up with the fried turkey things. My Thanksgiving tradition is going on YouTube and watching compilations of people screwing up the fried turkey and setting their house on fire.

So that has definitely terrified me from ever attempting my own fried turkey. If I'm going to have turkey, I like the smoked turkey more, but I lean more heavily into the ham in terms of the Thanksgiving meats. I don't want either of those. Does your family, is this racist for me to ask? No, no, no. Parents or immigrants, do you guys lean into the like normal? My parents are vegetarians, so it's like they don't eat that stuff. My parents don't, yeah, so they don't eat meat. But so it's like, yeah, I mean, they would do generally when I was growing up, it's like, you know, the families, like whatever, get together and it would be like a mix of Indian food. And then the Indians who did eat meat would definitely eat turkey and all that. I've been to enough of these places or enough traditional Thanksgiving meals and stuff that I—honestly, it's not for me.

Really? The whole thing. Yeah, all of it. I mean, the stuffing is good. That's about it. I don't like cranberry sauce. I do not like turkey. Like I said—

You don't like cranberry? You haven't had the right cranberry sauce. I'm not a fan. Maybe. You haven't had the right cranberry sauce. I do not like turkey. Like I said. You don't like cranberry? You haven't had the right cranberry sauce. Maybe. You haven't had the right cranberry sauce. Yams, even ham. So maybe. Because the cranberry, it goes so good with the other stuff. Sure.

I'm bringing you some. That's it. Okay, fine. I'm there for the chocolate pie or the pumpkin pie, those things. Those are actually pretty good. Sweet potatoes. Yeah, I can deal with sweet potato. You know, this is maybe a controversial take. I love sweet potatoes.

I do not like the casseroles that have marshmallows on them. Oh, yeah. That to me is gross. I don't like that. I like my sister makes one. We're probably pissing off the entire audience here. Yeah, definitely a hot take. My sister makes a sweet potato casserole that has like a lot of butter and brown sugar and like a nut, like a crushed nut topping. And because it has the sweet and the salty, that thing is incredible. That's like the first thing that's gone every year. I don't mind a green bean casserole, but that's more of like a traditional Southern dish as opposed to, you know, something that's on every table. We definitely do a green bean casserole for sure. The cream of mushroom soup

and the crispy onions on top. Oh, that's good. That's good stuff. Anyway, this is what real media should be talking about. It's actually a travesty that you guys can't afford. Um, your turkey or their food cost is going to be higher. And to just try and interject any seriousness into the segment, the reason why is because we had a drought, which has made it so that food cost has gone up. We also have increase in fertilizer cost because Europe's natural gas prices are much higher. That is one of the things that increases the price of nitrogen, which is increasing the cost of our fertilizer. Fertilizer goes up, means the price of corn goes up. And unfortunately, and this is another reason why you should avoid these types of corn-fed meats, is because the vast majority of the

turkeys that we fatten up are fattened up based on corn-fed, unhealthy stuff that makes them as big as possible. And so when the inputs into the turkey are more expensive than the turkey itself is going to be more expensive whenever it hits your plate. And that's pretty much the same case for a lot of the other food that's going to be on your table. Everything from actually wine as well, we've seen an increase in the price of, to a lot of the other ingredients which rely on the input cost of fertilizer, ranching, drought, shortages, everything that we've seen. That's why it's costing more this year. All right, guys, this is actually kind of a big deal. Heartwarming news. Yeah, some good news for you this Thanksgiving. Let's go ahead and throw this up on the screen. Target stores say that Target will be closed on Thanksgiving Day for good. So not just this year.

They say what started as a temporary measure driven the pandemic is now our new standard. Thanksgiving store hours are one thing we will not get back to when the pandemic finally subsides. And this might feel like a small thing, but for these workers, this is huge. That means they can enjoy Thanksgiving and be with their friends and family. And to me, you know, one of the things that we've talked about a lot is the divide between workers who are treated like actual human beings with wants and needs and desires and friends and families, etc. And workers who are not treated in that way, who are just treated as like automatons to be plugged in to serve their corporate masters. This is one small indication that Target believes their workers are actual human beings who might want to spend Thanksgiving with their families instead of behind a cash register. Well, I don't think

Target believes a damn thing about their employees. I think there's a tight labor market, and so they can't screw over their employees. It's not just Target. It's Walmart, too. They're staying closed. They're not like Target saying they'll never open on Thanksgiving again. But there's a lot of stores that are not going to be open on Thanksgiving. And I say, thank God. I remember when I was a kid, the first transition from Black Friday to Thanksgiving hours. And everybody at the time, this was like a big story. It was like 2005 or something like that.

And people were like, hey, this is screwed up because now those people have to go to work. And then it just became the standard. And it was like, oh, no, if you work here, you're coming to work. Screw you. Screw your plans. Don't make any plans. Next thing you knew, people were lining up out of the stores the morning of Thanksgiving, which doesn't make any damn sense. And everything was just open 24 hours a day.

Because of the pandemic, they actually didn't close. They had to be closed on Thanksgiving. They didn't just open 24 hours a day. Because of the pandemic, they actually didn't close. They had to be closed on Thanksgiving. They didn't have the staff and all that. And now some people are saying, hey, actually, it's not such a bad thing in order to keep this. And the staff, you know, they can just quit and go work somewhere else as we've covered with the great resignation. So if there is one good thing that comes of the labor market, people are being treated like humans. Once again, I think I told this story before I was at a Patagonia store in Georgetown here in Washington, D.C., and they were like, hey, we're closing for an hour so the employees can have a lunch break. And I was like, whoa, that's crazy. That's literally never happened before.

And those sorts of moves reset also cultural expectations because we've come – we had been trained to just assume that everything would be available for us. Yeah, at first I'm like, what do you mean you're closing? It's Sunday. That everything would be available for us 24-7. And that's not the case in all countries. If you go to other countries, we have different social norms where it's like, oh no, stores are going to close at 6 because people need to go home and have dinner with their families. That's right. So it's a lot of societal norms. And so this is an indication like when a big retailer like this sets a new expectation, that also helps to shift the societal norms. I mean,

you're 100% correct to say this doesn't like come out of the warmth of their hearts. I think it's also, you know, during the pandemic, a lot of shopping even more moved online. So having, you know, the store presence is less important to these companies' bottom line. But, yeah, it certainly fits in with that bigger picture that we're seeing. And you don't want to overstate it, but there are some encouraging shifts. More workers feeling like they can join a union. More workers going out on strike. More workers just up and quitting.

Mass resignations across sectors that especially have been sort of abused low-wage sectors that either the job prospects were extraordinarily volatile during COVID, so like in the restaurant or hospitality industry, or people like nursing home workers who were shoved onto the front lines of this thing and had their lives put at risk, also finding ways to shift industries. So this is part of that bigger picture of workers having a little bit more power in the country, of workers forcing employers to treat them a little bit more as human beings rather than just like replaceable widgets because ultimately right now they're not so easily replaceable. That's right. They have the power and they should keep the power. We're getting a new window into just how extensive the government's use is of paid informants and also just how many crimes these taxpayer-funded informants are authorized to commit. Let's throw this Ken Vogel tweet up on the screen.

This is actually from a report that was in Forbes. Federal agencies paid $294 million to confidential informants. That was from 2011 to 2018. The DEA paid an Amtrak employee $963,000, which the IG called a substantial waste of government funds. Oh oh you think in addition this was maybe the part that was most stunning to me the fbi authorized informants to commit 22 823 different crimes in just four years between 2011 and 2014 as As part of their work. And, I mean, this really gets to some of the questions that we've raised on this show about the overuse of informants, how oftentimes the incentive for the government and for these informants is to create crime. Yes. in quote-unquote disrupting acts that may never have been plotted or executed on if you didn't have government agents involved every step of the way saying, hey, you should do this, and let me

help you, and let me push you, and why don't we make it a bigger plot? Why? Why are the incentives in place? First of all, sometimes these informants, they only get paid if they're out there, you know, helping to foment crime. But in addition, from the government's perspective, a lot of times the actors involved, you know, they get to have the big press conference, political careers are made over big, high-profile terror plot disruptions and those sorts of things. So their incentive also is to help foment plots

that then they can, with much fanfare, disrupt. So the numbers here, ultimately, in just a few years are pretty stunning to look at. And what's funny is that because this is a non-political report, they point to the Gretchen Whitmer plot and January 6th as areas where we have seen government informants who have been authorized to commit crimes or at the very least have not been charged because of their role in the actual crime itself and then reporting it to the higher-ups and possibly testifying, providing evidence, and all of that. So we know that in some cases, these people are confidential informants who are not getting paid. And in many cases, though, they're getting paid a lot, like a lot of money. An airline employee, half a million

dollars. Amtrak, a million dollars. DEA is paying an average $26,000 over a five-year period, which, you know, it's not that much money, but it's also not nothing. So you're seeing here hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on these informants and 22,000 crimes, which, once again, according to their law, it's actually kind of crazy. They're allowed to authorize people to commit crimes as long as they're reporting on other crimes. And look, I get it. It's complicated. Sometimes you need that, but there's not a lot of oversight here. The fact is, is that this didn't even come from an IG report. It came from a bunch of guys who had to go through the federal court system and compile as much of the data. The government

hasn't released any of the data as recently. 22,000 crimes in four years. I mean, what's that on average? Something like, I mean, look, that's like 6,000 crimes a year. You know, something like that. And maybe even higher in recent years. We don't know. There's no data that's really publicly available in terms of recent times. So this stuff is being done in our name. It's a real corruption of the Justice Department. That is exactly right. They call them otherwise illegal acts. Otherwise known as.

Otherwise a crime. Crimes. Yeah, and to give you a sense of how much abuse there's been within this program, a court released, I'm reading from this report, a court released testimony of one confidential informant in Atlanta who received $212,000 from the DEA. DEA has so many of these informants, by the way, from 2011 to 2013. She testified she wasn't sure why she was paid. That was her testimony. She also testified to a sexual relationship with the DEA group supervisor who allegedly convinced the subordinates to falsify reports to justify those payments. That case currently under review by the inspector general. So you have, you know, just zero accountability about how these funds are actually being used

and very little investigation into whether this has actually been effective at preventing more crime than it's creating. And some of the tactics have been wildly abusive of entrapment and of helping create these plots and radicalizing individuals. We covered back on Rising, the Herald Square bomber, quote unquote, who didn't subscribe to any sort of radical ideology. The FBI informant who was involved showed him, let me show you Abu Ghraib. Let me talk to you about how America's evil. Let me encourage you to be involved with this bombing plot. And so it's things like that that you just wonder, like, you know, what exactly is being authorized in our name? What are our taxpayer dollars actually being used for? And so one of the rare glimpses into just the astonishing numbers behind how many of these informants exist, how much they're getting

paid, and how much criminal activity they themselves are actually committing. Yeah, that's right. All right, guys. Enjoy the day. We'll have more for you later. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind VoiceOver, the movement that exploded in 2024. You might

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