DeProgram with John Kiriakou and Ted Rall - More Amazon, Delivery App Drivers on Food Stamps | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas

Episode Date: July 24, 2026

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM ET. Today we discuss:• A study finds that dependence on food stamps and Medicaid for gig economy workers has spiked since the start of the pandemic. A U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) report found that the number of Amazon workers relying on federal assistance programs tripled between February 2020 and September 2025. Ride-hailing and delivery apps — Uber, Lyft, Grubhub, Instacart and DoorDash workers included — rank among the top three employers with workers receiving assistance from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid. • A day after the United States signed a landmark nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, President Trump added a new condition to the sale of nuclear reactors to the kingdom, declaring it now depends on the Saudi willingness to establish diplomatic relations with Israel.• The Trump administration imposed tariffs of around 10% on goods from more than 80 countries on Friday, its latest effort to put in place an expansive protectionist policy that has been repeatedly challenged in court.LIVE ON RUMBLE: https://rumble.com/c/DeProgramShowhttps://x.com/tedrallhttps://x.com/JamarlThomas#tedrall #jamarlthomas #news #politics

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Good morning. It's Friday, July 24th, 2026. Man, feels like a long week. You're watching The Program with Ted Rall and Jamarle Thomas. Thanks so much for joining us. Good morning, J-T. How are you? I'm doing okay. How are you doing this morning?

I'm all right. I'm okay. All right, so we are going to try to get Mickey Huff from Project Censored on again. We're supposed to have him earlier in the week, but we have him scheduled for the halfway through to talk about the 50th anniversary of Project Censored. So hopefully things will work out logistically this time. Also, we've got to talk about this study commissioned by Bernie Sanders

that found that basically Amazon, Uber, Lyft, all sorts of gig workers like Grubhub, DoorDash, Instacart, all these giant multinational billion-dollar earning corporations are all subsidized by corporate welfare paid by us. Basically, they underpay their employees so badly that a whole pile of them are on SNAP, which is the new word for food stamps, and Medicaid. In other words, that's taxpayer health care,

that's taxpayer welfare, and it's because these companies are disgusted. and don't pay their employees properly. And now we, the U.S. taxpayer have to pay for it. So, I mean, you know, I should stop criticizing capitalism. We don't really have capitalism. We just have, you know, corporate cronyism. Anyway, also the, we should talk a little bit about this Saudi nuclear deal and the motivations.

I'm very curious to hear your thoughts about this. I'm feeling conspiratorial about it. And Donald Trump is imposing. another round of tariffs. This time, it's based on another pretext, which is supposedly the United States isn't doing enough about forced labor. I mean, these countries aren't doing enough about forced labor. This includes Europe. And that's pretty funny because, I mean, the Europeans obviously have better worker protections than a lot of other countries, including, you know, the United States. But anyway, where shall we begin? Yeah, where should we start?

Let's start with the Saudis. Okay. Go ahead. Thoughts? Or should I tee it up? The Saudi thing is interesting. Well, just for the audience, just in case, I mean, they were under a rock or somewhere. The United States has effectively given Saudi Arabia permission to enrich uranium. Now, the thought for this being that this is going to be basically to build nuclear power plants.

Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia had for a while wanted to effectively use nuclear power with the idea that's selling. Summer weather can be relentless, the heat, the humidity, long, hot days that leave you ready for cooling, relaxing relief. Cariloja bamboo sheets are naturally cooling, breathable, and luxuriously soft, letting you enjoy a sleep experience that feels better and recharges you every night. This season, Discover why Cari Loja is proud to partner with the National Exima Association in celebrating comfort

that's gentle on skin. Sleep cooler, comelier, and cleaner with Caraloha bamboo. Visit caroloja.com. That's C-A-R-I-L-O-H-A.com. Cari-L-O-H-A-L-O-H-A-R-O-O-L-A, same summer, just softer. More oil, basically, externally, from the country itself. The U.S. has turned around and says, okay, you can

to the U.S., this is going to be U.S. personnel with U.S. people building it. So they're effectively saying the only thing that's going to be from the standpoint of Saudi Arabia is just that it's going to be on their soil. But either way, you can imagine this is a big departure, considering we're launching wars on Iran for the similar rationale. Trump then turned around and said, oh, by the way, you also need to lit. Nanjahu's ass completely clean if indeed you want this to take place. Effectively, you need to normalize with Israel and you need to take on the Abraham Accords. Now, Saudi Arabia has been effectively against this saying we're not going to do that up until the point where there's a pathway for a Palestinian state. All right. I think the rationale for this from the same point of the Trump

administration, and it could be twofold. It can be in one sense, Saudi Arabia pulling the United States closer. This is what one of my guests pointed out, that this is Saudi Arabia doubling down, saying we're getting closer to America. We're going to this. Yes, stay involved. The other point of view is that the United States wanted to prevent Saudi Arabia for moving closer to Russia and China. This idea of a petrol yuan, for example, may scare the hell out of the U.S. since the entire edifice of our dollar hinges upon oil. it could be both or it could be either. I'm not exactly sure which, but it's very possible that this is indicative of weakness on the part of the U.S.

If Saudi Arabia floats further to China, if Saudi Arabia floats further to Russia, okay, what does that mean for the United States in regards to its allies in the region? I'm not sure which one it is, to be honest. It could be either or both, but give me your thoughts on it. I mean, where do you follow in this? Yeah, I mean, the Saudi motivations are, we're not what I'm thinking first and foremost, but now that you bring it up, yeah, no, I think it's probably a mix of both. You know, Saudi Arabia is, you know, MBS is very forward-looking. He's trying to, he's trying to think of where the kingdom is going to be in 15, 20, 25 years, maybe, and even after he's gone.

And so, you know, I mean, you, it's not hard to see. the U.S. is going to be in a declining, less dominant position, and they're going to be less relevant to the fate of the region. Iran will be more relevant. Certainly, you know, you look at a map. You know, if you're Saudi Arabia, you want to, you know, make nice with China and Russia. So, I mean, I do think that could, you know, I mean, that's part of it. I was also interested in Trump's weird negotiating tactic here. So this agreement was very pros, it was very favored the Saudis, right?

The Saudis, in the way that the document that Trump already signed, right? So I mean, if there was, if this was a, if this was a, you know, a contract, they could go to some court and say, well, listen, we already have a signed agreement. We don't have to negotiate anything. And in that signed agreement,

there's no requirement to be in the Abraham Accords or to normalize relations with Israel at all. And in fact, there's no inspections to make sure that they're not enriching Pat beyond, you know, all the way to weapons grade uranium. So I think, you know, so why did a day later the president say, oh, well, you know, we've already signed this, but in addition, they're going to have to do this. Well, they don't have to do anything. They didn't sign this.

But obviously, there is no court they can go to and say, well, we have this piece of paper, not that they would do this. I mean, effectively what this is, it's a poison pill. Trump has basically torn up the agreement. The Saudis cannot, will not sign that. You know, they won't amend it. They will not join the Abraham Accords. Their public would not tolerate it.

So that's the end of this agreement. And I think that was the purpose here. I mean, clearly Trump got a lot of pressure from Israel had a lot of criticism saying, you know, like, listen, we don't want the Saudis to have nuclear weapons. We want to be the only nation in the Middle East that has nuclear weapons. And so this was his way of destroying the whole thing without announcing, I'm unilaterally reneging. I'm just going to add, you know, I'm going to be like the annoying customer at the, at the restaurant who keeps sending the waiter back for something extra, even after, you know, the meal was

supposedly over. Yeah. So that's, I mean, I think that's, I think this deal is dead. And, you know, I mean, you know, it's kind of like it, it lived for about 24 hours until the Israelis had a chance to read it. And that was it. I mean, so it says something about, about Saudi motivations, as you point out, but also speaks to the continuing influence of Israel, which, you know, I might think of as

being, like, I do think there is a future not long. from now where the U.S. is not going to be joined at the hip with Israel, but clearly we're not there yet. Yeah, I mean, it's weak on so many accounts, right? I mean, like, again, if the United States came up with this deal, it came up with this deal for a reason. And again, it depends on whose motivations it was to enact this deal. If it was the Saudis with the idea of, we want America in closer. Okay, then at that point, then yeah, poison pill is the issue because at that point it was the Saudis pushing for the snap at the U.S. if it was the U.S. pushing with us and then they turned around and killed the deal,

then they were pushing for it because they wanted something out of the Saudis that this deal allowed the U.S. to get. And if they're killing the deal for Israel, that looks weak. It's weak. And by the way, it has consequences. Because if Saudi Arabia was floating closer to China and Russia, and this deal was a way of bringing them back on the table. Okay, well, what does it mean that you just added this poison pill to the deal? I mean, it hastens that day. Yeah, it hastens that day. Yeah, I think we see it the same way.

We should talk about the tariffs. So we thought tariffs, you know, tariffs went to court. Tariffs are supposed to be approved of by Congress as in the Constitution. all the tariffs were thrown out by the u.s. supreme court hashtag sad um don't they expired now trump's right back at it with a new pretext I mean basically he's making a mockery of the

of the of the Supreme court he's also I mean they're not going to like this this is I mean basically it's sort of like I'm a petulant child I want to keep doing what I want to do I'll keep lawyering and it and, you know, I'll use the delay tax, the delay system that is the court system to just, you know, have de facto tariffs. The tariffs are in effect, you know, until they're successfully challenged and thrown out in court. And then the government collects all that money.

And then all the companies that pay it have to clot back from the government. It's not like the government gets in touch and says, oh, by the way, here's your tariffs back that we should never have collected in the first place. You know, I mean, possession is nine-tenths of the law. And, you know, the, so they know that. They're playing cute. I mean, to me, the big story here is, is that. And then also, the pretext is so thin.

And it's also like a troll, right? Like, you know, this is, this is about worker rights. This is about forced labor. You know, but we're going to throw in the EU, which has some of the best worker protections in the world. As, you know, you're not doing enough. There's no evidence. There's no report.

I mean, there's more going on in Rubio's report saying that Cuba is the center of a transnational 70-year-long conspiracy to overthrow everything that is good and decent. Because at least they wrote something up. I mean, it's all bullshit, but it's there. You know, with this, there's no report. There's no, like, hey, look, you know, in Romania, you know, you have forest labor. In France, you have forest labor. Like, no, there's nothing. It's just sort of, we're just going to say it.

and then you guys are going to deal with this 10% tariff. And, you know, I mean, I'm wondering if Americans, I think Americans must be starting to notice. I mean, I buy stuff on eBay. And I've noticed that like now if something is in like the UK is in like France, you know, it used to be like, oh, it'll cost me like five bucks to get it. If it's something small, like a CD or something or, you know, a small book. Now it's like 25, 30, 40 bucks. It's tariffs. You know, I mean, people participate in the international marketplace, whether they realize it or not.

And, you know, I don't know. I mean, prices are sky high. Oil is $100 a barrel again. You know, I mean, it's only going to keep going. Elections coming up. I mean, clearly Trump is not really worried about the way people feel about prices. He said. He doesn't seem to be no.

I mean, because for him and the people like him, it doesn't really matter. Like, for example, if when you hear politicians say stuff like, yeah, everybody is okay with this, they're just talking about themselves. They're just talking about people in their group that they engage with, that one percent that has so much money that this stuff doesn't necessarily hit in any kind of real way. If, you know, their groceries goes up by 50 percent, what do they care? They're rich. So from their specific view, it doesn't. Usually, when the old days, they used to care because those things conferred electoral consequences to the various people who were engaged. These days, Trump and his group doesn't necessarily seem to care all that much, at least insofar as it affects the U.S. economy, but they're in a lot as the road. The countries around the world has for the most part, acquiesce to this petulant behavior of the United States.

It's a child that's having a hissy fit and is using any kind of pretext in order to enact this stuff. I think you're right about the courts. The Supreme Court doesn't have a military. So I don't know if the administration cares entirely what the Supreme Court is going to say one way to the other one. This will come up with some other concomic excuse and do something else. Because as you point out, the Supreme Court pointed out this was illegal. Trump, in doing this, is taking an illegal. act. Congress hasn't agreed to this. The administration is just doing this. The American public needs

to kind of soak that in. The president is blowing off the Supreme Court in regards to the behavior that he's effectively taken. It doesn't matter to excuse. A tariff is a tariff. It's a tariff. And they basically said that the presidency putting this out is illegal. This is an act of Congress. So I just want to nail that part down. He doesn't see. to care. And by the way, just to be very clear with this also, the rationale for this is, well, China is using unforced labor or is using slave labor. And any country that is doing trades with China gets a tariff. Hence, Europe also gets hit with tariffs. Ridiculous. Yeah. It's a third party tariff. It's a deal by association. Yeah, but it has nothing to do

with labor. It has everything to do with competition in China. I mean, China seems to have this idea that they're going to sail off into the sunset without fighting a war and that all things being equal, we can just kind of coast because the United States can't necessarily challenge us in war. There was even some people who had this idea that the U.S. was pulling back from China. Nonsense. Nothing can be further from the truth. All of these, this is just economic war through other means. Okay, we can't hit China directly.

So let's go through third parties to try to get people to stop trading with China. and use the tariff mechanism as a way of doing that. That's what this is. This is nothing to do with slave labor. I mean, mind you, this argument is being made as 60% of Americans can't afford groceries. Right. Put it in context. And even with the labor thing in the U.S., having these companies that are able to effectively pay these people so poorly that they're using SNAP benefits despite the fact that they have jobs.

How are we making this argument about slave labor or other places? It's just outrageous. It's a joke. I mean, it's sick, really. All right. Some comments. Manchild 5,000. Has anyone given any thought to the fact that the Middle East region is not fit for nuclear energy?

Seems like a prime target for terrorism and uncouth wartime shenanigans that always seem to happen. I mean, that's true. Where is the terrorism coming from? Well, I mean, it's true. it's true. The Saudis are the exporters of terrorism. But there are radical groups that think that, you know, there's always, you know, internal people who think that the Wahhabis don't call far enough. Like ISIS. It's like, you know, like, you know, ISIS K is fighting the Taliban for not being, is Muslim enough. There's always, I mean, look, Saudi Arabia seems to me like a perfect example of a pressure cooker that we don't pay attention to. I mean, it's so autocratic. It's so repressive. I mean, at some point, it's going to, it'll dissolve in a civil conflict at some point. Well, I suspect that NBS believes that if he recognized Israel, then his head will be on a spike.

March through Riyadh. For sure. Because, I mean, as you point out, it's an autocratic government. And like 90-something percent of the population disagrees with. this way in which the government is interacted with Israel and completely discreet with the way they are treating the Palestinians. I mean, you have like 90, like a just massive amount. And NBS himself has even noted to this idea of, you know, the internal, that he is a small monarch in a country that effectively hates the policy of normalization with Israel and that that could

create issues for his own life. We have a question. What does normalization? of Farhash is asking, what is normalizing relations mean? And what it normally means is, sorry, pun not intended, is that you have, you exchange, you have embassies in each other's countries and consulates,

and you exchange consuls and ambassadors. Your citizens can visit each other, get visas to perhaps work, but certainly visit us tourists. You know, the same way, like, you know, And the way that, say, you know, Belgium has normalized relations with the United States, you can go to Brussels and there's a U.S. Embassy and you can get, you know, consular representation. We don't have that, for example, with Iran. You know, there's no Iranian consulate or embassy. You know, there's workarounds, as you know, but for the, because countries do have to talk to each other. But as a matter of normal standard practice, someone who's just like, oh, I want to go look at the, you know, amazing ruins in Iran, you can't.

You just basically can't go. It's a pain in the ass to arrange the visas and stuff. Let's see. It's actually into Jewish supremacy in the region. That's what it is. I mean, the Abraham Accords is effectively accepting Jewish supremacy. Yeah. I mean, look, I don't think MBS gives a shit about the Palestinians personally.

I don't think he does either. But he can't ignore it, you know, politically, internally. It's just he wouldn't survive. And Amanda Raqa. So we're coming to the conclusion that Israel and the Jewish lobby runs U.S. foreign policy. Ted, finally. Well, I mean, they have outsized influence. But, yeah, I still don't, I still think it's like the other.

I agree with you, J.T. It's like we run that dog. Israel straight up runs us dog. They are driving the plane. They are behind the wheel. They've got our balls and a vice. And the thing is, we willingly cook ourselves out to them. We be the American nation.

We get on our knees as a yes, yes, Mr. Netanyahu, whatever you want, sir. You want us to go fight a war for you against your mortal enemy, Iran, and try to bring democracy by installing a shot. Sure, we'll do that for you. We'll lose, but yeah, we'll go do it for you. How many American coffins should we fill up for you? You're too much of a pussy. Let your own people go and fight that war for you.

I'm glad you pointed out that we overthrew their government, most of that and put in the Shaw. Yeah. Meaning that was U.S. policy for a very long time. I'm trying to point out to you that this is U.S. policy. I understand that we're using Israel as our senator. And we're like, oh, it's all that. it's their fault. They're doing all of this stuff.

Well, because of that, I mean, US policy for like 30 years. No, I guess that. I mean, going, like even going back to Bush, this was U.S. policy. No, I get that. But I mean, here's the thing, though, with, because of that, because it's a little bit different because that was, he made the mistake of thinking that Iran

owned its own national resources. True. And so BP, she's like, no, you can't do that. So then they talked to the, to Britain was a real, was a real country at the time the british like yeah no actually we own that uh and we worked with the british to make sure that the iranians uh conveniently misplaced their natural resources that good lord put up under their ground and we installed the shaw that wasn't israel is too week at the time fast forward israel barely existed fast forward 60 years the entire west is on its knees before the jewish lobby it's called what it israel owns the united

state's government. They own us. Lock, stock barrel. We are the whipping boy. And the thing is, we keep on asking to be whipped. It is beyond retarded. I mean, so our country of nine million people owns a country of 320 million people. Because they own the purse. Because they, because they owns who. Who protects who in the UN security council? Oh, we protect them. Because we are there more in a general assembly. from the ICC. Yeah, we protect them. I'm trying to say that this relationship goes in one direction.

I understand. Look, I understand that them buying our politicians. Fair enough. If you have to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, what does that mean? I mean, it means you're not really that popular. You're just braving. Yeah, that's what this is.

Oh, you don't have to be popular. I mean, you don't have to control the electorate, just have to control the elected officials. That's the difference. So if you get, so if you're able to control the mechanism of both political parties, and you always get the choice of Coke and Pepsi and Root Beer's never makes it onto the stage, then nothing ever changes.

I guess that's what I'm trying to make it. Well, nothing ever changes until it does. I mean, look, under apartheid, right, the Republic of South Africa was, you know, had an analogous relationship to the United States. I mean, the United States protected it in the UN. The United States, you know, did all sorts of things for South Africa to, you know, and South Africa also bribed a lot of congressmen and senators all, you know, under the apartheid regime. They bribed our actors and our musicians to go and perform at Sun City and stuff like that, right?

I mean, they were the Israel in this relationship. They were, you know, an apartheid regime. But, you know, who would anyone say that South Africa had an, it had a, you know, outsized political influence in the United States? It did, which is why we put up with their shit and allowed, and allowed them to run things the way that they did in such a rancid way for so long. And, you know, we were interested in what they had to offer in terms of natural resources and so on. But we were the big cahuna, right? We were the, we were the boss. I mean, it's like no South Africa, the United States is fine.

No United States, apartheid South Africa is not fine. I don't know. That analogy, maybe lands flat. I don't know. A false flat. I don't know. All right, so we're expecting Mickey Huff. We'll see if he turns up this time.

In the meantime, oh, let's hit a few more comments here, too. Okay. Okay. Adamantaraki, how many times has Chabad gone to the White House tomorrow? How many times has who gone to the White House? C-H-A-B-A-D-Chabad. Chabad. J-B-A-D-Jabon. I don't know who Chababat is. Shabad, Shabad Lupovich.

It's the Orthodox Jewish group. They have a bitch of pureblog stuff. They have the funny little hats and they wear the black coats and stuff. And that's what they do. So they're the ones that they're ones who are dancing in the Oval Office. But J.D. Vance and Trump did you have to know, like last year. So they're all in the police. Yeah, I don't know.

I didn't even know who the group was. I didn't even know who the group was. It's fast. Do some research on them. They are fascinating. They're based out of New York. They had this dude called the Revi. They believe that he was the Messiah in 2016, Ivanka, who's.

Rabbi Shearsson, right? Shea, no, Ivanka. Jared went and prayed to his grave. And since she converted to Judaism, she had to change her name. Her name was actually J.L. Ivanka Trump, she had to change her name because she became Jewish. Look it up. I'm not making this stuff up.

Oh, I don't think you're making it up. It's wild, man. It is wild. I mean, these people have so much control. It's amazing. Oh, speaking of amazing. Can I talk about what happened yesterday? Please, by all means.

Yeah. So yesterday was really wild. Well, there's the most interesting day I've ever honestly had. I was here at my apartment doing some work, and there was a knock on the door. Okay, so I go and I check the door. And there's this lovely couple outside who drove up from California to meet me. What? They drove from the Bay Area of California, and I promise I'm not going to mention their names.

Really lovely people. And we talked to each other for about an hour. I have no idea. Random people showed up. your house yes yes no phone call no email it was public records oh robbie that's not good that's what i say it's just a wild i'm not listen the thing is i mean we went to dairy queen we sat down had a you know we had a lovely chat super nice people uh yes i do have a request though for anyone in the chat because i don't have felt bad if they came all up for california and i

hadn't been home i mean that that would have sucked right um so if if you're going to come up to visit your favorite right winger in in callousville email me first let me know that you're coming and so that way i'm not called flat-footed and we can actually meet but that it was that that was often that was the most interesting experience i've ever had in my entire life it was wild That's a no-no. That's a no-no. Robbie, I'm saying, look, I'm saying this for safety reasons. Oh, I did it?

No, no. That is a fail. Look, do you realize, like, as a YouTuber, I've done the YouTube thing for a long time? That's why I'm reacting with this with a certain degree of. Oh, sure. I get it. I don't want to say panic.

But I've seen people call cop things, like when people are on stream and they would call the cops in, They said that there was like a birdway. Oh, God, man, that stuff. I've seen people come to people's houses and hang out and do. Yeah, it was just bizarre. I've never had that. I'm just some smuck in Montana works on the back end.

Just like, that concerns me, Rob. I know. I don't like it. Yeah. I mean, for everyone, everyone who here knows, though, that Robbie does avail himself of his Second Amendment rights. So don't try any bullshit. True.

Yeah. for that yeah for sure and i said no and that we we went and we hung out at the dairy queen that's the that's the meet up meet up place here in calispell montana i would have been terrified it was the fbi also one of the commenters said that that that was my first thought it's like the fbi i mean i don't know what they would think you were doing wrong but in these days you don't have to be doing anything wrong i mean yes i don't say i mean who has to say that i am doing anything we didn't like yeah yeah screw them i don't care i'm glad that I can try out well, but Robbie.

Listen, when it comes to the public safety thing, honestly, I mean, the worst thing you do is send me to be Jesus. I'm one happy to go to heaven. I'll take care of them. You have wife and you have kids. Yeah, it's not cool. I do. It's bizarre. All right.

Well, that's weird. Yeah, thanks for that story, Robbie. Before we bring in Mickey last one, we have a $10 comment from Dead Meme Club. Will it ever be safe for Americans to travel to the Gulf again eventually? Dubai was just. starting to pop off L.O.L. I don't know. I think Dubai was popped off a long time ago. You know, that's a good question. I mean, I have to, look, I've gone to war zones. For me, traveling to the Gulf, it's a war zone now. I would view it that way if I were making that

plan, which is to say, I would still go, but it's a war zone. And you have to think about it that way. Well, they have worn people, say 500 kilometers away from U.S. military bases. all of that stuff is fair game. Well, that's, yeah, 500 kilometers away from a military base is any of the Gulf state's entire territory, right? Right. It's sort of like in New York City, there was an ordinance where you couldn't smoke within 100 meters of a building entrance.

And it's like, well, that means you can't smoke in New York City, right? So it's like there's no place to smoke. All right, let's go ahead and bring in Mickey Huff. Mickey Huff is the executive director of Project Censored. Mickey, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me on, Ted. It's been a minute since you and I caught up. It's nice to see you all again.

It has been. So, Jamarl, meet Mickey. Mickey meet Jamarle. So, yeah, so it's the 50th anniversary of Project Censored. Time flies when you're having your fun censored. Do you want to tell us for people who might not be familiar, what is project censored? Sure. Sure. Project Censored is 50 years old this year.

What sets us apart, we're a media watchdog and media critics using critical media literacy to deconstruct propaganda, discover what corporate media miss and why. But what makes us different than a lot of other watchdog organizations is that we're primarily an education. organization teaching critical media literacy news media literacy and we've been doing that for 50 years so while calling out issues that the corporate media decide to either not cover at all or wildly distort we try to teach people why that is and how they can sort of be media critics on their own not to be confused with the the smear of the doing your own research crowd but the idea is is that this isn't rocket science people can learn to think critically about media And what we do with Project Censored is we teach people how that happens.

In the process, we've also had a few documentaries over the last 50 years. We do have presence on social media where many people are going to get their news right now, even though we're very critical of those platforms. We utilize them to the degree to which we can to help educate people about what's actually happening on those platforms. We teach courses every semester. We have an affiliates program where we work with a couple of dozen different professors, colleges, universities, around the country. Each year we work with a couple hundred students that research stories from the independent media,

and they go and find out, did the corporate media cover these stories? If so, how? Or did they not cover them at all? And then historically, we look and see which stories tend to languish in obscurity versus those that eventually get picked up. What is that lag time and why? What does media ownership and advertising have to do with that? Political pressures and so forth. And we produce a book every year.

Five years ago, we started an imprint, the censored press. As you know, Ted, we've worked with Seven Stories Press for a long time, one of the original seven stories there. We have a national syndicated radio program for 16 years now, and so we try to get the word out as much as possible that we need an independent and free press and that the First Amendment doesn't exercise or protect itself. Totally. So tell me about, you know, sort of one of the things you guys, I mean, one of the big things

you guys do is collect the 10 most censored stories. of the year and then you put them in that you compile, you announce them online and you put in you and you compile them in books, right? What, how do you determine, you know, what constitutes a censored story, you know, sort of is it a story that ran, might have deserved wide coverage, but only ran in maybe a smaller outlet or is it something it has to have just literally not seen the light of day or what's the criteria? Well, thanks for the question, Ted. If it never sees the light of day. We probably don't see it either. So if you go back far enough, you know, the founder of the project, Carl Jensen, the project was founded in the spirit of the great

muckrakers of the 20th century and that we have good journalists that report important stories, particularly in the independent media, but occasionally in the corporate press and the establishment press. Occasionally there are great stories that break through in the New York Times and the Washington Post or even on cable or the broadcast network. So we don't pretend that those outlets that are routinely called mainstream, which we call corporate or establishment as a better descriptor, we don't say that they never report in the public interest, but we say that they fail to do so oft consistently. And when you look at the independent press, these are stories, Ted, that are underreported, basically. And the censorship element of it comes where corporate media decides they're not going to cover

these important stories, no matter how factual they are, no matter how significant or important they are. But, and if they do, this is what we teach in these courses, we ask students to say, well, how does the corporate media cover this issue? You know, the corporate media certainly has covered the Epstein Files issue, but they can't seem to follow their own breadcrumbs about who's involved, who's responsible, how it happens, what it means, what were the entanglements with major banks, hedge funds, corporate powers, intelligence agencies. I mean, this information is floating out there and it's largely been reported on in the independent media, but the corporate media can never seem to be. pay attention long enough to string those things together because they're distracted by the latest UFC fight on the White House lawn or what's going on at the reflecting pool. And so we talk about the problems of what corporate media actually do cover, which is often junk food news and news abuse

propaganda. So again, our definition of censorship is anything that interferes with the free flow of information in a society that reports to have free press systems, which means it includes underreporting. It includes skewed or slanted or biased reporting. It includes any kind of, like what's happening right now, the kind of chilling effects that have when the Justice Department issues subpoenas to places like the New York Times. And again, we're not fanboying out here over the New York Times and some of their horrific coverage of many things that have been going on for decades. But whenever the Department of Justice goes after one of the major newspapers in the country, we should all stand up and take notice. It's not just that the government is threatening the major outlets like the Times. we just saw in the past week major attacks on the funder of places like Breakthrough News,

you know, Rania Kallek and others. There's a full-on attack on MSDEMIC institutions from academic freedom to press freedoms going on in this country in an unprecedented fashion. And given the history of this country, which you're all aware of, that's no small statement. And I don't believe it's hyperbolic. So unfortunately, after 50 years, I think the work of Project Censored is needed now maybe more than ever, which is why we do try to hold up as great examples and pillars of the First Amendment, the great independent media upbreakers that we have among us.

In the last two years, Ted, I've also been able to take the head of the Park Center for Independent Media, and we do the annual Izzy Award every year that you probably know about. The program was started by Jeff Cohen from Fair in 2008, and so now, in addition to working with Project Censored since 2008, I'm also over at the Park Center, teaching the next generation of young journalists how to be the next upton sinclair writing the book the brass check you know teaching them how to be an ida tarbell teaching them how to be a lincoln stepans teaching them how to go after the stories no matter what um and again to be very aware that censorship comes in many guises and to help them

understand the networks of independent media and the networks of the institutions that try to protect and safeguard a free press whether it be free press dot net freedom of the press foundation whether it be you know any any of these kind of groups even foundation for interviews rights and education or they changed their name to expression recently in the last two years to basically broaden what their coverage on protecting free speech and free press rights. And we think it's really important that people know that these organizations and institutions exist and that they deserve our attention and support. Mickey, how do you address the problem of what I call unconscious bias? I was very good friends with a top editor at the New York Times for years. And

he repeated something, I'm sure you've heard a million times. You know, like, well, we get criticized from the left. We get criticized from the right. We must be doing something right. And, and, you know, and one of the things I got to understand was, you know, like a movie has a continuity editor. A movie, like, for example, if you see a car that's, you know, involved in an incident, it should have a ding later in a later scene, right? You should notice that. But a newspaper, like the New York Times or a media outlet like CNN, they don't have that. They don't have someone,

I'm not even talking about an ombudsman, but they don't have someone who sort of keeps track and says, you know, we generally, like the way Fair does, you know, we generally, two out of three pieces about Bernie Sanders were negative. You know, two out of three pieces about Kamala Harris were positive. There's no one, or we don't really cover the Libertarian Party or whatever. There's no one who pays attention to it.

And then, of course, also these organizations tend to hire from elitist organizations like Columbia Journalism School, which does not offer financial aid. So really, they're only drawing from, you know, wealthy families, people who are from a privileged background. So there's a class bias inside the, you know, the halls of these institutions. And so, you know, there's how do you address. How do you convince these organizations like, you know, you guys are, you have your thumbs on the scale and you might not eat. It's not even like you're evil.

You're just putting out a magazine or like the Atlantic every month or whatever. You're putting out a magazine. And like you just, you, you, you, it's a miracle that you put it out and then you kick off for drinks at the end of the day. And you're not, and you know, but everyone thinks like the Atlantic is a neocon rag because they never have anti-war voices, for example. It's like they don't see the criticism. You're right? I mean, yeah,

you're on to a lot of things here, Ted, and I think the magic word you mentioned was class, and that's connected to privilege. And in the whole world of the left of DEI issues, class, unfortunately, was one of those things that got inconveniently left behind.

And it's unfortunate because it's one of the most significant ways that we can analyze and understand the disparity in viewpoints that we don't get to see in a lot of the, corporate for-profit commercial media. By the way, the Atlantic is one of the institutions spearheading the attack on anything that's left, left populist, progressive populist. They were running, I mean, they were trying to beat out the Washington Post's like 15 stories against Bernie Sanders in 12 hours from a couple election cycles ago when they were going after Graham Platner, who of course had problems of his own. But the point is, is they never really wanted to talk

about his message. They just wanted to talk about his text messages. Right. And so what you're talking about, Ted, is an implicit bias. The bias that these institutions don't know they have because they're baked in. And people that go and work at the New York Times don't necessarily need to be given a list of things they're not supposed to do. Although we know they are given a list of words they're not supposed to use when it comes to certain things like Israel, Israel, Gaza, or Ukraine, or what have you, Russia, Ukraine. And we also see, of course, some more piling on of late, not just through the State Department, but again, working in cahoots with corporate media to really smear anything, you know, anything to the left of, I would say,

you know, the Democratic leadership, quote, unquote, in the Congress as being communist. Somehow we woke up from a time travel and we're now in McCarthy's 1950s where there's commies under the bed. I mean, it would be laughable. Were it not so dangerous for people being so completely unprepared, uneducated, to have this be decontextualized, the degree to which it somehow has any degree of effect shows that we need media literacy education and historic and civic education in this country, again, maybe more than ever. And I think the class bias is the one of the more significant ones. The Overton window at places like the New York Times is very narrow. It's very small. And you can have wild-looking debate within that center, center-right, further-right kind of

political ecosystem and we can talk about how it's hyper-partisan, but they leave out the libertarian voices often. They certainly leave out, you know, voices that would be more aligned with the Marxist left, the anarchist left, the anarchist left, you know, they act as if those voices don't matter. And it's unfortunate because often, even if we don't agree with some of those perspectives, they're off-rooted in historical discussion, historical debate, factual analysis. And we, the people benefit from having a broad range of debate and discussion in this country. And that's what the free press is for. It's to present those debates, is to expand the Overton window, and it's to give people

the opportunity to see what's happening and make decisions so they can be meaningfully, civically engaged. That system is broken. A media ownership has been a big part of that. We've consolidated it further and further over the years as it's drifted even further and further right. As A.J. Liebling once quipped in the New Yorker in 1960, the best way to guarantee freedom of the press is to own one.

The seven richest billionaires in the world are all media barons. And, you know, this is the direction that we're going, Ted. It's not a great one. But to counter that, as we celebrate in Project Censored every year, the best from the independent media and at the Izzy Award at the Park Center and at the college every year, we celebrate the best independent voices to remind people that there are great journalists doing independent work. And it's the kind of thing that you all talk about on your program.

It's the kind of thing that we see reporting in 404 media, drop site news. We see these organizations doing this kind of work on the daily. Most people, unfortunately, don't know what they are, so we try to help make people more aware of where to go and find independent media. We're not interested in telling people what to think, Ted. We just want to try to help people think more critically and independently about the news that they consume. And given that more than half of Americans now sort of snack on the news on their social media, algorithmically biased feeds, is kind of problematic,

which is why we need to go wherever the public is to try to inform them in a better way to diversify their media habits and think more critically about the information that they're taking in. I mean, you know, Mickey, what worries me the most is the extinction of serendipity in media consumption. I mean, when I was a kid, I mean, you know, for all of the imperfections of like, you know, mass market newspapers and magazines like Time and Newsweek, you know, there was sort of more of a range ideologically and culturally in those publications. You know, I mean, you like, culture, let's just take politics out of it. I used to read The Village Voice.

It was a, you know, it had a dance section, right? I don't care about dance, but, you know, but like I had a chance to flip by there, and sometimes I might stop and linger on something about dance. That's never going to happen now because those kind of publications don't exist anymore. And I guess are we hopelessly siloed due to the internet and the algorithms and the keyword searches? Are we, is this like impossible to put this toothpaste back into the tube now? Because we're just, we're, we are not only choosing to look at stuff that we agree with, but on top of that, even if we're curious and we are, we do want to know what's going on, you know,

ideologically and otherwise, you know, in places that we've, in other spaces that we might not know about, you know, it's not, the algorithm's not going to feed it to us. No, Ted, and that's why we need agency. And this is again why critical media literacy education is so important. And that's what I've been spending so much time doing the past several years is showing people how you go out, where do you find these things, right? The idea of news snacking is that the news will find me. And what we know, Ted, is the kind of news. news that tends to find us is the news that someone else with Deep Pockets wants us to know. It's not necessarily what we need to know.

And again, there are some grim developments as a result of what's happened with what I'd rather call anti-social media. You know, places as prestigious as the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism in New York, I'm sorry, in Arizona, are now offering a major in their journalism communications program on content creation, how to be an influencer. And so the institutionalization of this vaping. I see odds for reporters on LinkedIn, and they don't say a reporter. They say content lead.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, what the fuck is a content lead? We could argue that journalists are always some form of influencer. But the fact that that's just crept into the lexicon and been totally normalized institutionally by some of the premier journalism institutions in the country should be alarming to any whether they're in the industry or out, particularly that should be of concern to the general public, that somehow we're elevating in some way and not just elevating, but also exonerating these people and the idea that they're not just these half-wit proclamations of people in their bedrooms spouting off about things where they may know little. It's the fact that some of these people have garnered extraordinary numbers of followers for no great reasons other than the sensationalism of what they might.

might be spouting, that is not to suggest that there are not good things happening in those spaces. There's great information happening in various spaces and platforms. But unless you're critically media literate and unless you're an independent critical thinker with diverse news habits, you're not going to be able to discern the facts from fiction. You're not going to be able to discern opinion from fact. You're not going to be able to understand what kind of propaganda that you're being subjected to, be it white, black, gray, etc. You know, we have a culture that was momentarily fixated on fact-checking, as if facts were the only problem in this issue, that we weren't just getting facts.

Bigger problems include frames. You know, at Project Censored, we talk about the framing of the news and back to that over to window. Things that are outside the frame that don't get reported on may be extremely important and influence what's happening in the society, but people at large are largely unaware of it because they may not know it's a factor at all. And again, that's why I go back to the education element, and I think it's really important to people diversify their news habits, think more critically and deliberately about where they go to get that information. And if they disagree with something like you just said a moment ago, you said, well, maybe I don't like the dance section. But, you know, the flip side of that is, is what if you do like the dance section and places like the Village Voice had a great section where they were writing about the arts? Once upon a time, you'd also accidentally run into curmudgeonly folks like Nat Hentoth, who was writing a lot about important First Amendment issues, right?

You know, almost kind of going back to an H.L. Mencken, you know, kind of sensibility, where you have people critiquing and criticizing not just society and its institutions, but the media itself. And that's one of the more important things that we also try to remind the Fourth Estate, is that they also are required and should be responsible to cover their own industry and business as a beat, a press freedom beat. Like you were mentioning, there's nobody at the New York Times that seems to cover their own biases.

And that is one of the establishment press's biggest weaknesses. And it can be wildly exploited by owners, advertisers, and others in position to wield that kind of influence and power over our information disseminating institutions. Mickey, last question, and I would be remiss not to ask you this. Jamarle and I were talking about this last week. When we, nowadays, when you see something particularly on social media, the first, but not necessarily, sometimes in mainstream media, you have to, or comes out of the White House or whatever, your first thought might be, you know, to have an emotional or a big reaction. But then your second reaction as an educated news consumer is to think, wait a minute, this may be AI, this may be a deep fake, this might not be true.

you know, we know the president is crazy, but would he really say or do that? And I better check it. And then you sort of table it and you choose not to respond. How do we get into a, how do we balance being skeptical of what we see and not just running off half cocked and, you know, with with pitch, with torches and pitchforks and burning down the city? And versus becoming, having flat effect and not responding to anything because we don't know what, you know, we can't really assume that anything's real. And by the time an appropriate emotional reaction, you know, it should have happened. The moment passes because everybody's moved on to the next outrage. So great question. And I really appreciate the opportunity to talk with you about these,

these issues with you all. On one hand, you've got sort of the reactionary gallability problem. on the other, what you mentioned, I don't think is healthy skepticism. It's nihilism and cynicism. And there's a big difference between being cynical and being skeptical. And we teach healthy skepticism to do what you just described. Of course, we're human. Of course, we react to things. But we also have to push a pause button in our brain and go and find, well, what really happened? What was really said? Did this really happen? We have to deliberately go and follow through and ask tough questions and question our own implicit cognitive biases. We have to question our own kind of biases when we're going through and looking and sifting through information.

But I would say that somewhere between those two, the believing everything or believing nothing, is how about we believe the things that are transparently factually sourced? How about we consider the things that are empirically so? We don't live in a post-truth world unless we cede all of our intellectual capabilities to the major institutions that are disseminating and flooding the zone, as it were, with so much information and so much nonsense that we're being really tacitly encouraged to just give up and give in to what feels right. That's the great allure of the post-truth conundrum in our current epistemic crisis. And I say what we need is human resolve. We need to fuse

our creativity with our intelligence. We need to ask tough questions. We need to hold each other to equal kinds of standards. And we need to be charitable with each other. We need to trust, but verify. Don't get to quote Ronald Reagan every day, but there we go. I think he was actually quoting someone himself. Yeah, exactly. But we need to extend these same kind of things that we want for ourselves to others. And we've actually written several books about it, but as we know, Ted, a lot of people aren't reading books these days. And so we try to distill that information without dumbing it down and get it across to people wherever they happen to be giving them the opportunity to hit the reset button on how and where they get the

information, how they're going to think critically about it, and how they're going to choose to act in the future. And as the great Nick Johnson once said, who's still a project censored judge 50 years later, who was an FCC commissioner years ago in the 60s, he wrote a book called Your Second Priority. Whatever your primary area of interest is, if your second priority isn't press freedom and media democracy in supporting the rights of people to know and disseminate information as well as receive it, you're likely to gain very little traction in any of your primary areas of interest. Press freedom and media literacy is for everyone. Critical thinking is, for everyone. It's not about how to think, telling people what to think. It's how do we do this

critically? How do we teach people how to ask the right kind of questions? And how do we agree to disagree, right? Let's agree to disagree. We've really lost the ability to talk across aisles, and we simply shout and shout names at each other. And that may be profitable for hyper-partisan commercial media, but it's no way to do a self-governing society. And if we don't really reverse that direction, we're going to continue to sort of swirl down the drain where we've been heading. Mickey, thanks so much for coming on. Mickey Huff is the executive director of Project Censored. Come back soon.

Thanks. Pleasure to be here. Okay, so, yeah. Do we want to talk any more about this food stamps and Medicaid story before we call it a weekend? What's food stamps and Medicaid story? So, yeah, basically these companies like Instacart, Grubhud, Uber, Lyft. Yeah.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah, let's hit that for a bit. but I mean, we have a couple of minutes. So basically the rates of those employees of those companies, including Amazon, has collecting SNAP and Medicaid, has triple in the last five years, according to the GAO, which is the nonpartisan government accountability office. Obviously, those numbers are reliable.

And, I mean, I think it's a problem. The question is, what's the solution? Well, those companies are able to do these kind of gig work ideas. But understand what the gig work idea is. Instead of the people working for a company, we act as if these are individual actors that are unseparate and they're somehow entrepreneurs, despite the fact that they're working for Girlpub or Instacart or whatever these other companies are. And they've been able to effectively keep wages down.

And those people who the wages are already low, at that point, are not able to make a living off of the wage that they're effectively making. Because, I mean, it's almost like them saying, hey, we're not going to really employ you, but you're kind of working for us, but kind of not. And so you're your own little entrepreneur, kind of like we do on YouTube, right? Right.

We're gig workers. But the amount that they pay is not necessarily going to be what a company pays. They try to act as if there's something else. It's something different. And so when those people are not making enough, to support themselves, okay, well, what are they going to do? They're going to take SNAP benefits. They're going to take other government services.

And so it's supposed to them working a job where they're able to cover themselves, now the company can make the argument that these people are really. I went to my boss at Bear Stearns, and back in the 80s, it asked for a $16 a week pay cut so I could collect food stamps. My boss threw me out of my, threw me out of his office. but yeah that's it's insane I mean I guess

I mean the solution would have to be I don't know those companies would have to somehow acknowledge that those people work for the companies as opposed to being these kind of entrepreneurs that are telling you need a revision to the labor laws that were passed

under the Roosevelt administration nearly a century ago like you know update of the federal fair labor standards act I mean because it's bullshit. I mean, look, even, you know, like for example, and we've got to wrap up, you know, I'm a syndicated cartoonist.

I've worked for the same company since 1996. You know, I mean, it's my job. It's what I list on my taxes and everything, but I'm an independent contractor. I'm a 1099 employee so they don't pay me benefits. I'm on my own. It's like, I am the master of my own little poor domain. And that's what a lot of Americans deal with. it's all bullshit yeah and the companies are able to make a shit little profit off of it because of

yeah that's exactly what it is tomorrow have a great weekend uh the d program show will be back monday nine a m to 10 a m we're here monday through friday nine a m to 10 a m tmi show coming up right now if you missed it dm z uh is not on in uh today it's normally on on fridays we aired yesterday so go and look that up it was a really good discussion about AI and cartooning. Anyway, take care. Have a question.