11/3/25: Trump Says Maduro Is Hamas, Trump Billionaire Party As SNAP Expires, Welfare Queen AI Slop Videos

24:44That is an increase of$10 million from just the last year. So add all that. This is almost a billion dollars that I can verify of just over the last five years flowing into Venezuela. Maria Machado, this whole Nobel Peace Prize thing is 100 percent orchestrated by the United States. And this is part of the bipartisan narrative. Yes, Rubio and Trump are the ones who are taking it a step further. Biden pumped hundreds of mils into the Venezuelan opposition. This whole Juan Guaido regime op that's been going on since 2000 and what is it? 2019 has been flowing now for years to the point where the entire bipartisan machine just seems to agree that we need to pump all this money into Venezuela and that regime change itself is an effort which will be successful.

25:27It will not be. We do. We learn nothing. And, you know, again, just to stick with this is Maduro himself. And look, I'm not pro Maduro. I think he's a bad guy. OK, I'm not saying, you know, I'm sure he stole an election. At the end of the day, I don't really care. If he's willing to sell us oil, whatever. Okay, there's a lot of bad people all around the world who sell us oil. Saudi Arabia, shocker. Well, you know, it's really funny. Maduro has been telling anybody who will listen, he'd go, by the way, he's like, I didn't invade you. You destroyed my country with sanctions. And what I uncovered was a USAID contract for September 2023 to July of 2024.

26:07I literally got to read the contract to a large Colombian newspaper called El Pais. And this newspaper was being funded billions of Colombian pesos to run ads about a, quote, new narrative about the Venezuelan migrant population to document and make visible success of stories of migrants accessing the formal market in Colombia using formats and media regularly consulted by business groups. The justification of that contract was to say that Venezuelans should stay in Colombia. Now, what do the critics of that campaign say? is that we funded, this is just one of many contracts all across Latin America, which basically encouraged Venezuelans to leave Venezuela.

26:44And then once they got to Colombia, they were like, oh, well, maybe we'll try and do this ad psyop to make them stay there. No, what it did is it sucked even more people out of Venezuela to Colombia, Guyana, all of these other neighbors throughout Latin America. And then they came here for DPS, using the border under Biden. I mean, over a million people came here from Venezuela just under Joe Biden. Just to point out, like he and by the way, not just him, leftists and other people who are currently in power in Colombia have been screaming this from the rooftops is they're like, look, we agree.

27:15You know, the border situation, all that is out of control. But you cannot absolve yourselves of literally funding a group of funding huge ad campaigns across our countries, basically encouraging Venezuelans to leave. Well, sanctioning the shit. Yeah, exactly. And then making ads. So they cannot benefit from the vast mineral and oil wealth that they actually have. Engaging all these multimillion dollars of USAID democracy regime change funds, the whole Juan Guaido thing. And then the ad campaigns actively, effectively encouraging Venezuela migration. So, you know, I mean, and this is where, again, the bipartisan aspect of it.

27:54Everything I just said happened under Biden. people that was Biden, but all Rubio and all the South Florida people like they support all of that. Right. And so and that's the other thing about all of this. We talked about the mainstream press drop in the ball here, but like the supposed opposition party largely quiet. You got, you know, Mark Pocan, you got Ro Khanna, you got a few lonely voices out there. But you ask yourself, where is the where is the fury? Like, where is them taking them to task over there? Where is them explaining to the American public what is going on here and how they're being lied to and how they're being snowed.

28:25And the reason they're so quiet is because a lot of them kind of sort of agree with it. They're okay with it. Or they think, oh, this is not the political place to fight or whatever, which to me is insane. But there is a lot of support, a lot of bipartisan support for this insane leftover Cold War mentality and this fantasy belief that somehow this time the regime operation is going to be different. Why can't we just say that opposing regime change in Venezuela is not an endorsement of Nicolas Maduro. Why is that so difficult? It's not. Like, yes, he's a bad guy. There are bad people all over the world.

28:59We make deals with them on an everyday basis. He's willing to sell us a shit pot of oil and gold. Take the deal. We're working with the freaking Al-Qaeda guy in Syria. I was going to say, if we can live with a guy who literally slaughtered U.S. soldiers in Iraq as in Syria because he's pro-Israel, we can live with anything. Same, like, oh, he stole an election. They don't have elections in Saudi Arabia or in Qatar. Guess what? We buy shit tons of LNG and oil. It's not my problem. What? In Turkey. Yes. Turkey, Erdogan, I'm sure he's stolen multiple elections or whatever at this point. Yeah, well, Incirlik Air Force Base is really important.

29:35We have nuclear weapons there. Deal with it. OK, we've had military coups and military dictatorship there since the 1970s. Whatever. OK, this is the point. The inconsistency around all of this is so insane. And now it's about drugs. Like, no, this is 150 % bipartisan regime change, USAID, CIA. It will end in the same way that it always does. You really think the Venezuelans are going to accept this, you know, CIA-funded woman who encourages and wants the murder of her own countrymen? How can you possibly think that that is going to go over well? You know, let me tell you a little story about Lula.

30:16Lula not doing so well down in Brazil, actually, before Trump came in. Then what happened? Trump slapped the shit out of him with sanctions. And Lula's more popular than ever, OK? He's more popular than ever. Look at Canada. Little story I heard about Colombia is that Petro is desperate for Trump to sanction him because he wants to get reelected. He's not actually doing so well down in Colombia. Part of the reason he's been mouthing off so much is he wants Trump to come in and to sanction him because the populations around Latin America are sick of this. They can see it and they're watching what's happening.

30:47You know, and that's the final thing in terms of the whole Monroe Doctrine. I strongly believe in the Monroe Doctrine. But part of that is also that increasingly engaging in the same bipartisan regime change throw ops over and over again has dramatically undermined U.S. security in Latin America. It has mass encouraged violent migration and other to the United States because of demographic and political crisis here. Put that all together. It's like, how can you possibly say that that's successful? Can you talk, Sagar, a little bit about you and Ryan's reporting with regard to the target bank, including targets in Colombia and targets in Mexico as well?

31:28Because effectively what you and Ryan reported is, you know, since they're using this whole pretext of drugs and there isn't a lot of actual drug trafficking in Venezuela at all, when they were when, you know, people were tasked with coming with, OK, we'll find us some targets. They were like, well, there's not. There's no targets in Venezuela. But we do have some in Mexico. So we have some in Colombia. So can you talk about that aspect of him what that means? Yeah, this is a hilarious little side story as well, is that Trump has recently found out there is no fentanyl in Venezuela. And so even though he's apparently okay with these strikes, what him, actually, let's put this next one, please, on the screen.

31:59This was about the U.S. poised to strike military targets in Venezuela in escalation. This was a Miami Herald report. The administration denied it, just to be clear. But clearly, Miami Herald, they've got some good sources down there in South Florida. The story, as I understand it, is that there was like a go, no-go situation. It did eventually calm down over the weekend, but in the next few days to a week, you can definitely watch. One of the reasons is that a lot of those warships do eventually need to return to port or where they came from, so they're on actually a limited timeline for the amount of time they can stay out there absent some crazy circumstance if they want to keep them there.

32:30But to your point about what you were saying, the reason why Colombia and Mexico have now increasingly been extended in the target list is there is no fentanyl or cocaine that's really coming from Venezuela. There's just not a lot that comes from there. It's like 6%, 7%. This is from the DEA's own 2025 report. I tweeted it. You can go read it for yourself if you want to. It's publicly available. It's pretty hard to find. The point that you read from that document, though, and the reason why many of the more recent strikes from the U.S. have shifted to the Pacific Ocean is those actually are cocaine routes from Colombia to Mexico.

33:02Now, a lot of the cocaine will come from Colombia to Mexico. Mexico is where the fentanyl comes in. They use the precursors from China. And then the absolute vast majority of it crosses the U.S.-Mexico border, not by sea. It almost all comes by land. Now, in terms of the strike packages that have been prepared, a lot of them, the fact that, you know, any cocaine which is moving from Colombia to Venezuela is happening on that border. A lot of it has nothing to do really with Maduro. This is like some guerrilla, you know, this is jungle stuff. Like, it's kind of hard to explain for a lot of people.

33:33But it's effectively like a lawless no man's land down there. And that is where, you know, to the extent you can find a Venezuelan connection, it's there on the border and it's a lot more with the Colombians. Now, internally, what I'm told is that Mexico and Colombia, even though they're the most legitimate strike targets for the U.S., you would cause huge political problems. So as I just explained, Trump does not want to sanction Petro. Why? He doesn't want him to get reelected. He doesn't want the leftists to win. If we strike Colombia, it's game. It's going to be a socialist takeover down in Colombia.

34:05Scheinbaum is massively popular. She's actually playing ball right now. If we strike Mexico, first of all, economic consequences could be a disaster because of the NAFTA and the amount of trade that we do down in Mexico. They could cripple our economy if they wanted to. But two is that it would solidify the Scheinbaum regime even more than it already is and make the leftist parties even more popular down in Mexico. So the administration is aware of this to a certain extent. Brazil massively backfired on them. They did not expect. Bolsonaro to dip, the Bolsonaro is supposed to dip in popularity and for Lula's popularity to go up as a result of the sanctions.

34:42So I don't think it's going to happen personally. I do think if anything does happen, it'll be in Venezuela. But the Venezuelan regime change thing, it's here. I mean, Trump is now saying his days are numbered. He seems to believe all of this. We potentially maybe have one or two more off ramps, but I'm not feeling very good about it. I think we have maybe 14 days right now is a very critical time. That's why we're spending a lot of time on this right now. Yeah. Let's take a look at A6. This was an important report from The Washington Post about the legal justification. So the headline here, Trump administration tells Congress, war law does not apply to cartel strikes.

35:22So effectively, they say the president needs lawmakers' approval for sustained military action under the 1973 War Powers Resolution, which was passed in the week of the Vietnam War, a 60-day clock started ticking after the administration informed Congress on September 4th that it had conducted a strike on an alleged drug boat in the Caribbean two days earlier. It's followed that with other strikes. It's killed dozens of people. That 60-day window closes today. And until now, it had been unclear what the administration would do. And so basically, the administration is saying, we don't have to follow that law.

35:55We don't have to notify you. We don't classify this as meeting the requirements under this War Powers Resolution. So they continue to claim the ability to do all of these random extrajudicial assassinations with no due process indefinitely without having to go to Congress whatsoever. Congress is probably not all that upset about it because of the reasons that we just were mentioning, that they don't like to have to make difficult decisions and have their fingerprints on this. There is a more or less bipartisan acceptance of the general thrust of, hey, let's get rid of Maduro. So they're probably not going to protest too much.

36:32There are a couple other interesting notes in this piece. I mean, number one, what the administration is actually claiming here, which is something I've been saying for a while, is that they can assassinate any person that they claim to be tied to the drug trade. OK, that's what they're claiming and not just at sea. Like what they're asserting is that they can murder anyone they want domestically here in the U.S. with no due process as long as they say, oh, but they were related to drug trafficking. They were related to a drug cartel. They were giving material support to drug cartels. That's their view of their legal abilities, which is insane.

37:11Also, just a little nugget in here, there was supposed to be a briefing where the military lawyers come in and sort of like brief Congress on the legal rationale. That didn't happen. And originally Congress felt like, oh, they're just stonewalling us. But the reality was that the legal experts were not comfortable with the legality of it and didn't want to have to go and do this briefing. So to give you a sense of how much tumult there is in terms of the like career officials and lawyers who've been involved in this process. And of course, we saw one high up, you know, military commander who was pushed down over his objection to some of these things as well.

37:47So, I mean, what what they're claiming here is absolutely insane, even putting the Venezuela piece aside and focusing here domestically. Absolutely. You're absolutely right. Ryan had some stuff on that as well, by the way, in the report. So look, that's where things are as of right now. We really don't know yet where things could go. It's still possible we could reopen some talks with Maduro. I think it's going to be very difficult. You can see it as a massive pressure campaign, but every single day that this goes on, it just gets more dangerous. Who knows what kind of crazy black ops mercenary thing is going to be happening inside Venezuela.

38:20now. I have no clue. Yeah, exactly. I mean, on the Venezuelan side, too, for ostensibly anybody who cares about the opposition, as I've explained, you know what Maduro says? Maduro is doing back flips when we do the CIA announcement, because then anyone opposes him is who? CIA. This is what the Iranians did after the Mossad targeted assassinations. Any person in Iran who spoke out against the regime, now they're Mossad and they literally just kill him. That's what Maduro is doing is throw them all in jail. He's going to kill them. This is the best gift you've ever given for the regime. He's also coup-proofing himself increasingly.

38:54Most of the people around him at this point have been so tested. And, you know, I mean, there's a recent story where he tried to buy off his pilot to try and fly him to the United States from the CIA. And the pilot was basically playing them off, trying to get some cash, but he eventually told Maduro. He saved him. So he has a pretty good cocoon around him to protect himself at this point. And I don't think he's going anywhere personally. So we'll see. All right, let's get to the shutdown. Trump disagrees with you. So we'll Well, I don't think he's going anywhere voluntarily. Yeah, indeed. Is he going to die?

39:23Very possible. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. have both been assassinated. And Black America was at a breaking point. Rioting and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's Almormata, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in Black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution, I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone.

40:05The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should. and it will blow your mind. Listen to The A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

40:29What do you do when the headlines don't explain what's happening inside of you? I'm Ben Higgins, and if you can hear me, it's where culture meets the soul, a place for real conversation. Each episode, I sit down with people from all walks of life, celebrities, thinkers, and everyday folks. And we go deeper than the polished story. We talk about what drives us, what shapes us, and what gives us hope. We get honest about the big stuff. Identity when you don't recognize yourself anymore. Loss that changes you. Purpose when success isn't enough. Peace when your mind won't slow down. Fake when it's complicated.

41:07Some guests have answers. Most are still figuring it out. If you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story, this show is for you. Listen to If You Can Hear Me on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

41:45Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. its crazy cast of disciples, and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

42:30Meanwhile, the government remains shut down. You'll recall Republicans were trying to deny everyone SNAP benefits. As of now, the November 1st EBT refill has not happened. I'll get to more on that in a moment. But while all of that is going on, Trump was partying down at Mar-a-Lago. We can put these images up on the screen. Throwing a Great Gatsby-themed Halloween party. The title was A Little Party Never Killed Nobody. You can see here's a lady scantily clad dancing in a rotating champagne glass. ban it. Lots of scantily clad, sequin clad women and opulence at this party. You can only imagine if any other president threw a party like this at any point, let alone at a time when the economy is cratering and people are being denied basic food benefits and the government remains shut down.

43:25So very, very gilded age, I would say, literally very gilded age feeling. You can recall the images of people having these opulent parties and people's noses pressed down on the glass. That is kind of the vibe that it's giving right here. At the same time, Marjorie Taylor Green continues to be outspoken against her own party and their failures with regard to health care specifically. Here she was on Bill Maher's program. Here's why I'm angry. The Democrats passed Obamacare, but yet the Republicans have never done anything to correct the problems that exist with it. And I blame my own party. That's absolutely wrong.

44:00And I don't think it's an easy thing to fix. However, it's something that we should have a plan for. And Mike Johnson, for a month now, cannot give me a single policy idea. And I'm angry about that. Is this your understanding of Obamacare? So she says, Mike Johnson cannot give me a single policy idea. Right now, the shutdown appears to continue to be at a full impasse. There are no ongoing negotiations that we are aware of. I think Democrats feel very secure in their political position, and Trump is feeling no real pressure to cave here. He thinks that he can continue to sort of like exact pain on Democrats via the American public.

44:41And as we get into holiday season and Thanksgiving travel and all of that, the level of pain is only going to increase. The theory I have heard is both parties want to keep it shut down until Thanksgiving so that people have horrible travel experiences and then they blame either side. That's basically the gamble. That's not currently happening. It's been basically a month now since the government has been shut down. A lot of people, I mean, put the furloughed employees and all of that aside. The point is, is that at a certain point for the TSA, you know, they're not getting paid. A lot of them are showing up voluntarily.

45:13And so how many of them are just going to start calling out sick and they don't have to come to work? And especially for Thanksgiving, they might have to get another job. Exactly. I mean, look, I don't particularly blame anybody. If you pay for a month, you know, not why would you necessarily have to work? But the point is, if you were one of those people, you would also maybe strategically want to call out sick, especially if you're air traffic controllers and others whenever it comes to the shutdown. Because you have air traffic control, TSA, a lot of other employees, but you're being required to work.

45:40And there's a lot of contingency funds. For example, you know, the paying the troops thing. You had that donor, the billionaire mega donor who paid the – which, by the way, is still insane. insane. Completely insane. That's like some literally gilded age thing from J.P. Morgan back in the early 1900s. Not joking. You can look it up, that incident, if you're interested. But the point actually just remains around the shutdown itself is, look, I think it's crazy because it's such an impactful story, especially maybe more of a Washington bias because I know so many people who have been furloughed, but it still doesn't feel like the number one story yet in the country.

46:13And I really wonder if so many people now have given up at all in the government and just don't care. They just kind of move on with their life. Like a number one story in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, everywhere else. None of it is about the shutdown. I literally just checked this morning. A month into the last government shutdown, which lasted only 35 days, the amount of pressure on the Trump administration was unbelievable, which is part of why Trump caved so quickly initially in that one. And so I really have no idea where this will go. Both feel pretty comfortable in where they are right now.

46:42So let me give an update on the SNAP benefits, because we covered this extensively last week. Republicans decided they were going to cut off SNAP funds, which would run out at the end of the month. Now, previously, they had indicated there was an emergency fund to allow those things, those benefits to continue. 42 million Americans are beneficiaries of SNAP funds, disproportionately families with children. So obviously really critical program for people. So there was a lawsuit, and you had two federal judges on Friday say that the Trump administration must tap into contingency funds. I'm reading from a CBS News report to make payments for SNAP during the government shutdown, ruling against the government in a pair of suits over the imminent benefits lapse.

47:26And they mentioned as well, roughly 42 million Americans rely on SNAP to help buy food. In a case that was brought by a coalition of states in federal court in Massachusetts, Judge Indira Talwani ruled that the government is required by law to tap into the emergency money to make at least partial payments and gave the administration until Monday to tell the court whether it planned to do so. In a separate decision in Rhode Island, Judge John McConnell Jr. granted a request for a temporary restraining order from a group of municipalities and nonprofits that sued to block the imminent funding freeze.

47:59The ruling was made from the bench. An entry on the case docket said the court orders the USDA to distribute contingency funds and report back to the court again by noon today. So two courts that are saying, no, you have to tap these emergency funds. You have to continue paying out benefits. So far, those funds have not come through. They're still frozen. Big question mark over what is exactly going to happen, whether there's going to be an appeal, et cetera, whether it's going to be a full or a partial payment, how long it will take to effectuate those payments. All of that is incredibly unclear.

48:30And so in the meantime, you know, SNAP benefits, especially with how costly groceries are at this point, they don't usually make it. It's not usually nearly sufficient to actually make it to the end of the month. So people are really waiting for that first of the month to be able to replenish their grocery supplies. And everyday delay is, you know, really painful for a lot of people. I'm sure we're going to be seeing images of the food banks as we already have with, you know, lines around the block, both from food stamp beneficiaries who have now been cut off, also from furloughed workers have no idea when they're going to be able to be getting their next paycheck.

49:03And there are some indications that this is starting to hit Trump's approval rating. We can put B4 up on the screen. This, again, speaks to the political dynamics and why Democrats feel they're on somewhat solid ground here. So his approval rating is 43 percent disapproved, 55 percent. But even more significant in this NBC News poll, they tested the generic ballot for the midterm elections. You know, are you going to vote for a Republican for Congress or a Democrat for Congress? And they found the Democrats leading on the generic ballot by eight points. Now, that is the largest generic ballot advantage that NBC News has found for Democrats in years.

49:44It comes at a time also, interestingly, where the Democratic Party approval rating is still complete and total garbage. It's actually lower than the Republican Party approval rating. Part of that is because you have so many Democrats who are disgusted with the Democratic Party but are still going to vote for them over the Republicans. So it's not like Democrats are like making the most of the situation and really providing, you know, a glowing, optimistic path forward for the country. But you do start to see some real fallout from Republican, you know, single control leadership in the House, in the Senate, in the presidency.

50:18I think the awareness of the shutdown, the way the shutdown is starting to hit a lot of families across the country and a variety of other issues that people have with this administration as well as well is beginning to take its toll. And just for perspective, look, caveats, polls, other polls show different, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. An eight point popular vote win in the House, that's a landslide. That's like bigger than the margin. And, you know, 2010, 2008, the years we think of like huge wave elections. Eight points would be, you know, among the largest popular vote victories for either party in, you know, in recent years.

50:54So all of the like Republican gerrymandering stuff that they would do is kind of moot if you have that large of a victory for the Democrats. Well, that's one of the warnings I've given is that, you know, a lot of these gerrymandering in Texas are like 52, 48 seats. And I'm like, yeah, well, considering how demographically for me, I'm like, look, Texas, the Texas I know, which is dramatically changed demographically. with all of these Californians, urbanization and the education gap, in addition to some of the price increase who are drawing in some more educated liberals. I wouldn't be so comfortable with 52-48 if I were you, Texans, especially from what I've seen in terms of the voter data.

51:30But you do you, I guess. You know, you can try and go for it. Again, I don't know where things will go because at the same time, the frustration may be building. How much of it is shutdown-based? You know, it's one of those where it seems to me a lot more people who are upset with Trump have reasons to do so. They have a lot more to do outside of the shutdown. Part of the reasons why the Republicans themselves, they feel pretty comfortable right now. Like I'm not seeing a lot of discomfort in the overall GOP ranks to the extent that there is. It's from Marjorie and others, but that's not really about the shutdown.

52:02That's about healthcare, right? That's not about SNAP or anything. It's really about healthcare premiums. By the way, I can report, I did check my Obamacare premium. It'll be up 17 % this year. So it'll be about$12 ,000, $15 ,000 deductible. So thank you, President Obama. Thank you, President Trump and all of the interim political leaders for that. Everyone has been involved in creating this disaster. Being serious, if I didn't have a kid, I'm rolling the dice. All right. I'm going to pay cash and just hope I don't get hit by a bus. There's only one reason that I'll ever literally sign up for usury.

52:30You're 25 grand in the hole before you even get to anything. I haven't checked my price increase yet. I'm not looking forward to it. Open enrollment's here. What a great time. We're on the bronze plate. What a great season. We're on the lowest level, the bronze plate. Oh, me too. Trust me. All right. Yeah. This is literally, I'm doing the same thing. That's why my deductible is so high. That's even more if I had a high premium. I don't know, man. I just have no idea how this is possible. Were you, did we do the show together where we put up that guy who was a solopreneur, father of four? $42 ,000 with a$10 ,000 deductible.

53:0450 ,000 bucks if you ever, you know, get into a serious crisis. What's the point at that point? Yeah. Seriously. Well, and this is where, you know, I mean, Democrats have there was not really a health care conversation that was going on at all. It was completely absent effectively from the 2024 election. And so they did with the shutdown. I mean, the reason Marjorie is talking about health care is because of the shutdown, because of the conversation that they forced on it. So, I mean, I you know, I got my issues with their strategy, whatever. But they did accomplish kind of shifting the conversation in that direction.

53:34Now, that may have happened organically because of the way people are getting hit with these premium price hikes. but they certainly helped to sort of focus the national media on that. Let's go and put the next numbers up on the screen. I think you're right, Sagar, that, you know, I also am not sure that a lot of the deterioration in the Republican position is really related to the shutdown. In a lot of ways, that's a bigger problem for them, though, because if it's just about the shutdown, then they open the government back up and everybody kind of forgets about the shutdown. I think the problems do actually go deeper than that.

54:02But here you can see they ask this question, has the Trump administration lived up to your expectations or has it fallen short on these issues? The place where they're doing the best is still border security and immigration, 51 percent. So a majority say that Trump has lived up to his promises there. 44 percent say fallen short on foreign policy. You've got him underwater, 44, 53 changing business as usual in Washington. This is kind of actually a low key devastating number for Trump because that's kind of his whole brand is like doing things different, upending the status quo, et cetera. And you have only 40 percent saying that he lived up to the expectation to change business as usual.

54:41A strong majority, 56 percent, saying that he's fallen short. But his numbers on the economy are the worst. Only 34 percent feel he's lived up to his expectations on the economy. Only 33 percent on looking out for the middle class. And only 30 percent on inflation and the cost of living, which was as central an issue in this last election as absolutely anything. So taking on more and more water with regards to the economy. Of course, we've been covering here the AI in part spurred layoffs, which are accelerating very little job creation. Yes, the stock market continues to soar basically on the back of AI and data center build outs.

55:21And that's effectively it. So not something that a lot of Americans are benefiting from in a real and tangible way in their day to day. Prices are still very high. Healthcare prices are accelerating and just becoming wildly, wildly unaffordable. And people really feeling the pinch at this point as, you know, Trump is there doing his whole great Gatsby thing. Not a great image. That's another thing, too. Between that and the ballroom, not great images for him. I don't disagree. I just wonder how much of this stuff even penetrates at this point. You know, Trump is just he's like in a different universe.

55:50I think if anything penetrates, it's the economic stuff. I don't disagree. But I mean, the Gatsby thing or the ballroom. I mean, I know the ballroom was like a meme. And I actually, it's, of course, you know, some dumb ass segment about the ballroom gets like 200 ,000 views. It becomes the thing that people ask me about in public. It's like, what do you think about the ballroom? That did kind of go off. I don't know why. It's the stupid shit is the stuff that penetrates. But, you know, I'm always like, well, but how much of this is just like a funny meme? Is this something that actually is going to head home?

56:19Like what? I don't know. You know, I do this for a living and I still have never been able to figure out like what actually gets people to vote. Yeah. Well, here's what I would say is, you know, his brand is a few was a few things. Right. The appealing part of his brand was like he's a businessman. He's going to make the economy good. And he's going to be, you know, and he's pro working class. Right. He's going to be fighting for the working class and he's going to upend businesses. Usually he's going to be this renegade outsider, overturn the system, et cetera. And I think Epstein was a devastating blow on the like upending the status quo thing.

56:52I think certainly, you know, people are disgusted with his handling of the economy from the tariffs and just, you know, there's been no addressing of their inflation issues. It feels very chaotic, layoffs accelerating, etc. So you have, you know, the businessman thing not working out. And then like the Gatsby stuff and the constant surrounding yourself with these oligarchs and catering to them and, you know, the the East Wing and the parties and all of that, you know, visual grammar of luxury and opulence. I think that gets to this, you know, oh, is he going to fight for the working class? And now at this point, you just look like a fool if you really, you know, continue to believe that that's where his heart and soul is.

57:34I don't know. I still wonder how much of it was economic. I really just don't know. It was a very strange election. So much of it was economic. But then remember, we had the culture war midterm election of 2022. Democrats sweep in despite crippling inflation in the mid, not sweep in, but they did dramatically better based on the issue of abortion. I kind of think immigration might actually have been more number one than anything else. Obviously, it's not a vacuum outside of the economy. I also think Biden's age was the huge superseding thing. on top of Kamala's inability to speak, right? Literally, you put all that stuff together, that's why there's no grand kind of thing that comes out of it.

58:13And there are disparate coalitions for various reasons that support him. Have you seen his numbers with young people? With young people, yeah. That's what I mean. And look, if anything, that's probably the people I care about the most. Just not about the Republicans. I don't care about that. It's just in terms of who literally the future of the country is. And for them, Like it's pretty obvious that nihilism – I'll save some of this for our last block. But a huge reason why politics are the way they are right now is because of a pervading sense of crippling nihilism because of the basic fact that you will not do better than your parents today unless you are extremely lucky or if your parents give you some of their money.

58:49That is a gerontocracy. That is a system of aristocracy, of the bourgeoisie, of the early Gilded Age period in the United States and of the House of Lords period in the UK. Literally the opposite of what we were all supposed to be. And that's basically who we've become again. So, of course, you're going to have violent politics basically rise up and you shouldn't be so surprised. You can do two things in moments like this. You can blame the voters for being bad, for being naughty, or you can blame the leaders who architected that system. I'm always going to choose the latter one. Can we do both?

59:24Huh? No, we can't. I think we can. We can blame the voters? I think we can. I think we can. Where's your personal agency? Come on. People have responsibility for their own, like, views. How about this? I hold the voters often in a form of, like, it's not hatred, but I'm just like, what are you people doing? Like, it's like a scorn. this is a very elitist mentality and I'll put that on this where sometimes it's like bro what are you doing it's almost like the what's the matter with Kansas book you know you see people I somebody recently who uh frankly like doesn't make that much money was complaining to me about the estate tax and I was like do you even know what the estate tax is it's like 28 million dollars I'm like you're never gonna get there shut the fuck up see you know it's like but that's I'm like I don't know where that comes from I guess I I have evolved on this issue I would have previously said 100 % you can't blame the voters.

1:00:13You got to look at the elites. But you know what? You got to first, the most important thing is to blame the elites, figure out what went wrong trying to fix the system. But you know what? At this point, I've lost some pain. I'm done coddling some of these people. Like, you know, you like figure out what's going on. You're getting lied to multiple times. You're just accepting it. I mean, going back to the Venezuela drug boats, like you're just accepting these stupid low Maduro's Hamas. I'm sorry. I'm done coddling these people. At a certain point, I'm feeling more like you. You got to take some personal responsibility for yourself.

1:00:42I feel, look, I agree, personal responsibility. I guess I'm more talking about political. So you and I are commentators and we have the luxury. Like I can just openly be like, boomers, I think you should be kicked out of your houses for the property tax. I'm going to say it. All right. That nobody will ever get elected. I think property taxes should go higher on you. And yes, if you live in a four bedroom house, sorry, you got to go. And somebody younger should be able to live there. You'll never get elected based on that message. So when I say stuff like this, it's more of like how I think politically it should be.

1:01:09But I mean, sometimes, you know, you look at some of the choices that individual voting blocs make in America and you're just like, what are we doing? It's like, is this an IQ problem? Probably. Yeah. Education problem. Whatever. Well, I just wanted to say, because I mentioned the young people numbers with Trump. And I think this is the place where you can say most clearly the economy is the problem. I agree. And he now has an approval rating of 20 percent among voters under 30. According to YouGov, 20 % disapproval is 75%. That is an increase in disapproval of 38 points since February and a decline in approval rating of 22 points, again, since February.

1:01:56So used to be, you know, it was relatively even between approve and disapprove. Now you only have 20 % of young voters who say they approve of Donald Trump. And so, you know, there was a lot of talk and understandably so. We did some of it here as well about the way young voters were shifting right or whatever like that. I think there's a called for a total reassessment of how voters, young voters are thinking about the political landscape at this point. That's fair. Welcome to the A building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. have both been assassinated.

1:02:31And black America is at a breaking point. Rioting and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in Black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution. I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should.

1:03:13And it will blow your mind. Listen to The A-Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:03:25What do you do when the headlines don't explain what's happening inside of you? I'm Ben Higgins and if you can hear me is where culture meets the soul a place for real conversation Each episode I sit down with people from all walks of life celebrities thinkers and everyday folks and we go deeper than the polished story We talk about what drives us what shapes us and what gives us hope We get honest about the big stuff identity when you don't recognize yourself anymore loss that changes you purpose when success isn't enough peace when your mind won't slow down faith when it's complicated some guests have answers most are still figuring it out if you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story, this show is for you listen to If You Can Hear Me on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts

1:04:22What if mind control is real? If you could control the behavior of anybody around you what kind of life would you have? Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car? When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain.

1:04:59It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. It's crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits. He stood trial for murder and got acquitted. The biggest mind game of all? NLP might actually work. This is wild. Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, let's get to this very dystopian segment. Frankly, so there were a bunch of videos that went viral that purported to show Black women who are moms doing the whole, like, the most caricaturish welfare queen shtick you could possibly imagine.

1:05:44All of them turn out to be AI. AI generated, total bullshit, made up, invented out of whole cloth. The number of conservative influencers and outlets that fell for this crap should make you despair for society, period. So here is Brett Cooper, who has a large channel, very popular, etc. Here is Brett Cooper falling for one of these AI videos. There are bad actors who have abused the system time and time again. And now that benefits might be cut off next month, they are lashing out, to say the least. Just watch.

1:06:43You're watching this video and you can't send me nothing? I'm blocking you. Now, let me say, in fairness to Brad, if you guys are just listening to this, looking at the video. Look, I think it was, like, to me, it looked 100 %... Hard to tell. It looked absolute... Maybe I'm, you know, reaching boomer levels of my inability to parse AI, but, like, that's pretty much... What's it called? Like, the realistic standard? I forget. The Uncanny Valley. That's outside the Uncanny Valley, to me. I mean, it looks 100%, like, from what I could tell. And this is not to excuse, Brock, because we really try because we realize at this point we can be fooled.

1:07:20In fact, there was an element we didn't throw to in the segment before because we weren't 100 percent sure that it was real. So, you know, you have a responsibility to check these things out. And what I will say, too, just as like a user guide, especially if something is just tailor made to fit one political, your particular political perspective and it feels a little too much on the nose. those are the ones you need to be the most suspicious of. In any case, it wasn't just that one video. Apparently, this one account created a bunch of these just like racist AI welfare queen slop videos. Here's a TikTok breaking down this one creator and what they're up to.

1:07:59This is AI. Here's how we know and why it matters. It's made by Impossible underscore ASMR one, who, after eight failed slop posts and a three-month break, decided that Sora could finally make their dream content. Videos of black women trying to use EBT in places it's not accepted. True creativity unleashed by AI. The shutdown created an opportunity to have them yell at the camera, but it's not until the whole family's back there that the full racist stereotype is fulfilled. This is rage bait and we'll get angry commenters who, when they learn it's AI, will say, oh, but it's true anyway, which of course it's not, and that's cope for being played.

1:08:36They were so played they didn't notice the kid missing half an arm while the other kids are frozen in place for no reason, and these down here are warping together. They were too focused on this fake AI person cramming in a script that they used three other times for their other fake AI people. I will gladly knock down AI rage bait of all kinds, and from anywhere on the spectrum, because it's part of the same problem, casually letting our feeds slip into fake parallel AI universes that exist only to divide up. All right. So it's not just random online influencers, however, who were tricked by this stuff.

1:09:11It was also Fox News. It could be eight guys up on the screen that shows you the new and the old headline. And this is so this is so sleazy, too. So the first headline is Snap Beneficiaries Threatened to Ransack Stores over government shutdown. One mother claims taxpayers must feed her children as SNAP benefits face cuts. That's the video that Brett Cooper played. They wrote this up as a genuine story, like, look at these women and what they're saying. Oh, my God. I mean, total classic throwback Ronald Reagan era politics, right? Let's use a few bad examples to smear everyone who benefits from this whole program in an effort to cut the program.

1:09:51That's what they were going for here. Then they find out, oops, all those videos were AI. And so they totally rewrite the article, same lady here, same byline, and reframed it as, oh, AI videos of SNAP beneficiaries complaining about cuts go viral. And put B7 now up on the screen. So this is the new way that they rewrote it. They rewrote the whole article to be like, oh, we totally knew that it was AI. Don't worry. We totally get it. It's just this phenomenon of AI videos. The only disclosure they gave was this tiny editor's note at the bottom that said, this article previously reported on some videos that appear to have been generated by AI without noting that this has been corrected.

1:10:33Like, that is so incredibly sleazy that they got tricked by the AI videos where a whole like welfare queen scare, scary article, and then had to rewrite it once they got caught and realized it was AI. And they only put that little editor's note at the bottom, like absolutely disturbing. And, you know, this is this is the landscape we exist in now. This isn't coming like this is here. And I think Sora has been probably a jump forward in the level of accessibility of high, like pretty convincing AI creation that can now just be fed into your political feed. You've already got campaigns like Andrew Cuomo's campaign put together, AI attack videos against Zoran and Curtis Lee-Wa in the final days of the campaign.

1:11:17Trump, of course, is using all sorts of AI stuff. And the other thing that I've noticed, Sagar, too, is like some of the videos, even the ones that are completely obviously AI, people will still be fooled by it. Oh, yeah. I'm looking at it right now. I just opened Sora just to see. I haven't actually checked beforehand. I mean, if you look at some of this stuff, I mean, it looks real, right? Like, it does look real. Yeah. We can put some of these in here. I think that might literally be some. But this is the genre of like what. That one does look real. That one I can't tell. I mean, it could be real, right?

1:11:47You know, Mac was saying that I'm sure you guys probably all get served all these like adorable animal videos and I get lots of cat videos and whatever. And he was saying that in these TikTok compilations that he'll get served, some of them will be real and some of them will be AI. And so it's all mixed in together and it becomes impossible to tell reality from complete fiction. And so now we're at a point where, you know, I mean, not that Fox News has the highest of standards here, but they have a massive audience. are incredibly influential, continue to be in the conservative space, and they're just getting wholesale taken in by some garbage AI videos that probably took like 10 minutes to create.

1:12:26You can see this happening a million times, right? Look at anybody. And this is part of the problem with confirmation bias and part of why it's so important to hear it from here. Like, if you're left, right, whatever, if it's too good to be true, it almost certainly is now at this point. This is a problem on Twitter, by the way, with their verification policy where anybody can just buy a blue chick. there is literal fake news BS that pervades all of Twitter. And apparently a huge number of these accounts are from abroad because the payouts, I guess, are meaningful enough for them. Let me just say a side note.

1:12:59Anybody who spends their life trolling for Twitter payouts, you are a stone cold loser. The amount of money that I have made off Twitter in the last year would not be enough to turn the lights on in the studio for like three days. Like just so you're all aware. Yeah, and you've got a big account. It's like fine. It's like a couple hundred thousand followers. That's a lot of people. Sure, yeah, but it's not like, you know, I only have millions of followers or whatever. But the point is, is I literally went to go look. It's like less in a month than what you would make in YouTube from a day. So anybody out there, you're wasting your time.

1:13:31You should just spend your time on YouTube, like wherever, a podcast, that's a much higher ROI platform. But the point is around this is with AI, if it's limitless in terms of the friction to create these types of videos and to get the amount of views, whatever, then that money starts to add up in the aggregate. And if you have an entire farm, let's say in Bangladesh or China or wherever, where these types of dollars can go a much farther away, then yeah, it might actually be worth it for them. But just please, like for real, everybody out there, if it seems too good to be true, you have got to make sure.

1:14:02And this happens with everything. I mean, on the Israel conflict, right? Remember the Israelis were always like, oh, that's a Pallywood fake video, right? I mean, it's hard, right? We're here, we're thousands of miles away. We're trying to suss out what's real and what's not. You have no idea. I mean, you know, me chasing this whole Venezuela thing, you have the amount of bullshit which is out there. And trying to get to the stores, it is not easy right now. And people will lie and they'll use AI. Like you said, they're currently, there's a lot of that in Latin America, right? Because there's a huge amount of, like, shorts usage down there.

1:14:33There's tons of slop for propaganda purposes. So everyone just be careful. Everybody knows we are not ready for this. Everybody knows that. You can't find a single person who's like, oh, yeah, we'll be able to handle this well. Like, look at how fucked up the political landscape already is. We can't handle this. This is insane. I've got one more piece for you. This is B9. This AI, this clanker, quote unquote artist. We got to come up with another word because if you're AI, you cannot be an artist. But in any case, we have the first AI song making an appearance on Billboard's radio chart. Xenia Monet debuts on the adult R &B airplay chart with How Was I Supposed to Know?

1:15:15We listened to it this morning. It's fine. It's fine. It's not my personal favorite, but it's pretty good. If you told me it was AI art, there's no way I would know. I just, you know, I actually am pretty attached to humanity. You know, I like the idea of art having human sentiment and emotion behind it and, you know, Connecting to some real experience, not some amalgamation of farmed experiences from the internet that no robot could ever truly understand or relate to. So I find it disturbing. I think most people do. I've been on a big post-AI apocalyptic movie kick and Elysium. Tell me. Elysium hits.

1:15:59It was not that well received at the time, but I increasingly think it's one of the most accurate films made. It's a Matt Damon film. from back in the day. Again, not very well critically reviewed, but I just watched it the other day. I think that's where things are trending.

1:16:261969, Malcolm and Martin are gone. America is in crisis. And at Morehouse College, the students make their move. These students, including a young Samuel L. Jackson, locked up the members of the Board of Trustees, including Martin Luther King Sr. It's the true story of protest and rebellion in Black American history that you'll never forget. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. Listen to The A-Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Over the last couple years, didn't we learn that the folding chair was invented by Black people because of what happened in Alabama?

1:17:03After Montgomery Braw. This Black History Month, the podcast Selective Ignorance with Mandy B unpacks Black history and culture with comedy, clarity and conversations that shake the status quo. The Crown Act in New York was signed in July of 2019, and that is a bill that was passed to prohibit discrimination based on hairstyles associated with race. To hear this and more, listen to Selective Ignorance with Mandy B from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. You can scroll the headlines all day and still feel empty. I'm Ben Higgins, and If You Can Hear Me is where culture meets the soul.

1:17:36Honest conversations about identity, loss, purpose, peace, faith, and everything in between. Celebrities, thinkers, everyday people, some have answers, most are still figuring it out. And if you've ever felt like there has to be more to the story, this show is for you. Listen to If You Can Hear Me on my iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.