12/19/25: "PROTECT HER!" New Trump Epstein Bombshell, Brown MIT Killer Found, AIPAC Tracker FIRED

27:09I know Jasper Nathaniel had pulled some of the key quotes from this. But, you know, I mean, this won't be a surprise to any of us because we know that Trump and Epstein have this very, you know, significant relationship. But there were some details here that were for sure new. So one of the things is an Epstein employee from the era recalled Mr. Trump would occasionally send over modeling cards for Mr. Epstein to peruse like a menu. And the the Trump modeling agency has long been one of the like major red flags because these modeling agencies, including, you know, I mean, Epstein got close to Lex Wexner and he has Victoria's Secret and that's the whole thing.

27:51But, you know, Trump was very close to John Casablanca and sort of looked up to him as a role model. His modeling agency was maybe the most infamous and notorious for exploiting young girls and he himself for exploiting young girls. And so the, you know, the modeling agencies have been used as a front for effectively human trafficking. And that's a documented phenomenon. So that's obviously disturbing piece of information there. You've got this gross detail where Trump would love to, you know, they'd love to like publicly brag about their exploits, put themselves on speaker phones. So whoever was in the room had to uncomfortably listen to whatever they're like sexual exploits.

28:29Apparently, they called each other all the time to share this sort of information. This one woman says she remembers one call in the mid 90s in which the two men discussed how much pubic hair a particular woman had and whether there was enough for Mr. Epstein to floss his teeth with on another of these calls. Mr. Trump told Mr. Epstein about having sex with another woman on a pool table. This one is very disturbing. one of the 14-year-old models who was brought to Mar-a-Lago as one of these parties, event-type things, says she ran into Trump's then-wife, Marla Maples. According to her, she says during a trip to the bathroom, they ran into Mr.

29:09Trump's new wife and they had met earlier. Ms. Maples clasped her hands, Ms. Coleman recalled, looked her in the eye, so this is the mother of the 14-year-old model, and says, whatever you do, do not let her around any of these men, and especially my husband, protect her. Now, Marla Maples denies that that that she said that and that that quote occurred. But in any case, some new new details there about the depth and nature of the Trump Epstein relationship. And I think gives some insight into why Trump was very, very not excited about any of this information coming to light. And and remember, Trump bought Miss Teen USA in order.

29:49he's this is from his own testimony in order for him to be able to creep into the locker room and look at the nude teens like young teens like that he he said this on he said this publicly publicly yeah so there's no question that aside from the gross stuff he said like about his own daughter like he's he's a he's a gross dude put into this modeling industry by the way which if you know you know know what he knew is a real interesting choice yeah and and there's that quote he gave to i guess was vanity fair or somebody where he said yeah jeffrey epstein likes him young um so like but yeah all of this is but yeah probably not surprising to people that he's this much of a creep um i think it's surprising to some people in a sense with the young girls apparently and i mean you know i mean this was always the glaring like glaring blind spot for MAGA when they were very focused on Epstein and revealing, you know, the connections with the elite circles.

30:56And it's like, you guys do know that this man was like besties with Donald Trump for a decade. You don't think there's going to be anything there? You don't think there's going to be anything there? So in any case, of course, you know what Trump would say? Go ahead, Em. Well, I was just going to say it goes back to the origins of MAGA, which is that Donald Trump was standing up on the stage and saying, I alone can fix it, for example, because I know the system. The same thing with the Clintons. I bought Teen USA. I can fix the problem. It was his whole. But that goes into this. Just this broader point is that he pitched himself to MAGA as somebody who was and created MAGA as somebody who was the billionaire against the other billionaires.

31:36He was part of the billionaire system, but he was going to sort of disrupt it from the inside. And it is, you know, important then every time he does anything but disrupt the billionaire system from the inside, anytime he protects the billionaire system, anytime he's sort of revealed to be part of that system. I think it does. You guys talked about earlier this week, you and Sokrat did a segment on Harry Enten looking at this poll results showing 2024 Trump supporters. Strong support from Trump is down from 66 percent to 50 percent. Not super surprising. But at the same time, it does, I think, lead, you know, Erica Kirk endorsed J.D.

32:20Vance yesterday at Turning Point's big conference. That genuinely is surprising, not that she would endorse him, but that she would endorse him this early. And so there's it's setting a tone for what the Republican Party, what the kind of populist wing of the Republican Party, MAGA, is supposed to do going forward. If you're J.D. Vance, you should be looking at those numbers, 66 percent to 50 percent and thinking very hard about them because of things like this. And now if you want. Not that J.D. I'm not like obviously J.D. is connected to Teal and all of those people. So I'm just saying like the politics of it, I think are kind of interesting.

32:56Now, when it when it comes that Emily and I talked about this a little bit on the show Wednesday when we talked about the New York Times story. And I promised or I pledged that we would try to have our story out by Friday, and we did get it out. The timing of the New York Times piece was helpful to us, I think, because we had been reporting around a lot of the same kind of period of time that they said that they uncovered and put to bed the questions about where he made his money and whether or not he had intelligence connections not making any sense throughout the entire piece. Let me put this up.

33:33I would highly recommend reading this piece. It's it's also just fascinating um as just a a piece of kind of alternative like espionage history because um i it's fair to think of epstein almost as like the forrest gump of the spy world like when it comes to iran contra uh he's just he's just everywhere um and i i highlighted this one paragraph from the New York Times piece here where they write, Jeffrey Epstein had been spending extravagantly, and despite his lofty compensation at Bear Stearns and his work for Douglas Lees, he found himself strapped, even occasionally bouncing rent checks. Back in New York, he joined forces with John Stanley Pottinger, a lawyer who had recently left a senior post in the Justice Department.

34:23Epstein, Pottinger, and Pottinger's brother rented a penthouse office in the Hotel San Moritz on Central Park South. The broker, Joanna Cutler, told us that Epstein initially stiffed her on the commission. And so this is an example of some of the really impressive kind of shoe leather reporting that the Times did for this piece to track down all these details. Like they got Joanna Cutler on the phone and got her to tell them, you know, that he stiffed her on the commission and confirmed this arrangement in the penthouse. But as we argue in the piece, if they had looked in the other direction, looked upwards, they would have, in this paragraph itself, found two details worth exploring.

35:09One, that Douglas Lease is himself an arms trafficker. And we talk about his connection to the Iran-Contra scandal, which was, it's called Iran-Contra, but right in the middle of it is Israel because the United States was barred from shipping weapons to Iran. And so the arrangement that we created was that Israel would send weapons to Iran, which is comical if you think about it. So Israel would ship weapons to Iran. Iran would then pay, would put money into the slush fund that Shimon Peres, uh ehud barak and adan khashoggi were organizing um and then khashoggi by the way khashoggi trump buys what the khashoggi yacht yes because this is khashoggi's uh this is jamal khashoggi's uncle in fact um and then the u.s would then backfill the uh weapons to israel so so we weren't giving weapons to iran we're giving them to israel we would then use that and then um And Hezbollah then would release some hostages, American hostages that were being held.

36:21And we would use the money to illegally finance the Contras because Congress had said you can't finance this insurgency against the Nicaraguan leftist government. And so the Reagan administration used the proceeds to put them there. Now, Stanley Pottinger was a lawyer who was like heavily involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, helping to set up the flows of money. And so they have – so the Times found Epstein literally in business with an Iran-Contra lawyer at the time that the thing is unfolding and Douglas Lees, who was also involved with it. And he was – Yeah, and he was associates with Khashoggi, but go ahead.

37:05Well, I was just going to say, so Trump's NSA starting in 2019 was Matthew Pottinger, who is the son of John Stanley Pottinger, which is when Ro Khanna now describes the Epstein class. Here's an example of the Epstein class. It doesn't mean anyone is necessarily implicated in this massive blackmail. It just means that it's all being pulled from the same small pool of people who are part of this like tightly knit network. But Pottinger, in his defense, actually, he died recently, but he represented a bunch of Epstein victims. I think he, whatever his time. Epstein class traitor. Although some people may be very suspicious of that because it could look like controlled opposition.

37:52Might be. He's an interesting guy. He he was almost ousted from the Nixon administration as part of the Saturday Night Massacre. And he was like packing up his stuff. And then at the last minute, the massacre was kind of stopped. So he kept his job. He also in this New York Times obit, it says that he figured out who Deep Throat was as part of this grand jury process. Oh, that's right. He kept that secret. He then made a fortune in real estate in the 80s. And real estate, I'm not saying that he used Iran-Contra funds, but real estate was a major way that Iran-Contra funds were laundered. Then he became a novelist, best-selling novelist.

38:38And he's, according to his Times Older, he has a side thrill that hasn't been published yet. And then he represented the Epstein victims. So like what an arc that that guy's life took. But then so you have all of this. The Epstein Epstein being close with all of these different Iran-Contra figures after the lid gets blown on Iran-Contra, the CIA's airline, Southern Air Transport, that was involved in this weapons shipments and drug running. has to lay low for a while. And what we report here, Whitney Webb has written about this as well, but we have some new details from a journalist in Ohio who covered this at the time.

39:18Jeffrey Epstein brought Southern Air Transport, the CIA's front company airline, to Columbus, Ohio. They moved the headquarters from Miami to Columbus, Ohio, to start trafficking lingerie and fast fashion for less westerners. Trafficking lingerie. So as one friend responded last night, he's like, well, this is something decent that Epstein did for the world. So instead of trafficking drugs and and like guns for the CIA, these planes for a couple of years were moving, you know, you know, crappy bombshell push up bras. Right. Abercrombie and Fitch in Victoria's Secret. So it's like, OK, maybe there's no intel connections here at all.

39:58But how on earth did this guy end up bringing the CIA's airplanes to Les Wexner? Like Times is going to have to do a little bit better than just hand waving it away with with these kinds of details out there. It's kind of like kind of suspicious activity to be involved in. I was very interesting to me how much The New York Times wanted to say like, oh, case closed, figured it out. No intel ties, no blackmail, no nothing, nothing to see here. And then did a bunch of reporting that does not at all rule out those possibilities. And in fact, raises even more questions about them as your reporting points out.

40:39And we also make the point in the preamble of the piece that in order to acquit him of all of these links to intel and to say that there was nothing interesting going on here, what they had to do was craft this anti-Semitic caricature of the guy. Just like in a genuinely offensive way, because all they're left with is like, oh, he's just a giant con artist. And you go through it and you're like, this is actually like. What are you doing here? But it's almost like what's the Barry Gold? It's like a version of the Barry Goldwater quote. You would say anti-Semitism in defense of the liberty of Israel is no vice.

41:20Is no vice. A lot of people apparently view it that way.

41:28Yeah, read the piece because it just completely. if this is all just a coincidence, it's the greatest coincidence of all time. Yeah. Well, and to, I don't know, also to make the claims that the Times did of like, oh, there's no Intel connection and to not even, you know, not even reference the reporting that you and others have done, I think is also just very, you know, very lazy, also very condescending, you know, like you don't even exist. Right. We even got a, we have a Times quote for the piece because I put all this to them. They said, quote, we report on facts that we are able to confirm, not supposition.

42:08What a bunch of punks. These are facts. Like, these are facts. You're welcome to report on them. If you can't confirm them, I don't know what to tell you. Yeah. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. had both been assassinated. And Black America was out of breaking.

42:35In 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. And it will blow your mind. Listen to The A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

43:20What 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.

43:56It'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. This is Ryder Strong, and I have a new podcast called The Red Weather. It was many and many a year ago in a kingdom by the sea. In 1995, my neighbor, Anna Trainor, disappeared from a commune. It was hard to wrap your head around.

44:38It was nature and trees and praying and drugs. No, I am not your guru. And back then, I lied to my parents, I lied to police, I lied to everybody. There were years, Ryder, where I could not say your name. I've decided to go back to my hometown in Northern California, interview my friends, family, talk to police, journalists, whomever I can, to try to find out what actually happened. Isn't it a little bit weird that they obsess over hippies in the woods and not the obvious boyfriend? They have had this case for 30 years. I'll teach you sons of bitches to come around here and my wife. Boom, boom.

45:13This is The Red Weather. Listen to The Red Weather on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, guys. Super excited to have this morning with us Corey Archibald and Casey Kennedy, who are the co-founders of Track APAC, who recently went public, stopped being anonymous on our show, which we were very privileged to have you guys there. Great to see you both. Thank you. Good morning. Thanks for having us. Yeah. So I wanted to talk to you guys again because I feel like the question of AIPAC funding and overall position on Israel has just become such a central issue, in particular in Democratic primaries, although showing up in some Republican primaries as well.

45:55So I wanted to touch base with you guys about some of the races that you see as being really significant just in terms of that funding question being a dividing line. But before I jumped into that, I wanted to just ask you, so how have things been going? How is it now, you know, coming out and being public faces? I know you guys have gotten a lot of scrutiny online. Casey, I know you have been punished in terms of your career. You lost your job for the work that you're doing. So, Casey, maybe start with you on how things are going. Yeah, it's definitely been a tumultuous month, to say the least.

46:29Shortly after we did our initial interview with you folks, I did lose my job. That followed a doxing and harassment campaign from accounts like Stop Antisemitism and that whole network of pro-Israel troll accounts. basically they my employer just didn't want to deal with that so I'm no longer with them but on the bright side the silver lining is that's really just unleashed me and given me all the time in the world to focus now on this what's up until now been a volunteer time passion project for me now I can really focus on it full time and work on a lot of things that I've been pushing to the back burner and I'm excited for the opportunity to work on it even more.

47:11Did you expect when you came forward, did you expect it would be a problem for your employer or did that kind of come out of the blue for you? I was definitely unsure. I was operating the account anonymously for that exact reason. I just didn't want to risk it. I obviously wasn't informing them of like what I was doing during my free time. And I thought that I might be able to explain where I was coming from and maybe, you know, work out a way to keep my job. But it all just pretty quickly. And it's crazy to me. I mean, all you do is put forward publicly available information, compile publicly available information.

47:48Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty awful that people can just make smears and just really baseless claims and have that up in somebody's livelihood. So I know I'm not the only one. I'll be OK. I have other means to make my living. A lot of other people don't. And I think that's a really important point that we have to keep pushing in this narrative. You're seeing a lot of shift right now happening in the political spectrum, but it's not only in the political spectrum that we need to have this attention focused. It's regular people who are speaking up who are also being executed and targeted. Yeah. Corey, how about you?

48:25Oh, sorry. No, as Casey said, it has definitely been a very tumultuous month. I have not had the same kind of impact and scrutiny that he has, although I've certainly had people picking through my very online life that I have lived for decades. And, you know, oh, congratulations, you uncovered things that I post about constantly. Well done you, I guess. But I guess people are supposed to, they want me to be ashamed of who I am, and I'm not. I'm proud of the work that I've done and what we've been able to achieve through this project. And if anything, those kinds of attacks and scrutinies just make us more determined to keep doing what we're doing.

49:08All right. So let's turn to the topic at hand. There's a ton of races that we could have picked to focus on. But, Corey, why don't you go ahead and give us a little bit of a rundown of a few of the Democratic primaries that you're really watching where the question of APAC funding has taken a sort of central spotlight? Yeah, of course. Well, we are, as many people are, We are closely following and engaging with both races for Cori Bush and her rematch against Wesley Bell and Abdel El Saeed. Both of those races are important to us, not only because of who the candidates are, especially because of who the candidates are and because of what they represent.

49:49And they are objectively the best choice in those primaries. But also I got a little personal connection to both races in the sense that I worked very closely with Cori Bush in her first two runs for Congress. And I took it very personally the way that she was attacked and smeared by APAC. It was part of the reason for the inspiration for founding this PAC and for joining up with Casey and working on this project. And then, of course, Abdul El-Sayed, he's running against Haley Stevens, who is another villain. APAC dumped truckloads of cash into the race against Andy Levin to get her into office.

50:26And so that's another one that I take a bit personally. And so for that reason, you know, those are two races that are, I think, have the opportunity once those two are in, once Corey is restored to Congress and once Abdul is in the Senate, I think they will have a significant impact on the direction of democratic policy. And so those are very important races to us. But, you know, there are also a number of other races that we have we've supported. And sorry, just really quickly on Abdul El-Sayed, because there's another significant contender in that race, Mallory McMorrow. And I actually haven't followed closely.

51:01What is she what has she said or has she said anything with regard to to APAC funding? What's your sense there? Casey, I'll let you take this. Yes. So Mallory McMorrow has been an interesting kind of case study for how the needle has been moving on this topic within the Democratic Party. I'll pull up my story while you're talking. Yeah, exactly. That you had a great piece on that. She actually some supporters had kind of leaked to the press that they had read a position paper that she had submitted to a pro-Israel organization, which we're pretty sure based on reporting. Now they're just leak it to the press.

51:40and they gave it to Ryan Grimm dug it up. Is that how it originally came to? Okay, okay. Ryan is synonymous with the press. That's right, that's right. All right, so Michigan Dropsites' own Ryan Grimm broke that Mallory McMorrow had submitted a position paper to a pro-Israel group, which was an AIPAC confirmed at that time right out the gate. It wasn't AIPAC. So her supporter said it was AIPAC. I suspect that it was actually DMFI, Democratic Majority for Israel, and that the supporter was using AIPAC as a shorthand because DMFI is a shorthand. Which is what we do, frankly. I mean, we use AIPAC as kind of a shorthand to refer to the whole lobby.

52:25But anyway, go ahead. I'm sorry. Yeah. So they call it an AIPAC position paper, but I think it was DMFI. Okay. Fair enough. AIPAC ally, DMFI. She had submitted a position paper, and obviously that position paper hasn't been made public, but we can infer what was included in there based on the comments of those supporters. Yeah, they really gave her a lot of praise for her strong pro-Israel position. And we also found out that she had taken a trip to Israel, which we believe was with the American Israel Education Foundation, is AIPAC's nonprofit arm. So that's definitely concerning. She has said that she agrees it could meet the definition of genocide, but it's not the forthright conviction that we're looking for in a candidate in this moment who we're really looking to have the moral clarity to take a bold stand and not be kind of hedging their bets of where special interests might come after them for speaking the truth.

53:23Yeah, that kind of feels like her vibe on a range of issues on health care as well. She's tried to kind of, you know, yeah, I'd love to have universal health care, but here's why we can't do it. Yeah, it feels like she's kind of threading a needle. You can see she's sort of pinned between the progressive lane that Abdul El-Sayed is filling and the establishment lane that Haley Stevens is filling with the backing of APEC. So that's another one where the split is going to be interesting to see. I'm not sure right now how that's going to play out. The polls have them pretty evenly matched up. All three of them.

53:55Yeah, pretty close. Yeah, there would be some interesting plays for sure in that race. Ryan, maybe you should set up for us the Nita Alam race, because I know that's versus Valerie Fushi, which is another one that I know you've done a lot of reporting on. And then we can get Corey and Casey to weigh in on that one as well. Yeah, this race, this is a rematch of a race from 2022 when Nita Alam announced her candidacy. she was a county commissioner from durham and she was close if you if you remember she was close friends with a group of uh muslim men who were a victim of a hate crime if like it was this like horrific like national story um where several men were killed in durham um and it became like huge news definitely in north carolina but even around the country and around the world and that inspired her to get into local office.

54:52So she ran, became a county commissioner. Then she ran for the House seat. And then Valerie Fouché came in with enormous amounts of backing, not just from AIPAC, but also from crypto. And she ended up only losing by four points or something. You guys might remember better, like 4 ,000 votes. It was a very, very, very close race, even though she was outspent absolutely massively. Now, North Carolina has redrawn the district, and it's actually more favorable now to an alum. If this would have been the old district, she actually probably would have won, even given the massive amount of crypto and APAC money being spent.

55:38As we covered on Breaking Points, Fouché throughout the last couple years or has kind of turned against Israel. She's made some critical comments in an interesting way. And in the back of her mind, and I would assume, but definitely in the back of my mind as she was doing it, I was like, oh, I bet she assumes that Nita's going to launch another challenge to her and sees this as a massive political vulnerability because there's just so much money on the table. And either of you guys can respond, but while you do, I'll just put up this. DMFI put out yesterday its list of dozens of endorsements of Democrats across the country.

56:23And Fouché was not on there, which is quite interesting because it either means they're so frustrated that she distanced herself from them, you know, anticipating this challenge. or they recognize that even rebranded as DMFI, this pro-Israel money is just too damaging in a Democratic primary to be public about. Yeah, I mean, I think Valerie Fouché is someone who... How do you say that? I have no idea. I actually just learned this recently. I think it is Fouché. I used to say Fouché also, but if, well, one of us is correct. Yeah, when Crystal said Fouché, I was like, that might actually be right.

57:07I just have only ever read it. Same. Yeah, I was actually corrected on it by someone from North Carolina recently, so I'll take that as gospel. But, you know, this is another interesting case because, you know, what we see happening with her, I think, is representative of the work that we're trying to achieve here. We want politicians to change their positions. We want them to recognize that they are creating a political liability for themselves by working with AIPAC and DMFI. And so I – in one sense, it's hard to know because I'm not inside somebody's head. So I don't know exactly how genuine her shift is.

57:45But I would say that paired with her somewhat critical comments of the genocide in Gaza, I think it does seem to be something of a genuine change in her position. And to that, I'll say I've spent a lot of 2025 feeling, on one hand, very immensely relieved to see such a shift in a lot of politicians and public figures and how they view what's happening in Gaza and our role and our complicity in it. Um, but on the other hand, it's so frustrating because a lot of people had to die for you to learn that lesson. And, uh, and, and it just feels like she's a little late to the game. Like I welcome the change.

58:34I hope it's genuine. I feel that it's genuine, you know, time will tell, but, uh, you know, if I have to choose between someone who was late to the game in that way on such a life or death matter, I'll take the person who was on the right side the whole time. And what are some of the other, there were a couple of other races that you guys had sent me that were ones that I was less familiar with. One is the congressional race that now Colin Allred has jumped into in Texas after he withdrew from the Senate race. Talk about a few of the races that are a little bit more under the radar for people.

59:11Yeah. So now down in Texas in the newly redistricted 33rd district. There's a candidate that we're supporting named Zeeshan Hafiz. He is going to be running against in the primary Colin Allred, who just dropped out of the Texas Senate race to go run for a seat in Congress in the House. And also Representative Julie Johnson, who's currently representing the 32nd district, is going to be campaigning in the 33rd district for 2026. Julie Johnson is an active AIPAC-backed rep. She's only taken a little over$40 ,000 from the Israel lobby, but she votes in lockstep with them. Colin Allred has accepted over$646 ,000 from pro-Israel groups, including AIPAC and DMFI in the past, although it seems he did stop taking APAC and DMFI money after the 2022 cycle.

1:00:09But again, looking at his voting record, he was a pretty reliable pro-Israel vote in the House. So in this race, we are supporting Zishan Hafiz. He's committed to rejecting APAC and the Israel lobby outright, and he's calling for overturning Citizens United to get big money out of our politics. He's never taken any corporate money. This is something that he's made really foundational and a central plank of his campaign. And these are the kind of candidates that we're looking to get involved with who really have the backbone to stand up, call a genocide a genocide and do what they can in their capacity as a federal representative to stop our complicity in this genocide.

1:00:51And that sounds like one where there's a very, very clear divide there. And if I could just jump in really quickly on both of these two races that we just talked about, you know, the North Carolina four race and the Texas 33 race, these are two primaries are coming up very soon. March 3rd is the primary for both both of these races. We are less than 90 days away. And we're also I don't sound like fundraiser, but I am one. We are coming up on the end of quarter. So, you know, if you're if you're sitting at home and you're looking for candidates to support like this is the moment to pay attention.

1:01:23This is the moment to think about these races because these are the this is the point at which we decide what the future of the Democratic Party is going to look like no matter what Ken Martin decides to bury. And Corey, tell me a little bit or Casey, whoever's, you know, wants to jump on it about California 7 and Mae Vang. Go for that one, Casey. Yeah. So Mae Vang is challenging AIPAC-backed Rep Doris Matsui. Doris Matsui is 81 years old and she's running for reelection. She actually filled the seat of her late husband, Bob Matsui, who died in Congress back in 2005. Doris Matsui is another reliable pro-Israel vote.

1:02:01She consistently ranks among the most pro-Israel votes in the Democratic caucus. And she's since married a billionaire. So she is, you know, just really out of touch with what we need in these times. She's not bringing the fight to all the corruption and the madness that we see going on in Washington. and Mai Vang has stepped up. She's a, I believe she's a city council member currently and she is outright rejecting AIPAC in the Israel lobby, corporate money. And she calls a genocide a genocide. She's really bringing the pressure to Doris Matsui who has previously not spent a lot of time in the district.

1:02:38You'll see her making her campaign stops now. You can tell she's feeling the pressure. And this kind of young, exciting candidate is another one that we're thrilled to see stepping up into the ring. And then the last one you guys had sent me, and then we had some sort of broader, more general questions, but was Cameron Kasky, who Kyle and I actually just interviewed him last week. He's running in the seat in New York that's opened up by Jerry Nadler's retirement. Very crowded primary. A bunch of people jumped into that one. What makes Cameron stand out to you guys? Yeah, so Cameron is, I mean, for one, I've followed his activism since the days of Parkland.

1:03:18And I've just been so impressed with him as an activist and the way that he consistently speaks so clearly on issues. He is not afraid to take a stand. And he has certainly demonstrated that in the short time that he's been running this campaign. There is no other candidate in this race currently that, as you said, is a very crowded primary. And yet not a single one of them in a district that, you know, heavily favored Zoran in the recent mayoral election. Not a single one of them has come out very clearly and made a stand about Israel committing a genocide or calling for an arms embargo or rejecting support from AIPAC and the Israel lobby just generally.

1:03:54So he is the most clear on this issue. And he I think he just represents such an important voice that I think would would be a real game changer in Congress. Yeah. And for people who don't know, he was there. He survived the Parkland shooting. You know, he's 17 years old. He became an activist. He talks about, you know, starting that organization sitting in his bedroom and also has really been through the ringer. You know, Alex Jones and these people saying he's a crisis actor and all that. You know, I don't know if it was Alex Jones specifically. I shouldn't say that. But there were right wing activists saying that he was a crisis actor.

1:04:28And so he has really been through the fire in terms of political activism. And, you know, I was really impressed with him when I spoke with him last week as well. How much do you so one of the questions I had for you guys that I think we touched on before and you've kind of touched on here as well is politicians are starting to get the memo of like, oh, I should say I'm not I'm not going to take APAC money. You saw Gavin Newsom after initially just being like, that's interesting. That's an interesting question saying, no, I'm not going to take any APAC money, although Ryan feels like he left himself a little wiggle room there.

1:04:59But in any case, he clearly wanted to give the impression. Exactly. That that was his answer. Seth Moulton came out. Oh, no. Even after he had asked a pack to support him, he's like, oh, I don't want anything to do with these people. So what are the follow up questions that people should be asking as it increasingly becomes clear that this is a politically toxic position? But, you know, you're going to have politicians who want to have their cake and eat it, too. Want to signal to the base like, oh, yeah, totally. I'm with you guys. I'm against I'm not going to say it's a genocide, but I'm against bad things.

1:05:29But at the same time, they still want to be able to get that that money and that support from the Israel lobby. So what are the follow up questions that people should be asking? And can I just tack on to that quickly to ask, are there new other than like Newsom doing? I don't know if anyone could pull off what Newsom did quite like Newsom did. But are there new lines that we're seeing be rolled out kind of to either mask or hedge? Is there anything people should be paying attention to specifically? Yeah, great question. Yeah, I think, Casey, do you want to go first or I can? I'll jump on Emily's point real quick there, just while I have it in my mind.

1:06:07I would say standing against sending offensive weapons to Israel is a big one for us. That is what we see as hedging. A weapon is a weapon. A bomb is a bomb. The more bombs that you send to Israel, the more for self-defense, the more bombs they have to use for offense. So that's definitely a line that we see as kind of a red flag when we're assessing candidates and we will probe to find out more. Corey, did you want to jump on that? Yeah, I think just to add on to that point, I mean, it's like Rashida Tlaib has talked about this. You know, she has said the words a weapon is a weapon. And others have made the point that even if we take at face value, even if we just accept as truth what is stated, that the weapons that we provide for what are supposed to be defensive purposes are only used in that capacity.

1:07:00Well, certainly it frees up military resources for them to be able to focus on not only committing genocide in Gaza, but also attacking their neighbors and creating hostilities in all parts of the region. So I think the only thing that sends a message because so much of our of so much of the support that goes into the the Israeli military comes from U.S. U.S. aid. The only way to send a message that we are no longer on board with with what you're doing is to say you're cut off. And that's that's the line that needs to be drawn. So we're not going to hedge and split hairs on what's an offensive and what's a defensive weapon either.

1:07:41There are very clear U.S. laws that state that if someone is receiving U.S. military aid and they are committing war crimes, which Israel very clearly has in multiple ways, then we are supposed to cut off the supply of aid. That's our own laws that we're violating when we try to split hairs and say what's defensive and what's offensive.

1:08:09how do you guys count the money uh that shows up um when it says like forty thousand dollars from pro-israel groups like is that a a pack so it's gonna be a pack and bmfi or is it also people who have previously given to a pack like what's the so up until now it has been um money from pro-israel any pro-israel pack so So there's like a whole slate beyond APAC and DMFI of these smaller groups that within the Israel lobby ecosystem. We've got a full spreadsheet of them on our website. But basically we take those PAC IDs and then just we run an FEC report. So we pull it from the Federal Election Commission and it just aggregates the data of how much has gone through the PAC to the candidate.

1:08:56That can also include like conduit contributions. So like APAC will bundle all the donor money through their website or through their portal to the candidate. So that's where those numbers. We also track the independent expenditures. So if APAC or any of their allies are spending independently to run ads or any other campaign activity on behalf of the candidate or to attack their opponent, we'll also add that into the candidate's lobby total. Yeah, that has a lot to do with why Wesley Bell's and George Latimer's totals are so high, because a lot of that was the independent expenditures. Oh, my gosh.

1:09:33They had so much money come in for them. But we are expanding on that. So as I think we mentioned the last time we saw you guys that, you know, APAC is starting to change tactics. They've always kind of done this. They've always created these like secret donation portals where, you know, donors can just go straight. They get a link straight to a person's donation page where they can donate without having to have the label APAC attached to it. But we see there's been reporting recently about how they are increasing use of that tactic, and we expect that they will. And so one of the things that we're doing with as we ramp up and we're working to expand our team is we're going to be expanding our data capabilities so that we can more carefully track these large donors that are very closely affiliated with APAC.

1:10:21They're consistent APAC donors, and they're also funneling, like, you'll see, like, big money drops that happen, you know, in a coordinated fashion. And so we want to be able to track and report on that more accurately so that we can reflect the genuine total that's coming into these reports. Yeah, you would think it would be something that LLMs could even help with. you know in other words if you've got let's say you've got a donor who has given you know more than five thousand dollars over the last several cycles to a to APAC or to DMFI so you know that that's like that's like an APAC donor and then you see them maxing out to a candidate and then on that same day you see 10 other people max out to that candidate like right you couldn't you You couldn't say that's 100 percent APAC money, but you could be like, this is.

1:11:13Yeah, exactly. It's very likely this was a coordinated. This was either a fundraiser or an email that went out to this group. Yeah. There's the hallmarks of. Yes. Yes. There's the hallmarks. For Israel information. This is actually a good segue to ask you guys, how can people support your work? Because you are continuing to expand. And as you said, this is really, you know, crunch time in terms of these Democratic primaries. But also, as I said, it's a relevant issue in increasingly on the Republican side as well. Yeah. So, for example, if you are interested in supporting any of the races that we just talked about and supporting our work in amplifying those races, a great place to go is to track APAC dot com slash endorsements.

1:11:59That will take you to a page that has all of our endorsed candidates on it that you that we just discussed. and each one of them links to a tandem donate page where you can split a contribution between between our organization and that campaign directly. Those tandem forms really are something like they they can raise a lot. I think we raised what was it over twenty thousand dollars for Afton Bain on our tandem form just in the last few weeks lead up to to that special election. So, you know, this this is a really powerful tool to amplify the grassroots effect. And it not only puts money directly into those campaigns that could really use those boosts.

1:12:38But it also amplifies what we're able to do in support of them on the IE side. Amazing. And as you guys grow, there's going to be more scrutiny on you. And because you guys are talking specifically about campaign finance and spending, it's going to be increasingly important probably to be way more transparent than a normal organization is with the spending. So would you guys commit to some sort of, I don't know, independent audit or something that tracks, track, track, APAC so that people who are like giving money, like, because you're going to have people in this world who are like, no, no, these are just grifters who are like cashing in because FEC reports are very confusing and you see money moving in and moving out.

1:13:27And it's very easy for people to just screenshot and be like, hmm, what's going on here? And then it discredits everything that's going on. So have you thought about how you're going to use some level of transparency to counteract what is like I can guarantee that's coming if it hasn't already? So we're already seeing some of that. I mean, there's been some critics from the left that just say, oh, you're just grifting. I mean, as you said, the FEC reports are out there. It's publicly available data. It can be hard to parse. Absolutely. We've always been very conservative in our spending. So we've been building up our war chest to be able to put as much as we can.

1:14:05In fact, until very, very recently, Casey and I weren't even taking a salary from the PAC. So, you know, we've been very conservative in that way that we just really wanted to build up our resources. I mean, in terms of transparencies, people can always ask us any question they have about the FEC report. That's, you know, I don't think that we've had a discussion about any specific transparency project internally. Right. Something to think about. Sure, of course. All right, guys. Well, thank you so much for taking the time. I know it is hectic and crazy and you have a lot going on. And so really appreciate your work and really appreciate your time with us this morning.

1:14:41Thank you so much. Yeah, it's our pleasure. Happy holidays. You guys too. That was great. See you later. Thank you. Thank you. All right, guys. Well, let's go ahead and wrap up the free show here. Got a bunch of interesting stuff we're going to get to in the premium half. In particular, this TPUSA conference, Ben Shapiro coming in, Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson and Tucker responds and Tucker's calling out the Islamophobes. So that's a spicy one. And Emily, you mentioned Erica Kirk endorsed J.D. Vance at this. That part I missed, actually. Last night. Yeah, it was late last night. So she's not on board for Trump 2028?

1:15:21Not on board like Dershowitz, but also. I was going to say Miriam Maddelson, again, to the anti-Semitic caricature. You guys are doing yourselves no favors. And then so. So the Erica Kirk endorsement wasn't just her. It was she said Turning Point USA is going to work on behalf of JD. So already a lot of infrastructure behind him. Rubio. Marco Rubio hardest hit. When Rubio obviously was quoted in the Vanity Fair piece this week saying he's not going to run if JD runs. And so Erica Kirk in that endorsement said that she said, we'll support my husband's friend, J.D. Vance. And so it's quite an interesting development.

1:16:04Yeah, especially after that photo that people paid a lot of attention to with the hands and the hair and the hands on the hips and whatever also makes it noteworthy. But there's a lot of, yeah, I mean, put it, I don't know, whatever. We don't have to get into Erica Kirk discourse. Not in the free half anyway. If you want more Erica Kirk discourse, you got to pay for it, people. We also have the bank wrote an interesting op ed about, you know, what really makes you an American really pushing back against like the anti-Indian hate in particular, but also the sort of like, you know, Nick Fuentesification of the Republican Party.

1:16:40Curious about you guys thoughts on that. There was a big compact magazine piece about the quote unquote lost generation of millennial men focusing on the media industry during the woke era that I would think Ryan would have some particular insights into. So a bunch of stuff. Sandy Vance also posted it. So there's politics behind it, too. Yes, for sure. So a bunch of stuff to get to in the premium portion. If you guys want to join us over there, join us at BreakingPoints.com. Become a premium subscriber. subscriber. We will probably end up doing a breaking news segment tomorrow about whatever comes out from the Epstein files.

1:17:17We have some great content that all of us put together, you know, over the past week or two to be posting over the holiday break. We'll also, you know, if there's big breaking news, we'll one or the other of us will get it together and get to a camera and break down what's going on to the best of our ability. But outside of that, guys, happy holidays to all of you I hope everybody has a restful and nice time with family with loved ones and appreciates the you know the beauties of the season and certainly I appreciate Ryan and Emily appreciate you guys appreciate what we're able to do here as well yeah love all you guys love all of the viewers appreciate it so much alright y 'all see you in the premium half black history lives in our stories our culture and the conversations we still having today.

1:18:03This Black History Month, the podcast I Didn't Know, Maybe You Didn't Either digs into the moments, perspectives, and experiences that don't always make the textbook. Let me tell you about Garrett Morgan. Bruh had to pretend he didn't even exist just to sell his own invention. Listen to I Didn't Know, Maybe You Didn't Either from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or simply wherever you get your podcasts. I Didn't Know,

1:18:331969. 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. This show contains information subject to, but not limited to personal takes, rumors, not so accurate stats, and plenty more.

1:19:10What's up, man? This your boy, Nav Green from the Broken Play Podcast. Look, it's the end of the season. The playoffs are here. But guess what? It ain't the end of your season. You can always tune in with Broken Play Podcast with Nav Green on the Black Effect Podcast Network. Not a team who ain't going to the playoffs. They're chief. It's time to rebuild. Listen to Broken Play with Nav Green from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.