12/3/25: Trump Plots Venezuela Strikes, Hegseth Panics Over War Crimes, Leftwing Populist Loses In TN, Tyson Wipes Out Nebraska Town

26:35And we're also being asked to trust the Pentagon's process here that the boats they're blowing up, which do look like drug boats, but they're not showing their work on that. And so we don't actually even know that they're, I'm sure they are mostly hitting drug boats. And you saw what Rand Paul said. Did you see this yesterday? From yesterday? He backed up something we reported here before based on a Coast Guard source that he said something like 21 percent of drug boats that were approached by the Coast Guard are found to not have drugs. So this is a Coast Guard whose job it is to recognize from up close.

27:12Yeah. Not even in the sky from like Tampa Bay or wherever. Right. A drug boat and say, stop. We're going to board you. and 80 % of the time they're right. 20 % of the time they're like, our fault, go on about your business. Right. We apologize. And we're not charging them. And we're not charging, right, exactly. We used to kill them, the survivors. Now we just repatriate them. Right, they're just being repatriated back to, yeah, and so it's a hell of a, I mean, it's a hell of a lift. And again, to take Rubio's point about your own hemisphere, that is actually where if you are waging regime change wars, if anything, I mean, we should be meticulous about legality of armed conflicts, period.

28:03But of course, when you're talking about a regime change war in your own hemisphere, where you could antagonize other countries and by his own logic, I'm just saying like you could make the argument that this is the type of thing that destabilizes the entire region because it sends pink waves around Latin America as people are furious. And that may actually end up happening because of all of this. I mean, this gets into the entire conversation about how this playbook has never really worked, but that's probably for another day. And meanwhile, one other piece of bizarre reporting that Sagar and I did was confirmed by Trump.

28:39So we can put up A6 here. This is a truth social from Donald Trump where I challenge you to get through all of this gibberish. You can pause this and try to read through this. But basically what Trump is sharing here is a theory that Venezuela in 2020 and also in 2008, but 2020, used their control of voting machines to flip the election to Biden over Trump. so what we had reported what Sagar and I had reported is that Rubio along with his we need to stop the drugs argument was telling Trump that Venezuela stole the 2020 election from Trump and that then that's one reason that we needed to go ahead and overthrow Maduro this was what a thing we heard from multiple sources confirmed a bunch of different ways And it was the kind of thing that in the past I wouldn't even have reported because I thought it would think it was too crazy.

29:50But I was burnt by it. Remember the Secretary of War thing? I had Pentagon sources. Oh, that's right. I do. You had that. I had Pentagon sources telling me, Pete Hegseth keeps saying he wants to change the name to the War Department. And you were like, no. I was like, that's too stupid to report. I forgot about that. So from now on, nothing is too stupid to report. So I thought this was too stupid to report. I reported it anyway. Sagan and I reported it. And here's Trump just tweeting it out. He's tweeting out this conspiracy theory that Venezuela flipped the 2020 American election. Not the Venezuela election.

30:29American election. There's a related theory that Hugo Chavez flipped Iowa 2008 against Clinton for Obama. For Obama. The caucuses. That sounds like one you'd believe. No, like I think Obama clearly won at Iowa. Yeah. Yes, we can. That was real. The Venice wheel and voting machines, man. The Venice wheel and voting machines. That goes deep. And then there's a whole theory that Elon Musk sniffed all this out and stopped it from happening in 2024. And that's why it wasn't stolen in 2024. Really? so meanwhile Winduero continues to dance we got A5 here he continues to dance yeah this I know he so we'll see like he's literally if you're listening to this he's dancing in the streets of presumably Caracas but he seems to be in good spirits he well I mean one reason I think he's in good spirits is he keeps calling Trump's bluff I think he was supposed to be out by last Friday yeah Yeah.

31:36And then so Trump keeps bringing out, bring the submarines, bring the aircraft carriers. You've got until Friday. We're bombing. You close the air. You must close the airspace and they don't close the airspace. And he's like, well, it's fine. We're not going to do anything about it. So. The deal is there for the taking. Trump just has to say yes. I think it seems like Rubio was kind of standing in the way of it because Rubio doesn't want a deal. Rubio wants Maduro killed. Yeah. He wants him out. Well, he's willing to leave. He doesn't want him just out. He wants him dead and he wants Machado put in.

32:09He doesn't want like... Yes, he wants Machado. He doesn't want a peaceful transition in elections. He wants to install a South Florida puppet. He definitely wants Machado in, right? And he does... That's why that deal... And she would get like 4 % of the vote at this point. So you can't have an election. The idea that they're going to make a deal with Maduro to have two years of his vice president is not happening. That's obviously a non-starter. So it seems like intentionally non-starter is the case. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

32:45have both been assassinated. And 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.

33:28and it will blow your mind. Listen to The A Building 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. It was nature and trees and praying and drugs. So 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 right 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.

34:16Isn'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. Come around here and my wife. Boom, boom. This is The Red Weather. Listen to The Red Weather on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You know Roald Dahl, the writer who thought up Willy Wonka, Matilda, and the BFG. But did you know he was also a spy? Was this before he wrote his stories? It must have been. Our new podcast series, The Secret World of Roald Dahl, is a wild journey through the hidden chapters of his extraordinary, controversial life.

34:56His job was literally to seduce the wives of powerful Americans. What? And he was really good at it. You probably won't believe it either. Okay, I don't think that's true. I'm telling you, the guy was a spy. Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelt's, played poker with Harry Truman, and had a long affair with a congresswoman? And then he took his talents to Hollywood, where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock before writing a hit James Bond film, How did this secret agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever? And what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids?

35:29The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote. Listen to The Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So also at this meeting, we can move over to Pete Hegseth's troubles. Also at this meeting, Hegseth continued to kind of back off of responsibility for the second strike on September 2nd that killed the survivors of the first illegal strike. Let's roll B1 here. I watched that first strike live. As you can imagine, at the Department of War, we got a lot of things to do. So I didn't stick around for the hour and two hours, whatever, where all the sensitive site exploitation digitally occurs.

36:13So I moved on to my next meeting. A couple of hours later, I learned that that commander had made the, which he had the complete authority to do. And by the way, Admiral Bradley made the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat. He sunk the boat, sunk the boat, and eliminated the threat. And it was the right call. We have his back. You didn't see any survivors, to be clear, after that first strike? I did not personally see survivors, but I stand, because the thing was on fire. It was exploded in fire or smoke. You can't see anything. You got digital. This is called the fog of war.

36:49This is what you and the press don't understand. You sit in your air conditioned offices or up on Capitol Hill and you nitpick and you plant fake stories in the Washington Post about kill everybody. phrases on anonymous sources not based in anything, not based in any truth at all. And then you want to throw out really irresponsible terms about American heroes, about the judgment that they made. I wrote a whole book on this topic because of what politicians and the press does to warfighters. So first of all, these are drone attacks that we're launching at these boats. Why are they not in air-conditioned offices also?

37:28So you reporters sitting in your air conditioned office, criticizing our commanders who are also sitting in air conditioned offices. Hey, if CENTCOM is a little warm, like get up and turn down the thermostat. Right. You can do it. You can do that. You can do it. Well, and he's coming in. Southcom, sorry. Southcom, yeah. He's coming in real hot, obviously, because they feel now with the Washington Post report that the wind is at their back. Or in their face. At their, well. In their face, right? At their back. Well, they feel like they have momentum is what I was saying. Like they feel like they, Hexeth, I think, feels really comfortable right now.

38:08Oh, interesting. Yeah, I think so. I think they feel like it's turned. Because of the Times story or the, wait. Because the Times, yeah, the Times' pushback on the Post report, which obviously the Times story and you've been posting about this is planted. It was planted. But it was basically identical. Well, but Hegseth feels he's like completely off the hook now because that's a distinction with a difference. Whether or not he came in and said, out of here, or whether he just said, quote, kill everyone. And the Admiral was the one who. Here's where I disagree with you. Because the Post story, the one distinction is that the Post has him saying kill everybody.

38:43Right? Hegseth acknowledges he ordered lethal kinetic strikes. Yes. And he keeps repeating this phrase, lethal kinetic strikes. Lethal kinetic strike means kill everybody. So what he's trying to say is he didn't say it colloquially. He just said it in the military term. But the Post story didn't say that Hegseth ordered the second strike. What the Post story said is that Bradley interpreted the lethal kinetic strike order to mean that the second strike should be taken. And the Times said the same thing. So that's why I don't quite understand why he feels like he has the wind at his back. And that's why I was like, why his back?

39:28I thought you were mixing up your metaphor. Oh, the mixed metaphor. for. No, I genuinely think they feel totally fine. And you also saw he people on the Internet thought he was like cooked because he had in early September, September 3rd, the day of the strike, said he watched the whole thing. And now he's saying, well, yeah, but you can't really tell in the moment exactly what's going on. So anyway, all that is to say, I don't think they're worried one bit when you look at the way Hagseth is talking about. I mean, Trump would pardon them anyway. Even if there were a problem, Trump would pardon them.

40:00Trump would pardon them. Yeah, Trump doesn't care, but Trump does care about the bad press. He's always asking, how's this playing? How's this playing? And he doesn't like that Republicans are pushing back against him. Hegseth's whole approach here, if you go back and look at the time that he instituted new rules on the Pentagon and basically kicked out the whole Pentagon press corps, lines up exactly with this. And so he kicks them all out, tells them, you know, any, if you want to come and cover the Pentagon, you have to agree only to speak to authorized sources. You cannot solicit information from unauthorized sources.

40:45Another word for that is reporting. That's like journalism. And then you can come into our press briefings and then you can get a Pentagon access. And he got what he wanted. So here is how this new press corps is covering this issue. Let's roll B2. Does the Department of War plan on pursuing any sort of legal action against the Washington Post? And what consequences will there be for lying to the American people? because, of course, the implication there was that Pete Hegseth and Admiral Bradley are war criminals. It is frankly disgusting that The Washington Post would publish something that is so insanely false.

41:26And we've seen this from the mainstream media before, right? Anonymous sources that are being quoted that probably have no idea what's going on. And The Washington Post actually went so far as to falsely attribute a quote to the Secretary of Defense of War, excuse me, that he never said. That is preposterous that they would write that and pass that off as true journalism. So the Washington Post, I think readership should think twice before reading that outlet again. It is disgraceful that they call themselves journalists. And we told them as such, right? We get press queries like we do from all of you.

42:00We told them this story was completely fake news on Thanksgiving evening with a three hour deadline and they still published it anyway. It's disgraceful. My point there is they are feeling pretty good now. I feel like they think they flipped the narrative. And I think that's why you saw Hegseth going in so hot at the cabinet meeting. And they're now having reporters. If you were listening to this, you missed in the corner of the screen, Matt Gaetz. And right behind him, James O 'Keefe. James O 'Keefe right behind him. So the Pentagon. This is an SNL called open. Indistinguishable from an SNL called open.

42:33That clip was from a Pentagon press conference. This was about a half hour long yesterday where the new Pentagon press corps is all like MAGA new media. And Matt Gaetz, former Congressman Matt Gaetz, was there, actually asked a good regime change Venezuela question. I don't know what you thought about Gaetz's question, but he was like, what's your plan? And he was wearing his representative Matt Gaetz jacket. She didn't even understand the question. If she did, she answered a completely different question. It seemed like she didn't even understand it. He asked, hey, when we did the Iraq war, debathification turned hundreds of thousands of just regular government employees into insurgents.

43:12Right. Like, do you have a plan to not do that again? Or is everybody associated with the Maduro government going to be considered a narco-terrorist? Yeah. And she answered, everyone in those boats, according to our intelligence, is a narco-trafficker. It's like, okay, you didn't listen to the question, didn't understand it, you don't know about debathification. I mean, she would have been like three at that time. I don't know how old she is. She's like, can we just get back to that guy who's asking if we're going to sue the Washington Post? Right. Because, yeah, they suck. Right. They call themselves journalists.

43:41You all are journalists. It's an amazing setup. We gave you a little badge that says journalists. How bad is the Washington Post, Kingsley? Very, very bad. That's a good question. Excellent question. They are terrible. Laura Loomer was also there. She was. She asked an adversarial question. It was fine, yeah. I'll give her that. It was fine. It was bonkers. But she wasn't asking how bad is the Washington Post. Right, right. She asked, Muslim Brotherhood is evil, so therefore, and you're designated some of them as terrorists, so shouldn't you stop Qatar from using this American air base? I actually think that's a fine question.

44:15Yeah, especially from her right wing, like, she hates Muslims' perspective question. Like, it's at least adversarial. Yeah. It doesn't align with my politics. That's not what I ask for in a journalist. It's just adversarial is all I ask. And then there were the, it was peppered with questions from guys like that who were just like, tell us. How hard do you think you could smack the Washington Post in the mouth, Kingsley? That, yeah. Three hour deadline on Thanksgiving. That's kind of dirty. That's shitty. That's not good. That's true. I don't know if that's true, but that's not good if that's what happened.

44:52That's when you know you have the story completely nailed and you're not actually interested in hearing the lies from the government? Well, I mean, I'm sure their sources told them with great confidence what they were telling them. And so they probably, I mean, they have... In the room, notes from the meeting. Like, you don't report that without confidence. If you have high-level sources who are telling you that, the story might be incorrect, do your due diligence, but you also still have two high-level sources telling you that. So I don't know. I don't know. Who knows what went wrong on that story, if anything.

45:26But man, what a time at the Pentagon. Yes, indeed. Let's move to Tennessee, where Afton Bain did lose that special election last night. But the margin was single digits. So this is a plus 22 GOP district that Afton Bain was expected to eat away at that margin and did. Again, 22. She loses. Afton Bain loses by eight points to Republican Matt Van Epps. Eight points is a margin. Republicans are still feeling pretty comfortable about. I saw some in the GOP consultant type world like Matt Whitlock saying it's basically a five-alarm fire because if there are margin erosions like this. So 14 points in other swing districts in the midterms.

46:14That's going to be a bloodbath for House Republicans. Obviously, that math is true. Right on the other hand, special elections are special elections. We could put C1 on the screen. These are the results. And this is Tennessee's seventh, obviously, to replace Mark Green. About 97 ,000 votes as of right now, 95 percent of votes in for Van Epson, about 81 ,000 votes for Afton Baines. So we're looking at 54 to 45, basically. And Afton Bain, I think, Ryan, coming to 45, nearly half of the electorate, is definitely a win for populists. She didn't get it quite as close as people wanted to. Some people thought maybe she actually had a chance to win.

46:53Didn't come down to anything quite that close. In order to win, she would have needed kind of this almost contradictory situation, which would have been enormous excitement on the Democratic side and very little attention from the Republican side. Right, right. And so you've had this debate break out online, which has said that Afton Bain was too left for the district. So you've got the Galatius types saying if they had run a very boring centrist candidate who you couldn't hit with anything, then actually she would have performed even better. Wrong. Yeah, the problem with that analysis, and besides just vibes and feelings and, like, the, you know, bias because we like her and when I share her politics, the problem with that analysis is that she blew it out of the water in Nashville.

47:51And, you know, she wins, you know, 78-22 there. Expanded her margin over Harris by, like, 30 or something. Which, by the way, is kind of ironic because the people in Nashville are the people who actually love Nashville, who should have been devastated by that clip of Afton Bain saying she hated Nashville. And the people outside of Nashville are already going to be the ones that are like, screw Nashville. They actually do hate Nashville. Just a little point. Yeah. And what Bain was saying also was she hates the Times Square tourist part of Nashville. So she also had this one quote that was in every ad where she said, I'm a very radical person.

48:31And so the centrists are like, that's that's that kills you. It's like, OK, but the fact that she had so much support among Democrats created a situation where she had thousands of doorknockers and, you know, phone bankers and an enthusiastic base of support that then put her within two percentage points in the polls, which then brought in millions of dollars from Republicans. So it's sort of like a chicken and egg situation. Like, okay, if you have a boring candidate who doesn't generate any excitement among Democrats, then it's true that you might not get the millions of dollars being spent by Republicans.

49:19And then in a super low turnout special election, you might be able to eke out those last nine points. And you might be able to claim that district. But the problem, let's even say that that's possible. The problem there is that that's not representative of what the midterms are going to look like. So turnout wound up being roughly what it was, I think, in 2022 in this special election, which is really unusual. Like it's hard to match a midterm with a special election turnout. So people were tuned in here. And why that matters is that in the upcoming midterms of 2026, you're not going to be able to sneak through.

50:04Like everybody's going to know there's an election happening. So you actually want to play, if this is an exhibition match, you want to play on as similar conditions as possible to the regular midterms. So now you know that in a district like this, 20 plus district, Republican district, you can look for about a 13 point swing, 13, 14 point swing. Whereas if you ran some boring centrists who snuck through just based on anti-Trump turnout, that doesn't tell you as much. So that would be my counter argument to the Iglesias types that you might actually be right that if you could have kept turnout to half of what it was, that maybe enough of that tilts Democratic.

50:54But so what? Like you then get annihilated in November in that same district. Yeah. And I don't think Afton Bain, no offense, is the best candidate. I don't think anyone would say that somebody who had such a candid podcast is the best candidate. You should have said it was PTSD from the war. Something like that. But the idea that... From the culture wars, PTSD from the culture wars. From the culture wars. Well, we all have that. But the idea that this debunks the point that populists make, and I should say populists on the left and the right, this goes back to Barry Goldwater, literally. This goes back to Ronald Reagan.

51:28Goldwater had the line extremism and defense of liberty is no vice. And what was it? Moderation and appreciative justice is no virtue. And that was basically to say these electability questions that are going to send Gerald Ford or whomever aren't necessarily. I mean, Reagan himself said bold colors with paint with bold colors instead of pale pastels. And the argument was that the Reagan revolution would be politically more powerful than moderate Republicans at the ballot box because people are actually going to believe what you say. People are actually or they're going to believe you believe what you say.

52:02They may not agree with you 100 percent of the time, but it's obviously a race by race designation. I mean, if you're talking about running somebody who's super, super MAGA in the Boston area, it's probably actually not going to improve your margins. But in a special election where you can flood the zone and maybe try to sneak someone past, that is different. So at the other hand, what was the Pennsylvania race? Not Dr. Oz. Shoot, I'm forgetting the really super MAGA candidate's name who lost. And he like probably lost Mastrione because Doug Mastrione because he was like. Right. You know what I mean?

52:42Like that. Those sometimes it's obvious that you needed just a better candidate. But that'll always get used to say, oh, it's populism that's killing them. Right. And sometimes you get kooky populist candidates. Christine O'Donnell, for example. That's a fun throwback. And the problem really is the candidate. But it's often used as a smokescreen to say the populism was the problem, not the candidate was the problem. because populism can be extremely energizing, especially in little special election type races where you can send in a lot of money and the base gets really excited and you bring attention to the race.

53:17One final point, you made a really interesting observation that if they thought they could sneak Afton Bain past, they actually ended up getting a ton of Fox News coverage for the race, which probably woke up a bunch of Republicans in the area. They were covering this race a ton. Right, right. Right. So if you and maybe they would have ended up covering any race at the time just because there would be enough anti-Trump energy that the polls would show at least a competitive race. Right. It certainly made it more salacious that that they had to like, I hate country music. I hate Nashville and I'm a radical person.

53:55And, you know, all that. Well, you know, video of her like. You know, doing a sit in at the state legislature and. they had stuff to work with that got the Fox News base riled up. Nashville, 20-point swing. So even in Nashville, it didn't quite swing enough. That's significant, though. 20-point swing is massive. Yeah. You don't see that much in politics, especially with turnout that high. Right. Low turnout in Nashville, maybe you see a 40-point swing, but it's a much narrower number of aggregate votes. A Republican candidate could campaign on saying they hated Nashville and Tennessee and everyone would know what they were talking about.

54:38And that's increasingly about to happen. Like, oh, the traffic, all the New York libs and the L.A. libs all moving to Nashville. So it's actually kind of funny. Yeah, they've been running against the cities for 200 years. It's funny. Yeah. 2 ,000 years, maybe. 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 at a breaking point. Writing and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest.

55:14It 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. This is Ryder Strong, and I have a new podcast called The Red Weather.

55:57It 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. It 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, writer, 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?

56:36They have had this case for 30 years. I'll teach you sons of bitches to come around here and my wife. Boom, boom. This is The Red Weather. Listen to The Red Weather on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

57:15What? And he was really good at it. You probably won't believe it either. Okay, I don't think that's true. I'm telling you. The guy was a spy. Did you know Dahl got cozy with the Roosevelt's? Played poker with Harry Truman. And had a long affair with a congresswoman. And then he took his talents to Hollywood, where he worked alongside Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock, before writing a hit James Bond film. How did this secret agent wind up as the most successful children's author ever? And what darkness from his covert past seeped into the stories we read as kids? The true story is stranger than anything he ever wrote.

57:48Listen to The Secret World of Roald Dahl on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's take a trip over to Nebraska, Ryan, where Tyson Beef is just shedding thousands of jobs literally in a new announcement. Yeah, heartbreaking story, but it doesn't have to be over. Yes. If the federal government takes this seriously, they could reverse this. So put up the first element here. So about a week and a half ago, Tyson announced that it would be closing one of the largest beef processing plants in Nebraska in the town of Lexington. So this is a processing plant that employs 3 ,200 people in this town of just 10 ,000 people.

58:35But importantly, it will also have national implications. And it doesn't have to happen. The federal government could step in and stop this because it is probably illegal. And we'll talk about why in a second. But just for some background, nearly 5 % of the cattle that is slaughtered every day goes through this processing plant. 5 % in the whole country. 15 % of the slaughter that goes through in Nebraska every day goes through this processing plant. Now, what the mainstream press is reporting about the closure of this plant is that this is because the size of the herd is down and there's less cattle going through every plant.

59:18In 2021, the herd size was 94 million. Last year, the herd size was 87 million. So, you know, down 7 million cattle. A significant reason for that is that in May of this year, the Trump administration banned importation of Mexican cattle because of this parasite. I'm not saying that that was a bad move. I'm not blaming Trump for that necessarily because this is a parasite that would be devastating to the U.S. cattle industry if it creeped across the border. So the press seems to be mostly satisfied with this answer, that this is about the number of cattle declining, so we've got to shut down this processing plant.

1:00:08And it's a shame for this town of 10 ,000. Now, as you think about what's going to happen to this town, you put up this next element. About a week after it was announced this plant was closed, a contractor for Tyson, who basically was contracted to do like trash and cleanup around the plant, said it would be laying off its 139 workers. So 3 ,200 workers iced, add another 139 workers. And then if you think about it from there, everywhere that these workers go is now screwed. Fast food restaurants, regular restaurants, shopping centers, everywhere. This town will be wiped off the map if this is allowed to stand.

1:00:55uh but so i hinted earlier why why might this be illegal uh dan osborne is making this point so dan osborne as as viewers may recall was the independent senate candidate who lost to deb fisher last time but he's running again who's the pete rickets pete rickets like a billionaire right yeah like it's almost comical at this point like so he's running as a billionaire senator named Pete Ricketts. Give me a break. And so he's making the point that this appears to be a violation of antitrust law. So let's run through Osborne's argument. We can unpack this. So he says, I believe Tyson's decision to shut down its Lexington, Nebraska plant instead of selling it is a ploy to manipulate cattle and beef markets in violation of our antitrust laws.

1:01:45Let's move to the next one. He says, We have an antitrust law in the books right now called the Packers and Stockyards Act. This law was passed in 1921 to protect farmers and ranchers from concentrated abuse of monopoly power in the livestock industry. The act makes it illegal for meat packers to, quote, engage in any course of business or do any act for the purpose or with the effect of, and that's important, manipulating or controlling prices or restraining commerce, unquote. Quote, by shutting the plant down instead of selling it to a competitor, Tyson is driving down the prices they have to pay to ranchers for cattle and driving up the prices they can charge to consumers for beef, which is the, quote, manipulating or controlling price or restraining commerce part of the aforementioned act.

1:02:32This plant in Lexington, he goes on, accounted for 5 % of beef production in the U.S. By shutting down a plant that produced such a large portion of beef in this country, Tyson will cut demand for cattle and reduce the number of buyers competing for ranchers' livestock. With this increased leverage, Tyson will be able to pay ranchers less for their cattle because ranchers will have precious few alternatives to sell to, if any. This is why a monopolized food system is so dangerous. Nebraska ranchers will suffer the most because they will lose a local buyer. Normally, when a politician speaks, I would try to interpret it a little bit for people and put it into language that you can understand.

1:03:10But I don't think I need to do that here. Emily, what was what did you think when you saw this this news and Osborne's reaction to it? I mean, it's amazing how Dan Osborne, who is getting some support from national dem organizations, is still technically running as an independent. But this guy has his finger on the pulse of the conversation in a way that no establishment politicians do. And obviously, Dan Osborne has a background where you can see. I mean, you and I talk about this a lot. Like maybe the biggest barrier to entry is just class in politics and journalism. And Dan didn't come from the traditional political background.

1:03:52He's still just a couple of years into his political journey. and it shows because he understands. But also I just have to add, like this was a really sophisticated, I think, analysis. Yeah, straightforward. Of how - Clean, get it. But concentrated power. I mean, and that is just, it's not just that it's hard for people to talk about because they're taking a bunch of money from billionaires and whatever. It's that they have never really bothered to care and they don't understand that the average Nebraskan sees this as kind of a class issue. Like, obviously, it's going to have an economic devastating and devastating economic ripple effect.

1:04:32But on top of that, it's also infuriating to people because it looks like billionaires organizing the economy in a way that they profit and the normal people get screwed. And so there's just it's almost a culture war. You know, it's economic superficially, but it's I think it hits people as a culture war question, if that makes sense. Yeah, no, I think so. I mean, what could be more culture war than destroying an entire town? Right. For multimillionaire, billionaire profits. Massive corporations hurting the little guy. Right. Like, that's what it is. And so the counter argument that you'd see from folks who support the free market would be, well, A, they would just say, let companies do whatever they want.

1:05:16And we don't like federal laws like antitrust laws, period. Oh, but they'll like the laws that help them consolidate their power. Mm-hmm. They do like that. Yeah. But the other argument that they would make would be, well, Tyson has been reporting in its quarterly reports that it is losing money, losing significant amounts of money at its processing plants, that because the cattle herd is down, that they're operating at a loss and you can't require them to operate at a loss. I would say that the counterargument to that would be that they're cooking the books, that because they have such market control and because they are so friendly with the other big three companies, they're basically setting prices.

1:06:05and the processing plant part of their operation is overall a part of their price setting. And so they might be reporting on their books that they're taking X loss when it comes to the processing. But the business that they're doing in the processing is directly related to their control of the supply that goes out to the market, which is related to their ability to set prices. Right. Which, and they're doing quite well overall. So it's like, okay, you're not really, okay, you're claiming to be losing money on the process, but actually it's furthering this extremely profitable monopolistic business that you're operating, which will now be more profitable because of Osborne's point that now you're going to pay farmers less who are going to have to drive their cattle much further and you're going to cut supply further, which allows you to then increase prices at the grocery store for people who are buying beef.

1:07:10By the way, the Trump administration is talking constantly about beef prices. And actually, Brooke Rollins talks about cattle. They know, they're populist enough to know that it's a serious concern and problem in the economy. And so that puts Pete Ricketts in a rather interesting position because Pete Ricketts is not really a populist. And so here you have the competition between Dan Osborne, who's technically an independent, and a Republican who probably doesn't really want to talk about all this stuff, even though he's not like a realignment Republican. He's not going to like to talk about this at all.

1:07:48Right. And so it sets up a very— He's going to want to say, well, it's such a shame. Yeah. And we should be there for the workers and we should retrain them. Exactly. Exactly. Learn a code. you can expect something that sounds a little bit like that and this uh just underscores the point that we have to take a trip out to nebraska to cover this campaign because it's really becoming interesting it was always going to be interesting but yeah he's the he's a mechanic um and he the only major poll i know of was released by osborne's campaign itself found him trailing 46 45 to rickets It's going to be like, this will be close.

1:08:29The new poll has him leading. Anyway, so it's going to be a close race. And I think that Osborne is going to just hammer this point over and over. And if Trump, so here's where politics and electoral politics can be useful. Like, hey, if you're in the Trump administration and you're watching and you want to deprive Osborne of this issue, because you want to save your billionaire buddy Ricketts, tell Tyson they have to keep the plan open. That you find it to be in violation of the Antitrust Act. They might do that to neutralize the problem. Do it. I mean, they obviously have a really closely divided Senate.

1:09:08The Senate is in competition, so they may honestly just... Do it. Like, you let this plan close, you are probably going to elect Osborne. The Tyson pact gives more to Republicans than Democrats. That probably doesn't surprise anyone, But I'm sure they have an open line of communication with Tyson. And let Ricketts take credit for it. Let him come in, be like, look, I saved this plant. Maybe it'll happen. And like that, the point is to make people's lives better. So if this threat of Osborne, like, you know, one of the things that was the best for American workers throughout the second half of the 20th century was the threat of communism.

1:09:48And so the American government and American companies were much more generous to workers because of the threat. Osborne is not the Soviet Union, but Osborne's the threat.

1:10:01So keep the plan open or you get Osborne. How about that? How's that for a deal? What an interesting – well, actually, I was telling Crystal this recently. You and I were texting, and I was like, should I watch Roger and Me or Bowling for Columbine? And you were like, I was trying to choose between the two on a Friday night. So a very exciting life. And Ryan was like, you've got to do Roger and me. And it's funny because Roger and me is so coded. Like it was then coded as like left wing hippie stuff. But it's now so coded as Trump is. It's America first. Yeah, it's America first. But what Roger and me does a really good job zooming into is how these plants are part of an ecosystem and a really fragile ecosystem.

1:10:44And so what can happen is sad, just like personally sad, obviously, but also it's like devastating a swath of a state of that can when it ripples out. It's not just about the plant. It's not just about retraining those workers, telling them to learn to code. It can devastate the culture of an entire region. It's criminal. It's a crime visited upon this entire community. And all that is to say, Dan Osborne is getting out in front of this because he has good political instincts. And anybody who's not in Nebraska is behind the ball. Like they're missing it. Also, the other thing you could say is factory farming is evil.

1:11:26Well, there's that. So maybe the Trump administration actually is just strongly against factory farming. I want to know what Robert F. Kennedy Jr. thinks about... And wants to reduce the amount of suffering from animals. Let's hear from RFK Jr. about the Tyson plant.

1:11:51On the Adventures of Curiosity Cove podcast, what if there's more to the story than we've been told? This Black History Month, Adventures of Curiosity Cove invites families into a playful mystery that blends history, science, and imagination.

1:12:10As Ella and her friends investigate a missing peanut butter case, they uncover the legacy of a brilliant innovator. George Washington Carver? And learn how curiosity fuels creativity. In this Black History Month adventure, Adventures of Curiosity Co. shows kids that asking questions, thinking creatively, and imagining what's possible can lead to amazing discoveries. Because history isn't boring. It's full of surprises. at Curiosity Cove. Listen to Adventures of Curiosity Cove every Monday from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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