Thursday Afternoon Breaking News Updates with Ben — 2/26/26

26:58We're asking again, and I want to remind everyone, we've already brought in Alex Acosta and Bill Barr for depositions. That's two Republicans in the Trump administration. So this isn't just about Democrats. This is about anyone that has any knowledge of Epstein, the investigation. I think we all agree the government failed. The government failed the victims. And what our role is, we can't we can't prosecute anyone. But what we have been doing is getting transparency with American people. We subpoena.

27:31Ben Meiselas:Again, don't invoke transparency. Just tell us the truth about what you want to do. Right. It is what it is. You know, you are a political hack and you view your job as helping the Epstein class cover this up. And that's what you want to do. So don't use the word transparency. Don't invoke survivors. You know, don't, as the Trump regime is doing now in Minnesota, as they're stopping federal reimbursements for Medicaid there. Don't act like we didn't want to do this. We're just working out the fraud, right? No, just say it. I'd have more respect for it. Maybe respect's not the right word, but I would at least be like, okay, look, they're telling us, right?

28:20I mean, look, just say that you are retaliating. You like an authoritarian leader. You don't care about the survivors. You're all involved in this Epstein class stuff. And you want to harm blue states because you believe that, you know, Raqqa, the city Raqqa, Syria, you know, when it was under ISIS control, you know, was kind of a model. You like that. You like chaos. You view Kim Jong-un as great. You view Putin as great. You like that. You like Orban. You like that. That's what you're into. You're part of that cabal and that group. Okay? That's what you like. and but don't act like you're here for survivors and you're here for transparency if you were here for transparency and Hillary Clinton says let's do this in public you would say eureka transparency that's a good idea let's do it in public that's not what you did but so just admit it just admit it don't and I think you know when I speak with a lot of young people too because I teach I teach undergrad when I'm not doing this.

29:38I think, and it's not just young people, it's people across this country. It's where I started this episode saying, I think people in general hate politics, but I think it's important that we don't move away from understanding that politics impacts humanity. And what Trump wants to do and what MAGA wants us to do is hate politics in a way that conflates everything. So we go, everything is bad. And then we accept a dystopian world and no future. That's kind of what Trump and MAGA want. What we have to recognize is that oftentimes, but not always, that politics is used to divide and obscure and to manipulate.

30:32We can recognize that. So where we need to fight back is to make sure that politics is not what's leading, but that it's our values and principles that are leading. And we find leaders who represent these values and principles that unite and bring us together and then utilize that in order to make the world a better place versus starting with personalities and this person and that person and this person said that about this person. I just want to know who's going to be fighting for my fellow Americans and people in this country who are psychologically tortured living paycheck to paycheck, if they're lucky enough to get a paycheck, who can't afford their rent, who can't buy a home, who don't see a future for their children and grandchildren, who can't access health care anymore or never could to begin with, that was too expensive for them, that see AI and data centers popping up everywhere, replacing their jobs and making their ability to live much harder.

31:39I see people who are terrified about ICE and Border Patrol, Gestapo and SS torturing and terrorizing people in the streets. I see all of that and people want help on those things. And so we need to find people who help. And if those people are Democrats, great. And if they're not, we should identify that, right? I mean, that's where, or if we want them to fight for those issues, we need to start with those issues and then find people who fight for them versus hope that people fight for them. Do you get the difference? We need, this comes from the people. And we need to make sure that more importantly than anything, that values and principles are supreme here.

32:25And I'm going to keep on talking about that here on the Midas Touch Network. So we get back from our first quick break. I want to talk more about that deposition that was just taken. I want to talk about some international news because all of this stuff is interconnected, right? I bet you didn't know yesterday. Did you know? Well, I'll ask you. Did you know that yesterday, Kim Jong-un bragged about increasing their nuclear arsenal and making it even bigger? We have a plan to strengthen our national nuclear force. We'll focus on projects to increase nuclear weapons and expand nuclear operational means and space for use.

33:04Did any of you know, like I'm just asking you generally in the chat, other than us talking about the net, did you know that was a thing that he said? And could you, and the fact that that's not talked about as even headline news, when you have that, you have the fact that off the coast of Cuba, you had a boat coming from the United States where 10 people were on it. There was a shootout with the Cuban coast guards, four people on the boat were killed, six people were detained. and we don't, that's like all the information that we have. We don't know anymore. We're on the, we're about to go to a war with Iran.

33:41Iran's rejected all of Donald Trump's demands, even though Trump said everything was obliterated back in June last. I mean, everything here, we're four years past Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Yesterday in the United Nations, the United States abstained from a vote that said we want peace in Ukraine. The U.S. abstained from that. U.S. and China abstained from a resolution urging a comprehensive just and lasting peace in Ukraine. I'm not really good at teasing what's to come after ad breaks.

34:17Ben Meiselas:I think I just told you what was going to come after. Okay. But when we come back, I'll tell you much more about that stuff. And we'll talk more about the Clinton deposition. All right, let's take our Let's take a quick ad break. A reminder, hit subscribe. We just hit 6 million subscribers. We're heading to 7. Subscribe to the Midas Touch audio podcast as well. That helps us out as well. And leave a five-star review there. All right, let's take our only quick break of the show. Hey, everyone. Ben Meisel is from the Midas Touch Network here. Let's be real. Owning a handgun for self-defense, as I do, comes with serious responsibility.

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38:09Ben Meiselas:know that Midas Touch sent you really love Mudwater shout out to them shout out to all of our sponsors right there I mean check all it out I mean it's um it is it's great stuff and majority spends a long time working on those discount codes and uh you know make sure make sure you check it out uh if you can stop box you know it it is it is critical you know it's critical you know for uh for self-defense sometimes and you gotta you gotta be safe about it as well so the discount codes are in the description this has been on breaking news i'm ben mycelis this is breaking news um while that ad break was taking place we learned that warner brothers looks poised now to sell to Paramount.

38:58Ben Meiselas:And we know that Paramount just bought CVS and Warner Brothers Discovery is now saying that Paramount's$31 per share bid is superior to Netflix's offer as the latest twist in the bidding war there. Now Netflix has four days to try to counter, which this took place, basically paramount which now on cbs we saw what happened with cbs after paramount uh the parent company skydance acquired paramount cbs and now they're going to try to acquire warner brothers and you could i pretty much guess the direction that would be taken in there i mean you know as between netflix and um paramount in terms of acquiring warner brothers i mean you pick whoever you, you know, I'll leave that for you to decide.

39:53Ben Meiselas:But I mean, what we're seeing with this consolidation under, in my opinion, under normal situations of antitrust enforcement, I'm just giving you my opinion here. None of this would survive scrutiny under actual antitrust enforcement mechanisms. But remember, the DOJ doesn't really have an antitrust department anymore. Their leadership. The number one and number two were forced out recently because big tech told Donald Trump they didn't like what was being done by the head of antitrust, who when she was announced, she was, Donald Trump did a social media post when he hired the head of the antitrust division and said, we want you to make sure big tech can't do all these, you know, antitrust consolidations.

40:41Ben Meiselas:and her background was stopping or standing up to big tech. So look, she was a Trump pick. She was someone who said that she was standing up to big tech. But as we've seen before, and as we talked about before the commercial break, it's like when Comer talks about transparency or the survivors, right? It's opposite world. They say those things, Maha, make America healthy again. They say these words, but ultimately what they're doing is making America less healthy by far with measles outbreaks. I mean, heck, you had the surgeon general that Casey Means, the nominee. She couldn't even say during her testimony for confirmation that she supports measles vaccines and that she would tell parents to get measles vaccines.

41:28The surgeon general couldn't say get measles. Couldn't in a very basic way say get a measles vaccine. So make America healthy again. they say we're going to ban glyphosate they do the opposite they they make the glyphosate a they give it the status they give it immunity and then they give it the status of the most preferred pesticide right right next to coli you've got mr glyphosate and their whole thing was running against this stuff so they're not make america healthy again they're make america a sicker again. They're not for survivors. They're against survivors. They're not against big tech.

42:09Therefore, the most helpful aid and assistance to help big tech form monopolies, which is ultimately what big tech likes sometimes. So they go to the White House because they're like, oh, wow, all we got to do is give the guy a gold nugget, give him like a brick of gold, give him a fake metal, you know, and say nice things about him. And we could avoid all of the regulatory framework that was actually intended to protect consumers. Wow. That's all we got to do. That's, you know, that's, that's, that's, that's what's really going on here. And by the way, that's Putin's tactics, right? When Putin goes de-Nazification and we need to invade Ukraine because of the Nazis and We need to denazify it.

43:01And it's like, Zelensky's Jewish. And denazification, we need to help, this is what Putin said, build hospitals and help the infrastructure of Ukraine. So we need to take it over. Does that sound familiar to you? That's what Trump's saying with Greenland and Canada, right? We need to take it over because it'll be much more prosperous. We have to do it. We're sending hospital ships, even though we're not. to help Greenland because they're sick. The people are sick there. No, they're not. It's the same mindset. In Hungary right now, as you have the Fethys party, as you have Orban's party, by Tez, losing to the Tysa party, to the opposition party.

44:00What's Orban saying now? He's saying Ukraine is about to invade. He's saying Zelensky is about to invade Hungary. That's what Orban saying, we have to protect ourselves. Zelensky is about to invade us. That's what they say. By the way, in Hungary, when Orban came to power in the past 15 years, one of the things that he said, because it's all the same playbook, was he's going to get rid of the pedos. There's deep state of pedos out there, and he's going to stop it. Well, you know what they did when they came into power, they turned their juvenile justice system, and I put that in quotes, in Budapest into a sex trafficking of underage of children.

44:46And so a lot of the protests that we see in Budapest are that the Orban regime was covering up a sex trafficking ring there while they were saying they're going after the pedos and said, all these other people are the pedos, right? There is a playbook that is used by authoritarians to destroy democracies and to destroy liberal democracies and to topple really the advancements of liberal democracies since the late 18th century to now. If we view things through the lens of purely domestic politics about what's going on in the world, I've said this before and let me say it again. If you view the problems taking place as purely domestic, gamified, Democrat versus Republican versus independent whatever politics, it's like bringing a butter knife to a fight against F-35s, where your butter knife also has a kill switch on it set up by the Epstein class.

45:56Because what's actually happening in the world, and you see it in the Epstein files, which is why one of the other reasons Donald Trump didn't want to release, is that you have this international Epstein class, You have this group of authoritarians who view themselves as masters of the universe, who use sex trafficking as a currency amongst each other to blackmail each other to get ahead with each other. But you have these people who use the same playbook to rip to shreds a world order that existed at the time, create a new world order. And in the process of destruction, they see opportunity to profit and enrich themselves.

46:41Throughout the Epstein files, you see Epstein talking to people and other world leaders before the annexation of Crimea by Russia about you should short the ruble, you should do this, you should do that. You have him talking about Bitcoin to Putin. He's referred to as Putin's money manager, Epstein is. You have him and Bannon talking about propping up secretly Jair Bolsonaro, who was the prior MAGA insurrectionist leader of Brazil, who has since been sentenced just 27 years in prison. You have Brexit being discussed, the messaging behind Brexit being discussed and how the European Union would be destroyed and ripped apart.

47:33You have all of that. And Epstein's in the middle of all of it. And you have all that taking place in the files. And so at an international level, there's an international movement of authoritarianism, an international version. MAGA is the vessel in the United States for it. Trump is a vessel in the United States for it. But in Canada, Pierre Poliev and his mutation of the conservative party there was going to be that. The Liberal Party in Australia, which is not actually the Liberal Party, it's their right-wing party, Timu, MAGA, and Denton and all those people, they were projecting in Australia a MAGA vision there.

48:18And Anthony Albanese stepped up and he won and defeated them at the Labour Party. in Canada, Prime Minister Carney was the right guy for the right moment, right? The central banker to outmaneuver Donald Trump, Canada picked the right guy for that moment. But if you look in France, whether it's the successors to Le Pen's movement, whether you look in UK, the reform party with Nigel Farage, whether you look at Fidesz in Hungary with Orban, whether you look at the AFD in Germany. I can go country by country here. You get the point. This is why Rubio, this is why Vance rushed to Hungary in order to try to prop up Orban.

49:04Orban, by the way, is doing the same stuff that Trump is doing in Fulton County. Seize the signatures of the voters, go after, get the voter rolls, intimidate people at the polling locations. I mean, what we saw in that prior post, Jeremy, that you put up of the opposition party leader was calling Orban out for, frankly, the same things that Democrats are calling. Yeah, Peter Meijer is the main opposition leader, calling out Orban for the same thing that Democrats are calling Trump out in Fulton County. Orban is doing in Hungary right now. Same stuff, same playbook. And I want you all to know that because that's actually what's happening here.

49:49Because the history of humankind has been of authoritarians, of strong men. That's what it's been. And the idea of liberal democracy, popular sovereignty, we the people. That's a revolutionary concept. But authoritarians right now don't like that. And they are utilizing social media, AI, and a disparity of information. Paradoxically, there's more information now than ever, more access to information now, more ability to acquire knowledge. Yet paradoxically, people are less informed than ever before because with the disruptions of new technology, it's allowed the authoritarians to brainwash people en masse.

50:47This is happening at an international level. Let me repeat that to create a feudal dynamic of lord versus peasant internationally. That's what's actually taking place. That's actually in the Epstein files if you analyze it through the lens of what's happening here. And it's fascinating to me as well of some of the other major resignations that are happening as a result of the Epstein files. You had the head of the World Economic Forum announce resignation today as well. He's in the Epstein file speaking with Jeffrey Epstein. Remember that guy who was side by side with Donald Trump at Davos? Borges Brend?

51:29Remember this guy right here? There he is right there. I think he was a former foreign minister in Norway. And he says, it's a pleasure to welcome Donald Trump back to Davos. At a time of significant economic, technological, geopolitical change, the World Economic Forum provides a platform for leaders from government. Well, he's now resigned because here's photos of him and Bannon this is the crew this is the team right there these are individuals I mean who are causing a lot of the pain and suffering that lots of people are experiencing internationally and then going and saying we're the ones who can save you they cause the pain they cause the issues then they want to be the ones and say let us save you from the pain that they've unleashed, including if you don't see their hands all over issues regarding mass migration, their hands are all over it.

52:31The same way when there was a fix in the United States to deal with immigration in a common sense way, a bipartisan bill that was supported by Democrats and Oklahoma Republicans. Donald Trump, when he was running told the MAGA Republicans, kill that bill. We can't have actual immigration reform because they need there to be pretexts for the terror they want to inflict. That's true everywhere in the world, what these right-wing authoritarians want. They want the chaos. They want it so that their authoritarianism could step in and solve it. By the way, just like Howard Lutnick, this guy, Borsche-Brend claimed we have no, I never spoke to Epstein.

53:15I don't know him. And then they were setting up meetings. So then after he found out, we found out that he was doing meetings, he's like, but I never knew about his criminal record. Well, then there are messages in the files of Borsche brand doing laugh emojis with Epstein, joking about his prior felony conviction for child sex prostitution, which shouldn't be called, that should be called rape, should be called child rape. But they were doing laugh emojis about it. And so he clearly knew also about Epstein's prior criminal history. These guys are just liars. They lie and they lie and they lie.

53:59So let me share with you what Democratic Congress member Garcia said, though outside of that Clinton deposition. He said, look, this committee, this House Oversight Committee, a new precedent has been set. And we're going to now, we want Donald Trump to be deposed now. You deposed Bill Clinton. We want Trump to be deposed. You did Hillary Clinton. We want Howard Lutnick to be. Let's do it. Let's go. Let's brawl. Here's what Garcia said. Let's play it. Lastly, I want to also add that this committee has now set a new precedent about talking to presidents and former presidents. And we're demanding immediately that we ask President Trump to testify in front of our committee and be deposed in front of oversight Republicans and Democrats.

54:51And that should happen immediately. He is the person that appears almost more than anyone else in the committee. And it needs to happen right now. Mr. Chair, do you distinguish at all between a president and a former president and a sitting president? I mean, is there something in there? Because they will say, wait a minute, we know what the court ruled on his immunity. We should we should oppose the person that is mentioned in the Epstein files almost more than any other person next to Ghislaine Maxwell, and that's Donald Trump. We're going to have a couple comments, and then we're going to go ahead.

55:24Ben Meiselas:There you have it, folks. That's what I want. I just want transparency. So going back to how we started this episode, we want transparency. We want the facts. We want to know what's really happening. That's all. Shouldn't it be a Democratic issue or Republican issue, an independent issue? That's all. Just tell us what's happening. Tell us. give us the facts. Let the people know. That's why the catchphrase here is show the clip, play the clip. Sorry if it's annoying, so play the clip. I want to show you what they said. So you also know that I'm not just ranting and raving like I'm telling you. Here's what he said.

56:03Here's this, here's this, here's this. And then judge for yourself. That's it. that's what this whole network is about at the Midas Touch Network.

56:14Ben Meiselas:And that's what we're going to keep on doing every day. So a reminder, show I do with my brothers, 8 Eastern, 5 Pacific. Make sure you catch that show. Excited to do that show. To be live this evening. Excited to see them. Make sure you subscribe here on YouTube. Help us get to 7 million subscribers. I'll start to remember to say seven instead of six, but I'll still, I won't say what I'm about to say. But make sure you subscribe. Help us get to 7 million subscribers and subscribe on our audio podcast. That helps a lot. So even if you don't like to listen on audio podcasts, just if you can now, just search Midas Touch, subscribe on the audio.

57:03Ben Meiselas:It helps us a lot. Okay. Thanks everybody for watching. Grateful for you. Appreciate for you. I'll see you tonight with the brothers, eight Eastern, five Pacific. Keep checking in for videos throughout the day. We love you. We're grateful for you. Shout out Midas Mighty. This has been Ben on Breaking News. Want to stay plugged in? Become a subscriber to our sub stack at MidasPlus.com. You'll get daily recaps from Ron Filipkowski, add free episodes of our podcast, and more exclusive content only available at MidasPlus.com.

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