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Okay,
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Happy Monday, everyone. Welcome to the Joy Reid Show. I hope you guys had a fabulous weekend. Big up to everybody in the chat. Hello, everybody that's listening. On YouTube, on Substack, on Facebook, Our Twitchies on Twitch. We're still working on what we're going to call the LinkedIn fam. I say LinkedIn were like, I don't like LinkedIn or whatever. We love y' all that are on LinkedIn. Who knew you could watch content on LinkedIn? I didn't know, but apparently you can, and we appreciate you are watching us there. I'm looking at the chats right now. I'll pop over here and look at these Twitchies and say hi to them. Strong and mighty. The strong and mighty Twitch Army. We're going to call you guys an army because why the hell not? It doesn't. How many does it take to make an army? I don't know. But however many of you are in Twitch, that's our army. Right now, we're declaring you to be a Twitch army. There are 478 twitchies.
C
Wow, that number is growing.
B
478 twitches. Thank you very much, Winnie.
C
I just would like to say good evening, family. Let's have a good show today.
B
You're in the dark. It's like you're. It's like you're an anonymous.
C
I don't have my lights turned away, but I'll turn them once I get my. I just want to say that that question I put in the beginning. I'm serious, y'.
B
All.
C
I am not feeling this. This happened this weekend, but I'll wait till the show starts. Have a good show.
B
Okay. All right. Well, Jason, he's like. It's like I'm doing an interview with somebody that is obscured because they're like an anonymous interviewee. That's what Jason is looking right now. Because in the dark, I am.
C
So nobody knows it's me.
B
Yeah, exactly. You're.
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You're.
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You're obscured. You're the camera obscura. But thank you all for. For being here. Don't forget, by the way, there are so many people voting in our Vontel promo. Me put that up again. We're going to give you guys a little more time because I'm. I can't tell you which, but two of the eyeglasses are tied. Okay? There are three entry entries in this. You can see them all there. Okay? The block. Amina, Tiffany Black, and 7th Avenue Merlot. Two of them are tied. And it's like, not a big difference between the number, you know, one and two that are tied and then the third one. But we want you guys to. We want to break the tie. So we're going to actually extend this. We're going to try to give you the answer today. But thank you to everyone who's voted. Hundreds and hundreds of people have voted in this. I'm so excited about the response that this has gotten. But we need a winner. We can't have a tie. It just doesn't work that way. So we're going to give you guys a little more time, hit that QR code so you guys can vote so that you can break the tie. We need it to be, like, a definitive answer so that we can decide. This is going to be like stage one of deciding what kind of glasses we're going to be that are going to become our readers. But we also want you to go to shop. Go to shopredbag.com if you love any of these three glasses and you want to buy a pair for your mom or for yourself, Mother's Day is coming up. To gift yourself, gift your mom, you use the code. I believe it's the code is Joy to. To get a discount from us and you. And they'll just give you what you get.
C
10% off. Use code JOY.
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10% off. There it is. Okay, so you have to remind me by putting it on 10% off if you use the code. Joy at checkout. If you want one of those glasses, take advantage of it. This is our Mother's Day special. We want you to make sure you gift your mom or gift yourself however you want to do it. But vote, please vote for me. I'll set you free. You can go to shop.joyread.com or shop.joyanre.com or shop.thejoyreadshow.com we give you so many options.
C
Or just scan this QR code or
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scan QR code makes it even easier. Okay, that's it. We need you guys to vote. Vote for me. I'll set you free. So we all know what's happened over the weekend. I'm going to tell you right now. Jason and I declined all the parties we didn't do. We did nothing, okay? Did nothing. I started watching andor Aren't you glad
C
we didn't go out this weekend?
B
Aren't you glad I was binging paradise? I finished all the the.
C
I got to catch up on some work and stuff. I'm so glad we didn't go out
B
there and waste, you know, we just didn't feel like it, like we really were not in a party mode. So apologies to all the wonderful people substack and YouTube invite us. There was no way we were going to that White House correspondent dinner. Okay, I'm done with that. The last time I went to that, that cursed dinner, I got Covid because I, I had FOMO and I was like, I gotta get out of the house. And I went and put a beautiful dress on, got on the best lesson, best dress list for a few places. But I caught Covid and everybody I was with, nobody else caught it, just me. And I had a mask on the whole time. Like, how did I get to go? And also I just feel like the dinner became ickier over time. And I think I've talked about on the show, I've, I stopped like being in favor of it. Right. It felt just too, it's a little too incestuous for the media to be kikiing up. You know, I saw, you know, the head of the White House Correspondents association, great journalist from CBS News, just kiki kiing with Trump on the day. As gross it should. It's not something we should be doing. Hello, Oakland, California, hello to everyone, Big up to wherever you guys are watching from. Do throw in the chat where you guys are watching from. We love knowing where you guys are at and where you're watching from. But yeah, the bottom line is we decided, Jason and I to skip it all. We literally were housebound over the weekend. We did none of the things. And I'm actually glad all that we know that went on is our good friend Jim Acosta got accosted by a pro like Epstein Apart, psychologist weirdo at the substack party who got all in his face and threatened to fight him. We know that some of the people who did go to the dinner, Georgia Ford posted on her social media that some of them, particularly some of the black journalists who went, they went because they were going to protest. They actually planned that when Trump started insulting the media, they were going to get up and maybe walk out or protest. That was part of what they were doing. But it never happened because as I'm sure you know by now, there was a disruption. And today Cole Thomas Allen, a 31 year old part time teacher from Torrance, California who is a teacher of the month in 2024. He's like a like super geek scientist who went to Caltech, which is one of the hardest colleges to get into in the country, super smart, interesting guy from Torrance, California, apparently came all across the country to Allegedly try to assassinate the President. Hold on a second. We're going to keep telling the story. So he's, he has been indicted today. He was officially indicted for attempted murder against the President, United States. He's facing life in prison. Okay, that was the drama of the weekend. Well, that, and you know, that, that fight at the subsequent party that we missed. But as Jason just kind of indicated, I think the latest alleged attack, assassination attempt on Trump, you know, it is the big news. And the right, of course, is having a ball. They've gone off to the races with it, you know, accusing anybody that even expresses dislike for Trump of fomenting physical violence against him and you know, as if it's like pro democracy people and not his like swollen, exploding cankles and that weird sword in his hand that he should be worried about. That's what he should really be worrying about himself. But, you know, they're having a time and they're sort of trying to make the most out of it to say left wing violence, which is something, a narrative. They've been trying.
C
They're looking for more sympathy for Trump. For the midterms, man. Go, yeah, screw yourself.
B
Well, that, that is one way to look at it. So bad movie. Melania and Caroline are pissed. They're angry. Jimmy Kimmel, because he did like a parody White House Cor. Correspondence association dinner speech. He did like a parody of it in which he introduced Milani. Donald said, donald, this is Milani. Milani, this is Donald. That's my impression of Jeffrey Epstein. Tip your waiter. He also made a JD Vance couch stupping joke. You know, he said you can barely get him off the couch and if you leave your seats, he may try to have sex with him. So he did that. He said this was the best joke of the whole thing. He said, our first Lady Milani is here. Look at her, so beautiful. Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expected widow. Expectant widow. I mean, it was funny. But of course, Melanie has no sense of humor, just like her husband. So now she wants him punished and fired, yada, yada, yada. But, you know, to quote Melania's famous jacket, Remember this jacket? And we got a parody of it when this happened. I really don't care, do you? I mean, mine is I really do care. I gotta really don't really do care to you. We ordered this back when I was at the Artist Formerly Known as MSNBC when she did the I really don't care, do you? We ordered our own, but it says I really do care. But I really don't care. Melania, if you're sad about the joke, so what, you got a $40 million bribe from Jeff Bezos? Spend that money and be quiet. People are going to make fun of you. You're a public figure. Get over it. So she's mad about it. Whatever, whatever, whatever. I don't care. I mean, it is not our fault, you know, for noticing that every time Trump has like a problem or needs to get reelected or his poll numbers slump, somebody supposedly tries to assassinate him.
C
Someone shot you.
B
It feels like it happens a lot,
C
you know, Reminds me of the old hip hop song I shot you. And you know, you keep repeating it three times over. It's going to get older after a while. I listen, I'm going to keep it 100. I don't believe that.
B
Oh, I'll notice one more thing that Wangi is reminding me in the back, in the back room. We have a little back end chat and she was reminding me. We did do one thing this weekend. We did work a little bit. We did our Saturday morning special with Jim Acosta and Katie Fang. I actually should count, I don't count that as work. It was fun. But we did do that. Like we put pre budded the thing on Saturday. We did our own little pre bu of it, made fun of it and basically mocked anyone who was going because I why are you going? You know what I mean? We made fun of it. So we did that. That's the only work we did over the weekend. So thank you, Wanjie, for reminding me of that. It's also Aries season. We have two, we have two Tauruses and an Aries birthdays near the Wanjie and Winnie. So please wish them a happy birthday. This is their month. But anyhooms, bottom line, and I think last month was Ron, Ron, our team member Ron. So happy birthday to all. But bottom line, it's just weird that every time Donald Trump has like a problem, there's another alleged assassination attempt. I'm just saying, I'm not saying these aren't real assassination attempts. I'm just saying it is interesting and people are noticing it, right? Butler, Pennsylvania. June 4, which was four months before the 2024 election. Then a second attempt September 15, five days after Trump lost the presidential debate to Kamala Harris. Just saying. Then that's the one in at Mar a Lago where a guy ran on there. That guy's now serving life in prison for running onto Mar A Lago's property with guns. There was another one September 2025. About two weeks after Charlie Kirk was killed, this off duty NYPD officer named Melvin Ang infiltrated Trump's security detail at the Rider Golf tournament in, in New York after he showed up like armed and in full tactical gear. I think that was just a legitimately weirdo guy. I think that seems weirdo. It didn't make a lot of news. Then of course, this February, a man carrying a gas can and a shotgun was fatally shot by the Secret Service after he crashed his vehicle into the security perimeter of Trump's Mar A Lago result in Florida. Now, Trump wasn't there. He was actually in Washington at the time. The, the person was identified as 21 year old Austin Tucker Martin from North Carolina. Do you remember that his family had said he was missing? No one knows what the motive is, but those are the kind of things that do happen to presidents. Okay? Like we've seen that happen even when President Obama was in office, that these weirdos drove all the way across country, shot into the White House, but the Obamas weren't home. The bullets actually wound up lodged in the room where the girls slept, but they weren't there. But you know, these things do happen. And by the way, President Obama was the most threatened president in U.S. history. Obviously. You know, the most threatened obviously is Lincoln McKinley and the others who were actually assassinated, Kennedy. But he, he had the most threats in the modern era. But Trump seems to be like the least protected because this is, we have a little roundup of videos of what happened on Saturday. Take a look.
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Okay, so we're here on the White
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House, President Trump right over here. We saw chaos. There's Dr. O.
A
The cabinet members who were here were brushed out of this, of this dinner, the Secret Service to the stage.
B
So basically, you know, they're at the dinner and they just serve the or d'. Oeuvres. You're hearing Jonathan Carl giving his, he's very dramatic. Everyone's giving their statements. You can see up at the right hand corner the Keystone Cops. They're standing there, looked a little funny and then all ain, everybody jumps up. They, they hear these sort of, you hear of loud bangs. Everyone gets up, they get escorted out. It's like a lot of melee. The media is all involved. Trump like falls, although he now denies that he fell, but he seems to fall on his way off the stage. Weirdly, JD Vance gets, gets evacuated first. It's like there's a whole like sort of thing that's going on and everyone's yelling and, and then people sort of drift back in and sit down. The whole thing is very strange. But yeah, that happens, right? And then within like 30 minutes, Trump was already posting pictures of the suspect laying on the ground with his shirt off on his social media. And also video of surveillance camera footage of this guy running through the hotel. Let's look at that. So there's that video. Within like an hour. Like, it was very quick. Then all of a sudden that goes up. And of course the right very quickly starts finding everything about the subject because they have his name. You can put up some of these right wing posters in his day three. They're just suddenly putting up everything that you can find about the subject. They even have a baby picture of him. They have the picture of him getting teacher of the month. They have, oh, my God, he gave a $25 donation to Kamala Harris.
C
Ha.
B
You know, and of course, it turns out to be a 31 year old black man. But not even just black. Like, black in the same way as the guy who humiliated Trump the last time that he attended the White House Correspondents Dinner, which is of course then President Barack Hussein Obama. Black father, white mom. Right? And so this guy Cole Thomas Allen is black like that. And so it's like, aha, a black guy. And so they're like, aha, black man who gave $25 to Kamala. It's like $25 is not a big donation. But okay, they're making it like, see, see? Left wing violence. Just like J.D. vance has been trying to tell us.
C
Has anybody used the word alleged in this whole DAG on thing? Because he is innocent. So proven guilty. It's not like I'm defending a brother. I'm just sick and tired of this bs.
B
It is alle alleged. And here's the thing is, I did speak with a White House reporter who said that the press conference afterwards, the police chief didn't say specifically that this person shot at anyone or that they were holding a gun. There was shots. We heard four gunshots. But it's not clear whether the shooting came from the Secret Service or from this person. We were just left, as Jason has pointed out, with a lot of questions. Right? And I don't mean just we on our side or the on the pro democracy side. I mean on the right too. They were left with lots of questions. Okay, question one. Does Trump, like, just not have real security? I mean, this has got to be the worst protected president in U.S. history. Let me show you a post by Kerry Lake. Kerry Lake. Well, don't put it up yet, Jason, but Carrie Lake you remember the lady who pretended she won for Arizona governor? She just kept saying, I won, I won, I won. And then he made her the person that's going to destroy Voice of America, Carrie Lake. So she posted that when she arrived at the Hilton, nobody even tried to inspect her ticket. When she arrives at the Hilton, which is the most secured and protected hotel in the country, Jason and I have both been to this dinner. And when you get there, you have to stand in a long line, go through magnetometers. You cannot get through that front door without a ticket, without proof of identity, you cannot get in. They. They lock this thing down. If any time that a president is in a hotel, that hotel becomes a fortress. This hotel being the place they always do the White House correspondence dinner. You really can't walk in there. She said she just was sauntering on in without anybody even asking her for her ticket. All she had to show was something that looked like a ticket, and she walked right in. Which matches what Simone Sanders was saying to Stephanie Rule. We were looking at clips. We were just online looking at clips. One of the clips I came across was Stephanie Rule interviewing Simone Sanders from Miz now, and she said that the Beast, which is the. The vehicle that Trump rides around, was just cruising around in front of the hotel. People were coming up, taking selfies with it, and there was really no security. There was a Mediaite report saying the same thing, that they were going to a party nearby the Hilton, and there was just basically no real security. And then there was this hot mic moment from Fox. This is a four.
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I love that they have, like, two
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random chicks holding the front door open. We're not even trying anymore. It's just even. It's not even. I just mean, like, they're not even like, super service people.
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It's like the girls who work here
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are holding the door. Even if it was, the guys wouldn't
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even make it better.
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It's like. Like they might as well put a doorstop in. They put up a doorstop and a stage.
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Scarecrow, don't.
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With this guy. Oops. He looks and notices the camera. So they're literally joking. The Fox team is like. And so if you just for you guys to get the way this looks when you go in to the White House Correspondence center, the years that we went, that's the first area. You have to get through security to get in there. Then you go through what is supposed to be a secure location where they funnel you in. You have to line up and then you walk the red carpet. That's where I took my little red carpet picture before I realized I was catching COVID by taking off my mask and take the damn picture. But that's where everyone takes their photos. That is the red carpet area. After that area, you then go from there into where you line up to walk into the actual dinner. They're standing there like, where's the security? When we were there, it's armed security everywhere, okay? And this is both when President Obama was president and when Joe Biden was president. There's mad security in that room. They're like, where's the security? We don't see any. So that's what they said on Fox. But weirdly enough, Wolf Blitzer on cnn, he went on and he did like, four different hits, most of them by phone. He claimed it was the tightest security that he had seen in 20 years. He also claimed he was like a witness to everything, that he had gone to the restroom and that in the hallway, first he said he saw the shooter, like, he saw him shooting, but then he was really saying he heard the shooting and was ushered into the restroom. So it was very confusing. Was there a lot of security or was there no security? Most people are like, there was no security. Okay. Just all strange stuff. Then there was this hit that Caroline Levitt, the press secretary, did before the event. Also weird. Take a listen. This is April. He is ready to rumble. I will tell you, this speech tonight will be classic Donald J. Trump. It'll be funny, it'll be entertaining. There will be some shots of fired tonight in the room, so everyone should tune in. It's going to be really great. I'm looking forward to hearing it. I love it all. And you wrote most of it. You said, I can't take credit. In true Donald Trump fashion, the man puts his pen to the paper himself. So it's a lot of his own work. That's. That's Donald Trump. Don't write that. That's a lie. I mean, first of all, that's a lie. No president other than Barack Obama, who really actually did write drafts of his own speeches. Donald Trump don't write them. No, he doesn't. But she said shots will be fired. Oh, that's weird, right? Okay. Then there was this. Jason, this is a six. And you can pull the sound down as you pull. So here's that same space. Now, after the. After the shooting took place. Again, this is the vestibule. You can see beyond it, those escalators. Those are the escalators that when you walk through, you go through that security. And you go down into where the dinner is. The dinner is down. Those is down this escalator. But he's, like, standing around in his Capri pants. First of all, why is his pants so short? He's standing around these pants. And then in the center, you can see this is. Now these are all after the shots were fired. Right after the shots are fired. Remember, the shots were never fired inside the room where the people were eating. We're talking about outside. Through that opening, you can see in the back down into where people are eating. That is where that not even inside of the vest. It was on this floor that you're on right now. Right. The person never got close to where the dinner was. So nobody, like, shot at Trump, but he's just standing around. Cash Patel. I have more video of it that I'm gonna show you a little bit later. He's just standing there. He doesn't seem like he knows what to do, and he doesn't seem to have a lot of urgency about what he's doing. He's just kind of there, and it's not clear what he's up to.
C
I'm sorry.
B
He's FBI director was a stage.
C
I really hate to say. Let's just keep going. Just keep saying stage.
B
I don't know. Let's just keep going. Let's just keep going. Then there was moment where a Fox reporter was on doing a hit from inside the dinner. And then this weird thing happens. This is a seven. Let's quickly tell you. I was sitting next to Caroline Levitt, the press secretary's husband. He was one of our guests. He was seated right next to me. And, you know, right as the dinner was starting, you know, the national anthem happened. And then he kind of leaned over and said, you know, I watched you on tv. You do a great job. You need to be very safe. And he was very serious when he said that to me. And he kind of looked around the room and he said, you know, there are some. Sounds like we lost ise phone there. And this happens, by the way, especially when you have so many people attempting to utilize the same cell service at the same time. I did want to add this while we had a moment. Yeah, yeah. Wolf Blitzer did four hits and his call didn't drop. It's weird, right? I mean, she was about to say we. I would love to hear what Aisha was going to say. What was her next line? I don't know. Okay. And then you had just the reactions of some of the guests that are Weird. Let's play Dana White. This is the World Wrestling or whatever. He is like the Ultimate Fighter type of guy that's on Donald Trump's, you know, sports committee, whatever. Tables getting flipped over, guys running in with guns, and they were screaming, get down. I didn't get down. It was awesome.
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I literally took every minute of it in.
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And.
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And it was a pretty, pretty crazy, unique experience. So you were on the aisle.
A
What exactly. What exactly did you see?
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We were sitting right in front of the table. Okay, right in front of where the President. Yes.
A
And what exactly happened?
E
So someone got tackled or like, what?
D
Nobody got tackled, but guys came in looking for shooters.
B
They came toward our table. I thought the shooter was over by us or something.
E
So you didn't see the actual attack.
B
He's like, this is great. This is like the time I slapped my wife. Amazing. Just so much fun. Like what? He's from ufc, so he's like, this was great. He's like, I thought the shoot. No, you didn't think the shooter was by you because there's no shooter inside of the ballroom. This all happened outside the ballroom. You could hear the shots from inside the ballroom. But Wolf Blitzer literally said he was outside the ballroom going to the restroom, which is outside the ballroom. So that reaction is just odd. Right. Then you've got what Donald Trump did once all of this was done and they had decided they weren't going to do Wei Jiajiang, who was the White House Correspondents association president, who was the one king next to Trump. When the Oz the Mentalist puts a note in front of Trump and then all their faces change and you hear the shooting and I'm like, what's on that note? Like, curious, right? That was. That was do. That was Oz the Mentalist, that was in between Milani and Donald puts the note in front. And then all of a sudden, everybody's faces change and Wade Jiang is like, ah, that was. That's the head of the White House Correspondent association chief from CBS News. So. So all of that happens, and then Wei Jiajiang comes out and she says, we're not going to finish. We were going to go back and try to finish the evening, but we're not. They're going to do it again in 30 days. You're going to redo it. Okay. Weird. And then Trump and Ash Patel and Pete Hegsenth and the whole gang, who look very jolly, he comes out and takes full advantage of the situation. And this is a nine.
A
This is why we have to have all of the attributes of what we're planning at the White House. It's actually a larger room, and it's much more secure. It's got. It's drone proof. It's bulletproof glass. We need the ballroom. That's why Secret Service. That's why the military are demanding it. They've wanted the ballroom for 150 years.
B
Oh, so this proves we need the ballroom. Does it Trump? That's so interesting. And, of course, you know, John Fetterman agreed. Came right out there, said we were front and center. He wrote about the event, that that venue wasn't built to accommodate an event with the line of succession for the US Government. After witnessing last night, drop the TDS and build the White House ballroom romance exactly like this. Tom Petterman, please just leave the Democratic Party. You're not a Democrat. You're a Republican. Just please get out. Just go. You're already. We know you're not a debt. We get it. You. You are a MAGA Republican. We get it. Okay? And it is for all of those reasons that just even as Jason was indicating before, the top trending trend all night basically was the word stage. This is a 10. I mean, the word stage trended, like, all night. And so did Cole Allen, which is the name of the suspect. You know, Russell Brand fumbling the Bible verse, which is hilarious. We'll play that on Wednesday. Secret Service. But the stage is trending. And. And. And you. You really can understand why, right? Like, everything about this is weird. There is the thousand plus word manifesto that supposedly was sent to family members by this person, Cole Allen, 10 minutes before he allegedly sprinted through the hotel corridor outside the mags.
C
Is that the same kind of manifesto that that guy in Butler wrote?
B
We don't have a manifesto from the guidebook.
C
Exactly. Oh, they had bullets that said, I love my. Whatever he was talking about. This is all crap.
B
So. So he. So he. So he. He writes this manifesto, supposedly, and sends it to family members, which, of course, winds up in the hands of the New York Post of all papers, right? And it reads like, dear dumb diary, I, who am not an FBI agent. Right? It's just. It reads weird because it literally exempts just one person from being targeted, and that one person is Kash Patel. Let me read you just a little bit of this. This is a 11. I'm just gonna put screenshots of it. He writes a lot of apologies, apologizing to his parents for, you know, saying, I had an interview without specifying it was for most Wanted, Apologizing to my colleagues, my Students for saying I had a personal emergency. By the time I resolve this, you read this, I probably will he lots of apologies. Apologies, apologies. I don't expect forgiveness. If I could have seen on the other way to get this done, I would have taken. Taken it. Sincere apologies. And he writes on to why I am doing this. He's like, I'm a citizen of the United States, but my representatives do reflects on me. And while I'm no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes. Right. But he also, as you can see without all the apology stuff is done. He writes about the security. He says, like I expected. Security cameras at every bend, bugged hotel rooms, armed agents every 10ft, metal detectors out the wazoo. What I got, who knows, maybe they're pranking me is nothing. No damn securities. Not in transport, not at the hotel, not in the event. He says, like, the one thing, like a lot of like, like the one thing I immediately notice walking into the hotel is the sense of arrogance. I walk in with multiple weapons and not a single person there considers the possibility that I could be a threat. The security at the event is all outside, focused on protesters and current arrivals because apparently no one thought about what happens if someone checks in the day before. Like, this level of incompetence is insane, and I very sincerely hope it's corrected by the time this country gets actually competent leadership again. Like, if I was an Iranian agent instead of an American citizen, I could have bought a damn ma deuce in here and no one could have noticed. Shit. So the way this person is writing is I need you to understand that a caltech genius, I'm not sure says like this much. It's just strange sounding. Okay, I'm just.
C
Are they saying he's from California? Like California say like all the time? Is that what it seems?
E
It just seems.
B
Weird movie, California.
C
Yeah, it looks like somebody wrote this.
B
And anyway, it's giving. Dear dumb diary, I, who am not Cash Fidelity, hereby write that I am from California. Therefore, I say, like, a lot. I mean. And I'm saying he didn't write it. Again, I don't know. Okay? I'm. I can only tell you what I know. I. As a journalist, I cannot owe you things. I don't know. All I can say is things are odd, right? So they're all allegedly. And even he is innocent until proven guilty. But the thing is so interesting. So the other piece is he goes in, okay, And. And the end. And he says about him, no Longer being willing to let a pedophile rule the States of America, yada, yada, yada. He's like, you know, I was no longer willing to do it a long time ago. This is opportunity. I had to do something about it. He's probably a terrible format. I'm not in the military, so too bad. He says administration officials. And then in parentheses, not including Mr. Patel, meaning cash Patel. They are targets prioritized from highest ranking to lowest. He never mentions Trump in here. Okay. Secret Service. They are targets only if necessary. And to be incapacitated non lethally if possible. Now he sounds like he's speaking really intelligently. And no, more like, AKA I hope they're wearing body armor, because center mass with shotguns, messes. People who aren't hotel security, not targets if at all possible. Aka unless they shoot at me. Hotel security would never shoot at you. Then I'm done. Capitol Police, same as hotel security. National Guard, famous hotel security. Hotel employees not targets at all. Guests not targets at all. Right. But he. Some of the things he says are really strange. He's saying, allegedly, this person, whoever wrote that this is alleging that this person walked into the heavily guarded Hilton Hotel, the location every year of the White House Correspondents association dinner, with multiple guns, which now there's one picture that's shown up in the Daily Mail, multiple knives, and no one said anything. Do you all understand the gun laws in D.C. you have to have a concealed carry permit. You have to have a permit. Ask Enrique Tarrio, who actually got arrested for having a gun in D.C. you cannot have a gun in the District if you don't have a permit. Walking into the. The allegation would be that this guy came from Torrance, California, I guess, packed weapons in his suitcase, flew to Connecticut, drove weapons. No, no, the train was from Chicago.
C
No, it was California to Chicago.
B
California, Chicago.
C
And he took the train from Chicago
B
and then to Chicago. Okay, so took a train with the guns, went to Chicago and then. And drove to. And then drove to D.C. or whatever, something like that. Took all these guns, but walked into that hotel with multiple weapons to a very secure location. No one said anything. And just let him. And so if he really did it, why would he have gotten in? Why would no one notice? Okay. They also are saying that in this manifesto there's anti Christian rhetoric. Right? And the part that's the anti Christian part is this part where he says rebuttals to objections for what he's doing as a Christian, you should turn the other cheek. Rebuttal. Turning the Other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed. I'm not the person raped in a detention camp. I'm not the fisherman executed without trial. I'm not the school kid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration. So he goes on to sort of saying, turning the other cheek is not a thing. But it was that line about the pedophiles, I think, that really got to Trump because he was asked about it by Norah O' Donnell on 60 Minutes, and he basically dressed her down for it. Take a look. This is a Called manifesto is a stunning thing to read, Mr. President. He appears to reference a motive. In it, he writes this, quote, administration officials, they are targets. And he also wrote this. I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes. What's your reaction?
A
Well, I was waiting for you to read that because I knew you would because you're. You're. You're horrible people. Horrible people. Yeah, he did write that. I'm not a rapist. I didn't rape anybody.
B
Oh, you think he was referring to you?
A
Excuse me, I'm not a pedophile. You read that crap from some sick person? I got associated with all stuff that has nothing to do with me. I was totally exonerated. Your friends on the other side of the plate are the ones that were involved with, let's say, Epstein or other things. But I said to myself, you know, I'll do this interview and they'll probably. I read the manifesto. You know, he's a sick person. But you should be ashamed of yourself reading that, because I'm not any of those things, Mr. President. I was never. Excuse me. Excuse me. You shouldn't be reading that in 60 minutes. You're a disgrace. But go ahead, let's finish the interview.
B
The other thing that he wrote in the. The other thing in the m. You think he met you about protest too much? You think he's talking. You know, I have to tell Nora ODonnell, you know, she had to do the interview. This is what she was tasked to do. That's what CBS wanted. Bari Wise wanted to do. I, in these moments, Ms. Barbara Walters so badly because I promise you, Barbara Walters would have been like. She would be like, okay, no, she would not have taken that line down. Barbara Walters would have been up his rectum. No. Excuse me. That's what he said. These are not my words. These are the gunman. These are the alleged person assassin's words. These Are his words. If you take that as you. Why do you take that as you? Like, she should have gotten that gotten at him. That's why I don't get an interview with Trump. I'll never get interviewed. So, yeah, and so that was weird. So. So he gets all upset. He says, I was totally exonerated. No, bruh, you weren't. When were you totally exonerated? There's never been any adjudication of your role. The FBI interviewed a woman who did four interviews with the FBI making claims that you abused her sexually when she was 13 or 14 years old. That's never been adjudicated. And the one time that a sexual. Alleged sexual abuse related to Trump has ever gone to. Gone to trial in a civil trial, Trump lost. The only time that there's ever been a court case about whether Trump has committed any form of sexual abuse, he lost. Eugene. Carol won and she won a defamation case against him. He tried to say she was defaming him by saying that he sexually abused her. And the judge said that it was. Anyone else would describe what happened as rape. He grabbed her by the P word, which is something he bragged about. So, Donald, when have you ever been. That would be in the great follow up. When have you ever been exonerated? We've never had a case. Okay. Then it got even weirder, guys. So, you know, the Twitterverse, or not even just the Twitterverse, but you know, the Internet, be, be. Be doing better investigation them. And the Lego, the Lego videos and the Twitter and the, and the Instagram people and the online people, they're doing better than we in the media. They're finding all this information. They found this guy named Henry Martinez. So we're going to put this up. There's 8, 13. So this is where it gets weird. Weird. So this person calling themselves Henry Martinez joins Twitter, if you believe this screenshot. And I went, and I did do my dirt, my due diligence. I went on and I found. This is a screenshot I made. I went on and found the account. And it is somebody called Henry Martinez who joined in 2023. This person follows. No one has like maybe 4,000 followers, but a lot of them probably joined and started following after this and only has one post. And the post says Cole Allen. Weird, right? And then that image at the top is, you know, when I did a reverse image lookup, it's tied to all these sort of weird, sort of psychedelic and stuff. I don't know if that means anything. But this is. And it's got The Pepe the frog, which is a symbol back when Trump started running in 2016, the Pepe the frog became the symbol of like the pro Trump memes. And it's holding up a glass of champagne. So it's, it's very strange. There's no other posts by this person, just Cole Allen. Very odd. 2023, right? This is three years ago. Internet sleuths also tagged that Cole Allen, back in 2014, was an intern when he was a kid at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which I went ahead to track that down to make sure that I'm just not giving, serving you, you know, bullshit for the Internet. I went and found his LinkedIn and in fact he put that up at day 14. This is his LinkedIn, which does appear to be his LinkedIn, unless somebody faked a LinkedIn and put his face on there in his name. But if we, when you keep scrolling down on it, it does get to him having been an intern at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which people find weird, you know, because all those missing scientists and all the missing and dead scientists. And so people are like, huh, that's weird. So he, he is, you know, there are all these missing scientists and all these missing NASA missing people who are dealing with like nuclear stuff. And so very odd. He was also an amateur video game designer with a game that, you know, lets you pretend to be a neutron, like fighting with electrons, like super nerdy stuff. It was available on Steam. Also went to that link and verified that game is still there. You can still see it online. It's for 299, but you can't purchase it anymore because the feature to purchase it has been disabled. So verify that as well. Now, one of the latest Iran Lego videos references the game in a super cryptic way, saying that it is somehow the key to all that. But I have no idea what they mean, so I cannot give you anything on that. All I know is people are sleuthing about this guy and that weird thing. There's also this 2019 interview that the Internet sleuth dug up from a Los Angeles ABC affiliate from when this guy was a college student presenting at a conference where inventors were allowed to pitch projects to help elder people as they age. Take a look. A student, Cole Allen, developed a prototype for a wheelchair emergency brake. The wheelchair brakes tend to lock the wheels, but don't actually walk the chair to the ground.
A
The idea with this
B
is to prevent it from moving at all. Recent Aging into the Future conference held by St. Barnabas Senior Services and the Eisner foundation offered a test run on products that have the potential to enrich the lives of seniors. 14 different tech startups got to present to over 350 people in the hopes of getting their projects into some sort of senior health facilities. Weird, right? Okay. And no, I cannot verify that the woman who looks like Usha Vance is Usha Vance. I tried every way to look it up and see if that woman who looked like Usha Vance is. There's no. She was working for a law firm in San Francisco at the time. She and JD Were married, I think, very like a year before that. Cannot verify that. So people who are saying that's Usha Vance, I can't tell you that. All I know, right, is that Donald Trump has had a lot of these kinds of incidents. A17. And they're all odd, right? Whether it's the butler shooting. It's a 17. It's a butler's. Right? There's the Butler shooting. There's this. There's the other guy whose name also has coal in it. That's the black guy who turns out to allegedly be the pipe BOMBER, Brian Cole Jr. Who also has cold in his name. Another black guy with Cole in his name. Very weird. That works for bail bondsman. His parents are bail bondsman. It's just all of these cases and the thing that they have in common is that there's usually not a lot of investigation. We get the headline, the person gets arrested or killed. In the case of the person in the Butler shooting, and then the whole story's gone. Trump never talks about it again. It literally just kind of goes away. And in the case of Butler, I think one of the reasons that you're seeing a lot of doubt among people who follow the things that happen to Trump is that just weird things keep happening. Right. In the case of Butler, you have all these bystanders warning that, hey, there's a man on the roof. Let's play that real quick. Hey, there's a man on the roof. Nobody does anything about it. They're like, man on the roof. Let's just ignore that. There he is right there. Right there.
A
See him? He's laying down.
B
Yeah. He's not there. So there's a man on the roof. And everybody's like, oh, no, it's just the roof. And then you've got the weird thing in Butler where you can put this up, a 19 and pull the sound down that you've got. This shooting happens. Donald Trump is allegedly shot in the ear, although no one's ever showed us any Medical records. And then you've got this weird thing where it seems like the press was like maneuvered into a position for him to take this iconic photo. And this iconic photo happens and it's like the media is being like pulled into place to go, if there's an active shooting, everyone should be on the ground. It's just weird. And we're not allowed to ask those questions. Back when I was in mainstream media, these are questions we were not allowed to ask. It was made very clear. Don't ask any questions. Even though there's just odd things that keep happening around Trump. And we know that Viktor Orban allegedly, allegedly, according to Washington Post reporting, there was a plot by the Russians to stage an assassination, fake assassination for Orban. So all of this throws them together. You're like, when something seems to perfect people, they don't believe in it. And Donald Trump now again gets victimized by an alleged would be assassin in front of the perfect witnesses, the press, who are literally the only people who can match Trump's energy when it comes to centering themselves. That's what we do in the press, right? Instead of. Unless, of course, if it's a Palestinian journalist getting murdered in Gaza. And they don't center themselves at all. But they're now part of the story. Wolf Blitzer's part of the story. They're all putting videos up. They now are incentivized to be a part of it. Tony Dicopolis tweeting out dramatic video of Pete Hegseth and Cash Patel at his table, because that's the CBS table responding or not responding in the Capri pants. And so you get the media now is involved in the story. And all of this days after Cash and Blanche. Todd Blanche are telling you that the real source of domestic terrorism and Klan funding is not the far right, it's the left. It's the Southern Poverty Law center, the people who bankrupted the Klan. And we are being tracked 247 from our phones, from reverse cameras in our cars. We're being tracked by Palantir every day and night. And yet we're being told that nobody could have done something about someone who announces to his family in advance that he's going to try to assassinate the President. All that surveillance that we have, none of it worked in this case. He just basically walks in with multiple guns and knives. It doesn't make sense. The manifesto sounds like it was written by the FBI. I mean, it could have been written by him. We just don't know. And here's the problem. And why we'll end it here. We can't trust that the administration will tell us. Let me put a couple things up for. I know we have a guest and we're running a little long. Midas Touch noticed this and Ashley Sinclair noticed something, too, because a 21 was playable. And you have, as many of your fellow Democrats have used some heated rhetoric against the president. And do you think twice about that? When something like this happens, what rhetoric
D
do you have in mind?
B
Just talking about some of the. The fact that he, you know, is terrible for this country and so on and so forth. I understand that that's your Democratic right, but overall.
D
Yeah.
B
Do you.
D
I have a responsibility problem with Donald Trump at all. I mean, I talk about the policies of this administration. Administration, the authoritarianism like we saw on display in Minneapolis where two of our citizens were gunned down in the streets simply for exercising their First Amendment rights. Renee Good, Alex Preddy and others have, you know, died in custody. I'm talking about policies. I don't personalize it. And I certainly have never called the press the enemy of the people. I think the press are the people's best friend. And that's why it's written right there into the First Amendment. We need the press to be a vigilant watchdog.
B
So. And that. So what I have here is a 21 is the Midas Touch Ashley Sinclair video. So last week I told you guys that all of MAGA is paid and they coordinate their messaging in lockstep via group chats. And what do you know? All of these people came to the conclusion that after they saw what happened at the White House correspondence dinner, their first thought was all independently. Trump needs his ballroom. The statistical likelihood of this happening in a vacuum, if we are to stipulate that these people are not coordinated, the statistical likelihood of this happening, that they all came to the same conclusion, not probable. Okay. I think it's also important to note that one of the main group chats in which they coordinate this messaging is literally called Fight for Fight Fight after the attempt on Trump's life in Butler. Okay. And this has the official Trump war room members of the administration, including James Blair and all your favorite MAGA influencers. And I would log on and show you more of these messages, but I can't log on to Twitter because they're suing me for $75,000. You know what? Let's. We're going out of order a little bit. Let's bring in our guest, Ben Collins. He, he is the former. My former colleague at Msnbc but he is the CEO of the Onion, which we're going to get into, which is taking over the big conspiracy site Infowars from Jones very imminently. Hello, friend.
E
Hey, Joy. It's been a minute. Good to see you. How you doing?
B
It is good to see you. Good to see you too. And I won't make you get into this whole thing about the conspiracies, but I can say that since you really did follow very, very closely and in minutia the Right. So that we didn't have to. It's interesting, right, how from Marjorie Taylor Greene all the way to the left, people do not believe this assassination attempt story. And I think it's partly because Donald Trump has not earned. He's not really earned like our belief. Right. But it's also because things keep happening that feel opportune. And he's like, oh, now I need the ballroom.
E
I think that segment you just had about the people in the group chat that Ashley Sinclair was bringing up because she clearly knew, she was proud of those group chats before, where there's coordinated messaging in these moments. Absolutely. There's no question about that. Where they coalesce around one idea. They all tweet the same thing at the same time. It's like a known thing. It's a known tactic in those spaces. And I think just a way of thinking about this is, you know, these are organized information campaigns that they do at the drop of a hat when all this happened. You know, the idea that like some like 15th rate influencer would be in on a, on a, on a shooting like this is impossible. But the thing that does happen is that they are, you know, they get downwind stuff in these group decks and they say, you know, they say what they're told to say and they get in line. And if they don't get in line, the issue is, of course you lose favor with the president and then you're suddenly getting yelled at by him just like Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens or Alex Jones.
B
What?
E
Where if you're not in line for every single thing in those group chat threads, then you're suddenly an enemy. And that's how I has suddenly so many enemies.
B
Well, and also you don't get paid because the other thing Ash made very clear is these people are on payroll. So if you want that check to clear, you're going to say what needs to be said. And the last thing I'll say, we play the Dana Bash clip. The other thing that has made this, that makes this very useful to him is that now you have somebody like a Dana Bash questioning every Democrat in front of her saying, do you think maybe your rhetoric about Donald Trump has been too harsh? And he's like, I love that he said what rhetoric? And made her tell him. And she was like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna. I mean, like, when you say he's
A
bad
B
and right, what are you talking about? But you're gonna have like our former. Where we used to work mainstream media, not naming any single one specific one. They're all gonna do it. They're all gonna now interrogate every single Democrat in front of them to say, why? Why are you so are saying rhetoric that's causing people to be violent against the president? It works for him in every aspect, including that one.
E
Yeah, it's an authoritarian regime trying to criminalize protest in, you know, dribs and drabs. And this is one of the dribs or drabs that they got in front of them. They will take every opportunity and, like, that's just the way that's. That it's going to be. They're doing it to sound protest. You know, my. My girlfriend is in a month or so has a trial in front of. In front of a Chicago jury because she's the only person they haven't dropped a case against in the country because she was running for Congress for protesting ICE at Broadview. We all know now that Broadview is a, you know, a place of national disgrace. They're going to turn that detention center, hopefully into a museum of four protesters. But she's still being charged by this administration and faces up to 15 years in jail because she was standing in the street. Like, that's what happens. So they do these things. They do they. In the process, by the way, is the point the. These interrogations of Jamie Raskin and, you know, yelling at people, yelling everybody to get in line. That's the point. They don't fully expect results. You know, this campaign to get Jimmy Kimmel taken off the air, even if they don't get him taken off the air in the next day or so or whatever Melania Trump says, it's not necessarily the end goal. The end goal is to get everybody else afraid of ever speaking up.
B
Yeah, indeed. Let's talk about Infowars. Jason, if you could play B1 for us. His response, Alex Jones response to you guys, take over infowars. And I apologize to everyone in advance for what you're going to see. You will not be able to unsee it. Fire off Whenever you're ready, folks.
E
The Onion has stolen the shirt off of Alex Jones's back at this point, and it's a sad thing to see. Are you an employee of the Onion now, Alex?
A
No.
B
We laugh about this, but a year
A
and a half ago, they announced that
B
they now owned us. Yep.
A
And it was all a fraud. This time they haven't had a court
B
hearing and they're announcing they own us.
A
Which shows with this judge that's been super corrupt, the state judge, it's already done deal. But don't worry, we got a bunch of legal avenues.
B
It'd be one thing if they just
A
shut us down, but then they are
B
telling New York Times and I've seen more videos. They're going to misrepresent. If you played the trailer. Yeah, they're going to misrepresent. So what is it that you're going to misrepresent? They said he went on to say that you all are going to be wearing his skin, but I'm now seeing his skin. And if you wear it, you're going to need a deep disinfectant.
E
Yeah, I'm good. I'm going to keep mine, Joy. I think that's. I think I've decided to keep my skin over that one. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know what he's talking about, but, you know, he's. That's what happens. Look, the guy has got. The guy got sued for $1.4 billion by the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting and their families, and they have not received a penny to this day. We are just trying to get them a few pennies in this process and take over that website, maybe provide something better in the world. He has been sort of hand in mouth trying to get money from Elon Musk and Donald Trump or help in some way to try to avoid paying the settlement. We just didn't give up. We decided in the age of all these other places giving up and just handing over their rights. You know, we're not going to let that happen to these families. And we, we're going to take over in fours, hopefully on Thursday. Knock on wood. You know, we hope this, we hope this judge comes to this. The obvious conclusion that, you know, we keeping this thing in our hands and not his is probably a better idea for the families and their. And their creditors. But, you know, we'll see how it goes. Please, again, cross your fingers. Someone up.
B
We want everyone to subscribe, by the way. First of all, the Onion has always been one of the most hilarious, the most Hilarious. You know, promoters of, of, of fake news. Right. But the thing that's so wild is I did wonder, like, what does the Onion do in an era where the actual news reads like a skit from snl? Right. Like, what do you do if you write comedy when the reality is comedy, tragedy?
E
Yeah, it's, it's harder. It definitely requires professionals. There's no question about that. I think a lot of the non pros have washed out in the last couple of years. Yeah. But like, usually we're just a little bit ahead of the game. I mean, I think it was six weeks ago we put a headline that said, RFK Jr. Colon, I'm six raccoon penises away from curing cancer. And then it came out like two weeks ago that he cut off a raccoon's penis to try to. For study is what it said. For studying. And I. Roadkill, by the way. Roadkill, raccoon penis. And sometimes we're just gonna be a little bit, we're just gonna be, you know, 1.5 months ahead of things that are actually happening and maybe a little bit more exaggerated. He only needed the one raccoon penis and he didn't need all six. So that's just the way it's gonna be for the next few years. And hopefully at some point in our lives, we will be less relevant. And that's my goal.
B
Yeah, I, I, you are, I cannot imagine. Because you're right. And there's nothing so absurd that you could write that people won't mistake for real headlines. Because the things that you guys are writing sound exactly like reality. Talk about some of the people that are writing that are doing this, like, what is, you know, who's on this, who's part of this?
E
Yeah. So Infowars, when we take that over, will be done by Tim Heidecker, who is a. Who does. We didn't know this until we hired him, but does a masterful Alex Jones impression. But he's also, he did a 14 hour long Joe Rogan parody where anytime he comes up to saying a sentence or point like something sounds like a real point, he changes the topic. So nothing happens for 14 hours. That's. That's the kind of professional comedian we need in this moment. In terms of the writers, you know, they are. Every day they go in, there's. Most of them have been there for over 10 years or Chief has been there for 30 years. And every day they go in with like 15 headlines. Says like 150 or so headlines in the room. Maybe 200. And they leave with, like one or two. So we throw away 99% of our jokes and we end up with RFK's raccoon penis story. And somehow it works out. Yeah.
B
Exit question to you. Are you as feeling as liberated as I am not being at mainstream media? Because I know you and I, we both had the issue of trying to say things on social media that social media people fully understand and people that are in corporate media being like, you can't say that.
E
Yeah, yeah. I remember Joy and I used to text about this all the time, just to be real with you guys.
C
But it was.
E
It was a rough ride. We were just like, I'm pretty sure
B
this is what's going on in Palestine.
E
Not.
B
Not good. It's not good.
E
And that was not a shared commonality among everyone at that moment. And also, like the Elon Musk, we're way ahead of the game on that shit. And they were, man. They. They really held onto him until the last breath. The lady who sold our ads became the CEO of Twitter.
B
I just like what is happening. It is very dystopian. You can write about it in the Onion. I appreciate you, Ben Collins. It is so good to be back in touch with you. I'm glad that you are back out in public life, and I expect to steal some of your time as often as possible to get you back.
E
Can I plug our paper quickly? We are the 5th or 6th largest newspaper in the United States now, which is hilarious almost. Yeah, exactly. We were so close to being the Washington Post, which is very funny. So if you want to get one over on our friend Jeff bezos. Membership the onion.com get it? It goes to your house. It's really good. It's good for you.
B
So membership the onion.com. you guys, please subscribe. Because, look, by the way, it's actually more honest in this, in a sense, than Jeff Bezos sometimes. Some people watch the Post are doing great work, but it's Jeff Bezos paper. You probably want the Onion.
E
Yeah, we're much better than their op ed page.
B
Let's put it that way. 1,000% better. Yes. We're going to make sure that we put the link in the description so that people can directly click and go ahead and subscribe away. Thank you, my friend. Best of luck to you. Come back soon.
E
Absolutely. See you soon, Jay.
B
Cheers. Thank you very much, y'. All. This is. It's going to be good. Ben is one of the smartest people out there, and I actually want to make sure we cover his girlfriends story too. I'm gonna text him about that too. But let me really quickly let you guys know that we are and it is so apropos our, our first sponsor that we want to bring up here. And here it is. This is the book. The book is called Bullies, Parasites and Slaves. Human history is filled with thieves, bullies who take because they can, and parasites who steal by stealth and deception. And they still exist today in neighborhoods and in nations in communism, socialism and capitalism and democracy and dictatorship. They thrive within any system by manipulating it to their benefit and denying others what they need. So Dr. George Byron Koch. He is a Silicon Valley executive from the early foundation of Oracle and other former startups. 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But it starts by going to www.bps.online or texting CARE C A R E to 51151 1. If you do the text, text fees may apply. Now once you read it, I guarantee you're going to want to talk about it with your circle of friends and family a lot. So get the book and then we can change our world. I want to also note that the Joy Read show is brought to you by our friends at Wild Alaskan Company. Now look, Jason and I were talking about this the other day. I, I'm now a, a snapper girl. Like, you know, I like lots of different kinds of fish, but I'm a snapper girl. It is so good. But what you really want is you want, you want high quality food, not low quality like mystery seafood. You want to know that you're getting quality because your health matters. And your health means eating clean, eating fresh, eating stuff that is, has got easily accessible ingredients that's healthy, that's filling, that's genuinely enjoyable, but also that is eating clean. It's really important, right? So this is something that we're really doing in this year of our low 2026 because we're trying to like improve everything about our health and wellness. And Wild Alaskan Company offers the best way to get wild caught. High quality seafood delivered right to your door on your schedule. So each Wild Alaskan box, do they order it in a box? It comes with individually portioned fillets, vacuum sealed and easy to prep and great for any meal, no matter how quick or elevated. What if you're a meal prepper? If you're trying to like prep so you can save time, it's easy. All the fish is quick frozen fresh from the Alaskan waters, which helps to lock in the freshness, the texture, the flavor and the key nutrients like omega 3s. It's fish you can trust. No GMOs, no antibiotics, no other additives. Every order supports sustainable harvesting practices and Alaskan fishermen whose history is tied to the region and the practice. This is the most important thing, the ease of it, the convenience of it, the fact that it's vacuum packed an individual so we can prep our meals because we're always on the go. We work 24, 7 over here at House Reed. So we need this kind of convenience. And also we're trying not to eat highly processed foods. We're trying to eat fresh. Wild Alaskan Company is so confident that their fish is the best that they offer you a 100% satisfaction and money back guarantee so you can try your first box risk Free. If you want to try it, go to wildandlaskin.com joy for $35 off your first order of Premium Wild Caught Seafood. That is wild alaskan.com joy for $35 OFF your first order. Thanks to Wild Alaskan Company for sponsoring this episode. Now I want to go back really quick because there is one more piece that I want to play. I just want to play this, Jason, before we go because we're getting off this topic because we talked about the Donald Trump sort of conspiracies and people not believing what he's saying. Jason, if you can pull a 23, I just want you to play this because it is clear to me that we are not the only people who have questions about Donald Trump's story. Since we had bullies, parasites and thieves, we're not saying he's one or the other. We're just saying I just want you guys to hear this real quick what Donald Trump has said himself about these multiple assassination attempts. This was before what happened just now, two assassination attempts.
A
One obviously where you got hit by that bullet in Butler. And there's a lot of frustration that we still don't know about that shooter and Butler and we don't know about his communications. We get stonewalled all the time asking questions about it. Is there frustration on your part? Will we get transparency? Will we know the bottom line story? It's very interesting because we have great people. I think Pam is incredible. I think Cash is incredible and they're doing a great job. They're being recognized is doing a great job. I was given an explanation early on, you know, sort of a little bit pre them and I thought it was strange. You know, the one guy had 18 cell phones. Okay, I have a lot of cell phones, but I have like two. You know, I call that a lot. And I think I probably make more calls than him. It's like that's all I do. And why does somebody have 18 another one, the first one, one from Butler, he had three apps, very unusual apps, and two of them were foreign apps. And then he ends up with a white shoe lawyer, meaning a super lawyer from Pittsburgh, you know, the big city. And they live outside of Butler in a little place. Where did they get this lawyer that would represent IBM and would represent ExxonMobil?
D
But you're the president.
A
Can't you find out? No, no, I know, I know, I know. I'm relying on my people to tell me what it is. You know, we have deep seated craziness in this country and I'm Relying on my people. And so far they, and they're good. But so far they. And in this case it's Secret Service. They tell me it's fine, but it's a little hard to believe, to be honest with you. Okay, it's a little bit hard to believe as I get that throbbing feeling. Yeah, yeah. I get a little throbbing feeling.
B
Yeah. Even he doesn't seem convinced that he's been given the full story. Right. There's a part of this that is because Donald Trump is not like clever enough to lie. He usually just says what's in his. What's in his. What he believes. Right. He just. Or he posts on his true social. What he, he just says what he believes on his fake. You know, the fact. They call it truth social. So I don't call it that. It's dumb. It's Timo Twitter. Because he wants you to be like, this is the truth. And they play these word games. Right. But even he seems to be like, you know, I don't know, I'm not sure I get it here. And just one last thing before we get off this topic that has also gotten people to think what is going on here? So there is a Post is a 16J's when you can find it. It's still that people have been pointing to that. Again, this is one I couldn't verify because this per his social media is not still all there the way it probably was before. This is a picture that people are claiming is an authentic picture of Cole Allen in an Instagram post allegedly wearing an IDF sweatshirt. That is the Israeli idf, Israeli Defense Forces. It's weird, right? And that has been posted as well. And this is one of the reason that people are saying we do not have an answer to what's happened. All I know is the outcome. The outcome is Dana Bash lecturing a Democrat about why you all are so mean to Trump. The outcome is Republicans and right wing social media and John Fetterman agreeing that Trump should get his 90,000 square foot ballroom. You get Mark Wayne Mullen now using this to demand that Democrats cave and fund all of the Department of Homeland Security, including ice, even though they had nothing to do with it. And you still have no repercussions in the Secret Service for having bollocks. Both the Butler, Pennsylvania situation, letting an NYPD off duty officer get right on to Trump's security details, sneak his way onto it, and now effectively leave him and the rest of the entire cabinet basically completely barely protected at the White House Correspondents association dinner. There's no repercussions to the Secret Service.
C
Three times and they messed up the first time. What did they say? Well, nothing. Second time we don't hear anything. And it's got to be the most incompetent Secret Service ever.
B
And I promise, and I promise you this guy will.
C
That's why I don't believe it.
B
He will be thrown in prison and you will never hear about it again. And that is very unusual for Trump, who cannot stop talking about himself when it comes to these attempts on his life. He never says anything more about it. In fact, he said, and this is one of the things MAGA has pointed out, he said at the RNC convention that he will never talk about it again. You would think Corey Comparatori, who's the man who was killed, would be all over Fox would be lionized as here. His family should be. Were they at the rnc? I'm not sure. Have they been invited to a State of the Union maybe? Like, are they being like, embraced? Where are they? Like, have they got, do they feel they got justice? Do they feel good about it? I don't know.
C
And again, as we discussed earlier, it's not that we're saying we're throwing wrenches into this damn thing. What we're saying is we don't know. But it's just weird that there's so many explanations and Trump knows more than he's saying. I mean, it just sounds fishy. There's too much. It just sounds.
B
Stinks too perfect. The California shooter that says like in every paragraph but is a super genius. You can't get into Caltech unless you basically have perfect SAT scores and you are a genius. And he's, and the writing is so weirdly pedantic. This guy's like a NASA level scientist. Brilliant. And it just, it's all weird. And I'm not saying he didn't do it. I am not saying that. I don't know.
C
We're just asking questions. We're just asking questions.
B
Just like with Butler, which I was not allowed to do at Ms. At the Artist Formerly Known as msnbc, we were told you must ask no questions because you're going to sound like a conspiracy theorist. You can't ask any questions. But even Trump is asking those questions about Butler. Even he is asking these questions and he should. And if I were him, I would, because I would wonder, does this Secret Service even like me? Because every time I turn around at some weirdly opportune political moment, somebody trying to allegedly kill me, if that were my Security, I would say maybe I'm firing everybody because it doesn't make sense and this is odd and I hope that journalism is still capable even though they have dinner with the President to ask journalistic questions. I would definitely love to interview anyone in Cole Allen's family. Putting that out there right now. If you guys have any information, we do have an email called News tips@the joyreadshow.com Please send us any information. And I'm just letting the the Allen family know we would love to do an interview. We'd love to talk to him. We'd love to talk to you, the family members, the siblings who received the note. We'd love to know if we think that's authentic. We have also been in touch trying to talk with the alleged pipe bombers family whose also name has Cole in it. Which is weird, you know, because I, we, we need to get to the bottom of this.
C
Just like Paula Keys 8089 said.
B
We just asking, we're just asking questions, guys. We asking, this is what we're doing. All right, let's give you one more of our wonderful sponsors. The Joy Reach show is brought to you by our good friends at 120Life. Now look, while we're asking questions, you know what questions people are not asking? Do you have high blood pressure? Because if you do, you it is the number one risk for mortality. That means doa. So it is literally the most important question you should be asking. Do I have high blood pressure? What is my blood pressure number? If you don't know it, I highly suggest you get to know it and get yourself a blood pressure monitor. Figure it out. Another thing that you could do is to change some lifestyle things about the way that you actually live your life to bring that blood pressure down. We talked earlier about eating right, eating food that is non processed, eating stuff that is natural, trying to get as much natural non processed food as possible. Another way you can do it is by drinking something nutritious. So 120 life is a 14 day experiment you can try on yourself, right? It is basically a delicious functional drink made from superfruit juices that is delicious. And that has the ancillary benefit of helping to bring down your blood pressure. It's helping. It's a blood pressure management tool that you can include in your lifestyle. And they say to you, look, just take it for 14 days, drink it for 14 days, it tastes terrific. The powdered one, this is the powdered one is extremely low sugar, one gram of sugar or if you want it pre mixed and you don't want to do the extra labor of mixing it out of this powder. And you can actually do this in a smoothie, too, which is actually quite delicious. You can also just drink the liquid one, which is the one I like, because you do it ice cold after you come out of the gym, or you do your tai chi and then drink it. It's perfect. But then the important thing is after 14 days, check your numbers and see if your blood sugar has gone down. If you feel that it hasn't, you don't feel it's worked for you, they'll give you your money back. It's not like a wellness gimmick or like a pill. It's, it's a natural, functional beverage that actually helps you with lifestyle changes. And we all know that you're in control of one thing, your lifestyle, what you do with your lifestyle, what you eat and drink is super important. So we want to promote things on this show that are going to contribute to a positive lifestyle. So if you'd like to try 120-life.com, just go to 120life.com that's 120life.com if you use the code joy or the code read, they'll give you 20% off. So try it risk free for two weeks. If your blood pressure doesn't come down again, you get a full refund. It's nothing to lose but your high blood pressure. Go to 120life.com, use the code joy or read for 20% off. These statements have not been approved by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. All right, before we get to our next guest, I want to catch you guys up on a couple of stories that you may have missed while you were paying attention to the White House Correspondents association dinner. So Trump on Sunday endorsed the idea. I know this is going to sound too crazy to be true, but it's true. He endorsed the idea of changing the name of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, ICE to the National Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, which would give the agency the acronym nice. The idea was promoted by conservative influencer Alyssa Marie last month, and this was her quote. I want Trump to change ICE to NICE National Immigration and Customs Enforcement. So the media has to say NICE agents all day, every day. She wrote in a March post on X Twitter on Sunday evening after apparently recovering quickly. My favorite post, sorry about the alleged assassination attempt. It was a response in the NBC News IG post about it. Somebody posted, oh, no, not the other ear. Sorry. It's like, don't worry, they grow back. His ears just grow back magically. Jesus grows them back. It's fine. Not the other ear. Late Sunday night, he posted great idea in all caps. Do it. So that's their new idea, is they're going to change the name of ICE to Nice. Another story that I think you all should pay attention to, which is that you know that Lev Parnas has talked a lot about what the administration has in mind to take control of our elections. Well, Reuters has caught up with Lev Parnas and they're now doing they posted a story about how systematic the planning is from the Trump regime to take over elections and to take them over in the key states that we vote in and to go one state at a time taking over the elections. And it's scary stuff. We're going to keep talking about on the show, probably have Lev back on to talk about it. But we're talking about in states like Ohio, where certain counties where Donald Trump feels that he won't have enough margin, they're looking to try to find a way to claim there's election fraud and then use the courts and other means to try to seize control of the elections in those states. And clearly they're worried about Ohio because they're definitely worried that the midterms are going to go the other way. And so they're trying to do things to ensure that they don't. One more story along this vein is that in the state of Florida, even though he's no longer a Trump ally, Ron DeSantis went on Fox and he previewed a new gerrymandered map of Florida. Of course, he previewed on Fox is where he previews everything that shows Republicans being rewritten into four additional seats and Democrats essentially being down to nothing. The Democrats would only, in this redrawing of the map, have a handful of seats in South Florida and nothing else. So just know that while we're paying attention to Donald Trump's 18th assassination attempt, where nobody ever gets anywhere close to him anyway. So he's clearly fine. It's just the Secret Service don't care about him. They're still plotting very aggressively to take over the election, very, very aggressively to take over the election and to force ICE to be still omnipresent, likely also at polling place. So the idea here is don't take your eye off the ball. While we're paying attention to the goofiness and foolishness and the tomfoolery of this regime, they are doing some very Serious planning to try to stay in power forever. They don't actually intend to ever leave power. They intend to stay in power. And even on this build the ballroom thing, never forget, they're not just building a ballroom, they're building a bunker. And the judge that halted the construction of the ballroom on top of the beautiful East Wing, which Donald Trump destroyed without permission from Congress, the judge has said they can continue building the bunker, the 1930s style bunker. This afternoon, a coalition of clergy convened in Washington, D.C. to protest the U.S. israel. The U.S. israel war on Iran and Lebanon. Now, the coalition staged this moral Monday rally to object to the Trump regime continuing to funnel billions and billions of dollars to the war. And instead, they're calling on them to end the war and redirect this massive spending that's going to the military right now, redirect it to people in need. Take a look at this clip.
D
And Senate have failed to pass on March 4, on April 15 and April 17, joint resolutions to restrict Trump's war powers in this illegal and unholy war.
A
The slim Republican majorities in both chambers
D
have chosen to stay in lockstep with the president through nearly two months of an unholy war. By this coming Friday, May 1, the war powers act request requires. This coming Friday requires Congress to act affirmatively to continue waging war. Neither Speaker Johnson nor Senate Leader Thune have announced votes on a war powers resolution. And Trump has given no indication that he will comply with the law. That is why we must deepen our commitment to nonviolence. Witness. And while we're calling, beginning today, a
A
thousand clergy and others to send this
D
declaration directly to every member of Congress.
B
And joining me now is Jonathan Wilson Hargrove, our friend, spiritual writer, preacher and community cultivator, chair of the board of Repairers of the Breach. It is always good to see you.
D
Good to see you, Joy.
B
Let's talk about this. So this protest happened today. Walk us through what happened. Were people arrested? Where do we stand?
D
Well, you heard Bishop explaining the context that we're in. All distractions aside, there is a deadline mandated by law 60 days after, unilaterally, you know, of his own choice, analysis, whatever he calls it, waging this, this war. If Congress does not act, the President has no power to wage war. And he was noting that, that there have been votes in both the House and the Senate to, to try to limit those powers. Those have narrowly been defeated. But. But if Congress doesn't do something by Friday, uh, then this is an entirely illegal war. Now, we have been maintaining since Monday of Holy Week that it is an immoral and unjust war. And Pope Leo has made this very clear. I think most famously he's simply teaching the just war doctrine of the church which says that any war of choice is unjust, is unholy. But furthermore, and I think this is important in terms of the timing, he made a direct appeal to members of the church in the United States to call a petition their members of Congress to demand peace. That was his word, demand peace. When Trump made the social media post about annihilating a civilization. And that is very specifically a response to another part of just war doctrine. It comes out of Vatican II which says that any total war is entirely immoral, cannot be sanctioned by the church under any circumstances. It's actually in that document that the church produced. It was a, a gathering of bishops that happened over two years in Rome really about, you know, what, what, what the teaching of the church means in the modern world. They've re, they thought about the whole just war doctrine and they said that any total war in a nuclear era would necessarily be unjust and that, and that no member of the church could support it. So when a threat of total war came from the U. S. President, the Pope was speaking as the lead teacher of the church to all its members to say that they had to do anything they could to demand peace. So that's what moral Mondays are doing. That Catholic social teaching and just war doctrine is one moral tradition, but really any moral tradition leads us to oppose this kind of war of choice and this sort of threat to whole civilizations. And so moral Mondays have been directed at the White House and at members of Congress to make this appeal to demand an end to the war making and to reinvest that money in the real needs that are here at home. And today's announcement was really a moral escalation of that demand. There are 266 Members of Congress that have not supported this effort to rein in the president's war powers. We are calling on moral leaders and clergy to have gatherings at as many of those offices as possible in communities and to use those gatherings not only to petition their members of Congress to end this war, but also to use those gatherings as really nonviolence workshops to, to, to have an upsurge of nonviolence and of using all of the tools of non violence. I mean, voting is an essential tool of nonviolence. You were talking about voting earlier, but there, there are other things that we have to do. This coming Friday, you know, there's a mass Withdrawal of economic support of normal participation. That's also a non violent tactic. Civil disobedience is a nonviolent tactic. We are, we are calling people to use all of the available tactics, including for young people. And this is the final thing I'll say on this, is that this year is the first year in US history when 18 year olds are automatically registered in the Selective Service. And so we are saying that all of these Moral Mondays are places where 18 year olds can go and publicly make known their conscientious objection to war and use that to register that they, while being automatically registered, they're not going to go into a potential draft to support this immoral war. The conscientious objection status is legally protected in the United States and you have to make that public. So we're inviting young people to come to Moral Mondays and make that conscious objection public.
B
That is a huge, huge, huge thing. Because I think that people don't understand the consequences if you don't formally acquire conscientious objector status. You can lose your access to student loans. You know, if you go by the Muhammad, you know, back in the day Muhammad Ali was arrested, you know, and, and went to jail saying, I'm not going to go and fight Vietnamese people who didn't do me anything. He didn't do anything to me and I'm certainly not going to do it. They never called me the N word, never did anything to me and I'm not doing it. And had to give up his belt, you know, his, his championship belt. But the idea that young people today are being conscripted without their, unwillingly, without their consent into a military industrial complex that is fighting in an immoral way. Even, you know, there shouldn't be war at all. But these are being fought with AI tools that are choosing little girls schools as targets, with AI tools that are allowing Israel and the United States to wipe entire Lebanese towns off the, off the map, to wipe effectively Gaza off the map. I saw a video over the weekend of some little kids trying to have school outside because their school is gone. All the schools are gone, all the universities are gone, all the hospitals are gone. What do you make of this moment, Jonathan? Because you have Bibi Netanyahu who constantly uses the Bible to try to justify his genocidal policies. He's constantly quoting the Bible. But now he's facing a Pope who, you know, I like the previous pope, but this Pope, this Pope throws that Bible down on the table every day and runs it right back at him and Trump and he's like, he's not being mean. He's very soft spoken. He's like, I got this Bible too, and I'm going to use it for what it's really meant for.
D
He has the Bible and he has the teaching of the church. This, this is not his personal reading of the Bible. This is a, a deliberative process that many people have participated in over generations. You know, to go back to the issue of conscientious objection, it was also an issue that the Second Vatican Council took up. So in addition to condemning total war, the Second Vatican Council also said that the church affirmed conscientious objection as, as something that should be legally protected. And so, you know, while Muhammad Ali was doing that, as a, as a good Muslim, good Catholics have the authority of the church to, to tell them that, that there is a place for people of conscience to come forward and say, I, I will not engage in this violence. I'm not, I'm not refusing to serve my community. I'm not refusing to be a citizen. I, I'm saying that I believe in the power of non violence, and my conscience tells me that, that I have to prepare to use all of the tools of non violence. So that's why we believe this is a time for intensifying moral struggle. And really, you know, like, like we had in the early 1960s in this country, we need nonviolence workshops in communities all across the country. You know, churches where people are coming together, mosques where people are coming together, synagogues where people gather, community centers where people consider what can we do with the moral traditions that we have inherited and the power of love to resist the evil that we see in front of us. And that is a strength that I think we've seen this president doesn't know what to do with.
A
Right.
D
He's apoplectic in response to a pope who doesn't have to yell, who doesn't have to scream, who's very measured, but who is speaking in moral authority. Moral authority is stronger than the strongest strongman. And I think that's why Donald Trump didn't have any idea what to do with it.
B
The other thing about it that I'm seeing and Moral Mondays really does epitomize this is, it's a beautiful ecumenism. Right. It's been a long time since we've been able to hear the clarity of Muslim voices, Catholic voices, Protestant voices, Baptist voices, Kojic voices, you know, all really working together. I mean, really, probably since the Vietnam War. I think you did see it a little bit during the war against Iraq under George W. Bush. I did remember seeing that kind of ecumenism, but that is back big time, right? I mean, you're seeing, I mean, Moral Mondays is a mix of all faiths. And as you said, they're all speaking from the same Abrahamic playbook and even people of no faith. There's, it's everyone at the table together. And I think that actually is, is powerful.
D
Yes, indeed. In D.C. today, midday, in addition to Bishop Barber, who sits right in that, you know, Christian church Disciples of Christ tradition, but the rabbi beside him blowing the shofar, you know, there's that, that's a, that's a great moral tradition also. I just came from the Moral Monday at Senator Thom Tillis's office in Raleigh, North Carolina. And you know, we had Catholics, we had Episcopalians, we had Methodists, we had Baptists. We're North Carolina Methodists and Baptists are all over. But also, you know, people who, no particular faith tradition, but deep matter of conscience for them. People who came. We had two powerful veterans share their stories. I didn't learn about their faith traditions, but they were sharing from their experience of being sent to war. One in Iraq and one in Vietnam. Both of them saying, you know, it's, it's, it's terrible what happens to the people that you're sent to, but it's also terrible what happens to the people who are sent and testified about that in a powerful way. So these spaces are, you're right, they're incredibly important ecumenical spaces, spaces for the broad spectrum of voices we have in a democratic society to share how our moral traditions call us together to the same resistance to this kind of evil.
B
What is next for Moral Mondays? You all came and you had this moment today. What's the ongoing work look like?
D
Well, we encourage people to go to the repairers of the breach website, breachrepairers.org because there, as of today, you can find the, the litany that we're using to create these essentially non violence workshops. Outside of the offices of members of Congress. There are 266 members who have not agreed to any of the joint resolutions that have been voted on. We think every one of them needs a moral witness. And so we're encouraging people to reach out to their member of Congress first, learn where they are right. This is the first step of non violence. Any non violent movement is committed to communicating with those we oppose. We want to hear from them and understand how they understand things and where they are. So reach out first, as we've been reaching out to Senator Thom Tillis here and then plan a, a peace rally on May 11 at any office of a member of Congress who is not willing to oppose this immoral war, that's the next step. And as we prepare for those peace rallies across the country on May 11, we're also encouraging the clergy and community leaders in our networks to reach out to those young people in our communities and invite them to participate and to use it as an opportunity to make their conscientious objection known at those public gatherings.
B
Well, I love this, and we would love to get the team TJRS folks involved and figure out ways that we can support what you guys are doing. And I am particularly, you know, as a, as a mother, I, you know, my kids are not 18, but I think if you are a parent of young people that are military age and know that they've raised that age to 42. So when I mean young, I mean young up to 42, because they have said they want all bodies all the way up into their 40s. And it's clear that they don't care enough about them to even tell us how many of them have been injured in the war that we're fighting. We don't know how many have been injured. We don't know how many are dead. We don't know anything about it. You know, we just are told we need to be for it. And we do know, per NBC News reporting, that a lot more of our bases were destroyed than we were told. And I can tell you I spoke with a source that was in United Arab Emirates who told us that. And it was a single source, so we couldn't go forward with it. But now NBC has effectively confirmed it. Our bases have been destroyed all over the Middle east, and that means people have been injured or died. Is there a final sort of word you can give us? How do we speak to our enlisted, our military brothers and sisters? Because many of them, they don't have a lot of choice. They're already in, but they have a. It's a bigger challenge voicing their objections. It's a bigger risk. What is the message of Moral Mondays to people who are already in the military?
D
Well, many Americans haven't paid attention to the Selective Service for decades, since the Vietnam War, because we haven't had an official draft. We've had a poverty draft. Yes, the people who. The military. And again, we use billions and billions of taxpayer dollars to do this recruiting. But the military is recruiting from poor and marginalized communities. And those are the people, you know, people who I pastored here in this neighborhood when they were growing up. They are people who have, you know, taken the, the, the job offer and are living on those military bases in the Middle east and other parts of the world. And we, we, we need to be honest about the fact that those are the people who are bearing the brunt of this reckless and immoral war. Making Moral Mondays are really about communities taking responsibility for what's being done in our name. And we're saying that collectively, we, if, if we trust the power of non violence, we can come together and use all the tools of non violence to demand this, that this end. Like you said, for the children, the children who are already engaged and those who will be drug into this if we allow billionaires who wage war for their own profit to do whatever they want to do.
B
One of our favorite pastors, Jonathan Wilson, Hartgrove. We appreciate you so much. It's always a pleasure to have you on. Please come back often, keep us apprised of it. And we want to get involved, particularly in educating those young people who are going to be conscripted. And many of them may not even know because it's not like they're necessarily watching the news. So we would like some of them
D
on the Joy Reed show to say why they're conscious objectors.
B
Please say less. All you have to do. Text, let me know when we can get them on. And we will clear space for them and for you and for bishop, anytime. Y' all are always welcome. Your family. Thank you so much.
D
Bless you. Good to be with you.
B
Thank you so much. Pastor Jonathan Wilson Hargrove. He's great. We love, we love Bishop Barber, but we, we love, we love both of them the same. We think they're both dynamic and incredible people. Those are the repairers of the breach leaders. And this is a big deal, you guys, because, you know, we're in this moment where a war is being waged, and it's not like the one that George Herbert Walker Bush waged on TV where they conscripted the media to show the videos that they were approved, that were approved by the government to make this like a sort of spectacular video game. We were watching on tv. This is a war where it's essentially black. It's a blackout. We don't see anything. You know, I was talking, you know, with a friend the other day, and we were talking about those supposed down pilots. In a normal propaganda universe, those pilots would be all over TV. They'd be on 60 Minutes. Their families would be interviewed on Fox. They'd be lauded as these American heroes. We don't even know who they are or what they were doing or where they are or are they really not hurt or are. Are there two pilots? Like, we don't know anything. We just know that for whatever reason, there was an F35, which is a war. War plane, and a C130, which is a cargo plane over this part of Iran where they shouldn't have been. And then you have the Iranians in a Lego video saying they were trying to steal our uranium, which seems more plausible than what we're being told at this point. The Lego videos seem more credible in terms of giving you the news of what's happening than what we're getting out of the White House and the Pentagon. They're not telling us anything.
C
We'll hear about all the stuff that they did wrong once he's out of office, if he's ever out of office.
B
And that's the reason they're so afraid to lose the midterms, Right? Because if they lose the midterms, it becomes a lot harder. It becomes a lot harder to keep it all under wraps, because suddenly you have Democrats in control of the committees. They have the gavels. They have subpoena power. They can call the hearings. They can do investigations. If there's one thing Democrats are good at, it's investigations and hearings. Two things. Investigations and hearings. They're not great at messaging and things, but they're very good at those.
C
I take them. I don't believe so, because the Democrats can't even get their witnesses in the dag on House. Before they could remember last term, they couldn't get any of them inside there to testify, even when they subpoenaed them.
B
They're good at hearings, but they're not good at using power because all they had to do was have those people arrested, and they weren't willing to do that. There's a jail under the Capitol. If you refuse a subpoena, you can go to jail. They just weren't willing to play that game. You know, people are complimenting me in the substack chat about my Mory Povich conversation. Mory's great. It was so fun talking with him. We have very differing views, but one of the things we deeply disagreed on is whether the Democrats play politics at the Republicans. Of course they don't. Republicans are hardball. Republicans are ruthless. Like they, they. They don't care about the rules. They don't care about the law. They are absolutely ruthless. Democrats are like, oh, I. I have Power. But I'm so embarrassed. I don't want to, I don't want to do anything that'll upset the other side. They're my friends, and so they, they don't use the power they have. They should have just had those people arrested. If you won't testify, Steve Bannon jail. How about that? Now you want to testify? Now you can testify from jail. I mean, they need to become more ruthless. Let me, let me play this for you guys really quick. This is from Jason. This is D1 from Sky News, if you have it. Back to our royal commentator, Alistair Bruce,
D
because there they are. Alistair.
B
For the King and Queen starting this
D
state visit to mark the 250th anniversary
B
of the United States, a welcome and a salute.
E
And at the bottom of the stairs, Ambassador Monica Crowley, who is the chief protocol officer and the Assistant Secretary, Secretary of State.
B
You can turn it down? Yeah, you can. You just turn the sound down. Monica Crowley, by the way, is the Fox News, a former Fox News host who's now the ambassador to Great Britain. Everybody gets, everybody gets a taste. So they are here for a state visit. King Charles and his consort turned Queen Camila, the lady who he cheated on with Diane, cheated on Diana with, you know, that one who he promised his sons would never be called queen, but now, oh, surprise, surprise, now gets the queen title. Anyhooms, them, they, him, they arrived here for a four day visit, hopefully getting better security than that dinner. The trip is to commemorate the 250th anniversary of. Let me just check my notes here. Oh, us breaking up with Britain and dumping.
C
They may want to take us back after this.
B
We don't, they don't want us with Trump. They don't want us. And, and so basically the, the colonies, as we were called, were lost under Charles's great, great, great, great grandfather, Mad King George iii. So King George III was considered the mad king whose queenly wife, by the way, was Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg, known of course, to be the first black queen of England. If you watch. Oh, my God, I'm forgetting the name of the, of the, of the show Bridgerton. If you watch Bridgerton, they're the real, the real people that Bridgerton is based on. Okay, this is what's so crazy about this timeline we're living in. So King George iii, who was called Mad King George, he probably had syphilis, syphilitic madness. He went mad and he was king. When the colonies were lost, there was a gentleman named Charles who was sort of a viscount that they say is The Charles that lost it, he was like a viscount or something. But the actual king at that time was King George iii. And that is the fourth grandfather or, you know, great great, great, great grandfather of this Charles, King Charles. And the wife was basically the Meghan Markle of her time. She was the first black. Well, she's never gonna be queen, but she's the first black queen. Charlottesville is named after her. All, everything that's called Charlotte something, Charles something, you know, Charlottesville, that's all named after Queen Charlotte, the black Queen. And it's so odd that the, at the time of the colonies were breaking away from Great Britain, the queen was technically black according to race math, the race math that was invented by American slave owners, because that race math didn't really exist before enslavement in the United States when they created whiteness to justify enslaving Africans, right? But the, the Crown, the British crown was made uber wealthy. The wealthiest woman on earth for a very long time was always the Queen of England. And the way the, the source of their wealth was mainly slavery. They owned plantations here in the United States and across the Caribbean. And they also enriched themselves through colonization by stealing and colonizing parts of Africa and the east, you know, India, Malaysia, like they were, they were colonizers. And that colonialism and slavery is the source of their wealth, full stop. The diamonds, the jewels, all stolen from Africa, India, you know, and so that, that is sort of. And so the irony is they lost the colonies because the slave wealth that was being generated in the Americas, in the United States, those slavers didn't want to pay taxes on that slave wealth. They were getting incredibly rich people like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and they were getting exorbitantly, extravagantly rich off this slave plantation economy. And it was like a mutually beneficial economy. Like the cotton that the Queen of England preferred was Mississippi cotton. It was considered the greatest cotton, the finest cotton on earth that came from Mississippi, which was the richest of the colonies. The richest colony was Mississippi. So they were, so they had this weird sort of tragically symbiotic relationship that created great wealth for the crown. But then when the colonists decided they wanted that wealth tax free, they decided, we're out. We want our, we want our slave wealth. We don't want to pay taxes. And, and so now, 250 years later, at the Declaration of Independence, this is the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in which the founding fathers, all who are 30 something year old slave owners, declared that they no longer wanted to have a king. And now, ironically, the king of England is coming here for a state visit to commemorate that, for whatever reason. This is not something I'm. I don't understand why England wants to commemorate that. But it's Charles. So of course, Queen Elizabeth would never. Okay. Queen Elizabeth, who was a quite dignified soul, would never. But Charles is so freaking thirsty that he's like, I'm gonna take my queen, who I don't call queen either. I just call it Camilla. He gonna bring his bride on over here to celebrate with Trump. And Trump is a giant suck up to the royal family. He famously had a big crush on. On Princess Diana, who would have nothing to do with him and would brag that he could sleep with her if he wanted to, which he couldn't. Sort. Sort of like how Piers Morgan would thirst after Megan Markle. And then when she turned him down, he's like, I hate Meghan Markle. She's evil. And then he went to war against her. Right. Trump had that same sort of obsessive, you know, thing about. About Princess Diana. Yeah. But Charles's mother would never be here, Roasty toasting with Trump. She could barely stand it when Trump came over there during his first term. She looked at him like he had the cooties. But. So now they're coming over here, They've stepped up the security because clearly the Secret Service ain't ready for prime time. And Trump continues, of course, to deny that he is a king. The other thing that he yelled at, or, you know, not yelled at, but went after Nora o' Donnell about was her talking about no Kings Day, that the alleged. The alleged, you know, would be assassin, whatever we're calling him, that he allegedly was part of a no kings protest, which of course is evidence of nothing. Right. But they're like, he was in a king, no kings protest. And so Trump says, king, king. I'm not a king. If I was a king, I wouldn't be sitting here with you. He's certainly acting like a king. And he's acting like a king. That's very specifically like the English monarchy, which, again, enriched itself off the bodies of Africans, Indians, native people. They just enriched themselves in a gross and disgusting way through their rule. It is the way kings roll. The. The king gets to profit off of all in the kingdom, from slave to lord. And Donald Trump is acting the very same way. There's a guy named Coach Scott. I don't know who this man is, but he gave what I think is the best explanation of the Trump kingly. Grift. Take a look.
A
That you're looking at is $10 million in this small stack over here. To start with, this is a representation of a full century of U.S. presidents, perhaps personal wealth growth while they were in office. We're talking Coolidge, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Reagan, Bush, Bush, Biden. All of them except 14 cups. Roughly $40 million in total. And that's what all the modern presidents combined gained while serving over an entire century. Total, not per president. Now shift your eyes to this monstrosity. One year, one president, same cups, same scale, one century versus one year. Not opinion. It's visual math and your eyes are doing it in real time. So take a good look. All of the presidents, including successful business owners over here. 100 years versus less than a one year period of wealth accumulation for one president. Donating a salary is just a headline. It doesn't offset the billions quietly being accumulated elsewhere. It's if you're telling yourself it's because he's a good businessman, then ask one question. If nearly 50 years in business didn't produce anything close to this, but one year in public office did. That's not skill, that's corruption. Nothing you can say can explain this. And if you're at the point where you say, I don't care, I'm not changing, then you own it. And this is what it looks like to sell out America and call yourself a patriot. I hope you learned something. I'm always rooting for you.
B
I'm always rooting for you too, my friend. I mean, that is a brilliant explanation. Explanation of what Trump has done. And by the way, that little pile of, of cups on the other side, that includes Joe Biden, who was effectively a middle class guy before he became president. And all the wealth he's made has been like book deals. Same with Obama. They were regular. They didn't have a lot of money. The money they've made about, you know, 60 million dollar Netflix deal, that's after he was president and he was offered Netflix deals and all sorts of things after being president. None of these people did this while they were president. Everyone was like, Hunter Biden. No, Hunter Biden made a couple million dollars being on boards. People make money being on board. Some media executives are on boards, which they probably shouldn't be. This dude is making billions of dollars being president. The only other type of leader that does that are kings or people like Mobutu, dictators, people like him, people who literally steal from their country and enrich themselves and then let everyone else go hungry while they are enriching themselves off of the meat and the fat of the land. They are getting rich and fat and the rest of the people suffer. Trump is acting like a king. He is acting like all the good old kings of England that we try to get. Everything about Trump is ironic. In this 250. I'm really struggling with this 250th anniversary birthday of the Declaration of Independence. It literally is a declaration of wanting to remove ourselves from the king. And Donald Trump is behaving in every way. The king was being able to quarter soldiers in your house, effectively treating those people like they were dealing with ice. They could put you in jail without trial. You had no right to free speech. How are we different now than we were when we started 250 years ago? If Donald Trump can do all the things that Mad King George III could do, he can do almost everything that Mad King George could do to the colonize to the colonists. He could do almost all of it. Except for slavery. Oh, no, wait, they can do slavery, too, because once you're locked up in one of those ICE private prisons, guess what? You no longer have the effective use of the 13th Amendment.
C
Exactly.
B
Prison incarceration means they can even do slavery. So again, I ask you, what are we celebrating in the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence? What are we celebrating? Donald Trump behaves in every way like the king, and he does it with the Supreme Court. The sort of hands of the king saying he can do it. John Roberts has effectively said, Fuck that 250th anniversary of the Declaration Independence. Fuck a declaration. Y' all got a king because I want a king. Because they too are grifting. Don't sleep on it. Those six right wingers on the court, audit them. I would love to see how much money they're making off this shit. Do they have money that they're making in bonds? Who's buying all of those bets against the war? Who's buying all that stock and all the bombs? The president's sons own drone companies that now have defense contracts. He's giving them your money. The Trump family is grifting off of the government just like the sons of kings do. What's the difference? What did we get for leaving England if we're right back on the hook to a king who is grifting billions of dollars? Not millions. Billions.
C
Troy.
B
Yes.
C
I am so sorry to say this, but do you do realize that this guy is going to get away with all of this shit, right?
B
Of course.
C
Do you believe he's going to literally walk out of the White House a billionaire, and there's going to be nothing the Democrats or anybody's going to be
B
able to do about it, they won't do about it.
C
Truly is a king.
B
He is a king. He is a king. But here's the thing about what one can do to a king. You know, Mobutu was a king, too. Mobutu also gripped directly off of the. Of the Congolese people. He enriched himself. I mean, the guy in. You know, there are plenty of these African dictators who do. IDI Amin did it as well. You know, Trump is basically like an African dictator. He does all the same thing. You know, he's doing it now. Look, Fidel Castro did it. Castro wasn't poor.
C
I'm sure the president of Venezuela was doing it also.
B
Of course, Bolsonaro did it in Brazil. Berlusconi did it in. In Italy. I'm quite sure that.
C
But the difference is they sent Bertosconi's ass to jail, right?
B
Eventually. Eventually. And Bolsonaro, too. Eventually. Eventually, these people run out of. They run out of luck and they run out of gas. And Trump will run out of luck, too. Trump will run out of gas as well. But the question is, will Democrats push him over the ledge and will Democrats punish him? And the thing is, there are ways to punish Donald Trump. Even Donald Trump, there are ways to punish him. Because if I have a couple of suggestions about what we could do about our king, people ain't done it yet, but I wish someone would do some of these.
C
Off with his head.
B
No, One of the things that you could theoretically do with Donald Trump is that if Democrats get back in, you can strip him of the things that he values most, the things he cares about most, which is his prizes. His prizes. Because, you know, he's. He's never. He's never. He's going to live forever. You know, Donald Trump, the devil is taking care of him. Take the prizes from him. Why should he get to keep his name on the Kennedy Center? Chip that off right now. Turn the Department of Defense back into the Department of Defense, which it still is. Take that Department of War.
C
Now, now, now. You know, Hakeem Jeffries is not going to do any of that. They're not going to do it.
B
I'm giving my list. Chip all that gold off of the. Of the. Of the Oval Office and put it right back to the way it was. Knock down whatever he builds on the East Wing, take sticks of dynamite and get rid of it. If he builds an arc to triumph, destroy it. And he make him, make him live to see it. I want him to live to see it. I want Trump to live long. I want him to see it all go to go to take it all from him, take everything away. Then that crypto money. What if all of a sudden Democrats passed a law regulating the ability to hold money in crypto and froze his assets? You could, I mean, is there a way to do that, kid? He go to the Hague.
C
What about, how about investigating him and taking all that $3 billion that he's not supposed to make away from his,
B
away from him, investigate him financially. Look, Tish James did it, you know, like, maybe we need to start investigating it. Maybe the, the Supreme Court has said he's untouchable in terms of you can't put him in jail. He's essentially said he's a king John Roberts, but you can certainly investigate him, freeze those assets, and you know what else you could do. And this one is the simplest of all. And I challenge somebody from one of the international organizations. These people are war criminals. If South Africa, little South Africa, Little South Africa isn't a rich country, it is a powerful country. If little South Africa could take Israel to the Hague and fix it so that Bibi Netanyahu, Smotrich and Ben Gabir cannot travel to 2/3 of the of the earth, they can go to Washington D.C. because we love war criminals here, apparently. They can't go to England, can't go to Ireland, they can't go to Germany. He can't go to 2/3 of the earth. Because any country that actually enforces the human rights treaties that we don't enforce in the United States, we and Israel are exempt ourselves from them. But he can't go. This man is limited. Why should Pete Hagseth be able to go to Mexico on vacation ever again? Why should Marco Rubio be able to jump on a flight and go to Spain for a vacation?
C
They should be locked in this country for the rest of their days.
B
There is such a thing as a prison of your borders. And these people are war criminals. No different than Bibi Netanyahu with whom they are waging an illegal and unjust war, that every religious leader that matters has already declared it such. These fake Christians that are pretending that this is some sort of a justifiable war, they're not even using the actual Bible, they're using the Trump Bible. They're making things up. But, but all of the religious leaders that matter, whether they're Muslim or Jewish or Christian or, or, or, or Hindu, you name it. People have seen that it's unjust. So who is got the courage, the moral courage to go to the Hague and say these men are war criminals and these women, Pam Bondi, you know, all of them put make a list. Bibi is Amalek. I have, can I, can I point out one comment in the thread, Jason, that I started laughing in the middle of the clip because I couldn't. Why did one of our commentators, and I don't remember who said it, but please claim it. This is your line. Someone said maybe Melania and Camilla can exchange side piece stories or side pieces steps.
C
I didn't hear any lies there.
B
Whoever.
C
Did you hear any?
B
I didn't hear any lies but I sure did hear some laughs.
C
That was funny and I'm sure both of their ex wives could agree to that too. Donald Trump's voice. Two ex wives.
B
The ex, except for the one that
C
fell down the stairs anyway.
B
How she fell down her own stairs
C
that she been walking there for how many years? Anyway, we're going to behave. What did we say? We're just asking questions.
B
We're just asking questions, guys. That's what we're supposed to do. Let's play our moment of joy. Our moment of joy is really funny. Our moment of joy was found by way by Winnie. Found this one and it is a gentleman named Jay Swift. And we just call it chicken.
C
Really silly.
B
He was like, oh, I was just having a nightmare. Oh God, I was just having a nightmare that somebody tried to eat me. Oh, oh. Oh my God. Honey, you will not believe the dream I had.
C
That's what Melania said when she used to sleep beside Trump when he had his makeup on.
B
Oh, I know. She'd be sleeping, she'd be like, oh, honey, I can't believe I had nightmare that I saw you without makeup. You look like chicken without skin. Oh, T.R. don't sleep next to me. It does look like chicken sleep in other room. I really don't care, do you? I really don't care, do you? Can you imagine the stories that Camilla and she could tell? And then I took him from wife. I took him from his wife as well. Oh yes, he had a beautiful wife. But I said it doesn't matter.
C
Matter of fact, on their wedding day I was there too, right?
B
I went on their honeymoon with them. Could you believe that? Melania? It's, it's, it's remarkable. And she had enough honeymoon.
C
She had enough to be upset about it.
B
She. Diana, Diana, Diana, Diana, Diana, Diana. Everywhere I go, they say, diana was beautiful. Diana was blonde and fabulous. You're not. I say to myself, melania, I said, but I got the man, didn't I?
C
You got the man, but don't get anything. Queen Elizabeth made sure she didn't leave her jack, except for whatever Charles is getting.
B
Charles said, I'm gonna be king if I had to be king for a
C
year, God bless him. He ain't healthy. So you enjoy it while you can.
B
The only royals I've ever. That I ever like, I kind of like Queen Elizabeth because she seems super shady and kind of shady in a fun way. I really like Harry. I'm a Harry. Megan girl, I'm sorry for y' all with the other one. I don't know. I don't know about him, but I think Harry and me, they're my favorite royals, but my favorite was always Diana. Diana forever. I'm a forever die girl Girl, I'm a forever dying. I'm a Diana girl forever. And Queen Elizabeth was like, bibi, you can't come here. She was very clear. She was clear. She said, don't come over here. You can go somewhere, but you can't come over here. She said, nope. I think we should. We should. We should. We should. We should do, like, a blackified version of the Queen of England. Somebody needs to do a skit that just. If the queen. If. If the royal family was black, like, what would it be like? You can't come here. You can go somewhere, but you know, that ain't your real wife. You know, you. You left your wife over there.
C
Somebody's black mama saying that.
B
Oh, and they were just looking at you.
D
Bring.
B
You bring the side girl over and she would say. She said, well, hello. It's so nice to meet Camilla. What's your name? Camilla. Okay. You gonna. Oh, can I help you cook, Mom?
C
No. Go sit your ass in that front door.
B
I don't like the way you make your greens. Your greens don't look right.
C
You put raisins in your potato.
B
Salon, you know, would love to help you. Can I. No, no, we all right. We.
E
We good.
B
We don't need your help. You just go ahead and sit over there. Jennifer Lewis would have to pay the queen, y'.
C
All.
B
Jennifer. L have to pay the queen.
C
She could sit in the car and I'll bring her play it out to you.
B
Yeah, you. You go ahead and sit in the car. We. We bring you something out. Are you sure? Yeah. Or you know what? They'll do what a black mama would do. They'd be like you, you, you were trying to fit in. And they'd be like, you know, I just really loved Diana. She was such a wonderful girl. She had all the finest qualities that I thought my son deserved. Do you want some more potato salad? Not the one you brought. The one I made. That actually tastes good.
C
Seasoning, seasoning, seasoning. You forgot the seasoning. It's eight o'. Clock.
B
All right. So see you guys on the next door vision we're going to be talking about. I'm gonna just let y' all know we are stat. We are are finding a good guest because are we talking about those missing scientists, y'?
C
All.
B
We are going to talk about these missing scientists. That is coming up on the Joy Reid show. Coming up. Vote on the glasses. Love you guys. Let me pick those glasses. See you on the next every show. Oh, there they are. Pick one. Don't have a tie. We can't. No ties. We're not like the maga. Not everybody gets a trophy. See you guys on the next trivia show. Bye.
A
Getting back to the basics, grassroots level. Let me dig a little deeper with the shovel. Plenty can't tell the force from the trees that I'm hard to detect Like a black hole in a dog Injustice anywhere, it's a threat to justice everywhere Let me make this clear I got a bone to pick and I'll never fear the threat of poverty they don't want to talk about they rap the party so I'm a real talk about it for sure.
B
Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Because behind every headline is a bottom line. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. And when you see the money side, you understand what others miss. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for 15amonth plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do. @mintmobile.com Upfront payment of $45 for 3 month plan equivalent to $15 per month required Intro rate first 3 months only, then full price plan options available, taxes and fees, extra fee, full terms@mintmobile.com.
The Joy Reid Show — Does Anyone Believe Trump’s White House Correspondents Tale?
Host: Joy-Ann Reid
Date: April 28, 2026
This episode centers on the chaotic events surrounding the White House Correspondents' Dinner, particularly the alleged assassination attempt on President Trump by Cole Thomas Allen. Joy and co-host Jason offer an incisive, skeptical, and at times wry look at the incident, media responses, Trump’s opportunistic narrative, and broader implications for American democracy and protest. The show weaves in spirited banter, media analysis, historical context, and a segment with guest Ben Collins on conspiracy narratives and the ongoing Infowars/Onion saga, before closing with a progressive faith-based discussion on anti-war protests.
Exploring the questionable and conspiratorial elements of the alleged assassination attempt on Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, media complicity, right-wing narrative maneuvers, and what it means for American democracy—plus, righteous skepticism and moral action in response.
(06:00–13:00)
(14:00–28:00)
(28:00–50:00)
(26:09–38:39)
(66:59–112:11, sprinkled throughout)
(77:33–94:30)
(50:00–56:23, 118:45–119:34)
| Timestamp | Speaker | Quote | |-----------|----------------|-------| | 03:44 | Joy Reid | "I just feel like the dinner became ickier over time... it's a little too incestuous for the media to be kikiing up..." | | 14:19 | Jason | "Has anybody used the word alleged in this whole DAG on thing? ...I'm just sick and tired of this Bs." | | 16:56 | Joy Reid | "When we were there, it's armed security everywhere... They're like, where’s the security? We don’t see any." | | 24:46 | Trump (clip) | "This proves we need the ballroom. Does it, Trump? That's so interesting." | | 43:51 | Rep. (Clip) | "I have a responsibility problem with Donald Trump... I talk about the policies of this administration... I certainly have never called the press the enemy of the people." | | 46:42 | Ben Collins | "These are organized information campaigns... They coalesce around one idea..." | | 62:30 | Trump (clip) | "I was given an explanation early on... and I thought it was strange... So far, they, it's a little hard to believe, to be honest with you." | | 105:19 | Coach Scott | "If nearly 50 years in business didn’t produce anything close to this, but one year in public office did...That's not skill, that's corruption." | | 79:11 | J. Wilson-Hargrove | "If Congress does not act, the President has no power to wage war... It is an immoral and unjust war..." | | 118:45 | Joy Reid | "We should do like a Blackified version of the Queen of England. Somebody needs to do a skit..." |
"We’re just asking questions, guys. That’s what we’re supposed to do."
— Joy-Ann Reid [115:45]
Joy and the team critique the spectacle and opportunism surrounding the Trump 'assassination' incident, highlight the media’s and institutions’ failures, and stress the importance of skepticism, protest, and community action. The episode closes on a call for ruthlessness in holding power to account, protecting protest, and defending democracy, all in Joy’s signature sharp, satirical tone.
This summary omits ad reads, intros, and outros for focus on substantive discussion.