The Ignition News Podcast

On May 12th, a reporter asked President Trump how much the financial struggles of everyday Americans factor into his decision-making. His answer: "Not even a little bit."That is today's show. We run the receipts.PolitiFact pulled Bureau of Labor Statistics data 16 months into the second term: groceries, electricity, housing, clothing, medical costs, tuition, and childcare are all rising faster than the Fed's 2% target. Consumer loan delinquencies, credit cards, auto loans, mortgages, are now at Great Recession levels. Meanwhile, the Treasury Department is firing 64% of the staff at the Office of Financial Research, the agency created after 2008 specifically to detect the next financial crisis before it arrives.The US government is spending $88 billion a month on interest payments alone. The financial press is starting to use the word stagflation.But there is real economic resistance happening. The US saw roughly four million fewer international visitors in 2025, a $8 billion loss and the sharpest tourism drop in 20 years outside of COVID. Canadian travel to US cities is down 42%. A majority of Canadians now view the US as a greater threat to global peace than Russia. People are voting with their wallets, and it is having an impact.We also talk about what inverted totalitarianism actually looks like from the inside, why the Iran conflict represents a military and political credibility crisis, and what economic pressure can and cannot do.Finally: the Ignition News is going on pause until June 8th. We are going into production on our Flock Safety documentary and preparing Season 3 of Ignite: Fighting Fascism in the Age of Its Rise. We will be back June 8th. Take care of yourselves out there.

The Las Vegas City Council voted to spend $400,000 on traffic cameras they swear are just for a "study."Their own emails tell a different story.In today's episode, I walk through the open records I pulled that catch the city in a shifting narrative. The same project was pitched in January as an "Automated Camera Enforcement Pilot Program," with coordination with LVMPD baked in and per citation pricing already quoted from vendors. Now, with the public watching, the language has quietly changed.This is the second story this month where I have put the city on its back foot. The first was Flock. The Flock coverage forced the council to spend meeting time explaining what their cameras are not. That alone is a win. The bigger win is what those Flock records dragged into the light along the way.I also get into the financial picture no one wants to talk about. The $636 million lawsuit. The sale of Cashman Field for $36 million. The golf course fight that started at $7.5 million and ended up vaporizing $286 million in taxpayer money. And the reason a broke city is suddenly very interested in cameras that can write tickets.The lesson today is simple. Pay attention. One person reading old emails can change what a city government gets away with.The Ignition News. May 22, 2026.

The Democratic National Committee finally released their post-2024 election autopsy report. They titled it “Build to Win. Build to Last.” It is 192 pages long. It has no executive summary, no conclusion, no House section, and a blank leadership message page.We read every page so you don’t have to.Here’s what they found: the DNC spent $1.04 billion on advertising and $150 million on organizing. They made 370 million voter contact attempts and reached 3.2% of them. Door-to-door canvassing — the tactic with a 17% contact rate — was used for less than 9% of all attempts. Seventy-two percent of door contacts happened in the final month of the campaign, when people were already voting.The campaign’s polling team found out about Harris campaign ads by reading about them in the press. The post-debate survey after Biden’s catastrophic June debate was scrapped. There was no self-research on Kamala Harris when she became the nominee. The voter database nearly collapsed on Election Day. Final staff hires in swing states happened in October.And the word Gaza does not appear in the document one single time.This isn’t just a bad report. It’s evidence that the party has no intention of changing. We break it all down — the specific numbers, the missing sections, the margin annotations from their own fact-checker, and what the voters they keep losing are actually trying to tell them.

Three stories. One through line. On today's show: the Trump administration has settled its ten billion dollar IRS lawsuit for 1.776 billion dollars, creating what amounts to a loyalty slush fund. The president controls who sits on the panel that distributes the money and can fire them if he dislikes their decisions. Every American is paying roughly ten dollars for it. Then we go to South Carolina, where Governor McMaster signed House Bill 4756 into law, requiring trans students in public K-12 schools to use bathrooms designated by sex assigned at birth, and explicitly permitting schools without single-occupancy indoor restrooms to offer an outdoor porta potty instead. And we close with Thomas Massey's primary loss, what it signals for the Republican Party, and why I think you have not seen the last of him. Plus: a personal word on intuition, what we have built together at the Ignition News and Rebel Radio Network, and why history always vindicates the helpers.

Three stories. One through line. This is The Ignition News for May 19th, 2026.In Troy, New York, a mom walking her newborn spotted an unfamiliar black device at the end of her block. It turned out to be a Flock Safety AI license plate reader, one of 26 installed by police without city council approval and without a single public hearing. The $156,000 contract required a council vote. No vote happened. When the council moved to stop payment and let the contract expire, the Republican mayor declared a public safety emergency to keep the cameras running. The council sued her. Residents showed up outside with signs. And underneath all of it, a national story: Flock cameras have been used by ICE, used by Texas law enforcement to locate a woman who had an abortion across state lines, and used by a Kansas police chief to stalk his ex-girlfriend. This is happening in more than 5,000 communities. It may be happening in yours.The NAACP launched a major new campaign called Out of Bounds, targeting public universities in eight southern states after Republican legislators redrew congressional maps within hours of a Supreme Court ruling that weakened the Voting Rights Act. The campaign calls on Black athletes, recruits, fans, and donors to withhold support from those programs until fair maps with meaningful Black representation are restored. NAACP president Derrick Johnson said Black athletes should not generate wealth and prestige for institutions that strip political power from Black communities. The NAACP is also opposing the SCORE Act, a federal college athletics bill, until the affected states act. This is economic pressure. The same tool used in Montgomery. Applied to college football.The Trump EPA announced it is gutting the first ever federal limits on PFAS chemicals in drinking water. They are rescinding regulations on four specific compounds, eliminating restrictions on chemical mixtures, and extending compliance deadlines to 2031. The justification is procedural: they say the Biden administration did not follow proper steps under the Safe Drinking Water Act. A government that has spent a year tearing down regulations suddenly discovered a love of procedure. According to the Environmental Working Group, 176 million Americans drink tap water contaminated with PFAS. The EPA's own data confirms it. Lawsuits are active in federal court.The pattern is identical in all three cases. When people push back, the powerful find a mechanism to override them. An emergency declaration. A gerrymander. A procedural lawsuit filed by the industry doing the poisoning. The language changes. The outcome does not.But the fight is not over in any of these places. And neither are we.The Ignition News broadcasts live every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. If this episode mattered to you, share it with one person.

Three stories. One theme. All connected.First: Hennepin County attorney Mary Moriarty charged ICE agent Christian Castro with four counts of second degree assault and one count of falsely reporting a crime after he shot Venezuelan national Julio Sosa Celis, a man with legal status, through a door in January and then claimed there had been a shovel attack. The video proved otherwise. Moriarty made it explicit that a conviction would be ineligible for a presidential pardon. A state prosecutor just told the federal government that a badge is not a blanket.Second: Iran has formally announced a toll system on the Strait of Hormuz, creating a government body to issue permits and an email inbox for ships to apply through. Before the war, twenty percent of the world's traded oil and natural gas moved through that strait. Transit has been frozen. We are spending an estimated one billion dollars per day on the conflict. Gas is up. Toyota is telling dealers to substitute oil at routine changes. There is no end in sight.Third: Dan shares a personal experience from a Nevada campaign event last week, where he was interrupted while speaking as an openly autistic advocate on behalf of a candidate who then stood by and let it happen. After being ghosted by the campaign and having private messages about his neurodivergence weaponized against him publicly, he is withdrawing support and recommitting his platform to autism advocacy.And finally: Atlas Intel's new poll has Alexandria Ocasio Cortez leading the 2028 Democratic presidential primary at 26%, ahead of Pete Buttigieg, Gavin Newsom, and Kamala Harris. Fifteen million dollars raised, ninety nine percent from small dollar donors, thirty thousand people at a recent rally. The numbers are moving.Today is Malcolm X's birthday. Mount St. Helens erupted forty six years ago today. And accountability, one way or another, is arriving.New episodes drop Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Follow Ignition News on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, TikTok, and Substack.

My son's school went into lockdown yesterday. By the time I got the call, it had already been going for thirty minutes. Best case, it takes me 22 minutes to get there. That math adds up to 52 minutes of not knowing. That number will stay with me for a long time.At 9:30 that night, my 14-year-old came out of his room and told me the full story. His teacher called her husband during the lockdown and started crying. His classmates played cards under their desks. And when he told me about it, he said: it was my first lockdown. Not a crisis. A milestone. A thing that was always going to happen eventually. We have normalized school violence so completely that our kids have accepted it as a rite of passage, while the rest of the country moves on to the next outrage cycle without a single serious conversation about why this keeps happening.From there, I get into the Kevin O'Leary data center push in Utah, the Stratos project, and the billionaire gaslighting playbook. Kevin O'Leary is not a US citizen. He holds citizenship in Canada, Ireland, and the UAE. And yet he is on television telling Americans that data centers are a matter of national security. But the argument isn't really about China. It is about extracting public resources and threatening to leave if you don't hand them over. That is not capitalism. That is a hostage negotiation.The good news: citizens in Reno, Nevada spent seven hours at a city council meeting and won a 30-day moratorium on data center construction. That is a real victory and we need to say so out loud.I also talk about driving to a political event for a Nevada gubernatorial candidate, passing through a homeless encampment on the way, and walking into a room full of people who, against enormous odds, are still choosing hope. That contrast broke something open for me.I close with something I have had to teach myself: pour support into the people around you who are fighting. Over-index on telling them you see them. We are all standing in the fire hose. Sometimes the most important thing you can do is push up through the water for the person next to you and say: we are still here.This one runs long. It was supposed to be a news day. It became something else.

The ship has lost its propulsion. Today on The Ignition News, three stories that all point to the same place.First: the president is suing the IRS for $10 billion, and the people negotiating that settlement on behalf of the federal government work directly for him. His former personal attorney Todd Blanch is running the DOJ. Two options are on the table: a direct cash payout from the Treasury, or the permanent erasure of every audit against Trump, his family, and his businesses. A federal judge has already flagged the constitutional problem. Tax lawyers say it may be a crime. Elizabeth Warren called it a massive unprecedented scandal. Don Beyer called it the largest single act of grand larceny in history.Second: Americans are leaving. Not vacationing. Leaving. 180,000 emigrated in 2025 alone, the largest outbound wave in decades. For the first time since the Great Depression, more people left the United States than arrived. 30,000 are standing in line to formally renounce their citizenship. And the people doing it are not panicking. They did the math. They wrote it out. And they decided it was not worth it.Third: the DNC paid for an autopsy after 2024 and is hiding the results. The DCCC once blacklisted consultants who worked for primary challengers against incumbents. That is still the operating logic. And the party wonders why it is six points less popular than MAGA Republicans.The wealthy are getting room service. The rest of us are below deck with the rodents. Some people are slipping off on life rafts in the middle of the night. Someone needs to take the wheel.Stay lit.

Town halls. Thousands of people. Hours of testimony. And they build the data centers anyway.Today on Ignition News, we break down why that keeps happening. It has a name. Regulatory capture leads to inverted totalitarianism, and what you feel on the ground is neo-feudalism. We are not being dramatic. This is documented, peer-reviewed, and happening in your neighborhood right now.We also get into the 2026 midterm math, and it is not good. The Washington Post ran the numbers this morning. Democrats could win the popular vote by four full points and still lose the House. Gerrymandering has tilted the map that hard. The wave is real. The surfboard is broken.Then we talk about a fourth grader named Christian Mango, who did everything right, mailed a persuasive essay to his Congresswoman, and got told to ask his teacher about propaganda. By an 82-year-old former educator. No, really.And the inflation numbers are here. Vegetables are up 44%. Jet fuel is up 60%. Your grocery bill in April erased everything March had given you.But we are still here. Ten toes down. Stay lit.

May 12th, 2026. Three stories. One theme: power being used illegitimately against the people who have the least of it.Leonardo Garcia Venegas is a 26 year old American citizen born in the United States. ICE has arrested him three times anyway. He had his real ID in his hand. They tackled him to the ground, shackled him, and brought in a drug sniffing dog. His lawsuit is already in federal court. The government's current legal position is that he may not even have standing to sue them.The sitting president of the United States spent three hours on Monday night posting racist content about Barack Obama, including AI generated images, debunked wiretapping conspiracies, and videos of Black people paired with treason accusations. Then he woke up and kept going.And Amazon and Meta have been caught running a phenomenon called token maxing, where engineers burn through millions of dollars worth of AI resources on fake projects just to hit internal metrics. The waste is staggering. The justification is nonexistent.This is The Ignition News. Stay lit.