9/9/26: Wild Socialist Conference Goes Off The Rails, New Doc Exposes Caribbean Boat Strikes

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It should be smothered in the crib. Is it representative? Maybe not. Sometimes it is genuinely representative of a growing movement, but it isn't always. And so I feel like we try pretty hard not to do that on this show. So Ryan on that note, the Socialism 2026 conference, I am hoping you can help us understand how serious or not serious some of these incredibly. I mean, what we can all agree on serious or not is that this should is hilarious. So how funny some of how serious some of these funny clips are. So this is Emily's payback to us for nut picking or right. I did not pitch the segment for the record. I did not pitch the segment. All right, so let's roll a couple of clips for people missed. So first here, we have Beatrice Adler Bolton, he's the co-host of the podcast, Death Panel and the co-author of the book Health Communism. This is one of the ones that all of these clips have gotten many millions of views on Elon's app. But this one is maybe in the top five. So let's roll her clip. You have to give up the fantasy of being fitter than the fascists. It's not just that it's cringe or strategically bad. So it is. I think it's also politically revealing. Fitness is a measure of relative disposability under capitalism. Our task is not to become less disposable to become more useful to the ruling order. What we all need to be doing is rejecting disposability in all of its forms. The point is not to beat the fascists at their own game. It is not to lay a better claim on their own territory by being fitter, more eugenic. In fact, the more disgenic, the better, I think. Revolution is not a contest between optimized and properly prepared bodies. That idea is fascist in and of itself and it races the history of less struggles around the world. OK, so also on that panel before we unpack some of that is was Dishon Harrison to her right. They're the author of belly of the beast, the politics of anti-fatness as anti-blackness. They also made some comments that were making the rounds. Let's roll that. The political deployment of GOP ones is fascistic. Not because individuals take them, but because the conditions under which they become necessary are shaped by a world fixated on genocide. This is a structural critique that asks what happens when the conditions produced by capitalism, by public health, by the state apparatus, and by anti-black desire. A line around a single bodily ideal that leaves little to no room for diversions and punishes any body that does. Where as earlier diet drugs were often associated with vanity or addiction, GOP ones are positioned as responsible medicine, promising relief rather than restraint. But to understand why the deployment of GOP ones as fascistic requires turning to fronts for knowns account of black flesh under colonial surveillance. So I saw one response saying, hold on, if GOP ones are genocide of fat people, it's Donald's genociding than people. Clearly. The idea of genociding a population by having them lose weight I think is not even kind of worth engaging with. So I think a lot of people had questions, what's going on here? Why is this happening? And this wasn't it, by the way, it wasn't just the fitness panel. There were clips that were emerging from other panels. A lot of the panels were, yes, wildly out there. And you're watching that you're thinking, wait a minute, but socialism is searching in the ballot box. The majority of normal people around the country, even in swing states like Michigan and Maine, are voting for people who are either socialist or socialist adjacent. And there's just no world in which they would be doing that if this is what it stood for. So how is this possibly happening? I think it's worth, so there's an argument, just ignore this stuff. And it's not worth engaging. That is, to me, a comical defense of something. Right. Like I acknowledge it's bad, just ignore it. Right. No. Which you can do if it doesn't represent some level of significant strain. Right. And or have some funding behind it. And this does. And so, so who is, what is this conference? So it's originally this conference was sponsored by the International Socialist Organization, which is a troskiist organization that folded in 2019. It was, Colt is too strong of a word. It's close. It's as close. It's a, if you understand. Colt ish. What it is. What a Colt is. Colt ish. It's like, it's kind of a creepy, it was kind of a creepy organization. It had some impressive figures who served as kind of spokespeople for it. The conference had a lot of big names. It had Hassan, Angela Davis, Bill Ayers, was there, but a prominent people. Yeah. But then you dig deeper down your neck anyway. So ISO folded in 2019. Its members have splintered off into a lot of different directions. Haymarket, which kind of, it was, which is a kind of left wing publisher, which flows out of that same tendency has, has taken over this, this convention. And a lot of the same figures are rolling through it. Now, we can talk about the history of this kind of strain of leftism, which is supported by and runs through basically nonprofit, the nonprofit world, propped up by philanthropies and universities. Like that is the kind of social economic structure that props this up. And as often given some quarter by corporate media outlets that are looking at kind of, what is the best way to put it, wash their problems? Yes. And I saw it described in an essay by a communist writer yesterday as the compatible left, which is a decent term. Compatible with capitalism, compatible with the ruling class, because what they say sounds radical. They call all kinds of radical buzzwords being thrown around and they're going to abolish this and they're going to abolish that and they're constantly identifying kind of new forms of oppression. But what they're going to do is just administer some type of kind of non-profit industrial conflicts over top of this new oppression that they've identified rather than actually try to address the oppression by crucially organizing a working class that has its collective interest in overcoming their bosses right and then for lack of better word through some dictatorship of a proletariat like basically working class then takes power and dictates how dictates how the economy is going to operate in its own interests and then within that they could sort out whatever kind of internal contradictions they have but you have to resolve those contradictions so that you can pull together the entire working class to fight against the super rich in the capital zone in class like that's the that's the Marxist idea so when which they by the way I'm sure they would say that's what they believe in the question is that it's not practical or whether it's practical that they don't think they're wonder they're so far I guess so far from that but they still think they're a threat to the capitalist world I think most of them probably see themselves as a threat to capitalist imperialism right they just believe that they're kind of identitarian Marxism is a threat but that's what so like they really see themselves well what psychologically is disruptors what they call that on the left is idealism in other words things like what you think sure which is separate from materialism which are things that matter and exist in the real world yeah so it really doesn't matter what does Sean or Beatrice think about what their role is they can I will I 100% believe they are completely earnest in all of their politics what is more important is the material and social conditions that allow have allowed this to thrive for now what 80 years post you go further than that going back to but let's probably smarter start after World War 2 after World War 2 the CIA in particular like recognized and then not just the CIA but the Ford foundation and all of its kind of ancillary kind of class allies recognized that communism global communism socialism was very appealing to people because it was raising their living standards and also communist people for people would forget this communist throughout the world during World War 2 fought the fascists and so they were surging after World War 2 in Vietnam Ho Chi Minh fought you know fought against the Japanese and Chinese nationalists and and fought for the country's independence in Korea the socialists and communists fought against the fascists Spain in France the communists and the socialists in Spain yeah well Spain is a little separate but yes what you know in and as a result the socials and communists come out of in Greece in Albania in Italy France they come out with a moral authority in in second Italy for instance they almost won the 1948 CIA didn't help the communists in that one no this CIA killed them yeah allied with the mafia to kill up on some ballots stuff and ballots in 1948 but the reason the communists were popular in Italy in 1940-80s because they had fought against the fascists whereas the liberals had been collaborators with the Nazis and so they were discredited and the the CIA the Ford Foundation others recognized that opposing communism from the right just on kind of Christian Western values wasn't going to be enough you needed a left wing argument that said communist capitalism is bad and communism is bad we need a third camp you need a glorious time to go organize conferences in Europe yeah they called it they basically called it third campism trots a lot of trotskiists who whether they were you know useful idiots for this or not wind up in that wind up in that position where they're criticizing both communism and capitalism but they don't they're not a threat to capitalism so it doesn't matter that they criticize capitalism and so the nonprofit industrial complex which the time included a lot of the CIA money funds this to undermine global communism right global communism doesn't exist anymore but the idea of the working class uniting in order to fight against the billionaire class is still a threat and so the CIA we don't know how much they're involved with it anymore doesn't matter the the foundation world which flow directly out of that it's a construct of it yeah is is still doing it like it's the foundation the foundation world is out there funding all of this stuff some of the a lot of the people at the foundations certainly believe that they're doing a good thing and I remember when I first learned that like foundations were like the major funders of so much kind of left wing organizing and left wing think think think tanks and left wing work remember thing ah how the carnages of the world they must be so bitter about that like they're you know they pass the money down and then their kids became these left wingers who are then trying to undo all the things that you know the Carnegie's stood for for instance and then and then as you you're like oh it's they're not actually fighting against their own class interests right they are very in a very sophisticated way propping up their own class interest by creating this kind of valve and so for the last 80 or so years this nonprofit industrial complex university academic left has continued to grow and continued to gain people money funding strength you know publishing houses podcasts taking over and like massive yeah universities yeah um meanwhile union density has continued to collapse and the threat that the left poses to the ruling class has continued to decline and and the fact that both of these things are happening at the same time i don't think is it is a complete and total quenches i think there's also this little yeah piece of it inside academia where in order to get a PhD you have to write something unique as you should in kind of these social studies you'd have to identify some new kind of oppression sure and and then become the authority on that oppression and so you start producing all these more and more obscure layers of oppression which then further divide people and then you layer and top it well it's got the idea of intersectionality that's our attempt to bridge it but it ends up obviously not working but i wonder that it's even worse than that in the sense so many people who are doing these more and more or or finding these more and more obscure of oppressions actually i think there's something sincere in it like a lot of people my age and younger have been alienated and isolated it's not true and not you know not without the help of the capitalist system that we live in like mousseau garby has a great book on this and you've talked about this before as well like it is an alienating that has a psychologically alienated in effect on people and the bomb i think for some folks who get in sconston academia is finding purpose through identity and that's where i think it's these are like pretty sincerely held beliefs for many of these people who do see themselves as as threats to the capitalist system and disruptors to capitalist imperialism because that's their source of identity like as our communities have been hollowed out and loneliness is at record highs it's a false hope to find purpose in identitarian politics and it also totally does undermine the genuine Marxist Left right and it's it's a feature of that politics that right that it undermines a class solidarity and it and it teaches people that if they don't know all of this language and if they watch something they're like that sounds completely insane to me like then you're a reactionary right-winger and then they'll do this oftentimes they'll have this little parlor trick where they'll say no this is like this is some obviously true things like do we kind of fetishize kind of how people look sure like r right is the right wing like taking over in some ways like this manosphere physical fitness stuff yeah they're doing that it's Pete Hegseth using fitness as a way to whitewash the pentagons around war problems yeah he is Yeah, but that doesn't mean that fitness is a the measure of relative disposability to the ruling class. - Right. - And also what's interesting, so this goes to your question about whether Beatrice sees herself as actually a threat to the ruling class. Her line there, fitness is a measure of disposability to the ruling class. Suggest that the ruling class will always be there. - Mm-hmm. - Because if you envision a world in which people have taken control, let's get socialism, democratic socialism, communism, whatever they want. If you envision that world, then your fitness is a relative measure of your ability to contribute to this collective society. - Mm-hmm. - But in her understanding of the world, there can only ever be a ruling class. - Mm-hmm. - There can not be victory for people. So whether she believes her or not, like unconsciously, just in that one line, she clearly doesn't. Now let's make fun of this. Do Smith's guy for a second. - He was clipping all of these moments. God bless you, Stu. - He's a Manhattan Institute. It was right wing tank tank. He hit the jackpot. Gotta give it to him there. But when he came across some reasonable points, like his own brain falls out of his skull. This one's a fun one. Let's play. Here's a soundpiker. Let's roll D5. - One question I have is, yeah, what are you seeing in terms of the broader movements that is inspiring you that points the way forward based on your location? You're like, I like this energy. I like this is something we need to keep doing. - Yeah, I would say tennis union organizers are doing phenomenal work. Not only, yeah. Not only in blue districts, not only in deep blue districts, but deep red in the south as well. And that's actually really important. (audience applauding) That's one. The work against data centers is another one. - Oh, yeah. (audience applauding) - And then the other one is master valence, acts in cameras and in flock cameras as well. So these are issues that cross party lines. These are issues that are frustrating for Americans of all different backgrounds, all different demographics. And these are issues where predictably the establishment of either party is these are issues that neither establishment of either party is offering any reasonable solutions on. So it's a real opportunity for us to once again show that we're real, that we're here, that we're here to stay, and that we wanna make these changes. We're not simply just demanding them, but we will also elect people who will make these necessary changes as well. - So here Hassan says he wants to organize to bring the rent down against data centers and against flock surveillance. - Yeah, that's a pretty strong argument. - Which everybody is basically for. - Manhattan Institute has been going pedal to the metal for flock. - Oh, yes, right. - So it's not really a surprise. And so Stu Smith sees that and says, the Singham network has fingerprints in both organizing spaces, data centers and flock, which makes me think some of the recent outrage around these older technologies may be getting artificially amplified. So he sees that immediately he thinks, this Roy Singham rich guy who funds some left wing projects that he like Roy Singham is puppeteering this public backlash against data centers and flock, which is like, go ahead and think that if you want. That is completely. It's also set, like, guys, Sam Piker makes his money in the capitalist world from-- - Sure does. - His show. - Lives in his mansion. - He does not take money from Roy Singham. Like he's not taking money from any foundations. He's just, he's just as a matter of fact, not. Like he went on the Cuba trip with me. - But that did have Singham funding vote. - But we paid for it. - Right, but the organizers could think has Singham funding. - Yeah, and he'll interview people that are associated with these organizations. But and he is talking about things that his audience wants to hear about. If you really think that data centers and flock and rent being too high are things that, like the Chinese are making us think, then you're not-- you're going to miss the reality that's gonna punch you right in the face. You're gonna miss it. Just in the same way that when the Democrats saw the Tea Party coming, they were like, "Oh, this is the Koch brothers." - Yes, that's so well said. - If we can just go after the Koch brothers. - It's astroturf. - If it's astroturf, it's not real. - So well said. - And yes, is there some funding from the Kochs involved in it, of course, but there's also real anger. And they missed it because of their refusal to engage with it. - And they try to do the same thing with Bernie. It's all Russia funded. - Right, yes, Russian bots or whatever. Like yeah, and look, the Russian bots are on a roll, if that's the case. - Hell of a decade for the Russian bots, finally, because we teased it. This is, I think worth showing. This is Mamdani announcing a new office that has been created. It is what the actual Democratic Socialists are doing in office, yes. - Let's take a look. - Do you remember when you said this? - Because whether you are organizing a museum or a bar, we have your backs. - Of course I do. And today we're announcing the Office of Worker Power. (audience cheering) - This is a first of its kind in the country office that we are setting up to help workers organize. Whether you are working in a hotel, whether you are working in a hospital, whether you are working as a barista, you are a worker. And as a worker, you should have protections. We know that when workers try to organize, there's all kinds of tactics that are used against them. And we will make sure that when workers are intimidated, that they know that they don't stand alone. - I work for the Jewel Hotel. I've been working for the Jewel Hotel for 16 years. I'll be stuck there, working 60 hours a week easy. And I couldn't say no 'cause they'll tell me, "Lord, if you abandon your job, we're just gonna replace you." - What would the ideal outcome be for a worker who comes to the office? - To me, it is that a worker leaves the office with a better understanding of the rights they already have and the ways in which they can win the rights that they deserve. - And that's the key difference. The DSA is backed by people, workers. Mamdani is backed by voters. What you saw at that quote-unquote socialism conference is backed by philanthropies and universities without a mass backing from workers. That is the difference. So one of them is a mass movement, the other is a conference. - Yes. - Self-care September is here, which means it's time to rethink what self-care actually means. Yes, self-care can be a long walk, it can be an everything shower, it can be putting your phone on, do not disturb, but sometimes it's actually about sitting with the uncomfortable stuff. And understanding your patents, your boundaries, finally figuring out why you keep doing things that you swore you would never do again. I'm Jenna Spegg, the host of the psychology of your 20s podcast. And each week we unpack the psychology behind the experiences that shape your 20s, from relationships and friendships to money, anxiety, confidence, attachment, just becoming more comfortable with who you are. Unlike the quarter-life crisis, which is depicted as the collapse, the quarter-life reinvention is the expansion and growth of something. When we develop the ability to be happy by ourselves, nobody else can take that from you. So this self-care September, don't just take care of yourself, get to know yourself as well. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the iHot Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Didn't catch the latest role in the Martin Unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests, and they complained about the very thing they were seeing. It's raw. I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men. Roland Martin Unfiltered. I went off, I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all go scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same van. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the black information network. 12 C's, those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground, going to heart in the south now. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHot Radio app, Apple Podcasts. Or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, everybody. Amy Robock and TJ Holmes here from the Amy and TJ podcast with midterm elections just around the corner. We're breaking down the biggest political stories leading up to November and some of those big political stories. Aren't just what's happening on Capitol Hill. Yes, we just saw Lindsey Graham, the death of a long time Senator. Also, we've got a couple of missing members of Congress. Also, we got a lot of members of Congress behaving badly. We got accusations, allegations flying all day long on Capitol Hill. It's just like a reality show. We're going to cover everything you need to know during this heated political season. And it starts with our morning run. Yes, go for a run with us. maybe you can take us along when you're on your actual will run outside or if you don't feel like going out still, you get what we're saying. It's our morning run, it's our daily news rundown of the top stories that will get you going before you even finish that first cup of coffee. Listen to Amy and TJ on the iHeart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts. The U.S. is expanding its attacks on what they call drug smuggling and drug operations in the Pacific and in the Caribbean and put this element up on the screen. Making what they said was a ship that was used to refuel drug boats, kind of a significant escalation even as we reach the one-year mark of a PETA access war on drug boats in the Caribbean and the price of drugs and availability of drugs has not budged, although more than 200 people have been killed and disappeared. A new investigation called Killing It See is out now on Al Jazeera English. Josh Rushing, who is one of the lead investigators in that report is joining us now to discuss this. Highly recommend everybody, check this out. We'll play a clip at the end of this interview for people. But first of all, thank you for coming by the studio, really appreciate it. Thanks for having me Ryan and Emily, I really appreciate it as well. And also, it's not just out on Al Jazeera, it's on YouTube, so everyone can see it every any time. Yes, go pause this and go watch it. Seriously, very worthwhile. So I wanted to start with a couple of things that this has been done sort of in the open except for this couple of the strikes that Dropside has been covering that apparently involved some secret CIA program, which is very weird and we may get into that later. But most of this has been done out in the open. Attacks on these fishing boats, videos posted online, bragging about the crimes publicly. The first strike, which did garner some significant attention because there were two survivors of it who were then killed by the Americans in a, what is a, by definition of war crime. The, the rules around shipwreck sailors have been very clear and war for hundreds of years and apparently even in their war college, it's, it's a for instance, like you shall not do these things. For instance, if there are sailors who are shipwrecked, clinging, clinging, you know, to their shipwreck device, you have to at least try to save them instead we killed them. You second, tell us about the second time that the US launched a strike on, on a vessel because I think that what they did with the survivors here is really revealing about this entire project. You touched on a number of things that I, I, I love to kind of go back on that these were done in the open. One of the things is so for, for Operation Southern Spirit, which ended in early August and they transitioned to joint task force Western Hemisphere, which is going to be a much larger version of what we witnessed that will include Lansi and Airstrikes, a definite military expansion into Latin America and Central America. That's what the, the Operation Southern Spirit was really an entree too and I think that's really important. That's where this narrative and that's where this group needs to go. So that's what started last September, September, second, twenty-two. Was Operation Southern Spirit? Southern Spirit. The one, we just passed the one year anniversary. It was the first strike where there were, it was a double tap. It was in the Caribbean. Now, to say they're done now in the open, what's kind of interesting is it's, it's almost, if it is a crime, it's almost a perfect crime because it is done over the horizon. No one can really prove that their loved one died and wanted the strikes. All they know is dad or their husband left and didn't come back, which sometimes happens with fishermen. But they didn't come back on the same day that the U.S. announces as a strike. Now the U.S. announced, I think 61 strikes in killing 221 people in that time period up to the first week of August. As now expanded to I think we're over 225, maybe more than that, now that we're in the second phase of this. But in that first phase, the numbers at 221, but there's an important caveat. It's 221 people and 61 strikes that the U.S. government has told us about. The only reason we even know this is happening is that the U.S. government has posted these videos. They're breaking about it. They're often breaking and boasting about it and what's insane about it is so they say that these are it's a war that these are enemy combatants and so what we wanted to see at fault lines are who are these enemy combatants? What's the other side of this war like? So we went down to meet them. They have no idea that they're involved in a war in the U.S. They have no idea that they're enemy combatants. And particularly those when you bring up the first strike on 19, they would have no idea why like they wouldn't even know why the boat blew up. And so there is video that Trump posted it on social is true social, right? There's a second video though that they haven't allowed anyone to see except for select Congress members that shows the second strike. And the way it's been described is 45 minutes later, two guys still clinging to records in the water and waving to the aircraft above because they probably had no idea that that aircraft fired on them. They think it might be there to save them and then they get killed by the same aircraft. Now you're right about what they teach at the War College, I'm a former Marine officer. And it's not just on the water. When someone's out of the fight, you can't execute them. You take them as a POW, you even have to render aid to them, medical aid. It's just the laws of war. And there are several different regimes, legal regimes that you could apply to this. International humanitarian law, human rights law, maritime law, war, the laws of war, our own domestic law. But all of those, there is no compelling argument that this is anything other than murder or war crime or both. To go to the second strike, it was the carons of family who we go down and interview there in Sanctum, Martha Columbia that happened last September. One of the things interesting about it is, as a journalist, I think as long as it's just numbers in the US, no one's really paying attention to this. So you always want to put a face to numbers, right? So hard to do in this case. One to confirm that this person was actually lost in a strike and not their boat just sunk or whatever, right? But two, to find a family willing to talk, they're scared of the Trump administration, they're scared of their own administration, they're all shifting rapidly, right? And they're often maybe scared of narcos if narcos are involved. So it was really difficult. We worked with journalists on the ground for months and six different countries to try to buy families. And there's an excellent consortium of investigative journalists across Latin America that I would point people to lclipclipp.org. They do excellent work in Latin America. They were the first to really identify some survivors. I think they started with 13 and might be up to 21 now. Air Wars, who we also worked with, has been tracking survivors. But through lclip mostly. So a big shout out to lclipclipp for being able to identify survivors. But one of the interesting things about this particular family, the carons of family that was in the second strike that we highlight in the film, is that they're one of the few families to actually pursue legal recourse. So they have an attorney in the U.S. that has filed a claim in the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights. And they're trying to pursue some sense of justice for their lost family member. Although I will say while Caterin, who is the mother of the children, they weren't together at the time that Alejandro Cronzo was killed, is pursuing this, which means he's accepted his fate. It's not true of his children. Like his youngest son, who's probably between 8 and 10 told me that his dad's a really strong swimmer and that he comes to him in his dreams. And he'll tell his sisters, his sister told us that he'll say, "I'm going to go walk around town so I can see if dad's out there, I can run into dad." So they haven't even, it's, I've done, been a journalist for 21 years at Al Jazeera and I've also done the disappeared as opposed to the killed. And it's a fate worse than death for the family because there is no closure and there's always wondering. And that's basically what we're rendering. And the videos that you talked about, that young boy, his mom was keeping it from him. What happened to his dad or what they thought might have happened to his dad at that point. Other kids at school bring the video to him and say, "Oh, your dad's a drug runner and Trump killed him and show him the video, which traumatized them." Traumatized them. And the dehumanization involved when they post these videos as if they're just video games and there isn't some kid on the other side of that video watching it saying, "Is that my dad?" Because it was the same thing as St. Lucia too. They watched that video over and over and over again as her chancey survived. It was that dad. It's haunting to them. And yet for these guys, heck, Trump, they act like it's a video game that they won and they're moving on to the next level. Well, and they're operating on the premise that it can be kind of a funny troll because it is almost certain that these fishermen were running drugs and acting as enemy combatants, literally enemy combatants against the United States. Now, we had a problem with fentanyl. It is highly unlikely that, and fentanyl is down. But it's highly unlikely that any of these boats were trafficking fentanyl. You can tell us more because you're on the ground. What is the likelihood that there was any, like, set the extra-judicial stuff aside. It is obviously egregious and ridiculous. But let's even just take the Trump administration's point that these are drug runners that are operating as enemies against the homeland. evidence did you uncover that? if there's any truth to that. - So I would love to discuss theoretically, if these word drug runners, let's talk about the legality of that. But first, I wanna lay out that the carons of family and the families that we found in St. Lucia, the Joseph family and the William family of Noppy Williams and Ricky Joseph, who were on the boat that was blown up there, insists that they had nothing to do with drugs, insists that they didn't, and I wanna make clear that we're not implying that they did. - Right. - There has been no evidence to say that they did. Let's say they did, the these families that I found, I found Lucia, who's Ricky Joseph's partner. They have four children. When I found her in St. Lucia, there was no electricity in the house 'cause she couldn't afford it. There was very little food for the four kids. We spent the first day getting electricity on getting food in the house. Before we even sat down to really talk about what's going on, her own government hasn't checked on her. It's been five months. Ricky, she says, made about $2,000 a year as a fisherman. $2,000 a year to survive, right? They're barely getting by when he was working. And now, if he was a drug, some big time drug runner, you'd think they'd have a food and electricity. - If it was a drug runner, they wouldn't be living like this, right? Or even if he was and they were living like this, how far down the total home do you think he is at the cartel? In the Karanza family, Catherine is now having to like cook meals and try to sell them as lunches on the street into people in the neighborhood, so that she can survive. The oldest daughter got a scholarship to college. It's an online college. They can't afford a laptop for her to go. So she's helping mom with the meals right now. If they were really part of a Colombian drug cartel, how far down do you think they are that that's how they're living, right? - And it's not like the extent of the evidence is that maybe there's some small amounts of cocaine on some of these boats, maybe, maybe. - Okay, so we don't know the legal criteria to strike a boat because it's in a classified justice department document. - Yes, that's right. - In an LLC decision that only select members of Congress can see. And when they see it, they can't take a lawyer. They can't take their national security expert. Only the Congressperson can see it, right? - And then the lawyer's refused to even go down to the hill to defend it. I think that's what I had heard. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. But here's what we do know that's in there. So in the LLC, it will have the legal justification and the criteria to strike a boat. Senator Kane and Senator Paul found an interesting way to talk about it. They both seen the document. They can't say what they've seen because it's classified, but they can say what wasn't there. And one of the things they both brought up that isn't in the criteria is are there drugs on the boat? There doesn't have to be drugs on the boat. - Amazing. - For this strike legally from the US. - Not that they would have any, they're legal claim. - Unless they have like human intelligence on the boat or around the boat. - Perhaps they could track it. Satellites, perhaps they could track it by drones, but it doesn't matter because they don't need drugs on the boat to blow them up. According to their own justice department. - Which is why trials matter. - It blows your mind, right? - But let's talk about, this is really about fentanyl, right? So I go to St. Lucia and I ask them, well, this is a war against fentanyl. What do you think about fentanyl? And I had more than a handful of people tell me what is fentanyl. They've never heard of fentanyl there. They don't know what it is. And yet they're caught up in a war over it. So, okay, it's not about fentanyl because fentanyl doesn't actually come out at Columbia in Venezuela, right? It's made in the US, it comes from China, it comes across the land border from Mexico, but it doesn't come from down there. So it's not about that. So, okay, let's just say broadly. It's about stopping drugs. In December, the US killed more than 20 people with multiple strikes in the water. And the same month that President Trump pardoned Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former president of Honduras, who's convicted by a jury of Americans of trafficking four to 500 tons of cocaine into the US. And saying, we're gonna shove these drugs right up the noses of the green goes. - So this is on tape, right? - Let's, so people don't miss that. - What did Juan Orlando Hernandez say? - We're gonna shove these drugs right up the noses of the green goes. And where is he now? Fully pardoned and back in Honduras. He was given a 45 year sentence. He was convicted guilty by an American jury. And the same month that we killed 20 of these four people riding around on little boats, right? We let him go. So if you're really serious about stopping drugs, what's the question there? Now, we're gonna say-- - Delta Rodriguez is in charge of Venezuela and was apparently part of the same cartel that Maduro was in prison for. - And Maduro isn't facing any capital charges. No death penalty is on the line for Maduro. Why is that on the line for these guys on the boats? - Yeah. - Even if they were, right? - It's a good point. - Shipping drugs. And so it's like, you can punch a hole after a hole in the argument to show that this is not about drugs in the United States. Marco Rubio says drugs with ventilated, coming to our shores is an exigent threat to the country and we can take them out. Coming to our shores is a stretch. These boats are designed to go 50 to 100 miles. The Ricky Joseph, not the Williams. Their boat was blown up 1,500 miles away from the US. It's not coming to our shores in these boats. - Couldn't, yeah. - I mean, they're a continent away. We're blowing up boats and acting as if they're, oh, they could have landed in Miami tomorrow and that is not a fact. - So after they got a lot of heat for killing the shipwrecked sailors. There was another strike where there were survivors. - Yes. - Tell us what happened after that strike. Now that the lawyers are involved saying, okay, this could have been a criminal act. On top of the criminal act. So what do they do this time? - Okay, so the survivors are a really interesting part of understanding the locality of this. I know of at least three strikes where there have been survivors. And one of them, there were two survivors. Well, okay, one of them, there was a survivor from, I believe Columbia, who has been in a intensive care unit in Costa Rica since it happened and hasn't spoken to anyone and I don't think he can speak and I've heard he probably won't, because the situation is dire. Two others, one was returned to Columbia and one was returned to Ecuador and we've been in touch with some of those families and there's no way they're gonna talk to us and they've gone off the radar. The family says they haven't heard from them anymore. But here's the interesting thing. How do they get back to their homes in Columbia and Ecuador? Well, after the strikes, we repatriated them to their country. Okay, so these guys are such a threat to the U.S., these terrorists that we can kill them on site unless they happen to survive that and then we take them home with no charges. They're not POWs in the war. Why wouldn't they be POWs in this war? It's a war because it's not a war. That's right. And so the survivors show you kind of a whole 'nother. So then what they did was we can't pick up survivors in the water because it exposes like this whole thing. It's embarrassing. So they had a boat go down in the Pacific off of Central America. There were like 9 or 10 survivors in the water. So the U.S. calls a rescue plane from the Coast Guard. Where do you think they called that plane from? Utah. Well, it's gotta be San Diego, right? It's like, Utah. Oh, Utah. Where Air Wars has a great report on this that shows the plane circling for hours before it actually heads down to El Salvador, has to have a crew rest before it goes out to look on the water. So you have eight guys in the open seas waiting for rescue. Our rescue plane gets there in 45 short hours later. Self-care September is here, which means it's time to rethink what self-care actually means. Yes, self-care can be a long walk. It can be in everything shower. It can be putting your phone on, do not disturb. But sometimes it's actually about sitting with the uncomfortable stuff. And understanding your patterns, your boundaries. Finally, figuring out why you keep doing things that you swore you would never do again. I'm Gemma Speg, the host of the psychology of your 20s podcast. Unlike the quarter-life crisis, which is depicted as the collapse, the quarter-life reinvention is the expansion and worth of something. So this self-care September, don't just take care of yourself. Get to know yourself as well. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? It's real. It's raw. I went off. I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. You're going to scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same bag. 12 seats. Those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030. You better be hitting the ground, going hard in the south now. Hey there, everybody, Amy Robock and TJ Holmes here from the Amy and TJ podcast with mid to elections just around the corner. We're breaking down the biggest political stories leading up to November and some of those big political stories aren't just what's happening on Capitol Hill. We got accusations, allegations flying all day long on Capitol Hill is just like a reality show. Maybe you can take us along when you're on your actual run outside. Or if you don't feel like going out still, you get what we're saying. It's our morning run. It's our daily news. Run down up the top stories that will get you going before you even finish that first cup of coffee. Listen to Amy and TJ. DJ on the iHeart radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts. So the plane takes off, they now understand that they're required to attempt to rescue these survivors. The plane takes off and it just starts circling. Why would it do that? I can't answer for them, but it seems as if the plan is what they would call in the military, as a guy who used to be in the military, slow rolling it. That time do its job, while it looks like you're doing your job. So instead of executing them 45 minutes later, we let, deliberately, let every single one of them slowly drown. That's right. That's right. And there's also been reported in at least two other cases where we are Coast Guard contacted, Coast Guards of another country, they're in Mexico or El Salvador in two different cases, and asked them to conduct a rescue operation that, from what we hear from people who were in those port towns, never actually left the port. And if you listen to Trump, particularly about the double tap, Trump says, "Well, people say one strike, two strikes for me, I just wanted them taken out." So he really believes that he has this kind of imperial power that can, with a way of a hand, say, "I want these people killed and they'll be killed." I think this is a key part of this when you're wondering why. What's going on here? The cartels have been designated as terrorist organizations by the FTL, foreign terrorist organizations, by the State Department. Now, that makes it harder for them to travel, it makes it harder for them to bank. It is not a death penalty. There is not a trial or a jury involved, and yet the Trump administration wants you to think that if you've been labeled a terrorist, that it can kill you. And that, if American citizens accept that, it does not stop in the Caribbean. Look at the way they responded to Alex Petty and Renee Good's death, right? They were domestic terrorists. So if they say you're a terrorist, they're saying they can take you out, and that will happen domestically if people don't say something about this. And here's the other thing. I know Alex Petty's name. I know Renee Good's name. Why don't we know the names of these people? It's the same situation, right? It's the U.S. government murdering people without trial or jury. We should know their names, but it's unclear if the U.S. knows who they're killing. We submitted detailed questions to Southern Command, State Department, and the White House asking, was Alejandro Caronzo killed in the strike on this day? We're Ricki Josef and Navi Williams killed in the strike on February 13th, and they did not respond to either of those questions. They responded to us, but they did not answer those specific questions. So it remains unclear if they even know who they're killing. Let's talk about another man whose name we should know, Renee Kobos. So another layer of this is that Daniel Nebo, who's the head of Ecuador, is himself accused of being a massive narco trafficker. He's the sion of a banana export company. The banana shipments are constantly getting found to be smuggling huge amounts of cocaine particularly to Europe. Violence in Ecuador under Nebo has made it one of the most dangerous places in the world. So drop site for its reporting on the CIA linked Boat Strike and your team as well, worked with Renee Kobos. Tell us, like, who was Renee? Renee lives in Guayaquil, Ecuador, near there, and he had kind of a security background. We first engaged with him under a security situation, but he ended up becoming a fixer and then a producer, acting as a field producer in pieces. We did a piece on the Ecuadorian military disappearing children last year, and Renee was a field producer on that. He's also recently worked with the BBC as a field producer. About three weeks ago, you had two trucks of armed men, three armed men each in jackets with somewhat pistol, somewhat rifles, show up to his neighbor's house about two in the morning, go in and kill his neighbor before they realized it was the wrong guy, went into the next house and killed Renee. Renee was a fixer for us as well. You were telling me recently that he actually saved your life at one point you tell us that story. We were investigating the listed trade of shark fins, and we were on the coast of Ecuador, which is a heavily contested area by the new Holesco cartel and the Sinaloa cartel or having a fight there. It was an extremely violent time. This is a time where it was right before the Nibbo election. So let's say three years ago, I think my years run together. You had a presidential candidate who was assassinated in the street in broad daylight by seven Colombian secarios, a governor was murdered shortly after that. We go in, we're on the coast at the Sanderosa Fish Market, and the mayor of the town. While we were there, it was like one block away from us, was surrounded by gunmen. They opened fire on his car with him and his wife in it, but it was a bulletproof car, so he survived. Just to set the scene for how violent the country was at this moment, the elections were going to happen that weekend. We went in and filmed at a place where they were fending sharks, and people got really upset. And we had been working with a high level smuggler there, and we were supposed to interview him and protect his identity. We had already interviewed some lower level smugglers and protected their identity, but when he found out we filmed at this fish market without basically his permission, things went south pretty fast, and they said we need to get out for our safety. And then people started canceling interviews on us, and then that night he called my producer and said oh, which means keep your eyes out, it's a threat, and said that they say your DEA, which is an accusation you can't disprove when you're in that kind of environment. And the tricky part was we're basically a soft location, no security at all at the house we're staying at, and we called Renee in Guaranteville, and they're about to shut down the highways because of the election. They were stopping all highways, and it was about 10 o'clock at night. He said I'll be there by 5.30 in the morning, don't check out of your hotel, don't pay your bill, we'll take care of that later, and tell these guys that you're headed to Manta, which is the opposite direction, I'm sorry, we've offended you, we're going to leave after the election in a couple of days, and we're going to go to Manta, and then he was there before the sun came up, and he got us to Guine Hill the other direction safely. And those are kind of things like okay, no bullet was ever fired, but when you start getting threats like that in an area like that, in a place like Ecuador right now, you take those threats really serious, and Renee dropped everything and extracted us out of that situation. >>And put himself in danger to do it. >>Yeah, absolutely, put himself in danger. >>Because you're going to like, you know what, busy tomorrow. >>And he did it without pause, he did it without pause, I mean, this is like 10 o'clock at night, and he was there by 5.30 in the morning, and it was a two hour drive. And so, you know, this happens too often in journalism. Those are the guys who are there, who are actually living the risk, and will be there after I go in for two weeks and leave, you know, and I carry a really heavy heart for the risk that those guys carry, particularly when it ends up like this with Renee. >>Any reaction from the government to his killing, the assassination? >>Not that I have heard of. There's also been assassinated, assassination of a prosecutor there recently, who was investigating the boat strikes off the Ecuadorian coast. There's so much violence in Ecuador right now, I would suspect that there isn't going to be much of an investigation. And in fact, there have been, I would say, credible accusations that the police were involved in what happened to Renee. But I can't prove that, it's just the way they shut up, the equipment they had, that's what people there have said. >>Well, it's finished by rolling this clip, which you can find on YouTube, killing it's see. >>In September 2025, the Trump administration began targeting vessels in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific that it claims were carrying drugs to the U.S. >>Whoever are piling those boats, the guilty of trying to kill people in our country. >>More than 220 people have been killed in over 60 strikes, but the Trump administration hasn't released any of their names. The only public evidence of their deaths are official press releases, and these videos posted by the administration. >>It looks like a video game. These are grainy videos where you can't even see individual people, you just see a boat blow up. >>It's easy to distance yourself from the humanity. >>Documentary is called killing it see, you can find it on YouTube now, I strongly recommend you check it out. Josh Rushing, thank you so much for being here, really appreciate it. >>Thank you so much for having me. This is an important issue, and I think right here, you're in between the one-year anniversary of the first strike and the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and you can trace the American reactions in 9/11 directly to what we're doing now, and that path goes through Obama's drone war, which may be why more Democrats aren't speaking out about it, but they should, particularly as this expands into a much larger military expansion into the Western hemisphere. >>Thank you so much. >>Thank you, Emily. >>That's going to do it for us on today's edition of Breaking Points, thank you so much for tuning in. Of course, if you want to make Ryan Proud and Sagar angry, head to breakinpoints.com for a free month trial of a premium subscription, so you also get a trial of the full version of the newsletter and the show on Kat and your inbox every morning, early. All right. Thank you. Appreciate it. Ryan and I will be back on Friday. Crystal and Sagar will be back tomorrow. All right. See you then. 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