Pay Attention

They Don't Care About You

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.

Pay Attention

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 DNC Released Their Autopsy. They Learned Nothing.

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.

The Slush Fund

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.

The State Of Emergency Over AI Cameras

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.