Signal Fire

Trump is buying Russian diesel in violation of two laws his own party passed less than a month ago. Elon Musk shut down Starlink access for Ukraine preventing planned drone attacks and costing lives while he was accepting a medal of gratitude from Zelensky. And the federal government subpoenaed Ilhan Omar’s sister over immigration paperwork filed when Omar was 12 years old and had no legal authori...

The White House pulled federal agents off real investigations to monitor Americans for legal protests. 281,000 legal immigrants who followed every rule are losing Medicaid this month under the One Big Beautiful Bill. And Utah just became the first state to allow AI to prescribe medication without a doctor in what experts are calling a preview of where healthcare is heading. Jon and Lisa break down...

Dozens of psychiatrists and mental health professionals are saying Trump must be removed from office and his mental and physical decline is accelerating. At the United Nations he threatened to annihilate a country of 92 million people and the media covered it like a normal speech. Mary Trump, a clinical psychologist and family member, has been raising the alarm while mainstream media coverage cont...

Trump launched his own state TV channel this week and only 8000 people out of 174 million eligible voters watched it. He is also banning journalists from the White House. The Greenland deal Trump is calling a victory is a corruption vehicle for donors who bought up Greenland mineral rights years ago. And Trump gave Xi the highest level state visit while using China as the justification for taking...

The Iran war has entered a new phase and it is hitting your wallet. Seven months in the conflict has expanded into a wider regional war with no exit strategy. The Saudi pipeline outage took 7 million barrels of oil off the market and sent oil prices spiking. Iran oil control is now a defining factor in global energy markets. Gas is now hitting $4.31 nationally and as high as $9 a gallon for diesel...

Tech companies have been writing their own rules for decades because regulators have never effectively stepped into this space. The Meta settlement the media called historic is structured so Meta might not actually pay the full $18 billion. And AI data centers are ending up in communities that do not have the power to push back. Jon and Lisa sit down with Gaurab Bansal, executive director of Respo...

25 years after 9/11 America is still living with the damage it did to itself in response. Two decades of war, a surveillance state, and Afghan interpreters who risked their lives for America now being sent back to the Taliban to die. North Korea is pursuing a nuclear armed navy and Trump is calling Kim Jong Un a friend. Jon and Lisa ask what America learned from 9/11 and what blunders we are cooki...

Meta was fined $18 billion for knowingly addicting children to social media. That fine represents less than 10% of their annual revenue and the same week the judgment came in Zuckerberg bought a castle. A new drug doubles pancreatic cancer survival with minimal side effects but costs $40,000 a month while the rest of the world pays a fraction because of drug pricing corruption. Jon and Lisa break...

Dr. Dan Barkhuff is a Naval Academy graduate, Navy SEAL, and Harvard Medical School physician who says MAGA is selling young men personal loyalty to Trump as a substitute for real masculine values like honesty, duty and courage. Trump and Hegseth are purging military officers who are not politically aligned with MAGA and capping promotions based on politics instead of merit. And 29 states are suin...

Donald Trump owns 41% of a company that profits directly from his own government decisions. Private companies are building a surveillance network that tracks millions of cars across America without anyone ever voting on it. The world is experiencing its worst wildfire season on record and Trump is spending taxpayer money to bring back coal while China dominates the global clean energy market. Jon...

Trump started the Iran war to distract from tariffs and a collapsing economy. Now 75% of Americans oppose the war and he needs a new distraction. Reports suggest hundreds of US troops have been severely injured while the Pentagon stays silent. America's anti-missile stockpile is so depleted from the Iran war that there is nothing left to send Ukraine.

Peter Pomerantsev is one of the world's leading experts on propaganda, authoritarianism and information warfare. Born in Soviet Ukraine, his father was arrested for sharing banned books and exiled. Peter grew up studying how authoritarian governments control information and now researches political manipulation and disinformation at Johns Hopkins University.

Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley billionaires believe voters mess up democracy and their wealth proves they should be governing instead. Trump just made a deal giving Saudi Arabia what they wanted while the Saudis had billions invested in the Trump family business. And corruption is now merging with the US government at a scale that has never existed before in American history. Jon and Lisa break do...

Both the supplement industry and big pharma profit from your fear. Dr. Nicholas Jackson is a PhD immunologist who built an audience on Instagram and TikTok by making complex science fun and accessible. In this episode he breaks down how to spot a fake doctor online, why fear drives sales on both sides of the health debate, and what red flags to look for before you trust anyone giving you health ad...

Carrie Scharbo spent years as an Emmy winning network TV anchor covering the darkest stories in the news. She became so desensitized to suffering that she stopped feeling anything. So she walked away and built something better. Now she sits down with Jon and Lisa to talk about how algorithms decide what news you see and what you never see, why social media is intentionally keeping Americans in sep...

Trump increased his personal wealth by 2 billion dollars last year while running the federal government. He profited from crypto while his administration eliminated crypto regulation. Three Supreme Court justices voted against birthright citizenship even though the Constitution clearly allows it. And Trump is sending people back to Haiti while his own State Department has it listed at the highest...

The president of the United States has 1500 nuclear weapons and the power to use them in under 28 minutes and most Americans have stopped thinking about that. Trump just walked away from the Iran war with nothing and called it a win. Iran kept its missiles, got billions of dollars, and now controls the Strait of Hormuz. Jon and Lisa sit down with Tom Nichols from The Atlantic and the US Naval War...

This week on Signal Fire, Lisa and Jon examine the aftermath of the Iran conflict and the agreement President Trump is calling a victory. They explore what the deal actually contains, what it means for American credibility abroad, and why allies may be rethinking their dependence on the United States. The conversation also explores the growing influence of billionaires and technology companies in...

Local news is dying and no one is replacing it. Newsrooms have shut down across the country. No one is sitting in on your city council meetings anymore. No one is filing public records requests on your school board. The platforms that filled that gap were built to spread the most engaging content, not the most accurate. Misinformation travels 70% farther than truth on social media and the people r...

Why do corporations pay no taxes? 88 of the biggest companies in America paid zero in federal taxes last year. Some got money back from the government. Tesla made $5 billion in profit and paid nothing. Pepsi and Yum Brands did the same thing. This is completely legal. Jon and Lisa break down how companies avoid taxes by moving billions through Ireland, Malta and the Cayman Islands. They cover the...

Katherine Stewart has spent 17 years going inside the rooms where the movement to dismantle American democracy operates. Her newest book Money Lies and God documents the machinery, the money, and the people behind it. And she says it is further along than most people realize. Christian nationalism is not a religion. It is an anti-democratic political ideology that exploits faith for power. It has...

In this episode of Signal Fire, Lisa Senecal and Jon Zieger examine the real-world outcomes of the modern “America First” agenda and ask who is actually benefiting from it. The conversation explores rising debt, inflation, Social Security, immigration, healthcare, and the growing influence of political patronage in American policymaking. They also discuss the long-term consequences of governing th...

Jon Zieger and Lisa Senecal break down artificial intelligence and wealth inequality — and the alarming ways they are accelerating each other. Elon Musk is about to become the world's first trillionaire. He just called Social Security a Ponzi scheme. Jon argues the real story is not that billionaires avoid taxes. It is that they have engineered a system that taxes you instead. Data centers are dri...

Justin Glawe is the only journalist in the country who filed to unseal the FBI affidavit that authorized the raid on a Fulton County elections warehouse. He read every document. He filed every motion. And he has two alarming conclusions. The first is that this is the first time in American history that the federal government has seized records from a local elections office. Not during Reconstructi...

Hosts Lisa Senecal and Jon Zieger break down the week American democracy took some of its worst hits yet. The Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act. Southern states had backup redistricting maps ready before the ruling was announced. The DOJ is arresting a former FBI director for posting seashells on Instagram while quietly dropping hundreds of human trafficking cases. This is not a coinciden...