Информатор раскрывает крупнейшую операцию массовой слежки в истории и грядущее полицейское государство

Whistleblower Reveals the Largest Mass Surveillance Operation in History and the Coming Slave State

Источник: https://tuckercarlson.com/live-show-july-15-2026

[Транскрипт]

Tucker [00:00:00] If you're over 40, you probably were assigned the George Orwell novel, 1984, not written in 1984, written in 1949, right after the Second World War, and it is famously a picture of the dystopian future where the state controls everything. And if you can think back, the novel, not quite as widely assigned now. Your kids are probably not reading it. If you are under 40, you may not know exactly what it is, except it's like a synonym for the state. Being overbearing, big brother is watching you. But it's worth remembering what 1984 describes because it is so, so prescient. It does not describe a lot of physical repression by the state. In the end, there is torture and there are allusions to killing. But the state in 1984 doesn't spend a lot of time putting gun barrels in people's faces. It doesn't need to. What it does instead is spy on them. There are cameras everywhere in 1984. Something called the telescreen, which when the novel came out in 1949, seemed very space age. It was a screen and it listened while you spoke, it eavesdropped on you, and it bombarded you with prerecorded propaganda messages. And again, when this came out, it was impossible to imagine, say, the iPhone, which is listening to you at all times, or one of those seat back screens on. Delta Airlines that's yelling at you without your permission about some credit card deal, no one reading 1984 when it first came out had any reference point for this level of surveillance. There was famously a guy called Jeremy Bentham who was a liberal reformer in the 19th century who had the greatest idea in the history of human progress called the Panopticon.

And the idea was we're going to build prisons. With a round design so one officer can see everybody in the prison. All the cells will be open and one guy can see everybody and of course can't see everyone at once but inmates will never know when he's looking so they'll know at all times that they could be under surveillance and that will compel them to obey. They'll be a lot more obedient once they suspect we're watching. That was the whole idea of the panopticon meaning see anywhere. So, apart from that kind of kooky, supposedly well-meaning, but actually totalitarian theory of Jeremy Bentham's, nobody had really constructed a state capable of watching or listening to everything that people did because the technology wasn't there. You just couldn't do it until 1984. And it painted, once again, a pretty accurate prediction, as it turned out, of what the future was going to look like. But what's interesting, there's a scene in there. Where the protagonist in the novel, without being boring about it, but a guy called Winston Smith, meets another person and has a kind of a low-grade love affair with this woman called Julia. And the reason this is notable in the book is because there are very few love affairs in 1984, or in a world with this kind of surveillance, because they're impossible. One of the things you learn when you lose your privacy is that you can't have intimacy without it. Intimacy is, by definition, exclusive. It is a relationship between a very small number, usually two people. You can't have an intimate DMV line or concert, your bedroom, you hope, is intimate. And that's because not everyone's invited. So without privacy, there is no intimacy. People can't say what they really think. People are afraid that everyone can hear what they're saying, and so they don't say it, and after a while they don't think it. So, the main takeaway from the novel is you don't need to beat people or shoot them to get them to comply, you only need to spy on them and then tell them that you're spying on them, and they will know that they have to constrain their own behavior. They will be so terrified and alone, so completely isolated, that after a while they won't be capable of having revolutionary thoughts. They will accept whatever you tell them. So, stripping people of their privacy is the key to enslaving them. So in the novel, Winston Smith and Julia decide, we're gonna try to have a normal conversation. So they go to Paddington Station in London, they take the train out to the countryside, and they stand in a pasture and they have a conversation. And that's the kind of extent of their intimacy, but it's thrilling within the context of this dystopian, privacy-free world. They go out into the countryside. And there they can talk freely, there they be truly themselves, there they they can be honest and be intimate with another human being, break out of the prison of solitude that the state has cast them in. What's interesting if you think about it is that even Orwell, who died months after finishing the book, his last book, even Orwell couldn't have imagined the world that we live in now in the United States in 2026, or even driving to the countryside, much less taking the train to the country side, is no escape from nonstop surveillance. Because cameras are everywhere, and cameras aren't simply recording you, they're listening to you and analyzing your biometrics, your gait, your face. There is almost, if you live in a metropolitan area in the United States, no place you can go from your bedroom.

To the grocery store, to the sidewalk in front of your house or apartment where you're not being surveilled at all times, 24 hours a day. And who knows what's happening to the images and sounds those cameras are capturing, that data, we actually don't know. And there's really no legal safeguard in place to let us know or to protect us from the misuse of that information. Information about us. Remarkable. How did this change so fast? And were you consulted on the change? Did your local lawmaker ask you, would you like to be spied on 24 hours a day? No, of course no one asked. In fact, until very recently, most Americans were not even aware this was happening. There's been an explosion in surveillance in one specific area, which is misleadingly named, automatic license plate readers. So the idea is that a camera either affixed to a pole or bolt to the side of a building or increasingly in a drone, takes pictures of a license plate and runs that information back to police headquarters presumably or corporate headquarters. And that information can be used to track down the fabled child traffickers. Everyone in charge is so upset about child traffickers.

There's not a single member of Congress who isn't very exercised about the existence of child traffics. Even the ones who opened up the southern border and led in tens of thousands of child traffickers. They're very upset about child traffickers. And because child trafficking is America's most pressing problem, everybody in the country, all 350 million, need to be spied on at all times but just your license plate. Well, it's become clear in recent months that these license plate readers are doing a lot more than reading license plates. In fact, there's no law that says they have to constrict their spying to people's license plates, they can spy on people. And cars, and they could do facial recognition and they can listen to what you say, and indeed they are. So there are a lot of companies that provide this service. The biggest and certainly the most famous is called Flock, Flock Safety. The idea behind Flock safety is police departments will use its product, its drones, or its cameras affixed to poles in their towns to reduce crime. And from the perspective of the police department... It's a pretty good deal. And it's a good deal because it's a whole lot cheaper than police officers. Police officers are very expensive. It costs over $100,000 a year on average to employ a police officer.

Over the course of an entire police career, through recruitment and training and sick days and of course salary and then retirement, it can cost $7 million to a city for a single police officer But if you were to switch, if you're to automate the process, if you are to get a machine to do what people once did, it costs you about 2,500 bucks under the Flock contract. So you can certainly see the incentive. Of course, lost in this is any privacy or even interaction with the human being with whom you might relate in some way, personal interactions coming far too expensive in the new digital economy. But you can see why city councils and mayors and police chiefs would be incentivized, would have great incentive to use flock cameras instead of people. The problem is, it's not clear what the rest of us are getting in return. So the promise, and it's inherent in the name, flock safety, is that if you give up your privacy, your preexisting you thought right, to kind of walk around without having your face analyzed and sent to headquarters somewhere in this or another country, If you were to give up all privacy... You would, in exchange, get what safety? Of course, and that's the trade, always. The problem is, it hasn't worked that way because safety has never been a priority of this ruling class. There was a time when big city mayors and police chiefs and governors and even presidents said explicitly, look, we're gonna crack down, but in return, you're gonna get the kind of country that is clean and orderly. Safe for your daughter or grandmother to go to the store. No one's getting raped in my country, and we may need to crack a few heads, but you will get safety. And for years, a bipartisan Republican and Democrat agreement remained in place. That the first order, the first job of government was to provide safety for its citizens, because without that, what else do you have? Doesn't matter what your GDP is, if, I don't know, the downtowns of your biggest cities are open air drug markets, or hundreds of people are getting shot to death. It doesn't matter, so you first have to provide safety. But somewhere around 30 years ago, that part of the deal ended. And big city mayors, governors, members of Congress, sort of forgot that their number one duty is to provide safety to the population. And this kind of reached its most obvious and hilarious point five years ago when those same people, members of Congress and governors, big city, mayors even police chiefs were calling for some version of defunding the police. How about no police at all? Well, you think it's dangerous now? How about we just don't enforce any law? How does that sound? And they told us that they were not embarrassed at all. Opposing funding the police was a prerequisite to being anti-racist. So it was really a kind of moral test Anyone who's for the police hated black people obviously in case you weren't here when that happened But this was a widely understood principle and every channel including Fox News told you about this Anyone who is for the Police particularly white police is just a racist first cousin to a Nazi What's interesting is that some of those exact same people literally the same people? Are now telling you that you have to have cameras everywhere in drones, on light poles in buildings. In fact, now even in your car, thanks to an act of Congress, a law passed recently by the United States Congress, mandates cameras in all new passenger vehicles that assess the face of the driver. Whether he's eating or yawning or who knows what he's doing, having a private conversation. Well, there are no more private conversations even within the confines of your own vehicle. Why? Because safety. There are drunk drivers out there. Of course, it was only two years ago that Joe Biden explained, well, actually, drunk driving is not a big deal when illegal aliens do it. Somehow that standard's been revised. Drunk driving is such a big thing that you can't have a private conversation in your own car anymore, according to the U.S. Congress. And in fact, that is a law, and it's going to happen. So how exactly has this brand new, but already incredibly widespread phenomenon, flock cameras, license plate readers, in virtually every city in the United States, what has it done to crime? Well, it has not eliminated it, despite what they may tell you. So one of the cities that has the most license plate reader in the United States is Houston, Texas, Harris County, Texas which is a huge place, about 4.7 million people in Harris County Texas. It's about the size of Oman or New Zealand. It's a lot of people. And it also has a famously high murder rate. Lots of different kinds of crimes, but murder is the most straightforward because almost all murders are accounted for because there's a body and a missing person sometimes. So murders go reported.

So we know pretty much precisely how many murders a city has. Harris County, Texas has over 3,000 license plate readers in it, in the county. So you would think, think about 3,700 actually. So you'd think with 3, 700 license plate readers all over the city, when you look at a map of where they are in Harris County. I mean, there's nowhere you can go where you're not being watched. You would think it would be the safest place in the United States. But weirdly, Harris County Texas had over 500 murders in 2025. The murder that- Aggregate number of murders the total murders in Harris County, Texas has risen dramatically over the past 10 years Even as surveillance has become so intense. There is literally no place to hide Now, how does that work exactly? How is it that we increase the surveillance past what 1984 describes and we still have 500 murders in one US County? Hard to know how that happened. But one conclusion we can draw confidently is at the point of the license plate readers and the facial recognition software, which are integrated, probably not to keep you safe. So, if you're looking for a shortcut to decode everything that you're hearing about almost anything, discount the part where they say it's good for you, because that is not a relevant component to the formula. Should we do this? Well, let's see. Does it save us money? Does it increase profit? Is it good for us? Those are the three main criteria. What it does to you and your family, it's kind of not on the list. It's not a variable in that equation. So it is clear, in fact, it's proven, that if you turn a city into a panopticon, you still have, well, in the case of Harris County, Texas, hundreds of people getting murdered, but you have no more privacy, which is to say you have more intimacy, which is say you no more freedom, because Privacy is a prerequisite for freedom. You cannot be free unless you can have independent thoughts and privacy. And independent thoughts are impossible without privacy. Which is why when the U.S. Military wants to train its pilots on what life in a prison camp must be like, very often it puts them in a glass box naked in the center of the faux prison camp. That is a form of torture, because you are stripped entirely of privacy, there is nowhere to hide, everyone can see you at every moment. And what does that do to people? Well, it tends to drive them insane. And yet, the U.S. Government, state, federal, and local has now constructed exactly that, a glass box at the center of a prison camp, and we all reside in it. So, What do you do about that exactly? Do you go to your city council meeting and complain?

That's been tried, and if you're interested, go online. You can see video after video of concerned and very kind of forthright and reasonable citizens asking their city council members, like, why are we doing this? Why am I paying for this? And what about my Fourth Amendment right? That prevents unreasonable search and seizure without a warrant by the government. And in every single case, we could find they're just blown off like some annoying crank. Oh, shut up. Safety safety Eliminate cigarette smoking wall live forever. It's not like the life expectancy is gonna go down if we do that. Oh, but it did so the point is License plate readers are safe and effective and if you don't believe that you're obviously anti science shut up science denier What are you for the drug cartels? Oh, no, that would be the government. They're in business with the drug Cartels But normal people cannot get a hearing on this question. Congress has made no effort to ban it or even regulate it to protect say images of you or your conversation with your wife and or girlfriend or anyone else from being sent anywhere. There's no law preventing other people from stealing your conversations and your image in the most intimate moments of your life like in your car and sending it to anybody or selling it to anyone. Now some of these companies like Flock claim they don't. Okay, hope that's true. Is it? We don't know. And how would we know? So it's not an endorsement of vigilante justice or vandalism, of course, which we are not for the record endorsing But is it out of the realm of possibility that if you set up a system like the one just described that some people will Say I've got no option But to take these cameras down myself Well, in fact, that's exactly what a lot of people will conclude including this man, watch.

Soundbite [00:18:10] Do you have plans to continue to take down these fluxes? Absolutely, they are a clear and present threat to public safety. You know, you call me, but I am here. I'm right here. I stood up, I walked up there. She wanted my name, but I have a right to not bear testimony against myself, giving my name consults as testimony. And so I just chose to remain silent.

Tucker [00:18:44] Oh, guy in an American flag shirt, quoting the Constitution. He must be a dangerous radical. Better kill that guy. He knows his rights. That's not acceptable. So there are a lot of people like that. And if you go on the internet, at least as of yesterday, and this may change in the age of AI, who knows? But as of very recently, there are dozens, maybe hundreds of similar videos of people destroying license plate readers, cutting down the poles, running into their cars, spray painting them, their how-to videos and how to disable them with high-powered lasers you can buy on Amazon.com, which apparently fry their circuits. We're not endorsing that, of course. But there are videos, in other words, of people who don't feel they have any other recourse whatsoever making one last-ditch attempt to preserve the one thing that makes them free in this or any other country, their birthright, by the way, and that's called privacy.

They don't have it, they'd like it back. They think the Constitution guarantees it to them. Their lawmakers don't care. Their leaders don't car. Their police departments don't ca. They don't think it's to make them safer. They understand that it's to strip them of their most basic humanity, which it is. And so they're doing the only thing they can imagine doing, the only the powerless really can do in a situation like this. They're taking matters into their own hands and some of them are being punished for it. So you don't have to endorse vandalism, of course, and we're not, to understand the impulse behind it. And if that guy is any measure of who's doing it, and judging by the videos we saw, he definitely is a measure of exactly who's is doing it. It's not the malcontents, it's not drug addicted kids knocking down flock cameras for fun. It's sober, decent, patriotic Americans who believe the promises of their country. They're mad, not because they're trying to get something from flock, but because they wanna be left alone by flock. Because Flock was not part of the country they signed up for, no one asked their permission to steal their images and to spy on their conversations, to read their license plates. So any person with any capacity for reasoning and with any empathy for other human beings may not endorse that behavior, but can certainly understand it. And enlightened people might work to some kind of compromise. Maybe there are ways we can use technology to lower crime and make it safer for your grandmother to go to the grocery store. That would be good. But maybe we can do that without eliminating your humanity by taking away your privacy. But that's not, of course, the posture of the billionaires who run flock safety. Safety? Here is the founder of flock safety, Garrett something, doesn't look like he's even 40.

This is Garrett, the billionaire flock guy, describing how he feels about anyone who disagrees with his project. Watch.

Soundbite [00:22:00] Corporal Wars looking at citizen projects where citizens concerned about the rise of flock and flock cameras going up everywhere and increased surveillance everywhere. There's an organization called D-Flock, who are semi well known now I guess if you're interested in this stuff, who take a fairly aggressive approach in terms of counting the number of cameras and having a discord channel where they talk about potential activities to move against Flock and stop it expanding. What do you think of that organization and the way they go about their business? So I mean, I think there's really two groups of activists. You've got organizations like the ACLU and the EFF who take an above-the-board approach to fight for their point of view. And thankfully, we live in a beautifully democratic, capitalistic country where we can fight in court. And I have a lot of respect for those groups because they have reasonable debates and we follow the law. And then unfortunately, there's terrorist organizations like DFLOC, whose primary motivation is chaos. They are closer to Antifa than they are anything else. And that I think is unfortunate because we don't want chaos, or I don't what chaos. I like law and order. I like a society that has a bedrock of safety.

Tucker [00:23:08] It'd be interesting to know where the douchebag factory is that turns out billionaires in t-shirts who run our most powerful con companies what what who is that guy he's a billionaire where the money come from oh from state and local governments that's it's tax dollars Mr. T-shirt guy Garrett Langley or something He just described a group called D-Flock as a quote, terroristic organization. Well, what's D-flock? Well, if that's the only knowledge you have of D-flok, you probably think it's, as he said, it's like Antifa. Guys in black masks, spray painting things and beating people over the head with flag poles and shooting bear spray into the faces of cops. Antifa, they want chaos. Uh-huh. Well, actually, unlike Antifa, DFLoC has a website. So you can just kind of go there and assess for yourself. What is Deflock? Well, the answer was in the question and it was accurate, is a group on the internet that tells you where the flock cameras are. That's what they do. They have a map. They're not for flock cameras or any license plate readers. They think they're a violation of the Fourth Amendment. They think there an invasion of your privacy. They think their dehumanizing, all true by the way. But what they really do is keep track of where the monitors are, where are you being surveilled? And you can go on the map, it's deflock.com, and find out where they are in your neighborhood.

And by the way, it is overwhelmingly likely that you have them in your neighbor, that you're being watched, you didn't even know it. That's because the people who are supposed to be protecting you, actually protecting you like the mayor of your town, or the chief of your police department, or your member of Congress, your governor, they should be telling you, but they don't, because they don't care at all about you or your privacy. And so Deflock steps in and says, maybe you'd like to know where these cameras are. And in some cases, because the information is out there, the guy in the American flag shirt and the sombrero may disable the camera, okay. But most people would like to now. And so providing that information is terrorism, really? So think about what the T-shirt douchebag guy is saying. The billionaire that got rich on your tax dollars is saying to you, he's saying, we get to know everything about you.

Everything. You don't even know we're here. Actually, we have a drone overhead that at the distance of hundreds of yards can see everything about you, just like a military drone. And that information is going, well, we're not going to tell you where it's going. I mean, it's proprietary information that's going to the client, but what's he doing with it? He could be selling it to insurance companies, to other governments, to companies, data brokers who can sell to all the above. That's not happening? I don't know. Mr. T-shirt billionaire, is it happening? Shut up. But in other words, he's reserving the right to use tax dollars to know everything about you, but if you wanna know anything about their company, Flock Safety, you're a terrorist. Oh, you are a terrorist! It's a terroristic organization. Are they committing acts of terror? No, they're actually disseminating knowledge that he's not contesting is factual. He's not saying it's wrong. It's It's accurate! That's why he calls them terrorists! How dare you! You get to know everything. This is sort of the deal the government has with us or federal law enforcement has with this. You lie to an FBI agent, any federal agent, go right to jail. And if you live long enough, you'll know people who do go to jail for doing that. So of course the FBI can't lie to you, right? Oh, yes they can. So in other words, your employees that you pay who work for you, an FBI Agent works for you. Hey, get me a cup of coffee, son.

That's the posture, he works for you, he's your employee. He's your housekeeper with a gun. You're paying his salary. But if you lie to him, you go to jail, but he is absolutely allowed to lie to you and does all the time and faces no penalty because there's no law against it. Well, that's called asymmetrical. That's called unjust. And that's been true for a long time. But now you have a so-called private sector company. Defender of what he described the t-shirt kid billionaire described as capitalism. Oh, it's really it's capitalism, huh? Taking money from the public without their consent spying on them and Then if they try to even know what's going on their terrorists like Antifa who are against order Yes, so that's not a sustainable system by the way and across the country these very obvious and clearly identified on deflocked.com God bless them for doing that Cameras are under assaults. Hard to know how many. Flock on their website says not many. Well, it seems like a lot. But pretty soon it won't matter because they're gonna be in drones. And unless you're an extremely good shot with a tightly choked 12 gage, you're probably not gonna knock one down.

And if you do, you're going right to jail. Just charging a firearm. So they get to like hover over your bedroom window if they want, there's no law against it. Watch you and your wife and listen. But if you take any action at all, or even complain too loudly, or tell other people that it's happening, you're a terrorist! Okay now. So, while we can, in other words, while these surveillance devices, this whole North Korean setup that we're building here in the United States, is still visible to us before it's all airborne, and there's literally nothing you can do about it, you might not even know what's there at that point. There'll be no way to identify, there'll be no Flock for drones because they're mobile. So during this moment when we can talk about it, it seems like maybe it's worth talking about it. So Ben Jordan has thought a lot about this, knows a lot of about it and knows a lot of the details about where the data from these cameras are going, which is worth knowing. And he joins us now, Ben, are you there? Yeah, I'm here. How are you? I'm great. Thank you for the work that you've done on this. So. Why are you concerned about license plate readers, flock cameras? I mean, we're told that, look, it's for your safety, okay? And unless you want to be a terrorist, you should probably shut up about it. And there's nothing to be worried about at all if you're not doing something wrong.

So I'm not doing anything wrong. Why should I be worried?

Benn Jordan [00:29:27] Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of reasons to be worried about it. One pushback I always get is people saying, I have nothing to hide. And I feel like that is one of the most inaccurate statements ever. When somebody says that to me, I always ask them to hand me their phone and unlock it and let me go into the other room for a while and just, you know, why? Do you got something illegal on there? Let me look at it. Um, but yeah, anybody who's ever been stalked, who's been falsely accused of a crime, anybody has ever been hacked, who has had their identity stolen. They all have stuff to hide. And it's when those terrible things happen to you, when you realize, Oh, I actually have a lot to hide and this is really important. Um, as far as the first thing that I always, when I talked to like a police chief or something like that, the first I always tell them is that this is a third party tech startup. They're not even a public company. It's a private company that has venture capital investors, but one of which is on on the hook for Cambridge Analytica, by the way. And. They have one job, and that job is to make as much money as possible. So they're going to tell you whatever it is that you need to hear to put as many cameras in your community as possible, they're gonna tell you that it helps solve crime, that it'll increase your clearance rates, and the fact is that they don't have any evidence of doing any of that.

Tucker [00:30:35] So the crime thing, it does seem like, we tried to find the numbers, crime stats are complicated, cross-referencing them with what we know about these cameras and where they are. It didn't seem like they, well they certainly had an eliminated crime in like Oakland or Houston or places that have a real problem with crime, but it seems intuitive that like if you spy on everyone all the time, there'll be less crime. Like that doesn't seem a crazy claim.

Benn Jordan [00:31:01] Yeah. Well, I mean, criminology and sociology are incredibly chaotic. We actually, as a society, don't even know if increasing police reduces crime. Right. Like that can go either way, depending on what city. Yes. Um, one of my favorite studies, uh, was actually on dog ownership. Like those having a security dog, um, or having a lot of dogs in a neighborhood reduce crime. And it actually did. And the reason was because people walk their dogs. And they walk around and they get to know their neighbors and they might even get to know their police more, you know, if they have police on foot walking around the neighborhood and that makes everybody safer. But the only thing that we truly know that lowers crime is community policing, is people trusting their police officers and saying, hey, there's a gang member that all of a sudden bought a gun. I think something's going to go down. I saw this. They'll have that conversation with their police department and then they could actually reduce crime and prevent victims from happening so it's not a matter of getting somebody's license plate and arresting them down the road you don't have a victim in the first place.

And I feel in most of the communities that I've visited, and I'm literally on the road right now visiting communities, talking to city council members and stuff like that, in most to these communities, the public feels like the license plate readers specifically from FLOC are betraying the relationship that they have with police. They're actually violating that social contract where people expect privacy and they're not being given.

Tucker [00:32:30] Well, I mean, if surveillance created safety, then prisons would be very safe, but they're very dangerous. So I guess that's obvious, right? Now that I think about it.

Benn Jordan [00:32:39] One thing that I, the thing that a lot of people also don't think about, one of my favorite analogies, and this is used by the ACLU often, is if you're driving somewhere and a cop pulls behind you at a stoplight, you immediately change the way you behave. You start, you know, you might be really into a song you're listening to. Now you're distracted by the cop. You might be in a conversation. For some reason, the flow of that conversation changes, even if you've done nothing wrong. We all just have that weird feeling with this person who is able to I don't know, handcuff us, pull us over, write us a ticket, shoot us, whatever they want to do. When that person's behind us and surveilling us and looking in and saying, oh, what's that guy up to? Is he up to no good? We start behaving differently. And so when you put cameras in front of playgrounds and there's plenty of flock cameras in front playgrounds, which is baffling to me.

Nobody's saying hey doesn't this affect the way kids play like when I learned how to do a cartwheel the first time when I was A kid or when I went out to play the guitar. I didn't have anybody watching me I had to be alone to do that I needed my privacy to be able to find my own identity and find what I'm so good at Which isn't cartwheels, by the way

Tucker [00:33:48] It's a really, no, I think that's such a wise point and a deep point. So to what extent did communities have a say in this?

Benn Jordan [00:33:59] Barely any, most people, up until we started releasing big videos on this and then started going in the news, most didn't even know what the cameras were. They didn't realize that they were storing their data every single time they passed it for 30 days. So every single, so it's as if in my neighborhood, for example, in Atlanta, it's if I had a GPS unit on my car. I can't go to Chick-fil-A or a grocery store or do anything without the police knowing about it despite having not. I'm not suspected of committing any crime.

Tucker [00:34:32] So, I mean, shouldn't there be, like, a period where the town, the city of Atlanta, in your case, says to the public, you know, we're going to put North Korea-style surveillance posts all around the city? Like, are you for this? Are you against it? Like here's the trade-off that we're thinking about. What do you think? There was no democratic input that you're aware of.

Benn Jordan [00:34:53] No, it's very, and most people have been out of pocket. I've been paying for polling to find out, you know, how many people are for this, how many are against this, and overwhelmingly Americans are against it. And one thing that I find interesting is you're seeing a lot of people on both sides of the political aisle be against it at the same time, which it's like the only issue in America right now where everybody's kind of getting along and being like, yeah, we don't want that, we hate it. And I think that's. That's really important, because as you had just shown, as you have just shown that video with the Garrett Langley interview. He's very quick to say the word Antifa. After some of my videos came out, he emailed police chiefs around the country, his client, from his personal email address, telling them that they were under attack by lawless activists who want to defund the police. And I'm like, I've never wanted to defun the police, that's never been the stance of mine. And just the other day, he did an interview saying that people like Flock, they don't hate Flock. They hate the Trump He literally said this in an interview, and he just seems to be trying so hard to act like conservatives are aligned with him and that it's the left that's against him. But I'm trying to make it very clear that one of the reasons I'm here right now, conservatives are not aligned with them. Conservatives have classically always been anti-surveillance.

Tucker [00:36:19] And of course, starting at Orwell, who was famously a socialist and sometimes identified as a communist, but whose views are like beloved by every conservative I know. So it's like, I don't even know what those terms mean. If you're for America, if you're, for human dignity, if your, for privacy, you oppose this and that partisan crap is not applicable on questions like this. These are human rights. They're not political rights. So I have to assume that kid Garrett whatever his name is was just put my

Benn Jordan [00:36:49] I think it's actually three 12 year olds dressed on top of one another in an adult human costume. Oh, that's so good. That's exact. That so exactly figured it out. I know what's going on.

Tucker [00:37:02] That is so good. Okay, exactly. I hate to be mean to this one kid, but it's like, what's his, I mean, he's getting rich from this, from tax dollars, by the way, and then lecturing the people who are being abused by it. There's something about that combination that infuriated me, but he said, well, you know, there's the ACLU. Now, as someone who grew up admiring, sincerely admiring the ACL you, I wish the ACL, you were leading the fight on this, but you don't work for the ACL. You do you? Who do you work for?

Benn Jordan [00:37:28] No, but I've just met with the ACLU yesterday, with somebody from the ACL. They're a little bit less public on this, but they are supporting people who are filing suits. They are. Involved in it, but much less publicly, which is part of the reason I was having a meeting with them is because they're like, Hey, you're kind of the face of this right now. Do you want to maybe we'll give you some resources to help. And so, yeah, the ACLU, the EFF, the Electronic Frontiers Foundation, they've also been, they actually, the person who made Deflock, his name's Will, Flock sent him a cease and desist. And they stepped in and said, We have a legal team. We'll check this out and you know told flock to pound sand so They've been very helpful in that regard

Tucker [00:38:14] So where, where do the images and the sounds go? Where does the data go?

Benn Jordan [00:38:21] So typically what happens with your standard flock camera, like the black ones that you see, they're called like Falcons, that's the model name of them. They will see a license plate, they'll take a picture, and then they'll send it to the flock servers where the police can access it whenever. So if the police, let's say you had a brown car with a bumper sticker and maybe a broken window, the AI actually picks that up. And so not only your license plate the police could just search brown car, brown car broken window, and then they'll be able to find every single time that you've passed a camera. But it gets worse than that because they have something called a hot list where they could put your license plate on a hotlist and then every single that you pass a license plate, the police get a notification saying this person is here, this person's here, this person here. And they don't need a warrant to do this, which is the most staggering part because it's just this is no different than putting a GPS on somebody's car functionally if a lot of flock cameras around, and pinging somebody beyond one cell phone tower. The Supreme Court had not that long ago actually decided that that was unconstitutional. So I just don't see how this is.

Tucker [00:39:32] What's the status of the drones? Flock is saying publicly, you know, we have a drone fleet, we're expanding our drone fleet. How big is that fleet, do you know? And that does seem to change the calculation.

Benn Jordan [00:39:46] I had just done an interview next to, and not on the property, but next to the property of their secret drone facility, which has a construction company name on it. It doesn't have the Flock safety name. And they called the police and had me detained for doing an interview across the street They, yeah, they have a drone facility there. Their idea is to have drones that are persistently in the air. That's what some flock employees have told me as of like a year ago. They do have something called emergency responder drones that I don't really have a huge problem with. Like if my house is on fire, I kind of want a drone to fly by really fast and let the fire department know how many trucks to send. But what they're doing is a lot different than that. They want drones that. Persistently in the air and then you know when it runs out of batteries one will go down one will go back up and it'll be able to surveil every single person under it.

Tucker [00:40:41] So you're describing a war zone. I mean, there are a couple hot war zones in the world right, several, and there are permanently drones in the air. So why would our government be using, we're not enemy combatants, we're Americans, why would they be treating us like we're the enemy?

Benn Jordan [00:41:00] I mean, so the true, I want to joke and say, because it makes us safer, but I think that the truth is, is that all the Flock has spent hundreds of millions, billions of dollars on their product and marketing, but their marketing has been towards police. And they have studies that they wrote themselves that they point to saying, look how good this is for, look how much safer this makes your community, how much better it makes your job. They have conventions where they invite the police officers and give them freebies. And then there's also a really large revolving door effect where if you even go down LinkedIn, go down to like flock employees, you'll find the head of communications happened to be a police officer in Dallas. Um a year before and he happened to be the person in in the police department who signed the surveillance contracts or recommended the surveillance contract same thing with city hall members things like that and so you have something that really i mean i call it corruption i don't know if it's legally corruption but revolving door A revolving door between government and private industry to me sounds a lot like corruption. So I think that's why you have this massive expansion and that's what you have police saying we need this otherwise we can't do our job and city council members saying okay well we're gonna have a quick little meeting and then vote this in before anybody hears about it. But in the end everything that you're everything you're talking about the things that you scared of absolutely could happen like I think back to covid you know just five six years ago imagine flock cameras. You leave the house to go pick up food during quarantine or something and flock cameras are now, you know, you could be arrested for violating quarantine or get a ticket or facial recognition cameras are the cameras that they have in retail stores. Sending you a ticket because you didn't wear your mask properly because your nose was sticking out the top leg I think that these affect people across the board from every political aisle and and I think it's it's really important that People speak to their city council members and their local politicians now and let them know how you feel and what I'm doing I know you talked about people taking flat cameras down themselves.

What I'm trying to take down the politicians who signed the contract. To enable this, because that's literally what I'm doing. I'm interviewing politicians on the local level to find out who's running against the person who threw their community under the bus by signing this contract.

Tucker [00:43:24] I mean, it's very easy to see how military technology, and this is military technology is these weapons of war could be used as tools of political repression. Let's say the war in Iran continues. This is not a partisan point. It's just an obvious observation. The war continues. The strait remains closed. We drain the SPR and we have an actual energy crisis at that point, like an actual one. And the government says, well, we're instituting a work from home order. You know, we did that during COVID. We're doing it now. And a lot of people like me would be like, buzz off. I'm going where I want to go, it's America. And then drones are deployed to make certain that the sheep are being herded correctly. Like that's not a crazy scenario at all.

Benn Jordan [00:44:06] No, no, and I mean, it's one of the most outrageous things that we've discovered. A friend of mine, Jason Huniar, he lives in an Atlanta suburb of Dunwoody. He has been just volunteering his time. He's not a professional investigator, he's not journalist, he has been volunteering his time pulling audit reports through FOIA requests of what these things have been used for, where they're located, what they've been searching. And there's a place there called Marcus Jewish Community Center. It's a private, large community center that's kind of beloved by the community, and they have cameras on the wall there that aren't flat cameras. They're like the standard cameras you would have in any sort of business. And the community center said, okay, well, we're a little worried that there might be some sort of antisemitic attack. So we want to share our footage with police in case they need it, in case there's a shooting or something terrible happens. And by doing that, they shared it with Flock. So what Jason had discovered is that over a thousand times Flock employees viewed those cameras inside this private community center, including, but not limited to the pool, the daycare center, the children's gymnastics room. And nobody had been arrested, nobody had to answer any questions about it. In fact, they actually made it harder for Flock to collect an audit or to collect a record of who was looking at the camera internally from the company.

Tucker [00:45:31] Wait, just to be clear, it was flock employees who were not licensed law enforcement officers. All grown-

Benn Jordan [00:45:36] All grown men. Yes. Yes, all Flock employees. Over a thousand times, and they were all grown men. And they were looking at these cameras of the daycare center, the children's gymnastics room. Like, and their defense to this was that it was a product demo for another client. And I'm thinking to myself, if I had a business and I wanted a flock camera by the police department and somebody pulled up a laptop and said, look how good this works. And then it was the childrens' gymnastics room? I would call the police like, or hit them. I'm not sure what I would do, but that's an outrageous explanation. And that's just delusional. How many flock employees are?

Tucker [00:46:12] Fired after that.

Benn Jordan [00:46:13] None, not one. They took down their LinkedIn though and deleted their, one of them was in a band and removed his band page on Facebook. So yeah, they pretty much got scrubbed from social media because I released a video about it on Instagram and it had made the news a little bit and so they immediately just scrubbed their profiles.

Tucker [00:46:35] What has Congress done?

Benn Jordan [00:46:38] Um. So I had found some Flock law enforcement accounts on the dark web from a Russian vendor, and it didn't have multi-factor authentication. You know, when you sign into Netflix and then you have to like say, yes, I signed in from Netflix on my phone or type in a code, they didn't that. And not all Flock gamers have that, or not all flock accounts have that. And I found it for sale on a Russian Vendor. And so I actually started talking to some senators, Representative Krishnamurti and Senator Wyden from Oregon. They wrote a to the FTC saying, hey, these need to be investigated immediately. There's a massive national security risk here. And the FPC, I assume, printed it out and threw it in the garbage. I'm not sure what they did, but they certainly did an open investigation. And this was Uh, almost a year ago.

Tucker [00:47:25] Are there any laws governing what Flock or, and Flock is not, of course, the only surveillance company out there, there are a lot, but are there laws governing what they can do with the data? Your data, pictures of you and your family?

Benn Jordan [00:47:39] In there's in Illinois. Maybe in California, there's some states that are starting to try and mimic data privacy laws that they have in like the EU or any other country really, like they have data privacy law that are superior to ours right now. And the problem is, is that if it's only in one state, then they could just send it to a server in another state and then, you know, sell the data elsewhere. Flock claims to not sell your data, but I've literally seen PDF price sheets with an amount on how much they sell data for. So make sense of that.

Tucker [00:48:16] Oh, so you think they're lying about not selling data.

Benn Jordan [00:48:20] It's almost as if they have a financial interest in lying to the public to get their company to IPO as quickly as possible.

Tucker [00:48:28] Oh, cynical, cynical. I don't think t-shirt guy would do that. And last and most obvious question, why are you doing this? Why are you devoting so much time to this?

Benn Jordan [00:48:39] To be honest with you, I hate it. I'm so tired of Flock, I'm so tired at all. But it's been the last year. I mean, we've discovered massive security vulnerabilities and we've reported on them. But the reason I'm doing it is because it's making a difference. You're seeing communities across the country and some big cities canceling their Flock contract or refusing to renew them. And I think that Everybody needs to be concerned about this and I feel like there's very few people in America who want to be tracked everywhere they go and now is the time when we need to let your local city council, mayor, county, whatever it is, senators, governors, you need to make a big stink about it and let them know that they're not going to be running for office anymore if they continue to allow this to happen.

Tucker [00:49:25] You actually are making a difference. That's the amazing thing. You know, everyone wants to make a difference I think you're actually succeeding. So thank you. Thank you for taking the time while

Benn Jordan [00:49:34] There's a possible thing.

Tucker [00:49:35] It's so great, it's so affirming. Thank you very much for doing this. Thank you.

Benn Jordan [00:49:39] Have a wonderful day. Thank you.

Tucker [00:49:42] So as you hear stories like that, you gotta wonder like who would participate in this? A lot of good people are cops for sure. Many more than they tell you. On the other hand, police departments across the country are participating in the dehumanizing of entire populations by stealing their privacy. Can't go anywhere without being watched. So you're not actually a citizen anymore. You are to some real extent enslaved by the government. So most people involved in this process, gathering the information, enforcing the laws, I probably don't think about it too much. But some of them aren't stupid and probably reflective and they probably have thought of it and yet they still work there and what's that? So it's interesting that there have been people who refuse to participate in them and one of them is a former police officer from Rhode Island, a decorated police officer called Noel Pichardo who said, I'm actually not gonna do this because it's wrong and you hear that so seldom, anywhere for any reason, people voluntarily giving up a good job because they think it's immoral. That we thought it'd be worth talking to him and he joins us now. And well, thanks very much for doing this.

Noel Pichardo [00:50:45] Hey, it's okay. How you doing? Thanks for having me.

Tucker [00:50:46] So can you just tell us your story so you're a cop in Rhode Island, correct?

Noel Pichardo [00:50:51] Oh, no, I was. Yeah, I resigned. Yeah.

Tucker [00:50:53] Yeah, you, I'm sorry, figure of speech. You were at one point a police officer in Rhode Island, and you no longer are. So what happened and why?

Noel Pichardo [00:51:03] So back in 2021, my department was the Pawtucket Police Department over here and a lot of other police departments across the state. They started doing these trial periods with Flock. So they were introducing to our police chiefs, our city councils and say, hey, we have this new technology. It's going to help you solve crimes, crash criminals. And I was trained on it along with my other coworkers. And even the captain at the time who was tasked with training us, he was already very uncomfortable with it. He said, look, I was tasked training you guys seems a little sketchy, but this is how it works. This is how you get it on your computer. This is the system works. This is you find a vehicle on Hotlist, and there you go. So when we first were introduced to training, I was already uncomfortable with it. And then when I finally had it in my vehicle and I saw how it worked and how it basically tracked vehicles in real time, I knew that it was a complete mistake. I believed at the time and I still believe now that it's a Fourth Amendment violation, including the ACLU and the Institute for Justice who agree on that. And, I'll see you in the next one. Thankfully my city was too poor to afford it at the time, so they shut it down. So when I got involved and I got in trouble was back in 2023, I'm driving in my district and I see them up in my community. And I'm a patrolman and I wasn't notified that we were getting these cameras. So, I'll see you in the next one. I was like, if I'm a police officer and it's my business to know when things like these are introduced in my department, the public doesn't know. And that was the case.

The public wasn't notified. The other cities in Rhode Island were not notified like Ben was saying to most cities across the country. They were not notify. It was just something that Flock had a conversation with the city council and the police chief and they were put up without notifying the public. And so, you know, after a couple months of having a hard time looking my wife in the eye. I spoke with a local reporter, I spoke with the Valley Breeze and I told him, this is what's going on. This was put up without the public's knowledge and needs to be addressed. He asked if he could use my name. And because I'm an idealist and a bit romantic and a a bit stupid, I guess, I told them to give him my name because I knew people hopefully would pay attention if they knew a police officer felt this strongly about what was happening. And so once he did the article back in October, 2023, I got in a lot of trouble. I spoke with a lot of my local representatives to try to let them know that I got me in trouble. One of our representatives was a really good guy. His name is Joe Solomon. He invited to speak at the Government Oversight Committee in April 2024. That got me into trouble. So because I was doing all this, I got suspended a total of four times, 72 days without pay. So I lost about $20,000 worth of pay because of all those suspensions. I was supposed to get promoted to detective. I got that denied twice. I was banned from taking the sergeant's exam. Every time I was suspended. They would do things like have me hand in all my gear and all my equipment, which is not a thing that we do anymore. That's kind of an old custom. The only time they have a police officer when he's suspended, hand in their gear is when they're arrested for a crime. And I wasn't charged with any crime. I was just being suspended for. Well, they will they will lie and says, no, we're actually suspended you because you missed the municipal court day or we're suspending you because, you know, you didn't take this report on a road rage incident. We don't take road rage incidents reports in Pawtucket. That's a lie. So they would say that's why they suspended me, but everyone in my department, all my coworkers knew that they were suspending me because of my opinion and because I was trying to address the problem as best as I can. So eventually what happened was in July of 2025, so last year they wanted to terminate me and it was based, one of them was literally based to lie one of the reasons why they want to terminate me. So I wanted to challenge it in Leobor, which is like our version of a trial. When you go to Leobors and know this is wrong, I'm fighting for my job. It was going to cost me $30,000.

My union was only going to pay 10. So I needed to come up with 20 grand to defend myself. I couldn't afford that. So I had to resign. It wasn't my choice. I couldn't afford it. And so since my resignation, you know, I decided, you know what, I gave it my best shot. I tried to address this problem best I can. Maybe I'm not articulate. Maybe I am not. Diplomatic enough, I don't know, maybe someone like Ben should be dealing with this instead of me. So I decided to let it go. I said, you know, I'm going to let go. I'm gonna try to get hired somewhere else. Maybe I can get a job working campus security somewhere. I couldn't even get that because they wanted me to sign and it was probably because they wanted to sign an NDA before I left, which I was even though the thing you can do with police departments, but they wanted you to sign NDA and I refused. And the deal was, if you sign this NDA, that... Bars you from saying anything about your experience here, but in return, we'll keep you on our health insurance. You'll stay on the city health insurance until you find another job and the chief will promise not to say anything about you when you're looking for another job. I thought about that. It's not a bad deal, but I decided not to do that. I didn't sign the NDA and that's why I haven't been able to find a job in my field and definitely now that I'm doing this interview, I won't be able to a job in the entire country.

Tucker [00:56:06] That's even, no offense, I used to live in Rhode Island, so I can say this, even by Rhode Island standards, that is very corrupt. I mean, you just described corruption. That's ridiculous. And your behavior was, in my view, heroic, so thank you. But I've got a lot of questions, but the main one is, why was the Pawtucket, which used to be a pretty tough town, as I remember it, with crime. It's still a tough town. Yeah, it's a tough time. Big project there, tough. Why were they so? Wedded to these cameras. Why was it so important for them to have these cameras?

Noel Pichardo [00:56:40] I actually don't know. I asked to speak with my chief because she dehumanized me. The only time I had a conversation with my Chief is when I got hired eight years ago. I'd never spoken to her since I got fired. So she's putting all these punishments on me. Maybe I could have gone about this in a better way. Maybe if I had had a with her first. Before I spoke with the reporter, before I spoke to government oversight committee, maybe it would have made this, you know, it would've made this back and forth a little more cordial. So I asked to speak with her and she refused to speak to me. Or they told me to not even bother, so I don't even know if they asked or not. So I don't t know. I mean, I asked some of the city council members in Pawtucket, I was like, look, don't you think it's a bit of a problem that the public hasn't been notified about this? Like that doesn't concern you And, you know, their response was the same response that Jordan was saying was like, well, it's for their safety. So what's what's the problem? So I don't know. I don't You know, look, and, you know, we're dealing with a battle of extremes in our country right now. It's like you mentioned in your monolog, it was the fun police thing going on three years ago. And now there's this another extreme of mass surveillance. So which one is it? And I think that's where we're in a battle of extremes, you know, as they say, hurt people, hurt people, you know. You know, we put body cams on our officers and when I had a body cam, look, whatever you think about body cam. It is a bit dehumanizing to have a video camera put on your chest. I bet. I say go do your job. It's a bit humanizing. So it's not surprising to me that now when the police or the city now have the opportunity to return the favor to the public that they're not going to think much about it. Yeah. Like you put body cameras on us. It's such a smart point. Yeah. You put bodycams on us because we're a scumbag because of some guy did something in Minnesota. Well, now it's your turn. I think there's a Freudian thing going on there where you do it to us, now we do it to you. To defend my old co-workers, it's a mix. Some of them think this is wrong. This is immoral. Some of the think it's good idea and some of them just don't care. They just want to finish their job and go home and get their pension without getting shot. It's not a of life you know you know I want If there's one thing I can add to this that's useful other than trying to warn people as best I can, is not people to be too angry with their local police officers. Like they're getting bombarded with things all the time. You know, some of them are in union fights right now where some of their health insurances are being threatened. So I don't think it's crazy. I don't think every police officer who feels the way I should I the way, I feel should be as idealistic as me. Maybe they should. I don't know. I mean, if people want to be courageous, they instead of expecting it from others, they should just do it themselves.

Tucker [00:59:29] Yeah, it's only a small percentage of people are willing to do that, I've noticed, like a tiny percentage. So did it make Pawtucket as safe as Little Compton, for example?

Noel Pichardo [00:59:41] Oh, you've been a little Compton. You've been around Tucker, huh?

Tucker [00:59:43] Oh yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, I know Rhode Island very well, but no, but what I'm saying is Pawtucket, as you just said, is like kind of famous, is nice town, but there's some definitely very rough parts of it. Are they now totally safe with these cameras?

Noel Pichardo [00:59:56] Oh, no, nothing changed. Um, nothing Changed. The thing is too, it's like Ben, you and Ben were talking about if you treat people like prisoners, they act like that. If people is like you said, a prisoner should be ideally safer because of all the surveillance, but it's not. It's the most dangerous place in the world. And criminals too, criminals no matter what you do, no matter where you input, they're going to break the law. They're going try to find a way around it like. Things like this, they only hurt the law abiding citizen, you know, criminals will find out a way to try to get around it. You know, instead of driving one car through all these cameras, you know, maybe we're going to do stop points and switch cars, like, half way sophisticated criminals are going to figure out a way. To try to get around this, you know, but the dumb criminal and the law-abiding citizens are not, you know, they're going to be tracked everywhere that they go. And this is what it is. It's kind of a geofence for vehicles. It tracks vehicles everywhere that they go And I've heard some really juvenile arguments where they say, well, we're not tracking people, we're just tracking cars. And I'm trying to figure out how that's any different. Sounds the same to me, especially in a place like, you know, Rhode Island or Minnesota, everywhere except New York, every state doesn't really have a proper subway system. So if you need to get around in every state in America, you need a motor vehicle, you need a car in order to get it around. So if your tracking people's cars, you're tracking people. You know, so that's a really stupid argument that was trying to be argued at. And like I said, I don't know how that any better. We're not track people, we are tracking cars

Tucker [01:01:27] Well, especially if they haven't done anything wrong. So it's sweeping up everybody into this drag net. It seems like by definition unconstitutional. I mean, I don't want to, I'm not alleging any specific crime because I have no knowledge of a specific crime, but given everything you've said, is it possible that members of the city council or law enforcement officials are making money on this?

Noel Pichardo [01:01:55] Yeah, I don't know. I mean, the reaction to me made me very suspicious. Yeah, it was very suspicious because I was the only officer in my state and at the country at the time that was vote, you know, publicly given my objections. So the smart thing to do would just be ignoring me and say, you, know, he's just some crazy guy in the wilderness eating honey or exactly.

Tucker [01:02:16] Exactly, exactly, but they beheaded John the Baptist so it didn't work for him.

Noel Pichardo [01:02:24] Yeah, so I thought, you know, because the chief, she's pretty smart. I thought what she was going to do was to ignore me. I thought that's what she's going to. I thought she was gonna punish me once, suspend me once. You know, and I take that hand. I just move on with my life. You know? I tried. You know. But when I was getting, it was in a two-year period, I was going suspended, suspended and within two years, it wasn't a two year period. I was dealing with all that. So I did get suspicious of what's happening behind the scenes that I may or may not No! Why they're trying so hard to get rid of me. You know, I just thought maybe it was just a tribal impulse that was kicking in, you know, but you know, now that Ben is sharing, what Ben is showing is the first time I'm hearing it that there are some backdoor ideas that look like that happened. Maybe I don't know. I mean, it is Rhode Island, so who knows?

Tucker [01:03:13] What was the reaction from your wife and your family, people you know, your neighbors, were they on your side?

Noel Pichardo [01:03:21] So, my wife was on my side. Good. My wife was my side, she supported me from the beginning. She was worried. I mean, this was a sad thing. Everyone when I was telling my family and all my friends and my co-workers who really care about me and I still care about them very much, they all told me. They all read the same script. They pulled me inside and they said, well, if you go this route and you talk about this, they're going to make sure that you lose your job and they're probably to make sure that you don't work again. They all told me this, my family told me this, My coworkers told me, this, they all said the same script. So it's really sad that as Americans, we've accepted this idea that if you speak up, you just kind of get hammered. Exactly. Like that was that was really sad that everyone just accepted that. But so no one really spoke against what I was doing. They were their argument was what you're doing is noble. But, you know, leave that for some other idiot to do. You know, you have two kids, you Have a wife, you have bills to pay. Let somebody else put the neck on the line.

Like that was the advice that everyone was trying to give me. And I thought about it. And, um, like I said, I know after a couple of months, you know, I had, I had trouble sleeping, you Know, my first son was born right before I spoke up. And then when you become a father, I'm sure you understand this talk. You're like, Oh man, like, I am responsible for who this person becomes. That's right. So, you know, one day I'm going to have to have a conversation with my sons about integrity and when I have that conversation with them, I want to be able to look them in the eye when I had that conversation. So I knew if I ignored this problem and I pretended that it didn't exist, you know, I wouldn't be able do that. So I thought it was worth the risk. I paid the price for it, but I'm doing all right.

Tucker [01:05:04] Oh, you made me emotional saying that. Well, I, for whatever it's worth, nothing really, but I just want to say it. I hope you are richly rewarded for your courage and decency. Uh, I think you did that for everybody in this country. And I'm just, I'm really grateful you did it. And last thing, you were very articulate, so that was not your problem.

Noel Pichardo [01:05:21] You know what it is? It's my Rhode Island accent. It's disgusting. If anybody who's never been to Rhode Island, don't worry. We don't all talk like this. Just blue collar, Latinos, black guys and Italians. We're the only ones who talk like that.

Tucker [01:05:37] It's the best, I miss it. Noel, thank you for taking the time. It's great to talk to you.

Noel Pichardo [01:05:44] Appreciate it. Thank you, Tucker.

Tucker [01:05:46] And thank you for watching tonight, we'll see you next Wednesday.