Question Everything

Last week, host Brian Reed interviewed former MAGA influencer and the mother of one of Elon Musk’s children, Ashley St. Clair, in front of a live audience in New York. After they walked off stage, St. Clair laid into Brian over the questions he asked. She then demanded that we not release the interview publicly and asked to speak to our lawyers. Here is that interview, uncut. In it, St. Clair talks to Brian about her landmark lawsuit against xAI, the artificial intelligence company behind Grok, which generated millions of sexually explicit deep fake images of her and other women. xAI is owned by St. Clair’s ex, Elon Musk, and Brian asks her to share stories and insights from her relationship with Musk to help people understand his erratic and offensive behavior. Brian also asks St. Clair about her years as a major figure inside the right-wing propaganda machine. It's those questions that seemed to bother her most.  Find video highlights of the live interview on our new Instagram account – @questionverything.podcast. The full video is available at our Substack.  Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. The live taping was presented by OnAirFest. Our fact-checker reviewed this live, unedited conversation. We were not able to independently verify St. Clair’s remark that Musk’s devices were seized during French authorities’ search of X’s offices. Likewise with St. Clair’s recollection that she saw a Grok-generated image of a 4-year-old girl in a Bluey microprint bikini, and her claim that immigrants were getting on planes with boarding passes that didn’t have any name on them. We reached out to Musk and xAI for comment, but they did not reply. Guests:  Ashley St. Clair Please support the organizations that support this show: DeleteMe makes it quick, easy and safe to remove your personal data online. Get 20% off DeleteMe consumer plans when you go to joindeleteme.com/QUESTION and use promo code QUESTION at checkout. Ground News is a platform that makes it easy to compare news sources, read between the lines of media bias, and break free from algorithms. Go to GroundNews.com/QUESTION to get 40% off the unlimited Vantage plan. Go to https://zbiotics.com/QUESTION and use QUESTION at checkout for 15% off any first-time orders of ZBiotics probiotics.

In June, journalist Mario Guevara was arrested while covering an anti-ICE protest in Georgia, transferred to ICE detention, and locked up by the federal government for more than 100 days. And that wasn’t even the worst of it.  But Mario is not the kind of ICE-criticizing reporter you might be picturing. He was a Trump-supporting, Republican-identifying, law-and-order-sympathizing immigration hawk, who knew ICE well and had covered them favorably for years. Why did the Trump administration still go after him? This is the first in a special two-part series about Mario Guevara.  Please take 5 minutes to fill out this survey about Question Everything – it’ll help us know who’s listening and what you want from us! Thank you.  Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Sign up for our Substack newsletter, where we’ve been covering the big landmark lawsuits against social media companies for harming people with their products. This week: Mark Zuckerberg’s rare testimony in an LA courtroom. Guests:  Mario Guevara, MG News Emily Wu Pearson, WABE Giovanni Diaz, ESQ. Scarlet Kim, ACLU This episode has been updated to reflect the fact that Mario Guevara had a Social Security card before his immigration case was administratively closed, not after. His subsequent green card petition was also unrelated.

Our managing editor, Kevin Sullivan, had a conversation this week with an old colleague in Minnesota that we wanted to share with you as quickly as we could. He’s a former data journalist, Michael Corey, who lives with his family in St. Paul. As ICE agents have flooded Mike’s state as part of a massive federal immigration enforcement operation, he started getting involved in grassroots efforts to track and document ICE’s conduct. He’s been following and filming agents during tense encounters, including one where they chased an American citizen into a building, pinned him against a wall, and arrested him.  Mike takes us inside what it’s like to live in Minnesota right now, and tells us how he and his neighbors are getting and trying to verify information with the encrypted messaging app, Signal, which he thinks deserves a Pulitzer. Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Sign up for our Substack. Guests:  Mike Corey, Minnesota dad & public historian

Many people were surprised that ICE officer Jonathan Ross was filming with his phone when he shot and killed Renee Good in Minneapolis. But Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell was leaked thousands of internal ICE messages that show the agency is obsessed with creating viral videos, and is using arrests of immigrants slapped with “hooky” captions and pop music to feed their content machine. Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Please rate and review our show – on this very app that you’re in right now! And don’t forget to sign up for our newsletter. Here are Drew's Washington Post stories: ‘It’s a War’: Inside ICE’s media machine ICE Plans $100 million ‘wartime recruitment’ push Guests: Drew Harwell, Washington Post technology reporter

At a bar that survived the destruction, a group of reporters get together a year later to talk about the personal impact the LA wildfires had on them. And some of the harrowing – and surprising – requests they got from people to check if their homes were still standing. Thanks to Good Neighbor Bar and West Altadena Wine & Spirits for hosting us. Question Everything is a production of KCRW and Placement Theory. Sign up for our newsletter please! Guests:  Tony Briscoe, environmental reporter, Los Angeles Times Jacob Soboroff, senior political and national correspondent, MSNOW and author of “Firestorm: The Great Los Angeles Fires and America’s New Age of Disaster” Leanne Suter, reporter, ABC7/KABC-TV Los Angeles  Michelle Zacarias, reporter, CALÓ News Randy Clement, co-owner, Good Neighbor Bar in Altadena, California