WTW115 dissects the Sentinel Foundation’s anti-trafficking claims, spotlighting Matt Murphy’s disputed narrative about his sister Sarah Vinnick’s 2019 death—ruled a drug overdose but framed as trafficking to fuel his charity, Operation Light Shine. With $500K from Tim Tebow and backing from 16 governors, including Glenn Youngkin, Murphy pivoted to Sentinel Foundation while critics question his vigilante origins and selective evidence. The episode exposes gaps in trafficking statistics, institutional silence on abuse, and whether fear-mongering charities exploit grief over verified threats. [Automatically generated summary]
What's so scary about the woke mob, how often you just don't see them coming?
Anywhere you see diversity, equity, and inclusion, you see Marxism and you see woke principles being pushed.
Wokeness is a virus more dangerous than any pandemic can sound.
The woke monster is here and it's coming for everything, Instead of go-go boots, the seductress green Eminem will now wear sneakers.
Hello, and welcome to Where There's Woke.
I'm Thomas.
That over there is Lydia.
How you doing?
Hi, I am doing pretty well.
How are you?
I've been really productive since we last spoke.
I operationalized some future efficiencies.
Yeah.
You reduced some inefficiencies.
Yeah.
I also prepared trainings and coordinated a lot.
I did a lot of coordinating.
That's good.
The MOU.
Yes.
I understood the MOU.
Yeah.
Okay.
Came to an understanding about that.
That was good.
Yeah.
Well done.
Thanks.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I'm too tired to record.
Yeah.
I've been doing all this stuff.
Yeah, you knocked out so much.
God.
Well, it's time to get an expensive drink and a cigar and golf at a golf tournament.
Hello.
This is, I guess, America Fest 5 technically, but it's part two on human trafficking slash child sex trafficking slash Sentinel Foundation slash other organizations that are taking in millions of dollars to do a nebulous thing around those things.
Curious.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Very interesting.
I can't wait to get to this video.
This is a journey.
I mean, this is just, this is an absolute journey.
So we're going to dig into it.
This Matt Murphy guy and his story and the Sentinel Foundation and maybe some facts about human trafficking, perhaps.
What's real, what's not, what the stats are.
Even if it is hypothetically overblown, is it still a problem that they're addressing?
Right.
If you've ever come across the human trafficking statistics and allegations that those are a little overblown, have I got the episode for you?
I think we're going to dig into that and some related stuff.
It's going to be fun.
Oh, good.
All right.
Well, we'll take our break and we'll hope we don't get human trafficked before then.
I would say that I'm technically probably human trafficking you into podcasting.
I think you're not free to leave.
Everything would crumble.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You're not free to go.
Okay.
Then again, I feel like you're trafficking me as well.
What if we traffic each other?
Because I can't go anywhere.
As long as we're consenting to it, I think it's okay.
I don't know if we are, but if we're both not and we're both doing it to each other, doesn't count.
And then it's a wash.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They're like the police come and they're like, oh, it's a tie.
We're out of here.
Go to counseling.
Yep.
All right.
Well, we'll take a break.
Please support the show, patreon.com slash where there's woke, because we don't get millions of dollars of donations to possibly solve a fictional problem.
We sure do not.
We don't.
We get tens of dollars to try to solve an impossible problem, which is misinformation in the media and such.
So every dollar counts.
So thanks so much to those who support.
Sure does.
And we're working on buying a helicopter to be able to fly in to coordinate better with other wokeists, you know, build the woke.
Multi-agency, woke network.
Improve communication.
Patreon.com is the first one.
Okay.
I took notes and took time stamps, but it's going to be the kind of thing where I'm like, oh my God, I want to watch the whole thing.
But we can't.
But I will, I, man, there's some things.
So this is an episode of something I've never heard of called like the hit report.
It's so interesting the internet now because this is a very polished show in a lot of ways.
He talks like he's got an established thing.
It's called the hit streak.
What did I say?
Did I say that?
You said the hit report.
Okay, yeah, the hit streak.
The hit streak, a podcast where we talk about anything and everything.
It's not a lot of views.
It's not a lot of subscribers, but I would almost guess this guy maybe has a radio background.
Like maybe I always think like, is this this small or is there some other medium that it's big?
Because our YouTube is, you know, pretty tiny, comparatively speaking.
Like maybe the podcast that's audio is like big.
It's always hard to know these days, you know?
But it seems, you know, this has 600 views.
It's like nothing.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
But the guy talks like it's a major show kind of in a way.
And it's professional, pretty professional, you know, as far as things go today.
And so that's interesting.
It's nothing I've ever heard of.
I don't think you've ever heard of that.
Nick Hyder.
So it's kind of like HIT, but it's H-I-T-E-R.
So he's Nick Hyder with the hit streak.
It's like, okay.
I don't think it's Nick Hitter, though.
No.
It doesn't quite work, but okay.
All right.
The guy comes on.
I'll skip a bunch because he comes on.
He's like, this is so important, super important.
And it's fun because he's like, this is so important.
I've got my wife on today.
I was like, oh, okay.
You know, double date here.
This is Nick's wife.
Nick's wife.
Yeah, not the other guy's wife.
So we're on a little bit of a double podcast stage here with the mirror universe us.
Oh, my God.
And so, God, I just want to play the whole thing, but I can't because it's two hours.
Key Ingredient in Trafficking00:08:01
So let's see.
I have a time stamp here.
But like, Reed, before we go any further, obviously just chime in whenever.
But you got anything for him right now?
No, it's very interesting to hear how much goes into that on the back end, right?
Everyone just, you know, as a person that listens to social media, sees social media, you believe it just, it sounds simple what goes on.
You know, social media is really good at magnifying, oh, well, this, it's, this is how you do it.
But behind the scenes, what you guys are doing, no one will ever understand unless they're actually doing it.
And you're going to do a good job today at kind of filling everybody out for that.
But there's just, there's just no way to know.
what goes on behind all of that.
So so right away, I'm like, once again, there's no way to know it's impossible to know behind the scenes.
We can't know anything.
It's just like, very convenient.
Unfortunately, that's very true.
Part of it's because operational security.
We can't give up how we catch these guys.
And, you know, because then they'll just start doing new things, which they do anyways.
But the other part is protecting the victim and privacy.
And we owe the victim and those families that, you know, that privacy and security and ability to return to normalcy.
But at the same time, on that, it's a very slippery slope, right?
Because so much of this is kept hush-hush here in the United States by parents, by communities, by schools.
And institutions, because no one, and even in the church, no one wants to destroy the overall, you know, entity, you know, about it.
And we as Americans need to realize how big of a problem that this has become and speak out.
And I'll definitely get to addressing that, you know, as we continue on this.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So I want to be careful because I think elements of this are certainly true.
Like, and I think this is a way that this becomes really slippery.
So if I'm trying to evaluate, because like I've basically taken us on a bit of the tour that I did, I went through a bunch of tax documents, which I haven't talked about here yet.
But I essentially was like looking at this company.
I'm like, what?
Do they even do anything?
Like, where's the thing they do?
You know, what do you make here?
And then I push play on this.
And it's like, yeah, it's really, you know, we can't talk about it.
It's just like, God damn.
But then they talk about like, well, you know, churches and whatever, they don't talk about it.
I'm like, okay, yeah, no, like that's true.
But that's like sex abuse, which is, you know, awful, a huge problem, huge problem.
But like, I was told there's trafficking.
Look, the reason I think this matters is that if someone started, here's what I want maybe people to keep in mind as like a bit of a comparison or context to think about.
Cause someone might make the argument like, oh, well, you know, what's the harm?
They seem to be helping.
You know, they're doing something.
Yeah, there's the bad things they might be helping.
Imagine this.
Maybe this exists.
I don't know.
If someone were to start a 501c3 that was like, hey, you know how there's a billion untested rape kits and no one cares?
We could maybe help with that.
Do you think these conservatives would give a fuck about that?
No.
Do you think they would give two shits about that?
Do you think that would be a part of their fundraising and their whatever?
I think it's a key aspect of this that it's trafficking.
It's child trafficking and it's human trafficking, child trafficking.
And like, I think that really matters.
And the thing they are selling when they're talking about it is who knows how many kids this will save.
You know, they do so much about child trafficking.
And then if you're going to talk about like, well, okay, sex abuse, awful, huge problem.
I wouldn't donate to a sex trafficking 501c3 with military guys to stop sex abuse.
First off, I'd be like, well, the fucking churches, let's take a look there.
Right.
You know, and a lot of this, and the reason it's so awful and pervasive is, yeah, it happens within families, within households, within trusted people oftentimes, like overwhelmingly.
And I don't know what the military is going to do about that or what, or a military, like a quasi-military entity.
I don't think they're doing much about that.
It's very nebulous.
Like on one hand, you're like, okay, yeah, people don't talk about it, but the implication would be that there's a bunch of children getting sex trafficked and no one's talking about it.
Yeah, I think it's playing on a couple of things.
First of all, it's this fear of trafficking, which is like this intense loss of agency that potentially could happen to children and stuff and that this person is being used for things.
And then there's also this element of direct, you know, kind of aggressive response, being able to save somebody from something.
Yeah.
And I think you pair those things together and it's almost like.
Savior complex.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's, it's like this overwhelming, you feel like, oh, they're doing something.
And it's like, it's a heroic effort.
And you can tell because of how many guns they need.
Like it's heroic.
I think the key ingredient, I agree with that.
I think the key ingredient that I'm not sure if you are either missing or haven't gotten to yet is when it's this, when it's a child sex trafficking thing, there could always be some invisible enemy that's doing it.
Yeah.
Which could be the Democrats or it could be the whatever.
I'm not saying that the Sentinel Foundation is actively claiming that or anything.
I don't see it in their website or anything, but I do think that's critical to the zeitgeist that's supporting this, which is like, yeah, there's this trafficking.
Like there's this, there's just bad guys out there just trafficking children, you know?
I think it's a critical undercurrent.
And they do talk about it a bit when they say the network, right?
There is, there's always a lot of people.
But I took those to be like criminal networks a little bit in Uganda.
Like that's a different thing.
I think so too.
But like when you're talking about the problem of rape and sex abuse, more often than not, it's not networks of people figuring this out right now.
Overwhelmingly, it's not going to be that.
Right.
Maybe there's some amount of that, like super evil people who, you know, I know there's obviously when it comes to like awful, you know, child sex crap, I think there's rings where they distribute child sex abuse material.
So I, you know, gather, I don't know.
But like, I think it's very important to not be misinformed about where sexual assault happens, you know?
Yeah.
If you want it to be like a shadowy bad guy, then you can always kind of blame someone else or blame whoever you want or blame the Democrats or blame whatever.
But if in reality it's like, well, we have a major problem, like a societal problem among mostly men about consent and about boundaries and about like there's just a major problem and it's unspoken and we need to really do something about it oftentimes.
You know, me too was an attempt, but that feels like it's been fucking erased.
Yeah.
You know, it's kind of like a similar thing to when the kids ask me if there are bad guys and what they're expecting are cartoon versions of bad guys where it's very, very clear.
This is a bad guy.
And I think that there are a lot of people who, I don't know what they're clinging on to exactly, but if you see this as like the key thing that we need to solve, you're often probably thinking like, because there are bad guys, right?
There are bad guys.
And usually it's a lot harder to tell who's a bad guy and who's a good guy in reality.
So I think it's not as exciting to be like, we took down this person who looked seemingly normal and was also doing like some really crappy stuff.
Well, and you're not going to do it with military.
No, no, you're not.
So keep an eye on all that as we, I think I'm going to play.
One of the things that stand out to me the most is no matter how uncomfortable we are hearing it, you are seeing it.
How about, what about the child, right?
And that is at the end of the day, what it's all about is about the child.
Amen.
It really is.
So he goes into his background.
I think I can skip this.
Army Green Beret, Special Forces.
He first mentions this, and then I think we're going to get a little more on it later.
Yeah.
Sarah's Disappearance Mystery00:15:22
So because of personal loss, lost my sister, you know, I had been in special forces, detailed to the CIA.
I've done mostly counterterrorism my entire career.
So Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, sort of multiple combat tours and different tours all around the Middle East.
I speak Arabic in a couple dialects pretty fluently.
The Middle East and counterterror was my world, right?
You see trafficking over there, you know, especially in Syria.
Girls are sold for packs of cigarettes, you know, from different clans or tribes or, you know, ethnic backgrounds.
You know, there's a very different culture there where people are worth different things to other cultures or tribes just based on their ethnicity or the way that they, you know, believe in Islam.
Right.
We were never able to interdict in that because of, you know, our authorities and our mission was counterterror, even as much as we wanted to.
That was just a thing that we could not get involved in.
But November 5th, 2019, my younger sister, Sarah, went missing.
She was picked up by a guy who had previously beaten her up really bad.
And 30 minutes later, her cell phone never touched a tower again.
She was missing for almost two months.
That was really my first wake-up call when she went missing to how bad her life was.
I was gone all the time.
I was lucky if I was home two months in one year.
And that wasn't two months at once, right?
Between training and deployments and everything else.
I knew my sister had a bad drug problem.
I knew that was falling out with my parents.
I know she had been kicked out.
I just did not understand how serious it had gotten and to the level that her life went.
Yeah.
So first off, note she had gotten kicked out of the parents' house.
That's probably not a good thing to do.
Yeah.
This was like, oh, wow.
Okay.
Really shocking.
It's like, is kind of his origin story here.
Yeah.
It's really interesting because then he links it to like trafficking.
And I was like, it's just interesting.
Like, is that what happened?
Yeah.
Is that what he feels like happened to his sister?
So not to go on a tangent, but my sister, like so many other Americans, was affected by the heroin and fentanyl epidemic.
And it's killing people at a rate that's more people have died from fentanyl in Vietnam in the past couple of years.
It's insane.
So she got into that and that lifestyle.
And unfortunately, the worse the drugs get, the worse the drugs take hold of your life.
But then the worse the drugs get, also the worse that people get.
Sure.
Right.
And one of the most common tactics that is utilized here in the United States to pull people out.
What the fuck was that?
Was that you?
Was that me?
No.
Right.
And one of the most common tactics, right?
Oh, he pushes a button or something.
It's like a sound.
I didn't even notice that the first time.
I think because I had it on high speed, maybe.
Yeah.
The fuck was that?
He hits a button and it's like a, is that a sound effect?
I don't know.
I hate this.
Probably unfortunately no matter what it was.
Yeah, I don't know what that is that is utilized in the United States to pull people into trafficking and to pull people into this underground world is drug addiction, right?
Because if drug addiction destroys your life, destroys your job, your career, whatever you're doing.
So most people have nothing left to sell, right?
Or no other way to make money themselves.
So my sister was trafficked and victimized in order to get her fix, to get the drug.
And when she went missing, that's where it all is still a mystery to us.
You know, these people are great at what they do.
There is so much that goes into this organized drug trade and organized trafficking.
And there's really nothing we know about what happened to my sister.
Federal, state, and local agencies have investigated it.
But on Christmas Eve, 2019, almost two months later, her body was found in a river in Mississippi.
So she was abducted in Memphis, Tennessee, and then they found her in a river Christmas Eve, 2019.
So and her autopsy showed that she had been in the water for, you know, two to three weeks.
So she was missing for almost two months.
So we just have no idea what she experienced or what happened to her.
There's rumors of trafficking, rumors of her being, you know, carried around Mississippi and abused.
We just don't know the truth.
So what would you gather from that?
As a listener, thinking about kind of what he said in that story, what are you left with in terms of how she died?
What would be the impression?
When I first heard it, I just, I guess, assumed murder.
Yeah, I would think that's what you would assume.
If he's saying she's disappeared or selled in Pinketower and then, you know, gone for a few months and there's rumors of, you know, her being trafficked and whatever.
And then she was found in a river.
That's pretty much all they gave us, right?
I mean, I could look back at the transcript here.
They found her in a river.
Autopsy showed that she'd been in the water for two, three weeks.
Right.
Interesting.
This is a very sensitive thing.
And obviously, like a brother who lost a sister in this horrible way, like I, you know, I understand, you know, maybe he's got reasons for thinking the things he does, but I find it a little weird that his whole pitch is about human trafficking and he talks about how, you know, drug, drug trafficking, they, they traffic themselves because they don't have anything left to sell.
But when I look at the details of what actually happened, if it weren't for him saying any, all of that stuff, there would be no reason to suspect this was anything other than what the coroner ruled it was, which is a drug overdose.
I find it weird that he doesn't say that.
Like, isn't it a little weird to omit?
You know, he does talk about drugs, but like when you think about trafficking, it seems like he strongly suggests, he very much leaves out the fact that it was a drug overdose.
And he just says she was found in a river or whatever it was.
It feels a little weird to me.
I was trying to track down if anybody knows anything, just quickly doing like, what happened to this random person?
There's not a whole lot of info, but, you know, the details are pretty much what he says.
She was when she went missing.
There's nothing I could find anywhere about, you know, some of the things he said were like rumored.
Who knows?
People say all kinds of stuff, I guess, or maybe he had some legitimate source for that.
But basically, she was missing.
There was a random guy before she was found.
There's a random news report that says an anonymous person, and this is weird.
So this is a week after she's gone missing.
It says, a man is coming forward claiming he has information about what may have happened to a Collierville woman now missing for a week and a half.
The man who wanted to keep his identity hidden said that the night before the 26-year-old Sarah Vinnick disappeared, he brought her to St. Francis Hospital after she said she blacked out.
The man said he wants to speak out with hopes someone else will come forward with more information.
She was a sweet girl, he said.
She was just all over the place, a wreck trying to figure out what she was going to do.
It's been nine days since Vinnick was last seen.
Surveillance footage shows her getting into a dark-colored pickup while leaving the Airbnb where she was staying November 5th.
Family said she was staying at the home, the Airbnb thing while she waited to move into her permanent home.
They suspect foul play was involved in her disappearance.
That's the family.
The man WREG spoke with, that's this news station, whatever, spoke with, said that he was with Sarah.
This is a weird story.
I don't know what to make of this.
He was with Sarah the day before she disappeared.
He says a friend of theirs asked him to drive Sarah to court that morning.
He says when they left, he made a stop by his house.
When he got outside, he noticed Sarah was unresponsive.
I was giving her CPR while going 80 miles per hour, he said.
He says he drove her to St. Yeah.
He drove her to St. Francis Hospital, and by the time they arrived, she was awake.
When she realized where we were, she started freaking out.
And I told her, you're awake and you're fine.
I'll drop you off at your Airbnb.
I just pulled up here to make sure you were okay.
He says Vinnick then jumped out of the car and took off running.
Hours later, he said he was notified that she got a ride from a stranger in a pickup.
He was notified?
How in the world would he be notified of that unless it's just her?
The day Sarah disappeared, he said she asked to stop by their mutual friend's house as her stay at her Airbnb was coming to an end.
That friend declined.
I hope she's just out somewhere trying to drown her sorrows and not something worse, the man said.
Then obviously the body's found a month and a half later.
And a bit later than that, it's, you know, the coroner says it's a drug overdose.
And then, weirdly, about a year later, there's a random news story in a newspaper, like the online version of this newspaper.
Right.
Some other stuff and kind of buried within it.
I mean, not like buried, but like just deep within it, like not the focus of the thing.
It says, Randy Ellis Smith, 55 of the 1400, blah, blah, blah, where he lived, was arrested by the Shelby Canning Gang Unit.
Smith was transferred to Marshall County December 16th, where he is charged with tampering with evidence in connection with the death of Sarah Vinnick.
Huh.
Sarah Vinnick's body was found by a hunter below the blah, blah, blah.
An autopsy at the Mississippi Medical Examiner's Office determined the cause of Vinnick's death was a drug overdose.
Smith is charged with placing Vinnick's body at the bridge.
Oh.
So I think the anonymous person was probably Randy Smith.
Like, I mean, that's me just guessing.
I'm not, this is just a very casual guess.
But that statement really seemed like somebody who maybe was doing drugs with her and she overdosed and he put her body there and then was like coming up with a story as to why.
And he kind of freaked.
Yeah, like he's coming up with a story as to why he doesn't know where she is.
Oh, she got out and just ran and she ran down toward that Brit, you know.
It feels like that.
This is just speculation, but it kind of feels like that, to be honest with you.
And by the time we're doing this interview, as far as the police are concerned, the investigation's concerned, she overdosed and this guy put her body there probably because he didn't want to be busted.
Like they didn't charge him with murder and the police like charging people for murder.
If they had anything.
You're saying Matt Murphy has all this information at the point that he's doing this interview.
Yeah, I mean, it's his sister.
But at the same time, there's a quote right when she was found that says, investigators say she was beaten to death based on her body.
And I think that's kind of bullshit because police wouldn't say that.
I think that's like the family hired an investigator and she was missing in water for two months.
She probably looked awful.
Yeah.
I mean, it's not known for sure how long she was there.
Now, he claims she was only in the water for some shorter amount of time.
Two to three weeks, I think.
That's what he says.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't see that verified anywhere.
And everything else lines up with she overdosed like that day or, you know, shortly after because her cell phone didn't do anything else.
You know, again, this is a terrible situation, but like it's hard not to feel a little bit like things are being massaged.
And maybe this is just his way of coping with what happened.
I don't, you know, it could be, who knows?
But it feels like things are really massaged to make it seem like a trafficking thing where she was missing and being taken places.
Didn't it?
Yeah.
Well, I mean, that's a far more sympathetic story.
Well, that and it's far more like trafficking and the thing he's raising millions of dollars for, you know?
Aligned with the mission of non-profits.
Let's go.
Now that you know all that you know, that's everything that's basically at a glance, at a pretty quick look publicly available.
This isn't a major, you know, there's people who go missing where there's a bunch of stuff on the internet about people trying to track them down.
This is a pretty minor thing.
Like there's not a lot of online sleuthing about it.
There's a little bit and there's a few news stories, but there's not much.
She has a six years before that history of like several mug shots.
Like she was horrible, sad story.
She was a drug addict, seems to me.
And it seems like she got in trouble for various things, probably related to trying to, you know, who knows, rob people to get money for drugs or something.
You know, like it's awful.
It's an awful story that has happened a lot in this country because of what went on there.
Like it's really awful.
Yeah.
There's nothing.
Purdue.
Yeah.
There's nothing.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But there's nothing at all anywhere that I can find that indicates at all anything like human trafficking, sex trafficking.
Maybe he knows stuff we don't.
But I don't know.
Now that you know that basically she went missing, a random guy was like, oh, I don't know.
She, you know, I dropped her off.
You know, like, seems like that was a fucking guy.
And then a year later, someone was arrested who I think was that guy, but who knows?
Someone was arrested for moving her body to there.
And it was a drug overdose, according to the coroner.
If they were literally going to arrest someone and charge them with moving a body, I think if they had any reason to suspect murder, especially if it was like a violent murder that would have had any sort of forensic evidence, I feel like they would have tried for that, or at least, you know, like police want to charge people with murder if they murder.
Like if they have anything, they didn't even charge him with like one of the like negligent whatevers, you know, involving the drug overdose.
They just charged him with placing her body there.
So he was charged and released.
I didn't try to track down if he pled guilty or whatever.
I don't see any results on that, but who knows?
But point is, that's all they could charge him with.
It sort of really looks like she overdosed with this guy probably, and he didn't overdose and he got scared and moved the body somewhere.
I think that happens a lot, to be honest with you.
I think there's a lot of stories of that because people are terrified of getting into trouble, especially who knows if, you know, he was on parole or some shit and he can't be around drugs.
Like there's lots of reasons.
And if he's high right now, too.
Like you don't make the best choices when you're high.
Right, right.
There's lots of reasons people do that.
And I mean, that kind of like, it kind of looks like what happened.
There's nothing, there's nothing I see anywhere unless he's seen something we haven't, which is possible, I guess, as a family member, that put a time that she was in the water.
They hired this investigator who does a little bit of like publicity about it.
And the fact that they had that like investigators say she was beaten to death, that makes me really skeptical.
Like I feel like that's the investigator they talked to because I don't think police would have said that right when they picked up the body.
I think that's the investigator.
And I think maybe that person's kind of full of shit because it's a weird thing to just announce that she was beaten to death when you find her.
So now that you know all of that stuff, let's just listen to this again.
November 5th, 2019, my younger sister, Sarah, went missing.
She was picked up by a guy who had previously beaten her up really bad.
And 30 minutes later, her cell phone never touched a tower again.
She was missing for almost two months.
That was really my first wake-up call when she went missing to how bad her life was.
I was gone all the time.
I was lucky if I was home two months in one year.
And that wasn't two months at once, right?
Between training and deployments and everything else.
I knew my sister had a bad drug problem.
I knew that was falling out with my parents.
I know she had been kicked out.
I just did not understand how serious it had gotten and to the level that her life went.
So not to go on a tangent, but my sister, like so many other Americans, was affected by the heroin and fentanyl epidemic.
And it's killing people at a rate that's more people have died from fentanyl in Vietnam in the past couple of years.
Sister's Struggle00:08:04
It's insane.
So she got into that and that lifestyle.
And unfortunately, the worse the drugs get, the worse the drugs take hold of your life.
But then the worse the drugs get, also the worse the people get.
Sure.
Right.
And one of the most common tactics, right, that is utilized here in the United States to pull people into trafficking and to pull people into this underground world is drug addiction, right?
Because if drug addiction destroys your life, destroys your job, your career, whatever you're doing.
So most people have nothing left to sell, right?
Or no other way to make money themselves.
My sister was trafficked and victimized in order to get her fix, to get the drug.
And when she went missing, that's where it all is still a mystery to us.
You know, these people are great at what they do.
There is, you know, so much that goes into this organized drug trade and organized trafficking.
And there's really nothing we know about what happened to my sister.
Federal, state, and local agencies have investigated it.
But on Christmas Eve, 2019, almost two months later, her body was found in a river in Mississippi.
So she was abducted in Memphis, Tennessee, and then they found her in a river Christmas Eve, 2019.
So and her autopsy showed that she had been in the water for two to three weeks.
So she was missing for almost two months.
So we just have no idea what she experienced or what happened to her.
There's rumors of trafficking, rumors of her being, you know, carried around Mississippi and abused.
We just don't know the truth.
Yeah.
How do you feel about all that now?
Yeah, I mean, the only thing I will say is like he does, in passing, mention the number of people that have died because of these drugs or whatever.
But yeah, he definitely does not link his sister to that specifically.
He seems really certain that she did not die immediately.
This comes across to me as someone who, look, maybe he's convinced himself of this.
Maybe he has a bunch of information that is not only not public, but kind of goes against a lot of what the coroner said.
You know, it was just a overdose.
And they said the guy was arrested for moving her body to there.
And I feel like he's telling a story that doesn't outright lie, but strongly implies that she was trafficked.
Because the part where he says, and I kind of tried to highlight it with a hmm.
Oh, these people are good at their job.
Yeah, these people are really good at what they do.
Yeah.
That's where it's still a mystery to us.
You know, these people are great at what they do.
There's so much that goes into this organized drug trade and organized trafficking.
Organized trafficking.
Yeah.
Doesn't that strongly imply some organized, like she got into a vehicle of a guy.
He says that he's beaten her up before.
I, you know, I don't know.
I haven't seen that, but I don't know that I would see that.
Maybe that's something he knew or the family knew.
It's entirely possible that two drug addicts in a relationship, I can imagine there's abuse there.
Like that's not like related to trafficking.
You know what I mean?
Like domestic abuse, domestic violence is very common, especially, I mean, if you were to take a subsection of severely drug addicted people, like, I don't know.
I mean, but he's really strongly implying, it seems to me.
And maybe, hey, let me know, listeners, if you think I'm being unfair, but putting in the like organized trafficking, they're really great at what they do.
There's rumors of her being taken around Mississippi or whatever.
Yeah, well, it's like basically self-serving on behalf of the organization, right?
Where he has this story that can be used in this moment.
Yeah.
And it feels really, I'm going to go ahead and say, I don't know for sure.
And it could be this like genuinely believes this stuff.
And that's why he got into this.
There's also a possibility that this is a pretty cynical use of his sister's death to shape all of the facts in such a way to tell them in such a way that's like not really outright lying, but really drives into, plays into a narrative about organized drug trafficking and the thing that he raises millions of dollars to fight.
It just feels gross to me, you know, like that's, oh, I don't know.
I don't know about that.
So I was pretty intrigued by that.
I mean, again, it's a sensitive thing.
I don't want to outright, but that's certainly in the realm of possibility.
Or he believes this stuff.
Like people might convince themselves of stuff or maybe he has reason to believe this stuff.
And that's why he got into this.
I mean, that's kind of how he tells the story.
It just feels convenient that there's a lot he left out.
There's a guy who's charged of moving her body to there.
That's not something he's going to mention.
Yeah.
I think it's fair for you to feel the way that you do because also everything that we've read about this organization is also very like ambiguous.
Yeah, we're barely into it.
Yeah.
And so I think it's okay to have kind of like our guards up with this.
So then he talks about, oh man, it's so hard to not just play all of that because then he goes into what he was going to do.
He's like, oh, I wanted to do this vigilante stuff.
And then my mom kept reminding me, like, you have kids and they'll be sad.
And there's a part where he, you know, the other guy's like, yeah, that's moms.
Yeah, they're the best.
And I'm like, you kicked the daughter out of the house.
And she died.
Like, it's, I mean, it's okay.
I don't know.
I don't know the details, but it's like, oh, it's really, I'm just weirded out by this.
It feels all weird.
But he wants to do vigilante stuff.
And, you know, he says that his mom kind of kept him from doing that.
And that's when he says, like, okay.
So then after a while, he's kind of like goes into a dark place.
And then he says he's like drinking a lot.
And then he's like, okay, maybe I can do something with my special forces experience and all that.
And it's a lot of God stuff.
A lot of God stuff.
Started praying.
Someone sent him a Bible.
Oh, no, no.
So he's not on our stage.
Oh, okay.
Oh, you're right.
This is the podcast.
This is a guy.
This guy wasn't at Amfest.
That's not clear.
This guy is just the president, allegedly, of this organization that the Aldines raised a million dollars for in one golf tournament, essentially.
So then he talks about like, well, why don't I pick it up here?
I tried to skip as much as I could.
Praying and I started to, you know, read the Bible again.
This girl on Instagram mailed me a Bible.
Probably one of the coolest things ever happened to me.
She just goes, I feel like you need this.
She's mailed me a Bible.
I think he's playing it like God works in mysterious ways.
I don't know.
Philosophy was a bad thing.
I was like, is she going to try to traffic me or something?
I don't know.
I don't just pay my children.
Why is she bringing up traffic?
That also, I didn't want to talk during that because I found that to be so fucking dumb.
Like, okay, let's get a clean one of that.
Go on Instagram, mail me a Bible.
Probably one of the coolest things ever happened to me.
She just goes, I feel like you need this.
She just mailed me a Bible.
I never even met this person.
I was kind of scared to send her at my address because, you know, I was like, is she going to try to traffic me or something?
I don't know.
I don't pay a joke about on this, but it's like, you know, you don't just give your address out online.
I mean, yeah, it's a joke, but like, what?
Everything.
Why, why that particular thing as opposed to anything else that is way more likely if someone gets your address?
It doesn't make any sense other than in the hyper world building he's trying to do around trafficking.
Like he's trying to like get people afraid of it.
Yeah, it's like constantly front of mind.
That's the last thing anyone would think of.
Like, this person on Instagram is going to traffic you because they get to be like trafficked in that way.
You know, like you get like, you're a green beret guy.
Special forces and someone's not going to just come traffic you at your house.
Like that's like, how often does that happen?
I feel like he will never be a victim of being trafficked.
No.
Like that's never going to happen to somebody like that.
No.
I was like, you know, you don't just give your address out online.
Law Enforcement Fears00:12:16
And I did.
And she sent me a Bible.
But it's those little things, right, that brought me back on a path.
And once I started to realize, you know, that I needed God in my life, I started to look into human trafficking and child exploitation.
And that is when I decided to start a charity to fight it because I saw there were other charities that did it.
He started it.
He was one.
Oh, okay.
I saw there was multiple others and I was like, you know what?
I'm going to do something about this.
And that's how Operation Light Shine got its start in the darkest time of my life.
Yeah, because, you know, my whole goal was like, okay, I couldn't save my sister.
Right.
But then I was like, you know what?
I got to save one more.
I just want to save one more kid from this.
So I applied for the 501c3 and I had no idea what I was doing.
I googled it.
Like probably most people start charities.
It takes about a year.
Most people anyways.
You can get it done quicker, but it takes a while.
Yeah, it took a while.
So we put that in and I started building up what Light Shine is.
And at first we were going to do some vigilante stuff, you know, because I still had that vengeance mindset, right?
You know, I wanted to save kids, but I wanted to get some bad dudes.
That's what I'm wired to do, right?
Get bad guys.
And we were going to do some vigilante stuff.
And a buddy in Homeland Security who's a starving guitarist at night, but a Homeland Security agent during the day, right?
There's a lot of those people here in Nashville.
Awesome dude.
He's like, Matt, I love you, man.
You know, he heard what I was going to try to do with Lightshine.
He's like, man, you're probably going to get in trouble if you do this.
Yeah.
It's like, all right, well, so.
So he's like, Matt, just talk to somebody.
Talk to somebody.
So turns out the top child exploitation agent in the world, Jim Cole, decided he wanted to do his last two years at the Homeland Security Office here in Nashville before he retired.
So now I got the guy, the best guy in the world at fighting child exploitation in my backyard, right?
That's cool.
Yeah, right.
It just kind of got things.
So he agreed to have a meeting with me.
Right.
And I didn't realize how at this time, how guys like me were kind of like a dime a dozen.
So yeah, you know, like they want to go save kids.
I didn't realize that.
There was a lot of military guys trying to do it.
But he agreed to meet with me for some reason.
And I guess he looked into my background, my resume.
I don't know what.
So I walk in the Homeland Security office and you got FBI agents there and this boardroom table just full of agents.
Right.
I'm like, oh man.
At first, I'm thinking they like what I'm going to do.
Right.
You know, so I sit down.
Jim's sitting right across from me in a room full of these agents.
And Matt, tell us what you're going to try to do to, you know, fight trafficking.
Like, all right.
They want to hear it.
So I laid it out.
And when I was done, Jim looked at me and he goes, Matt, that's illegal.
That's vigilante.
If we don't arrest you, somebody else will.
And a couple of things that he's like, somebody already does that and they do that better than you can because they've worked out agreements with the government.
This did not go the way that I expected.
So I remember at the time I just kind of looked up, you know, did it again, said a little prayer.
Hey, God, me again, you know, know what to do.
And so at that time, I just looked back down and looked at Jim and I said, you tell me, you know, tell me what I can do to honor my sister with what I just told you.
How can what can I do?
So he looked at me and goes, Matt, if you took everything you just told me and instead of you getting you and the boys to do it and kicking somebody's door, you do all that to support law enforcement and a task force, and we can do it.
So long story short, because I don't want to waste too much time on this.
We start talking about how to build this task force with federal, state, and local law enforcement where jurisdictions aren't an issue, where there's, you know, all the red tape and all the issues that even affected my sister's investigation can go away because you're bringing federal, state, and local law enforcement together in a task force concept and you're feeding them intel and resources and everything they don't have.
Because here's what most people don't realize: law enforcement in the United States, right?
Understaffed, underfunded, undertrained, under-resourced, and they're struggling, right?
Yeah.
How many of us can utilize technology?
Yeah, I mean, I guess it's also like we put a lot of money into policing, and maybe it's just not spent, right?
But yeah, but yeah, so that's sort of the origin story of starting his other nonprofit because you'll you'll note Operation Light Shine is not Sentinel Foundation, Sentinel Foundation.
Yeah, yeah.
So his origin story is I wanted to commit crimes against people.
Yeah.
Cool.
Pretty much.
We'll get into later how he goes from light shine to the current one.
But so he talks about how like, oh, you know, we can help them with technology, you know, we can like all this stuff that he and I guess his company or charity thing can do to help officers that aren't good at stuff, which might be true.
But he's saying like, you know, this charity is going to do everything the government can't do.
It's going to support law enforcement.
And then I think, oh, there's a little thing I want to play here.
We're in a perfect storm right now.
So creating this task force was part of the problem.
And then doing everything that the government can't and won't do inside the charity to support law enforcement.
Gotcha.
So no one in that room thought I could pull this off.
I didn't at that time, but you know, hold my beer a moment, right?
That's right.
You know, so long story short, I ended up meeting up with Tim Tebow and he agreed to give me the first $500,000 we needed to launch his task force here in Nashville, Tennessee.
Wow.
Forever grateful for Tim and his foundation for that.
He's solid as earth.
He's great people.
And I did not, I think when you play it at 100 speed, that doesn't really like so funny.
I had no idea that was happening.
So he gets 500,000 from Tim Tebow.
A side note, I wonder, I mean, maybe he's a good businessman.
He probably is, but like his NFL career sucked.
Like, I don't, where did he get all his money?
I don't know.
I guess he, if he was smart with it, maybe he got a good decent NFL paycheck.
And then, yeah, he probably, oh, he did do, yeah, he did do.
I mean, he was an amazing college athlete.
So maybe he got a bunch of like sponsorship, you know, endorsement.
Well, and like we said with with America Fest, there's a lot of money in like being Christian white dude stuff.
Yeah.
I, he, because like just having $500,000 to be like, yeah, here you go.
Like that's, wow, I didn't know he had, I mean, I would have assumed he's quite wealthy, but $500,000, that's a lot.
Like having that much, like kind of liquid, unless it was like a long-term agreement, maybe I guess.
But I don't know.
That's crazy.
I didn't know he was that wealthy.
I think some of this is interesting.
And I'm going to Cliff notes this because there's a lot.
Here, Cliff notes it for us.
People from all over the world within the first few months started flying into Nashville, Tennessee to see what we had done, right?
And because this is like, how did you do this?
Right.
You know, a working model, yeah, we had a working model, and now a charity is partnered with law enforcement on operational support capacity with resources and getting something that we don't have.
The other guy said they were already doing 16 governors, right?
16 governors approved to move this charity in all these states.
And when we moved into Florida and we got two active task forces down there, and then they just launched a task force in Virginia.
Governor Yunkin donated his paycheck to get the task force started there.
So that was interesting.
I was like, what?
And it turns out, I think Yunkin, I guess, donates his paycheck every quarter because he doesn't need it.
And yeah, does like a kind of a donate each quarter thing.
And so, yeah, sure enough, second quarter 2023.
I'm not sure when, I'm actually not entirely sure when this guy left Lightshine, but July 2nd, 2023, Yunkin donates second quarter salary to anti-human trafficking efforts in Virginia.
Oh, here's a tweet about it.
Donated my salary to Operation Lightshine, which will work with Virginia law enforcement to combat human trafficking in the Commonwealth.
That's crazy.
Like, I think that goes to show how one way or the other, there's a lot of energy and interest around quote-unquote human trafficking, child trafficking.
I'm not entirely sure what's, but like, he's got Tim Tebow, he's got 16 governors.
Yeah.
And he's got Glenn Young is done.
You know, like, I guess the Glenn Young thing, he did fast forward quite a bit because he started Lightshine in 2020 is the first year that there's a form.
And then that's 2023.
So I guess we can assume, you know, a couple, couple good years sort of thing.
2021, it looks like might have been could be the Tim Tebow year because they have like an income of 659,000.
Maybe.
I was just speculating.
But isn't that crazy like how fast that goes to that?
To do what?
To like work with law enforcement to whatever?
Like it just, it's weird.
Like it's a nebulous thing.
Yeah.
It's just like a thing that sounds scary, that seems scary, that is scary.
And yeah.
Yeah.
People want to be against the scary thing.
And then he's going to talk about how he got to the other organization.
Yeah.
And so that was a movement.
But what I realized in all that, right?
I'm a doer, right?
If I say I'm going to do something, I'm going to get it done.
I don't care what I got to do.
And, but what I stopped doing and being that founder and CEO of Lightshine was doing, right?
Now I'm just fundraising.
Now I'm just going to meetings all the time.
Now I'm just, you know, this talking head.
And I like that.
I don't mind doing that a little bit, right?
Because it's necessary, but I was in no way, shape, form, or fashion able to operationally be involved in rescuing kids.
And that was my passion.
That was my heart.
Right.
You know, so it started a lot of conversation and internally.
And I decided about a month ago.
And this, well, I mean, I've made it public a month ago, decided a long time before that that, you know, that being at the head of Operation Lightshine, now that I built it and it worked, was not where I belonged.
You need somebody 20, 30 years in geo experience, somebody that wants to be sitting in that seat, someone who's not going to be, you know, as divisive as I am and address the issues that I want to address.
And then somebody who is happy not being operationally involved, right?
Right.
So you say not as divisive as I am.
That's interesting.
Oh, wait, here's the, you know, I turned it back over the board and the Tebow Foundation was like, hey, guys, find that person.
They me.
You know, I built it.
Never take that away from me.
It works.
I hope this expands and is great, but I got to get back in the fight.
Right.
And, you know, so that, and that's how this Sentinel conversation started and all the cool things that are that are happening with Sentinel right now.
And I could not be more excited with where my life is going, this organization's going.
And yeah, so that's literally, this was July 25th, 2023.
When did I say the Youngin thing?
Wasn't it like right then?
Yeah, it was quarter to 2023, wasn't it?
Yeah, so right before that, I guess.
It's like, oh, okay.
June 2023.
Okay.
It's like that just happened.
And he said he was divisive.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Why is he dividing?
There's like with this kind of stuff, again, pure speculation, but it feels weird to start an organization that does a thing and then leave it and just go to another organization that does the exact same thing.
Doesn't that seem like there could be something going on?
I don't know.
Like, who knows?
Even if it was just like an argument or something, like, it just seems, I mean, get back in the fight.
He's the president of this one.
He's not in the fight.
That seems to be doing like perfectly fine.
The same amount of being in the fight from what we can see.
But who knows?
Maybe behind the scenes, it's not.
All right.
Well, there's so much to talk about.
We're going to cut it off here.
Next episode, it's a lot of fun because we're going to start to dig into their worldview more, more so on this guy's worldview on the human trafficking and the kids and the sex trafficking and the phones.
And like he's going to start presenting what's going on in the world.
Yeah.
And I have done a bunch of research on actual numbers.
We'll see if we get to that next episode.
But one way or the other, the agenda is we're going to get into what this guy says is happening and eventually get into what the actual reality is and onward.
Next Episode: Digging In00:03:34
I mean, there's so much here.
There's other companies.
There's other people that have actually been busted for fraud, but it's not related to this.
I want to be very careful legally.
Like it's not directly, doesn't directly say anything about this guy or his thing or even his particular nonprofit.
Yeah, but like there's other instances that it's interesting to talk about.
So so much here.
Can't wait for you to hear some of the nonsense in the next episode.
Thanks so much for listening, wokeies.
Stay safe out there.
Don't get trafficked.
Oh my gosh.
Yeah.
It's bound to happen.
No, seriously.
The more I think about this, the more scared you are of being.
I just re-watched Ralph Breaks the Internet with the kids.
And so I'm like, oh, these people think that slaughter race, the game, like that's actual, like what the world looks like is slaughter race with like great white sharks coming out of sewers to eat people.
I'm like, it's just nonsense.
Anyway.
Yeah.
That's my, that's my take on it.
I mean, it's not, it's not super far from what they think.
Yeah.
They just think it's like a Bill Clinton shark and a leftist.
You know, it's like, it'll all be left, even though it's mathematically speaking.
Way safer.
If so, it doesn't mean totally safe.
But if you were to play the odds, like just playing the betting odds of like hmm, who should I?
You, you're forced to trust your kid around a random stranger, what are you gonna pick?
You know, there's that Frank Turek guy who we, who covered slightly in the um oh, actually I think it's in this, but I don't know that we'll bother getting to it but he had this old apologetic where he was like, hey, what would you feel safer?
It's it's uh, it's just getting dark and you come across a group of men.
Would you rather they had just come out of a prayer meeting, Christian prayer meeting, or I think it changes over time, but either atheists or like Muslims, maybe it's like hey man, not even being ironic or a wokist, i'd rather they not just have come out of a prayer meeting because, especially now I mean, he's been doing that for 25 years.
Yeah, a bear, a bear meeting.
I want bears coming out of a bear meeting.
That's what I.
They will be so helpful.
They were having a bear government.
You know like, if they're yeah, if they're arranging government and having meetings, you know they're going to be helpful.
It depends on what the bear is wearing.
If i'm being honest, if it's a bear that's totally naked, that's a, that's a wild card.
You know, it could be a bear that like is actually just a bear.
Or it could be like Winnie The Poo, like just a shirt.
Yeah exactly, the clothes really make the bear.
I've always said that yes, i've always said that Lydia can back me up.
Little vest, you're in hat, you're golden.
Oh yeah, the little Paddington hat.
Yeah, so cute golden, all right.
But point is like, I don't know man, I don't think it's that much safer to like, if you were to pick, you would want someone to have come out of like a progressive government meeting, you know, like here's our um Communist.
You know, meetup like that would be much safer than a meeting of Christians.
Let me just say it doesn't mean, doesn't mean totally safe, don't get me wrong.
There's plenty of predators, people who take advantage of the left.
We've seen that, obviously.
But uh statistically, every single time you see a headline of someone having done something horrible, either with kids or just like adultery and cheating and weird stuff.
It's a Republican senator, or you know of a state, it's like a Republican state senator.