Badlands Media - Badlands Story Hour Ep 157: A Few Good Men

Episode Date: March 4, 2026

Chris Paul and Burning Bright revisit A Few Good Men and quickly move beyond the iconic courtroom scene into something deeper: authority, hierarchy, narrative control, and the dangers of collectivist ...thinking. What starts as a discussion of Jack Nicholson’s legendary performance turns into a sharp analysis of rank as abstraction, forged “official” documents, Code Red as institutionalized struggle session, and the illusion of systems protecting truth. They unpack the moral tension between law and honor, question the mythology of national defense narratives, and draw striking parallels between military chain of command and modern online “truth” movements. From epistemology to propaganda, from Cuba to forever wars, this episode explores how stories become reality and how easily people surrender individual judgment to a collective code. It’s not just about whether you can handle the truth. It’s about whether you even know what it is.

Transcript
Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:10 of the badlands explain those badlands that's a hell of a name all right good evening everybody before we get started we have word from our partners over at river bitcoin that's right stack sats with river the bitcoin only platform built by bitcoiners for bitcoins why river zero fee recurring buys stack bitcoin effortlessly hourly daily weekly or monthly 3.5% bitcoin bitcoin interest on cash, FDI insured, no minimums, withdraw anytime, and expert U.S.-based support. Human help plus private client services for big buys, 100K plus. Business accounts, boost your balance sheet with Bitcoin and earn 3.5% paid in BTC and a top-tier wallet, send, receive, and manage Bitcoin securely with unmatched security, full reserve custody, multi-sig cold storage,
Starting point is 00:01:12 and proof of reserves. Join the Bitcoin Revolution at Badlandsmedia.tv slash river and earn real returns. That's Badlands Media.tv slash river. Kind of interesting little tidbit. Trump putting out a clarity and genius act truth post tonight in the midst of the very serious and real war that is no doubt being waged. He makes sure to be like, and you know those Dems are real mean and some of the banks are mean too. We've got to make sure we keep our eye on the ball there. Yeah, he's got a lot going on.
Starting point is 00:01:45 He's talking about all sorts of things. They are getting very, very mad at him for talking about things that aren't the quote-unquote war in Iran. Okay. Well, anyway, good evening, everybody. Welcome to Badland Story Hour. I'm Chris Paul. That is Burning Brighton tonight. We are discussing 1992s A Few Good Men, written by Aaron Sorkin, directed by Rob Reiner, starring Tom Cruise, Jack Nicholson, Demi Moore, Kiefer Sutherland, Kevin Pollock, Kevin Bacon.
Starting point is 00:02:16 every other Kevin you've ever seen and James Marshall one of the stars of the great great television series Twin Peaks so I was told and the star of what did I say earlier in the chat a soccer movie yeah and you know you know what's funny he uh you know how the daily mail if you ever follow a headline over to the daily mail you'll open up an article and then you be assaulted with celebrity news and Tuesday or Wednesday last week I had followed a link to the Daily Mail and there was an article about James Marshall and how he looked now like 25 years later. Weird. It's just so weird.
Starting point is 00:03:05 Soccer dog, the movie was the movie I was thinking of. Soccer dog. Soccer dog the movie. Wow. Just so that if there was any, I used to, that was like a 90s thing. where they were like, and just in case you weren't clear, we're going to put the word movie in the title of the movie so that you know that what you are picking up is, in fact, a movie.
Starting point is 00:03:29 And yeah, I was partial. I never heard of soccer dog. I was very partial to Air Bud. Yeah. I thought that's what you were going to say, that like back then, they used to constantly do movies with dogs doing things that dogs weren't supposed to do. That was like, I was a sucker for all of a man.
Starting point is 00:03:45 half hit on your hands. Homeward bound. Oh, yeah, yeah. I love that, yeah. All right. But that's not this movie. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so a few good men classic 90s film, some of the kind of most quotable moments in contemporary cinema, I would say, if, you know, once you get past
Starting point is 00:04:08 kind of 70 years, 70s or 80s, this was like the movie line of the 90s. You can't handle the truth. You want me on that wall. You need me on that wall. You're goddamn right I did. Like just Jack, just crushing it there. And there's something so, he's got such presence. You know, he's like so authoritative.
Starting point is 00:04:29 He can just be there perfectly still in himself and still be projecting so much power forward. And I think that that was obvious in this performance, of course, those two great scenes, particularly. I mean, he's got the same. seen in his office at the beginning. Very good scene. The scene around the table on the beach, fantastic. And then the courtroom scene, obviously, classic. It was fun to go back and watch this. The legal interplay and what the law means relative to the code that the Marines follow, I guess we're going to probably spend some significant time talking about that. And then the interplay, I thought, between Tom Cruise's adherence to the law.
Starting point is 00:05:15 and getting the best outcome in a kind of very easily quantifiable way being more important than the principles that they were fighting for. I thought that those were two big kind of important thematic aspects that we can probably spend some time on. But you haven't seen this in quite a while either, right? I had never seen this. You had never seen one of those. You know, there's some of those movies that I call them like the walk by the uncle's TV movies.
Starting point is 00:05:44 like at the family parties. I've probably been subjected to a lot of this movie, like on my periphery. But I often know whether or not I've seen it once we're actually sitting down to watch it. And this one, I knew nothing. Like no scene was familiar to me except for the famous scene at the end, which was kind of cool because I wasn't just sitting there being like, okay, where's that next thing I've seen when I was a kid and everything? really the whole plot structure and everything was pretty new to me.
Starting point is 00:06:17 I just knew the general framework of that ending. I also expected the movie to be a courtroom drama based on the famous, the fame, the infamy of that scene. And it really wasn't, not until the end, which I kind of liked. I liked that there was a lot more on the periphery. I know it's about a courtroom. It's just I thought it was going to be more structured like a courtroom drama, which I do. not tend to like those movies. I liked this. I totally agree with you. It's going back and forth in the chat a bit just before we even get into some of the meat of the themes. Admittedly, I think
Starting point is 00:06:56 there were some really bad performances in this movie, like noticeably bad. But with that said, part of that is probably because Jack Nicholson, I thought, was incredible. And I saw a bunch of people in the chat saying, you know, he's in this for like 20 minutes total, most of which is that last scene totally steals the whole movie. And I think it's weirdly hard to do that when a scene like that, to your point about the 90s, like that is a scene that lives in infamy. That was a, I would call that a memetic scene before we use that term in like the common parlance, right? Everyone wasn't online sharing memes. But that was a memetic quote that like people just said to each other in American culture. And I think it actually is tough to have somebody that hasn't
Starting point is 00:07:50 seen it in its entirety, in context, go back and kind of get that out of their heads, right? Like, I'm going into it being like, this is the scene where he says the thing. And yet I was totally into the scene and into the character. And you said, you know, he had a weight and presence. And he definitely did. And a couple of people in chat were saying, you know, Jack Nicholson's one of those guys. that he's sort of Jack Nicholson in many of his roles. But I actually think that that works. And I was thinking about that just randomly this week, where I think we've gone away from like character actors
Starting point is 00:08:29 to the detriment maybe of Hollywood. Like I understand that there's the Jacks of All Trades, like Christian Bales of the world and stuff that really do, or like Leo DiCaprio, really plays like different roles and that's what a lot of modern actors are known for but there's something to be said for like jack nicholson kind of does similar versions of the sameish character but really really well and uh yeah tom cruise is good in it like i didn't think anybody in the main principal cast was bad but nicholson like he's on screen for three minutes and you can feel the
Starting point is 00:09:09 energy around even before the court scene you mentioned that table scene and it's like there is no doubting even when he's completely at ease that he is in firm control of the entire social dynamic of the room so you totally buy it and I think it helps solidify kind of attention of the plot because you got you can believe that it's not just that these men are trapped in the system of the military, which I thought was mostly what I was going to be thinking of, it's that this man would have the kind of presence that would trickle down into really enforcing whatever the sort of belief or honor structure that was there, right? It wasn't as simple as everybody in the military acts this way. Like, I think one thing it really communicated that I wasn't expecting was
Starting point is 00:10:04 everybody on this military base really acts this way because they are under the shadow of this man and you believe that he has that kind of a shadow. Yeah. And the funny thing about that is that he doesn't actually follow the system of laws that he kind of positions himself to be upholding and then demands that his underlings uphold as well. his underlings, they are required to uphold his interpretation of the system. And he takes whatever liberties he wants with that system. The system is not constructed.
Starting point is 00:10:44 I mean, as high ranking as he is, the system is not constructed to just let him run things however he wants. There are people he answers to. You can see him answering to the court here. There are senior officers to him. And I think that there's a line in passing about how he's being considered for like sec deaf or some high ranking position back in Washington. But what happens on the on the base is under his command. And he kind of governs as an authoritarian. These are his rules.
Starting point is 00:11:21 The system is in place, but he amends the system however he wants, whenever he wants. So he then creates a second system of rules where he is judge, jury, and executioner, and can everybody else has to obey the thing. And then he can do whatever he wants. And that stratification is something that we actually see in our society. You know, Donald Trump, the conversation when he was getting indicted for all of those ridiculous indictments, the conversation was about a two-tiered system of justice. And that actually is what we have. there is a system of all of these rules from the Constitution to our statutory law to like our criminal law and the rest of it, all of that is put in place. It can be enforced against the kind of less powerful, the underlings, anytime the system wants to enforce them.
Starting point is 00:12:12 But the system is never actually required to enforce them against itself. And this is a movie about the system actually being exploited. The exploits that remain are being used to turn the system against a bad actor within it. Yeah, it's interesting. I think these aren't always interchangeable, but I thought of the word paradigm when you said that, you know, I wrote down system a lot in my notes for this movie as makes sense. but it's almost like there's the system to your point the system of military structure you know chain of command is a big theme in this movie but what jessup has done what nicholson has
Starting point is 00:13:00 done is sort of create a paradigm within the system and to me you know like mileage varies that's a pretty broad word but the way i think of paradigm is a system that is codified belief. It's essentially a belief system. You know, you and I talk about this kind of stuff a lot when it comes to reality formation and creation and hyperstition, that word you brought to my attention a couple of years ago. But, you know, all of those are, like, what is the end goal of hyperstition and reality creation? It's really to form paradigms. What's the role of Psiop's? It's either to form or dismantle a paradigm. And I'd say, Like, that is actually what I came more out of this with from what Jessup was doing, was less he's exploited the system and more he just created his own.
Starting point is 00:13:59 But the sort of dark genius of it is that everybody operating within his paradigm seems to think they're operating within a system. And I'm no fan of systems. We can talk about that plenty tonight. but I expected to think, man, the real failing here, the real failing that this movie is trying to get across is systems, the failure of systems to encode morality and to do what's right. I think that is throughout the movie, but I don't think that's actually what was going on here. I think what was going on here is that these people basically believed in a figure and in the paradigm he said. because all of them acknowledge, you know, Code Red is sort of the mechanism throughout the movie in which this is communicated, but they all recognize all of them that Code Red is not a part of the system. So ultimately they're not defending a system, and all of them on some level know that they're not defending a system, but they are defending a paradigm, and the paradigm is a belief system that is not codified in any sort of rules. It's just something that is enforced.
Starting point is 00:15:11 And, you know, you mentioned Trump and there's many different layers of this, but I certainly couldn't help but think of the truth community. And we certainly see that a lot. We've talked about that a lot the last couple of years. But the idea of like, okay, most people got into the truth community because they were ostensibly looking for the truth. And they were trying to find people that were like-minded, that were also looking for the same thing. And it's actually turned into kind of a balkanization, a balkanized set of paradigms wherein you are supposed to say certain things, because if you don't say those certain things, you're going to be ousted from the truth community, even if you are looking for the truth. Yes, it turns out that some of the people who claim to be looking for the truth actually can't handle the truth, nor can they detect it, which is a problem. So I think what you're getting at, I think there was a moment where they kind of laid out the code, as they called it in the film.
Starting point is 00:16:16 They said it was unit, core, God, and then country. So the unit was there on the base. All of those people, all the commitment was to them, above the Marine Corps, above God, and above the United States of America. So that, you know, and we're talking about people who pledge an oath to defend the Constitution of the United States of America. And so they put God above that, which God, of course, should be. Although I saw an argument, by the way, I think yesterday, maybe today, online where someone was bemoaning the idea that people would put God above the Constitution as military members. And of course, there was, we're talking about some godless heathen on the left making this case. And they think all of this makes a great deal of sense based on the supposed separation of church and state in the Constitution.
Starting point is 00:17:20 And so, you know, that is supposed to clarify the code in some way for them. If you sign up for the military, the Constitution of the United States has to be the highest priority in your life. A little weird. But so unit core God country. You've already got the priorities all jumbled up. That's just not going to lead to quality, moral decisions down the line. And that's what we see here. And the parallel being to the truth community, if you are focused on the wrong thing,
Starting point is 00:17:54 if there are priorities ahead of truth, right, if your commitment is to Donald Trump above the truth, you got something wrong. If your commitment is to what Q influencers say the Q drops mean, you've got something wrong. If your commitment is to slogans within that school of thought, you got something seriously wrong. And all of those things we see regularly put ahead of truth in the truth community. And it's people who are saying, well, we are the media now. What?
Starting point is 00:18:34 Why would I want a media? Why would I want to replace a media that does not prioritize truth because they have this other conflicting set of priorities with a new media of people who do not prioritize truth in favor of another conflicting set of priorities and also happen to be degenerate retards? I mean, that part's just thrown in there at the end. Yeah, Matthews. A lot of Matthews in the truth movement, it turns out, well, not a lot of them, just a few. But yeah, I wrote that. It's funny that the framing you use because I wrote down unit core, God, country, dot, dot, dot priorities with a question mark in my notes. And yeah, the truth community version of that might be, you know, Q, Trump, Republicans, truth. Yes. And, you know, I genuinely believe that many people or most people in the truth community, which I do think is different than MAGA. There's a lot of Normie MAGA, but I used to draw a much clearer line of demarcation between Normie MAGA and the truth community.
Starting point is 00:19:48 I do think a lot of people that got into this originally did have it right, you know, or they were provoked, you know, the reason that the cue drops provoked them. and that Donald Trump provoked them in a good way was because they were encoded toward truth. They knew something was wrong in their world, you know, the old Neo and Matrix, Alice in Wonderland analogs. People don't find their way into the truth community unless they were at one point looking for the truth. Unfortunately, there are opportunists who find people that are looking for that. And they, once they, you know, once they see a years-long pattern of behavior, of to your point, repeating slogans or looking to specific influences to explain everything to them, to decode the correct meaning of things to them and the truth to them, they see an opportunity.
Starting point is 00:20:41 And we've talked about that from a deep state framing, but you don't even have to go deep state or anything like that. You can just go opportunist, human nature. Somebody who's like, I can build a business model off of that. You know, one of the ironies and one of the things I'm actually proud about at Badlands and with a lot of us is that when we say the things that we do, do, people somehow are like, you're doing this to make money. Who's like, we lose money based on saying the things that we say. Like, we could show you that there has been significant money lost by taking the hardline principled stances that we have, particularly over the last couple of years.
Starting point is 00:21:19 But, hey, that's the right framing, I think. And ultimately, I do think even if you want to be Machiavellian about it, on a long enough timeline, that's the best business model too. You know, we've often said authenticity is the currency of the future, which is another way of saying truth is the currency. Truth is a universal currency, right? Like, you don't always recognize the truth at the same time, but eventually it's inarguable, or that's the hope. So people that are, you know, in any paradigm you're talking about, whether it's this false paradigm construction presented in the movie, Ultimately, I guess I'll skip to the very end just in terms of one button I liked at the very end of this movie that I wasn't expecting was, what's his name?
Starting point is 00:22:06 The Lance Harold, is that it? I don't know. His full name. The Black Soldier. One thing I liked at the very end was when they were discharged, disarably discharged. He's shocked at first, but then he does accept that, ultimately accept responsibility for that. and to tie into the belabored point I'm making, you know,
Starting point is 00:22:31 he does realize that even though him and his buddy there were wronged by the system, they were culpable as well because they were not adhering to the right, you know, priorities or the right structure. They weren't adhering to the truth or honor. They were just adhering to a control structure. Yeah, it's funny, the, the money aspect of it. as if it is somehow the quickest path toward riches to say things that gets you banned from social media platforms kicked out of in-groups and left subject to non-stop struggle sessions
Starting point is 00:23:15 from strangers who just want to disrupt what you're doing because you're not adhering to the commands of the in group. And so, you know, there is the month before Gart. Yeah, it's always a month before Gart. Always the month before. Yeah, how do they always just nail it? It's like they see the, uh, the Gart Flyers go out and they're like, oh, yeah, it's time to attack those people with bots and try to struggle session them into saying
Starting point is 00:23:49 the things that everyone's supposed to say. But then again, you know, we're, we're coming up. one of the, or we just are in now one of those periods when there is a massive, like across the board, media-wide effort to get everybody back on the same page. Like, we are immediately supposed to accept all of the underlying claims about what's happening now and then begin to emote about those underlying claims, struggle session people into supporting Trump, even if they have to violate their principles to do so. And I, I mean in their language, I mean, everybody can kind of, we all support Trump.
Starting point is 00:24:28 We can still talk about how no one wants these forever wars. There's no clear justification for this war. And you can go on down the list about why we would not support this action in principle in a given situation. But there is no money whatsoever for saying the things that must be said that no one wants to say. Okay, that is the way to be treated terribly by everyone on the other side of the fence indefinitely. And many of us have signed up for that and have been doing it for like six years. So the funniest thing is to be called, like called out for you guys are making money. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:25:13 Oh, yeah, tons. If only we could show you. Millions of dollars of money. Yeah, yeah. Millions of dollars a month. Like all us co-founders get. Right. Which is why we do appreciate when you guys support us because that is direct support,
Starting point is 00:25:27 which is what we're based on, contrary to popular belief. You mentioned struggle session. And in one of my notes here in the framing of this movie, obviously Code Red is like a very literal form of a struggle session. You know, that's what I think most people think of when it comes to a communist struggle session. They think of, you know, the CCP strapping you to her chair, waterboarding you and saying, you know, fearless leader, whatever. Or you think of North Koreans two decades ago or a decade ago going into the streets and mourning very loudly and dramatically because, like, that's what
Starting point is 00:26:06 they're expected to do. Those are super obvious struggle sessions. In this movie in the military, there's obvious struggle sessions, hazing, you might call it. One of the reasons, now I know, I try to back off my anti-faternity rhetoric, but I've had bad run-ins with fraternities in my youth. And one of the reasons I did not like them is because I usually called them gay, which got me into some hot water with some of them back in the day. So you called them gay, and then you ended up in a hot tub with the fraternity guys? Not quite. Yeah, they wanted that.
Starting point is 00:26:42 Maybe what do they call it, a soup kitchen and the other guys. No, but they're, you know, hazing. It's like, oh, hazing, this is just one of the things we do, you know, one of the guys. And it's like, so a communist struggle session, it's usually a bit gay, too, when it comes to the military or a fraternity. But in this movie, one of the notes I wrote down was struggle sessions are the way all collectives instinctively deal with individuals. So, you know, before you even get into collectivism versus sovereignty and what are the arguments here and why are we subjecting Martinez or whatever? his name is to a struggle session in the military, you know, to preserve, to preserve unity is often what it's about. But, you know, just by subjecting somebody to a struggle session, the thought I had
Starting point is 00:27:31 was you are perhaps subconsciously encoding yourself as part of a collective and encoding that person as an individual. And the ultimate irony, to your point about the truth community, is that the idea behind the truth community was literally decentralization incarnate, like a community built on the tenets of decentralization. And yet when you are struggle sessioning people in the truth community, you are basically de facto acknowledging that they have done the thing that you say you have set out to do. And because they have done that, they have self-actualized, thereby presenting a threat to the unity in-group you have created. And if they are a threat to the unity in-group you have created, then it means that the unity in-group you have created is literally based on nothing. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:28:29 Well, it's certainly not based on truth. Because you would not, if you were seriously committed to trying to bring the, you. truth forward at all times, you would not want to cut off conversations ever. And every group I have ever been in, in and around the truth community, every time I have seen groups form, there are still subjects that are just off limits where as soon as you bring something up, some struggle session leaders from the group will immediately speak up and try to put down that view and then bring everybody else in to make sure that it is clear to everyone that point of view is not going to be discussed. You cannot get to the truth that way.
Starting point is 00:29:21 That's a perfect one, yes. But there are many like that. Just as soon as a conversation comes up, that is even ballpark in the range of that, someone wants to let everybody know, I am going to show you where the fence is. Here is where the serious people stop. And out there, that's for all the crazy people. That's for all the conspiracy theorists. And it's so weird that people in the Hugh community will gatekeep people from talking about other subjects, like the existence of viruses, for instance.
Starting point is 00:29:58 Why would that threaten someone to talk about whether or not viruses are real? Like, do we get lied to by scientists? Yes. End of discussion, right? Okay. Of course you have to. Of course you have to find out whether or not the claim you have taken on authority is true. Because yes, we can see that you have gotten sick. We get it. People have symptoms. But the thing is, if we don't know what the cause is and we are told to believe it's something that it's not, well, then we're not actually going to find the cause, which means we can't properly cure the disease you have. or prevent it from happening again. And so you actually have to even question the fundamental foundational assumptions of something like that, yet there's entire swaths of the conspiracy theory community, the truth community, the Q community, however you want to define it, who just are not open to any of these discussions.
Starting point is 00:30:59 That is just 100% gatekeeping. And yes, enforced with the struggle session. Yeah, you know, it's it's kind of funny because I think this movie is a very literal analog to it, right? You're even literally using terminology like, here's the fence, date keeping. And it's like, what is the prime argument? And actually, that makes me think of another thing I really love about the character of Jessup and the way Nicholson plays him with the presence he has is that. he doesn't make any apologies for what he's doing.
Starting point is 00:31:39 In fact, he acknowledges that what you think he's doing is exactly what he's doing. And that is something that the truth community does not do to your point, right? If you were to, if you were to, you know, point out a lot of the logical fallacies of the cute community or the truth community to them, even if you're ostensibly a part of it, they, they, attack like an infection. Obviously not everybody, but it's like white blood cells fighting an infection. And the reason is ostensibly they don't want to view themselves as being collectivist. They don't want to view themselves as not having principles. So they attack anything that's a threat. I think it gets framed as being a threat to the plan. But as you often point out, which I think is a funny way to do it, how can you threaten something that nothing
Starting point is 00:32:34 can stop. It turns out that like the answer lies in the question there. You can't threaten something that nothing can stop, but you can threaten the reputations of people who have built their identities and their in groups based off of the nothing can stop, based off of, or rather, based off of being the authority figures that disseminate and translate the nothing can stop what's coming, the plan. You know, the irony being that, as I've said a million times, I was under the impression that we were trying to do away with that whole thing, which was like the whole point of the plan. But it turns out that we've just installed a new priesthood of people that bring the decodes down from the mountains like tablets. The same people who many have probably noticed over the past five to seven days have completely inverted and rebranded their former. meaning behind saving Israel for last. And now, maybe within the last 24 hours, based on some cagey comments Trump made in the Oval Office about Israel, are rebranding again and going, ah, we knew he
Starting point is 00:33:48 was going to get him. It's like, hold on. This weekend, you said, we knew him and them, Israel, we're going to get them. But now that you're realizing you're probably fucking wrong about that, like you're wrong about everything else, you retroactively meant neither of those things and both of those things because you have no principles. And to bring it back to this movie, again, this is the literal argument for gatekeeping. And ultimately, we've said this in a million discussions about gatekeeping and collectivist struggle sessions. Why do individuals fall into that emotionally? Why do individuals fall into that? It's as cliche as it is. It's fear, right? And it's fear, I think in the truth community, it's fear of the unknown. It's like, oh, I found this group that makes me feel like
Starting point is 00:34:34 they know everything that's going on. And I'm able to orient myself, right? And not knowing the shape of the earth or not knowing whether or not nothing can stop the plan, not knowing what the plan is, is very threatening. So would these people speak very authoritatively on all these subjects? It makes you feel good. It makes you feel safe. And again, the reason I respect Jessup in this movie is he's like he'd be like if a decoder one of these people just said hey honestly i'm just making a lot of this up because i'm trying to keep the in group i'm trying to keep consensus and unity and make us all feel good uh ironically a badlands a lot of us say we don't actually know what's going on um but it turns out a lot of other people aren't willing to do that and jessup is just willing to say i am
Starting point is 00:35:22 literally doing all of the bullshit you think i am and i'm doing it to keep you safe and And he has a hell of a lot of a stronger argument in that kind of a paradigm than I think people in the decentralized truth community do. Yeah, I can get down with that last part for sure. The other good question I asked would be, how do you know what's threatening a plan that you don't know? Right. Does asking questions of Trump and his motivations and the motivations of the people in the administration, particularly the ones that were recruited, directly from the television, are we allowed to question those motivations? Does that help Trump or hurt Trump? Well, they don't know. How could they possibly know? They've never thought about it. They've never
Starting point is 00:36:09 talked about it. They don't ask any of the questions. So how could they know that that threatens the plan? What if they actually need people out there paying attention to what's going on, figuring out where the logical holes in enemy narratives are coming from, or figuring out where the logical holes in people speaking as allies are coming from, so that the people who are the good guys, assuming that is a group of people out there, can navigate through all of those various narratives. They're only going to get there the best way if they have really smart, really knowledgeable people asking questions that no one else is asking. And those questions are being cut off by his strongest supporters,
Starting point is 00:36:57 or at least like the people who, you know, call themselves the strongest supporters. So how do you know what threatens a plan that you don't know? What are you going to say about what helps drive the plan forward? We all need to agree with things. We need to encourage people by playing match online to go back to watching Fox News. and everybody else is just supposed to sit quiet because the in-group of some fringe community online has decided that that's the way we're going and now you all have to go that way. That's absolutely bonkers, but that is kind of part of the theoretical environment,
Starting point is 00:37:39 the mental control structure that we've lived under for these last five years in a certain part of the internet. I would say about Jack Nicholson, kind of a parallel here, one of the things that really struck me in this film, this is something that we've talked about a few times, is once you give a justification like, if you don't do the thing I say, everybody's going to die, or certain people will die, enough people will die, and then the blood will be on your hands because you didn't let me do the job that I know how to do. Well, so that's, we have that on one end. And then, of course, on the other end, the extreme is always, if we don't do this thing, the Nazis are coming. And we're seeing a lot of that this weekend, right?
Starting point is 00:38:22 If we didn't go in and take out the Ayatollah, who maybe has been dead for two years, and apparently now is being replaced with his son. If we didn't take him out, well, same thing's going to happen. World War II all over again. Terrorist state hates the Jews. They're going to kill everybody. So we had to go in and do it. But once you put a justification that strong, you can use that justification in any scenario to justify and explain anything.
Starting point is 00:38:50 And again, that is what we have in these struggle sessions. Why do we all have to fall in line right now? Well, because if we don't, we're going to lose fake midterms in November, where one person who's not on the ballot is Donald Trump. And everybody else who is on the ballot is at minimum a potential rhino and Trump and our enemy. who is there to serve the system and we're not going to ask questions. We're just going to unify and then go vote hard. We live in a crazy time right now and it is made crazier by the code that so many people think they have adopted over these last few years and are being taught how to follow by just,
Starting point is 00:39:38 I mean, morons. Yeah. And it really is. I mean, there's the moral element to it that there's the moral element of gatekeeping and incentivized gatekeeping, the monetization of the in-group of preserving unity and all that kind of stuff. But ultimately, to your point, you just ended on there, there is an intelligence gap. And I'm not like afraid to say it these days. One of the reasons that there is a fear for a lot of people in this, in this community or the people kind of making content and saying the same things on every show over and over again for 10 years is because those people very literally do not have the capacity to think about these things in a way that is not surface level narrative. And that's just not great for branding when your brand is an info warrior who uses terms like fifth generation warfare without ever acknowledging what that means. which reminds me there was a great post today, I believe, or yesterday by John, John Harold, in response to somebody that on Twitter, I'm sure a lot of you guys saw it, but go look at his feed and look at his replies there, where somebody was basically doing this to him. Now, ironically, I think this was actually a follower who was like earnestly struggle sessioning John, which shows the danger of this because they then came back under his response and we're like, oh, thanks for that response. That makes a lot of sense. But John essentially said, what, you know, a different version of what you said there, which is, I trust Donald Trump and the irony being some of the people who are questioning the central narrative that Donald
Starting point is 00:41:22 Trump is essentially piloting and is the lead character of might be ironically the ones who are defending him and trust him the most, whereas the people that are defending the surface narrative itself are to your point and to John's point earlier today threatening the plan that Trump has, right? Like, what is better? Many of our reads at Badlands, certainly the read I had on Sunday night. It sounds like it was similar to what you and John were talking about on Saturday night, that we're looking at some version of a Donald Trump disentanglement, a Donald Trump disarmament of really bad things that were going to happen through a narrative translation. You and I have talked about this with Midnight Hammer.
Starting point is 00:42:06 It looked like the same thing happened with absolute resolve. while I was live on the narrative with Ghost on Sunday night after giving my whole theory on it being another narrative disarmament, I specifically said, watch it's going to follow the Venezuela template. And then Trump gives comments during the show to the New York Times saying we're following the Venezuela model in terms of a leadership change. And then like you said earlier today,
Starting point is 00:42:31 now we're going to get Kamani's son in there. We don't know if any of this shit's going to hold in the central narrative. But it turns out that the people who, who did not just revert back to Bush era neocons screaming for regime change in the Middle East and endless carpet bombing of innocence because that's part of the plan, nothing can stop. The people who are going, I think this is actually a whole narrative inversion meant to stop the really bad thing from happening, look a little closer to right than all the people who were cheering unironically for the actual of what we were being told about.
Starting point is 00:43:06 And the really like disturbing part of it is that a lot of these people in the truth community are just going to go once it's clear that oh, this was a Maduro rerun and you know the status quo is largely unchanged. But now Israel doesn't get to carpet bomb the Middle East or neocons don't actually get their forever war that they definitely wanted. The irony is you're fucking cheering for the forever war because you think that the forever war is going on. The real irony of people who believe everything in the central narrative that are in the truth community is that means they're reprehensible, awful people that are earnestly cheering for wanton death and destruction in the same shit that they like to do their fake maya culpas about, which is why I always point out, even to people in our audience, that so many of the people in the truth community voted for Donald Trump by accident. They voted for Donald Trump because they wanted permission to be Republicans again. And this op this past week demonstrated to a lot of people that those people are still Bush neocons that just had to go into hiding for a while. And they thought Donald Trump gave them the green light to come out of the hole.
Starting point is 00:44:21 And now they're getting a little embarrassed, I think, or at least I hope that they will be. But yeah, you know, it turns out that just approaching these things from first principles, as John said in this post earlier today, you know, is the infinite game. Yeah, they thought they were going to use Trump as a vehicle, and it turns out he's using them as a vehicle. Let's take a quick pause here and hear a word from Burning Bright. Legend says on St. Patrick's Day, a beard without oil is just a chin with ambition. But a beard with soft disclosure beard oil, that's true treasure.
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Starting point is 00:47:13 Pro tip that's relevant to today. I saw some stuff we were talking about in our main chat where apparently there's some controversy over the ledger company. Now, I don't know if the accusations are correct or not, but people claiming that their crypto disappeared, et cetera. And I learned, yeah, one of the greatest benefits of terms of. Trezer and a few other companies like it is that they are open source software. I know people say that often, but the reason that matters is that the second a back door is introduced, it would be on an open ledger and everybody would see it. Whereas the company ledger, ironically enough, is closed source software.
Starting point is 00:47:51 So you don't know what's going on in those devices. All right. So let's get, actually, maybe the cryptocurrency will lead us in an interesting way to the next day. want to talk about, which is the abstraction that is rank. And so this is something that is discussed at some length in software by Major Jason Lowry. He talks about rank as an abstraction, rank and title. These are symbols of superiority in a hierarchy. And Jessup takes full advantage of the abstract power that he has.
Starting point is 00:48:33 as granted to him by his rank. And I thought it was interesting, an interesting statement on abstract power and rank, that it's more likely that the people who have these higher ranks, then we'll feel, and not all people with high ranks, you know, but we'll feel more entitled to usurp additional power because they are placed in a position where it is a, agreed by at least some group of people, that guy is better than you. He can do more things
Starting point is 00:49:10 than you're allowed to do because he has this abstract rank. And now, I'm not saying that merit in the world is not a real thing. Certainly, you know, there are great athletes and very bad athletes and people who aren't athletes at all. I'm not suggesting hierarchies don't emerge in the world at all. We're talking specifically about abstract power hierarchies, titles and ranks that are given rather than and sometimes earned, but regardless, they are just positioned in this hierarchy in a way that doesn't necessarily correspond to their merit. If it was just a natural competition, they might not have that rank at all. And there's something about being in those ranks that makes you feel like maybe you don't deserve it. And it's one of those things that
Starting point is 00:50:01 kind of represents itself in the world by you taking even more power that you don't deserve because now you're just a person who gets extra power. Yeah, it's sort of like it gives you something to defend. It gives you this reputation. It gives you this hill to stand on ostensibly and a hill to defend, which I guess in some scenarios could be considered good or beneficial. I certainly understand the chain of command arguments in the military, but the rank thing, you could also see how that can incentivize the wrong behaviors too, where it's like, hey, I've achieved this rank through suffering. It's like the cycle of abuse, and now you men must suffer beneath me because I have more power over you. And it's not military, but it reminds me of I spent a long time in the martial arts world. and eventually went from like traditional martial arts into competition.
Starting point is 00:51:03 But I definitely noticed that in the martial arts world, it's very notorious, actually, kind of cultish. There's good aspects of it, but each kind of school has their own philosophy around martial arts. You have rank systems, right? And one of the, we started calling the McDojo's, this is largely an American thing. Americans ruined it, of course. but where you've got like 11 year olds running around with black belts. I was higher ranked in Taekwondo when I was 15 than anything I achieved from age 16 to 22 when I was fighting. And yet the 18 year old version of myself was infinitely better than the 14 or 15 year old version of myself, right?
Starting point is 00:51:49 But that version of myself was at a school that was like, do these certain things, stay here for this certain amount of time, give us this. certain amount of money and then you too will get ranks and I'm torn on that as somebody who wants to teach my son how to fight of whether or not I would ever do you know there's something about motivating like a kid and like hey look we're recognizing your achievement now you're a yellow belt now you're an orange belt right but there was something dark about it I started to notice where you know no offense intended but there would be like women with black belts on their waste who would carry themselves like that meant, I now have a certain amount of physical power projection capabilities in the real world. And you do not. So it's like some of them did.
Starting point is 00:52:40 Some of them were good fighters, but there are many that weren't. And I could apply that to guys, too. Like, there were guys I knew that had black belts that sucked. You put them in a ring and they would freak out at the first sign of damage or anything like that they incurred. Then you'd have completely unranked guys that would come in off the street. And within a month, they just had like really good footwork and just knew how to take a punch. And, you know, so anyway, you could see how that could apply, especially with much more intense versions of that martial arts world in the military where it's like, hey, we're training to kill people. And you need rank and you need chain of command. But it can also create this sort of cycle where it's like, well,
Starting point is 00:53:21 are we really confident to your point that everybody in these ranks in the military is meritocratically the best guy in that unit for that rank? Or did they just do the most amount of the training for that thing? Because those are not the same thing. Yeah, 100%. And I think that there are members of our audience who have significant military experience who might relay the same ideas. Going back to that scene where Jessup is holding court at his beautiful lunch table on the beach where he is being served and he's talking about how he doesn't care about money or anything like that. The dude is on a permanent vacation. That's like how he's showing himself to be. He just barks orders, hangs out smoking cigars in his office and gets served
Starting point is 00:54:18 seafood down by the beach. And he has his whole story about Cuba and the rest of it, which we can get to in a second. But I thought it was really funny. You know, after he goes to the whole thing about Ask Me Nicely, which I thought was great. Right. Like, yeah, ask somebody nicely. Just ask me to do it and I'll do it. Don't be disrespectful.
Starting point is 00:54:39 I'm, and he wasn't being respectful, but he just believes he is owed that respect. So he puts Tom Cruise through. this thing and then he's like, okay, fine. And what does he give him? What kind of document? Does he give him a forged document? One may just made up. And so the document was officialized, right? If that went into a file and was looked at 30 years later by some researcher online, some conspiracy theorists who finally saw the JFKs, the JFK files for the first time, they would go through all these files. We're about to see so much of this with the alien bullshit, whatever they're going to do with the alien bullshit. It's going to be ridiculous.
Starting point is 00:55:25 And we're going to have all these files in there. And everybody's going to be like, look at the government files. Well, okay, those are government files. They're official. I get it. That doesn't mean that what is in them is true because it's this easy if you have any kind of rank or any kind of access to the creation of those files to forge them in whatever way you want. And, you know, again, this is this particular conversation is focused on the military. This is just an argument in principle.
Starting point is 00:55:54 You could be a bank teller kind of just putting something off to the side because your manager says that that's the way to do it. Because the regional manager says that's the way to do it and everybody's taking a cut. You know what I mean? You can make up a million scenarios for how people might just be skimming a little bit at work and getting away with it and the rest of it. all the official records record a history that didn't happen. The order to remove Santiago from the base never happened. There never was a transfer order until he made it up after the fact and put false information on it.
Starting point is 00:56:35 But everybody looking at that, especially from within the system, is going to say, yes, that's an official document. the proof that he was being transferred is right there on that paper and that proof, which is what we consider like a top level standard of evidence in the Normie sphere at least, that would be proving something that never happened and people would take that as authoritative. And that is how bad our epistemology is in general. And I would suggest that the people most heavily invested in internet research are the most the most vulnerable to making exactly that mistake and doing so repeatedly. And we've had plenty of people in the orbit who are ultimately committed to documents who can't understand a damn thing that's happening because they are committed to documents
Starting point is 00:57:30 and not reality. Well, well said. and to go one step further, some of them don't care whether or not they're finding the truth or what is right. They just care that they have landed on the official narrative. It's like, hey, this was what I thought the official narrative was. And I was right about what I thought the official narrative was, right? It's like government documents are just official lies. They're the lies that are official, like, this is company policy for how we lie about this specific thing. This is the official lore. And it's so funny because there's so many aspects of my old background
Starting point is 00:58:14 in the fiction world that I didn't think would translate to the Info War. You know, I thought storytelling would. Obviously, that's what kind of brought me into it and recognizing like, hey, man, if a lot of this stuff is fake, I'm pretty well geared for this because I've been writing fake shit knowingly and reading fake shit my whole life. Like I've been singularly obsessed with fake stories about things. What I didn't expect was that that was going to give me a massive advantage over people who are quote unquote experts in real stories. And the advantage it gives people like us is that we know when we're dealing with fiction.
Starting point is 00:58:55 Where people who deal in nonfiction believe that they're. they're dealing in nonfiction, right? Like you go to the nonfiction section. I always thought that was crazy that we have sections in bookstores called nonfiction. It's like, how is nonfiction defined? A guy is making claims about reality in this book. So that's nonfiction? What do you mean? Who is deciding that that's nonfiction? And I'm not even talking about like intentional lying and gatekeeping, which is what we're dealing with a lot of the times with institutions and governments. I'm just talking about a historian. You go to your local Barnes and Noble and go into the nonfiction section. You could pick up 10 books on George Washington from 10 earnest historians writing
Starting point is 00:59:43 nonfiction, and they are going to completely disagree about massive swaths of the story that they're telling you. That's nonfiction. Surely everybody could understand if they were using epistemology that one of them surely is accidentally writing fiction, right? If there's 10 different stories about one event about George Washington, doesn't it stand to reason that nine of them are fictional or partly fictional? They're all in the nonfiction section. And I remember arguing with my father-in-law about this years ago, which I brought up a few times, that he asked me why I wrote fiction.
Starting point is 01:00:15 And I said it's because it's honest. It's just, I'm just telling you that I'm writing a story about ninjas. That's what it is. It's just a story. whereas, you know, history and government documents and files and all the rest of it are official claims made. They are official stories being told. And it's astounding to people like us that it really is this cognitive layer that so many people just can't get over. They cannot get over onto that other line.
Starting point is 01:00:45 And to pass it back to you, one other thing I wrote down about this movie, similar context, is that the honesty that, Tom Cruz's character has in this movie or sort of the wisdom he has early on is that he knows a courtroom is literally just a place where arguments are made. Like it's not this place where the truth is discovered. It's a place where people argue about things until one side gives up and stops arguing because the other side story wins. That's what the court system is. And we know this, like we're intimately aware of this. But that is what the court system is. And there are people like at bad lands who still defend the court system. And it's like, man, I don't understand how we're not at the point where we're recognizing that this is just dueling narratives and whoever has the more
Starting point is 01:01:33 compelling narrative wins the actual. That's just what we're dealing with. Yeah. And the funny thing is we have a real problem with the inability to recognize who the enemy is. People are so desperate for friends and allies to feel like they are in a large group, perhaps the majority, majority, and we are in the majority with a number of our viewpoints that are actually more appealing to the general American public to a much broader part of the American public than the appeal of the online so-called right. You know, that is, it's represented as though the online so-called left and the online so-called right represent 50-5,000. of the entire country when the truth is the online and this is just a unit party the online
Starting point is 01:02:28 unit party left the online unit party right represent a very small portion of the country who are online all the time totally addicted to the central narrative and spend all day long trying to figure out what is true within the fake news it is just it is maddening to witness from the outside I've taken myself intentionally outside of that. And when I look at it now, it is just the most preposterous thing I could ever imagine, spending my day arguing with people who don't know what's going on about what's going on. It just doesn't make any sense. Everything people are saying about what's happening in Iran, about all this affects China. They're making that shit up from stuff they've heard.
Starting point is 01:03:18 All of the information is down to. from the military, industrial complex, intelligence communities, and transnational corporations. And they're taking that information, deciding which pieces of it they like, and then arguing about those pieces and telling other people they're wrong because they have better sources. Oh, my God, it's so stupid. People are not able to get over. Oh, you were talking about the founding with the George Washington thing. I thought that it's a great example, because I'm reading a book right now called
Starting point is 01:03:50 founding myths, stories that hide our patriotic past by this guy Ray Raphael. And he seems like he's probably like an academic who is like a moderate on the left and or some kind of liberal. But he actually believes there's a people's uprising that was much more important than the one our state school indoctrinated founding mythology is relaying to us. And so he knows. Yes, exactly. And so he goes through a number of pieces of the founding mythology and says, hey, that's not actually what happened. Now, he's using historical documents and historical records to dispute that story. And so there's obviously an epistemological problem in there. But he talks about like this, this Molly pitcher who was literally made up from nothing. And she's like a leading figure of the American Revolution. He talks about how. the Paul Revere story. Ain't exactly how it happens. It talks about how Valley Forge in, I think it was at 77, 78, 78, the famous winter there was actually
Starting point is 01:05:02 not the coldest winter of the American Revolution, nor the place where the coldest winter was had. It was actually a couple years later. And it turns out that a lot of the people at Valley Forge were actually surviving through the winter by, like, looting the American citizens around them. So it's a crazy book, and I encourage people to check out stuff like that. But you're 100% right. I mean, there's, yes, it's nonfiction.
Starting point is 01:05:30 It's called nonfiction because people are trying to relay what they believe really happened, which can be a truthful expression and still be wrong. They're not trying to write fiction. But the nonfiction aspect doesn't mean by. any means that it's true, they don't really have access to the truth. And people can't get past that because that's scary. Well, what does it mean that you don't have access to historical truth? Does that mean that nothing's real? Well, no, it doesn't mean nothing's real. Obviously, you can look around and see that things are real. It does mean that you should be ultra-sceptical
Starting point is 01:06:08 about any claims from authority. And if you can't know, yes or no one way or the other on certain subject matter, it means you just don't put that into your thinking. You just keep that outside. Yes, it's possible this way. Yes, it's possible this way. I can think about it one way or another and see where I come down. But you can't just say, yeah, it's, ah, man, historians agree. It's that. So I'm just going to assume that's right and then move forward. Yeah, this is why, like, again, the nonfiction section. It's like, that's the earnest retard section. Like, you can learn from retards. you could observe them. What's the movie quote?
Starting point is 01:06:46 Look at all the retarded shit they do. It's the Simplejack that's from Tropic Thunder. It's like, yeah, I spent a lot of time around retards. I watched all the retarded stuff they did. You know, nonfiction has its uses, right? But as long as you're reading something like that, to your point, which is what you're doing, with that filter on your mind, you know, with that like protection system.
Starting point is 01:07:08 And, you know, I would also relate this back to another thing. Like, not only was I super into genre fiction, because I wrote it and everything. But I was really into those communities. Like I was a big Lord of the Rings guy. And to the point where I was one of those people at 13 that's on internet forums, like arguing with people about fictional stories. And it's funny because, you know, you get a little older and you're like,
Starting point is 01:07:33 oh, maybe I shouldn't talk about this at school, right? There's social disincentives of that. And this is all fake stuff. And nobody really cares about my Star Wars theory or my Game of Thrones theory because it's all fake. right that that's what you'd be hit with and now i've come full circle where i'm like man the epistemology being expressed in the comic book forums i was on when i was 12 is so much better than the epistemology of people reading nonfiction because the irony is there would be debates in this comic book forum about like which fictional character would win a fight and they would cite fictional stories
Starting point is 01:08:09 but they would acknowledge in their arguments like yeah this one brinket the canon of this other one, which is why it doesn't make any sense. So we're going to go by this canon. And, you know, these comic book nerds would be structuring these ironclad arguments, epistemological arguments saying like, hey, this is all fictional, but we should all agree on the parameters of the story that we're arguing about, right? Like, for example, if J.R.R. Tolkien wrote it down, it's something we can argue about in the context of J.R.R. Tolkien's world. If his son Christopher wrote it down, it is not in the same argument.
Starting point is 01:08:54 And like, that's something that people who engage with fiction inherently understand. That's just like a rule of fiction. If you write a Game of Thrones sequel, does anybody consider a Game of Thrones? You're not George Martin, right? You are not the primary source of the narrative. And I think that is actually an advantage that fiction people bring into the sort of nonfiction world where all these nonfiction retards and historians are writing things down based on what other people wrote down with no baseline understanding that that's what they're doing. They think they're writing down the translation of actual events rather than the stories about those events. you know, even the debunkers, where again, people arguing about fiction understand at a baseline level that every single thing they're arguing about is fictional. I'm eventually going to turn this into a Lord of the Rings podcast.
Starting point is 01:09:53 You can. I mean, I guess, well, isn't it funny that you've never picked any of the Lord of the Rings movies? It's intentional. We've also never picked this movie. I work with retards. Isn't that a little politically incorrect? Oh, all with that, no one's going to tell me who I can and can't work with, right? That is something about Mary for anyone who is not aware of that.
Starting point is 01:10:25 Let's talk briefly. We have a few minutes left here. We have the situation set up, as Jessup describes it. He is eating breakfast 400 yards from 3,000. Cubans trained to kill him. Now, I am not sure if this movie is accurately depicting the state of things at any point in that relationship. But let's say, they're at Gitmo, right? Yeah. I can't believe we didn't talk about Gitmo at all. Oh, I know. Although that part of the story, storyline has not resolved itself yet. So what are we going to do? Jimmo has been rebranded a few
Starting point is 01:11:06 times in our lifetimes. Yes. And it's had reconstruction and the rest of it we know. Was there actually a Cuban threat, even in the world of this film, is it possible to believe that Jessup was under the threat he claimed to be under or that America would be threatened in any way were Jessup not on that wall? Now, we can explore. this to the larger military situation and assume that there are, you know, military fortifications around the world that are actually doing a pretty important job in protecting Americans. I'm not sure this would have been one of those. The Cuba thing seems like a total failed SIOP from the regime's side.
Starting point is 01:12:01 And that failure has stretched now for many decades. And I would assume that we are probably running up on the, it's going to feel like a revision of history when it happens. Whatever event ultimately happens, it's going to give us the run of the Cuban narrative that's going to resolve kind of some of the Castro stuff, some of the JFK stuff, some of how that relates to Russia and the Cuban missile crisis. We're going to go through those storylines. and hopefully some of that will be resolved. That'll feel like a historical revision when it happens. And the normie's out there, the people who go to the documents and go to the written history and the rest of it, are going to cling to all of that, even though it will be absolutely abundantly clear at that point that the history is wrong and that the history actually mirrors the situation as we're being shown it now. We should understand that what feels like a revision of history is actually for the
Starting point is 01:13:03 the first time the proper history being told and reversing that propaganda that we were led to believe was the truth. Yeah, yeah, that's well said. And it makes me think of the word, this is why I often say, even though it's a very debated and watched movie, I still think most people do not understand Inception and what Christopher Nolan was doing in that. And the word I always think of is catharsis. The ending of Inception, you've got the Killian Murphy character who has a cathartic moment, a cathartic memory of his dead father that essentially breaks the chain, breaks the spell, and that's kind of the climax of the movie. That is not a real event that occurs, but it is a cathartic event because it codifies a
Starting point is 01:13:56 story and closes a loop of trauma that Killian Murphy's character never. had closed. And that's the brilliance of DeCaprio's character. Cobb is that Cobb is like this dream engineer that understands you are not trying to get to the truth when it comes to changing somebody's mind. You are trying to get to a powerful emotion that locks in a story or a paradigm of belief into that person's mind. And his wisdom, he's the only one on the team that believes the strongest emotion is catharsis. It's not love. It's not hate. It's not anything else. It is catharsis. And, you know, another word for that might be sort of a resolution. So to your point about Cuba, what we are getting is not even necessarily, to our earlier conversation about Washington,
Starting point is 01:14:51 a translation of the truth in my mind, or at least that we'll ever know. It is rather a cathartic story that resolves as much of the collective minds' beliefs about these events in a satisfying way. And to your point about Cuba, it has never had a satisfying ending. In fact, it's kind of just been an atrophied story to your point. I think that's true. It kind of like ran out of steam. Just like Nukes kind of ran out of steam as a narrative. It's like, what about the doomsday clock when anything from the 60s, it's like, oh, all about that. In the 80s, they brought it back and had some success with it. I was never subjected to like hiding under the desk drills. Like I just missed that that generation. But for me, it's climate change, right? And my kids will be like, what? You were
Starting point is 01:15:41 afraid like, you know, don't you live on an island? Like, you were afraid that the oceans were going to get you at some point. So yeah, I think that that's why, you know, I'm not saying it's the right thing or in every respect. But the reason I don't get very emotional about like, Are Patriots lying or are they not lying? I don't see any of this as like truth versus lies. I see the Patriots as being Cobb and Eames and the team are in the collective mind right now. And they're like, what fucking story will get these people to stop being such idiots and ruining everything for the rest of us? And, you know, you don't have to like that.
Starting point is 01:16:20 But I think that is a much more accurate interpretation of what they're doing or trying to do. And I think what they've found out a few dream layers down is like, man, the people are more retarded than we thought. And the catharsis is going to be more difficult to achieve than we thought. Yeah, well, the epistemological problem has not been solved. And just revising the stories and telling us a different one and telling us that we've been lied to and actually we have a deep state and blah, blah, blah. That's not enough. The epistemological problem has got to be resolved and the spiritual problem's got to be resolved. otherwise the solution is not going to just magically present itself.
Starting point is 01:16:58 The last thing maybe to point out about the Cuba thing is if the threat is overstated from Jessup's perspective, then his justification for him doing whatever he wants, no matter how bad, wrong, illegal, and moral it is, his justification is gone. His justification for everything is that he is under a real threat and he is defending you, from being under that real threat. So we have a parallel to that with the Iran thing now, and we're being told somehow that America's interests were threatened by Iran. I don't think too many people believe that,
Starting point is 01:17:37 and certainly not in an imminent fashion. And we had Marco Rubio attempt to answer that yesterday. Benjamin Netanyahu went out on Sean Hannity to call that ridiculous last night. Then Trump sided with Netanyahu today. Then Rubio said, no, I didn't say that. And so we're, again, as we have throughout this time, getting every single possible version of the story all thrown out us. And I think that's the point. And we've kind of been talking about this a little bit over the past few weeks in relation to the discombobulator.
Starting point is 01:18:21 All of the perspectives are being put out there. by Donald Trump, there is no way that the official narratives, that the central narrative is going to survive this onslaught of conflicting information. And that is the point. If it's narrative warfare, you have to defeat enemy narratives. And somehow people have not come to terms of that and still think it's about winning fake elections. Man, I mean, again, a button on the current narrative thing to this combinator, to your point, is like I've been joking in our chats of like 2011 liberal BB would probably beat most current
Starting point is 01:19:03 truthers. Oh yeah. In an earnest moral argument. Um, the people on the left right now, including Gavin Newsom are owning these dudes like every day. They're getting slaughtered by normies on the left. Which is why again, I pointed out John's post earlier today. That was one of the major points he made. Imagine like a normie, the wake up the normies thing that doesn't actually happen. Imagine one of them coming into the truth community right now and being told, so what we do here is we cheer for regime change and forever wars and foreign involvement, U.S. involvement in foreign wars. Now, we said a million times that we trust Trump and think we know what he's doing with the discombobulator.
Starting point is 01:19:46 Those are just theories, but that's what we think is going on. They tend to map pretty well on to reach. reality as it unfolds, but that's not what most of the truth community in Maga Base is doing. What most of the truth community and Maga Base is doing is unironically and earnestly cheering for very bad things right in front of all the Normie liberals who are being like, aren't you, weren't you guys against Forever Wars last week? So again, the irony of like the truth community thinking that the Normies are the ones being subjected to sciops, maybe they,
Starting point is 01:20:21 They weren't the ones that needed the Psiops at the end of the day. Yeah. All right. Guys, that's all the time we are going to have. Burning Bright is going to check for some rants. I think that there were a couple in there. And then we also just have to remind everybody that Gart 11 is on the way. We are about five weeks away from that happening.
Starting point is 01:20:51 That's going to be in, there it is, Nashville, Gart 11 men, basically the entire Badlands crew is going to be there. It's like 18 people or something, which is- -LOLD on half of one panel. Dude, that's fine by making so many Gar-Pedels over the last few years. So, yeah, everybody else can just go do their thing. But Gart is always just a blast, everybody. and Nashville is a hell of the city. I think we're going to have a great time.
Starting point is 01:21:22 So that is April 9th through 12th. You can go get your tickets at a special early bird price between now and March 15th. After that, the regular price kicks in. Go to badlandsmedia.com.TV slash events to snag the lowest price for the virtual tickets and the in-person tickets, I believe, are. still available as well.
Starting point is 01:21:51 And yes, so we have a rant or two in there. Yep, Polymathanon, 10 bucks. Chris B.B. Thank you, gentlemen. Great show. Loved it. Thank you, Polly Math. And then Sod this with $100.
Starting point is 01:22:05 Wow. Rant in there. Appreciate you guys very much. Another great discussion. Thank you very much, Sond. Thank you. Very much appreciated. All right, the movie for next week.
Starting point is 01:22:13 We're actually going to stick on the war theme and the Middle East theme. I've been meaning to watch this one. I have not watched it yet. We're going to do Alex Garland's Warfare. Nice. This is from last year. This is from 2025. Apparently, this is a true story.
Starting point is 01:22:32 Speaking of everything we've talked about tonight from 2006 in Iraq. And a lot of military movies say that. But apparently the seals who were in this mission were heavily involved with the making of this movie. I've heard it's extremely realistic in terms of that sort of scenario. And yeah, you know, there's always something unique to what Alex Garland puts together. So I'm interested in what we take out of this one. And AJC just came through with a last minute, $100 rant. Great talk, man.
Starting point is 01:23:07 Thank you. Good night. And God bless you all. Thank you, AJC. You sometimes submit these at the end and I miss them like you did on the narrative, but very much appreciated. he's just flying just so low just too cool there right at the end slides it in he's like oh hey guys chiching thanks jay appreciate that Alex Garland's warfare check it out Alex Garland's warfare for next week defcon zero is coming up next on Badlands they're just starting over there right now so stay
Starting point is 01:23:38 tuned for that thank you so much for watching we will see you next week for Alex Garland's warfare good night Thank you so much for joining us and don't forget to hit the thumbs up on this video. And a special thank you to all of our advertising partners. Please remember to shift your dollars to support those businesses that support Badlands Media.

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