Badlands Media - Badlands Story Hour Ep. 160: Three Days of the Condor

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

Chris Paul and Burning Bright take on Three Days of the Condor, unpacking a story that blurs the line between intelligence work, institutional power, and the individual caught in the middle of it all. What starts as a classic political thriller becomes a deeper examination of how systems operate behind the scenes and what happens when someone inside that system begins to see too much. The discussion focuses on the film’s portrayal of covert operations, internal secrecy, and the unsettling realization that threats are not always external. Chris and Burning Bright explore how the story reflects larger questions about trust in institutions, the role of intelligence agencies, and the way information is compartmentalized to maintain control. As the conversation unfolds, they connect the film’s themes to modern concerns about transparency, narrative framing, and the difficulty of discerning truth within complex systems.

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All right, everybody. Good evening. Welcome to Badlands Story Hour. I'm Chris Paul. That is Burning Bright. And tonight, we are talking about three days of the condors. written by James Grady and some co-writers directed by Sidney Pollock, starring Robert Redford Faye Dunaway, Max von Seidow, and Cliff Robertson, among others. A fantastic movie, kind of one of those conspiracy theory legend movies.

This is a burning bright pick, so I'll let him kick it all. Yeah, this is one of those ones I picked. well I've been meaning I've been thinking either you I figured you would pick this one at some point because most of our 70s it has been on the list forever most of our 70s movies have been you I as I've said when you've picked them have have learned that I have a woeful lack of exposure to 70s film even the ones I don't think hold up that well I still am enjoying like rewatching them because they're they definitely feel of a time. And I think the 70s movies feel more of a time to me in a kind of good way than 80s movies even. Even though I like a lot of 80s movies, like when I think 80s movie, I think cheesy and over the top. And I do love some of those. The 70s movie vibe is different.

It's definitely got its own flavor before the show I was saying, you know, some of the 70s movies we've watched, I feel like get a little bit, I don't know what the word is, but they, they feel like they jump the shark a bit, they feel a little awkward. There might be a couple scenes in this where I see that, but I actually thought this was pretty damn good. And I really enjoyed it the whole, by that, I mean, I didn't find it to be, it looked like a 70s movie. It was filmed like a 70s movie. It had all the paranoia. all that, but I felt like it was played straight through most of it and didn't come off as unintentionally comedic. And I actually find that a lot of 70s movies to me do come off as unintentionally funny. Do you remember one? Sorry to derail us right away, but it might have been the first like conspiracy 70s movie you picked. Parallax View. Yeah, that was a great discussion, but I found that movie to be unintentionally funny. That's funny.

Like, you know, there was like a 10-minute fight scene in a bar that had nothing to do with anything. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Some of that was going on in that movie, and I feel like three days of the Condor pretty much stuck to a traditional plot structure. If there was any near jump the sharkage, I don't get the Faye Dunaway thing. Maybe somebody can help me out with that. You mean like the love scene? Yep, a little weird, but just her in general. I think there's been at least two or three movies we've done that she has been in,

and I don't get it. Oh, wow. Like at all. You just don't understand why people are interested in Fay Dunaway. Don't think she's attractive. Don't think she's good at acting. I mean, I don't know. That's just she comes, she has those like crazy eyes, and maybe that's,

That's why they're casting her, but I just don't get it. Like any scene she's in, I'm kind of like, oh, it's that crazy lady. Anyway, like the movie, it was way different than I thought it was. When I read the synopsis and knew it was about the CIA, I was thinking of my modern CIA propaganda, which is all Jack Ryan's and, you know, super secret special agents. And this was like refreshing propaganda. And it was almost like nostalgic CIA propaganda where back in the 70s, CIA meant, you know, really smart pattern recognition guy, not necessarily super spy on TRT in the jungles of Venezuela.

So anyway, those are some of my scattered opening thoughts. Yeah, Fay Dunaway, I've never been. been bothered by her in any way. It didn't bother me. I just, yeah, she's very famous, like, very, very famous. I guess that's what I don't get. I'm like, really? Yeah, maybe someone in the chat knows what films she's particularly known for.

I mean, network in Three Days of the Condor are both big films of that era. So it could just be. She was in the big movies and everyone knows her because of that. Yeah. Sure. but the the sex scene that they have is very, very strange. I mean, he has kidnapped this woman and an odd kidnapping. Like all of a sudden he just decides, this is the woman that I'm going to, that I'm going to take.

And then later that night, despite knowing that she's in a relationship, engages in sexual activity with her, which is just awfully weird for both of them. And it's kind of explained in the imagery. the photographs and all of it is, I mean, it's handled as well as they could handle it, I guess. But in this day and age, they would say if a kidnapper has held you at gunpoint and tied you to your own wall for like six hours and then wants to have sex with you, that's probably not. You would probably have to sign one of those consent forms that they were talking about so much five or six years ago in order to be able to do that. But apparently they just liked each other the next morning.

She, like, wanted to make him coffee and then take him into the city so that they could do spy things together. I guess at some point, she just wanted to be the person that she's not. And that was communicated in the photographs. And I thought that was a kind of an interesting moment where she was like, you know, you recognize these things and these characters. And I don't recognize myself or in these pictures. And I don't recognize myself in some of these pictures, but because I took them, I know it's me. And so I try to put that stuff away. And so part of her character, obviously, was coming out of that in these various ways.

But yeah, that whole part of the story was just strange. Yeah. You know, she played into the movie. It didn't derail it for me in terms of like the whole, you know, plot-wise, the whole woman coming into the movie, obviously greased the rails for a lot of the stuff that happened in the second half. But yeah, the actual relationship between them, it sort of reminded me of like the, you know, we talk about the Overton window and there's a there's a whiplash, there's societal whiplash against things. We're kind of stuck in perpetual cycles of societal whiplash. And right now we seem to be

coming out of a whiplash against misogyny where it's like, oh, toxic masculinity became a term that men have been hit with over the last 10, 15 years, and now people are like, shut up, the Me Too era and all that, right? But as much as I'm, like, based along those terms, it is weird for somebody like me to watch a 1975 movie where I'm like, oh, there's no commentary going on here. This is just, like, how you guys thought things were. Again, I mean, I said, I don't think incest was cool in 1985 and what's it called?

Back to the Future tried to make it seem like not a big deal. So I won't cast aspersions onto everyone in 1975 as being rapists. I assume not everybody was a rapist. But certainly the pop culture was like totally cool to be a rapist. and it's like there is no way to look at what he is doing as anything other than what a modern feminist would call rape. It's like you have held this woman at gunpoint, you tie her up and leave her in her house, and then just like do CIA errands all day, you know, and comes back and she hasn't moved. Like, so it used to be so easy to just like leave somebody tied up in a movie. They could never escape.

So that was weird. But when you get over that, the rest of the movie around it, I think, worked pretty well. And this is another one of those movies where everyone knows Robert Redford. Rest in peace, he obviously died fairly recently. I've seen him in quite a few movies, but when I watch a movie like this, I realize I have seen him in many movies over the last 20 years, 30 years. So I really have not seen Robert Redford movies. and this was my first, I would say, real experience of watching one of the movies that made him, and I get it. Like, I could get it right away.

He had a, and I think the biggest compliment I would pay to the movie for me is that, like I said, about some of the jumping the shark and the 70s kind of vibe can sometimes take me out of it in terms of just how, I guess, overacted, I think a lot of these movies are. They're very dramatic and, like, to me, overly dramatic. I actually did not find that with Robert Redford. I did find it with whoever the main character of Parallax was, but I did not with Robert Redford. I thought he was mostly believable. And I thought, you know, that worked well for me because obviously you're following him the whole time.

And he was able to kind of strike a balance of having a presence that was strong. like I bought that he was a capable guy while also being like he's kind of a normalish guy too and is in over his head. So it was a little refreshing to me. I don't know why. Maybe it's just because it's a 70s movie. But who he reminded me of was,

I got to look up the actor. Brad Pitt. No, although it looks wise, yes. But just vibes wise and character wise, it reminded me of Roy Schneider in Jaws, which I love Jaws growing up. I can't believe you haven't chosen that yet. I know this summer. We'll do it this summer.

But the thing I always loved about Roy Schneider in Jaws is what I just said about Redford in this movie, where he seems like he is simultaneously in way over his head and capable. And like, you know, not making stupid decisions. as things are going along. And I appreciated that because I feel like a lot of movies feel the need to go one way or the other. You either have to be dealing with a super spy Jack Ryan who just note, the plot knows exactly what he needs to do to get out of every situation. Or it's a total fish out of water like flying by the seat of his pants. And I thought Redford in this movie was a little bit in between.

Like he did things that made sense to me while he was doing them, but also didn't know what was going on. for sure and also maybe did some really dumb things but he was being proactive well i mean he went he went back to his house he went to the house of the only guy that wasn't working there then he kidnapped a woman then he took that woman's car and to try to track down the guy that was trying to kill him there there was just a i mean there was some messy stuff there and it's based on a book yeah and the book is called six days of the condor and so who knows what kind of continuity we lost with those three days that we uh half the days man yeah i know i know so you gotta gotta double all the action it doesn't quite make the same sense um but man the so let's talk a little bit about the uh the backdrop

of this whole thing which is that he works for this little intelligence cut out basically that goes by a secret code name called what the american historical society literary foundation or something like that. I don't remember, but I remember they referred to it as Department 17. Right. Section 17. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, Tom. Accused. Yeah, yeah. They were thinking about this back then for sure. Yeah. But yeah, so they have this, they have this little name. And all they do there is read books and do book reports. And their book reports go to the CIA. They all know they work for the CIA, but they're just reporting on all these books. And the guy that runs the office is English, which is kind of weird.

And then they've got the boardroom. And, you know, they have these various levels of these kind of managerial layers. And then they have that ultimate red boardroom that is kind of, you know, a movie cliche. We've watched a number of movies now where they've had the kind of boardroom thing. Everything from the, what is it called, the Phoenician scheme. that we watched a few weeks ago back to, Network has a great one with the boardroom. What was it?

The Hudsucker proxy. This is like a thing we all know where like the guys that make the real decisions, have their secret meetings. And it doesn't matter what happens in the world. The real business goes on in that boardroom. The cigars. That's where the me, that's where like the cultural idea of the cigar filled rooms.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so this one, though, the interesting thing about this boardroom is that they are all, their job is scheming and subterfuge and they're doing it to each other, even in the boardrooms. The story they are discussing paints Condor as the, like the lead suspect in who took out the office and then who shot at Wix and shot this Sam guy. And of course, he was no part of either of those incidents.

And they can't even get the story straight among themselves. Wix tells them that somehow Condor was able to strike that guy, Sam, just above where his flack jacket ended. And it was really Wicks shooting him from 15 feet away. So I thought all that was really interesting. And then they kind of came back around with the boardroom scene. later on, but I'll pause there and we can go back. Yeah, the board the boardroom scene, the note I wrote down about that was a, was, uh, the inner circle meeting moves from threat assessment to narrative construction.

Uh, so I don't know if we saw that differently, uh, based on what you just said, but I saw that as them just calmly moving into the narrative construction phase of, of what they were, you know, what the story was going to be. Like it was a like a writer's room Sure. And I even liked how they did that because I thought even the way they were talking to each other was kind of realistic for a writer's room

where the sort of lead guy who was clearly going to railroad Turner was asking a series of rhetorical questions, right? He was like, oh, and what happened when he returned home? And then what about this? And he's the only survivor. and like workshopping in the scene, almost like you're in the scene, the room with other writers and saying, like, and who's our protagonist? And what does he really care about? And what does he want? What motivates him? And what would he react to if you did this? And it's like, you know, they're taking this real guy.

And again, the irony, like you said, about them opping each other. That was one of the things I wrote down early on was obviously after the initial ambush happens. you've got this paranoia within paranoia and as obvious as it is to this audience in particular who reads a lot and thinks a lot about intelligence agencies the idea that you could ever whether you I mean the idea even if you're a bad guy whether the idea that you could ever construct a system or agencies or units in the Intel world the way they do and trust them is absurd, right? And I even mean that from the perspective of the bad guys. You're trying to create an intelligence network that serves your interest.

And a lot of us, and a lot of you watching probably think that U.S. Intel was literally created for that reason. Not that it was corrupted over time, but that it was, it was the corruption. from day one. That is how I feel about the intel agencies. But I guess that was really a theme to me throughout it where it was like, okay, of course you're watching it through the lens of this is the protagonist. He's paranoid.

He doesn't know who to trust. You know, the higher-ups don't necessarily know whose op this is. Who's op? Am I tiptoeing on? Is this foreign intelligence or domestic intelligence? All that aside, the idea that you could ever, even if you were the bad guy intelligence, trust your own intelligence operatives to not betray you at any moment is absurd.

And I would say they probably know this. Like it's pretty clear. I mean, the ending of the movie, we'll talk more about it later, I'm sure, but basically proves that where it's like, there's a reason they use the word assets in the intel world. Like none of these, none of the people in the intel world could be trusted at all. You know, again, whether they're earnest or otherwise, the system itself is one designed on, as you said, Sutterfuge. And then one quote that I wrote down from early in the movie before everybody in his department gets killed, he says, it bothers me that I can't tell people what I do. I still trust some of them. And he kind of says it as a joke, but I sort of saw that as the weakness and strength of the character.

The weakness through the lens of Intel is that he still thinks like a human being. But I think maybe some of the strength of him is that he thinks in a way that these other automaton intel guys don't think. And that's what gives him a little bit of an advantage over them. Yeah, I think that that's really the interesting part of. So I think that there are two really interesting things going on here. One is the trust and the kind of jockeying proposition within the Intel program and within the various layers of that, within their little sections, and then with the freelancers outside and all those relationships. And as you said, the total lack of trust, I think the other thing that we should talk about in a bit is the process by which they form these stories and the fact that they're mining literary material for the bullshit that they're going to tell the world. I mean, that's what it ultimately is.

But in terms of the trust aspect, I mean, I talk about all the time operating in a zero trust environment. And people don't like to do that. They don't like to think about that. They want to know who they can trust so that they can delegate their thinking to these other sources because they know there's so much information in the world. A lot of it is highly specialized, very complicated, and they're never really going to be able to wrap their head around all this stuff.

and a lot of people think that. And that's, I'm not disputing that. It's definitely true on some level. It's just that the level on which it's true is one you probably are never going to need access to. Right. You don't need to know highly specialized things about very many subjects at the end of the day to get through your life. It's better to have a general understanding of how things work broadly and then the ability to quickly learn in case you need.

specialized information in some way. Because people understand that the hill to climb is so steep and so high, they don't want to do it at all. And they want other people to think for them. They want to say, hey, what's the right answer? Guy, what's the right answer? Other guy? What's the right it, you know, and just go down the list, media sources, whatever it is, and get all those answers in. So they can, because we have this idea that if we just had all the information in the world, then we would know the right thing to do and to be able to take advantage of this asymmetric information advantage we have. We can make things better for ourselves. We understand. If we had a bunch more information, we would know what to do here and here and here and here. That's not really

how things were. You know, it's not about just accumulating the most. most information. But regardless, the idea that we can just go trusting people on television, like these media figures, or trusting politicians or corporate leaders or celebrities, or whomever else, all of that is so ridiculous. These people, at least, are honest and open and understanding of that particular thing. Don't trust any of these people ever. You know, Like if you, yes, I'm not saying that they don't respect rank and they don't do as they're told or whatever. But the other side of that is they're thinking, how's this person trying to get me right now? And you can call that paranoia.

But it's not paranoia if you know that the environment you operate in is necessarily zero trust. And if we were more focused on our survival and our thriving and really trying to get things right for ourselves and our family, trying to figure out who on television. vision to trust and what politicians to trust, what influencers to trust, we would see that obviously as the dumbest fucking thing we could do. And still, we do it all the time. And people are desperate for more powerful strangers to trust. In fact, they want to figure out who the most powerful person, the furthest number of degrees of strangerness away that they can trust. They want to trust ultimately powerful people because those powerful people are going to know the things they can't know and they're going to fix the things that they can't fix. Yeah, all well said. It's funny how you started that because one of my notes was asymmetry is not about more information. It's about the right information.

Definitely that too. And again, I don't know what the right information is. Right. But like if you go into Psiops knowing that the right information, is what matters a lot more than how much information there is, you are at least shielding yourself a little bit. On the trust conversation, you know, this is one of the things that gets us kind of flack from all sides of what we call the Info War. And again, you know, it's funny because we can forward a view. There's been a bit of a divergence for me recently that I find myself very annoyed by, I mean, not anymore, but a couple of weeks ago where just noticing this trend in 2026 of despite my writing, now I'm not saying you should trust Trump implicitly or not,

but what I find troublesome about the truth community is that they could look at somebody who's commentary they supposedly follow pretty closely, who 90% of my writing is like about all the fifth-gen warfare I think Donald Trump is doing for good. But then if I say something or come to a conclusion they don't like, the immediate question is, don't you trust Trump? To your point, right? And besides everything you said, which is the more important, like you shouldn't outsource your trust to anybody, I think that another nuance that is particularly egregious in the so-called truth community right now is that when they say, do you trust Trump, do you trust Q, do you trust the plan, they don't actually even mean

that. They mean, do you trust my personal interpretation of what I think this unknowable thing is, right? And like, that is a difference. It is much different to say, I really trust Donald Trump. Do you trust Donald Trump? Yeah, I really trust Donald Trump. How did you come to formulate your trust in Donald Trump? I find those to be very interesting and worthwhile discussions to have. That is not the discussions that are happening in the truth community right now. The discussion is, are you saying the things that align with what I think the plan is?

And if you're not, you should be silenced. You should be harangued. you should be struggle sessioned and all the rest of it. And, you know, it's just to say it's not to get into a whole sub topic on Q and Trump and all that. But it's kind of funny in this movie, we're dealing with like, I would say mostly from our perspective, black hat intel portrayals. Like I wouldn't, I wouldn't feel comfortable saying anybody in this movie is a good guy or even if they are a good guy that they're not involved in doing immoral work.

Like I don't automatically assume Turner is doing some great stuff in there with the CIA. whether or not he knows he is. In the truth community, as we call it, I think many of the people we encounter are, do think that they're involved in good open source intel operations. And yet the mirror between them and the intel as portrayed in movies like this is uncanny, where nobody trusts anybody. And to your point, there's a lot of value in that.

But I think a lot of truthers are, basically just trying to get people to repeat the story they like the most. They're not actually exercising any of the discernment or information gathering and definitely not first principles logic that they like to say they are. And one more point on it would be I always try to make the point that for me, as somebody who observed the cue drops in close to real time, I did not take that away from them. When it said, trust yourself, think for yourself, look at the news cycle yourself.

I started doing that because I thought it was the point. And I did not think we were going to have a cottage industry 10 years later of people who just read those every night to everybody else. And then those people said, tell us what it means. I'm like, how did, how is that what you got from reading this stuff? So anyway, I mean, it's, this is what happens. This is why we can't have nice things. We can't even have nice intel ops. That's true.

The trust Trump stuff is so weird, especially when he says conflicting things, because then that's when it becomes the most apparent that they are only using trust Trump as a tool to enforce their point of view and their point of view. view always coincides with the consensus of the community with whatever opinion develops over the course of a day or two online. And everything draws toward that consensus. And anybody who might dissent from that consensus, well, they're not trusting Trump or they're not trusting the plan, or they're blackpilling or they're dooming or they're trying to subvert the movement by encouraging people to think for themselves without giving them the conclusion that they must accept. It is

mind-blowing how much of the so-called truth community is committed to nothing other than gatekeeping to protect consensus. We don't have to go too much further down that road. But the idea that people who do that with such low humability and poor discernment are trying to tell others who they must trust is absolutely insane. And it's very, very strange that the opinions that they're always trying to push when they're using these various kind of social manipulation tools, like saying, oh, well, you're, you're not really trusting the, you're not trusting our leader. You're not trusting the plan that we don't know.

You're dooming. You're blackpilling all this stuff. That is just social manipulation to make people get back into that consensus. We should really understand what that is. And the idea that the judgment of these people is what must ultimately be trusted, as you pointed out, that makes no sense at all. Because none of these people have established anything that would lead a person. to trust them. In fact, they tell people that what they're doing is trying to keep everybody's

spirits up, for instance, as if like some strange middle-aged man on the internet was assigned to judge how to manipulate people's morale rather than just tell them what he thinks and see if they think the same thing too. Well, it's one of the ways you frame this is, you know, that nothing can stop what's coming refrain. Nothing can stop what's coming except for all these different things, right, except for the truth. But, you know, put another way, and as I said about Turner in this movie, I think one of the good things with him is he does show those hints early on of humanity. And one of the things I've really thought about a lot lately in the context of the truth community and the gatekeeping in the truth community is, man, if it's not just if the truth

can stop what's coming, we're in a bit of trouble there. I'll try. try to even play devil's advocate with that and say, okay, let me say that my interpretation of what the truth is is not the correct interpretation. The earnest attempt to discover the truth seems to be a big threat to the people trying to form this consensus, right? And that's a big trend I've noticed, where it's not just, it's not that I am asserting something that Q decoders disagree with necessarily. it's simply enough to say, I'm not really sure what the right move is right here. And a lot of that would be, I'm not really sure how you are interpreting Donald Trump is the correct way you should be interpreting Donald Trump. And that's why I always use that as an irony to say, if I do trust Donald Trump, I might literally believe he is trying to get us to do. the opposite thing to what you think he's trying to get us to do.

And you and I joke about this a lot when it's like, man, you were posting some videos earlier tonight of Donald Trump saying for the, I don't know, eighth, ninth, tenth time in the last 10 days, the war is over. And then today he said, I wish the fake news would just like start saying that. Almost as if if this fake news just started saying that, it would just become true. It would.

Because it would. And if it did just become true, then would we in the truth community retroactively go back to the people saying, I'm not really sure this is happening and say, I guess it wasn't happening? Or would we say the very real war that very organically kicked off ended just today because Donald Trump says it ended, right? Like trust the plan except for the people who kind of keep nailing what the plan is every time. it seems to be in the office. That's the biggest problem to me. It's kind of like you've got central... If you do want to play the info warrior,

truther, truth or Spartan game, and be like, I'm the ultimate truther. I'm the ultimate truster. You guys are kind of fucking the plan up when you are constantly pretending everything Donald Trump is saying is real. And, you know, maybe we can take a page out of the book of these black hat intel assets

portrayed in movies like this, whereas you said a little bit ago, the thing they get right, pretty much from the jump is not trusting each other at all. They're like, nope, I know you're saying these things to me on the phone. And I know I know that guy in that alley right there, and I'm supposed to meet him, but I think something's fishy here, so I'm not going to walk down that alley. Yeah. Okay, so there's a bunch of things I want to respond to. One, first, no, they will not not go back and reconcile the fact that other people said the right thing when it happened, they called that thing crazy. I can guarantee you that's never going to happen. The threat, ultimately, to them is not that they are worried what's going to happen if people

out there, strangers to them, people they don't know, hear words from others that they don't approve of. It's very, very weird to be in a place where you are prejudging, the belief formation of strangers on the internet, people you will never meet, and then deciding whether or not it's good for them to hear what some other person has to say. That stuff is crazy. And that's one of the biggest elements of gatekeeping. And you can see it even with like people who pretend to be hardcore truthers, but are still just, you know, making content to be important on the internet. Trust, as far as Trump is concerned, is not. He was asked about trust today in the Oval Office when he was swearing in Mark Wayne Mullen,

a man that he does not appear to know at all, by the way. I encourage everybody to watch that media event that they did in the Oval Office. It doesn't sound like Trump ever heard of this guy, to be perfectly honest. He said they were asking him about his negotiations with some of these Middle Eastern partners, Iranians, and the rest of it. And they're like, well, do you trust them to uphold the deal? And he's like, trust. I don't trust anybody.

I don't trust you. Why would I trust anybody? They're just making a deal. And you make the deal. You see if the other side actually holds up their end of the bargain. And that's how you develop trust. And if they don't, well, you need to have the right kind of leverage and the right kind of, like, fail, safe, set up whatever so that you don't sustain really catastrophic damage. if, for instance, they back out and neg on the deal, right?

So Trump doesn't trust the people that he's making deals with. He knows what kind of environment he's operating in. You can operate in a zero-trust environment. And the thing about a zero-trust environment is that you change your epistemology. You change the way you form beliefs and the way you interact with other people. To form beliefs on the basis of trust for what other people say, whether it is a new, newsman or a politician or whoever it might be. If that's not someone that you know personally, that you can judge yourself personally and know, okay, I've dealt with this person for a long time.

This, I know to be an honest person. They would never lie to me because we have all of these different ties. This has been tested in both of our lives so many times. I know I can trust this person. It is an appeal to authority. That is a common logical fallacy, right? Like I say, I assert something is true. The only way I know that thing to be true is because someone else said it. Okay. That is what the trust relationship is. Relaying information that you've received based on your trust for that source and not saying,

I know because of this source and then being honest about your trust level and what leads you to trust or distrust that source, you're not reporting things honestly at that point. You are restating something that you were told, often from something you saw on the television, corporate media that comes straight from the military industrial complex, global intelligence and transnational corporations. You are taking that and performing a logical fallacy in your acceptance of that belief. You've embedded the fallacy into what you believe. And then people will then expand on that and formulate entire theories around stuff that they only know because some guy on TV, said it. It is always, how do you know that thing? And we'll play this game at Gart because we're going to have to. Yeah, yeah. How do you know this? Oh, some guy on television said it. Okay. Well,

I guess we're having a mature discussion, other middle-aged man. Yeah. And yeah, you know, I had said two weeks ago, a week and a half ago, I did the blitz on the substack with Ash, and I'd use the term info war posture. It's not because I'm trying to be a badass. It's more of a resigned fate of, you know, despite being a somewhat confrontational person, I don't much enjoy it. I don't actively seek it out. I just am comfortable with it. And, you know, I guess I'm realizing, like lately when I've used that term info war posture,

I'm realizing, if I want to like stay in this whole thing and say the things I think are important for me to say, the things that I feel are true, then yeah, I need to roll my sleeves up a bit. And because I've been kind of letting a lot of stuff slide when it comes to that gatekeeping and, oh, well, that's their opinion, that's my opinion, whatever. And, you know, the gatekeeping point is a big one because I think that people sometimes don't get what we mean by that, where it's like, oh, you disagree, right? Badlands is synonymous with strong disagreements. There are, I would say that now, in the current iteration of Badlands, ironically enough, despite

being maybe more unified than Badlands has been since its inception a few years ago, there's probably more argument on shows and on Gart panels and stuff like that. I mean, the whole theme of Gart, Cocoa Beach last year just became friction. And I think that that's good in terms of the irony being when people trust each other more, they can get more frictional. They can have this exchange of ideas that don't necessarily align with each other. The gatekeeping is a different thing there. And the reason I've got this info war posture mentality is about the gatekeeping of saying, this is not us saying we disagree with somebody's conclusion about something going on in the world.

It's that there are people purporting to be truthers, many of them, who do. don't want us to talk about the things we think are going on in the world or are not going on. And that's a big problem. And, you know, one of the original notes I wrote down for this movie was, I don't know this to be a fact, but I'm kind of just guessing based on pop culture, that the 70s was really the beginnings of the mass pop culture lionization of the CIA, the lionization of the government, not the government necessarily that was before um but the CIA in particular um most of us believe they had something to do with JFK and all that in the 60s uh and we're running all this bullshit the whole

time but in the 70s and beyond you started to get this sort of subgenre within storytelling of the uh the heroes in the shadows and the reason i think of that in the context of this movie and in the context of what you just laid out there is that word trust that you use um the lot to lionize a president to lionize a military platoon soldiers is not difficult i'm not saying that that's good or bad i'm just saying from a storytelling perspective it is not difficult to lionize warriors and soldiers because all you got to do is tell a patriotic story and say these guys are fighting for what they believe in even if they are sent on an immoral mission they are doing what they think is right, right?

Their intention can be easily lionized. Even in modern portrayals of military, I was watching recently the terminal list, like a dark wolf thing with Taylor Kish, and it lionizes the military while acknowledging that what they're doing was probably bad. And I think you can do that.

But with intelligence agencies, I think they've always had trouble with it. And the reason is the thing they are asking you to lionize, the thing that they are asking you to just take on faith as an audience member is these aren't like those soldiers you're cheering on in other movies that sign up and they go to a battle and they're deployed by other people and they're doing the best thing that they think. These are the people that are pulling those strings and that are making those decisions. These are the people gathering the information that goes to the people who make those decisions on behalf of those soldiers that you lionize. And I think the

attempt to lionize intelligence agents has always been a disaster from a morality perspective, because really it's an attempt to lionize and moralize the act of knowingly lying to everybody for reasons that you know to be good and all of them do not know. And the reason I thought of all that is when we talk about the truth community lately, it is very clear that there is a worrying number of people who took the truth community moniker, the cue drops and Donald Trump and anything that they supposedly have learned for a sort of hall pass to lie to everybody in perpetuity until you as the moral and intellectual superior of your fellow Americans get to determine when, they are allowed to know the things that you believe you know.

And the reason that sounds satanic is because it is. And it's also the core framing by which psychopaths in the intelligence agencies that we watch in a movie like this sort of wire their brains. Well, we are the ones who are keeping the secrets so that you don't have to. And thank goodness for us. You mentioned gathering information there, and I think that we should applause right here for a break. But when we come back, gathering information versus making it up, because that is ultimately what intelligence agencies are doing much of the time. And that was kind of the centerpiece of this particular film.

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And we also have this. Patriots, the fight for truth does. stop at the screen, it's hitting the road again. Badlands Media is rolling into Nashville on April 9th through 12th for the next stop on the Great American Restoration Tour. Join your favorite Badlands hosts and like-minded Americans for three powerful days. Packed with unfiltered discussions, deep-dive panels, and real debate. Hear the raw truth, ask the tough questions. No topic too hot. No topic too hot. No question too bold. Guard is where our community comes alive. Tickets are on sale now at badlandsmedia. dot TV slash guard, where you can also grab a virtual pass. Join us to get your passes today.

See you in Music City. Oh, single day tickets just went on sale. Nice. I think today. Badlandsmedia.tv slash events. If you're in the Nashville area and you just want to come Friday, go to the welcome reception or just Saturday or whatever. Yep.

And on Thursday this week is the third of the exclusive GART live streams. So if you have your in-person or virtual ticket, you can go to badlandsmedia.tv slash events to get those. If you have your in-person or virtual ticket, you can join the exclusive live stream. That'll be on Thursday afternoon. I believe 2 p.m. Eastern is the time for that. But you can check my facts there. Okay, so information, rather than being gathered by Intel agencies, just straight up made up out of nothing.

And I think that that is something that we can see active in the world all the time, if only we would recognize it. And the problem is that we actively refuse to recognize it. What is it we think that think tanks are doing when they do their special little studies and they release their white papers, you know, Norm Eisen over at the Brookings Institution released white papers that formed the basis of essentially every Trump prosecution. It formed the basis of the January 6th sham congressional committee hearings that were broadcast as a primetime television event. We can look at. at, man, I was talking about this with John. I think it was last week or the week before on DPH on Saturday nights, talking about the map of all the places that had been hit in Iran. That map was produced by this little cutout under the American Enterprise Institute run by Fred Kagan, whose brother is Robert Kagan, whose wife is Victoria Newland. These are like the royalty of America. neo-conservatism, and they have these little think tanks where they tell us what's actually happening in the world. And there's a coordination there. The media reports all these things. The think tank analyzes them. They get the numbers and the theory in from academia. And all of this

is packaged up and sent back out to the American public as their news, as the events, you know, stories on geopolitics and the rest. I would assert, and I know that a lot of of people think that this is impossible because they actually haven't thought about it before, which is really disappointing because it's probably time to think about these sorts of things. But there are big chunks of our conceptual reality that are completely made up as fiction and then fed into our reality systematically to the point where everybody's like, they just give up on trying to discern for themselves whether or not any individual piece of it is true.

They're just like no way all these people would be saying the same. same things about all of these things, unless this is how it was. Well, sorry, guys. There's actually no reason to believe that's true. It is entirely possible that under the same incentive structure and working for a common goal, all of these disparate and divergent organizations could come to the same conclusions that help feed that agenda and then present them all together independently and no one would ever be the wiser. And that's how we find ourselves exactly where we are. Yeah, you know, it's funny. One of the ways I often think of this is the is, is, like this, I'm trying to think of a better, better way to say this. Like this movie is kind of

interesting because there's a loop where the, it's all inside baseball. There's no, there is an antagonist, protagonist relationship, but it's not just that it's paranoia. It's that even if you accept the protagonist or like the earnest framing of the movie as this is the good guy and these are the bad guys within the same intel apparatus that are apparatus that are going after him um the whole plot almost takes place within this closed loop that has nothing to do with the outside world you know like it's not like a lot of these movies the conception of the unraveling of the conspiracy the prospect is if we do not disclose such and such conspiracy within intelligence, this really bad real thing will happen in the world.

That's usually how these things are framed, these fictional stories. And these real fictional stories, as I often say, the real fake stories. But in this movie, the consequences, we're never told or implied that there actually are any consequences in this movie. beyond Turner, which is kind of unique. It's like Turner's trying to unravel a vast conspiracy against his little subunit within the CIA. There's no like, oh, I got to figure out what's going on in the wider world. There's not really any implication that there even is anything going on in the wider world.

It's just like maybe he was going to trip something off that would have been disadvantageous to some people. At the very end, there's a little bit of talk of, it's about oil. and everything's about oil. It's like, you know, they kind of throw that bone at you. But I found that kind of interesting. And it, I thought of it with what you were saying about the inability of people to accept that many things are fake or entirely narrative, narratively constructed. It closes people in this loop, this same kind of feedback loop where one of the things I've said for years in my normie life in particular when I get really, when I used to get really frustrated trying to like

red pill people. is that they would say, you know, well, how could this happen? Or you just hit those cognitive dissonance walls where people can't imagine the news just saying something fake that they know is fake. And my response to that before I even dove into these rabbit holes was that, that predilection or instinct that you have to think that that can't happen grants that thing. happening, asymmetric power over you, which in turn means that people who would stand to gain by doing that thing are much more likely to do it. And most people, like, it's just, in other words, I try to like reduce this to a, if you're talking to a seven-year-old, why do people lie? Because lying to other people gains them something. If you believe a lie, Chris,

Are you more or less likely for that person to gain from you? If you believe them, they probably will gain from you believing them, right? So it's like, and this is one we can sound like assholes or whatever to some people, but it's just like if you automatically believe the news that you are being told, despite calling yourself an information warrior and a digital soldier, you are immediately losing. And that includes if and when, to your earlier point, Donald Trump is telling you things. And I'm not saying when Donald Trump is talking about morals or principles.

I pay very close attention to when he talks about morals and principles. Or another way I've been thinking about this lately is desired end states. When Trump tells you his desired end states, I tend to pay attention to that because I don't He's lying about it. I want peace in the Middle East. Okay. I believe Trump means that. How could I make sense of what I'm looking at under that premise? I think that's reasonable to do. But to say, well, there were back channel talks today with Iran, but there weren't, but there were, but there weren't, but there were. And these three guys were involved, but two of them say they weren't. And one of them says they was. Like all of that, people are immediately absorbing as real details of a central. narrative, as you would say, or as reality. In doing that doesn't just make you useless as a digital soldier. It makes you very useful for the bad guys. And again, it's like the easiest way to put it is that if you automatically believe a liar, they have a lot of power over you. And that is not a good position to be in. Yeah, it's not a good position to be in. And there's a whole lot of that going around.

constantly, again, this is why the zero trust environment, because if there is good information out there coming from any given source, you know, the idea that it's going to be good all the time and then it's going to be consistently good all the time to the point where you can just chalk that up is like, I can definitely listen to this person and like all the things that they're saying. I mean, that's not a realistic way to handle our information environment. considering that we've been subject to like massive conditioning, massive propaganda and massive censorship throughout our entire lives from like our school educations from the age of five years old and now it's like four and sometimes three depending on when they put kids into pre-k or

preschool or whatever it is. You know, that's an entire lifetime of conditioning. We watch television. We have social media. We look at the internet. We watch movies. These are all layers of conditioning, mediated knowledge and information that comes into us. All of these different ways that we can be fed this information. If it is any function of the system that produces that conditioning, then we have to assume it's part of that system with the same intention. And that intention is to mold our belief in such a way that our actions will support that system. Okay. So even if it is kind of neutral or innocuous some of the time or even most of the time, when it's not, it's intentionally exploitative. And we fail to recognize these things because we are conditions to think that there's good guys and that these good guys are going to defeat the bad guys.

And even though the good guys exhibit a lot of the qualities of the bad guys and are oftentimes doing the exact same things, Well, we know that because of the things they say, these are the ones that agree with us and these are the enemies. And so we got to align, you know, they're both bad, but we got to align with the one that is slightly better so that we don't allow the one that's slightly worse to get us, even though we're doing a bad thing. And that was right here with what Higgins is saying too, when he was kind of telling Condor like, you know, it really doesn't matter. The system's going to get you either way. We play games, the enemy plays games. That means if you want to survive in this matrix, you have to play games too. And it's like, well, actually, I could just move outside of this and have my game against both your sides.

And that's like where we actually have to be with all this. There's not one side of the Uniparty, for instance, that is going to give us a better outcome. the battle is those of us who don't want the uniparty to persist versus the uniparty. And instead we have everybody trying to make sure that we vote in fake elections to reelect the uniparty right and see them do again nothing because Trump doesn't actually need them at all. Have you considered, though, Chris, the Republicans? Ah, yeah, there you go. Because I know there are many good ones. They're not all rhinos, you see.

Yes, yes. I know a lot of people talk about the Uniparty because they know that that's a word and they're supposed to be like, the Uniparty is bad, but not the Republicans. Only the Democrats and the Uniparty. But definitely not all of the Republicans

that have been nothing but traitors to Donald Trump's stated agenda, which is to say yours. And another point I'd make on the back of what you just said is that, you know, uh, one of the terms I use a lot in line with what you said there about the power is, um, mandate cultivation. You and John often talk about the feedback loop with Donald Trump and the American people. You can replace Donald Trump with anybody else.

You know, any, any supposed earnest representative system would be engaged in a feedback loop. And what is that feedback loop supposed to be mandate cultivation? What do you, the people I represent? want me to do as your servant as your representative. And that's another bit of a sort of like American lower candy that people in the truth community tell each other, especially conservatives. I find this lifelong conservatives. And again, lionization is my word of the night.

But they lionize all this with the republic and everything. And yet they talk about representative democracy and republic. and they forget that key component and never act like politicians should serve them. Whether or not we should have a republic and a democracy is a whole other conversation that we have been having quite a bit that makes people upset. But even if I do adopt that framework and say like, yeah, representative republic, people get insulted in the Maga Corps when you say, you know, Donald Trump himself is like, the most bullish on the idea of serving you that he works for you and i've made this point at

many guards it just tends to come up there but it's not meant to be a cute refrain it's like when are you going to believe in you're waiting around for somebody to tell you what to do who is like begging you to tell him what to do and these people in congress that we talk about the uniparty the republicans etc. are actively subverting that at every turn. It is very clear to everybody with a functioning brain that made it into the info war that Republicans are not trying to serve your interests. It is so obvious. This is a shit that you should have known when you were 13 and you first started finding your way in here. It's the one bit of unity that you could kind of unify with a lot of modern liberals about. Everybody probably agrees. They don't give a fuck about us. And that's just the

truth. But instead of thinking that that's this Dumer thing, I think it's more of a power, it's a reminder of where the power lies. It seems like it lies with them. And maybe in some ways it does, and that's where our society's gotten very twisted. But from where do they derive it? They derive it from your passivity. They derive it from your mandate or from your consent, as you might say. And that makes me think of one thing I want to bring up and get your thoughts on in this movie is there was a little exchange toward the end between a couple of these CIA officers, including Nick, or was it Bix? Where they're talking about the Korean War and he said, you know, back before we had the sense to number the wars. And I liked that, but I think it was Bix said, you miss that kind of, do you miss that kind of action, sir? And the other officer says, no, I miss that kind of clarity.

And I liked that because I felt like it was an honest exchange between like shady black hat intel operatives of saying basically I miss when this I can spin this positive with everything I just said. One good thing is that paranoia word you used earlier that is ubiquitous with these 70s espionage films is certainly back in the the zeitgeist. Now, it didn't necessarily work in the 70s, so maybe that's a black pill. But the white pill is, I think it's good that the American people are more paranoid than they have certainly been in my lifetime, and perhaps than they have been since the 70s. And many people, including in our audience, were paranoid in the 70s, maybe got lulled into a lack of paranoia in the 80s and 90s. I don't know, or stayed paranoid the whole time, and are re-paranoid again in the wake of the Bush era and the Obama era and everything. And you're double paranoid.

I think that that's good. I think that's ultimately a white pill. And I think that little scene is like one of those little markers where sometimes the machine tells you what it's afraid of. And when they say, man, I wish we could just number a war again. I think what they're telling you is we can't tell a compelling or believable. story in which to get the American people to agree to the third war, even though we're supposed to have a trilogy. They're just not going to buy into it. And which is why people like us pushed back pretty hard on all the Zionists in MAGA who immediately started jumping for joy at the fake around war,

because we're like, guys, do you think the point of Trump was to cultivate mandate for new wars or to do the opposite. And I think that they are actually being used right now as the example of what not to do. And so they are becoming the assistance in his cultivation of ending forever wars. And man, it is wild what the kind of the MAGA identifying anti-Trumpers out there are now doing.

Because, you know, as we discussed a number of times, there were groups of people or people who self-identified as parts of groups, whether it's Maha or, you know, traditional Republicans or neocons or tech-positive people who kind of glommed on to the MAGA coalition for the fake election in 2024. And most of those people were sometimes Trump in the same way that Ben Shapiro is. They like Trump when he's supporting their cause or they can use him to claim that he's supporting their cause and that their cause is therefore good. And they can sell that to Trump's actual supporters and kind of, you know, make that alignment stick. That whole thing, we're really seeing that all reveal itself. And the reaction that they've been having to all of the Iran stuff, in addition to any

of the discombobulation, they think that they've got Trump dead to rights. And every time I have ever seen that, that sentiment rise, especially among these people who were crowning Ron DeSantis as the replacement for Donald Trump four years ago. And I guess three and a half years ago, kind of after the midterms is right when that started. But the amount of confidence they have that they've got him dead to rights. This time, oh, man, it's so ridiculous. Like, they think that his, is what they paint as hypocrisy, or misstatements, but his communications about the Iran war, they think they've got him.

And it's wild to see it and how many sources it's coming from. Like people who really develop media personalities talking about Donald Trump to Trump supporters are just now full on anti-Trump, like no coming back anti-Trump. And I feel like that's not going to end well for that. And despite having called this out in 2022, both of us, quite vigorously, we are being called anti-Trump by some people. If you'll forgive me, you teed me up to just, I'm just going to read one paragraph from an article I wrote in 22 right before the midterm elections. This was called The Wolves Among Us. And exactly the point you just made, I said at that time, as we observed,

an almost comically large-scale turn by some of the most influential public figures who wear the public mantle of America First or MAGA but so more division than our would-be adversaries attempting to cast Trump as a bombastic harmful figure from a bygone era that must be abandoned, I would only ask that you commit their names and their faces and their current dispositions to your memory so that you might recognize the barbarians the next time they're at the gate or the wolves the next time they're among the flock. And that was an article all about all of these influencers who to your point are all the current midterms or nothing influencers. It is not just the same op. It is all the same people running the same op. And our stance is the

exact same codified in the record as it was at that time, which we were right about then, and we will be right about again. And once again, the audience that's mad at us right now will be like, man, those people were really trying to undermine Trump that whole time. And it's like, yep. And you said we were trying to undermine Trump by telling you they were trying to undermine Trump. And using the midterms as the prime narrative delivery vehicle to do it. Because they, as you've been arguing more than anybody, they want to be able to codify the narrative that Donald's. Trump has lost his base. And the most effective way to do that is to say that he lost the midterm elections because

of what he has done as president. Yeah, even when he's not in them, the elections are a narrative weapon that is used to enforce conforming to the consensus. people will say if you don't get in line right now, we're going to lose the midterms. Therefore, you have to stop talking about what you're talking about and say the things that you're supposed to say. Otherwise, you're helping the Democrats. That shit is so stupid, but we have not seen the end of it.

And we're going to go through this quote unquote election season. Hopefully we won't. Hopefully they'll just be canceled. But otherwise, we will go through this election. season. We'll see some bullshit result in the midterms. And then we will have the same people doing the same thing the next time around because that's all that they have. This is like the political soap opera must be fed. Like it doesn't keep working if people bow out and stop caring about winning elections. And it's a uniparty. Okay. There's no such thing as winning fake elections.

And there's especially no such thing as winning fake elections when it's a I know that the clever new thing now is to say that elections aren't fake. They are stolen. Well, for people who say that, I would challenge them to tell us what part of the election is real. What is it? What is it? What is a real election? And does our election process resemble a real election? And the answer in every case is no. And of course, there's not a whole lot of deep thought in people who think that like clever witticisms like the election. aren't fake they're stolen is going to is going to fly everybody knows okay but you're not supposed to even say they're stolen to normies because then you'll discourage the normies from participating in them

which is what I said earlier where as the truth community now you not only do lie you are being encouraged to lie on behalf of other truthers to the people you were supposed to wake up to the truth of the elections being fake. But now you're supposed to lie to those people so they will vote in the elections that you say are rigged. It's quite something. Yeah. If the elections, the last thing I want to say on this,

and then we can get toward the, I don't know if they're rants or not, but if the people who run elections, know that the elections are rigged, If people running in the elections know that the elections are rigged and the people voting in the elections know that the elections are rigged, that ain't a real election. That's a bunch of people collaborating on a performance so that we all participate in this ritual whereby we choose to reaffirm our worship in the state because we are scientific materialists and godless status. And that's what we will continue to be as long as we continue to give our power a way. way in such preposterous form.

Okay. So I don't know if we have any rants or not or boosts. And if we don't, then we can go straight to the movie for next week. I am a fan of the investigative reporter who wrote this book. I read it many years ago. I watched this movie once and I don't remember it all that well. except that it deals with some interesting subject matter. So the men who stare at goats,

it was a book by John Ronson, and Grant Heslov is the director, Ewan McGregor, George Clooney, Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridges, Robert Patrick, Stephen Root, Nick Offerman. It's a cool, cool cast, kind of quirky movie, some weird performances,

but really interesting. And I think we'll have some fun discussions on that. So, guys, thank you all very much for watching. We will be back next week to talk about the men who stare at goats. 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.