Badlands Media - Badlands Story Hour Ep. 170: The Godfather

Episode Date: June 5, 2026

Chris Paul and Burning Bright finally sit down with Francis Ford Coppola's 1972 masterpiece The Godfather, based on the Mario Puzo novel and starring Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall, and Diane Keaton. Both guys came to it fresh, with Burning Bright admitting he had never even watched it before this episode, and walked away convinced it absolutely lives up to its legendary reputation. The conversation centers on the changing of the guard from Vito's old world honor culture to Michael's coldly pragmatic zero sum game, with Sonny stuck as a will without tact and Tom Hagen as the official interpreter who fails because the rule set itself is dying. They dig into the controlled opposition between honor and business as two different justifications for chasing the same worldly prize, why both sides are spiritually bankrupt, and how Vito's actual power projection in his youth is what makes his soft power work as an old man. From there they go big picture on Donald Trump as Vito (and maybe as Michael), narrative warfare as the prime lever of power rather than an ancillary tool, mandate cultivation versus mandate manufacturing, the horse head as the perfect actual narrative fusion, and why don't insult my intelligence is finally where the audience is landing on the regime.

The badlands, what are the badlands? Explain those badlands. That's a hell of their name. I don't know the police, like a good American. These two boys were brought to trial. They judge sentenced them to three years in prison and suspended sentence. Suspended the sentence. They went three that very day.

I stood in the courtroom like a fool. And those two bastards, they smiled at me. Then I said to my wife for justice, we must go to Don Corleone. Why did you go to the police? Why didn't you come to me first? What do you want me? Tell me anything. What do I beg you to do? What is that? That I cannot do. I'll give you anything, you ask.

They've known each other many years, but this is the first time you ever came to meet the council for help. I can't remember the last time that... last time that you invited me to your house for a cup of coffee. Even though my wife is godmother to your only child. But let's be frank, you never wanted my friendship. And you were afraid to be in my debt. I didn't want to get into trouble. I understand.

He found paradise in America. I had a good trade, made a good living, police protected you and there were courts of law. And you didn't need a friend like me. But now you come to me and you say, Don't call you on and give me justice. Should I ask with respect, you don't offer friendship. You don't even think to call me Godfather.

You said you come into my house on the day my daughter's to be married and you asked me to do murder, money. They ask you for justice. That is not justice. Your daughter is still alive. I think it's suffer then. She suffers. How much shall I pay you? Honorable, Santa. Whatever I ever done to make you treat me so disrespectful? If you'd come to me in friendship, then the scum that ruined your daughter would be suffering this very day.

And if by chance an honest man like yourself should make enemies, then he would become my enemies. And then they would fear you. Be my friend. My father? Someday, another day may never come. I'll call upon you to do a service for you. But, uh, until that day may never come. Until that day, except this justice is a gift on my daughter's wedding day. Grazie. That's right.

No, no more. Not this time, concierge. No more meetings. No more discussions. No more Salazzo tricks. You give him one message. I want Salazzo. Tonight, the other family's won't sit still.

They're saying, hey, he had me, Salas. My father wouldn't want to hear this. This is business, not personal. They shot my father. His business is a rat. Even to sue you, your father was business. Not personal, Sonny. Well, then business will have to suffer, all right?

Hey, listen, do me a favor, Tom. No more advice. how to patch things are up. Just help me win, please, all right? About this Captain McCluskey who broke Mike's jaw. Or about him. Now, he's definitely on Salozo's payroll and for big money. Closkey has agreed to be the Turks bodyguard. What you have to understand, Sonny, is that while Salazzo is being guarded like this, he is invulnerable. Now, nobody has ever gone down a New York police captain, never. It would be disastrous.

All the five families would come after you, Sonny. The Corlione family would be outcast. Would run for cover. Do me a fate. I don't care what Celetzo says about a deal. He's going to kill. Pop, that's it. That's the key for him. Gotta get Saletso. Mike is right. What about this Plusky? What do we do with this copy? I want to have a meeting with me, right? It will be me, Plusky, and Solitza. Let's set the meeting. Get our informers to find out where it's going to be held. Now, we insist it's a public place, a bar, a restaurant, someplace where there's people, so I feel safe. You're going to search me when I first meet them, right?

So I can't have a weapon on me then. But if Clemenza can figure a way to have a weapon planted there for. What are you going to do? Nice college boy, huh? They want to get mixed up in a family business? Now you want to gun down a police, Captain Juan, because he slapped you in the face a little bit? What do you think? This is the army where you shoot him a mile away? You got to get him close like this.

Better bing! You blow their brains all over your nice cyber league suit. Come here. You're taking this very first. Tom, this is business, and this man has taken it very, very, very. personal. Where does it say that you can't kill a cop? Come on, Mikey. Tom, wait a minute. I'm talking about a cop that's mixed up in drugs. I'm talking about a dishonest cop, a crooked cop who got mixed up in the rackets and got what was coming on. That's a terrific story. We have

newspaper people on the payroll, don't we, Tom? They might like a story like that. They might. They just might. It's not personal, son. It's strictly business. We're all grateful to Don Corleone for calling this meeting. We all know him as a man of his work. A modest man, he'll always listen to reason. Yes, Tomparsidi. He's too modest. He had all the judges and politicians in his pocket. He refused to share them. When did I ever refuse an accommodation? All of you know me here. When did I ever refuse, except one time? I believe this drug business is going to destroy us than he used to come.

I mean, it's not like gambling or other. liquor, even women, which is something that most people want nowadays, and is forbidden to them by the pets and Avanti of the church. Even the police departments that have helped us in the past with gambling and other things are going to refuse to help us when it comes to narcotics. And I believe that then, and I believe that now. Times have changed. It's not like the old days, but we can do anything we want. A refusal is not the act of a friend. Don Corleone had all the judges and the politicians in New York, then he must share them, apologize up his youth.

He must let us draw the water from the well. Certainly he can present a bill for such services. After all, we are not communists. You could come here and reason together. And as a reasonable man, I'm going to do whatever is necessary to find a peaceful solution of his problem. Then we are agreed. The traffic and drugs will be permitted.

but controlled. And Dan Corleone will give her protection in the East, and there will be the peace. But I must have strict assurance from Corleone. As time goes by and his position becomes stronger, will he attempt any individual vendetta? Look, we are all reasonable men here. We don't have to give assurances as if we were lawyers.

You talk about vengeance? Is vengeance going to bring your son back to you? For my boy to me. I forgot the vengeance of my son. But I have selfish reasons. My youngest son was supposed to leave this country. Because it is a lot of business. All right.

I have to make arrangements to bring him back his safety. Clear of all these false charges. But I'm a superstitious man. And if some unlucky accidents, you'll befall him if he should get shot in the head by a police officer. Or if he should hang himself in his jail cell. or if he's struck by a bolt of lightning, then I'm going to blame some of the people in this room,

and that I do not forgive. That aside, let me say that I swear on the soul of my grandchildren that I will not be the one to break the peace we've made here today. Mike, hello, fellas. Everybody's here. Freddie, Tom, good to see you, Mike. How are you, Mom? All right, you get everything you want?

The chef cooked for you special, the dancers will kick your tongue out, and your grin is good. Drug chips are everybody in the room so they can play in the house. My credit good enough to buy you out? Casino, the hotel. Corleone family wants to buy you out. The Corleone family wants to buy me out. No, I buy you out. You don't buy me out.

Your casino loses money. Maybe we can do better. You think I'm skimming off the top, Mike? You're unlucky. You goddamn guineas really make me laugh. I do you a favor and take Freddy in when you're having a bad time, and then you try to push me out. Wait a minute. You took Freddy in because the Corleone family bankrolled your casino because the Molinari family on the coast guaranteed his safety.

Now we're talking business. Let's talk business. Yeah, let's talk business, mate. First of all, you're all done. The Coyote family don't even have that kind of muscle anymore. The Godfather is sick, right? You're getting chased out of New York by Bazini and the other families. What do you think is going on in? You think you can come to my hotel and take over? I talk to Barzini. I can make a deal with him and still keep my hotel. Is that why you slapped my brother around in public? Oh, no, that was nothing, Mike.

Now, uh, Mo didn't mean nothing by that. Sure, he flies off the hand once in a while, but moan me with good friends, right, Mo? I got a business to run. I got to kick asses sometimes to make it run right. We had a little argument, Freddy and I, so I had to straighten him out. You straighten my brother out? He was banging cocktail wages as two at a time.

Players couldn't get a drink at the table. What's wrong with you? I leave for New York tomorrow. Think about a price. Do you know who are? who I am. I'm Mo Green. I made my bones when you were going out with cheerleaders. Wait a minute, Tom. You're the other conciliary, and you can talk to the Don. You can express the minute now. Don is semi-retired, and Mike is in charge of the family business now.

You have anything to say? Say it to Michael. You don't come to Las Vegas and talk to a man like Mo Green like that. My older brother, and I love you. But don't ever take sides with anyone against the family again. You have to answer for Santino, Carla. You got what wrong? You're fingered sannie for the Barzini people. with my sister. You think I could fool the Carlone? All right, come innocent. Nice runner, kids.

Please, Mike, don't do this. Sit out. Please. Barzini's dead. So is Philip Tatalia. Mo Green. Strachie. Cooneyo.

Today, I settle all family business, so don't tell me you're innocent, Carl. Admit what you did. Get him a drink. Don't be afraid, Carl. Come on. You think I make me. my sister a widow. I'm godfather to your son, Carl. No, Carlo, you're out of the family business.

That's your punishment. You're finished. I'm putting you on a plane to Vegas. I want you to stay there. You understand? Uh-huh. Only don't tell me you're innocent because it insults my intelligence. That makes me very angry. Now, who approached you? Tatalia or Bozini? He's Bozini. There's a car waiting for you outside, take you to the airport. I call your wife. Tell her what the flight you are. I don't get out of my sight. Okay, I was a bit surprised, by the way, that cut off in our studio here.

So apologies for that, everybody. Before we get started with the show, a quick word from our partners at Loaded Gun Coffee. Badlanders, you were all familiar with Loaded Gun Coffee. They've been longtime supporters of Badlands, and you may have met them in person at Garlanders. But did you know that they are veteran-run, family-owned, and right here in good old Arizona in Lake Havasu, every bag of their whole bean coffee delivers a high-octane, patriotic punch of flavor. With a long family history of commitment to freedom, every bag is a testament of pride and honor. From the skilled farmers who cultivate each blend to their roasters that handpicked the finest coffee beans from the world, Loaded Gun Coffee has mastered their unique brewing methods, resulting in the best

tasting coffee around. This coffee is smooth and delicious, the perfect way to start your mornings. Get over to badlandsmedia.tv slash loaded and use promo code badlands to get 10% off your order. If you are in the Lake Havasu area, stop by their newly renovated store and say hey. that's badlandsmedia.tv slash loaded promo code badlands stay loaded with load a gun coffee all right all right all right well good evening everybody welcome to badlands story hour i'm chris paul that is burning bright and tonight's what's that you have a load of gun coffee cup yeah just there you go purely by coincidence good job well thanks for cutting off the intro uh that's burning bright and tonight we are discussing godfather Written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola based on the books by Mario Buzzo.

And starring just an all-star amazing cast. Many of them are classic all-star amazing cast members because of movies like this from that era. Marlon Brando Al Pacino, James Kahn, Robert Duvall, Diane Keaton, and just goes on and on. A fantastic movie. The Godfather 2 is widely believed to be one of, if not the best movie of all time, and we'll do that very soon. But this is kind of the introduction to the Corleone family and to the whole kind of atmosphere of the classic mob movie. I've seen this movie a few times over the years.

I don't think I watched it until I was probably in my mid-20. It was one of those things. We talked about this before where there's a big blockbuster that everybody talks about. And you've already been left out of the conversation for so long. You kind of have no desire to watch it. But eventually you finally come around to do it. I think maybe Raw Shark had a great quote about that last week or something. But yeah, I saw a different way this time as we often do.

And I'll pause right there. And you can give some opening thoughts. And then we'll get into it. Yeah, I'm interested to hear what you thought of this. some, but I, this is exactly what you just said. This is one of those ones, I've said this enough times on the show now where it makes me feel like I did not have the sort of film experience that I certainly felt like I had. But I think it really, as stupid as it sounds, it goes to show you just how many goddamn movies there are and even how many good movies there are. You know,

if you grow up and you kind of get into movies at a certain age, let's say you're a teenager, or you're 18, whatever, you're 20. I think it's normal. You know, you start to cultivate kind of a passion for storytelling and fiction, and because of that, you're going to be into what's going on in fiction as it still continues.

And that's the thing. It's like American fiction just continues to roll on. So unless you're really just naturally prone to being interested in a certain genre, or maybe a certain creator or writer or something, you know, you're really not going to look back unless something really points you in that direction. And this is one of those movies for me. I've mentioned before on the show. I used to have a real aversion to, I'd call them procedural, cop type stories just didn't do anything for me. They depressed me. And for some reason, when I was

younger, I used to conflate sort of gangster films with that. Part of that, is when I was very young, I watched casino and it completely traumatized me. I vividly remember the scene where they get beat to death with the baseball bats. And I was not supposed to be watching casino. Like I was at my uncle's house. It was just on. And I was a little kid watching it. Thought it was like everyone was having fun.

Like in the scenes I was watching, it didn't seem like a serious movie. And then that scene happened. and I couldn't get that image on my head for years of the two guys in the back of the trunk and everything. So I think that had a lot to do with it. But suffice to say, the movie that got me interested in this genre was The Departed. I'm born and raised in Boston, and I think that's a great movie. We've already done it. But for me, just on like a story perspective, I guess part of me was always a little bit worried about revisiting some of these classics because of all the movies that have iterated.

on them, it can be tough to revisit them if you didn't already kind of have that as you're framing. But I thought this held up really well. I thought the performances were great. I really have not seen Marlon Brando in many things. There aren't many movies that I would have seen him in, but in terms of what I've watched. I remember back in school, I watched, I think it's called on the waterfront or a longer. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I've seen that. film school type of stuff, but I had never seen this. You have come across, like if you're in American culture, you have seen clips of Marlon Brando in this movie. And I thought that as a, this is a perfect example of when you watch the movie from start to finish, his performance is so great,

but I feel like it's the type of performance that is so specific and so infamous that when you just see clips of it out of context. It's almost cartoonish, especially because so many people have, you know, spoofed it over the years. So that was cool to see. Al Pacino I was super impressed with. I just, I'm not really an Al Pacino guy. I don't, I've never really got it in terms of a lot of his career. I get it in this one. I thought he was way more subtle than I expected him to be. I guess I was expecting like Scarface. So for me, it was a weird experience before we even get into like the story of the story is infamous. It's like a foundation of a whole genre in movie history.

And then all the actors that you mentioned, they sort of built legends that started here, a lot of them. And it's hard, again, to revisit this or visit it for the first time and be like, I'm bringing in Al Pacino and his whole career into really what kind of launched him. But within a half an hour, I had kind of shed a lot of that and just was kind of along for the ride. And I guess the biggest thing that surprised me watching it was how sort of straightforward it all was. I thought it was going to be trying to, maybe that's just me, but I thought it was going to be trying to sort of play with a lot of things or disguise what it was doing in the plot. I thought it was going to be more mysterious than it was.

I didn't find it mysterious at all. I thought it was very straightforward, but, you know, really powerful in terms of the themes it was going for. Yeah, and there's a lot of depth to it. Maybe the place to start is with some of what we discussed a few weeks ago when we did No Country for Old Men. And I think that there's absolutely the same sort of kind of macro-thematic element in this film that there was in that film. We're talking about the changing of a guard to. to this new society that doesn't really function on the back of those older systems of honor and the way that people respected the rules, even within a kind of lawless aspect of society.

Now there was no heart, there was no feeling, there's no emotion in any of it. It's just a cold, calculated path toward success in the world. And you see in the first scene, Bonacera, comes in having never made friends, never even tried to make friends with Vito Corleone because he wanted to be legitimate, straightforward. He's here in America. This is not the old world. He's here in America where you can make of yourself anything you want so long as you are willing to participate in. and support the system and play by the rules of the system. If you work hard within the system, support the system, and play by its rules,

well, then you have the promise of the American dream, which means that, you know, if you're good at doing all that stuff and you really, really commit and do all the stuff really, really well and very committedly, then maybe you can have what you want. And, you know, as that kind of, you know, now, I'm making fun of this because now people see it as just silly nonsense. sense. That's not how it works, right? He found out really quickly that's not how it works.

There was no, there was no myth to be worn away. He committed himself to something. He trusted in the system. And then when he needed it the most, it failed him in a way that he could not even imagine. And so finally, he goes and tries to exact some old world justice and revenge. And he is stopped at first by Vito, who, says, hey, you know, you're the one who believes that we have passed the thing that I do. Like this level of reality is not what you deal with.

This is real power here. It's not your rule system. This is real. You think you're past that. You're going to be the good American. And now you come to me and offer me money, American dollars. The thing that I don't participate in, you offer me the benefits of that so that you can access. my world for a minute. And I'll

pause there as kind of an introduction, but there are, I think, a bunch of layers to this. Yeah, totally. One of the things we talk about a lot for years in this stuff we do is power projection. All the different forms of it. And that, for sure, was the major takeaway I had from this

whole movie. Basically, you know, from Vito Corleone to Michael Corleone, we can get much deeper into that, but I certainly wasn't expecting. that. I thought we were going to have a, I guess I was not surprised at all in terms of how Michael Corleone's character arc progressed, but I was surprised in the differences between him and his father. I didn't really know those themes, which gets into a lot of what you just mentioned. The first note I wrote down with the movie was Vito has a code that a man of the system does not understand until he has need to

understand it. And that that's exactly what I took out of that opening scene. And, um, you know, again, we can get into different types of power projection, but I think it's also interesting. This movie deals with the policing and the police force as, uh, its own mafia. And, you know, you can, you can take the very literal version of that, which is a corrupt police chief or captain that were shown in this movie. But even if he wasn't a corrupt police captain, it's clear that people, find out that they need, when they really need something done, the last thing you appeal to is the system, especially when the system arguably is guarding the very things that, you know, standing in the way of justice. And again, you don't even need abject corruption standing in the way

of your justice. You can just have bureaucracy. Like, we see this now. I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, like my wife followed this case, this horrible case of 2025 and 26 in Texas. That guy did get sentenced to death a few weeks ago. It was like a national story. But even the fact that like it started this national conversation of isn't it absurd that we are all talking about whether or not we should as a society kill this motherfucker when everyone knows that's the right answer. It's almost like everyone in the courtroom knows. The judge knows. prosecutors know. The defense knows. Like his family knows. He knows. He in the courtroom was like, yep, I did it. Like I'm fucked up. I'm irredeemable. And that, but we do this like little parade about like, what we got to do like a process and we have to like sign stuff and we have to, you know, do this whole charade of of whether or not this is right. And, you know, there's certainly false to it. But the Corleone family, for better or worse, has this very old testament, like, we are a source of power. Vito Corleone is a source of power.

And whether or not he's a good man is maybe far beside the point. The men coming into his office at the beginning of this movie that shows you in this parade, I don't get the impression they see Vito Corleone as a good man. But they see him as a man they understand. They see him as a man who does have a code, he does have honor. And Augusta and I, he's been on the narrative several times this year, and one of our themes and our discussions, we usually talk about the concept of the sovereign alliance. And kind of the core concept that we drill down into,

that what unites these guys? If there's nothing signed, if there's no, somebody can break contracts, like they're all against a system that we, the rules-based international order. What do these men believe in in our estimation? And we've talked about honor culture. The idea that when a guy like Donald Trump walks into a room and makes a deal, he has made the deal. The deal was made because Donald Trump made the deal, not because somebody signed something on a piece of paper.

And, you know, if you have leaders like that, the world can have this form of stability. And I think that functions on the macro, on a nation state level. And then in this movie, it functions on a micro on a family-to-family level. Yes, or ceases to function, and that was the problem because the weight of the honor part of the system could no longer withstand the, and I don't mean weight in gravity in this way, but the gravity of this change that was coming in. It was bigger and more powerful than the thing it was looking to replace. And so long as both of these things were chasing after the same prize at the end of the day, well, the one that has, that can play without the rules is probably going to succeed in that instance. So they're both chasing worldly rewards here, whether it's reputation or big houses and big cars and lots of money and lots of power. and all the rest of this, that's what they're both going after.

And I think that this movie beyond anything else was the conversation between those two points of view. And I think that that is a well-constructed controlled opposition layer that ignores that they are both chasing after the wrong thing to begin with. So in either case, and we can get more into this, Vito, so I would be able to be. put veto on one side. I would put Sonny on the same side, although not capable. Yeah, like a dumber version. Yeah. Right. He wants to be the honor guy. And there may be a few other characters who are examples of this in the film, but not really. But on the other side of that,

you've got the people who use business as the justification for everything. It's not personal. It's business. It's not personal. It's business. You know, Tom argues that viewpoint. He is the conciliary of Vito. They try to kill Vito. And then the man who is at least indirectly responsible for trying to kill Vito threatens Tom with his life and makes him go

back and like make a peace between the Corleone family and the rest of it. And Tom goes along and does it because it's business. And all the the Barzini guys, Barzini even says, hey, we're not communists. You just have to share your stuff with you or share your stuff with us, your access with us, or we're going to kill you. Sorry, just business. You know, so in either case you have these justifications and rationalizations for doing whatever it is you want to do to get the things you're both chasing. So on one side, you've got people claiming that this is honor and.

family and this this very powerful moral code. And on the other side, they're just saying, hey, man, this is a free world. We're all chasing out for the same things. We are playing by the rules. We're going to beat you at all these things. We want that thing that you're trying to get. And that's all there is to it. And like once you're in the materialist realm playing for only that thing, it's hard to

see even how it's hard to see how that thing is wrong. But it's it's even hard to see how that. That's not more honest than what Vito is doing. And I think maybe that's why Michael ends up being the bridge between those two. And again, none of this is good. It's just two different ways to approach it. Yeah, I thought I was actually reading after I watched the movie, I was reading some reviews on it, some older reviews on it. One of them was from the well-known Roger Ebert.

But I thought he had a funny way of talking about it where he, He pointed out, you know, like, you don't, this is the rare kind of gangster film where you really don't get any focus on the victims of any of the crime families. Like, all of it is just about these people. Like, you are in the house, literally. You are embedded within the Corleone family. The only other people you see in the movie or have any interaction with basically outside of them are other crime families who are. all jockeying for position. So it creates that the way Ebert had put it was it creates this hall of mirrors situation where morality is all relative and everything like the power dynamics at

play is what we're talking about. But the morality is all relative. And it's interesting when it's like the Corleone's veto Corleone, his sort of problem in this emergent new reality within the crime world seems to be that the hall of mirrors is turning back on him. And it's like, yeah, well, now somebody's playing your game, but or they've decided to change the rules. And, you know, Vito's mindset, I can understand. It reminded me of like, when you're a kid, you're playing with your cousins or your friends, and like you're playing Monopoly or you're playing tag or whatever it is. Like, there's the one kid who cheats. And after a little while, you're like, no, motherfucker. I know that you think right now in a vacuum that you have won this game of tag because you

cheated. You said I didn't get you. But you are ruining this for all of us in the neighborhood because now the game has been changed. Now we don't have trust in the game. And it's almost like Vito and the Corleones besides Michael are coming to the table saying some of us win and some of us lose in this game. Like sometimes our family wins, sometimes your family wins. It seems like it's implied based on how the other figures in the movie treat the Corleones, that the Corleones win the most, like that Vito Corleone is sort of the alpha dog in terms of his heyday. He has won the most at the table. But the irony is so Vito's like, Vito feels justified in, hey, we all kind of agreed to the

rules, and I've just been better at those than the rest of you. And then like you said, when this new crop of this new breed of criminal comes in, like the Colombians or whatever the hell it is from South America, the, you know, the heroin trade, they're playing by their rule set. And it's kind of, you could certainly view this either way. You could view it as a romanticized, like, ah, man. And, you know, organized crime used to be a real honest when it was like the Italians and the Irish all killing each other and, you know, forget all those innocent victims that they killed as well. At least they were doing it in an honest, honor-bound system. And then all these damn South Americans came in,

started just doing it all very dishonestly. You know, it has the feeling if you stepped outside of the family walls that are depicted in this movie of like, you're watching a bunch of psychopaths that are now dealing with a bunch of psychopaths who do not respect the rules that those psychopaths had set out for each other. And you don't like the new guys that come into town. Like you're what Virgil, Salazzo, whatever, who comes in and immediately just starts to wreck and shop and killing everybody. I thought it was particularly effective, by the way, as having really know, I didn't really know any plot points of this movie. I knew about the horse in the bed scene. That's it.

So I didn't know that they killed Luke Abrazi like immediately. I thought that was effective, a little effective subversion there. And that shows them right away. Like they came in, they dissected your power dynamics. They dissect, they cataloged your system. They came in, they completely upended it. And now like the Corleones are crying, besides, Michael, the Corleone's are all kind of crying because it's like this, you're breaking the rules. And, you know, again, I think that's how most people would view this through the Corleone's lens. Like, man, Vito had it, had it going good. And then these guys coming in ruin it. But I think if you're trying to be objective, Vito finally came up against something that a lot of people

in Vito's time probably felt like Vito was that force who came in. And, you know, last point on it would be, did Vito always play by the rules that Vito enforces on the rest of the battle space by the time he's a, what, 70-year-old man in this movie? Or did Vito do a lot of shady shit when he was 25 and 30 years old to create the empire that was then able to enforce rules on everybody else? Well, luckily, you're able to find out some of that in Godfather, too. Oh, okay. But, yeah, and that's, that's, I mean, you're right, of course.

You know how these things work. But, yeah, so he, the idea being then that he is attempting to enforce the rule set that he helped put in place after you'd already come to power. Because, of course, the rule set you put in place once you're in power exists to keep you in power. And we actually deal with that in our world all the time now. He is meeting a force that is going to overcome him no matter what, unless he agrees to get into that kind of game. But the truth is, once the shift happens and the shift is acceptable and people go along with the shift, it's kind of over for a while for everyone who doesn't shift unless they are able to kind of stem that. tied and push, push back against it and make it make kind of the pendulum swing back the other way. And that was, again, one of the kinds of the points at the end of no country for old men.

We talked about the scene where he's describing his dream in the very last scene of the movie. And he talks about how he sees a different version of his father. And they're both on horseback in the dead of night, it's freezing. And his father rides by with a lantern that's still lit and he knows he's going to see him on up ahead. Right. So the old thing is going to come back around again, that that lantern still burns. And it is behind and then it is in front. And so, yeah, in the long haul, like Vito's way will come back around.

And somebody in the chat, I think it was Rebel Nader, asked if, like, Trump was like a mobster. And I could see Trump as veto interpretation here. It might be more like Michael, though. And as I said, the thing, and maybe, let me pause right there and then we can get into some of Michael. Okay. Yeah. Well, the lantern scene you just mentioned just made me think of the, I mean, it's an age-old sort of truism. Live by the Sword, die by the sword is definitely one of the truisms in this movie.

at the beginning, one of the other notes I wrote down was, you know, what I had mentioned power projection, and that's something that I talk about all the time. Obviously, I'm most interested in narrative power projection. The way you would talk about this in sort of fifth-gen warfare circles or literally in the intelligence community, we see this on Devolution Power Hour. We often, for years, we've read documents from United States intelligence, from military intelligence, talking about this kind of power projection, which they call either abstract power projection or soft power projection. That would be narrative power projection, cultural. Hollywood itself is literally defined by both the United States military and foreign militaries as a soft power network. That's essentially what

Hollywood is. Intentionally or otherwise, that's what it's seen as. And one of the things I was thinking of at the beginning with this parade of supplicant. to Vito is, as I've said in my writing for years, the only way that you can effectively maintain an effective soft power projection stance is if everyone knows you have the real power projection, the actual power projection to back it up. There are many... And you're willing to use it. Exactly.

because the alternative, you know, to use current geopolitics, one of the things I've been writing about since 2022, I projected in the Righteous Russia series, the actual power projection dynamic was being sort of kicked off by Vladimir Putin in Russia. The storyline was like, we as the Russian Federation are going to do some shit. The whole world is going to freak out about it and they're not going to do anything about it because they can't do anything about it. Because the only faction on the board who can do something about it is the United States, and I think Donald Trump didn't want to do anything about it. But alternatively, the faction on the game board that's being exposed right now, including through this 2026 dialectic, is the European Union, the globalist, the collectorate, whatever you want to call it, all these people who have governed by a rules-based international order

without the actual power dynamics backing that up. The actual power dynamic backing that all up has been the United States. military. And when they don't have it, it turns out they literally have no form of power projection. So I think in this, on a micro level, that's on a macro level, on a micro level, I think it demonstrates Vito, Vito attained this position by leveraging actual real power projection in his youth, which, as you said, I'm sure I will find a lot more out about in the next movie. But to your other point, he also recognizes that he, needs to keep some of that going. He can't just be an old man and have meetings and say,

hey, remember, I used to do actual power projection. So now all I have to do is soft power projection. He is recognized like, no, no, sometimes you still have to send Luca Brazi out and leverage actual power projection to remind everybody what's going on. And you mentioned Donald Trump and Vito. That is the dynamic that I would say is the most what recalls how Donald Trump operates the most. We've even had years ago, Dan Skavino post the infamous Lion video with the Christopher Walken. I don't know what movie that's from, but the infamous Christopher Walken monologue over that clip talking about the every once in a while, the lion has to show everybody who he is. And I think that's kind of how Trump has operated as a politician.

He sort of like does his thing. He projects his abstract power. And every now and again, he just does something that shocks everyone. It shocks the GOP. It shocks MAGA. It shocks the commentariat. It shocks all our so-called allies. And Vito kind of, I think, what's kept him on top, even in his older years, maybe before this movie starts, is recognizing. Like, yeah, every so often, somebody fucks around and everybody is reminded how Vito got the power he got. Yeah, I think there's another layer to that, too, with Trump and Vito in that comparison. Trump actually does care about whether or not people respect him and are treating him as a friend.

He expects loyalty and he expects to be dealt with honestly. And for most of the people in the political universe, that is totally unheard of. Like our politics is only Barzini's and Tatalians, you know, they, they are just cold and calculating and totally corrupt and totally compromised and ultimately survive at the behest of all the other people in the cartel with them, which is what you essentially saw around the table in the mob meeting aside from Vito Corleone because everybody else had already, and I don't know what the mobster's name to his left was who was like, I also don't like drugs. I really, really don't like drugs, except it's just too much money. My guys are going to do it.

So I got to do it anyway. But I have some really important rules. Like you can't do it around school. You don't sell it to kids. You can sell it to darkies, but you can't sell it to kids or around schools. So I got my rules. Everybody agrees with my rules. He's the right rules. So now I can do it. He was trying to like have it both ways. He wanted to be seen as the, uh, the conscientious. objector like Vito actually was, but he just ultimately at the end of the day, folded and went along with it. So everybody around the table there is essentially like an American politician. And of course, I think it's in two where it becomes much clearer the political connections, although maybe it's three, maybe I'm forgetting.

That's just hinted at a little bit in this one with a very funny little quote with what's her name, Diane Keaton, who says, oh yeah, presidents and senators don't have people killed. And he just kind of gives her a look like, ah, yes. Yeah, yeah, let's actually do that. Because I forgot, I forgot when I was, I forgot this scene when I was putting the clips together today. And I realized the error of my ways while I was watching the intro. And so I cut it out here. I'm working for my father now, Kay.

He's been sick. Very sick. But you're not like him, Michael. I thought you weren't going to become a man like your father. That's what you told me. My father's no different than any other powerful man. Any man who's responsible for other people. Like a senator or president.

Do you know how naive you sound? Why? Senators and presidents don't have men killed. Who's being naive, Kay? Kay, my father's way of doing things is over. It's finished. Even he knows that. I mean, in five years, the call.

Anyway. Yeah. But yeah. Yeah, random thought, I don't mean to be a stickler or a douchebag, but when it comes to, like, the women in this era of movies, like, first of all, I didn't even recognize that that was Diane Keaton. I feel like she looks nothing like her, but how she looked older. But they act so strangely.

Like, I cannot get over it. I have yet to see in the 70s. movies that we have done, like a famous Hollywood actress who has done a good job. I'm just like, that is just how I feel about it. I feel, and it's not even my usual sexist thing, because like I think there's a lot of modern movies where women are really good at acting. But man, I don't know if it's how they were being directed. I'm not even saying the script because of course they don't really do anything in this movie, like they don't have any agency really, which is kind of part of the point. But just

that the weird like the inflection of Diane Keaton in every scene in this movie. I'm like, what are you doing? Nobody in the scene is talking like you. Well, it's just, I don't know, it's weird. It bugs me. I felt the same way about the, man, one of the conspiracy movies we did recently, Robert Redford. I forget which one that was. Three days of three days. Yes. Whoever the girl wasn't that was doing the same thing. Like, well, gosh, G. Willikers, I don't understand why you'd say something like that there, John? And it's like, do you understand what's going on around you? Anyway, with that aside, I thought it was great because, you know, like, some old movies have this reputation, maybe unfair, of being over the top, like when they're

the first to set certain templates to really spell things out and be really on the nose. and I thought again, I said earlier in the show, that scene's a great example to me of the thing I loved about Al Pacino in this is that he's very subtle. Throughout the whole movie, and that was another great scene of it where it's like he doesn't go into some diatribe, he doesn't try to mansplain to or you just see his facial expression or he's like, yeah, you don't understand the way any of this works. on on that note i just want to highlight this for people maybe some you know people who've watched the godfather 50 times have already seen this and picked up on it but like check out um

check out check out check michael out right here some of the other families won't just still say hey hey hey my son my father would want to hear this this is business not personal they shot my father is believe in the shoot of your father was business left. Let's keep watching. Well, then business will have to suffer, all right?

And listen, do me a favor, Tom. No more advice on how to patch things are up. Just help me win, please, all right? For the people who are just going to be listening to this,

he kind of just adjust himself in his chair and then just begins leaning against his fingers on the side of his forehead, rested on the armrest, like just totally embarrassed and disgusted at the conversation that he's watching because Tom is doing the, this is all business, it's not personal thing in a way that will never work.

And Sonny's doing the hothead, this is honor culture thing in a way that will never work. And that's why Michael ultimately ended up getting rid of Tom as conciliary because he knew that that was Tom's problem. He was meant to present the opposite case. from the kind of the old way honor system, he was going to be the bridge to this new way where you play by the rules. Hey, Tom, just make sure all that rule stuff's taken care of,

but he didn't actually bridge that gap in the right way. And so Michael eventually kind of just takes that all on himself. But to go back around to the Trump as Vito Corleone thing, and the point about the respect and the friendship and all of that, Trump really does act that way. I fully believe that a lot of the good things he says about maybe some of the people that we don't like or about the issues that we don't agree with. He's doing so as the product of a negotiation.

He had to ask someone for something. He wanted someone to do something for him or they asked him for a favor and he said, hey, I'll do this thing for you. I'll give you the endorsement or I'll always. I'll give you a high five for pushing this piece of legislation, but I want you to be there for me when I ask you to do XYZ. And it seems like a lot of them don't hold up their ends of the bargain. Some of them do.

And so they get to keep playing the game, I guess. But I always see those things, or at least I always consider that maybe those things can be an example of exactly that dynamic, where this is just. just something we've arrived at in a negotiation. I don't prefer that this person is doing this thing this way. I would rather them just be on board with my program and actually be assisting. But if there's a give and take, I get it. I have to be this guy running everything.

I can't be trying to make a point out of every single one of these issues. So I understand that on some level. You posted something actually in our chat earlier that this makes me think of about But, man, here, I'll pull it up, about Trump's comments about Iran and specifically the Ayatollah, which are great in this framing. So I'll just bring up that clip that you, if you want to share my screen there. I want to meet with the new Ayatollah, the new supreme leader. I don't want to meet, but if I did meet, I'd be honored to meet him. I'd like to see if we make a deal.

But if we make a deal, it's possible that I would meet him. I'd be okay with it. Would that happen here in the U.S.? Oh, I don't know, Peter. I haven't really heard too much about it. I didn't suggest it, but some people have suggested it. If it happened, it would be happy, I'd be respectful. Do you say because Epicure killed his dad and his life and his kid

that he's got hard feelings and wouldn't want to meet? Well, I would say I'm not his favorite person. But with that being said, he's probably a professional I don't know. He's probably a professional. In some circles, he has a very good reputation, actually. You know, sometimes some people say bad, but a lot of people say bad about me. It's totally false, of course. I mean, like, tell me that's not. You could just re-skin that with AI, change the names, and, you know, put Vito Corleone in that seat and them say, hey, Vito, you know, you killed his, you killed his wife and his son. Don't you think he's, you think he's, upset with you well you know yeah probably but he's a professional and and he's heard a lot about me but I've heard a lot about him and you know we have our

theories we go back and forth but like what does that mean does that mean he's saying I didn't kill his wife and his kid does that mean he's saying this guy isn't actually a bad guy and I know that because I've known him you know I've got all my theories about sovereign alliance and who's in it and who's not and whatever but more to your point about how Trump behaves it's not only I don't think it's only an observation of Trump's personality. I think it is, well, one of the things I've said for years is the, if you take away the never Trump brigade, the people that have cognitive dissonance and just hate him, that believe

Orange Man Bad, all that shit, take them out of it because they're kind of irrelevant to the conversation. I think that the faction I'm most interested in like psychoanalyzing are the so-called intelligentsia who are earnestly trying to figure out what Trump is doing, but the one premise, like the intellectual dark web, the alt media, all that, but the one premise that they never consider, ever, is that Trump himself knows what Donald Trump is doing, right? Like, we think not only does he know what he's doing,

but we think it's probably going to have the outcome he wants in most cases. I would even be willing to concede to people. You don't even have to go there. You don't even have to think that Trump's plan is going to work. But you do think he has one, right? And it's like I don't, I even mean this outside of the info war, outside of all of that. It is astounding that we are in 2026. And like from a normie perspective, this man has done, from their perspective, has dominated.

the West for a decade. And they still don't think he knows what he's doing. And it's like, man, guys, at a certain point, you are the ones who look a little silly. And I guess the reason I bring that up in the context of what you're talking about with these power dynamics and deals and favors is that maybe it's not that Trump deals in respect because he likes to be respected. Maybe it's because he recognizes that that. is a much more reliable form of deal-making than all the bullshit that we've been told are

reliable forms of deal-making. For example, Article 5 in NATO, what is it? Nothing, it turns out. It turns out it doesn't matter. It turns out the only thing that matters is what the men who lead nations do, and whether or not the people in those nations and the militaries in those nations, follow those men. And that's the same thing in business. And I'm sure a lot of people watching the show have read some of the lore about Donald Trump and his past. I really want to. I really rode off like the art of the deal and all that stuff years ago because I was like, ah, it's gimmicky. But I've heard from a lot of people that it's very interesting stuff. And to your point about the art, you know, his relationships, there are so many anecdotes about

Trump from the business world that talk about this. Like he would go into a room. He would know a lot more than the people in the room thought he knew. And he basically would wait to see how they treated him when it came to a business deal. And he had no problem given concessions. He had no problem with a guy at the end of the table saying, hey, I need to get something out of this too, Donnie. He never had a problem with that. What he had a problem with is when people try to take advantage of him or when people try to assume that he didn't know the parameters of the deal. And yeah, not only is that, I think, an honor culture thing, et cetera, but in geopolitics, in business, in crime. I think it's a practical move.

And again, the reason I bring up, like, it's so crazy that the never Trump brigade has not figured out that he knows what he's doing, even in a supervillain way. It's like, man, what does that say about you guys? Like, if he doesn't know what he's doing and he's just still there, you got to start reevaluating. Yeah, dominating them. Those people specifically are the ones who are the most dominated by Trump. They're also the people with the highest degree of Trump derangement syndrome, even if there are people who claim to be Trump supporters, which is crazy. You mentioned that maybe that was a more reliable form of dealmaking.

I think in some sense it is, especially if you have the power to back it up, because if the system is trying to destroy you, then certainly it's not going to bail you out if someone is backing out on your deals. You know, if you are negotiating against the adversarial party and the adversarial party controls the system or big parts of the system, operating within their system and expecting their kind of rule set to protect you would be insane. And of course, Trump knows that. And so many of his supporters have not realized that, which I think is crazy. We were talking about some of the election stuff today.

Trump's been going off about the election all day because everybody is watching the California elections do what California elections do, which is a reflection of what all elections do because they're all fake. And Trump is saying this over and over and over again. And still, where are all of his supporters behind him saying, yes, Trump is right. Elections are fake. Instead, they're like, yeah, he's right. 2020 was rigged. Well, yesterday he just said 2024 was rigged too. And it's not the first time he said it.

They're all rigged. Now he's saying the election yesterday or Tuesday is rigged. Everybody woke up Wednesday morning believing that Steve Hilton, a foreigner who used to work for David Cameron and his wife is like the head of public communications for like Netflix, Uber and one more. I can't read. Oh, Google. Yeah. Oh, just that. Then he's a British Fox News host. Then he goes from being a bald skinny character to being like a buff and strapping,

bearded character, just like J.D. Vance and Ted Cruz, Ben Shapiro, and Thomas Massey. And you can just go on down Chip Roy, all these guys that look like total nerds. And then now they're based in red-pilled checks. because they got to attract all the magas. Like, hey, I'm a, you think Trump's strong?

Look at my beard. Fucking idiots, man. Well, and you know who helped who's helping to codify the election system? I don't know what the intentions are. I'm just saying, Spencer Pratt was having a good little run there in the central narrative until a few days before the election. He preemptively shamed anybody who was not planning to vote or was talking about election fraud. And so, you know, you do wonder when Trump is calling these things fake, how much of it is he calling fake?

Probably all of it. You know, probably not just the election system, but probably the candidates in the election system. You know, you've been talking for years about the controlled opposition dynamic. Again, I don't know. I don't know these people's intentions. Maybe they're earnest and everything. But it gets to the point where, you know, I often say in my private chats, if I can't tell if you're a bot in my chat, I'm going to treat you like a bot. because it's kind of like you've sort of sifted yourself out of somebody that I want to interact with on the internet.

And I would kind of attribute that that same thing or apply that same thing to any politician. If I can't tell if you are earnestly defending a fraudulent system because you're a part of it, or if you don't know it's fraudulent, you need to get the fuck out of here because you're not the guy. And yeah, I mean, it's, it is incredible just like you said. in our own side and I hate even saying that these days. Yeah, it's amazing. That's why I have a particular fascination with people who call themselves MAGA

and maybe even mean it in their own minds and like don't think Trump knows what he's doing. And I do think that that's markedly different from trusting the plan. Because we often criticize that stance. I try to analyze everything Trump does. I have my opinions about what he's doing at all times. What I'm saying is I understand that,

Trump is a man of purpose and great means with a long history of accomplishing things he wants to accomplish, things that I don't always understand. So I'm trying to figure out what he's trying to accomplish. And I think that's a lot different than trusting the plan, you know, for people that ironically often, I think end up holding the plan back because maybe Trump expected them to be a little bit further along so he could push things in further directions. Let's get back into the film a little bit. Actually, you know what? Let's pause and take care of the rest of our advertising partners, and then we will get into it.

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In just a few weeks, June 25th through 28, Gart 12. Deadwood, Badlandsmedia.tv slash events. You can get your live tickets in person or you can get your virtual tickets. And I think that there are some merch packages available as well when you go to badlandsmedia. tv slash events. And we look forward to seeing as many of you as possible at Gart 12 and Deadwood. Okay. And the telegram chat just opened today.

So check that out. You get any kind of ticket. You'll get your invite into that. There you go. All right. So let's get back into the film a little bit. One of the major parts of Michael's character arc is the first time you meet him is at the wedding in the beginning. And the conversation he has with Kay is that's not me.

That's my family. I am separate from my family. I do a different thing than they do. And by the end of it, it was him saying to Fredo, don't you ever go against the family. And his embrace of the family meant he was embracing all of that family business, the good side of it and the absolute worst side of it. And Michael, once he begins the revenge part of his story, once they go out, after his father, then especially once they've gone after his brother, it's only I am going to, family is going to be my justification for everything else that I have to do.

I suppose that's maybe overstating it. He certainly uses business as equal justification. He rides both sides of that thing. But he is then allowed to become the absolute worst version of the thing. thing that he was supposed to never be. And so maybe that says something about the inescapability of repeating the family storyline. I'll pause there. Yeah, I mean, the turn Mike takes in this again from like a plot by plot what the things he does, none of it in this movie surprised me. Maybe it will in the sequel, but the motivation did in a pleasant way. I thought it was, I guess because

the godfather as a character, Vito is such a like larger than life legendary figure, both in the world, in the context of the film and in the context of storytelling and of our world, I didn't think his son would be looking to sort of iterate on him or improve on him or anything, but clearly Michael has a different vision for these things. One of the things I thought about with the family dynamic in this is, you know, before it was rendered into an abomination that will forever be a mark upon the West, Game of Thrones is one of the great stories in modern times, the last few decades, kind of the Sopranos meets the godfather, meets the Lord of the Rings, and the Game of Thrones really hammers home the core theming of family and names and lineage. And obviously when you're dealing with kind of a

medieval analog lineage matters. That's like your literal claim on on anything. That's that's your ultimate contract. That's like the game ender, you know, in that kind of a world, which isn't really the same thing in something like the godfather. But there is one family in Game of Thrones that after watching this, I was like, I bet you that was a very direct inspiration is the Lannisters. So you've got all the incest and all that stuff with the Lannisters. But from a royal family perspective, the reason the Lannisters are so feared besides that they have money and they have an army is they have cultivated this reputation that if you break a deal with them or if you go after a family member of theirs, if you go after somebody with the last name Lannister,

they will basically lever all of their power into an all-out assault to destroy you and everybody in your bloodline. And like, it's assumed that there are certain people in the world of Game of Thrones. And if they tried to do that with, they would lose that actual power battle with. But the genius of operating in that way, which I think is how Michael Corleone operates, is that if they know that you're not bluffing, that you don't bluff when it comes to your family, they either are they're confronted with one of two pathways you are going to end them and their whole bloodline or they have to put you down to stop you from doing this and essentially the way we would talk about this

in game theory would be a zero-sum game and you know i'm excited to check out the godfather part two to see where this goes but in terms of maybe that's the core difference i had written down game theory when it comes to Michael and Vito. There's other differences that we can get into, but that was something that stuck out to me is Vito understands honor culture. He does understand the rules. He understands power projection. He's obviously very good at it.

Maybe where Michael is coming in is with that zero-sum game mindset, that idea that cultivating a reputation, like if you move against me, if you move against anybody in the family, it's war. And there's no like, we're going to sit down to the table and hash this out. The infamous scene or the infamous legend in Game of Thrones is a song called The Rains of Castamere, which is all about the one-time arrival family that was cousins of the Lannisters tried to call in like a debt and humiliate them. And they wiped out their own cousins.

Like they wiped out a whole line of cousins. And then they wrote a song about it and had minstrels play it all. across the continent for a decade. So like now every family in Westeros knows if you hear the reigns of Castamere that you are reminded of what the Lannisters did to their own cousins. So it's that that's that like Michael Corleone, um, I'm sure people that were in the generation of Vito thought that Vito was the alpha dog and the scariest guy in the room. But I have a feeling that Michael is going to earn that distinction in different ways. Yeah, that's funny. Um, the Lannister thing, the Raines of Casimir thing, as a means of public communication.

Like, that's mass public communication and belief induction, something I talk about all the time. That's essentially like the Game of Thrones world version of propaganda. And it's funny because- Playing it in bars and taverns. That became a tavern song, yeah. Right. And so everybody knows it. They sing it in their head.

They think about it. They sing it on the ships, whatever. And it permeates culture by like the network. effect. So Michael, when he, after listening to Tom, say that this is all business, we have to just make peace with these people and keep business going. And Sonny's screaming about how he wants to kill Salazzo, even though Salazzo wasn't the top of the chain.

Like if Sonny got his way, they still would have lost and none of them would have known it. And he would have risked everything and still lost. at least Michael made the move that triggered the next move that led to victory ultimately. But one of the things that, so Michael justifies the, his plan to kill the police captain as well by saying we own a bunch of newspapers. These newspapers can tell this story about how this is a corrupt cop. He's dealing with the drug dealers. They're all kind of on the same thing.

I bet a lot of people out there in the community would be okay with a cop like that being taken out. We're going to have our newspapers and our newspaper contacts sell that to the public. And, you know, this is, I am very strongly of the opinion that this is how the world works, especially within those systems and especially anything. This is partly why it's important to understand the party of false decorum. I spent 15 plus years working in the Hollywood Nightlife industry and doing celebrity relations for corporate events. And throughout that time, I dealt with event producers and public relations people, all sorts of salesmen and promoters and all the rest of this. Public communications is like a major, major aspect of our society that most people are entirely ignorant too.

They know that politicians are trying to present themselves in the right way. They know they see commercials on TV, though most people think commercials have to tell the truth. Like, oh, the government wouldn't allow them to lie to us in a commercial. That's not something they can do, just like they think the news is like telling the truth, too. But all of this is public communications. It's trying to convince masses of people at once to adopt certain belief because then they will act in a certain way that benefits the person communicating. And so, you know, this is a lever of power that is pulled all the time and it works because no one knows that a lever of power is being pulled. They just think they're finding out what's going on or getting someone else's perspective.

It's like, no, you're getting played. That's the point. Yeah, one of the terms I use a lot in my writing is mandate cultivation. And, you know, I think you often talk about like consensus formation. you know, these are all the same thing. But when I say mandate cultivation, often I end up kind of amending that and saying the illusion of mandate. And I think the, I think maybe what, like,

it's not like we're the first ones who've pointed out media propaganda in the Info War. You didn't need the cue drops to teach you that. But I think, I think the further you dig into this stuff and the further you dig into narrative, the power of narrative, which is obviously what you and I talk about the most, the more you understand, I think what our society gets wrong about it is the order of operations or maybe the hierarchy of power in the sort of power dynamic pyramid. Even people that do believe there are systems of power, I'm not even saying truth community, like normal Americans understand that there are politicians, there are governments, there are systems, and then there are citizens, etc. there are these hierarchies of power. There's corruption at different levels, et cetera.

And I think even normal people, many of them understand that there is media propaganda. Maybe they think of that as being Fox News and not CNN. And other ones think it's CNN and not Fox News. Other people understand it's both of them. But a lot of them, even the third person who understands it's both of them that are propaganda, I think they still underestimate where that propaganda, slots in the Mortal Kombat Tower of Power. There is a reason that every ruler or would-be ruler leverages narrative power projection, and it's not to massage their public mandate,

it's to manufacture it. It is, I would argue, the prime lever of power projection, which is why it is the, I mean, part of it in the digital age. It's the only thing we can really look at to try to figure out what's going on. But I also think it is the most signal thing to look at. It doesn't mean you read a Politico article and you suddenly know all the deep state's plans. But when you, you know, apply pattern recognition to media propaganda and you see this one of the things I often do sort of accidentally is I'll see, hey, the Atlantic put something out, Politico put something out, Axios put something out. 90 minutes apart, all of them are roughly tackling the same subject. None of them were prompted by something in the news cycle. I will zero in on that.

and kind of put it somewhere in my mind and go, that's a deployment. And when I say deployment, I mean like that, that is, whoever's in the actual position of power is understanding, I need to start this deployment by deploying a narrative. And that should lead, that should, you know, let you know that the people in positions of actual power very strongly understand the power of narrative and that, you know, your article months ago, ago, chicken egg chicken. I've argued for years that the enemy has long understood what it is kind of taken like this whole digital info war movement for a much larger number of Americans to understand. And that is that information warfare, narrative warfare is not an aspect of power projection. It's not

like ancillary to it. It is arguably the start of it. And again, as we talked about earlier, you do need actual power projection somewhere if people call your bluff but when it comes to narrative power projection if you never call the bluff you don't actually ever need any power backing your deployments yeah i i would even take it a step further than that and say that it is the um single most important aspect of the enemies uh the single most important tool in the enemy's toolkit their most powerful weapon however you want to describe it um if you you go down to the very roots of the thing and you would look at the adversary and you a lot of people would understand the adversary to be Satan.

Maybe some people would be more comfortable describing it as a more generalized evil. But if you want to make good people do evil things believing that they're doing good, the way you do that is through the satanic inversion. You just reverse the polarity on every aspect of something and make it's opposite so that when someone believes they're doing the good thing, they're in fact doing the bad thing because the two things have been layered on top of one another, and it's very easy to confuse one for the other. And so if that is the tool, the inversion tool, well, how do you deploy that? You deploy that through collective belief induction. You get a bunch of people. You induce

the belief in the inversion rather than the thing in it's natural. form through this collective belief induction. And we'll talk about a bunch of this on Sunday. But the goal is for collective belief. That's the entire thing. Like that is really victory or loss is achieving collective belief. And it might only be like a tipping point. Like it's a hill you're pushing the rock up.

And finally you've hit the crest of the hill and the rock goes over. And somebody else will eventually push it back. up the other side, but for now it's only on that side. You know, it took forever to get up to that, to the, to the crest, but now it's only on the other side. And that's, that's collective belief. It's this system or this system. It's one thing or the other thing.

We, we believe that there is a lot of, because everything has so much nuance, we believe that it all exists on some kind of spectrum, like that there's just all this gray where the thing can be located. But no, it's one thing or the other thing. There's a lot of nuance to get you there, but you don't end up somewhere in the middle. It's only struggling one way or speeding the other way. Okay. And so collective belief is the entire purpose of the war.

Of course, public communications are front and center for that. They're front and center for absolutely everything. Everything else is subservient to that. And just one last thing on this, you know, I have a bunch of friends. who are very involved in being racist online. Or, you know, people, some of them are my friend. Some of them are people I know. Some of them are online strangers.

But people who I pay attention to and I'll have, I think, have occasional good insights about whatever it might be. And they're like, yeah, but this is the real problem. Well, how are you going to start a race war if you can't convince anybody to get on your side? Right. So even that, collective belief is a problem. prerequisite even and by the way I think that is the dumbest idea you are literally playing into the enemy's hands at all times when you go down that path but collective belief is is embedded in

everything it is the only way to get to places like that and it's still like people are like no I just got to focus on calling things racist okay yeah it's one of the reasons I I think that's tangential to one of the reasons I think uh Trump made the moves he did. It trumps the guy that we think he is. That I think, you know, people, we talk about the two-party system. We talk about like, I've been talking about a lot lately. I don't think that the plan was to save the GOP. That's crazy that that's controversial at this point. But that's crazy that anybody could even think that, honestly. Yeah, it's astounding.

The greatest military operation of all time, going to win a pick election for Republicans. Yep. Republicans. win elections 50% of the time as is in the original dynamic and continue to win them 50% of the time in the in the new reality but eventually they'll win them 80% of the time and then we will have the awakening that was foretold uh but you know my point was going to be that Donald trump uh yeah he ran as a republican like people will often counter me with that i would say that ties into exactly what you're talking about the reason i call Donald trump a narrative war master a master of narrative warfare that is warfare in this it always has been but especially in the digital age

and i think trump understood in my view like hey yeah i'm going to brand myself as this because in my view i don't think it was about this is the you know this party is better than that party or there's an opening here uh to run against hillary clinton i think it was more the people who identify with this story being American republicanism are going to be a much easier get in order to begin cultivating belief in the vision that I want to help push the country toward, which is America First, MAGA, Golden Age, sovereignty, et cetera. Even speaking as a former liberal, I would say that was the correct move. I'm by no means a Republican these days, but I will totally agree.

that especially in the modern age, in the in the current century, if you're looking to sort of push a nationalist, sovereign-minded movement, you're damn right. You're better off starting by talking to Republican voters or self-identified Republicans than self-identified modern liberals. And I think Donald Trump understood that. He just understands what the market is. What do these people identify as? I'm going to put that hat on for a little while. I'm going to make it my own thing. And, you know, that takes a long time, as we've seen.

But yeah, it's one of the things I fall back on in terms of any time I can feel like dooming out of my trust in the plan or my trust in a mafioso or a leader like Trump is that I always just go back to this guy understands the power of storytelling and this guy, which means this guy understands where the collective mind is at more than a lot of people do. And that gives him an advantage over a lot of the other people that have been playing this game. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, we can talk about this on Sunday. Did we say I'm joining. No, so Chris is going to be joining me on Sunday now. Yeah, and I've been trying to nail down a direction, but we'll talk about all this stuff and more. Yeah. So I would say I think that Trump is rebranding reality. I mean, he is like the master of branding things. He stamps his name on things. But he is, and so I think people get very, very upset at him because in, in. some kind of subconscious way, they understand that he's rebranding reality. He's taking the thing that they know as inverted, right? It's not the natural thing. We are familiar with the inverted version of everything because we have been conditioned to understand the inversion as the natural form. Trump is taking it and he is putting it back into its natural form. And that's very destabilizing for a lot of people because he's doing it across the board to everything.

And so I am writing about this. So it's going to be a much longer explanation. But yeah, he's rebranding reality. And to do that, you have to tell people a story. You have to make it connect. You have to make them understand why the thing is this way and not the way you thought of it before. And I think he's extremely effective at doing that, as you said. If you have notes, by all means, like, bring something out. Yeah, well, I actually have one that kind of dovetails off of that back on the movie. To go back to Vito. And again, I think maybe we'll get into a lot more of this with the sequel.

But one of the notes I'd wrote written down, speaking of power, is control, the appearance of control and restraint only redoubles Vito's power. So the idea, you know, and I think this is most easily contrasted with Sunny, the as you said earlier in the show it seems like maybe veto has been able to impart the moral structure not even the moral structure the code he's been able to instruct the code and pass that to sunny um but he hasn't been able to pass on the the mechanisms the skill uh how to use it you know it's like you can you can pass along your money, your land, and your titles to your son. Yeah.

But you can't, you can't make him not a shithead. And it's this age old thing where it's the, it's the hard times, strong men, strong men, good times, good times, weak men, that whole circle. And I think this plays out in the microcosm and this, where you're like, I am sure I will find out that Vito came from much more difficult circumstances than his children did. And that gave him the kind of the will. Well, Sonny doesn't lack in will, but he lacks the tact. He lacks the understanding of when to use the power.

And somebody from hard circumstances is going to understand when to use the power and when not to use the power. And I think that's one of the most effective ways they communicate Vito's sort of power, is that, yes, he does wield actual power, as we said at the beginning of the show, but he knows when to use it. He's sparing. One of the things I loved, and again, it's an infamous scene in like pop culture. I knew about the horse head and the bed scene, but I didn't know any of the context with it or anything like that.

I knew it was coming, of course, because I'm like this. It looks like it's setting up for that scene. But that I felt that was one of those things in the movie that I really liked because having not seen it, I was completely convinced that they were going to. going to kill this guy, the Hollywood director or producer that was, you know, going against Vito's wishes. And instead, it's like the horse head is the perfect actual narrative fusion. One of the things I write in my articles a lot is actual narrative fusions are my favorite, where you can see both things happening at the same time. And that's one there where they're like,

we came into your property, we killed your fucking horse with real violence, and we put its head in your bed, which means we could have physically killed you. So that is actual power projection, but they didn't do anything to him. They showed restraint in doing something to him, but they let, which that is abstract, that is narrative, but they are using an actual to amplify a narrative. And it becomes this recursive loop in the hands of a master like Vito. And that is something that Sonny doesn't understand at all, I think because he's an idiot. That's something that I predict that Michael does not understand in the way that maybe Michael believes he understands. I don't know if I'm going to be right about that or not.

But I think the restraint thing that Vito had, maybe his son's, But like, don't really have that. I know that Michael comes off in this movie as very controlled and very in control. But I don't know. I felt like, I felt like toward the end of this movie, I could already see the steps that he's taking that are going to get him in some trouble. That maybe wouldn't have got his dad in trouble. Then again, his dad got shot in the back five times. So, you know, it's not like Vito had it totally under control.

well Michael yeah Michael ends up taking the business to Heights Vito probably could have never imagined and then I shared with you the the famous scene from Godfather 3 that is kind of I can't even remember how many times it was said in it reenacted in the Sopranos maybe it was just that once but I think it was a bunch but like I I try to get out and they pull pull me back in. Yeah. That's like just a pop culture line. Yeah.

You're in way too deep eventually. And so, yeah, it's coming for him for sure. One last thing I wanted to mention. And then I don't know if you have any others, but I thought it was great in the scene where Michael confronts Carlo, Carlo, about his role in Sunny's death and his coordination with the heads of the other families. And obviously the treatment of his sister, he says to him, and I don't know if I wrote this down exactly, but don't tell me you're innocent and insults my intelligence.

And that's, it's great to be able to recognize that that is what your real response is and then be able to voice that because we are told consistently, like, Like, you know, the don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining. Yeah. Like it's that, it's that kind of thing. And we are told that across the board. That is what are we are getting from our government, from our media, all these institutions that have maintained power in kind of this Barzini fashion for all these many decades since probably then. It all persists on those same lives as I just mentioned before. it has to be to the point where our intelligence is insulted, where we have to say, like, all right, you know what?

I try being cool about this stuff. I don't believe most of this shit, but I just deal with it because I know that's how you are. Can't do that anymore. You are now insulting my intelligence. This has gone way too far. Like, I would rather you just be honest about what you are doing. Okay. Like, if we are just enslaved and the military, you're just going to be nicer to us.

Yeah, right. If we are just enslaved and the militaries of the world are operating at the behest of an AI advanced far more than we can ever imagine it. And we are actually just a slave society here. Like, all right, just tell me. You know, they just let me know that's how it is so that I can unburden myself with so many of these other parts of life. Yeah. Or in the wise words of Kamala Harris, you can unburden yourself by what has been, I believe, is something. It reminds me of, I was going to say, and there's a lot of people in the info war besides, like, being enslaved, that Tom Hagen in this movie, played by Robert Duval, he's sort of this sneaky, this sneaky gatekeeper, this keeper of the keys in the movie. because it's like Tom understand.

Tom is like a decoder in the context of this movie. Tom understands how the power dynamics work. He understands who the white hats are and who the black hats are in terms of the Corleonis. He knows how to talk to the black hats. He knows how to decode everything. He knows how to explain the rules of the game and everything to Michael and to Sunny. and this is the way you're supposed to perceive the game. This is what your father, the man with the plan, wants to do.

He's like the official interpreter. And that doesn't work on Michael because Michael's just, to your point, Michael's just like, yeah, but Tom, that's fucking stupid. So we're just not going to do that. Like even if what you're telling me is you have come up with a real encapsulation of the plan or a real interpretation of the plan, a veto's plan, that's not my plan. And that's one of the things that I think sort of carves bad lands out a little bit in a lot of our audience in terms of believing like, yeah, we've got a lot of respect for the white hats.

We think there are people trying to do some good stuff. Most of us are big fans of Donald Trump. But by no means am I subservient to any of these people. And do they get to determine, you know, my future? And again, it's strange that that's a controversial take. The only other note I had on this was just it's simple. We kind of touched on it. But the family, the power dynamic and power structure of the family and the patriarch, the father, the son, obviously the godfather is a theme in this movie.

It makes sense. It's a tale as old as time. But I really was thinking during this, you know, these are pragmatic men, too. And I mentioned the Lannisters as another great example of this in fiction. It really drilled home the idea to me that it's not just about this familial loyalty. Even in a psychopathic like zero-sum world, family loyalty represents a really good anchoring point for power projection and for defense. because it kind of just represents that last step, that last backward step. Like if you've got a good family structure, you've got the father, you've got the sons,

you know, you've got the next generation below them. And like that is what anchors you. That's what anchors your code, whether you're a good person or, you know, you're a crime boss. It's not just this like familial love thing. I think it's practical. It makes sense to me that that's part of the root of power of the, Italian mafia families, which I think the Italians were the most infamous in terms of like families, very familial oriented, where the Irish were a little bit less. It was more about just being Irish,

et cetera. And I think that makes sense. It makes sense to me that they were able to carve out so much power in that world because it's like, hey, in a world where you can't trust anybody, in a world where some men break the rules that other men were following, and in a world where you can't even trust your best friend across the, across the way in Atlantic City, because his son might be a total shithead that the father was not. If you can trust in your institution, which is your family, you know, that gives you this anchoring point and that stability from which to project outward, which makes sense to me why Michael, who seems like a psychopath himself, recognizes that there is a practical value in the family being the thing that you must not disturb.

I don't think personally it's because he's a great guy and loves his family. I think he understands there is a practical reason that that's the anchor point. Yeah, it also justifies, as I was saying, everything he does. And it's funny because the fact that his family has been attacked so many times kind of gives him that same preemptive justification to wage as widespread a war as he determines is necessary until he feels like the family is protected. And that's essentially what the nation of Israel says about the countries of the Middle East. I mean, Netanyahu spelled it out very plainly.

And essentially, he said that scripture says, or I think he even said the Bible says, and then quoted the Talmud, which was very, very, did you not see that? No, I didn't. I'll try to find you what I'm referring to. But if you have any other notes, if there's anything that you want to get to, let's do that. And then we are probably getting to that time. Yeah, no, I think we cover pretty much everything I wanted to. It was a good movie.

It held up. And yeah, so much so that I'm very much looking forward to the next one. All right then. Okay, cool. So we will leave the conversation there, everybody. If you want, if you could, please go ahead and hit that thumbs up. We hear that that helps us somehow, although, who knows, you know, numbers on random social media sites and Internet. What does it mean? What does it mean?

Power projection, Chris. Totally. All right. So do we, are there rants to get to? I thought of a rant from a rocket top biologist, yes. What an awesome movie. Thank you very much for supporting Badlands. Yeah, please support the channel when you can.

If you care about media like this, that's the way to keep it going. and hit our sponsors and hopefully we'll see many of you at Gart. Burning Man, Burning Man. Burning Bright has the selection for next week. And it is. Oh, cool.

I was going to pivot. I was going to go back. We will finish out the Matrix trilogy, guys. I plan to, you know, my next pick, maybe in a couple weeks, we'll do that. But, yeah, I was going to pick. I literally had that pulled up to pick to take a break from this one.

But I think this is a, unique pick. It's like it's, I have heard it is told as really one movie and I really like that kind of storytelling. I want to see what happens. I've never seen The Godfather 2. I do not know the plot. So yeah, it'll be good to keep this fresh in our minds and get into this one. As you said, I have heard just in movie lore that whether or not it's the greatest movie ever, it's one of the greatest, sort of the greatest sequel ever. I always hear The Godfather Part 2 and the Empire strikes back as examples, maybe even the two, as like the rare examples of sequels that are better than the first movie. So yeah, Godfather Part 2. Excellent. No spoilers, everybody. No spoilers. It's an indie film, so, you know.

It really does feel like the first and second half of a film because the end point for Godfather 1 is the sort of beat that you would expect at the midpoint of a film. It's like the false victory achieved. You know, he gets what he has been wanting, and it is not the real victory he believed it would be. And so- Thank you to, sorry. Yeah, go ahead. Tattoo teacher shot over another rant.

Oh, great show, gentlemen. Thank you, Teach. And by the way, this permanently, not that Chris wouldn't have let me pick Lord of the Rings before this, but if you'll note the run times. Yes. These are longer than the theatrical editions of the Lord of the Rings. Damn, 322 on Godfather 2. Yeah, I'm fine with that. I'm just saying.

I don't want to hear anybody bitching about Lord of the Rings. None of them beat Lords of Arabia, though. True. Yeah. And there's a lot of walking around in that movie. There is, yeah, a lot of sand too. All right, everybody. Thank you so much for watching.

We will be back next week for the Godfather too, and we will see you then. 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.