Badlands Media - Badlands Story Hour Ep. 184: The Siege

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

Chris Paul and Burning Bright take on this 1998 thriller about a terror wave hitting New York and the martial law that follows, and the "predictive programming" alarm bells start ringing almost immediately. Expect a deep dive into how this movie preemptively defended Islam and demonized the military years before 9/11 gave that framing real cultural weight, plus a genuinely sharp breakdown of what one host calls the Patriot Pendulum, the idea that controlled opposition gets fed right back into the next paradigm. There's a wide ranging conversation about cultural programming, the Bush to Obama pipeline, and a funny closing bit about a recent Atlantic headline that accidentally proves their point. Stick around for chat shoutouts, sub gifts, and next week's pick, a Terry Gilliam classic with a scene this community has plenty of theories about.

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Welcome to Badland's Story Hour. Story hour. Wow, I can't talk at all. I'm Chris Paul. That is Burning Bright. And tonight, we are discussing the siege, written by Lawrence Wright, directed by Edward Zwick, starring Denzel, Washington, Bruce Willis, Annette Benning, Tony Shaloobe, and one of those strange, hey, what's that guy doing in this movie?

Performances by Asaf Manvi, who I didn't come to find out about until like 10 years later. And then he became like a big star of the Daily Show and did a bunch of comedies and whatnot and became kind of... Is he in the Toby McGuire Spider-Man movies? Probably. He looks like it. Yeah, let me see.

He is. He's the pizza guy. He's the guy who owns To be. Spider-Man's Pizza Restaurant. Wow. Seeing that movie like a hundred times. Yeah, apparently. Way too many.

Yeah. Okay. So the Siege, another one of those 1998 movies that was kind of just telling us what the next few years were going to be about after we got through the whole false flag or who knows, maybe not, of the Y2K thing.

I feel like we were getting bombarded with SIOPs back then obviously didn't know it at all. At least I can speak for myself saying I didn't know it. So many of these movies end up being predictive programming or I don't know, man. I guess I guess predictive programming is the best way to describe it. But just setting us up for all sorts of things that words to come. And I was thinking just before we got started when the early clips were playing. i remember by the time 9-11 happened already having had it drilled into my head that islam was a

religion of peace and i'm not like one of those oh we got to get the muslims people but um there was clearly a major programming operation of public relations campaign to let americans of my age and you know you're a few years younger than me um but i remember me early nine We had these NBA stars who were turning into Muslims, not as though that's, you know, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, 25 years before that. We've had these things over the years. But I remember watching like NBA halftime shows in playoff games when I was in high school and obsessed with basketball. And they would be telling me about these Muslim players. Now Islam was a religion of peace.

Islam is a religion of peace. And I'm not here to judge that. I'm just saying, when you. then get movies like this pushed into the mainstream, and then three years later, everyone's arguing about 9-11. You got to think that some of that was calculated in advance, and that ground was seated for many years. This one is wild.

I mean, there's a lot. There's very fertile ground for this show tonight. What you just let off with, you know, we talk about the controlled opposition dynamic a lot. one of the things I've said on a lot of recent shows, the way I frame this is the Patriot pendulum I've been calling it. I've got notes from like five years ago about the eventual book I'll write on the Patriot pendulum. But the idea of one of the most effective long-running controlled opposition dynamics is a cultural controlled apodynamic. And you're hitting on it right

there because one of the most interesting things with this movie is from a liberal framework, I mean, mainstream media, cultural, liberal framework. This movie is preemptively defending Islam, preemptively demonizing the U.S. military, all that kind of stuff, right? And people like you and I would have fallen right into that type of liberal propaganda at the time, which wasn't even wrong because of what then followed in, you know, in the wake of 9-11, right? The reason I've called it a pendulum, we had a discussion on this in a movie we did in recent months, is that, you know, with the benefit of hindsight, post-Trump age, I recognize

that while I was right to be vehemently opposed to the Bush regime and that paradigm that was set in the wake of 9-11, that opposition was controlled and fed me right into the cultural. controlled opposition of the Obama paradigm. And the Obama paradigm was seated, to your point, in sports culture, in media culture, in Hollywood culture, particularly in Hollywood culture, apparently for a decade before it came along. And I think what it demonstrates is the truly generational planning. planning that this machine that we are up against and trying to escape from in X.

You know, it's not enough to say that they predictive programs 9-11. They predictive programs 9-11 the decade or two of war that would follow it and the opposition that would rise against that. They already knew that there would be opposition to it. And instead of saying like, oh, you know, when people inevitably put it. back against the war on terror and the forever war that we kick off in the wake of 9-11, which is obviously the point of doing 9-11, one of the points of doing it. You know, we'll deal with that when it comes.

We'll deal with the cultural backlash. That's not how the machine thinks. The machine thinks, let's already get our culture arm on that so that 50% of the country can right away be vehemently opposed to everything that's going on. And then we will create these culture figures and thought leaders and comedians and actors and athletes and, you know, pop culture figures and musicians who the left will grab onto as the voices of reason as the right hemisphere of the country is losing its mind in the wake of 9-11. And we're going to feel like that's where we started getting branded, you know, elites, cultural elites and intellectual elites, liberal. and everything. I'm not saying that wasn't already in the Cold War, but certainly there was a rebrand in the 2000s because, you know, a lot of us fancied ourselves a lot smarter than all the

Republicans who wanted to bomb the Middle East. And then we fell right into, look at this black guy who speaks well and thinks all this is bad too. Like, let's grab him. So, you know, and to pass it back to you, just this movie, there's a lot of things it's programming that it's It's amazing that we couldn't pick up on it at the time, but it also shows you you just can't until you know that that's a thing, right? It's like if your settings are not attuned or calibrated to look at these things this way, you're just not going to pick it up. You can't you can't know what you don't know?

Never mind, can you not pick up that they're seeding the idea of terror attacks in New York and that these things are going to happen and they're trying to normalize that. more importantly normalize the response to it. But what I just said, there's no way you could even begin to think. And they know that you're probably not going to like this. So they've already got an op for you that's going to kick off in about 10 years after this one. It's almost masterful, but it's gross. And man, growing up in the 90s, being a little kid in the 90s,

the more 90s movies we do, especially at the big blockbusters, I'm like, oh my God. Just honestly, hold. horrible program, like trauma, trauma-based program. I mean, Armageddon and like all the movie soundtracks that I would think of from being nine years old is just existential dread and nihilism and you will grow up in a jingoist hellscape. You know, it's just this one was particularly dark, though. There's not a bright moment in this movie.

Yeah, that's funny. You know, I talk, people give the boomers a lot of shit. And I think some of that is well deserved. And part of that is that people see them occupying a mindset that they are unwilling to let go of, despite the fact that the mindset has proven corrupt and unworkable in some way. Now, many boomers are awake and curious and understand they've been lied to and they're searching for answers, just like the rest of us are, and that part is very cool. I would say that they got the most massive dose of all of this stuff

that anyone could ever imagine. They have the first wave of, like, television in every home and pop culture being beamed in everywhere, and pop music rising up, and the Beatles and assassinations, and race war, and the sexual revolution, and marijuana and psychedelics. And, like, you can just keep going down the list and down the list and down the list.

And they got all of that. Now, I mean, I'm late Gen X. I got a lot, man. We got, we got like all the rock and roll suicides. We got. Oh, right. Yeah. I mean, and then when we were coming of age, we got like Y2K,

we're all going to die. And then 9-11. And then we go to war and blah, blah, blah. So every generation gets some of this. And the entertainment culture. and the rest of pop culture, once that pop culture was created, that kind of programs us into the rest of it. And, you know, as we went, if you start, like, at the beginning of the baby boom,

which is like, let's say, 1950 and 1965, right? So over the course of that time, this pop culture develops, and it develops, it begins to develop by putting newspapers of people's homes and then putting the network television channels in people's homes, and everybody's getting told the same things about what's happening in the world. And if that's, if that immediately becomes a trusted source and you don't have anybody telling you, oh, it's like you can see that this stuff's not true. You have no reason to believe this, blah, blah, blah.

It's on every night. You think it's true. Everybody else thinks it's true and you talk about it. And together, these things become very real. And so you can see that we've spent 60 years now 60 years plus in that mindset. And we are just now moving out of that to understand what we might have some things we might have understood better kind of across culture. And again, I don't think it started in 1950. I'm sure that it was building well before then.

But I think that it's kind of taken off at warp speed, we can say. And I think it hit another warp speed when the Internet came out and the rest of it. But so we've all had these influences throughout. throughout our lives. But what we're seeing in a film like this, and you know, you talked about a lot of people aren't geared toward recognizing it. There are still people in the so-called truth community that aren't geared to recognizing a lot of what it's happening in this movie. And I'll just kind of laid out really quickly and then pass it back to you. But I think one of the real divides here is between the two layers of government that we often talk about,

which is kind of one, the more real power. base layer, this is how the Constitution was created, this is why the Constitution was created. These are the organs of that system that are meant to preserve that system. And then we have the other system layered over top of that, which is the reconstruction system, the federal government system, the things that are spawned by the DOJ, which is this federal police force of the FBI that specifically is devoted to policing the people of the United States. enforcing reconstruction era and beyond

law that is necessarily anti-constitutional against the people of the United States and I texted my friend who was like the guy that was like oh guys you've got to do the siege my friend Josh who hosted with me and I was like

I was like Denzel is the bad guy huh and he just you know laughed at that of course but man the question the FBI this way is not something that I think a lot of truthers would even be geared toward to doing at this point. So he's the bad guy and he's surrounded by other bad guys for sure. But the, yeah, let's go with that angle because if there's so, there's so many directions to go in with this movie. But on that one, if I were to sum up, like skip to the end, not the end of the

movie, but the end of like, what are they doing? What is, what is going on here? Um, I expected to think that this was predictive programming about 9-11 and obviously it is in a certain sense. It's literally, you know, uh, normalizing the idea of very specific template of attacks, right? Um, Armageddon, we have all these different movies we've done and that people could think of from the 90s are certainly, it was a decade of normalizing the idea of terrorist attacks on the United States. I think the Russian boogeyman, the Soviet boogeyman had worn out its welcome a little bit in the 80s. It was really ubiquitous. Communists were going to get us. The 70s, a lot of those movies that we do, well, they did

get us, but you know what I mean. They were going to get us with helicopters. They were going to shoot missiles at us at that time. Also makes you wonder, you know, was it last week we did a couple weeks ago, we did The Saint. And, you know, Did they back off of the anti-Soviet programming in the 90s because they thought that they had it all sorted over there? They had their new oligarchy in place and they're like, you know what? Let's chill because we got Rush under control and then our boy Vlad came into power and upended that apple cart a little bit. The 70s, it was like anti-government paranoia, which is kind of back. It's definitely back in style in the 2020s.

But in this era, this movie in particular, I think the third, thrust of it is the FBI is beyond reproach, as you said. The CIA is beyond reproach. But the one problem with both is that they don't have enough power, number one, and number two, they don't work together well enough. And those are the twin deployments that I took away from this movie. what it this is obviously a very coordinated and planned piece of propaganda and i have an easter egg to share about how direct that is uh but just even before i found that it's obvious propaganda and programming and that's what i took away from it if you're looking at like what is the what's the through line of dunzel washington's character in the movie uh and obviously he's the pov he's who

were you know following what does he learn what are the trials and tribulations well he doesn't learn a ton that he doesn't know. But the one thing he does learn is he needs the CIA and the CIA needs him and they need each other. And both of them need to work against the American people, as you said, and they also need to be able to control the U.S. military, which I thought was an interesting through line, you know, that we can take in a few directions. But certainly Bruce Willis does a good job of being the exact kind of military guy that I thought of as military guys in the wake of 9-11. So they had their villain set up. They knew they were going to give that villain five, ten years of runway in the American culture.

And then they were going to bring in counterculture to kind of take them down and show the people that you're back in control now. You've got a communist in the White House and Barack Obama and you've rained the military in. And now we're just bombing kids in the Middle East with drones instead of human beings. It's interesting, the cooperation necessary between the FBI and the CIA, because, of course, one we are told only operates domestically. And the other one, we're told, only operates international outside the U.S. And so what they have to do then is cooperate so that they can have the whole thing cohesively covered or else we don't have national security.

Now, if you ask me, it seems like my read on it right now maybe is the best way to say it, because you have to be open to being wrong about this stuff. No matter what stage of the game you're at, no matter how obvious it seems that one thing is good and one thing is bad, you've got to stay flexible with this stuff. Right now it seems to me like the CIA and the FBI, the CIA is a function of global intelligence. that does not seem to be inherently American in any way. It does not seem to be aligned with a sovereign America in any way. It just seems to be a function of that global entity.

I've already said, I think the FBI is a function of the reconstruction and the fact that we now have a federal police force enforcing federal statutes against the people. I don't know how we got to such a state of being, but it's not a good one. And those two things seem very much aligned against the American people ultimately. Now, I'm not suggesting that they don't defend the American people from anything, but I am suggesting when the chips are down, if you're on the wrong side of things, then sooner or later, even the work you think you're doing in good faith for the American people is going to be turned in its results against them because you're working for the wrong. So I think that that one is right up front here.

and if you are producing movies from the perspective of those two organizations, but you've got to think that Hollywood generally is doing it. The intelligence influence in Hollywood is like it's just there. You can't, it's inextricable. You can't like separate it. Even if there are areas that would be separate, you can't separate it fully. and there are so many assets and so many compromised people that are just part of the decor in Hollywood. Like, you're just in and among these people all the time.

And so it affects everything. You know, it would be like in Washington, D.C. And pretending that the politics don't affect you. You know, it just is that thing. And so from that perspective, this movie is making the man running the military, who's, in charge of the martial law, like a cartoon villain. He's like cartoonishly evil the entire time. And they say in that big meeting where they're finally deciding to do it, like,

what if the American people support this three to one? Like is it, is it still bad then? And they're like, no, we have, we have layers of statute and code that say you can't. Yeah. It's, it's amazing. And there's so many, you know, like Denzel Washington's, great, but you look back on so many of his characters now, and you're like, man, he's just like an Obama template. You know, he's like a cooler, like, you know, Hollywoodized version of a

Hollywoodized, you know, president that came after him because he's always the strong but suave voice of reason in the room, and he knows all the statutes to appeal to, and he knows the rulebook, and, you know, he's got the blackness that he can kind of. of like subtly thread into anything in terms of how he you can trust him in the government because he understands the plight of the marginalized and obviously they kind of hit you over the head a little bit with that in this movie where you got a black FBI guy and a Middle Eastern a Lebanese FBI guy Shalub there you know you got the Takah Massad you get the Palestinians all this kind of stuff

so you got the victim culture the victim complexes all primed and ready to go in this one. And then you got that white all-American Kansas boy or something, Bruce Willis, just doing what those damn white military guys always do. They want to round you up. And now they've got their reason to round you up, damn it. And they're going to take it. So, you know, also I was remarking in the chat before we went live.

That last standoff scene. Do I think the movie is good? Not really. No. There's plenty to discuss. in terms of the movie. I don't think it was good, though. I don't think it was well made.

I don't think it was well directed. I thought it was acted fine, but I don't think the script is good. That last scene with the standoff between the FBI agents and the military guys was a very sorry attempt at repeating the tension

of the 1996 excellent action film that we will probably do at some point, The Rock, by Michael Bay, which I say has the best military on military standoff. I say unironically, it is good. And Michael Bean, the goat of 80s and 90s movies.

It doesn't get the recognition he deserves. So that was a piss poor attempt to repeat the Ed Harris versus Michael Bean standoff from 1996. We just wanted to call it out because everybody was thinking it. But I wanted to send this back to you. I don't know if you looked this up, but in my little travels about this film, I was looking into the writer who goes by the name, Lawrence Wright. And Chris, it would shock you to know that Lawrence Wright is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning 2006 book, The Looming Tower, Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9-11. And I asked the machine to look up some additional context about this book, because I said, surely it's been a topic of conversation that the writer of the most predictive programmed predictive programming ever. ever made, who then wrote the tell-all about how 9-11 happened.

Surely people have discussed this before. And the machine was telling me basically that Lawrence Wright was very upset at how he had predicted all of these things. But the sort of cliff notes, the cliff notes version of this. Man, it really is disgusting. If you want to share my screen just to show people, this is a fun rabbit hole for anybody to go down. You know, look up the Pulitzer article, looming Tower.

Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9-11 by Lawrence Wright. I don't know who this is. I don't know if this is... Oh, maybe this is who nominated him or something. Sweeping narrative history. I like that. At least they know. A narrative history of the events leading to 9-11.

A groundbreaking look at the people and ideas, the terrorist plans, and the Western intelligence failures that culminated in the assault on America. Lawrence writes a remarkable book is based on five years of research in hundreds of interviews that he conducted all throughout the mid-year-old. least. And we are told, even in the context of the siege, the film, that Lawrence Wright has

many contacts within U.S. intelligence. So he was a writer for the New Yorker. I'm not familiar with him. I know that he's well known and was even well known in the 90s before this came out, became very well known in the wake of 9-11 as one of the key narrative setters in sort of the media apparatus representing the intelligence community. But that's a very well-known. the key right the writer himself is telling you that ah you didn't listen to my movie and what i was trying to tell you in the movie is that u.s intelligence is not powerful enough and they need more power over the american people they need to be able to get around the constitution otherwise some arabs are going to knock down these towers and i've been telling you and you know he says in

an interview yeah i only i only did a mass casualty event of 600 deaths and my movie. Little did I know it was going to be even worse than that. And, you know, it's really, it's really dark because that's when I said this movie's dark, because as you said earlier, you can understand how people in the Hollywood machine, in the culture, counterculture machine can earnestly buy into the paradigms being set at the time, just like right now. You cannot, not, in my view, look at a Lawrence right and think anything other than this guy is plugged in, this guy knew what was going on, and this guy was running an up, and laying the narrative in advance and in the aftermath, and it granted him retroactive, what's the word, retroactive verisimilitude

or sort of authenticity authority to discuss these things, because everybody could bring. bring him on to their in the wake of 9-11 sort of shows and pundits and all this kind of stuff and say, you know, this guy actually was talking about this stuff in the 90s. And one more point on it would be that I was reading a couple interviews with Lawrence write about his 2006 book in reference to the siege. And he was saying, well, the only reason I was so accurate in the script for the siege is because I was talking to all the guys in the CIA and the FBI who were telling me this was going to happen. And again, that is very dark because even if you take him at face value, they were basically telling him like, we're going to stage an attack on the United States.

And, you know, these are the reasons why. Yeah, nobody takes it that way. And of course, he wouldn't. Yeah. Yeah. It's always displayed like you're getting special inside information from the people who really know. And because Hollywood is a reputation-based social hierarchy, where everyone is trying to increase their reputation, using that system to do it all the time, you really deeply believe in inside knowledge. It's important to know what the people closest to the center of the thing think about the thing, right?

you don't need to pull the 99% of people around the outside. You need to dig your way through the 1% and through the 10th of a percent and the 100th of a percent and just keep digging all the way until you get to the middle. And so if you have people from military intelligence or from the CIA or from the government telling you, hey, here's the things that intelligence is looking at. Here are the things that we're worried about happening. Here are the likelihoods. Oh, this one, well, we don't think it's going to happen.

But boy, is it an interesting story. And the writer's like, yeah, man, that is an interesting story. And by the way, I would probably think the same thing. I definitely would have 10 years ago. Now I'd be like, come on, man. But 10 years ago, I would have been like, okay, yeah, I want to know what's going on. I've thought about these issues before. you're telling me, oh, that's what they really think.

Oh, wow. Yeah, that's good. Oh, yeah, I could write about that. And these writers get into that. They take these meetings, these interviews, they go out to dinner, they pick somebody's brain to get all these little, these anecdotes and the rest of it. You don't know that that guy's telling you exactly what's happening.

First of all, they're probably not because that's not what they're there for. That's not why they're at the meeting. But even if they were approaching the meeting totally authentic, and telling the truth as best they knew it the whole time, well, then you have to depend on them actually knowing the truth and not telling you a biased story. And you can run that exercise through every iteration of that, which kind of tells you something about the worthiness of bothering to dig through all those layers.

But that is what they do. And so, you know, it's all you need as a writer who thinks about these things is a few nudges in this or that direction, the understanding that you are ignorant enough not to know everything, but you're aware of that, so you want to take some advice so that you can really get your hands around the situation

you're writing about, but it really doesn't take that much. And you nudge a few different writers in a few different directions about these subjects, and you'll get movies like this and like, what do we do, Arlington Road, and I don't know what, some of the other movies that we've,

Zero, Dark, 30. Here's the official narrative history of these things. Yeah, that's a good way to frame it, actually, because it is important to consider. And it might be the more probable direction of these things, direction of intent. You know, if Lawrence Wright didn't know maybe he was engaged in propaganda, you know, it's actually a theme that bleeds into the siege

where a huge throughline of this movie, especially with the, is it Annette Benning character? Elis Kraft. Funny that her name is Kraft in the movie. She is a handler. Well, she thinks she's a handler the whole time, but actually she's being handled, and they're doing the matrioshka doll of handlers on handlers.

But, you know, I think we use that term handler a lot in the sort of fifth-gen warfare space, trying to figure shit out and figure out who's a white hat and a gray hat and a black hat and who used to be this hat, and then they put a different hat on. And somebody above them was a white hat, but now they're a black hat and who's handling who. But, you know, the real, the truth is that handlers, the most effective handlers are handling people that don't know they're being handled. Sure.

Like that should be obvious, but it's not obvious to a lot of people. A lot of people, I think, think of this and think like, oh, yeah, a handler. Here's my handler. Here's, like, who I report to at the CIA. So I know I'm being handled. But in the case of a- Here's my spouse. Here's my what?

I think, here's my handler. Here's my handler. Here's my spouse. How dare you. I'll let it slide for this one. Tell me to get you off. But a Lawrence Wright, that type of template, he could be, while he was literally reporting to handlers in the CIA, in the intelligence community.

But he thinks he's engaged in earnest. propaganda on behalf of an apparatus that means us well. And, you know, the truth is that a handler is trying to guide you into directions that you are not aware you're being guided in. That's why you need to be handled. Because if you weren't being handled, if you didn't need to be handled, you would just be reporting to somebody. You'd be working for somebody. The reason you're handled implies that you need to be doing something that you are not fully aware. that you're doing or at least you're not aware of what the end goal is of what you're doing and you know we see you wouldn't otherwise want to be doing it right exactly because you know if they

knew the truth of hey we're going to have you pen this propaganda piece and really start laying the groundwork for the increasing of our power uh and then we're going to attack the country to codify the narratives that you're helping to set uh and you know then you're going to help us codify those in the back of it because obviously if he knew and was a good person you'd probably come out and say like hey they told me they were going to do this and that's not good um yeah the whole uh i found annette benning's character to be they're all reprehensible in the movie but like that one in particular it was just like a weird just just kind of weird way they did all of that where she's just screwing this guy and she's got that like cool CIA uh sort of thing or she thinks it's cool um but

you know the whole the whole will they won't they but between her and denzil washington is like just such a such an on the nose ridiculous manifestation of the theme that they're trying to drive home here which is like we need the cia and the fbi to start fucking each other more um like it's just like that they've just got it right out there uh and hey we may not like each other's methodology but what we can all agree on is that we don't want that guy over there, Bruce Willis, to be in control. And, uh, you know, the whole thing again has this feeling. Like even when you look at the poster, you look at the, the intel operatives kind of sitting there. And then you got that, that jingoist in the, in the foreground. It's like,

they knew, unfortunately and truly that if they staged an attack like this and had a story ready to go, then the U.S. military, and I'm not talking about the president, because he was, was in on it, obviously. But I mean like the rank and file of the U.S. military, including the generals, well-meaning men, some of the best men we have, they're just going to attack like white blood cells on an infection. They're going to attack like junkyard dogs, whatever, whatever you give them the scent of. That's what they're going to do. That's what they've always done. And unfortunately, that was true. One of the, you know, we talk a bunch about. how often in these films a justification that they sell through emotional manipulation or repetition

or, you know, on the back of previous cultural programming, they have a justification that covers no matter what awful thing they intend to do in the film so that you accept the justification for doing the awful thing. And you do that many times over. many films over many years and people start developing that as a sort of morality and you know oftentimes we we talk about the justification well they were gonna they were gonna get their hands on the magical bomb or they were they were gonna go um preempt we we had to strike them because they were about to strike us or like we had to do this or that because another hitler was on the rise you know whatever they give you the worst possible thing and they say well we have to avoid that really awful thing

So therefore we have to do this less awful thing. The catch-all defense for everything that Denzel Washington and the Annette Benning character wanted to do is because they were defending the country. They were just so patriotic and cared so much about the Constitution and about the law that they were going to do all the things that they had to do. Now, Denzel was going to do everything totally above board. And then the Annette Benning character, she just had to bang everybody. And Bruce Willis even made a joke about that with the shake prophylactics. Very, very subtle condom joke in there. But they were doing everything for the sake of preserving the Constitution.

You heard in the big roundtable discussion where they get through the logic and morality of declaring martial law. Certain of the government officials were like, you can't do that because of posse comitatus. Bruce Willis is like, I'll just invoke the War Powers Act. And it's like you're playing like magic cards or something. Like, I'm throwing that down. I've got you beat here, sir. I've got this part of statutory law that says, yes, I can. I can defend the country based on this statutory law.

It's just funny to me, though, because they are defending the post-reconstruction. Constitution. It's always Constitution this and Constitution that. Well, it's not the original Constitution you're talking about. You're talking about the one that was already overthrown. And if you're doing whatever you want to defend the Constitution that itself is already a usurpation, well, you're just doubling and tripling down on the original usurpation. And it would be nice if we could take the moral and social credit out of that. Because that's not good and getting past that is part of that's like one of the hills we need to take before this thing is over well i used the term matriashka dolls earlier and uh it's it's you're kind of

describing a version of it there where you've got the software like the software of the matrix the rules the rules based international order etc uh and then they've got this like fallback rule set which is the constitution like they don't even like the baseline code of their system, which is a false constitution that you're pointing out, but they will defer to it as a backstop. Like it's this line of retreat. They're like, ah, God damn it. We have to like, we have to roll back the net code to, uh, to the constitution because like people are getting upset that we're breaking all the rules that we keep saying are important. Uh, and you know, we can't do that. So here, fine. Like here, you can look at the code base.

This is the code base we're using. It's like forensic analysis, but the forensic analysis is just pointing out a thing that's already wrong, but that exists. So, yeah, I mean, it's, and man, we are, we are far away from that, unfortunately. It's, it's pretty easy to discover when you talk to people in the so-called truth community. Yeah. And, you know, it's always based on the appeal to the authority of the court. The court has decided that this and that are constitutional. They have decided that these other things are not constitutional.

Therefore, we can only do the things that the court has decided are constitutional. It's actually not how any of it works. And each one of these people pledges their oath to defend, to uphold and defend the Constitution or whatever particular words are in any given instance. But it's that. It's not uphold Supreme Court precedent. It really isn't. Everybody's supposed to understand the Constitution for themselves and argue and defend that

understanding and explanation. The idea that the Supreme Court can just, by fiat, determine court precedent, and then that overrides everyone's collective understanding of the Constitution forever until the Supreme Court changes their minds. well, that's insane. Because if they've gotten it wrong once or even worse, overturned it and kind of baked that overturning into the system, well, then we're just screwed forever because there's no actual way to get back to the Constitution. If people don't believe their oath is to actually defend the Constitution themselves by what the Constitution actually says,

not the rest of it. And yeah, I'm probably fighting a losing battle in the short term on that. But I think that people will come to see rather quickly when the, and hopefully after this fake midterm and another couple of months, like once this next veil drops away and people are like, oh, wow, it really is like that, huh? Maybe we'll make some progress at that point. But yeah, it's a, it's slow trudging out there. Yeah, one of the most ridiculous aspects of what's going on in the second Trump era. It was going on in the first one, but the second Trump administration, forget the Supreme Court. I mean, it's absurd.

In my view, to think that Trump isn't intentionally exposing this stuff is ridiculous. But unfortunately, large swaths of his own base are not willing to kind of take the cheese on that. an example would be leaving the Supreme Court aside throughout 2025 and 2026 on kind of an accelerating pattern, whether you're talking about international tariffs, you know, trade deals, election fraud, you know, new laws and executive orders, all this kind of stuff. Random individual federal judges named like Pagit Rang dancer from, the district of you know Dorchester Massachusetts yeah yeah and some of their names are like more

retarded than that no I know I think it's one of them named Sparkle yeah yeah Sparkle I mean come on you've got you've got individuals just like being like no I mean you talked about magic cards and Uno cards earlier right like we shouldn't be focusing on Sparkle rain dancer as the villain we should be looking at guys how many Sparkle rain dancers can And by Fiat, as you said, individually make a decision that stops the president of the United States from doing something until her friends agree or disagree. Like, it's so absolutely absurd to defer to court systems in any respect unless you're talking about, and I'm not even saying I fully agree with this because I haven't spent enough time

thinking about it. But unless you're having a principled argument about a trial by jury template as our own John Drake would talk about it, which is a fundamentally different paradigm of jury by your peers, power in the hands of the people, whether or not that works or not, you know, we can get into. But to think we have anything resembling that is absurd. And it's totally crazy. You know, one of the one of the main things that I've been talking about recently and, you know, you've been talking about this for years, but I think it's, it's accelerating. Like it's the, the tension is amplifying. One of the things I've said in the lead up to the, to the midterms is to remind people and people get annoyed at John and I a lot for, for saying, you know, hey, uh, you know that Congress is right

now controlled by the GOP, right? Like, leaving aside fake elections, leaving aside like whatever you think about the Republican Party and elections being real or fake and are we going to get a red wave or blue wave and should we vote or not. Nobody acknowledges that the end goal in the best case scenario of what happens in the thing in November is the thing that we currently have right now. And if we get the thing we currently have right now in two months, we'll be able to do all the things we can't do right now because right now we have the thing that we want to have in two months. It's so fucking crazy, man. Like, yeah. Even trying to talking about dividend payments, which I think is interesting and funny and worth parsing in many

different ways, it reminded, you know, John and I last night were talking about the sovereign wealth fund that was blocked by Congress. It's blocked by Congress. Donald Trump already tried to do this in 2025. And I think he is doing it. We talked about that in terms of building a sovereign wealth fund, basically because Donald Trump doesn't give a shit what Congress is doing or what the courts are doing. He's just doing it anyway. But to think that like, our path to freedom lies through Congress or the courts is really dark and disappointing to think that that's the way things should be. And I'd go so far as to say, we need to start looking at that whole co-equal branches thing

and start asking some questions of, is Donald Trump trying to elevate the two other branches of government or is he trying to do something a lot different regarding that? the two other branches. And I don't have the answer to that, but I certainly think that once the 50th federal individual knocks down decrees by the president of the United States that we supposedly elected and has our mandate, you've got to start asking questions like whether or not the court system is good, you know, regarding this stuff. Yeah, the thing with the Congress is tough because because they are supposed to be the people who are, well, they're supposed to be our representatives in the federal government, the ones closest to the people and most directly accountable to the

people. Of course, that's impossible when you have fake elections. And it's impossible when you have congressional districts of the size that we are now dealing with. Like one person cannot possibly represent the needs of 750,000 people. And the fact that they're not there to do that in the first place, because the whole thing has been overthrown and we have fake elections. That kind of makes it impossible to do. The Trump 5,000 thing, I think, is interesting. You've got to wonder why he's doing that. I can't imagine that that's the sort of thing that's going to happen.

But I can imagine that that is the sort of thing that the Unip Party could come together in a bipartisan fashion and immediately push to pass like first thing when they get back in office. And while all Americans are celebrating their federal government money, that like J.D. Vance and AOC and whoever these Democrats are come together and they give them $5,000. Well, it's like, oh, yeah. Well, you remember who gave you $5,000? Now we have to impeach Donald Trump. And so, you know, Donald Trump comes out and says, hey, that $5,000 thing, they're going to try on you in three months.

Now everybody knows that's my thing. Now let's watch them do it. You know, so it's the one good thing that they might be. able to give America, Trump has already taken credit for. And I think he does, I think that model applies. I think he does that sort of thing. Yeah. Um, a lot. And he'll claim these things and people are like, what is Trump doing? Well, here's one thing that's never a good idea. Determining that you know what Trump's doing on the day he does it. Because it almost always proves to be something else eventually. Yeah. So we'll see what that is. And I guess we'll get the discussion on it. But J.D.'s been going out there,

touting socialism for the last few weeks. And, you know, there's another conversation to be had about what government's relationship to the people is in general, whether or not our understanding of these kind of collectivist ideologies is even sensible. We were taught these, taught about these ideologies in our state schools. Can we really take their definition of their own behavior between these little ideological brands and assume they are describing them correctly and that we don't actually have like the state and the corporate fused together, which is fascism. We don't have the state controlling

the means of production with, which is communism. We're told that these things are operating outside of the state, but they're not. Like this movie's a perfect example. They're like, we're protecting the American people's rights. No, you're not. You're not. You're not? It's one of the, this is a thought that I don't know if it's going to make a ton of sense, but it's one of the things I thought of during this, especially the bus scene relatively early on where you can see it coming and you've got this explosion that tells you these guys aren't messing around.

Like they're not here for some money. They're letting these kids out just so that they can show you that they're still. they still mean business. In the aftermath of that and one of the early lessons that the CIA operative basically imparts onto the FBI operative is the idea that these terror cells are or this this organization is basically testing, it's beta testing. It's it's measuring your responses. It's seeing what you do when they roll out X, Y, and Z operations.

That framework works perfectly fine for the literal plot structure of the movie. It's probably a real framework that they use in real life. But given that this is a piece of propaganda, I just took that and took the mirror of it and said, okay, now let's go one layer deeper into the matrix. When the CIA or intelligence, et cetera, is putting together the script for this movie, what they are doing with this and many other of their propaganda pieces, is the same thing that these terror cells in the kinetic sense that they trained and recruited are doing. So the terror cell is measuring the response of the U.S. military, of law enforcement, of the FBI, of the American people, of whichever city they're going to attack, right?

On a kinetic level, we can understand that. The CIA intelligence, the deep state, is measuring the people's response on a psychological level to this. reign of terror. How will they respond? What percentage of the country will be engaged in this operation psychologically? So I thought while they're literally talking about like kinetic terror cells in the context of the film, when you distill the film into sort of a paint by numbers, this is how we run psychological operations. This is how we run terror campaigns by U.S. intelligence. You start to see that they're also kind of telling you like, hey, you watching the movie, we're measuring your responses. We're measuring how society responds to these things. We want to see how many of you

would like the FBI to have more power. How many of you would like the CIA? How many of you would rush to join the military, which it turns out was millions of Americans in the wake of 9-11. And they're sitting there going, just like the terrorists on the bus, don't you worry, we've got an op for you to fall right into. We're just trying to map the lay of the land. So, you know, I thought it was kind of like layers of disclosure in this of how they really do do these things. Speaking of disclosure, soft disclosure. Court is now in session.

Your Honor, the defense calls Mr. Dry Skin, G, Money to the stand. We're going to pretend I didn't hear that. Mr. Dryskin, isn't it true that soft disclosure is proudly made right here in the United States while directly supporting six American small businesses? I reckon? Isn't it also true that soft disclosure is made with honest natural ingredients without the harsh chemicals so many people are trying to avoid? Unfortunately.

And isn't it true it's made with the help of adorable baby goats? Can't argue with the goats. The goat reminds the gallery that Lobstock will conduct themselves appropriately. Bless your flaky little heart, Mr. Dryskin. Your Honor, the defense would like to submit Exhibit A. Proceed. Cindy H writes, honestly, the best lotion I've ever used. Exhibit A is admitted.

Exhibit B. I use it on my face and hands, get compliments on looking much younger. Mr. Drake, I appreciate your enthusiasm. Not greasy at all. Clean feel compared to other lotions. Manila citrus has a nice light scent. Well, that is just showing off. Tyrone, right? I find myself hydrating my elbows and moisturizing my soul a lot more frequently now.

The defense rests. That old Tyrone. Yep. He's always out there somewhere. When they finally come for me, Chris. In the lepracon close? Oh, me. In the court.

Yeah. Like the newsies courtroom outfit. And you can say, your authority is unrecognized. As I'll say, thanks, man. I don't know if I don't know if I could wear one of those hats. I don't think that I ever have. It's been weird, you know. You'd think that with how often I saw those hats in movies when I was growing up,

I would have thought there would be more time spent wearing them, but it's been basically zero. Yeah, my brother tried that out for like a year. Wow, bold. It was fine, but yeah, I was like, I don't think it works, man. I bet those will make a comeback. Maybe it's going to be funny just one day on Badlands. I'll just show up wearing one of those hats.

Or I'll try to bring back the tri-corner hat and just wear that on these broadcasts. With a pipe, with a good pipe, I think it could work. Yeah, I just don't want to change too much into like that whole theme thing. The idea is to bring this old revered tradition back into the modern age. And people just see me rolling around in one of those like at the gym, for instance. indubitably. All right. Okay, so let's get back into some

the siege business here. And gosh, I was going to talk about one short thing and then a much longer thing. And the short thing had to do with what you were just talking about. But now that I don't remember, because we talked about self-disclosure, what's that? I was talking about them setting templates and testing our reactions.

Yeah, I don't know. remember. Let's, maybe we'll end up coming back to it at some point. So the scene where Denzel walks into the back, the bathroom at the stadium, where they have his prisoner, Tariq Hussein or whatever his name is, and come to find the CIA woman, Sharon, is, you know, she's giving the interrogation to this supposed terrorist who's stripped naked and tied to a chair. And they're discussing all the different ways

they might torture him. And Denzel is like, well, losing our humanity if we do this sort of thing. And, you know, a few years later, we had a public discussion about whether or not it was okay to do exactly those same things

that were mentioned in the movie. And Denzel, of course, makes the point like, what if this is what they want us to do? What if they want us to, uh, to imprison these people in stadiums and torture these people so that they can show the world, particularly the Arab world that this is what America does. It rounds your people up and puts them in stadium, in makeshift stadium prisons. It declares martial law so they can round all these people up. It tortures them for information and the rest of it. Well, here's the thing.

The people that Denzel and CIA lady work for can already show America that stuff whenever they want to, whether or not it's happening. And it's like that movie logic made so much sense 25 years ago. What if this is what they, this is what the terrorists want? If you videotape this. You videotape this thing right here and show it to them. Well, that means they win. The fact that we're even thinking about this means they win. It's like, okay, guys, give it a rest. They can, they can show that to the terrorists anytime they want, but the deeper problem is, and it kind of mentioned it in, not even kind of, it directly mentioned it in this movie when the Annette Benning character admits that she was showing the terrorists how to make bombs,

the terrorists that they recruited and funded. And so it's like, at which point do you just admit, hey, guys, it's all you. Yeah. I totally forgot about that scene, even though I just said before the break, the terrorists that they trained and funded. But yeah, even in 1998, they were saying this in the propaganda pieces

meant to lionize themselves. And yeah, like, you don't even. need to be a fifth-gen warfare, you know, internet expert to understand or to just look at what they're saying. It's like, oh, man, I got some red in my ledger and I'm on this crusade for personal, you know, atonement for doing all of this. It's like, you're the bad guy. I'm sorry, but you're the bad guy. And, you know, I've talked a lot on these shows about that I came up ignoring a lot of movies like this and I was really into genre fiction. But, you know, it is funny because while these things are dressed up in like the real world and kinetic events, it's all the

same crap that I was looking at in comic books and superhero movies and fantasy stuff and all this kind of stuff where, you know, there's this trend. I've kind of remarked on in the previous shows, but there's this trend of post-millenium heroes that are like anti-heroes. And I like them. Like I grew up liking anti-heroes, the Wolverines of the world. And, you know, even like Batman by the time I was a teenager was sort of vanilla. You're like, I mean, he's a little mean sometimes, but he doesn't even kill anybody. Where like a lot of guys in my generation were growing up being like Wolverine.

Like we got to do what you got to do. But a lot of the background of those characters is that they did all these horrific things. But as long as they're doing good stuff right now, you as an audience member can really like them. And we're supposed to root for redemption, right? And, you know, you look at stuff like very serious 1998 films like The Siege with Intel agents. And they're saying the same thing. They're basically like these are their comic, the comic book origin of Annette Benning CIA operative is that the tragic back. stories. She couldn't have known that those desert boys and those sand people that she was showing

how to blow things up. We're going to come over here and blow things up and all of the ways she intricately trained them to do. And now she must become a dark Avenger in order to stop them from doing the things that she told them to do. And to your point, you know, even by their own logic, you're like, which part of this, any of this would have just happened if none of you we're doing anything at all the whole time. And, you know, it's funny because when you ask that question, you get into a discussion we have every so often. And I think we might have last week, which is that, which is, you know, wondering just how bad

are people just on their baseline level, just how bad are, would you get a bunch of people together in a civilization? Like, how evil are they? when it seems like intelligence has to work really hard to make people do really bad things at least at scale, in an organized way at scale. But then again, you can look at the sci-op of all the cats and dogs that get eaten and all the horrible things that the immigrants do when they pour into any lands. I'm not saying that's not true.

I mean, I am partial to racism, as we know. But, you know, I'm just saying it's also an op. Both things can be true at once. Sure. Yeah. And even if it's just displacement in time, even if the immigrant invasion happened during the Obama administration or the 30 years prior to Trump coming into office or prior to 2020 or whatever it is, even if we are just being shown historical geopolitical realities in these short, condensed formats

so that everybody understands the stories because that's how we learn. Well, fine, good. Let's say that. And then you have, you're evoking a deeper truth by putting up a stage play on television. And to some extent, everything that's on is a stage play. And so that's the sort of thing that maybe you could be more understanding about and consider, man, it's really hard to not call that a lie. but I really understand that the world is a very complicated place. And there might be people trying to do their best with what they have,

thinking that maybe through this strategy we can get people's minds to come back alive. And I would suggest that maybe there's something to that. And if that's what all this is for, then fine. Do I think it's the best possible way that that can be accomplished? Probably not. But again, you know, what the hell do I know? I'm not the ultimate authority on these things. I just think that we should not go around like making excuses for people while they lie to us. If we yearn for the truth.

And if that's what people really yearn for, they have to demand the truth, not defend people while they're lying. But we don't need to get off onto that other subject. You can respond to that after this, but I did think I did forget to do one of the most important things, especially right now, which to mention, we are headed next week to Gart in Las Vegas. Patriots, the fight for truth doesn't stop at the screen. It's hitting the road again. Badlands Media is coming to Las Vegas, September 17th through 19th for the next stop on the Great American Restoration Tour.

Join your favorite Badlands hosts and like-minded Americans for three powerful days of unfiltered conversations with deep dive panels. Man, this is an emotional talent. Real debates and tough questions. No topic is too hot. No question too bold. Tickets are on sale now at badlandsmedia. Dot TV slash garden.

Can't make it to Vegas? Grab a virtual pass and watch from home. Question the narratives. Fight for America's future. Vegas is calling. The restoration continues. Get your passes today. We'll see you in Vegas, Patriots.

That ghost stuff is just good good. I mean, it's amazing that someone... I had to clarify, and it made total sense why I have to clarify this now so quickly, like, as opposed to last year. But that is not AI. It came to my understanding that a lot of Badlanders who were not in Vegas have been assuming that that whole commercial is Ghost is an AI ghost. Oh, no. No, that is real footage of Ghost in Vegas. 2025. That happened basically exactly as portrayed, except he was playing the Ramblin Man,

not the song that's in the advertisement. I also wanted to mention, guys, that we are doing an exclusive live stream tomorrow night, Friday night, 9 p.m. Eastern with as many panelists as can arrive before only lands for all in-person and virtual ticket holders to Guard Vegas. So buy your virtual ticket, badlandsmedia.tv slash events, you get access to that live stream. We will probably, you know, shoot the ship, but also talk about what panels we're going to do. And usually on those live streams, we take feedback from you guys if you want to weigh in on stuff you want us to do next week. That's usually how those things come together. And then one tidbit I was sent earlier is that on that stream, we'll be giving away $100 to the Badlands merch store to a ticket holder

at random. So virtual or in person. So, you know, get on that. Maybe I am going to watch the show and do everything I can to win the $100 gift certificate. So I can really... You're utterly powerless besides just having a ticket, Chris. It's entirely up to the gods who gets this. Well, I'm just going to have to figure out some way to hijack the system. Okay, so let's get back into the siege. The only other thing that I think would be worth mentioning, again, in that big roundtable, and I should say, the only thing that comes to mind worth mentioning, I'm sure there are many other things worth mentioning that I'm forgetting. But the big roundtable meeting, the president's guy, I don't know if that's supposed to be a chief of staff or something, but he's like,

we owe the president a consensus. Like, we all have to get together and be on the same page so that we can tell the president what he's allowed to do. Like, let's make this decision for him so that he can make this decision. There's such a, such a, such a weird thing right there. And then Bruce Willis, you know, he evokes the War Powers Act, which is not, I don't think, I think he's talking about the War Powers Resolution or whatever. But this is the, the legislation in like 1973 that balances who's allowed to direct where the military goes between Congress and the President.

Well, it's not the Congress. And again, it would be good. The Congress has certain ways of trying to bind the president's hands or restrict him in some way or to stop his behavior. And by the way, if he crosses the line in such an egregious manner and the people's real representatives are there in Congress, well, then they can come together and impeach the president. That's the check that they have on that system.

But instead it's, uh, uh, they defer to a posse comitatis and ex parte milligan. Like we're talking about, uh, we're talking about practice. Remember that, uh, Alan Anderson thing that always pops up my head, whatever I said, whatever anybody says we're talking about. Um, but, uh, this is, so this is reconstruction era 1878 is posse comitatis. that's on the heels of reconstruction in that brief period after. And again, I would encourage everybody out there to read our secret constitution by George P. Fletcher. He talks about how the Supreme Court, after the Reconstruction amendments were pushed through,

all of these various cases were brought to the Supreme Court. And there was an effort over the course of the next generation, the next 15, 20, 30 years past the reconstruction, where they were trying to get the Supreme Court to supervise the Supreme Court to support. cement the elements of the reconstruction into the law, into statutory law, creating court precedents, and the rest of it so that the reconstruction could be kind of this infection within the Constitution that would spread out to the entirety of the Constitution and throughout all the court precedent. So it's just, no, we've actually flipped it over now. This is what you have now.

And here we are 150 years past that. And we can see that this is exactly what they intended. And the system has gone forward exactly as they intended. And now we are in a system that is in every aspect, the inversion of what the founders intended with the Constitution. There's also just a little seasoning when they're mentioning all the acts and various power, superpowers that their Pokemon of the U.S. government has at its disposal. And one of them is the Logan Act. that they must not trip over that one. So they're going to be careful about it.

And that didn't become relevant until 2017, where it became the most relevant thing of all time. But they were telling us in 1990, you've got to be careful about that one, because they'll really get you. And I don't know why I thought of this, but it's probably because I'm retarded and strange. But I've said before,

I like Dragon Ball Z. I plan to raise my son on it. It's a very moral Japanese animation from the 80s and 90s about getting stronger and beating up other people. But I used to think it was silly. Like as I got older, I was like, you know, all these shows, there's a meme from Dragon Ball Z that you've probably even seen on the Normie internet where they say, this isn't even my final form. That comes from Dragon Ball Z.

And it was a cliche in Dragon Ball Z where the hero would be fighting the villain and he'd start to get the upper hand. And then the villain would be like, but wait, I didn't tell you, I have this other form I can attain to become 10 times stronger than you immediately. And then the hero would go, but I didn't tell you that I was also holding back. And as an 11-year-old boy, I was like, this is amazing. I could not never have guessed that he had another form beyond this one to make this show last even longer. So I could watch these guys fight each other. But it turns out that that wasn't silly, Chris, because that is what the government.

is doing. And we're like watching Trump just pantomime this stuff, which is probably part of the reason why there are so many Dragon Ball Z memes about Donald Trump. Because it turns out that as the government, whenever somebody calls your bluff on anything, you can just like invoke a new power and say, I have decreed the war powers act. And it's like, well, how does that work? You just say it. And, you know, Trump, to his credit, is just saying stuff. It's just the presidency. In the MMA world, there was a guy who used to run a podcast like 20 years ago in the MMA Dark Ages. And there was a segment on that podcast called Just Sayin' Stuff.

And it was usually just a weird kind of stupid thing a fighter said after winning a fight. And I often think of that when it comes to Donald Trump. Not because I'm calling him stupid, but because I think as we see Bruce, do in this movie and all these guys in very serious committees, et cetera, you can just kind of say something. And then if people buy into it, then it just is now. Right. So what's the War Powers Act? It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what it is. Donald Trump yesterday said that we, in two consecutive sentences, said that the Iran war is not a war and then referred to the war in Iran. So it's like he's just saying stuff and that's totally fine because it turns out that the bad guys have just been saying stuff the whole time.

None of this is based on anything except for things that other guys just said and then wrote down. And other guys said that the things those guys said makes sense. So now we say them too. But yeah, I mean, they can just invoke whatever powers they need to invoke. And then it's basically up to us whether or not they have those powers. guess well yeah ultimately it is and it has to be uh we do have the numbers i don't know that we will ever kind of come into uh our power which is strange because you know our founding mythology our american birthright is exactly that power and the ability to participate in our

system and we are we remain unwilling i think in a large way to to to really claim that and to embody that. Now, Donald Trump certainly does say a variety of things that are mutually incompatible. And so a lot of people think that he sells out at some point or that he's lying or whatever it is he's doing. And I think obviously that he's doing something more complex as to you. And I think that this is ultimately for a good purpose. And even if he is intending it for a bad purpose, it is still not ultimately.

his decision and it's regardless being used for a good purpose. But of course, that is up to to the people to take information and then use it for a proper purpose themselves, just like with anything else. And so whether Donald Trump is the good guy doing all of this for a good reason or whether he's a bad guy, just trying to dogwalk everybody into the Great Reset and have us all just applauding ourselves while the thing. that we want to oppose the hardest is marching forward while we're applauding. If like we should be doing the same thing either way, we shouldn't be, we shouldn't be

idolizing anyone. We shouldn't be cheering on politics. This is not ultimately the point of our lives. And it's not the path toward even our practical political salvation within this country. There are other paths and we should be pursuing those. But we can, I don't have to get in a soapbox about. that. One last thing I wanted to mention, then I can turn it over to you and you probably get toward wrapping up. They were monitoring Denzel. The military was monitoring this special

agent from the FBI. And that was something about the way that they presented that I thought was interesting because it was very clear that while they were monitoring him, they knew what his next moves were going to be so they could always head him off at whatever pass he was attempting to make his way through. And I just thought about how interesting that was when you have information dominance like that. It's not that you're predicting the future. It's that you know everybody else's plans and where they're headed and why they're going there. And you can begin to map out what the enemy is doing. You don't, like if you understand what their ultimate goal is, and you have a comprehensive view of what they're doing, where they're arranged,

where they're allotting resources and the rest of it, well, all you're doing is really connecting some very localized dots to get the complete picture. And so I thought we saw that pretty well on display here. Yeah, that actually kind of leads me to, I guess one of my final main points would be that there is, if you ignore the timing in which this came out and you ignore the predictive programming in the entire point of the movie and 9-11, the 9-11 of it all. And you just look at the framing of U.S. intel versus U.S. military. There is a through line in many of these propaganda pieces of U.S. intel and the deep state

in the American government really being worried about one thing in particular, and that is essentially a military coup. Like, you know, I think they use it in this. My earlier framing in this discussion is this was perfect set up, set up the Patsy. Who was the Patsy in this case? I would say the Patsy was not the Muslims. It was not the Middle East. It was the U.S. military in the context of this movie.

The Patsy was knowing how the dog was going to respond. So you can then say, look at that dog. We need to control that dog. Only U.S. intelligence and Barack Obama can control. that dog. So, you know, that's why we need this. But there's a, there's kind of a, when you're talking about information asymmetry, I mean, whether you're talking about key drops or Donald Trump or military plans, there is absolutely a through line and a theme of the last 10 years of the age of Donald Trump where people in this world, in the Badlands world, certainly

believe that there is a shadow war between elements within the United States military, largely, versus intelligence. And going back to the 90s, going back to some other things we've done, it's pretty clear that intelligence believed that that was going on as well. Now, whether or not that's the same thing, who knows. But the deep state apparatus, I think genuinely has always had a fear built into it of, What if we just get the public, the American public, in a mind state where they are just done with us? They're done with our bullshit.

They're done with the government. They're done with all in this. And what if in that sort of an environment, a certain guy is general. A certain guy is a combatant commander. A certain guy is the commander in chief. What then could that guy do? And that's why they've seeded all these different archetypal characters into these movies of, well, he'd be like Bruce Willis or Ed Harris or, you know, whoever. And we can't have

that, people. So if you ever see a future commander-in-chief or a future combatant commander kind of getting up on a soapbox and saying, the government has betrayed you, you will know that that is the bad guy and not the good guy who is actually here to liberate you. And that's the same template that has played out in many of these other countries that we talk about a lot that have been branded as Axis nations, that have had these coups. that have had these military uprisings by generals and military commanders, that we are then told are evil because they have kicked out, you know, Five Eyes Nations, U.S. intelligence, NGOs,

and duly elected, democratically elected leaders. So, you know, it's going back to the early days of the Info War, of this iteration of the Info War the last 10 years. There's been all this back and forth in this community of, are we going to get Blackcock helicopters? Are we going to get mass arrests? Are we going to get like the deep state as we think about them rolled up? And as silly as that can sound, they are worried about that.

They've always had a fear. Otherwise, they wouldn't do the propaganda. They might not think it's likely to happen. But I think they know that there is a break class in case of emergency that you might just get that one American, that one leader at some point that is like actually just just enough of all of this. And, you know, may history judge the results. Yeah. Yeah. We shall see about that.

I mean, it is, it is certainly possible. I think they also gin that stuff up, though that they can do the sorts of things like run these limited hangouts and then have like a Nuremberg thing for Fauci and a few co-conspirators or whatever. And they're like, oh, we took care of that problem. You know, we can trust the medical science community. community again. It was only five of them or we can trust the FBI, the CIA, or whoever it is, right? It was only this handful. It's not a big deal. So we shall see. I don't know. We're still waiting for that phase. And apparently we're getting another story tonight about how that phase is still marching forward, even when it seems like it is. Okay. I have a few quotes for rapid

fire kind of quotes. Oh, awesome. Awesome. Okay. We're interesting. So when Hubbard is very upset, he says everyone that has ever said a bad word about this country, I want to hear about it. So a little on the nose. This guy was on the terrorist watch list. How did he get into the country? That's an actual quote delivered by the CIA handler. I would maybe submit that he was on the terror watch list because the CIA was training him and funding him. So they also probably got him into the country.

you ever heard of catch and release is one of the first arguments the CIA operative makes after training the terrorists who attack us. So a bit of a humiliation ritual. I'm sorry you people don't have any work left in Russia, Afghanistan, or Iran. He says to the CIA operative, this was in the 90s, and as we did on a show two weeks ago, who was cleaning up Russia and Afghanistan in this exact period of time. That will be Vladimir Putin who ascended to his leadership role that year in Russia. And what did he do?

He kicked out the CIA, Western intelligence. He declared them enemies of the state in 1998 or 1999. And he sent the Spetsnaz into Afghanistan. So kind of interesting. Putin's always been on their race. radar. The little roundtable section you mentioned, I just thought was funny. One of the guys goes, who's behind this? Libya, Iran, Iraq, possibly Syria. So, you know, it's the same rundown we've got. And then one more, quote, he's one of the good guys. How can you be so sure? Because he was part of

the operation to destabilize Saddam Hussein with me. So, man, I mean, there's some of these things that, of course, at the time I'd be like, Saddam Hussein, bad. He bad desert man must get him. Even as a liberal, I knew that. But now I go, actually, he was one of the good guys. And the CIA did kill him, just like they killed all the rest of them. Yeah, it's funny, though, because from their perspective, like, he's one of the good guys. Means like, he did all of the things that we are supposed to do.

Like, he was totally on board with the program. So, yeah. Yeah, I also thought it was interesting that they had. Ariana Huffington in there as an analyst in the news clips. And she was the, uh, the woman who started Huffington Post in the early, in the late 90s and early 2000s. She was like a major kind of globalist female political figure. Yeah.

She would always be on these people. The actually girl. Yeah. So okay. Um, I know I saw at least, uh, one rant. Oh, there's another one. uh, Mrs. Rhea freedom fighter says always a great show, gentlemen. And thank you very much for that. And then, uh, Emerald Dragon 1333 said, sup fuckers. You're, you're live and I'm overtired on my damn near 24 hour shift.

So I'm going to bother you or maybe just this one rant. We shall see. Thank you both for your very in-depth and detailed thoughts. And thank you very much for, your Rumble Rant and I hope you get some sleep one of these days. We also had Snowcat gift a sub over during the show and the final demand gifted five subs. So we appreciate when you guys do that. It just goes into the whole company pot. So much appreciated. Thank you very much. Okay.

Oh, let me show you this headline. I thought it was funny in light of this. I saved it for tonight's show. This was published today by my favorite. favorite current propaganda outlet, the Atlantic. What Bush understood that Trump didn't? The leaders of the American right have embraced the false idea that the United States is at war with Islam. And I did subject myself.

That's not even Trump who's done that? No. I mean, it's amazing. But yeah, we're at the stage of Trump's arrangement where the media is now like, at least Bush got this right. And it's just, it's pretty funny. So if you want to subject yourselves to that, you can. It's also just hilarious that they, that they're like trying to pin this on Trump because this program would have run without Trump.

This is like in that second, this is in the non, like the anti-Islam thing is in the non-Trump layer. Yep. Yeah, totally. And that's exactly, that's exactly the point. So just if anybody's confused at what's going on there, they are saying Trump is. trying to gin up like a holy war against Islam. But to Chris's point, and as only Badlanders have been saying, not even all of us, but you've

been saying it, Ghost has been saying it a lot. The anti-Muslim thing going on right now is definitely not a Trump thing. It is definitely a right-wing thing, but it's not him. And that I just thought was an interesting closing of the loop because it's the first time I've seen lately anyway. the first time I've seen the other side of the controlled apodynamic also pushing that same paradigm. Yeah. The Atlantic is just the elite wannabe version of neoliberal, neoconservatism. It's Jonathan Chate is a neoliberal who is doing all the work in, I think he did like the

righteous mind talking about, oh no, that's Jonathan Haidt. Forgive me. Jonathan Chate is just a liberal writer. conflagging the two in my mind so he's been doing a comment trump's a communist pieces uh shape oh really well that's interesting that's that guy um all right my movie for next week we're gonna get weird we're gonna get weird on the way to Vegas we're going to do fear and loathing in las vegas this is a terry gilliam movie johnny dep and benicio del toro apparently toby mcguire i don't remember that um yeah this is a strange one uh an oddball journalist and his psychopathic lawyer traveled to Las Vegas for a series of psychedelic escapades. This movie does have the infamous to this community, adrenachrome scene.

There are many theories within the within the Pizza Gate world and the truth community about Hunter S. Thompson and Johnny Depp and all that kind of stuff. So, you know, we can look into that if we want to. But otherwise, it's a strange movie. It's a movie about Gonzo journalism. It's a movie maybe kind of spiritually about Vegas and some of this stuff. And yeah, there's an adrenochrome scene.

So I'm sure we'll find more in it. I haven't seen this in quite a while. Yeah, I haven't seen it in a very long time, probably 20 years or more. Okay, cool. Well, that'll be fun. And Terry Gilliam is very interesting filmmaker regardless. And we've done a couple of things. Brazil? Was that him?

Yes. And I believe that. that the imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus is also him. And we did Big Fish, didn't we? I think that's a. Yeah, let me know that's a, is that him? I mean, let me look. Now I have to.

Big Phippers. Is that, um, what's it called? So he's definitely Brazil and. Tim Burton is Big Fish. My bad kind of seems like a Terry Gillian movie actually. Fear and Loathe, 12 monkeys will probably have to do that at some point. Did I, I guess, oh no, there it is, the Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. And so yeah, we did that one as well. Yeah, so I guess we've already done two.

This will be a third. Cool. Anyway, I mean, I like Terry Gilliam. So that's awesome. This will be fun. Okay, everybody, go get your GART tickets. Go grab your soft disclosure. Thank you all very much for watching. Please hit the thumbs up on Rumble or YouTube on your way out. and we will be back here next week for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. 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.