Badlands Media - The Narrative Ep. 63: The Iranian Knot

Episode Date: March 23, 2026

Burning Bright is joined by Ghost to tackle what they describe as one of the most complex geopolitical and narrative challenges in play right now: the “Iranian Knot.” Building on recent discussions and analysis, the episode explores how the situation surrounding Iran is not a simple conflict, but a deeply engineered entanglement shaped by decades of energy politics, foreign intervention, and competing narratives. Burning and Ghost break down why Iran continues to sit at the center of both real world tensions and the information war, examining how energy, historical power struggles, and global influence converge in this region. The conversation moves between macro level strategy and narrative framing, including how escalation and deescalation can happen simultaneously and why what appears to be chaos may actually be a structured process. They also explore the idea that this “knot” was intentionally tied, making the process of unraveling it far more complex than most people realize. As the discussion unfolds, the hosts highlight the difficulty of separating truth from narrative in a rapidly evolving media environment, emphasizing that understanding the Iranian Knot requires both historical context and a willingness to question surface level explanations.

That's a hell of it. We were sleeping. I've been sleeping. I've been turning away from the truth I wanted not to face. There is a wound that won't hear at the center of the galaxy. There is a darkness reaching like rust. Into everything we want us. We let it grow. Now it's here.

I wish you good fortune in the wars to come. And now begins. No. Now it ends. What's up, guys? Welcome to The Narrative, episode 63, named this one the Iranian knot. And lately, I've just been naming the shows after the most recent article I wrote. And if that sounds a little effed up, it's my show. So, I don't know. If it bothers you, you should just deal with that.

But it's also relevant. Been writing about Iran the last few weeks. We've all been talking about Iran the last few weeks. Iran, Iran. I'm looking forward to this one being out of the news cycle, not because it's dumb and gay, but because nobody can make up their mind on whether or not, say, Iran or Iran. Iran is the correct way. But when you say that, you sound like you're being a liberal that's like it's pronounced Iran.

So everybody's annoyed at you from the beginning. But if you say Iran, the liberals are right and you sound like a real. retard. So I'll probably go back and forth. Often I've been mixing the two, sort of an Iran-Iran situation. Iran, I think, is what's been happening to me lately. We're all a little messed up from it is what I'm saying. We're discombobulated, in other words. But we are here tonight to disentangle or cut the Iranian knot. And I think we can do it. We're going to. We're going to going to talk about if you guys watched the Blitz from Saturday, Ghost and I were on the Blitz, which is on the Badlands Subsdack, Badlands.substack.com. It is free for all subscribers over there,

but it is exclusive to the substack. We sort of laid a little bit of an appetizer for this show. We talked about some of Donald Trump's the way he's navigating this stuff. Some of you may have seen. I'm going to call them out right at the beginning, because if any of you guys watch this show or any of my shows, and if any of you guys read my substack in particular, you will know that since 23, I have been referring not just to any scenario, but specifically to the Middle East, Iran, and Israel as the Kobayashi Maru of Donald Trump's era. I believe it is Donald Trump's Kobayashi Maru, the impossible task from Star Trek, the impossible test, the unwinnable test and that he is Captain James T. Kirk, and he has a way through the madness. There is a

narrow way through, as Paul Atrades would say. Trump looking a lot like Paul Trades recently, or at least sounding a lot like him. And these assholes over in the alt media, I've told you guys before, it's not the mainstream media that farms us for takes in the truth community. The alt media does, however, the intellectual dark web types who act like they know what's going on and they're not mainstream media, but they won't go out on a limb and say things that make them sound crazy. So Michael Evry of Rabobank, who's this big shot, alt media financial guru, said, you know, couldn't help get me thinking about the infamous Kobayashi Rue scenario, Kobayashi Maru scenario in Star Trek 2, The Wrath of Khan.

For those unfamiliar, we're all familiar, Michael. We're familiar because I've been blasting this from the rooftops and a little bit of a humble brag. people do actually watch Badlands Media, and they do actually read our substacks, to the tune of thousands of you, sometimes tens of thousands. So it would be different if we were just running these random little blogs. But these guys know where these talking points are coming from. And that is a very, very specific analogy to this scenario. You guys know where it came from. But I thought tonight it would be good to sort of discuss how that Kobayashi-Maru is,

is running. What is it? What is the end game? What's Donald Trump doing? And as is the case on this show, obviously I focus on the narrative and we will do that. First half of the show, we're going to talk about untangling the Iranian knot on both actual and narrative terms. How is Trump doing both? How is he doing one or the other? They are different theaters. And I do think this is a fusion. I think this is a convergence situation where there is an actual disentangle. going on, but I think there's also a narrative one going on. I don't think it's just one or the other. Some comments from Scott Bessett we can play tonight that hint at both of those scenarios. And the second half of the show, which we will actually get to this week. We've been teasing it the last couple times Ghost was on. We're going to talk about something he brought up a few months ago on the narrative, and that is the macro theme, one of the macro themes of the age of Trump, and especially as it relates to the Sovereign Alliance and the Middle Eastern Theater, the return of honor, culture. Ghost has been talking about this quite a bit on his own show and when we do shows together,

I think it's a great call. And we're kind of going to talk about how maybe the Iranian scenario and storyline is another on-ramp to this honor culture revival. It's actually something even General Koss talks about in terms of the age of heroes, hero culture, honor culture. It's a thing that's coming back and it never really died in the Middle East. So before we get to that stuff, I'm going to thank tonight's sponsors, starting with our main sponsor tonight, and that is our friends at Patriot Protect. We're in the middle of the worst stretch of data breaches this country has ever seen, and it's hitting right in the middle of tax season.

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And let me see if, I don't know if Ghost is alive. Are you alive, Ghost? Is everything okay? Oh, you're muted. You're muted, man. I'm muted. What's up, dude? Sorry, I was just getting some coffee. No problem. Yeah, what's up? How are you today?

I'm all right. You know, I'm just, I just feel like I'm in the middle of the Kobayashi Maru myself. And, you know, a lot of people pretending that they thought of that. But I brought you on because not only do you deal with narratives, you track a lot of the actuals. You look at a lot of the histories of these regions. And first half of the show, I want to talk about the Iranian knot. And I guess maybe that's a good place to start. Before we get into how these things are getting disentangled, I've got kind of my general conception of what I even mean by the Iranian knot.

But as somebody in your position who has studied this theater, even long before you were in the Info War in doing this stuff, how would you describe the Iranian knot? You know, not even what's going on right now, but just the lead up to this stuff from a geopolitical lens. I know you don't want to go over a century of history. But basically, well, you do. I'm saying we can't have you go over a century of history. But how do you think generally what is the Iranian not?

Why is this theater in particular such a hotspot in terms of both the actual and the narrative, specifically where it concerns the American perspective? Like, how does it affect, why does it affect us so much? And why is it such a big problem that Trump seems to have found himself in the middle of, according to the central narrative? Yeah, it's a really good question. And I can only offer you my take on it, but my take would be two things. And it really, one word, energy. That's what it all comes down to. And I think you're apt to point that out.

But the first would be, of course, the Persian Gulf. That's like the first major oil belt that was discovered. It was discovered, I believe it was 1907. I have the original survey map on my map of the British exploration expedition that discovered that. And then they created the company that was then bought out, I believe in 1914 by the government. And that became British Petroleum BP. And then the Mogaday, who's. ran for president of Iran in

1951. In one, he ran on the platform of nationalizing the oil, taking it back from the British, because very similar by the way to what Hugo Chavez was talking about in the 90s. He was saying, we're getting screwed. We're not getting any of this money. This money belongs to Iran, and the

British shouldn't be taking it from us. We're going to nationalize the oil. He nationalized the oil. The CIA goes to Eisenhower and says, this is unacceptable, obviously. We need to overthrow this guy and install somebody who's going to give this oil back. In 1953, Eisenhower approves it.

That was the first, I believe, instance of the president approving the CIA doing a color revolution, like an overthrow of foreign government. They do that. They install the Shah, who was not actually a royal. That was a dynasty that was falsely created in 1927. And they signed what was called the consortium agreement in 1954, which gave, formally gave all the oil back to Britain, back to BP. It was a 25-year agreement, so it was only good for 25 years.

And then fast forward to 1979, or really 1978, they go to re-negotiate and they're like, all right, like, let's extend. And because of what was happening in the 70s, namely the Yom Kippur War, the war between the Arabs and the Israelis, which resulted in the Saudis doing the oil embargo, very similar to what we're going through right now. the embargo against the West. Anyone who was supporting Israel would not receive oil. And people of a certain age may recall, like they would only give out gas, I think on Saturday, and you had to wait in like an eight-hour line

to get gas every week for a while. Kissinger is sent by Nixon. Well, two things happened that we should talk about. Number one, and this is according to Jonathan Pollard, who is that the American-turned Israeli traitor from the 80s who met with Mike Kaka-Bean secret. He says this happened and a number of other people said this happened. But basically Nixon said, we're not going to send y'all anymore weapons.

Like, this is ridiculous. Y'all need to shut this thing down Israel. You're taking this thing too far. Nixon was not sympathetic to Israel the way the other Republicans were. And the Israelis basically loaded up a nuclear weapon onto an aircraft and then taxied the aircraft onto a runway and then called up the White House and said, hey point your satellite at the runway and they looked at and they said you see that if you don't send us the conventional weaponry that what we need the munitions we need to fight this thing conventionally we're going to use that on iran or on the arabs or whatever um and so that of course the next day it was approved the nixon sent them all the weapons they needed um the other thing that happened was that nixon sent kissinger secretary of state to saudi arabia to negotiate with king fysel um and the negotiation basically became the U.S. would defend Saudi Arabia, would be its military, basically,

in exchange for Saudi Arabia selling all of its oil in U.S. dollars. In U.S. dollars. And that is the, that is the Petro dollar. We will talk about that more tonight. But I do think it's interesting that you, just laying that out in one sentence even, as you did with Saudi Arabia, like so many, including myself a few years ago, so many Americans that fancy themselves up on geopolitics, use the word petro dollar interchangeably, but do not understand what that means. You know, I think as a former liberal, the connotation of the word petro dollar, I think people think,

oh yeah, we're fighting foreign wars for the oil, right? That was a lot of the rhetoric of the Bush wars in the Middle East. Like, we're after the oil, but that's not what the petro dollar is. The petro dollar is much more literal than that. So for anybody not aware, as goes said, the petro dollar since that time period means that everybody dealing in oil in this region, in the Gulf region must denominate that oil in U.S. dollars. So whether that is the Chinese buying the oil, the Russians buying the oil, the Indians buying the oil, Axis or allies, however you want to look at these nations for the last 50 years, have been forced to purchase the oil in U.S. dollars.

And now that might sound like, well, who cares? they'll just convert it to their own currency after. So to not be condescending about this, but it's very important to get this point across, the reason that's a big deal is because if Russia needs to buy the Saudi oil in U.S. dollars, what does Russia need to buy before they buy the oil? U.S. dollars.

How do foreign countries buy U.S. dollars? They invest in the U.S. treasury bond market. U.S. Treasury bonds are trash. All treasury bonds are trash. They have underperformed every asset, every real asset. You don't even have to go to Bitcoin. The S&P 500 has outperformed government bonds for the last 50 years since all this stuff. Why have government bonds stayed afloat?

It's not because of your 401ks. It's because of the rest of the world buying Saudi oil using U.S. dollars. So I just, I want to keep going, but I think the petro dollar, like there's a, it's one of those geopolitical buzzwords. And I think those buzzwords sometimes can just go in one year and out there. They're like, yeah, yeah, oil and dollars. I get it, I get it. No, no, no. It is the key, one of the keys to you guys following some of what we're going to talk about tonight.

And a lot of the research I've done in the last couple of years has led me into a much greater understanding of what the petro dollar is. and how there is no way to disentangle all these things that are going on in the world. And Ghost and I talk about the sovereign alliance more than anybody else. If there is a Petro Dollar, there is no sovereign alliance. One cannot exist without the other. So I just think that's important to drill down there, no pun intended. Because, again, a lot of people do not know what the Petro Dollar means. And it's very literal.

Yeah. And the really sick part is I think Kissinger came up with that. And it was actually kind of taking something and twisting it because apparently the term petro dollar already existed before that. I forget the exact circumstance that created the or the exact conditions that created the circumstance. But I remember digging into this. And prior to 1973, there was a term called petrodollar. But what it referred to was basically people buying oil. And basically it was a deflationary thing.

because U.S. dollars were being taken out of the market but never used, I think is what it was. I forget the exact conditions. I have to go back and scrub up on it. But prior to 1973, Petrodollar meant deflationary. It was a deflationary thing. It actually increased because it was taking dollars out of the marketplace and out of circulation, which is like the opposite of inflation. And then once the petrodollar was formally introduced under Kissinger, which is the term he used to coin that deal that was cut, that like you said, every single buyer of oil is forced to hold U.S. dollars, hold U.S. treasuries.

And that, of course, led to the hyperinflation of the U.S. dollar because they just started printing money, especially after 2008 with quantitative easing. And another point there goes, that's the bad side of it, of that it led to this hyperinflation in certain areas of the economy. But the reason they got away with it for so long is that the good part of the petro dollar is that it is solely responsible for the U.S. stock market being the juggernaut it is. And people don't understand that. This was a new learning for me last year of really digging into Scott Besson's history, who will also talk about tonight. the main purchasers of the United States stock market are not Americans. They are foreign governments. So a lot of people even in this audience think like, oh, you know, American pension plans and American unions and whatever are kind of buying these 401ks and that's keeping the stock market afloat.

The float in the U.S. stock market, especially like the Mag 7, it's China. Chinese oligarchs and the Chinese government for the last few decades have invested directly in the U.S. stock market because they're forced to buy U.S. dollars via oil or trade in U.S. dollars in terms of their energy trade. So where do they park those U.S. dollars? They park them in the U.S. stock market.

So it created this feedback loop where the government and Trump does this same thing where they're like, look at how high the S&P 500 is, despite the real day-to-day economy being trash. The reason that is the case is because Americans are not the ones inflating the U.S. stock market. Everybody around the world is inflated in the U.S. stock market because they're looking for a place to park their U.S. dollars. And what better place to do that than in U.S. companies?

So that's the weird thing where Silicon Valley's valuation, it's not based on the unions. It's not even based on your 401ks, and it certainly isn't based on retail investors. It is based on China, the government of China, investing in Silicon Valley because that's where they think their money is safest. So, again, that gets us a hint as to why I call this the Kobayashi Maru. It is a very difficult not to untangle, and it's not, in my opinion, it's not just because of the geopolitics. The bigger thing to untangle is the petro dollar itself. Probably the most difficult thing to untangle.

Yep. And yeah, so to round out the history, you know, Kissinger comes back. At this is, at this point, we're in 1974. Kissinger comes back. This little thing called Watergate was happening. And because of that, he resigns. And he goes, oh, oh, can't do it. Like, oh, disgraced.

but he had actually told in 1971 he had told his one of his he had two protege he told one of his protégés in 1971 hey I need you to go to Europe and organize all the elites into a group and like you know like a transnational like a super super governmental

group you'll understand why soon that was Klaus Schwab and he created the World Economic Forum and then he told his other protege to go organize the elites in Japan Europe in the United States into another supernational, supergovernment organization.

And that was Zabigny Brasinski, who created the trilateral commission. And between those two groups, among others, that's really where like the whole globalist plan, Agenda 21, Agenda 2030, all spun out of that stuff. That's when you got like this proliferation of think tanks. You got a proliferation. Because again, 1971 is another important year because that's when the communist took over the Republican Party. the Trotskyites took over the Republican,

Irving Crystal and all his friends. All the Jewish intellectuals from New York City took over the Republican Party. And the Republican Party became a Bolshevik party, which nobody understands, but that's the real history, is that the Republican Party was taken over by the Bolsheviks. But it was the war-mongering Bolsheviks. You had the cultural Marxist Bolsheviks

and the war-mongering Bolsheviks, and basically the war-mongering Bolsheviks became disenchanted with the Democrats under Kennedy, because Kennedy was pushing for peace, and then they had the hippie movement and all the liberals became very anti-war. And they're like, well, that's bullshit because Trotsky said that we needed constant warfare to fuel our engine of communism. And so we're going to rebrand ourselves as new Republicans, new conservatives, neo-conservatives.

And that's where all that comes from. Which is something of the opposite of a conservative, wouldn't you say? Yeah, exactly. This new thing. It's not anything like the old thing. But those guys were life, they were all lifelong Democrats. They're all lifelong communists. Like, it's really important that people understand that. And they became, like, the most important Republican thinkers in the 90s. Bill, Bill Crystal hired Tucker Carlson. Like Tucker Carlson used to go on Fox News and just like completely crush Pat Buchanan for opposing Israel back in like 1999. He was a neocon. Like Tucker Carlson was. But it's also important to understand that the guy on the, the guy on the, other side of the table from Kissinger, Faisal, King Faisal, he wasn't nefarious necessarily. Like people might think, well, he was trying to screw us. No, no, no. He was really good friends

with JFK. JFK actually gave him a bunch of advice when he was crown prince, a bunch of things that he should do in order to make Saudi Arabia great. And he did all those things. Right after JFK was killed, he seized power and basically made his brother resign, step down. And then he became king. And then he, implemented all those things, abolishing slavery, health, like free health care, taking all that oil money and investing it in the Saudi people. And that kind of started a trajectory that I think MBS has picked up on because the year after Kissinger and Faisal negotiate the petrodoll,

Faisal was murdered by his nephew who had just come back from a long trip to Virginia, which is where the headquarters of the CIA is. And the widespread speculation is that the nephew was basically brainwashed and, you know, M.K. altered into killing his uncle. And I would buy into that. So getting back to Iran, though, the 70s, you very, very unstable economic times. Anyone who lived through it will tell you about how shitty it was, stagflation, all that.

But the price of oil went up. Price of oil went up a lot. Iran made a shitload of money. They built some nuclear facilities. And I think the Shah was feeling pretty cocky. And so when they came back and they said, hey, let's renegotiate this deal, extend this deal. he was like, eh, go fuck yourself. No, we're not going to, we're not going to renew this consortium agreement.

And the British were like, really? Okay. Cool. Hey, CIA, CIA, 1978 declassifies all the documents, a 25-page document that, and then releases it to the Iranian press that tells the Iranian people, hey, we installed the Shah in 1953. We have the Americans. Your government's completely fake. It's not yours. It's actually ours. We own him.

puppet. CIA devolution. Yeah, yeah. And then, of course, they went and dressed up as the Savak, which was the Shah's like personal police. They went to a movie theater in a big city with 500 people in it, chained the doors shut. They made sure everyone saw them do this.

Poured jet fuel in the building, lit it on fire, killed everybody inside, women and women and children. And then that's what got everyone out on the street in like, enough's enough. The Shah's got to go. And then, of course, they flew the Ayatollah from Paris, who was living in Paris in luxury, on a private jet. I think it was CNN who was on the plane with him interviewing him, being like, what's it feel like to be the new leader of Iran? So, you know, the Ayatollah was installed just like the Shah was installed. It's like, yeah,

and we were selling them weapons, by the way. And by the way, we gave, like, he gave the British back their oil. And the rest is history. And, you know, there's just, there's just like a bunch of bullshit where people were like, oh, well, the Iranian revolution happened. And like, and, you know, now it's a sovereign state. I don't know if it's quite that simple. But, yeah. So Iran and Iraq spend the entire 80s pounding the shit out of each other while Henry Kisner and his buddies create a fake economy in the U.S. You might remember like Gordon Gecko, like Reaganomics.

Yeah. So basically we transition from a manufacturer-based economy from like World War II to a speculative financial-based economy, a consumer economy, where we basically just speculate and gambling. and gamble on the stock stock market and everybody gets rich, but you're not actually producing anything. You're not actually making anything. Your economy is just all smoke and mirrors. It's not anything real. Exactly. Yeah.

That's a great setup for this stuff, more than a setup. I mean, that's some of the stuff I wanted to talk about anyway. So we already got some of that out of the way. But I think it's, the reason I think it's good to set things up that way is, again, I named it the Iranian knot. That's nothing new. A lot of people can understand generally that this is a very complex geopolitical problem. right but I think some of that history going back to the 70s I know a lot of this audience knows that you don't end up in the conspiracy world or the truth community without at least having heard of a CIA overthrowing the Shah and all this kind of stuff or installing rather both to your point they install and then they overthrow it depends on which day of the week it is that's even pop culture like that that was so obvious that pop culture openly talks about the CIA in Iran and everything from the 70s. They weren't necessarily doing that at the time. And some of what

you talked about there, too, including the Iranian Revolution, that's a good example of narratives being used to massage actuals into the mindscape, right? So you've got the actual situation, which is this regime change, color revolution, engineered entirely from the ground up by the CIA in Western Intelligence, British intelligence. But the story, when you ask, a normie even if they have heard of the CIA's involvement in Iran if you ask a normie especially from that era like you said what happened in Iran in the 70s what's the first thing they're going to say they're going to say the Iranian Revolution right yeah they're not going to say the CIA you know if they're pretty savvy if they've been

around if they went down some rabbit holes they might get to the CIA as like a chapter in the story it they weren't able to hide a lot of that from pop culture. It did seep into the collective mind, I think. And a lot of that was because the 70s were really, as Chris and I even kind of increasingly find out by delving into 70s movies. By the way, this week we're doing three days of the Condor on Story Hour. The 70s film is synonymous with paranoia. There was a national feeling of paranoia. And part of that was about international parties, but you don't have paranoia if you're feeling really good about your national position, even if you think there's baddies out there. Paranoia comes from fear from within.

There was a schizophrenia that started to take effect in the 70s, and I think a lot of that was provoked or kicked off off the back of the JFK assassination. But the 70s is really when we had all these regime change. We had the School of Americas in South America, all this shit going on at the same time, where the CIA and Western Intel just went fucking nuts. Or just went hot, I guess. They went really public after they took JFK out. And, you know, a lot of your research, a lot of your stuff over the last few years has gone into all those different theaters. We've been talking about South America in January and February before pivoting to Iran. Next up is probably going to be Cuba as we're getting that laid out. But I think one thing I wanted to say that I sort of teed this up on Saturday on the Blitz is the reason I think it's important to talk about this as the Iranian knot to be as blunt as possible and as simple as possible.

A knot is tied. A knot is engineered. A knot is something a human being puts together. It is not something that just happens. And the untangling of it is what I refer to as the Kobayashi Maru. And I instinctively did that in 2023 is when I used that framing. That was in the wake of the October 7th attacks, the October 7th narrative. The reason I referred to it as the Kobayashi Maru at that time was more about the story.

It was more about the narrative, not the actual. I knew way less about the Middle East than you do. So you know a lot of the actuals of what would need to be done to disentangle these issues in the Middle East. But even at that time, I had picked up on the narrative of disentangling the U.S. from the Middle East and the Middle East from each other is incredibly difficult to untangle. And you kind of teed this up. But if you want any evidence of that, our community and the MAGA world is actually a pretty good indicator of just how damn complicated. complicated this not is and how carefully Donald Trump must tread because until the Israel-Iran narrative really went hot in 2023. As a former liberal, I had said on these shows going back to

2022, I have never seen a community that is so open about the sort of discussions that we need to be having in this country, right? It felt like it was very freeing for former liberals like myself and Chris Paul coming into the truth community coming into MAGA being able to talk about your liberal values you know getting on the Trump train realizing where you'd gone wrong most conservatives in our audience would admit that they got bamboozled by the Bush regimes right so like there was a lot of maya culpa going on in the American mind and MAGA really became a symbol of that until 2023 and in In 2023, certainly the former liberal in me, and probably a lot of you guys realized after October 7th, oh, a lot of MAGA still has quite a bit of programming in their psyches from the 70s and 80s that ghost kind of just laid out. And I think that's a good place to kind of lead things, is that on an actual level, we can talk about how you have to disentangle these things.

But on a narrative level, it's almost even more difficult for Trump, I think, to navigate this whole storyline because if he's too hard on Iran, the entire liberal mindscape sees it as warmongering and like you're just a Bush neocon. And I know people in this audience don't agree with that. I'm talking about the mainstream perspective is the optics. It, as we've been saying on shows in recent weeks, optically, the central narrative looks, in MAGA right now, looks patently absurd to the liberal mindscape, right? They are playing side-by-side videos of Donald Trump literally running a campaign on not doing what we are told he is doing right now. This is a disconnect in this audience sometimes. I am not telling you that's bad. and many of you believe it's good that Donald Trump is doing what he's doing, and ultimately Ghost and I think that Donald Trump is doing a lot more than people think,

and that it's a good thing. But from a central narrative perspective, Donald Trump is emphatically losing the story at the beginning of this stuff with the liberal hive mind because he said he was not going to do this, and then he did it. So it's like it's it really is that simple to a lot of Americans. And I do think he's untangling stuff here. I do think there's a reason we had to do all of this.

And I do ultimately think the story will be good for Trump and the MAGA base. But I think on the other end, and you deal with this a lot, you have really kind of put your feet in the fire. You've thrown yourself into the fire the last couple years on this topic. So I just mentioned the liberal high mind. that has PTSD from the Bush regime years and is like, Forever War in the Middle East, get the fuck out of here with that. We don't want that. You're just another bushy.

Turns out a lot of MAGA are bushyes. And I've been telling you guys this since 2022, because if you get drunk with one at a bar, they will start spouting neocon nonsense about glassing the desert. Or if they've served in the military, you're seeing a lot of that right now. A lot of military MAGA are like, yeah. It's like, hold on. Aren't you guys anti-intervention in the Middle East?

you want a glass of desert again? Okay, I get it. But Ghost has really put his, his, uh, himself in the fire where it comes to the conservative mindset. And the conservative mindset that Trump has to disentangle is the exact opposite. And that is that they want to be entangled in the Middle East if it is on behalf of our greatest ally of Israel. And again, I'm not saying we have all the answers here, but I think the reason this is the Kobayashi-Maru for Donald Trump is that this, you could argue that outside of his core, core base, including us, that really think there's a lot of method to Donald Trump's madness, from a normy perspective, conservatives have a right to be absolutely furious with him right now, and liberals have a right to be absolutely furious with him right now. and he friggin, he just laid it on the table and he's going into the fire and I think they have known this whole time going back however long this was going to be the toughest narrative to navigate and the one where they're going to take a lot of the slings and arrows. But I wonder what you think of that. Again, the narrative disentanglement that he's having to weather.

Absolutely. And it's really important. I mean, I said this to Ash on one of the shows that we did. it was either one of those Tuckabee shows or maybe it was the choice that we do every week. But most of the content that I produced at Badlands has really actually been surprisingly tailored towards Christian Zionists because I view them as the most heavily sciopped group in the world. I think they are the most heavily sciopped group out there. And you can expand that, you know, there's layers tall to that group, that demonstration. graphic, but it's, you know, it's 40 million, I think. Last, last figure that I saw. It certainly

makes up a lot of the core of the MAGA base, the populist movement. Outside of that one issue, very based on like all the other stuff, right? But that one issue, there is, there is a very specific mindset that has to do with dispensationalism and the Schofield Bible and all that. That's its own little rabbit. We don't need to go down right now. But do you want to laugh really, really hard? Share my screen. I'm going to because you already. Okay, but share my screen because I'm going to make you laugh really hard, I think. Chuck Norris, I think died today, is that, or yesterday?

Yesterday. I think it was yesterday, yeah. RIP, Chuck. Yeah. So the first instance of any mainstream Hollywood film using a Muslim terrorist as the bad guy was this movie right here called Delta Force. Oh, my God. A 1980s American Action film starring

Chuck Norris. This is where it gets even funnier, though. Chuck Norris and Lee Marvin. It was inspired kind of by some real events. In 1980, Operation Eagle Claw is aborted after a fatal helicopter crash. And if you don't know what Operation Eagle Claw is, that was in 1980,

Jimmy Carter tried to send in this new group that had been created, Delta Force, into Iran to try to save those 52 hostages that were taken. hostage right during the Iranian revolution and these helicopters all crashed and like eight of them died and it was a catastrophic failure and that was one of the things that like Reagan used against Carter during their their their during their campaign and then of course Reagan comes in and the hostas are all immediately released and a lot of people speculate that was already negotiated that was

already in the books before but if you go back to this movie five years later in 1985 a group of Palestinian terrorists hijack American travelways, airlines, flight 252, Boeing 707 flying from Cairo to New York City via Athens and Rome. And basically what this movie does is it says the Palestinians and the Iranians are the bad guys. It's a bunch of Jewish passengers on this plane. And then it is the Delta Force working with the IDF, working with the Mossad and the IDF together that saves the day. It basically communicates to the American public that, hey, the IDF, like Israeli special forces, they're badasses. These Delta Force guys, they're badasses.

And these Palestinians and these Iranians, I mean, these are the real bad guys. There is a sequel made to this movie, just to take this a little further. And this also started Chuck Norris. This is called Delta Force 2, the Colombian connection. And this is where Colombia. It's so on the nose. Yeah, and it's like Columbia and the drug cartels and cocaine. And by the way, if you don't know that history,

the Israelis were actually like sending weapons nonstop to those guys and they were all using almost exclusively just as rarely made weapons and colonel tanner walkins has done a lot of the actuals on that i've seen the research where the i think it's the israel weapons israel weapons industry the iw i was the company um but it makes all of those all of the weapons that the idf uses and a lot of these cartels were using them as well um and then there actually a third one made called Delta Force the killing game and this brings in the Russians the Spetsknotts. And so now the Spets Knots are working with the terrorists, right? Working with the Muslims and yeah and I think the setting might be Miami. I don't know anyway these might be some fun movies to explore on story hour but yeah what this does because this last one comes out in 91 this sets up for the 90s and really moving forward that all the mainst Hollywood movies, I don't know what the saying is, but it's like the Russians, the Muslims, like those are all the bad guys, right? The Russians, the Muslims. Yeah, yeah. It's like,

yeah, one of the mustacheed men, right? Yeah, one of my, one of the, what's it called, Righteous Russia articles, I think it was part one, which was the second one I wrote, but it's called the three store. No, no, no, it was after that. I think it was part two, where I kind of go into, Vladimir Putin and some of his history. A big part of that article is talking about the programming into the Western psyche of the prime villain of the last century, and that is the Russian. And, you know, people might think that's counterintuitive because they're like, well, what about the Germans in World War II?

Well, what happened after World War II? We're great allies with Germany, right? Germany's like the heart of Western power projection in Europe until they had. no power projection, but, you know, we've been good with Germany since the 50s and very good with them, again, according to the central narrative. So one of the ways I had framed that back when I wrote that series was that from a writing perspective, the Russian has been the preeminent, long-running threat. So if you're writing a, if you're writing like a screenplay or a three-act structure, and I mean three act in terms of like three books, a trilogy structure. The way you

tend to write those is you've got your flashpoint villains of each act, but then you've got a prime arc, they call it, but a prime villain arc that threads its way throughout the entire narrative. They tend to kind of be in the beginning. You don't know how big a threat they are. Maybe there's even some direct confrontations with the hero from the prime arc. but they are kind of behind the scenes. You usually find out you think there's a big bad that the hero is going to come up against or the alliance. And then when they defeat the big bad, they find out there's somebody else behind the big bad. In the Marvel movies in the last 20 years, it's Thanos, right?

You had a movie against Loki. Then you had an Avengers movie against Ultron. Then you had this, then you had that. But all through all of them, there was these whispers of like, there's this guy behind the scenes. And even the villains are afraid of him. The Russians have been that. They've been threaded throughout World War II, after World War II. Remember, as we pointed out on this show, when you've joined me, the Allies were not, they didn't want to call the Russians allies, even though they had an awful lot to do with defeating the Nazis in World War II.

It's just like, when you play Axis and Allies, you don't really deal with the Russians a whole lot. You don't think of them like you think of the Brits and the French and, you know, afterwards, the Germans. But so that's definitely been a prime narrative. And one of the other ways I framed that in that series was the war that was promised. The long-running war that was promised by the deep state, by the central narrative, and even programmed into the Western psyche, was the war with Russia. I really believe that was meant to be the final war. They were obviously seeding it in the 60s with JFK. They tried to get that shit going.

JFK and Akita Khrushchev found off ramps from that. I think we're going to get reruns of that with Trump and Putin. The 70s, to your point, they had the Soviets bubbling in the background. The 80s is really where they brought the Soviet boogeyman out of hiding. And it became the prime narrative war. was the East versus the West, the Russians versus the Americans. And to your point in the 90s, they kept that shit going. And I really think it's only been through the engineering of people like Putin that we have actually avoided that.

And then last point on that would be, as I've said on the show before, part of my awakening as a liberal before I became MAGA was the understanding that, hold on, it seems like Obama and the Clinton regimes really want us to get into a war with Russia. and Donald Trump was highly critical of that stance. So it really has been this macro theme threading its way underneath everything. And it's kind of interesting because when we come back to Iran in the Middle East, you've been talking about this on recent shows. Well, going back a couple of years.

But we've kind of been looking for what are the main on-ramps to these Sovereign Alliance peacemaker storylines we've been talking about for a few years. And it might not be this one. But if you did want a common thread here, you're looking at Iran and the Western hegemon, and then you're looking at how Iran connects to Russia. And it really is this flashpoint right in the middle, both actually from an energy perspective and narratively from an East-West perspective, that's part of that Kobayashi-Maru in my kind of framing, is, okay, if you want to disentangle us from Iran, you need to know. what the Russians are going to do.

If you're the Russians, you need to know what the Americans are going to do. Otherwise, you've basically one or the other of you are going to have to keep influence in this region. Yeah, I mean, I still remember Air Force One. I think I saw it maybe in theater. I was like 10, like in fifth grade. My dad really wanted to see it. And I think he was watching the kids that night. And so he took my brother and out to go see it.

And yeah, I mean, that was Harrison Ford is the president, right? the Air Force One is taken over by neo-Soviet Russian terrorists led by Gary Oldman. And it just reinforced this idea of like, even though we're six years removed from the collapse of Soviet Union, the Russians are still the bad guys. They're terrorists. They were seeking a nuclear weapon. I think Kazakhstan was like the home base of the story plot. So yeah, I mean, it's like this just and it just continued on and on and on and then you got shows like Homeland and you got, I mean, all of it. It just kept re-end, and all this is cultural.

It's all storytelling. Storytelling to be like, this is the bad guy, this is the bad guy, this is the bad guy, this is the bad guy. So that when the news starts reporting on this stuff and talking about like very real war is happening or, you know, whatever, you're like nodding along. You're like, well, this is, this makes sense. I've seen this in so many movies. Of course, these people look like this. But you go and you look back at it and you're like, what is the first instance in our culture of like an Islamic terrorist being introduced? to us like, oh, it was actually like Hollywood who taught us about this.

And before that, it was a book written by a guy named Benjamin Netanyahu before he became a politician, literally just a book. I think it was just called terrorism, where he was explaining to the Western audience what a terrorist is and made it synonymous with Islam. So again, these are just layers and layers and layers of siops. So, but let's fast forward because like let's fast forward to the Trump administration, because I think that's where the story gets really interesting. And Matt Arritt has really interesting, my co-host on Breaking History, has really interesting research he's done where he suspects that at some point, like 90s, 2000s.

In his estimation, he thinks that Iran regained its sovereignty to some extent. I mean, one thing they never did, and he may be right, he may be wrong, I don't know. But he points to a lot of like the cooperation that was happening between Iran and guys like Assad. you know, Sanamu, like not Sanamu's saying, but people who were considered like verboten. They were considered like persona non grata by the uniparty. That doesn't necessarily mean that the person is, in my opinion, that they're sovereign. But I don't know. That's Matt's theory.

But what I can look at is I can look at what happened during the Trump administration. Because let's start here. Where are we right? I want to share my screen. So this guy, Ibrahim Raiisi, this is the president of Iran from 2013 until 2020 until, what is it, 20, 21. The president of Iran from 2021 to 20, no, no, that's Raiisi. I'm looking for Rihani.

Rani, this is Rihani, Hassan Urani, from 2013 until 2021, he is the president of Iran. Now, you'll notice looking at him, he is a Sharia lawyer. He's an Islamic cleric. He's a Moa, right? So he's a religious extremist, right? He's an ideologue. He's a theological ideologue. The guy who replaces him in 2021 is Ibrahim Raiisi.

Again, another mullah. And he dies in a helicopter crash in 2024. And then he's replaced by this guy, Masoud Posseshkin after an election is held. And he is a heart surgeon who claims to be a reformer, who claims to be a moderate, clearly doesn't dress like there's other two and speaks very differently than they do as well. Now, that's just surface-level optics. Like the optics of that are interesting.

But let's back up to Trump's first administration, because there is a really interesting timeline that happens here that I recently stumbled upon in 2018. You have this, May 8th, 2018. President Trump is ending United States participation in an unacceptable Iran deal. Most people are familiar with the Iran deal that Obama signed, right? Trump pulls out of it May 8th, 2018. One week later, this is from the U.S. Treasury Department.

Treasury targets Iran's central bank governor and then the Iraqi bank moving millions of dollars for IRGC quads force. And so they are sanctioning specifically this guy named Saif. Okay, so he's the governor of the Iran Central Bank. It's important to note that the Iran Central Bank, along with the Iraq Central Bank, or at least used to be, not part of the Rothschild banking network, not part of like the Western banking system. They're outside of it. Okay. That'll get you helicoptered.

That will get you helicoptered very quickly. If you want to die, just make sure your central bank is not part of the Rothschild network. So they target this guy, Saif, and a number of other people with sanctions. They accused them of basically laundering money, like stealing and laundering money. And then we get this. Two months later, where is that story? It's right. So two months later in July of 2018, Iran just suddenly removes this guy from the government.

Like, Saif, you're no longer the governor of the central bank. done. One month later, August, they arrest the vice president of the central bank and then a number of other guys working under him. Now, the vice president is a guy named Ahmad Arakchi. And if that name sounds familiar, it's because he's the nephew of the current foreign minister, Arachi, who at the time was a deputy foreign minister. He's the one talking all that shit. Yeah, he's the one who's talking a lot of shit right now, that's for sure. So his nephew gets arrested. This is all under Rwani, remember? All this is happening under Rwani. And what ends up happening is that Saif gets sentenced to 10 years in prison

and Arakchi gets sentenced to eight years in prison. And if you look at the sentencing, like what were they actually accused of doing? What they were accused of doing by the Iranian government is they were accused of selling $150 million, illegally selling $150 million, of U.S. cash that they had in their possession and $20 million of euros, which was, I guess it's illegal to possess this or sell it in Iran, whatever. They had this in their possession. They weren't supposed to. Now, if you back all the way up to the beginning, like the Iran nuclear deal, do you remember like what the big scandal was surrounding the Iran nuclear deal under Obama?

The pallets of cash. The pallets of cash. 400 million in U.S. dollars cash sent secretly to Iran. and 40 million euro sent secretly to Iran. And yeah, so these guys were selling this money. I actually don't think the Iran nuclear deal that Obama negotiated had anything to do with energy. I think it was all just a big money laundering scheme. And probably to finance like these militias that were out there.

I think these militias were being run by... I think these militias were being run by Soleimani. And I think Soleimani ultimately was working for Mossad. And the reason I think he was working for Mossad is because the day that they the day before they were going to take him out, they took him out January 3rd, 2020. The day before, David Barnaya, who was running the, he was the point man on the Salamani file in the in Mossad calls up the White House and says, we're out. We're done. We're not doing it. Sorry. We just, it's, uh, just don't want to do it. Sorry. Thanks. Not doing it. We're out. And so Trump because the whole thing was the U.S. provides intelligence. Israel fires the missile.

You know, Israel takes the credit for killing him. That was the whole, that was the whole plan. And David Barnaya and Netanyahu called Trump, say we're out. And Trump turns to General Dan Kane, as he tells it. And Dan Kane says, we can do it if you want. Like, we have a missile. Like, we can fire a missile and take out this guy. And Trump says, do it.

And so then Trump does it himself. and then as Trump tells it he says I will never forgive Netanyahu for backing out and yeah right at the last second and my assumption is that I think that Salamani was working for um masad he was a he was a Mossad asset and that actually like that's something I thought for a very long time for a few years now let me pause you there for one second because I just want to show people a clip that you've all probably seen but it's good to go down memory lane because it's related to the Iran New your deal in the palat to cash you're talking about we all remember one of

Trump's most bangor-ass quotes so here's a short clip of him talking about big deals and you know we talk about different things with I'll go off the housing subject for a second but we talk about different things and what's going on with our government our government isn't giving us good protection our government has unleashed ISIS I call President Obama and Hillary Clinton the founders of ISIS. They're the founders. In fact, I think we'll give Hillary Clinton the, you know, of your sports team, most valuable player MVP. You get the MVP award. ISIS will hand her the most valuable player award. Her only competition is Barack Obama, but wind a tour. I mean,

they age like fine wines, a lot of that, even though they're a bit bitter. 2016, August of 2016, he calls Obama and Hillary Clinton the founders of ISIS and Hillary Clinton, the MVP. Now, you think of Benghazi, arms deals. I think that's what he's referring to with Hillary Clinton. I'm sure Benghazi was not the only arms deal. Remember, we only hear about the ones that go badly and result in, the Hollywoodification of and the overcomplication of a deep state arms deal gone bad we probably had some us special forces that figured some shit out and didn't play ball and then we get Benghazi and the

lionization of Benghazi and all that kind of stuff but how many of those deals do we not know about how many pallets of cash have been moving around that we have no idea about so you know it makes me wonder on the subject of Iran and the pallets of cash ghost, did the deep state get a little spooked by how badly some of these deals were starting to go that were fly-by-night sort of deals? And to your point about Obama was the Iran nuclear deal, the attempt to legitimize the funding and basically run public cover for the funding of ISIS and this whole war on terror. because they had been doing it on a clandestine in a clandestine fashion and they had got some egg on their face doing that. It seems like there was some people perhaps in U.S. Special Forces or Intel that were starting to ask some questions about what the State Department was doing with its money and its weapons in the Middle East.

And it makes me wonder in hindsight if that was part of why Obama felt the need to legitimize big deals like that. like this yes yes yeah I think I think that that that's probably true and by the way there were there were Q posts that occurred in August I'll share my screen here on Rwani where like specifically this is the one that it cut that comes to mind the August 28th 2018 now this is like three weeks after the arrests happened but watch Iran something incredible about to happen Hussein Rani the good people of Iran have the power fight for your freedom so and then there are like protests that happened in Iran

after that. And it's unclear exactly you know, through all those, I remember watching all that stuff and being like, all right, but again, it's like, is this a color revolution? Is this something that's positive? Yeah, it's always, always harder now. And, you know, speculating is just speculating.

But now we jump forward to to because Soleimani's taken out 2020. And then we jump forward to the second Trump administration, right? And you get the 12-day war, right? And so what happened in the 12-day war?

Well, Israel started a war with Iran, right? Just started bombing Iran. And again, before that, leading up to that, we had many situations both during the first Trump administration, because after Soleimani is killed, as Trump says, they called him up Trump, and they're like, well, we have to retaliate it to save face, you know, because of honor culture. So we're just going to fire some misconduct.

at like this empty building just make sure no one's standing in the area and and you know that'll be that and we can tell people we did something nobody gets hurt we're good that's what happens uh then under biden we had some missiles that got exchanged between israel and iran this is like 2023 21 24 um and same thing happens like like like israel bombs iran and then iran responds by sending like whatever 150 missiles that landed in a desert and i don't think anybody i think one person died but it was from debris falling off like one of the intercepted missiles, right? It wasn't like they targeted the guy. So again, like very strange because if Iran wanted to destroy Israel, like that was their chance, right, to retaliate from being attacked. That would have been, all right, like we're going balls to the wall and we're going to kill all of you. Didn't happen.

Then you get to June of 2025 and you get the 12 day war. And basically the way that the 12 day war culminates is that Trump steps in, launches the B2, blows up the nuclear facilities and then says it's done we're finished everyone pull back your planes pull the planes back Netanyahu we're done and then Trump wakes up the next morning and is getting on a helicopter to fly to I want to say he was going to the UN or something like that or some like G7 something like that and he's asked about this they say hey nettingya you're still sending planes to Iran to bomb Iran and Trump turns around and says I know They don't know what the fuck they're doing.

That's what he says. And he says he better turn those plans around right now and in this war. The war is over. And that's what ends up happening. But it requires a little arm twisting because Netanyahu doesn't seem to be quite convinced that the war is over. And that maybe those nuclear facilities were destroyed. And as we said, the two parties that agreed not with each other in the central narrative. This is where people get it twisted.

It said at the beginning of Operation Epic Fury, look for, if this follows the template that you're discussing from Midnight Hammer, look for one narrative tell in the early going. Does Donald Trump, do Donald Trump's assertions about events get codified by Iran or Israel? and I had predicted Iran is going to agree on what is happening with Donald Trump. They're not going to be friendly because they're on opposite sides of the war narrative, right? Trump is fighting with Iran. So they're not going to be happy with each other, but they're going to agree on what is occurring. And Israel is not going to agree on what is occurring. And Midnight Hammer, to your point, was a great encapsulation of that.

we are seeing it and last week in particular was the first time we saw that really directly during epic fury where we had the reports of the israeli attack on iranian energy infrastructure and donald trump put out a very similar message uh saying we did not know about this there will not be another attack by israel on iranian energy infrastructure so again it's like trump and the Iranians agreed that Israel made a decision and the Israelis initially refuted this. And then later on, they acknowledged it. So that was pretty funny. The initial framing from Israel was no.

That's not true. But yeah, then they ended up admitting it. And I want to talk about what happened last summer. But before we do, like, just share my screen. This is from yesterday. This is yesterday's news. Iran says that the U.S. and Israel have bombed the Natanz nuclear facility. No leakage of radioactive materials reported in the area in central Iran.

Tehran's atomic energy organization says, quote, following the criminal attacks by the United States and the usurping Zionist regime against our country, the Natanzan's enrichment complex was targeted this morning. The organization said in the statement carried out, I need to get coffee. Carried by Tasneem News Agency. That is really weird,

Because I thought this place got blown up last year, but apparently, according to Iran, it's still standing and it's been bombed again. I don't know. Like, again, sometimes I feel like there are things that I just put out there that are meant to confuse us. Sometimes I feel like there are things that are put out there that are like signals to let us know that a lot of this stuff is fake and just narrative. One of those things, by the way, is like last fall when, I think it was October, when Trump said, I have authorized. covert CIA operations in Venezuela and like just said it deadpan and everyone was like oh oh like what does that mean what is that and everyone was like analyzing it as if it was like a very real thing and i'm just like sitting here wondering like how hard is trump laughing right now at the

people who are seriously earnestly analyzing the fact that he just announced that he has authorized covert CIA operations to occur in Venezuela. That's how secret they are, Ghost. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, but like literally the people are like putting on their glasses and they're sitting there with their number two pencils like reading it down. They're like, well, that must mean, oh, wow, we must be, we're about to go to war with

Venezuela. And it's like, guys, like, I don't know how much more Donald Trump can make fun of you for like taking this stuff so seriously. But he just told you that he has authorized covert operations. in a foreign country. With Epic Fury, who was the conservative newscaster like a week ago that Trump ripped to shreds for asking him about Carg Island? Oh my gosh, Kill Mead. Kill Mead.

So similar situation you're pointing out there where we need to watch that video. That video is so fucking funny. But similar framing where Trump, you know, Kill Mead was basically operating on the basis of what you just described Ghost. and saying, oh, are you going to attack Karg Island? And Donald Trump is like, you idiot, why on earth would you ask me that? Even if I was going to attack Karg Island, which I'm not saying I'm going to, I would never tell you. But before we watch that clip, again, what is so funny about it is this was occurring during a narrative battle space that's still going on, where Donald Trump is in all caps telling you he's going to attack Karg Island.

And then, you know, Killmeet is like, are you going to attack Carg Island? I can't believe you would ask me that. Like, I would never tell you. Yeah. And so the timeline on that, because this stuff is all, like, hilarious. So here is, this is the day before, like, he, I think he interviewed him on a Friday.

This is the day before, like, Brian Killed Me was so excited because he had found this, like, 1988 clip where Trump said, well, if you're going to go after Iran, like, go after Carg Island. Like, that's the thing, right? And so Killed Mead was, like, listen to him here. Keep us. But we don't want that kind of disruption for our own citizens. We want our families.

I would love to see him take Kard Island, that oil island. He'd be just like that as well. We control their oil. 90% of their oil goes to this little island. The president talked about it in 1988 interview. And I think he should grab it. Wanted that for 10 stability. Keep us.

So Kilmeet is, like, super pumped because he knows he's going to have a truck. He's going to have Trump on his show tomorrow and he's going to ask him about this and man, he's going to get a cookie, right? And so here's what ends up happening. Let me share my screen. There it is. Now here in 2026, you are president. Are you thinking about taking Karg Island where 90% of the Iranian oil goes through? And what do you think about?

Do you remember that interview and that school of thought? Yeah, but Brian, I can't answer a question like that. And you shouldn't ask that. You shouldn't be even asking it. It's one of so many different things. It's not high on the list, but it's one of so many different things. And I can change my mind in seconds. But, you know, for you to ask a question, who would answer a question like that?

I mean, you're asking me a question, Garg Island, okay, everything. Who would ask a question like that? And what fool would answer it? Let's say I was going to do it or let's say I wasn't going to do it. What would I say, oh, yes, Brian? I'm thinking about doing it. be uh let me let you know what time and when it'll take place it's not you know it's sort of a foolish question a little surprised you're a smart man i am but you were just pretty amazing that

you thought about in 1988 so pretty uh poor little guy uh you got to feel for him you know he might be a degenerate uh war mongering psychopath or he might not be uh he might just play one on tv but um poor little guy like he was he was operating on the basis of the rules, the narrative rules that Donald Trump laid out. And that not even from the 1988 interview he's referencing, but like on truth social every day. By the way, three hours ago, Donald Trump was supposed to unleash Armageddon on Iran. Did he do that guys? Did the fake news?

Nobody in chat has said that Iran is gone. But he did say in exactly 48 hours from like 7 p. Was it 7 p.m. Saturday or was it? It was 7 p.m. whenever the post went up. So we need to check. Maybe that's Monday night. Maybe they get obliterated Monday night. Yeah, I think I think I think they're actually scheduled to be obliterated tomorrow. Okay. I think tonight they're being discombobulated and then tomorrow. Oh, right. You're right. You have to discombobulate before you obliterate.

But sometimes I get those mixed up. Yeah, it will, it happens. This is what this is what's so fucking funny though is that is that, um, so kill me is not the only one putting pushing this narrative. Ben Shapiro is pushing it. All of the conservative, like the conservative influencers are pushing this Carg Island thing, right, leading into this Brian Kilmead interview, which is on a Friday. Hours later, if you want to share my screen, this is what Trump post. After humiliating Kilmead, moments ago at my direction, I have ordered, I have commanded one of the most powerful bombing raids in the history of the Middle East

and totally obliterated every military target in a Iran's crown jewel, Karg Island. Like, it was like, like, too funny that he sits there and just totally humiliates and just... And Kilmead almost foiled the whole thing, ghost. I know, I know. He was just, Trump was just about to call the bombers back because the Iranians were watching Kilmead and they were like, do you guys think?

Do you guys think Trump? You know, this is why you just have to have fun with this stuff because obviously Trump is having fun with it, right? Because if you... This is why it is... Even though everybody thinks we're crazy, and that includes you guys in the audience, they think you're crazy for watching us and taking us seriously. You are, but you know, welcome to the looney bin. People in the alt media are the dumbest.

Like the really smart people in the info war who don't know that what we're looking at is narratively engineered are the dumbest people. because they're the ones who earnestly think all the open source intelligence that Fox news anchors are talking about on TV to hundreds of millions of people around the world are indicative of actual war plans. And they think, like, they watched that interview with Donald Trump and they're like, oh my God, guys, if this was a real fucking thing that was going on as it is being translated to us, I'm not saying nothing is happening. I'm saying if the story as it's being translated to us was representative of reality, you're going to tell me that the Iranians don't know that Karg Island might be targeted in a kinetic scenario with the United States. Like Brian Kilmead is revealing that to the Iranians and Trump is upset at him because otherwise the Iranians were like, man,

should we protect the most important thing to our sovereignty? in a war with the most powerful empire and the history of the world? Or no. Let's watch Kill Me to find out. It's like this is where I think Trump is, he's having fun with it. And even in that post he bring up, Trump basically disarms the narrative of like, well, what about the energy infrastructure? Because he's like, we didn't hit that.

We hit all the stuff that's great and great for the narrative of us winning against the evil Iranians, but we definitely didn't hit anything that would look bad on us and make this a strategic error. And, you know, is there any way to confirm any of this? Of course not. But unless the Iranians were to confirm it, which they do immediately after. Yes. Yes. So it's again, these are nears. This is like, damn it. He came in and he busted up all our military on Karg Island. But if he comes back and blows up our energy infrastructure, we're going to be extra upset. And, you know, they're like flirting with each other. Well, if you take what Trump, because Trump totally emasculated Kilmead,

I mean, I cannot overemphasize, like, how I think humiliated Kilmead felt in that moment. And he even says, I'm really surprised by this, Brian, because you're typically such a smart guy. And Brian goes, I am. I am. But if you take the logic that Trump lays out to Kilmead, he was like, why would I ever, announce a military operation that I'm going to do before I do it. Why wouldn't I just go do the military operation? Which is, by the way, it's like, oh, but Trump spent like five months being like,

I'm going to bomb around. I'm going to bomb around. And then like, and then for like three weeks, like all the Ocent guys were like, do you see all the planes moving to the Middle East? Like, holy shit. Like they're moving. I think something might happen. And then do you remember when like Fox News reported that all of the Marines got like

lobster like surfing turf and and it was like Pete Heggseth spent 21 million dollars on lobster for the Marines and it's like shit that means they're going in that means they're going in like they're going in the art yeah yeah so like yeah yeah meanwhile heggseth literally said in an interview like a year ago that he figured out you know the p that are you familiar with like the pizza the pizza um metric or whatever it's like if um if the if there's a big spike and takeout food like the takeout restaurants, which you can look on Google metrics. Oh, among Intel, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, like, if all of like the takeout places, the delivery places, the pizza places, have a huge spike in activity, which you can monitor yourself. Like any one of us can go look at Google and see how busy any restaurant is. If they all spike, like, on the same night, then that means that all of the intelligence and like Pentagon guys are convening and they're about, and like, they're about, so what Hegsef said he does is, what he says is that he, like, he's familiar with that, because that whole thing went viral like a year or two ago, a few years ago. So he's like, oh yeah, and like a random Tuesday, I'll just order like $500 worth of

takeout, delivered just to like keep people on their toes. So people will think, oh shit, like it's about to pop off. Yeah. So like, Higsef is aware of that. Like he's aware that people are studying that level of data to like figure out when and obviously the enemy is going to be studying that as well. And yet Fox News gets the exclusive, uh, that Higsef is feeding the moribing Marines lobster, right?

Like right before. Yeah. So again, like very, very silly. But let's back up again to last summer, the 12-day war because like 12-day war gets capped off by Operation Midnight Hammer. And then as we've recently learned, weeks later, about a month later, the Iranians devolved their government. Ali Larajani, he was the secretary of the national supreme security counselor, or whatever. He makes the announcement, formal announcement on Tasneem. He, that we have entered a continuity of government, uh, protocol.

Um, all of the powers of the IATOL are now devolved to the 31 governors. Um, we believe that the IRGC has been infiltrated by Mossad. Um, and so we have torn down the entire hierarchy of the IRGC, the intelligence and the military command. We've removed the Iatola from the chain of command that's a really important one because the iatoll it basically becomes a figurehead which really begs the question why are we even talking about the i toll anymore um and yeah so basically the governors are now allowed to engage in bilateral trade agreements uh with foreign countries they're allowed to use uh foreign currency including u s dollars they're also allowed to engage in bartering if they

have to in case like i don't know the iranian um uh uh ria gets or rial gets uh gets uh it's hyperinflated just in case that happens. We don't know what's going to happen, but it might happen. Yeah. But if it does, you can just negotiate and barter goods and services as opposed to currency. And oh, yeah, by the way, like the low-level missile commanders, you're all allowed to fire as many missiles as you want. Don't have to check with us.

You're good. You have all the power now. And then, of course, their currency a few months later is hyperinflated by Scott Besson, who admits to that. Yeah. And that leads to the color revolution, which you and I have talked about already. So that's the whole timeline. That's the whole timeline.

And now we have bombings happening, right? Bombing, Argy Island, bombings of Iran, bombings of Israel. Israeli media is finally admitting they are getting bombed, which they weren't admitting it first. And yeah, it's just, again, like, what's real, what isn't real? I don't know. Like, we can debate and talk about that. But the narrative, I think, is really what matters the most.

And really the reaction to the narrative by these leaders, I think is what matters the most. Yeah, one of the reasons, and you started the show by talking about energy, one of the reasons I've really been focused on that, obviously it's become, even in the normie layers, the macro theme, I think, coming out of this, right? For everybody that doesn't want to talk about just geopolitics or the war itself, the story of the war, the macro, team is energy. One of the things I said Wednesday night is that even the most normiest normie is tangentially aware that gas at the pump has gone up by 50% in the last 14 days. I filled the tank up last week for $2.83. I filled up yesterday for $3.67. So like, everyone's aware of that. And that's going to going to start trickling, not trickling. That's going to start surging into consumer price index.

That's going to get into groceries. It's going to get into everything, right? So energy is a key, a core macro theme coming out of the Strait of Hormuz and this whole Trump's gambit with Iran. That's basically, if you're a normie, you know that. If your osint savant, you know that. If you're an Info War, Q truther, truth community person, you know that. And what I'm interested in is what's really going on here. And to your point, we don't know what's actually going on. But I do think you can still ask that question on a narrative level and say, Donald Trump, this is one of the notes I wrote down is a rhetorical question. What is the alt media getting wrong about the framing of the Iranian Kobayashi-Maru?

I started the show by saying they are borrowing our terminology, the alt media. I ignore the MSM. We all know that the mainstream media is there specifically to lie to us, right? And we can use them as reverse indicators. But there are entire segments of the internet and the media escape, the info battle space, that are earnestly trying to analyze events. The reason we kind of just devolved into a little bit of a comedy hour there about Trump and Iran talking about what's happening there, that is relevant because it shows you that the OScent people and the alt media guys who are

earnestly trying to analyze events as they are being translated are totally lost or as Donald Trump would say discombobulated if you are just following everything like wait Trump said he wasn't going to do this and now he is doing this he said he wasn't going to do this with Cargile and now he is doing it the Iranians said they weren't going to respond now they are responding like what the fuck is is going on here what is Trump doing and I think that's why a lot of that That article, I didn't read it, but the article I showed at the beginning from Rabobank, Michael Evry, that said this is a Kobayashi Maru. Their framing was not my framing, to be clear. Their framing was Donald Trump has found himself in the Kobayashi Maru.

He has found himself within the unsolvable test. He has a no-win scenario in front of him with Iran. He wanted to disarm them. He wanted to stop them. he wanted to, you know, gain power over the region. Now he's stuck in what they call the escalation trap. He can't de-escalate in traditional geopolitics because he needs to save face. He can't escalate because the escalation just spirals the energy crisis further and further.

The reason I say, what does the alt media get wrong about this framing is, I think, something you would agree with, and a lot of people in our audience. The baseline premise, the baseline assumption that, I make is that Donald Trump knows how this ends. He knows how it's going to go ahead of time. And in order to know that, you would need other parties on board, right? If you don't think Donald Trump knew what was going to happen, you're looking at all this at face value like the intellectual dark web looks at it. If you're in this audience, you probably think that there was a plan here. And that's what I'm interested in getting your perspective on. and obviously I have mine of what is the plan what is Donald Trump's plan we don't even have to

talk about the actual and how he's going to accomplish it and whatever what is the end state the desired end state that Donald Trump wants to get out of the untangling of the Iranian knot and I guess the I'll start the answers in the question for me I think he wants to disentangle the United States from this region actually, actually, narratively, and that it's very messy in the interim. We talked about the petro dollar at the beginning, but I think there's a lot more ways this can go. But I think, you know, you approach your geopolitical analysis. Similarly, I think, by reverse engineering, what do you think the desired end state of the various players is? So I wonder what you think in terms of

Trump. What is his end state with Iran? And does this get us closer or further from it? Well, I think the question really is what's the in-state for the Middle East? It's like, what is the in-state? Like, what do we want the Middle East to look like when this is all done? And we have different perspectives on what that is. And for many years now, like we've been, have, we've had a very optimistic view, despite, you know, some of the conflicts that have been happening there, which are relatively contained. I mean, like the Gaza Wars contained in Gaza, right? It's not happening all over the Middle East.

However, it is exacerbating emotions across the Middle East, and it is getting people very anxious and very angry. over what they're seeing and what they're witnessing. But I think the in-state for the Middle East is for it to be a free, sovereign, stable region, much like Europe, right, where actual economic investment and advancement can happen, which, as we learned in the interview with Steve Wickoff with Tucker Carlson last year, the big point Steve Wickoff made was you can't get. a construction loan to build something in the Middle East because you can't get an insurance bond for like you can't get insurance on the construction loan and the reason the insurance companies

won't insure it is because of the like all of the conflict that's happening there how do they know the construction site isn't going to be hit by like a missile when one of these countries decides to fight another one right so that means every single construction project has to be fully funded with cash right you can't get a loan out and anyone who understands like how what that means is you can't spread your money out. You have to basically take all your cash, invest it in one project at a time. It's a very slow way to do development from a developer standpoint. Versus just leveraging your assets and building a bunch of stuff at once,

which is more likely to generate excitement and get compounding investment and compounding development on top of it. So I think the stabilization is really important for guys like MBS, the Crown Prince of Saudi, the Qataris, the Emirates, all of them want stabilization because they want, that's just one example, but they want money, they want investor money coming in, but they also want tourism. They want like all these things to be like Europe, right? The way Europe is viewed in the post-World War II lens. But again, the problem is, is that you have war mongers in the region and, you know, who are the warmongers? Well, we've been told that they were the Arabs. We've been told, but, That's been proven to be false because the Arabs are actually very reasonable when you get the right leadership. We've been told that they are the Muslims, you know, the Turks, the Iranians. The Turks have been proven. That's been proven wrong for the Turks, but Turks are actually very reasonable.

They seem to be one of Trump's closest allies, actually. So now we have Iran. They're the war mongers, right? The whole reason we can't have peace in the Middle East is because of Iran. And I did a show with Alpha earlier, and you know I both know Alpha's position on this. but what I laid out is like let's look at the checklist of why we're at war with Iran according to the narrative right what's the one thing Trump said Iran's not allowed to have nuclear weapons nuclear weapons right and then we're told that they are that Iran is a theocracy that's run by a bunch of religious zealots right and that third they are hyper aggressive and they want to attack Israel and they want to attack maybe the United States and so for all those reasons you check all those boxes. They're hyper-aggressive, religious zealots, nuclear weapons.

We've got to go to war with them. I would posit that you could take that same checklist and you could apply it to Israel and be like, wait a minute. That's the one country in the entire world. Go look this up. That has never signed a nuclear non-proliferation treaty ever. The one country. There's four countries that have not fully signed all the agreements.

Iran is not one of them, by the way. They've signed to every single agreement they're supposed to. Israel has never signed one, not one. And yet, not only do they have nuclear facilities, but according to Mark Levin and other Israeli supporters, they have hundreds of nuclear warheads, which they stole from the United States. That's like a pretty commonly known thing from people who study this stuff. That, you know, sorry, we stole it, but that's what JFK was trying to shut down. He was trying to shut down this thing called the Domina or Dimona nuclear facility. Well, that facility just got bombed yesterday.

And that's not according to Iranian media. That's according to Israeli media that Demona was just bombed by Iran. So that's interesting. Don't really know what to make of it. But you're asking, like, what do you think the endgame here is? I was disappointed when this narrative started because I was like, you know, now the Zionists and the neocons are getting what they want. That's not great. But rather than get angry about it, I rather understand it.

Like understand why is this happening? what is the actual that like the actual intent of the storytelling regardless of what's actually happening on the ground and i'm wondering if trump basically gave israel everything they wanted right which is a war with iran that's what he says that's what they have said they want they've wanted for 40 years they are absolutely giddy when this thing started um however iran seems to be fully prepared for this like in a way that you know according to the mainstream analysts we weren't prepared for how could Trump have done this he wasn't even prepared for this that's the official narrative is that Trump got in over his head he's got in like over his skis

how are these things not actually thought through well when you go and you listen to I want to play this clip from the joke and I know we're going to talk about Joe Ken a little bit but I want to play this little one minute clip from the Tucker interviewer Joe Kent says something really interesting right here place in six months where they're saying that we have to go back in And that's essentially exactly what happened. I mean, the department that there was no debate, as in it was a foregone conclusion.

Talking about the 12-day war in Operation Midnight Hammer. Exact timing they didn't, they weren't exactly aware of, or that had to be debated when, when do we do it? But it seemed to be a foregone conclusion. And I'm sure others will say, no,

that's not the case at all. But there was no robust debate like there was going into the 12-day war. Because a big question that- I'm sorry, he's talking about this version of the war. He's saying that the robust debate, did happen with the 12-day war but here listen to what he says we listen to what he says about the conversation that happens at the end of a 12-day war a lot of us had that were skeptical

of operation men at hammer was okay so we do this we know the israeli's whole goal is regime change what makes us think they'll stop and if they do stop for a period of time why won't we just be back in the same place in six months where they're saying that we have to go back in and that's essentially exactly what happened um so this was raised This was raised to my knowledge in June. So again, what he's saying is there was this forethought with the 12-day war, like we have a robust debate. But we understood that, hey, if we do this, the Israelis are going to want to go back in in six months. Like in six months, or whatever, they're going to want to restart the war.

But yet Trump steps in, does this narrative thing with Operation Midnight Hammer, it doesn't matter if it actually happened or not. but that is Trump's reason to say stop, pause. And then in the interim between the end of the 12-day war and the start of whatever the hell is happening right now, we get Iranian devolution. And we basically get Iran setting itself up to prepare for whatever the hell is happening right now. And now we have a situation unfolding. And this is according to Israeli media now,

which has taken a long time for them to kind of come to this confession, this moment of like honesty, where they're saying, we're actually in dire straits right now because we don't have enough interceptors to stop all these missiles that Iran keeps sending, even though everyone said that the missiles were going to stop. They actually have picked up and we have missiles now coming in and hitting places like Damona, places like Tel Aviv, places like Haifa, Haifa being their only deep water port where all the refineries are. to the extent that we now have Synccom, cannibalizing PACCOM and Indocom where they're grabbing all of the Patriot missile system, defense systems from Japan, South Korea, Taiwan,

and they're bringing them over to the Middle East. And now that's generating this excitement over in China. Like maybe it's time for us to take Taiwan because they don't have any defense systems anymore, but that's a whole different narrative episode. The point is, is that it seems like, as Joe Kent explains right there, there was no negotiating with Israel over this. Like Israel wanted to go in and do this regime change, whether it happens in 2026 or

2036 or 2046, this is going to happen, right? Like they want this expansionist war. I mean, right now they're in Lebanon and they're saying that they're going to take everything in Lebanon from Littani River South and that's going to become part of Israel. That is what every Israeli politician is now saying that, like, across the board. Even Netanyahu's political opponents are saying that that's what we're doing. And so it seems to me what Trump did is he took something that was on a longer time scale, like, and probably could have easily happened after him and Putin and Xi are all gone, and there's nobody there to stop the Israelis. And he condensed it down to something like this. And he even went ahead and paused the war last summer and said, hey, Ron, you have five minutes

now to go get your shit together, go get your shit together and prepare for this because they're coming back here in a few months and they're going to want to fight. And then Iran went and did devolution. And now that Iran has done devolution, you can decapitate them all day. Decapitate, decapitate, decapitate. But remember, they've devolved all the powers down to the lowest level commanders. You can now just pick a target, hit fire. They don't have to ask permission.

And again, that's maneuver warfare. I've had many podcasts that I've done with Colonel Oak and talked about that because he used to teach that to tankers in the army, which is as long as you understand the end game, and I'm bringing this all full circle now, we don't care what you do between here and there. You understand that you have to get your tank to the other side of that field.

I don't care which bunker you blow up. I don't care who you shoot. I don't care what building you drive through. Do it. Don't come back and ask me for permission. Do it. And so if Trump understands what the end game is, does it really matter like what the path is to get there i mean right from a narrative standpoint right

and that's where i totally agree with that um a couple people in chat some somebody said the only way out is through that's one of the first things i was thinking of there another person brought up accurately uh my reference to the iranian knot is a reference to the gordian knot and that was when alexander was campaigning against persia so uh you know all quite interesting it's been this way. It's been this way for quite a long time where this Middle Eastern knot has just been there and kind of acting as this war perpetuation engine that just seems seems to keep getting the West embroiled in it. I want to pick up more of that after the break. I want to hit a couple sponsors and get into some of the ways in which, because I agree with you on the end

game, and I agree with you that Donald Trump is, we talk about acceleration. all the time, right? Yeah. That's something that we, and what is, what is, what is accelerationism? It's timeline compression. It's narrative timeline compression. So if you're dealing with all the damage that is coming as a result of this knot that you knew you were going to have to cut, might as well go as fast as you can.

And, uh, I, uh, I will hit you guys with a short clip on the back of these, uh, these sponsors that might give you some hints as to Trump and team telling you. that Ghosts and Mize reading of this as an accelerated narrative or actual could be accurate and could be something that's reflected by that. First sponsor, first two sponsors here are ourselves starting with Old Faithful Soft Disclosure. Get you some of that beard oil. Now that I'm alone at the close up, do you see how awesome my beard looks right now? I use the beard oil every single day.

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there, but we look forward to seeing you guys. Badlandsmedia.tv slash events. That's always energizing. And we have one more sponsor before we get back into it. And that is our friends at Rumble itself, specifically Rumble wallet. Here's a little inside scoompson. that many creators are talking about behind the scenes. It's actually one of the reasons we use Rumble. They made a way to super chat creators so we get paid immediately and without any fees. YouTube and Twitch take up to 50% fees when you tip creators.

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How you just teed us up with accelerationism and a compressed timeline. There is a short clip of my favorite Trump character of the last couple of years. The one that I say is usually dropping the most signal. He's the silent killer in the narrative. And he's got another one, another banger coming at us from today. Every day, we are taking out their missiles, their missile systems, and the factories that build those missiles. and now are the General Kane, Secretary Hegsith, are leading a campaign to destroy all the fortifications along the straits of Hermos.

Just to put a fine point on this, though, is the president in the process of winding down this war or escalating the conflict? Again, they're not mutually exclusive. Sometimes you have to escalate to de-escalate, Chris. Okay, NBC News is reporting that President Trump is considering sending troops into Iran. will the administration every day we are taking So escalate to deescalate Last year in the summer during Midnight Hammer I said

I believe we are watching a re-nuclearization narrative Sorry a denuclearization narrative That is translating or hiding a re-nuclearization actual And I think it's pretty interesting people talking about the only way out is through. We're talking about the Kobayashi Maru, the no-win scenario.

And Bessent there is telling you, these are not mutually exclusive positions, escalation and de-escalation. You're like, well, hold on. That sounds like double-speak. No, it's game theory, actually. If you accelerate an endgame or a game toward an endgame as Ghost was laying out, you have to escalate the short. short-term damages in order to de-escalate the game, which to me means compress the timeline of the game.

In other words, if we don't escalate the narrative, the story, the actual, whatever you think is actual or not, we would all agree that the narrative coming out of Iran is escalatory, extremely escalatory, almost to psychos like us, comically escalatory to some of the truths and clips, ghost was pointing out a little bit ago. So I think that gives you a little bit of a inside baseball. I've long said Scott Besson is like the guy when it comes to sort of telling you what the plan is, even though that's pretty broad. He's telling you what the philosophy behind the plan is. And second point to hand it off to you would be, I think there's a double signal with Scott Besson. He's talking on a macro about escalation to de-escalation, acceleration to deceleration, which we might say, nuclear de-nuclearization

to nuclearization. But I think it's also interesting that Scott Besson himself represents he is literally called in the financial world the hatchet man because he engineered a margin call. He was the first person, arguably, to engineer a margin call on a currency. And he did this on the British pound in the 90s on behalf of George Soros. And now my supposition, my argument of Scottie Bessent the Hatchetman is Scott Besson is demolishing the United States dollar, just not the one you think. So I saw people in chat earlier tonight saying, how could we be de-dollarizing? How could we go against the petro dollar when Donald Trump keeps saying, I'm going to create a strong United States dollar?

Well, how can you do that if you're destroying the petro dollar? I think Scott Besson is your signal there. He wants to disentangle us from the Middle East and from the petro dollar system. The only way to do that in the short term is to weaken the U.S. dollar. And what that's going to do, in my opinion, is accelerate the public mandate for Donald Trump to transition what the U.S. dollar means, meaning what is the U.S. dollar backed by? And this isn't my argument of we're immediately going to shift to a gold standard, a Bitcoin standard. I don't think that's going to happen in this immediate flashpoint. But I think it is accelerating the mandate for drill baby drill, American nuclear revival,

even if the United States dollar still has this transition window for several years or even a decade that is largely based around energy, it's got to be based around U.S. energy, not Iranian energy, not Middle Eastern energy. And I think that's a big part of the unwind here. So that's just on the energy front and the financial front. But to your point, I think a lot of what we're seeing here is this escalation to de-escalation and a lot of what you talk about in research is this kind of Israel, Iran, permanent forever war narrative. It's like the U.S. Soviet thing, but, you know, more actual, that the two dogs staring at each other through the chain link fence.

and maybe to your point Trump is like okay the gates open boys and we're going to close it in a little while but like or we're not going to close it so like the gates open now and you either hash it out or we figure it out

so I agree with that framing as well yeah and yeah so what you're talking about is narrative escalation and that's something that I think in the past two or three guards we talked about like that I think at the very beginning of the Trump administration, we were like, what are you looking for? We're looking for narrative escalation.

We're looking for how quickly are we going to escalate this stuff from a storytelling standpoint so that the whatever has to happen kinetically, if anything has to happen at all, that can be condensed and not drawn out, right? Because again, like I'm open to all possibilities, including there being a kinetic aspect of this. Now, if we back up to what what's what's going on in Israel like what's happening to Israel because again I think that what Israel wanted is they wanted an earnest war just like Iraq where you've got boots on the ground from

the from the US military fighting Iran right US fighting Iran which would bring in Russia and China that would be World War III and basically all these empires would get destroyed because they get sucked into like a Vietnam style like Iraq war right it would bankrupt all of these powers and then it would allow Israel to basically pick up the pieces and form greater Israel, which is what their plan is, is to control everything from the Nile of the Euphrates. And they're being pretty flippant about that and pretty open about it. Now, if we, real quick, if we go to share my screen, I find this fascinating because this is something that has been denied by Israel for so many years formally.

after a night of destruction, residents of Arad, and Dimona began picking up the pieces. Right here, the second paragraph, although Iran claimed to have targeted the nearby Demona nuclear facility, it was local civilians who bore the brunt of the attack. Wait a minute, guys, wait a minute, wait a minute, you're not allowed to have any kind of nuclear facility because you have not signed any said. It doesn't matter what you say you're doing there. You can't have any nuclear facility because you literally have signed, you have not signed any treaty that allows you to have a facility. Because by not signing a treaty, that means you haven't agreed to allowing like whatever, the inspectors to come and check it and make sure that everything is on the up and up.

And that's kind of like the crux of it, in my opinion. Like if all of the things that are said about Iran, all the things about them being a problem and here's why they're a problem, it's actually Israel that's a problem. because they have these nuclear facilities. They're admitting it right here. They're admitting it that they have nuclear facilities. And yet we know nothing about the facilities. We don't know how many weapons they have. We don't know, like assuming that nuclear weapons are even real.

We don't know anything about this situation. We don't know anything about it. We have no control over it. And then the question is, well, why don't we have any control over it? Considering that we basically fund this entire country from our tax dollars. And it exists only because the US military protects it. Um, that of course is its own Kobayashi Maru, uh, to untangle. Um, and that's kind of what I think this whole op that, um, is being launched right now by, uh, what's his name? Um, uh, Joe Kent. I think

that's what that's all about. Um, I will, I will play this real quick because like we, we talk about energy, you know, I'm not a military strategist. I'm not trained in any of this stuff, but here's what I've been saying for years. I said it most recently on March 3rd edition of Badlands Daily. I think I said it on my show even since then. Regarding like, why would Iran not like Iran doesn't need a nuclear weapon in order to destroy Israel. There are other ways that

the strategic ways. They have enough ballistic missiles and there are other ways they could do it. Here's how they could do it. It doesn't seem like we're getting we're getting the full story. I've said it multiple times before. I don't think a nuclear warhead is what Iran requires in order to take out Israel because the like the core argument under like underlying all of this is that the reason they want a nuclear warhead is to destroy Israel. Well, the argument can also be made if they are actually pursuing a nuclear warhead is they want it for deterrence to deter somebody from attacking them as France has already made clear in other

countries. Saudi Arabia said the same thing. Many other countries have said, if we want a nuclear weapon because if we have a nuclear weapon, nobody will attack us out of fear. retribution. So that argument should also be considered. But if the concern is that Iran is too irresponsible to have a nuclear weapon and if they get one, they're going to destroy Israel. That's the premise that we're being presented right now. That's why we have to start a war to stop it. Although that goalpost seems to be getting moved a little bit because apparently now it's about ballistic missiles and Navy and whatever. Again, they have enough ballistic missiles to just carpet bomb Israel or just take out strategic points energy infrastructure, water infrastructure,

and make the place uninhabitable. So I feel like that, if that was their desire, they would do that. They would have already done that. If they were so irresponsible that they're going to do it regardless, like even at their own destruction, why haven't they done it yet? Like up until this point, I mean, they may do it now, now that they're at war with Israel. But, you know, those are always the questions I have. It was like, well, if they had all this capability,

Mark Peruvia just affirmed, why haven't they just gone ahead and done it? Like, why wait for, like, permission from the world to do it? Like, why wait for the justification? Why not just launch everything you have at Israel and just wipe it out? Who needs to be it? Okay.

And so here is the most recent news. This is from RT. Iran vows to target regions of water and energy infrastructure if U.S. strikes power plants. And this is, I mean, again, And I don't think you have, and the reason I play that is because I don't think you have to be like a military strategist to figure this out. That Israel has no natural resources. It's literally the least strategic country in the Middle East in terms of like if you were picking partners and you put aside all the religious sentiment.

It's the last country you would actually pick the partner with because it has no strategic value at all. Yeah. It's all been it's all been the commoditization and narrative of military intelligence. and like a military wedge, you know, it's been a kinetic and strategic partner. But to your point, the only strategy is with the intent of waging war on Iran. Yes. Yes. It's a desert country. It's a desert country, right? So to your point, if you, if you accept Donald Trump at his premise, his own stated premise, and I mean going back that he wants peace,

well, you would probably want to disarm a powder keg in the Middle East that is only there for war. And this goes to something Chris Paul and I have talked about quite a bit since Operation Midnight Hammer. And as I said a few minutes ago, that is whether you think it's actual or narrative, the story coming out of these attacks that you're talking about, the tit for tat, the escalating tit for tat,

what's one of the macro conclusions that's probably going to come out of this? I believe it's going to be, well, Iran does not have nuclear weapons, nuclear military capabilities coming out of the end of this. And maybe to your point, Israel doesn't either. And I think that will set us in a narrative battle space wherein Donald Trump gets to come in, perhaps with others, Saudis, maybe, Muhammad bin Salman, etc., and the Gulf states in particular, which tease up our next theme I want to get to, maybe this all paves the way for Donald Trump and the Gulf states and whoever is at the table to come to the table with Iran and Israel after they're

done fighting, after they've let the brothers at it, and say, well, listen, who could have seen it coming. But neither of you, it turns out, have any nukes, nor do you have the capability to produce them right now. And before you both start spinning up your next attempts to do just that over the next decade, we are all going to sign a disarmament treaty and a denuclearization treaty. And wouldn't it be something if Israel is part of that treaty with Iran? So I think the Abraham Accords were probably the template for this kind of thing, but the nuclear narrative to your point about Israel needs to be disarmed. And how do you disarm that narrative? Well, you tell everybody that their nuclear capabilities were destroyed in an escalating tit for tat with Iran. And on the back of that, Donald Trump

gets to save face, which also tease up our topic, and say, listen, I wanted Israel to have all the nukes in the world because they're our greatest ally. Ah, too bad Iran just wiped all those nukes out. Well, now that they're gone, how about we just leave them gone? So I bet, I bet you that's where this is going on a narrative level. And again, disarming Israel's chances. And Trump doesn't get, it will be Trump's fault, right? But that's not going to be the story. And I think that also lends a little credence to the idea of why to the Israel hawks out there, or Israel stands, why is Donald Trump willing to start creating a little bit of distance between him and Israel? I think it is so he has narrative shielding to do this, to forward this narrative at the end of

the story and say, you know what? It wasn't just me that escalated the situation with Iran. It was Israel who kept escalating. When I said we were done, I said, I Donald Trump, Trump said, we are not targeting energy infrastructure. And Israel said, fuck that, chief. We're targeting everything. So Trump gets to then turn back around and say, well, you started the fight. You escalated the fight. You brought energy into it, Israel.

So now you don't have nukes. And that's going to be your punishment at the end of this. But what do you think of that? And then we'll get into our last topic. Well, I think that's interesting. And I actually have a clip that I just saw before we went live that is kind of speaks to all this and is fascinating. Because again, this could be mostly just narrative driven. But there has been a narrative out there recently that Israel is once again leveraging the fact that they have secret nuclear warheads against the idea of like not invading Iran.

Like if we don't invade Iran and go after them and do the things that we want to accomplish regime change, you know, collecting the enriched uranium, like whatever the whatever their daily. desires are that seem to be changing all the time, then we're going to just nuke Iran. Like we're just going to go ahead and fire a nuke. That narrative has been out there for a few weeks now. I just saw this, this video and again, it might be real. Like, might be true, may not be true,

but Colonel McGregor, it's just worth noting that he was one of Donald Trump's top military advisors at the end of his first term. So let's hear what he has to say. We're a complete failure to understand that Gaza is the catalyst for the larger war that's now going to begin against Israel. Every Muslim country is going to come on board against Israel, along with Russia, along with China. I'd be surprised if Mr. Putin doesn't make it very clear to Mr. Netanyahu that if he contemplates using a nuclear weapon, he needs to understand something. If you do this, if you use a nuclear weapon against Iran or anyone in the Middle East, we will use nuclear weapon against you. I'd be very surprised if he has not already said that.

We don't understand what we've walked into because we're not informed. We still think this is 1991. Listen to the rhetoric. I'm ready for peace now. We've made our point. We hope the Iranians understand us and will make peace. Have you lost your mind? The war is now just beginning.

There's a complete. Yeah. So, again, I think like a lot of the rhetoric, I feel like when Colonel McGregor speaks, he's not speaking to the Trump administration. I think he's speaking to the subversive elements in the Trump administration, which, again, Joe Kent talked about that in his, you know, in the interview that he did with Tucker Carlson. But that takes us into honor culture because I think that you're right about what you just said. That's a really interesting take, by the way, that they just take out their nuclear weapons or nuclear facility or whatever. And more importantly, the story to not be able to restart it.

Because otherwise it doesn't matter, right? If they can just spin it up again, Trump is going to take that narrative away from them, I think. Yeah. But like the more dangerous dynamic, I think, in my opinion, than, you know, any specific kinetic weapon, ballistic missiles, hypersonic missiles, nuclear missiles, whatever, is the psychology in America as it relates to Israel. this idea that like no matter what Israel does they have a blank check and we just have to back them support no matter what they have a right to defend themselves they have a right to do whatever they want to go wage war against Lebanon let them they want to go wage war against Syria let them they want to wage war against Gaza Iran we got to back them like that needs to be unwound that's the kobiashi maru that we have

to disentangle and I think that you know ever I told alpha this earlier that um and I've said a little bit of this in the Badlands chat. Ever since this Joe Kent thing happened this week, I have received more text messages from, like, family members and other people who I've been trying to red pill for years on this stuff. People who are like, you know, into politics, but they're kind of normies.

Like they watch Fox News. They still watch Fox News. Three-time Trump voters, right? So they're like, they're MAGA, but they're not like exploring their things work. They're texting me now and they have, it's all fully clicked for them. And like, I mean, they have basically,

basically been like, okay, so Israel is actually like the issue that we, like, that's the thing we need to deal with because that's the reason we can't have the golden age is because of Israel. Like, like they won't let us because we have to go invest all of our blood and treasure in the Middle East to help them build their empire. That's pretty much what this is. And as you often talk about on your shows, again, it's actual to your point, but it's really the narrative of Israel as our greatest ally and who are the ones that are really locking us in. into that. It's all of the American congressmen. Yes. And Christian Zionists and the Christian Zionists who outnumber who outnumber the Jewish Zionists like five to one, right? I mean, there's like five times as many Christian Zionists as there are Jewish Zionists and they are very eager to support these war efforts in the name of Jesus, of course. Oh, yeah. That's what he wanted, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think disentangling that and basically like latching onto that, and addressing that is so critical. However, how do you do that?

Like, how do you even begin from like a strategic standpoint to engage in that? Because Trump can't hold a press conference and like lay this all out. Like that would never work. Ever. No. Like, yeah, he would be, he would be, I think, disregarded not only by his enemies, but also like Christian Zionists would be like what Trump does. The entire Unip Party would have their narrative fully weaponized and with the risk of actually

getting buy-in on that because to your point the APEC sort of contingent and the rhino contingent, the Christian Zionist contingent, would be able to say Donald Trump is turning his back on Jesus. I know that this audience doesn't feel that way, but there's a lot of Normies who do feel that way if he went down that rhetorical path. And then the liberal mindscape, the normie mainstream media unawakened mindscape, would say he's anti-Semitic. You know, it's the one narrative it's the one term that a Republican will hit you with and a Democrat will hit you with, and they will link arms and say, we may not agree on much, old chap, who is definitely not Uniparty, but that man over there is anti-Semitic, and he must go.

Right, like, it's the one thing. It's the unification narrative of the Uniparty. It's what grants them narrative shielding, which is why I know people like, there are some people that think you, you know, that this narrative is long in the tooth and that you've been hammering this Zionism narrative, you know, since you came to Badlands, but really in earnest since 2023, obviously, because of this event. But besides that it's been in the news the whole time and it's been a part of the macro story and right now is a massive part of the story, one of the reasons I think Ghost has focused on it so much is that it's the recognition that this is this, this is the Sordid Damocles, the narrative Sordid Damocles that has

been hanging over Donald Trump. And this is part of why I have been framing it as the Kobayashi Maru. And a lot of your commentary is brought in that Zionist element that I didn't really understand as a liberal. I heard the term. I got that there was this connection between conservatism and Israeli, you know, kinetic aggression. But I really did not understand how deeply rooted that was. And you brought a lot of that out. And I think Trump is bringing a lot of that out. And not to get too extreme and metaphorical, but part of what I think might be going on here from like a narrative. And if you want to say spiritual angle, and you and Ash might talk about stuff like this on The Chosen, he's sort of triggering a little bit of an exorcism within the American zeitgeist, specifically within the Christian zeitgeist. And that's as somebody, again, who I don't know a lot about that stuff.

I'm just kind of watching Donald Trump provoke something. And it's these Christians, these Uber Christians, the specific kind of Christians that are freaking out and are really triggered right now. Ones we knew at Badlands that got triggered back in 2023. And it's like, hold on. Holy shit, dude. I've been doing a show with you for two years. And all of a sudden now it's like, we can't talk about the Middle East. But it's like, well, I knew you were Christian, but I didn't know that there was different kinds of like, there's like Christians from what I understand.

And then there's like, whatever this is. Yeah. And whatever that is, it's a good way to describe it. So, you know, and I think, again, I think that part of the Kobayashi Maru, part of the reason I've called this the Iranian knot is not is not just a geopolitical situation. This is a spiritual disentanglement that is going on. It is geopolitical. It is financial. It is trade based.

It is energy based. It is military, kinetic, and it is spiritual. It is spiritual and cultural. And I think, you know, I want your thoughts on that. And then also the honor culture section of this, which I think that is this positive. If that's the negative what I just laid out. Yeah. I think the honor culture transition that you've brought up a lot maybe comes on the

other side of that disentanglement. Yeah, well, okay, so a few things. Number one, on Friday morning, I saw a clip of Lindsey Graham on, I guess, Bill O'Reilly's podcast. Bill O'Reilly, of course, was the number one, like, ratings on Fox News prior to Tucker Carlson, who replaced him from, like, the Me Too movement scandal. And that happened, like, right when Trump came into office. And they were arguing about in this clip about whether or not the relationship between the U.S. and Israel was actually a good thing. And it blew my mind. I'm like, I mean, that is such a great encapsulation of how far we've come that Bill O'Reilly and Lindsay Graham are having that discussion and that argument. Who would have ever thought that you would have seen that? Like that's pretty significant.

That's a big milestone. I also say, think about the first slander they created against Donald Trump. Who was he? Hitler. Yeah, I think that was strategic. I think that there were, Chris has been saying that for years, yeah. Oh, yeah, given all of the rhetoric that Trump said at the beginning of who he was going to go after, right? Like,

like who is to blame for the decline of America? Never said the Jews, but he certainly said the banking system. He certainly said foreign influence over our government. Yeah, like that was a big one. He went hard on the neocons back in that first era. He said the Iraq war,

like we went under false pregences. That was like a earth-shattering. moment for those who weren't paying attention to politics when he said that during your republican primary that was like people were like gasping like how could you say that in a republican primary like don't you remember it was the like we like we were the ones who did that and trump was like yeah like you did that like you're a bunch of lying scumbags like you are the ones who took us over there and you know didn't go as far as like some others and why we went over there as joe kent did in his uh resignation letter but again i think all of that is there is like trump would be fulfilling

if he held the press conference and was like Israel controls our government and that's why we can't have a golden age. He would be fulfilling the prophecy of him being Hitler. It's like, well, of course, because he's Hitler. And they all unify against him. Again, they'd all get shielding to unify against him. And, you know, the real problem, like getting to the honor culture thing about the Christian Zionists is that they're liars. They don't tell the truth about what their intentions are. You know, they, they say, well, we're just supporting Israel because we love Jesus, right?

No, they're supporting Israel. They're supporting it like an empire-building conquest to create greater Israel. They're very much aware of this. They're actually also funding these red heifers in Texas that they shipped over to Israel that were sacrificed like a year or two ago. They created those in a lab. And the reason they did that is because that's part of this ritual from Talmudic Judaism that's going to result in like the third temple, built in the Messiah coming. Like all of this is based on Jewish belief of Talmudic Judaism that they're going to

summon their Messiah. And then I think the Christian Zionists, if I understand it, some of them at least, believe that that will then force the anti, you know, that's the Antichrist. Then Jesus will come back and fight them. So I think either they believe in the Antichrist, like they believe in whatever this thing is that the Talmudic Jews are trying to summon. or they believe that they can use that to force God's hand to get Jesus to come back in a second coming. I don't think either of those are like a good line of,

like a healthy line of thinking, but they're not honest by the idea of that. Because if you go listen to the Israeli politicians, they're very honest about it. They're like, yeah, we want to build a third temple to their credit. We want to summon Mosheok. Like,

we want to build greater Israel, which is from the Nile to the Euphrates. They're very like, to their credit, they didn't used to be, but now they're pretty honest about. a lot of that has to do with like these religious zealots taking over the government um but we need to get to a point where our leaders say what they mean and mean what they say and don't

talk out of those sides of their mouth because nobody around the world respects us because they don't respect our leaders they respect trump because trump says what he means and means what he says like when he says he's going to do something he does it um and he's a man of his word like he talks about in his books how important it is to like shake somebody's hand say you're going to do something and then go do it. If they can't trust your word, then you can't be a good negotiator. You've lost your ability to negotiate

once you've lost your word. And that teased up, that teased up this honor culture conversation that you've been, you know, you've been kind of on this for a little while. Last time, I think it was either that you were on the narrative or maybe we did a blitz a few weeks ago.

You were talking about the Game of Thrones spinoff, Night of the Seven Kingdoms. I finally got to watch that a couple weeks ago. And, you know, there's a great scene in that where they have a trial of the seven. And you've sent, I highly recommended, by the way, guys. You do not need to know anything about Game of Thrones. It is a self-contained story, a Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, chivalry, honor culture, hero culture. You know, it's violent, but like, it is great, just first principal show.

And there's an infamous scene or a great scene that goes teed up a few weeks ago. wherein the main character is basically sentenced to a trial by combat against a corrupt prince and he needs to find six other knights to fight alongside him or he forfeits in front of the gods and of course he can't find the sixth knight the sixth night so what happens he calls out to the nobles and says is there no honor left among you is there no honor left among the noble houses of westeros and the man who answers his cry is the uncle of the very prince that he is in the trial by combat against. So because the uncle chooses honor culture over the defense of his own bloodline and literally joins a stranger, a strange knight, and fights against his own bloodline because he thinks that honor strips even blood. And again, it's a great scene you pointed out at that time.

But you know, you just teed up the positive way, if we assume Donald Trump can navigate this Kobayashi-Maru, can cut the Gordian knot, and can maybe get away from the sort of Damocles and have it fall on somebody else, it feels like, well, what would we be going toward, right? What would be the response and the whiplash positively toward this era of Sutterfuge and lying to your point and just misdirection and politicking and religious zealotry? It might look a lot like honor culture. And as you've been pointing out, there are some figures on the game board that if you kind of look closely, seem to have been exhibiting a lot of those traits, even if a lot of the Normie Hivemind, including in MAGA, has been positioning them as our enemies. and as Trump's enemies the whole time. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, the, you know, again, we want to demand from our leaders

that they be honorable, that they be honest, that they say what they mean, mean what they say, stop making us promises and then going and delivering for other people, for your donors, foreign interest, whatever.

But before we can do that, we really have to hold ourselves accountable. Like, we really, like, we see dishonorable behavior out there in the world that's being committed by among, you know, like ourselves. And I think it's like that's a big problem.

I think that it's very hypocritical for us to ask for our leaders to be honorable men if we are not honorable men. And that's why the impetus ultimately is on us, like each and every one of us to change the way that we think, change the way we act, change the way we behave. And that's the only way you're going to reverse this like trend towards, towards like degradation and towards degeneracy and turn the whole thing around.

It's not going to happen overnight. It's going to take probably generations. But you have to start somewhere. And it's like, why not start right here, right now today? And I think that, I think that, you know, the question kind of becomes for, from Trump's standpoint, okay, so how do you, like, number one, people saying, like speaking about this stuff and claiming that they have like authority. They're like,

well, I know what's happening. Like, it's obviously this. I don't know what the hell is happening, guys. Like, I'm literally just a guy on his computer.

Like, just reading the same news stories that you're reading. I don't have any, I don't have a security clearance. I don't have intelligence training. I don't have any friends in the government telling me anything. Like, I don't mean any of those things.

Okay. So my analysis is really just based on instinct and lots and lots of, of, of, like, sets of data, large sets of data. synthesizing data.

Yeah, just autism, weaponized autism. But it's just taking in lots and lots and lots of information. I don't worry about the messenger. I don't worry about, well, it's coming from this guy. So can I trust it? Of course, I have those filters, but I'm just taking in information, as much information as I can and trying to digest it. But I think people are too quick to say, well, I'm not going to listen to this because

it's coming from this source. Right. When, you know, like every source is probably going to tell the truth at some point, Like they're going to weave bad information into good information to sell the bad information. So you should just be taking an information all the time and just not emotionally attaching yourself to any of it. And then that allows you to distill it and synthesize it. But I wanted to play this clip because Joe Kent has obviously become like the center of this week of like the focus. And I found this clip very compelling.

This is from like many years ago before he was in the Trump administration. an interview that he did on this podcast. So let's watch this. And you kind of get some insight into who he is. You worked for about 20 years serving in the U.S. military as not only a green beret, eventually a CIA paramilitary officer as well. This all culminated when you were working in the Trump administration. And your wife, who was a naval officer, was actually killed while serving in

in Syria. You blamed her death on rogue elements within the Trump administration, whom undermined the president's withdrawal strategy in Syria. Can you explain how you came to that conclusion? I mean, I was in the military, right when the warranted air started, I came in just before 2001. So I was in Greenbrae for, I did 11 combat deployments, and then I went right into the CIA as a paramilitary operations officer when I hit the 20-year mark in the military. That wasn't in my second career. My late wife, Shannon, was a Navy Signals Intelligence Specialist. She spoke Arabic. So by the time I met her, she already had quite a few combat deployments.

She was deployed for the last push to go take out the last bit of ground that ISIS controlled in 2018. And they reached their objective by late November, December of 2018. And that's when Trump sent out a famous tweet. But that tweet also had orders behind it that said, hey, let's get our troops out of Syria. Because in Trump's mind, this is what the American people hired him to do. He ran on, hey, ISIS is out of control. We are going to go in there. We're going to crush and dismantle ISIS. And we very much did that. I was deployed under Obama in

2016, the counter ISIS mission, and we had no direction whatsoever. We had no authorities. We were over there very much in harm's way, taking casualties, but we didn't have the leadership at the, at the executive level to make hard decisions and give us the authorities to take out ISIS. Trump came in in 2017, and within less than probably about 18 months, we had defeated the Islamic Caliphate, lock, stock, and barrel. They didn't control any more ground. Now, there was a lot of people in permanent Washington, D.C., the administrative state of the national security blob,

whatever you want to call it, that they really wanted to stay in Syria. They were mad that we had left Iraq in the first place. We had reestablished a foothold back in northern Iraq, which is relatively peaceful, but we had a foothold in Syria, but that was all tied up with the counter-IS mission. But these people at the very senior levels of Department of Defense, the intelligence community, the State Department, there was a lot of Obama holdouts and even some old Georgia Bush people that just got swept into the Trump administration like Secretary of Defense Mattis, that they wanted to stay there forever. But they also wanted to turn this into regime change 2.0 against Assad, you know, which to me at that point in my career, I was like, have you guys seen, did you guys fight a different war than me? Because every time we do this regime change thing, like it doesn't work out in our favor. I was amazed these people even had the audacity to talk like this. But the orders came down in December of 2018. They were supposed to be out of there, my late wife,

and everybody else that was in Syria at the time, they were supposed to get on airplanes and fly to Urbile by Christmas Eve of 2018. Now, I could see this all play out in real time. There was a lot of feet dragging going on. There was senior level officials for the administration who were giving the orders, and there was these mid-level appointees that were just like, well, we have to wait till we get more orders, just really tying it up in bureaucratic speak. Because if you've been in the government for any length of time, you understand how to drag your feet.

It's not very complicated to do. And unfortunately, I don't think Trump had enough folks that were loyal to him and to his agenda to understand what was happening at the deeper levels of bureaucracy. So I saw this play out. I was communicating. I was talking with my life and I was like, I think that they're going to keep you guys there. And she's like, yeah, I kind of get that feeling too. But we do have orders to be out of here by Christmas Eve of 2018. And tragically, they remained. And then about a month later on. the 16th of January 2019 her and three other Americans were killed by a suicide bomber in manned in which Syria so I had a brief offer I decided I was going to resign from the government at that time we we have two kids five and seven now but they're very young um so I just really wanted to focus on my children um but I had a chance to meet Trump over I basically told them what I just told you I said look you you don't know who I am but I've been fighting these wars at the ground level

since they they started really and you're getting it right in a way that the president has your instincts are right like when Trump on as a candidate said that like when you Like we got lied to about Iraq and we never should have gone in the first place and we should get out. Like that, he was 100% right, his gut instinct. So I shared that with him, but then I just told him, I was like, you're getting undermined in a way that I've never seen before at the mid to senior levels. I came in under Clinton. I served off the Bush. I served all through Obama in what I saw on day one of the Trump administration, the way that we had mid-level bureaucrats who just basically said that we don't have to listen to the Trump administration.

Like, and that's ultimately what led to my wife getting killed. Yeah. So for those who didn't fully follow what he just said, what he just said is, so this guy was a green beret and then he worked in the CIA. And so because of that, the fact that he was CIA, everyone's like, well, he must be a bad guy because you never leave the farm. Okay, fair. However, he literally just said, my wife, the mother of my children, is dead because of subversive elements in the bureaucracy, in the permanent bureaucracy, specifically the CIA that refused to follow president. Trump's orders to withdraw from Syria. I remember that.

I remember 2018 when Trump made that post and said, we're getting out of Syria. By the way, guys, if you go check right now, we are currently in Syria. What are we? This would be seven years later. I think it's a seven, no, eight years later. We're eight years later, I guess maybe seven and a half years later. And we're still in Syria. We still have not fulfilled Trump's order from seven plus years ago where he said, all right,

everyone leave hasn't happened yet. So that's pretty damning. I would point to, and again, like Chris is great. And what I love about Chris is that he keeps my feet on the ground when we have these discussions. But he, you know, it's like I don't need Joe Kent to be a good guy.

I don't need Tucker Carlson to be a good guy. Like the white hat, black hat game, I feel like becomes its own little trap where people just sit there and argue about whether, like the morality of a person, like a television character that they'll never meet. And then they never actually discussed the substance of whatever the message or the content that is being conveyed. My gut is that if I were going to go recruit somebody to conduct an operation for me that would be to expose like the truth about Israel and the truth about the subversive elements inside our government, that would be a guy that I would go and recruit because he has a real, he has a vendetta.

He has a chip on his shoulder. he can't be negotiated with he can't be compromised he can't be leveraged um because his wife was killed by these people and he wants revenge i would i would justice um i would argue um and before i turn it over to you i want to play this one minute clip this is what tucker put out um this is like tucker's like own promo for the interview listen this is go kent's entire thesis throughout the whole throughout the whole interview. The war with Iran is potentially the end of a lot for the United States. At this point, it feels like there's no way out. What's the answer? It's going to take drastic action. The good news is this is something that President Trump is uniquely qualified to fix. The main issue is what the Israelis are doing.

And he needs to very forcefully, and probably with a new team of diplomats, go to the Israelis and say, you're done. We will defend you. However, you are done going on the offense. This is our war. We're paying for it. We're bleeding for it. you choose to continue this offensive operation, we will start withdrawing features of your defense system so that you will be on your own. We have to say that to them. And I know a lot of people who like the Israelis are going to say, that's wrong, they're under fire. But if we don't address our relationship with the Israelis, even if we come up with the temporary ceasefire, we'll be right back in the same situation in very short order. How hard will that be? It will be hard, but again, President Trump can do it. That's great, man. President Trump can do it. That was his message.

There's only one person who's uniquely qualified with the right personality to do this, and that's President Trump. That was his entire message. And it felt like everything he said right there was coming out of Trump's mouth, but through Jo Cant. That's like my gut, but I don't know. Yeah, well, it's a great, this is what bicameral thinking is supposed to be. Again, I often find myself like trying to remind people of the intent behind that is not to stick to one interpretation. it's to map both forward and time, forward and narrative time and see which one maps more strongly. And a lot of people think they do that, but they actually just marry themselves to one.

So Joe Kent, CIA, bad guy undermining Trump. Okay, map that scenario forward. Keep mapping that scenario forward. But you've got to be able to honestly and earnestly map the other one that you're doing. And on that narrative, it's kind of interesting because that little, that last one-minute clip you just played doesn't. that sound an awful lot like us talking about the Kobayashi Maru and James T. Kirk. And again, when I first started writing about the Kobayashi Maru, it was more about this. You know, lately, I've really gotten into talking about the actuals, energy disentangle, financial

disentanglement, the disentangling and transition of the petro dollar back to the US dollar. And what does that mean? But the original, my original framing of the Kobayashi Maru, If anybody doubts this, I do like to just show people the receipts, which Ghost is full of receipts. He's always got a clip saying one of these things. For me, it's my articles. November 3rd, 2023, The Impossible Task. And what was the subhead here? Peace was always an option.

And this is my response to October 7th. And basically all about Trump having to disintent. What would be the most difficult narrative battle space for the narrative. narrative war master, as I've been calling him since 2022, to navigate. Probably the relationship between the U.S. government and the Christian contingent and Israel. That is the most difficult task for Donald Trump to navigate. And it's interesting that you point out, Joe Kent is saying he is uniquely qualified to take that task on. So if we take that framing and then you rewind and go earlier in this show tonight, we're just laying out some scenarios. And for me, I say, okay,

if that is the end game, if Donald Trump's end game is to disentangle us from these Forever Wars in the Middle East, and more importantly, to the point Kent made at the end there, to disentangle us and remove us from the potential or future entanglements in the Middle East, our relationship over there must fundamentally change, right? would agree with that whether or not you like Joe Kent most people in this audience would agree with that how do we get there and that's when my mind starts going to well how do you get the narrative shielding to publicly break from Israel not just to normieville but to Christians to long-time Republicans to Zionists even how does Donald Trump get the political and social

capital to break from them it would be in my view Donald Trump and Iran getting closer and closer to a deal, and Israel just not really wanting that to happen. And again, let's say this all goes the way we think it will and we'll get a peace deal there, whether that's an expansion of the Abraham Accords or something brand new. How do you stop it from happening again? Well, you deprive them of the actual and the narrative of nuclear weaponry in the first place. And you make sure both sides are deprived of that so you don't have the actual. whatever you think is going on there. I've got my doubts about the nuclear capabilities of all these players. I'm one of those. But even if you think all that's very true and very scary as defined to us, if those things are removed from the board, they have lost the narrative of escalation and more more importantly than escalation. They lose the narrative impetus behind preemptive attacks. on these nations. They both lose it on each other. The Iranians can no longer attack the Israelis.

If the Israelis don't have a nuclear threat, Sordid Damocles hanging over their heads. The Israelis can no longer attack the Iranians because they're going to get a nuke. And I think that's a lot of what we're going toward. And yeah, you're absolutely right. And I want to see you up for the Gulf states as we're kind of winding down here, because I know that that's a lot of where your mind has been at. and with Vladimir Putin and sovereign alliance members with this honor culture thing of saying, you know, how do we reach these new treaties? How do we make sure this stuff doesn't, you know, we're leaving one era of geopolitics.

In your mind, why does honor culture have so much to do with what the new era needs to be in this geopolitical realm? Yeah, it's a good question. And again, it's like, I think it just comes down to respect. It's like respect and integrity, which, you know, we live in a world now where, being dishonest and unscrupulous is almost like considered a virtue like gamesmanship from a gamesmanship. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, oh, like I, like I won the negotiation because I was able to trick them into doing something they shouldn't have done.

And now they've agreed to terms that are ultimately really, really bad for them, but I win. So that makes me the better man. Right. Like that's kind of how like our world is viewed now. And if you've read Trump's books and you understand Trump's thinking, that's not how Trump approaches the deal. Like when he does the art of the deal, now, there might be people that he has dealt with that way because they were being, you know, very, very hyperaggressive and unscrupulous to him. But if you understand how he puts deals together, because he loves to put deals together, what he likes to do is he likes to put together deals where everyone wins, where everyone walks away from the deal saying, damn, like that worked out for me. right and that makes them more eager by the way to come back and do another deal with donald trump

the next time around um it's like victory but gets victory right um you know like the idea of like jesus like do a good deed pay it forward and then that person will pay it forward and then like you know everyone has has the feels right everyone feels good and that kind of spreads that uh that ethos um it's very similar i think i think it's a similar mindset now getting back to you know the Arabs, the Russians, the Chinese, again, very, I feel very frustrated for Putin. I feel very frustrated for a lot of these leaders because they don't feel like they have an earnest partner that they can deal with in the West. Because every single country in the West is run by a skumbag, like a lying scumbag. They're all just lying scumbags who do not say what they mean. They do not

mean what they say. And they will say one thing when they're trying to get elected and then turn around and do the complete opposite once they're in power. And again, is that a reflection of democracy or is that like representative government or is that a reflection of the nefarious elements that have taken control of representative government in the West? And I think it's the latter. And then understanding what is that thing? What is this parasite that like this octopus that has his tentacles in us?

And, you know, is it Israel? Is it the diaspora? Is it, you know, a consortium of different groups, different factions that all are like criminal groups that are all working together? Who knows? But Israel is a big one. I mean, this is a very, very big one that our foreign policy certainly seems to be controlled by Israel and probably other things as well.

To the extent that you now have the weaponization of free speech, you have the sheriff of Miami showing up at people's houses knocking on the door and saying, hey, maybe you should take that anti-Semitic post on Facebook down because you might inspire somebody else to go do something violent. Like that's by the way how it all started in Europe 10 years ago, like Britain 10 years ago, where they started there. Like your language might incite somebody else to go do something violent so you shouldn't talk like that.

And that's how it all starts. And then before you know, they're kicking down doors and drag. away kids who were who were shit posting online and saying mean things and it's like that's it really happens that quickly yeah yeah and the and the jew question the reason we try to unabashedly talk about it on all sides is because that's the trojan horse for this kind of stuff yeah and you know the the honor culture point i think is interesting and i think uh to to more to more uh to to focus in on the iranian theater in particular we're talking about i think it's really interesting one of the things you and I talked about via DM before the show was the idea that, you know,

Donald Trump's peace tours in his most famous peace tours, I believe occurred in 2017 and then 2025, the beginning of basically the beginning of both terms, both public terms. And the real highlight of the peace tours was the Middle East. We had Saudi Arabia and the South Arabia and the South. sword dance, the infamous sword dance, and you've done a ton of content on that from 2017. And then look at what happens in 2025. We get Donald Trump going to Saudi Arabia to the UAE, Doha, I believe, and then who was the third? No, Doha, Qatar, and then the UAE, right? Yes. So it was, yeah, the Saudis, the Saudis, the Qatari's, and the Emirates, yeah, Tatars. And

who is thrust into center stage? right now in terms of a high pressure cooker narrative actual scenario everybody's focused on the US and Iran but who's right on the periphery there we've got the Saudis the Qataris and the Arabians they're all right there and in the last week in particular a lot of that rhetoric while the while they are right now threatening Iran and saying like hey we're gonna fucking go after you if you keep fucking around with us. They're also lobbing a few narrative grenades over at Israel and saying, you provoked the latest attack on us. So I'm not saying that the Arab nations are like defending Iran in the central narrative right now, but they are saying,

we want peace. And a lot of what you focused on in your commentary with those two peace tours from Donald Trump with those nations in particular is that very public display of honorical coming back. So it's kind of interesting that we've got all these players orbiting the Iranian crisis right now. I wonder how you see that playing out like that the 2017 and 2025 seating and how these golf players and Donald Trump are going to come into the narrative here in a bigger way. Well, so here's like I can actually let them speak for themselves. Here is a clip from this past week of Turkey and Qatar, traditionally not great friends, but they've become better friends recently. And they are certain, like these two represent, outside of Saudi Arabia, these two

represent Donald Trump's closest allies in the Middle East. Tamim, the leader of Qatar, he talks about Qatar all the time how much he loves them. And then this is Haqon Fadon, the foreign minister of Turkey. And Trump's talked about how Erdogan is just his guy. Like, he's my guy in the Middle East. So here's a joint press conference from the two of them. Listen to what they both say. It should be two resolutions through diplomatic methods. It should be explicitly indicated that the primary responsible party for this war that has drawn our region to an unprecedented crisis is Israel. Okay, so that's Turkey.

Here's Qatar. Say that this war need to stop immediately. The aggression need to stop immediately because everyone knows who is the big beneficiary of this war and dragging the whole region into this conflict and unfortunately was taking bliss now it's a ser for those agendas thank you very much yeah so you're saying everyone knows who the real beneficiary of this is like it's obviously israel um and again like i have people in my responses and replies being like well how can you say that israel is the one control and everything like it's china china china's the one controlling everything well really when's the last war that we

started on behalf of china like what was the last time like what country did we did we invade on behalf of China. What country did we invade on behalf of Russia or on behalf of Venezuela? The answer is none. We've never started a war on behalf of China or behalf of Russia or behalf of Venezuela. So it's very silly to assert that any of those countries influence our government to the extent that they control what we do. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It's like just being honest. Like like look at like look at the net effect. Like why did we invade Iraq? I mean, go go read Joe Kent's resignation letter and tell me which part. you disagree with because he says Israel created ISIS. I mean, that's something I've been saying for years. He says the Iraq war was started on behalf of Israel to benefit Israel.

It's saying that for years. Like go through every single thing. The Syria war, like Tover or Assad started on behalf of Israel. It's saying that for years. It's like he's only saying the things that the rest of us have been saying for many, many years, presenting the research. He's just being honest about it and getting destroyed over it, like both the left and the right coming after him.

But nobody really wants to address the content of what he's saying. Is what he's saying true? I don't need him to be a good guy, by the way. He can be a bad guy. He can be a good guy. The net effect of what he's done, though, is he has shifted the Overton window that I'm getting text messages from family

members who refuse to engage with this narrative for years. And now finally have said, you know what? I think Israel actually is the issue here. I think we actually need to talk about this. Lindsay Graham and Bill O'Reilly talking about it. It's like it's here now. Like we're having the discussion. And one of the ways I had framed Joe Kent in my own kind of hypothetical that we talked about in the brief this past week, wrote about, we both wrote about him in a few different topics.

And again, not knowing what the intention is there, but I said, okay, if, if this is to use rise attire, misrise attire in the chat earlier tonight talked about central casting, I'm not closed off to those ideas. say, okay, well, what does that mean? Besides just TV character, Patriots at Control, and I think what she's getting at is, you know, the idea of Trump knowing who these people are. And the term I had used in the brief this week in regards to that reading of Donald Trump and Joe Kent is to say, what would be the purpose of Joe Kent

going out there and saying stuff like this? The term I used was a cognitive ranger or a narrative ranger, somebody who Trump can deploy to the outer edge of the Overton window within his own base. And as you've been pointing out this week, what is the net effect of Joe Kent's deployment over the last week? An intramaga argument about the nation of Israel

and its relationship with the United States and specifically with American conservatism and republicanism. Is that argument happen? Can that argument be weaponized? Absolutely. Are people trying to weaponize it? Absolutely.

is that argument happening a net positive or a net negative? And that's to each their own. I think it's a net positive. And I, for one, don't think Donald Trump is sitting there saying, I'm really upset that my base is arguing over whether or not we should be interventionists on behalf of Israel. So when you kind of reverse engineer those assumptions and those premises, it might change how you look at some of these figures. And, you know, again, you said earlier, it's unlikely Donald Trump's going to get up at the podium and take Israel to task yet.

He's totally comfortable within the Overton window, taking bad actors within Iran to task and within Europe to task. And he calls them our so-called allies. And by the way, I dug up recently, you know how Trump calls Europe our so-called allies? He's been saying that since 1987. So in a lot of these old interviews that are coming up that. people are bringing up in various contexts. Donald Trump has been referring to at the time, it was Japan, big economic player in the 80s. And Europe, our post-World War II allies, he called them our so-called allies on his TV interviews. So long, long time. No, we don't need it.

We're not going to get any arguments from this community. But yeah, you can reverse engineer these things. And last little question I have for you is a little question, given the Gulf states in particular and what you've been talking about with honor culture and I guess a positive reading of how Donald Trump can untangle this stuff. When it comes to regions of responsibility and this region in the Middle East, where do you see the end game? Like let's just say Donald Trump and the sovereign alliance get what they want in the Middle East. What does that framework? What does a stable kind of multipolar framework look like to you specifically in that region? Well, I'm I mean, I would say that, let's just start with Israel, because I think that's the turd in the punch bowl.

You know, I think a, in Israeli society that is not a theocratic society, which is it totally is right now. And all you have to do is go listen to Jonathan Greenblatt or, you know, from the ADL or Ronald Lauter from the guy who owns Estée Lauder, the makeup company, who's also the president of the World Jewish Congress, talk about this stuff. And they say that Zionism and Judaism are one and the same and they can't be removed. So if you criticize the government of Israel, you are criticizing the religion of Judaism and the Jewish people. Like that has to stop. Like we have to obviously like end that ridiculous political conflation. And having a like a truly secular Israel is what needs to happen. And now how does that happen?

That's not our problem to figure out. That's their problem to figure out. But if they can't get along with the other kids on the playground, they're going to get their ass kicked. And we're not going to sit there and protect them anymore. I think Joe Kent made that point on the Tucker interview. And I think he's right. It's like if they're not going to, you know, if they're going to go around and pick fights with all the other kids on the playground, we should start pulling back our defensive architecture that is there to protect them.

Now, putting them aside, let's just assume that that that powder keg is totally diffused. What does the rest look like? I go back to the statement that Trump's made since the beginning, which is peace through strength. And like, what does that actually mean? Like peace through strength? Because, I mean, the U.S. military has been the strongest military since the end of World War II, right? I mean, we have dominated the world. We've policed the world.

So we've been strong. Like, there's no denying that we're strong. So when he says peace, like we need a new, like a new model, peace through strength. Like that almost implies that we weren't the strong before, right? unless you consider the fact that when he says peace through strength, he means the strength of other countries to balance out, to have like a mutually assured destruction dynamic, where if you have a strong Turkey,

a strong Saudi Arabia, and a strong Iran in the Middle East, that's a totally stable Middle East because nobody's going to go pick a fight because they don't want to get their asses kicked by the other two tough guys on the playground. And frankly, if every country in the Middle East was really strong, that would be even better but if you can only have a few that at least balances it out so that you're not like because again look at europe

europe hasn't had a war in the past century now there's probably some nefarious uh negotiations that occurred um but i also think the world the war wars were conducted in order to destroy europe but a lot of it is because there's peace through strength it's like germany understands that if they attack france they could potentially get nuked and vice versa it's like that's led to this stabilization that Europe hasn't had in centuries. So I think that that's where we're going, is that it has to be, if you're going to have regions of responsibility, first of all,

we have to trust these people to manage their own region without us. Like, we walk away and we don't look back, other than just to be friends with them. A lot of people are uncomfortable with that. There are a lot of people who don't want the U.S. military to leave the Middle East or leave China, like leave Asia,

like Southeast Asia. That's ridiculous. Like, if we want to have a small presence there, like a small base, fine. But we don't need to be the world police. We don't need to have like a base in every single country in the world. We have like 800 or 900 bases. We don't need all that shit. Like, it's ridiculous.

Bring the kids home. Bring the troops home. You could argue that that last point you made was the defining difference in the story between what MAGA was supposed to be and what Republicanism was supposed to be. was supposed to be and by that i mean neo neoconservatism as you pointed out earlier like if there was one thing that separated maga from neocons it was that interventionism foreign interventionism donald trump is against it i firmly agree with how you laid that out and the one point i'd add on top of it is goes back to something we talked about a little bit earlier and that is that you can't

I understand why Trump feels like he can't just walk away from the table with the geopolitical game board set up the way it has been set up by his predecessors. So there is this escalation to de-escalation, this disentanglement, this cutting of the Iranian knot, and many other situations, a resetting of the game board. And my theory tonight is that, you know, the nuclear disarmament narrative, including Israel. once you get a reset game board to your point then I think we can have a clean exit and there's no mandate for re-interventionism but if you don't have a clean exit then it's a harder mandate to set I think so you know I think we'll see where this thing goes but hey they've been saying it's kind of interesting that Trump and Bessent and all the all the usual suspects are basically saying yeah this might have been longer than

the Venezuela op and, you know, narrative, but it is going to be shorter than you think. And, you know, I'm not, you know, we've been aligned on this and Chris Paul and John and, you know, we're not like everything's about the midterms, guys. But I will say that according to the central narrative, it would be very difficult to see Donald Trump winning a narrative about the midterms if this keeps going on a long timeline. Because just in Normieville, it just isn't going to work, no matter how much we get on shows and talk about the brilliance that's on display here. People don't care. They care how expensive their lives are.

And if that allows them to steal new terms. And the optics of war, the optics of like us being in conflict. But here's the thing that I think puts us on that condensed timeline. There's an election in Israel in October. And there's a real fear, I think, from Netanyahu standpoint, that he's going to lose this election. and if he loses the election he's going to go to prison because the pardons department just came back

and said you know Trump said pardon Netanyahu well there's a process where they go and they review for 90 days and say is this a legitimate request and they came back this past week and said nope it's not a legitimate request we can't give you a pardon we're sorry so he's not getting the pardon

which means he's going to press full court press because I think the only way that he's in a win public mandate to stay in office is if he expands the borders of Israel if he takes southern Lebanon, if he takes parts of Syria, if he takes over Palestine, or if he defeats Iran, like in a war, like those are the things that I think are going to get him public mandate to stay in office. And so he's going to push for that as quickly as he can. And that escalation,

that forced escalation is going to, I think, to Scott Besson's point, it's going to force de-escalation just as quickly. So we'll see. And the last thing I'll, like going back to honor culture. This is from, I just stumbled on this, looking at Gart clips the other day. This is from November, Cocoa Beach, a question from Oak. And I think this is what happened, by the way, like, with Mike Huckabee and with Ted Cruz, like going on a long-form podcast, Tucker in this case, but it could be anything. And being forced to answer questions, like listen to this exchange. The things that allows us to people is accountability and responsibility. And those two words, have become dirty words in our society and we have to change that people everybody has to be held

accountable for what they do their performance what they say what they don't say and i think we all agree with that and our leaders we're not going to respect them until they take responsibility for the things that we that they do and we don't see that right now so how do we get back how do we change and i don't know that there is an answer or an easy answer but how do we change so that we know so that we do have accountability and responsibility, and that's not a dirty word in a society anymore. What's a good question? And I, again, I go back to the friction and the confrontation, and, you know, being able to question things and being able to confront Meggin and being able to confront whoever the public figure, it's a great point. Because holding them

accountable means being able to ask them hard questions and put them in a position where answering the question that they don't want to answer is going to make them either look foolish or maybe look like a fraud. If you don't have the opportunity to ask that question, then how are you ever going to get that moment? How are you ever going to have accountability? And the problem is that when they only go and speak to CBS or Fox News or MSM or whoever, the questions are not the question that we actually want to ask them.

And so if you don't have those opportunities and there is no confrontation and there is no accountability, then you're never going to break out of the system that, Donald Trump is trying to break us out of. There you go. There you go. Great shit, Ghost. I hope you guys enjoyed that. Honor culture, Kobayashi Maro's Iranian Knots.

I'm sure Ghost will just end up becoming permanent co-host at some point. He's back every three weeks anyway. So thanks for joining me, man. You've got to scamper off to the brief dungeons. Yes, I do. Because Ghost is the lead on the Monday brief. So subscribe to the Badly. substack guys. I'll let you go, ghost. I'll just grab a couple rants and get out of here.

Thanks for having me, man. Always enjoy these conversations. Yeah, good shit, dude. See you. All right. I hope you guys enjoyed that. I think that was some good stuff. Yeah, it's the Kobayashi-Maru, and I know these are like catch-all terms and oh, trust the master and Trump's got a plan and trust the plan. And most of us do, right? But it's fun to have these conversations of like, okay, if we are watching the plan, what is it? And how might it end is usually where I start? Where might we be going? What is the current lay of the land? What has to occur between this and that in order for that to be actualized? And I don't know. So I hope you guys enjoy some of those suppositions and we'll see how accurate we are on the macro. Tend to get better at this stuff over time.

enjoyed that please hit the thumbs up button if you did i'll hit a couple rants here tom terrific 54 25 bucks as always for the cause thank you tom it's not going appreciated it's almost like it becomes a habit when it's like oh tom terrific but i understand is a donation it is a unique donation every time and we truly do appreciate that tropical rocket 10 bucks if trump rose blows up iran's power plants the world as we know it is going to end you might be right on a few uh counts there might not not be a bad world as we know it changing type of thing. Demob, 20 bucks, one of my favorite shows. Thank you, D. Mobb. Appreciate that. And then Melindy sends a fiver over, B, B, Dogmatic, not spiritual. And yes, I agree with you. I meant spiritual war in terms of spiritual, like, awakening and sifting

that's going on. And maybe to your point, the spiritual awakening is the, is Donald Trump amplifying the dogma within people that do not consider themselves dogmatic. and putting that on display for everybody around them who is spiritual, right? That might be a good way to sort of put it. And I do want to promote our substack, badlands.substack.com, guys, it is free. If you do want to support us over there, that support goes directly to Badlands. It goes to me. It goes to Ghost.

It goes to Ash. All the stuff we do over there is free. We not only do the brief five days a week. We switch off who's the lead on the brief. That takes a lot of time. myself, Ghost and Asher in telegram chat all week, passing stories back and forth. It's a whole extra run of content

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Really appreciate the support over there. And for the theme of this week's episode, if you guys fancy, go to burningbrite.substack.com. My latest article is like part three of a series I accidentally started writing, starting with Trump and the Path of the Torpedo. Trump's test last week, which was very popular,

reached some new eyes. And now the Iranian knot on the true Kobayashi-Maroo and Donald Trump's Info War posture. Again, if you guys do want other ways to support, you can support me independently over on my substack. But it's all free as well. So the Iranian knot, I think that one is a much deeper dive into some of the stuff we talked about today. Tonight we talked a lot about the themes and the narratives. Ironically, even though I'm focused on narrative, that article goes much deeper into how I see it being. disentangled on an actual level so check that out if you guys want to I'll drop a

link in the chat for that and otherwise I'm gonna outro with the intro go join the queue after hours boys see what they have to say about all this nonsense and otherwise I'll see you guys next Sunday night just a couple Sundays before Gart looking forward to seeing a lot of you guys in Nashville oh one more thing I know I've dropped the ball on this we've had a lot going on we got a four 14 month old running around. There are some copies of sword punk, the leather bound sword punk, that we have that are left over from people canceling orders and things like that during the campaign last year. We've got a few copies. If you are interested in buying one of those copies,

we already paid for the production and all that kind of stuff, please email real Mrs. Burning Bright at gmail.com. She's got a waiting list, but if you're on that, if you don't know if you're on that not reach out. We're going to try to get those spun out within the next week or two and send those last copies out for people that are interested. And maybe, you know, we'll do another print run if I write a sequel. But if anybody who was interested in those, reach out to her and we'll get you on a list. We'll get the list in order. And we'll tell you how to buy those copies because, yeah, there's only a few left. Otherwise, as I always say, the war is a story. The story is a war. Act accordingly. See you guys next week.

I've been sleeping. I've been turning away from the truth I wanted not to face. There is a room that won't hear at the center of the galaxy. There is a darkness reaching like rust into everything we want us. We let it grow now it's he. How many men have you killed my love? 50? 100? Countless. How many lives of you save? Our family.

King of Landing. Tell me if you're precious brandy have commanded you to kill your own thought and stand by thousands of men when you killed and burned a life would you have done it to your own dead? Our time has come. We prepared. We grew stronger

and rested in your cradle of power. You were trusted. to leave the Republic, but you were deceived. You assumed no force could challenge you. And now... We have reticions are clear now. I see possible futures all at once. Our enemies are all around us.

And in so many futures they prevail. But I do see a way. There is a narrow way through. It's not a prophecy. It's a story that you keep telling, but it's not their story. It's yours. They deserve to be led by one of their own. All this horror-breaking. We gave them something to hope for.

That's not hope! We have survived by hiding from them, by running from them. But they are the gatekeepers. They are guarding all the doors. They are holding all the keys, which means that sooner or later, someone is going to have to fight them. I wish none of this had happened. So do all live to Susan's story.

I'm tired. The war doesn't go for it. It lost it. I wish you good fortune in the wars to come. Begins? No. Now it ends.