Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 860: DC Police Under Federal Control

Episode Date: August 18, 2025

This episode of Cognitive Dissinence is brought to you by our patrons. You fucking rock. Be advised that this show is not for children, the faint of heart, or the easily offended. The explicit tag is there for a reason. Recording live from Gloryhole Studios in Chicago and beyond. This is cognitive dissonance. Every episode we blasts anyone who gets in our way. We bring critical thinking, skepticism, and irreverence.

To any topic that makes the news, makes it big or makes us mad. It's skeptical. It's political, and there is no welcome, Matt. Today is Thursday. I don't know, man. It's sometime in August. 14th? Sure.

Let's go with the 14th. Look, all that matters, all that matters is that soon enough, when people go to tune in to the Alex Jones crazy bullshit show, it's possible, finally, that some comeuppance is coming. Here's what I hope happens. That he has a heart attack and dies on air? here's the second thing what I hope happens to him what I hope happens

is that there's a moment of his life where he regrets the things he does because it's caused him so much pain can we just I need to take a break from this show you know it is exhausting to do a show with a person that is so much better than me as a human being

can you just get in the mud with me as a bad person I did say I'm okay with the first option when we met 25 years ago you were a bad person and I was a bad person and you grew up and I don't like it. I don't like, I resent your, I don't like the trajectory of our friendship. This is not helpful because now suddenly, oh, I'm wishing ill on him as a person. You're like, I hope it grows and learns and I'm just like, I'm, yeah, I'm also okay with him not. So that's also okay.

But I'm also, I'm also wishing that there's a moment of his life where he, realizes that he, that his, that he's, that he feels some pain. Like I've been talking about it for a while about touch the whole stuff with your whole fucking hand. Yeah. Not just the tiniest tip of your finger me like, oh, that was hot. I want you to fall and have to write yourself with your hand. That's what I want. And some people need that. And I think like, yeah, I don't know that that would teach Alex Jones. I think Alex Jones would then like say the blister on his hand was alien. But like, like, like, I feel there's a group of people in the country that might learn from that sort of thing.

Sure. I also wonder, too, Tom. That's so much better than mine. I just got to say, like, this is why you should be in charge of stuff, and I should be a podcast. It turns out that's what I am, too. I'm just saying, I'm just saying, Cecil, I would vote for you. I would vote against me.

Thank you. I'd be like, I know that guy's heart. Do not vote for Tom. You know how you never get elected is to have a thing called Gloria Holsterio. But seriously. like I wonder and I genuinely wonder this and I don't know

the answer to this and maybe the knowledge fight guys would know is there a group of people that are mad about this is there a group of people out there that are upset at the Sandy Hook families

because they're taking Alex Jones down do you think that there's a group of people out there that are absolutely 1,000% with certainty there is a huge

group of people that are like that I think there are still many men I would actually here's my guess I don't know shit about fuck

I didn't do like a fucking scientific survey of this, of course. But I would be willing to venture that most of the people who believed the Sandy Hook conspiracy still believe it. Yeah. I don't think that's wrong. And that's just because of what we know about conspiracies and how conspiracies react or don't react to changes in truth and to illuminations of fact, right? It's like I think of like how many end times preachers. preached a date for an end time, then the end time didn't arrive, and they don't lose any congregation. Yeah, the followers just are like, well, when's the next day?

Right. Like, I miss that. Yeah. So I think if you were a Sandy Hook truther, you are probably afraid or more nervous about acting and harassing and bothering people because you know that you're going to get your assing. You know that there's some. But those people are like, they're censoring the truth. Because the narrative from the beginning was always they're censoring the truth. So if I start with that as my supposition that I build my pyramid on top of, how am I ever going to get out of that?

Yeah. You know, so yeah, I would say 99 and a half percent of them probably. It's interesting because I've, you know, I listen to a lot of more Joe Rogan now that I do the other show. And I've heard him talk about Alex Jones. And I've also heard him say things like, you know, you can't say the things he said or things like that. You can't do this thing. But I don't know that I've ever heard him say like, that was a shitty thing that Alex Jones did. I think he's sort of talked about the things

as if like from a 30,000 foot view rather like you can't say those types of things or you shouldn't say those types of things not that's a bad person who would say those kind of things. I'm going to make a value judgment about the kind of person who makes those claims. Yeah, and he's not saying, I mean, I'm going off what he said, but I think it's important

the distinction between those things are lies that hurt people. Yes. And we should not tolerate a person in society who is spewing lies with the intent to hurt people for their personal gain, right? That's a true fact. Versus saying something like,

well, you can't say that kind of implies that the reason you can't say that is you'll get in trouble. Not, it's not true. Or that it's a bad thing to do to hurt people. Right.

Yeah. So if the reason I can't say things is because I'm going to get in trouble but not because I'm lying, those are two very different like worldviews that are built into that. It reminds me very much of the people who I used to have conversations with that were religious that would say, like,

I would be stealing and killing and fighting everybody and taking everything I could if I didn't think there was a God. And I'm like, oh, you're just a bad person. Right. You're just a genuinely bad human being. All the atheists I know do all the killing they want to do, which is none of it. You're just a bad person. And I'm be honest, I'm kind of happy you're not like unleashed. These are good shackles for you. You're a monster. You're a monster. you should be shackled. Yeah. Right.

And if your shackle is a book full of nonsense, cool, shackled a monster, right? Like, you know, if there's a, if there's a rabid pit bull, like I don't really care that much, like what metal the chain is made up as long as it will hold, right? I'm not real interested. If someone's like, oh, you know, you're real brass versus stainless, I'm like, will it hold back the rabid dog? Yeah. The one thing I worry about is that when they try to chain us with that stuff.

That is a problem. worried about that. That it's a problem. That it's a problem. You know, what's interesting, too, Cecil, is like, what is Joe's takeaway? I wish somebody could ask him, what is Joe's takeaway from the Alex Jones trial? Because if his takeaway is, be careful about what you say because the powers that be may restrict your freedom of speech and make you pay for it. That's a bad, that's a message that I'm worried about. And I wonder, too. And I think that's probably his takeaway. don't remember exactly when

Alex Jones got his got this judgment against him. I don't exactly remember when that trial was taking place. I think it was taking place during the Trump presidency. If I recall correctly, it was earlier on in the Trump presidency when some of that stuff was taking place

those trials. But I can't like time it's a flat fucking circle at this point. I have no idea. Right. So I, yeah, I could look it up. I'm not going to. Yeah. But I am going to say like it would depend, in my opinion, on when Joe heard it. Because if it's after his sort of falling out with media in general over COVID,

then there might be an issue. I think a serious issue that he might think that there's a coordinated attack against Alex Jones, like him. So this is actually a really interesting thing to do. I can look to see when those judgments came out and then go listen to some of those shows speed listen and dig through see if there's something there if he's mentioned it on the air so that might be something

that might be fun to do like search around that time for those for that sort of keyword and see that shift like yeah see that shift in tone and texture and that's an interesting thing to do too because you can look into somebody's

you know somebody's psyche based on current events well I think it's very clear that like Joe Rogan has had a Paul to Saul moment yeah For sure. Yeah. On the road to Damascus.

CNN knocked his fucking horseover. Yeah, right. Yeah, right. Absolutely. Like, he totally had a Paul to Saul moment. You know, like, he went from, like, one character to a very much more evil. Very, very different character. Yeah.

Yeah. I'll just say evil. Yeah. That's fine. Yeah. I know you don't want to use the same guy. No, it's fine. It's fine.

And that's why Paul was evil. Yeah. All rise for acting's highest honor. Judge Reinhold. Judge Reinhold is neither a real judge. Norsey received acting's highest honor. All right, this story is good news. This is hilarious from the New Republic.

Judge detested by Trump will oversee Epstein Files case. Welcome back, Judge Tanya Shuckin. That's fucking amazing. It's so good. That's good stuff. You know, no matter what you do, there is still going to be people that he hates in the justice system. Sure. You can't do anything about it.

Anybody upholding justice. Anybody. Yeah, exactly. And when it comes to this sort of thing, the files that get released will be based on this. It doesn't necessarily mean that some of this stuff is, just because he doesn't like her, doesn't mean that she's going to release things or do things that the public may want to see. It just means that it's one of those moments where he's not able to control everything about, because he has so much control.

We're going to talk about much of the show is the things that he's controls and how he's manipulating his power. But in this case, this is the one moment he doesn't have it. And you think about the give me for, that was Judge Eileen Campbell, Yeah. Right. Judge Eileen Cannon just broke all the rules. Yeah. Like all the rules. Like legal scholars were constantly like, what the shit is this?

What the shit is that? So I love that our justice system to some degree takes all the judges and puts them on a price's right wheel. And then you just fucking spin it. It's crazy. And you just fucking. It's fucking crazy. Judge Eileen Cannon. You know, like it's crazy.

It's crazy. It's a weird system. That's a bankrupt. Morally bankrupt. It's not the thing. Morally bankrupt. Yeah, but yeah, you're right. You're right.

It's like a fucking pick a card any card moment. Do you have any judge Eileen cannons? Go fish. Do you have any judge Tanya Shuckin? Go to jail. Oh, I hope that there is something that comes out of this because so many people want to see what's in those files, whatever files they have. I don't even know what they have.

Who knows? Yeah. It might be nothing. I think keeping it in the news makes him, it really puts him on his back foot. And he hates hearing about it. And he hates it so much that he's lashing out in any way he can to do whatever he can to rile people up. And you'll see that that much of our show today is going to be

a reaction to the Epstein files because he wants to rile people up and make people angry. And because his whole strategy the entire time he's ever been in office and ever been running for any kind of political office is to trigger other people. And not to, you know, overuse the same analogy, but, like, the guy has really cultivated a base of rabid dogs.

Yeah. And rabid dogs are a great base to have as long as they're not chewing on your face. But the thing with rabid dogs is they just want to chew faces, man. Yeah. They don't really give a shit. Yep. So, like, everything is meat to a rabid dog. And that's the base.

They just, they want to be mad. They're mad already. They're mad to start. They don't trust this. They don't trust that. They're not good thinkers. Conspiracy theorism is like built into the machinery. Distrust is built into the machinery.

That's dangerous to play with, man. That's building homemade fireworks. They're like you to blow off your own fucking fingers. It's fucking dangerous. It really is. It's like that scene from that secondhand of Electro movie when he pushes that wheelchair-bound scarface guy. Yes.

It's like eating his own brain. Does anyone have? have the new Creed CD? I have it. Give it to me right now. Give it to you. Why would I do that? You're not giving it to me. Give it to me faster. Wait, that's illegal. No, it isn't. I don't want it to be illegal. Therefore, it isn't.

That's the way it works. All right, this is from Huffington Post. Senator demands Bureau of Prisons explains Jelaine Maxwell transfers. So, Jelaine Maxwell got transferred from a minimum security prison. Like a fucking super easy to a summer camp. Yeah, club fed. The other thing that they have, too, that I saw this week was Allison Gill, who's like Mueller, she wrote, the person who does a Mueller, she wrote stuff, I guess came across some paperwork that is about Jelaine Maxwell through, like, Freedom of Information Requests, and found and sort of decoded some of the things, according to her, I've no idea how true this is, but according to her, that Jelaine Maxwell possibly is pushing for work from home prison. like Jeffrey Epstein. What?

So now there's a possibility that she may be on work release eventually because it looks like her paperwork is sort of suggesting that she's asking for work release. Get the fuck out of here. That's what I saw yesterday. Her job was to set up fucking predator sex massages. Yeah, man. How is she going to do that work? The guy's dead.

Like that was her gig. That's what she. She was a trust fund rich person who worked for Jeffrey Epstein doing creepy sex stuff. Like, how do you do that as work release? Well, what I was, yeah, I don't know what you do is work release. I mean, I don't know what you do. That's crazy. I feel like, I feel like you got to make her work retail.

Oh, that's a prisoner of itself. You got to make her work retail. Because retail workers, they are not. They are not, they get fucking wrecked by so many people. They have the, they get, they get yelled at. They have to clean up stuff. They should have to clean up. Retail work in this country is like genuinely a horror.

It's a bad thing and it's awful. And those people who get paid enough, it's terrible. It's genuinely terrible. She should be sentenced to work at a Popeyes. Yes, a Popeye's. She should be sentenced to work at a Popeye's. Just something just that sucks. Like, she'll be calling in sick to work from prison.

Like, I can't make it today. I'd rather get shived in prison. I'd rather stay in solitary today. Put me in the hole. God, man. Working reads. I've worked so much retail and I've worked fast food. That's why I feel like I can joke about it.

Like, it's really hard work. It's hard work. Customers treat you like you are such a piece of absolute human garbage. Here's one thing that I've seen comments at least. You know, like you'll see these like messages, these post messages that are taped against a wall and they're depicting it as if this is in the workplace. And I don't have any reason not to believe them that this is in their workplace. But there's like several retail things that'll come up

where people are like, you can't sit down on shift. You have to stand on shift. Oh, yeah. So like you can't sit at all. And I'm like, what kind of culture did we create? Yeah, man. It's like a marathon all day. You got to stand up for eight straight hours.

And there's no chairs for those people. Because I could see like if somebody comes in and you have to talk to them. Yeah, you got to get up. But like until there's a person to talk to, why am I making you stand like what kind of weird power trip do I did that was so when I was at Burger King and when I was at Boston Market they both would say if you have time to lean you have time to clean so if you stopped working you stopped moving and you were just like leaning against the work table because it's like a lull you're supposed to find something to clean yeah you know so just like

and I've worked in kitchens too I recognize that if I ever looked like I wasn't busy someone would someone would just make you be busy. Someone would find something for you to do. When I was at Circuit City, and I worked long shifts at Circuit City, like I would work like a bell to bells 9 to 9 to 9. So I worked a lot of like 9 to 9 shifts. 12 hours is a long time. And you were not allowed to sit.

Well, shut the fuck up though. We were never allowed to sit. So like, and you visited me at work, if you remember, like where I worked, there was a kiosk, there was the area. And then next to the kiosk, we would have a chair. And they would take our chair because when we're supposed to have it, we brought out from the lunchroom. And they would, the management would take the chair.

Like, you can't sit down. You got to do. You could be doing 10 other things that don't matter. Yeah, you could fucking vacuum or fucking straight and shit or whatever. You got to have your fucking gopher head popped up all at all times, right? So we would bring it out. It was this constant push, pull. That's amazing.

They would take it, we'd bring it out. We'd take it, we'd bring it out. Constantly we did this. Because like huge chunks of the day, I'll tell you this. Like, when you're at a fucking circuit city and it's Tuesday at three in the afternoon, there's like literally sometimes not one customer in the whole store. And I'm only on commission So I'm not getting paid to do anything

But sell stuff You're not getting paid to re-restock the shelves So there's nothing to do At all And if you sat or like read a book Or you were in trust Like you somebody come by and give you shit So yeah I would

A lot of times I would have a book Hidden in my kios This is literally hell Yeah You're just torturing people Because you want a power trip Yeah man Like why wouldn't

I can understand if somebody's reading a book and someone walks up to them and says, hey, I'd like to look at this there and you're like, hold on, let me get to the end of this chapter. That might be a problem. Right. I understand that. But like, if you're, there's nobody in.

There's nobody. There's nobody. Like, thankfully, I worked with another very close friend of ours, and I had a lot of friends in that store. So, like, sometimes... Be on lookout? We would have a lookout. We'd have lookout.

I would take naps. I would take naps. I know you know this, but, like... Like, there was times our friend would cover for me when I would show up like eight hours late to a 12-hour shift. And he would just be like, I just saw him. He's over there. I just saw him. He's over there.

Just send people on a goose chase for me. That's super amazing. It was so funny. Yeah. He just went out for coffee. He's going to be right back. He's going to be right back. He's going to be right back.

It's because, you know, if I showed up at four, now there's customers and it makes financial sense for me to be there. If I show up at 9 a.m., there's no one there. So if I had a lot of homework or something There's nothing You're not going to do anything Not selling anything I'm just standing around And you guys won't let me do my fucking homework

Makes sense And read a book Chief McNichol speaking Is this the police? Yeah This is the police Frack you I need

I need someone I need someone to I need someone to trace that call But that's impossible. Not for me, it isn't. This story comes from CNBC. Trump puts Washington, D.C. police under federal control, deploys National Guard. This is a huge monster story.

This is the biggest story of the week. Maybe one of the biggest, this should be one of the biggest historical stories of all time. It could be the biggest story of his presidency thus far. It could be. Yeah, it really could be. It would be difficult. Other than the destroying of the economy. But still, it's a big.

That's a bigan. Yeah, there's a lot of bigans. There's a lot of bigans. There's always a lot of bigans. This is a giant, big, massive deal. The auspices that he's using is that, you know, Washington, D.C. is a violent hellscape. Yeah. A dystopian nightmare from whence no one survives.

A mad Max Fury Road-esque disaster. None of that's true. Like, it's very important to note that none of the number. from Trump's own administration justice department bear that out at all. What happened is that a Doge employee

who goes by the name of Big Balls because that's the world we fucking live in now. Director Big Balls. Director Big Balls. Got beaten up. Carjacked, I think. Yeah. I think he got carjacked. He got beaten up and they put pictures of his beaten up

face around. And this was just an excuse. This was just an excuse that Trump used, to seize on, to do what he's always wanted to do. And because he has, the president has special powers within Washington, D.C., because it's not a state, it's not under a state control that he can use. This is at least for a short time. For short period. Legal. Yeah. He can't extend this very long without needing other approvals.

Congressional approval. He'd need a congressional approval, which he has. He's going to get. He has. Right. What would have to happen is, and you see right now, there's a group of people that are congressional and senators that are falling in line, that are saying, this needs to happen. Washington, D.C. is a hellscape. You've got to fix it. And of course, all the pundits on that side are going to say the same thing, too. I want to rewind people back to FEMA camps. Oh, yeah. You know what I mean? I want to rewind people back to during Obama when they said he was going to put martial law in place.

place, right? Yep. There's been this fear of the Democrats doing authoritarian shit forever. Right. Where are you at now? I know. Where are you now when it's literally happening? When there's an authoritarian, do an authoritarian shit.

I know. Where my libertarians at? I think the same thing. Where my libertarians at? It's the same thing I hear when I hear about trans rights. And I'm like, and trans rights being infringed and gay rights being infringed. And I think where my libertarians at? Yeah.

Where are you at? people, small government people, where are you at? Yeah, man. And the thing is, is they're fucking silent. Because the only thing they ever cared about, they had competing views. They thought, yeah, I'm fine with people doing drugs, and I don't really care about gay marriage or trans issues that much. And I love low taxes.

And the competing views of low taxes won out, even though, guess what you're paying? Tariffs are taxes. Do you pay way more taxes? I just want to point out tariffs or taxes. But in any case, they think they're too stupid to realize that they're being taxed pretty much the same amount anyway, but it doesn't matter. So these people that have lied all this time because all they really wanted was the Republican is. Yeah. Yeah. Like I've thought the exact same thing. It's like you've got all the don't step on snack people running around telling every, you know,

but like I think it's more than just taxes. I think I think they want to make sure that they can have guns and as many as they as they'd like to have. I think that's a huge giant issue for these people. They want the right kind. The truth is, and I think we all. know this, and we should say it out loud, they have always wanted the right kind of authoritarianism. Yeah, exactly right. They wanted an authoritarianism that privileges them. Yeah. They wanted an authoritarian that looked like them.

Yeah. Yeah. It's got to look like me. As long as the authoritarianism specifically privileges the group that they're a part of and that they represent, that's always what they want. Yeah. Right? Because like everything's a meritocracy.

If you build a game designed for. you to win it. Sure. So then it's all a meritocracy, right? A meritocracy sounds like a universally fair thing as long as the game is fair. But if you build an unfair game and all the rules are built to favor you and you start, you know, it's 10 steps ahead of everybody else on the playing field and then you say, well, now it's now let's just see who gets to go first. It's like, well, this was always bullshit. Yeah. The idea that like the National Guard is going to show up and act as police is also de facto bullshit.

They aren't police. They don't have arresting powers. They are not trained to do this work. That's the big thing. They don't know what they're doing. Yeah. And it is important to note the National Guard can't arrest you.

They don't have the jurisdiction to arrest you. So they have to call the cops if they see something. If they do something different, they have to follow specific military rules of engagement. Those rules of engagement are not built to police a city. They are built to do different things. Structurally, we have designed our military to perform a different function.

We can't ask them to be local police. They're not, they don't know how to do it. They don't know. You wouldn't know the first thing on how to do it. Imagine showing up for work. I mean, literally, this is just a good analogy, I think. Imagine showing up for work and you haven't been trained and you don't have any of the same equipment and you're not sure where to take people like you're a cop and they're

say okay today you're a cop and you're like okay well how do who do i call if something happens who are my backups where's the jail at when do i take people to jail do i have a car with the right cages in it where's the donuts yeah right yeah where's it you would have no idea to do any parts of your job because you're not trained to do any of those parts of your job because policing our cities has never been a function of the American military because we're not supposed to turn our military against our own citizens. What do you think happens in a month? In a month, I think he gets an emergency approval to continue this for as long as he wants to continue this. He'll declare a success because the statistics were already on his side to begin with. And he'll try to force this model

down the throats of other cities that he wants to take control of. I think we already saw his desire to do that in California. I think I would be completely unsurprised if we had National Guard troops mobilized here in Chicago. That wouldn't surprise me at all. He loves to use Chicago as an example of a hellscape city. I wouldn't be surprised if he's singled out Baltimore. He's brought that up in the past before. I think that there is a strong desire for him to use the military, which he just did a parade

for. He's got to fuck a giant hard on for, despite his bonespurs. I think he wants to use the military across, you know, many parts of this nation. I wouldn't be surprised if the National Guard were deployed in half a dozen or a dozen states in six months. This is authoritarianism, then. Yeah, this is a military control of the country. You're not in a regular country anymore. No, yeah. This is it. This is it. This is it. This is it. I think this could be the moment where we begin living under some version of centralized executive de facto martial law. I really do.

I think that that's possible. I remember after 9-11, I flew like October 2nd or 3rd or something. I flew in early October 2001. And I remember going to the airport. I was flying from O'Hare to Seattle. And there was National Guard troops in uniform. with their big fucking guns stationed all over the airports.

And I remember how fucking crazy that felt. I took a picture of it. They took my camera. They didn't like that. They took my camera away. So like I did not, like I lost my camera.

So I don't actually have the picture. No shit. Yeah, they confiscated my camera. And like, okay. I kind of get it, right? It was literally like less than a month afterwards taking pictures

of a military force inside an airport right after 9-11. Like I'll grant, I'll give them that one, right? But I remember thinking, like, even as a very young person, this feels wrong. It feels wrong to have the American military in a civilian space patrolling it. That doesn't feel safer to me. That feels like strong man shit.

And like, if it is a very temporary measure, which is what the National Guard is for, if it's a very temporary measure in an emergency, I get it. We should have a force that does that stuff. We don't have that anymore, right? You had it for a time. We had it for a minute. And then they created a TSA and other things. And then that was how things work now.

I'm not sure that they were better or worse than they were at the time. I don't know either. But I will say this. It's not, you don't go there and see the military there now. Right. When I went to, I'm reminded of like when I was visiting Belize and I crossed the border from Belize and to go out of Malah to go to the ruins and Tikal. this was maybe five, six years ago there were military stationed at the border

with their big ass fucking guns and their fatigues and stuff and they were performing essentially a police function at the border and it's very it's not America that feels like I felt how foreign and dangerous

just inherently it feels to have guys with guns like that patrolling what is really a civilian space and not a military space The thing is that's important to recognize, for me at least, about the Washington, D.C. thing is he's using emergency powers to mobilize the military against our citizens when there is no emergency. And that's the big difference between September 11th, where everybody can acknowledge that was an emergency. That's a big difference.

There's no emergency here. Big balls got beat up. Well, I think, too, there's been this push by this administration to use emergency powers to overstep the bounds in many different ways. It's not just one way. It's multiple ways because the Heritage Foundation knew that they could write that in their little 2025 book. Yes. And someone would pick it up and say, oh, you're right. We can put people in as acting heads of things and they don't have to get vetted and we can do emergency powers in different places. And they took that and they ran with it. And again, you know, everybody always sucks

the dick of the founding fathers, but it's like they didn't. think of this. Yeah. They didn't think of this ahead. They're not prescient. They didn't think of this stuff that someone would come in and rules lawyer their way into authoritarianism using the systems that we already had in place. Yeah.

I, dude, I have thought, and again, I know I've brought this up on the show, but I keep thinking about it. It's a worry. I'm curious if you're worried about this at all. There is a part of me that is worried that even something as small as our show might get shut down. Yeah. I don't disagree.

Yeah. It is a real concern that I am. that voices like ours, which reach, you know, a few, there's thousands of people that listen to the show. It's not a massive show, but it's not a million people. It's not 200 people, right? It would not, I would be very sad and I would also be very unsurprised if over the course of the next four years, like, pressure was created to make Patreon shut us down. Like, I don't think the government would knock on our door and take our microphones. But I, am I, do I think that like dissenting voices like ours and many others might get shut down de facto?

I mean, yeah. Look at what, look at the pressure universities are under. Yeah. Look at the pressure that like, you know, media companies are folding under, big media companies are folding under, paying billion dollar settlements, paying enormous, you know, sums of money just to stay alive. Yeah. I think like if I was trying to seize control the narrative, at some point I would say, look, I'm not going to try to find every show. But what I'll do is contact their revenue source. I'll turn off all the spigots. If you shut down, if you demonetize on YouTube, if you demonetize in other places, you make it so no advertisers want to come to you. You make it so that no place you can go that will put your stuff up. You can't put your stuff up anymore. Places where like Libson and other places get. pressure to take that stuff down where do you go right i really do wonder and it's a worry that i have and i like i'm like i am intensely glad for our patrons that we have today and i hope that in four

years we're able to continue to be a show and i think that we will i'm crossing my fingers yeah but there's a part of me that's like i won't be surprised i'll only be heartbroken yeah do you know what i mean yeah no i'm right there with you yeah hi i'm chris gettherd and i'm very excited to tell you about Beautiful Anonymous, a podcast where I talk to random people on the phone. I tweet out a phone number, thousands of people try to call, you talk to one of them, they stay anonymous, I can't hang up, that's all the rules. I never know what's going to happen. We get serious ones. I've talked with meth dealers on their way to prison. I've talked to people who survive mass shootings. Crazy funny ones. I talk to a guy with a goose laugh, somebody who dresses

up as a pirate on the weekends. I never know what's going to happen. It's a great show. Subscribe today, Beautiful Anonymous. The one thing on which both Democrats and Republicans seem to agree is that most Americans harbor serious doubts about the economic future. A recent poll suggests a staggering 57% of American workers believe there is a very real chance they will be unemployed within the next five to seven years. But what does that matter to a bloated millionaire fat cat like you? This story is from New York Times. Trump is turning us into a doddering industrial giant. This is a fairly long-form article about Trump's forcing the issue of turning America from really a country that was embracing clean energy and the change of into really a backwards 150-year-old version of itself, like a post-industrial age version of America.

Yeah, and not embracing those new industries that could have. been a brand new thing in the United States that could have flourished here as a thing to like not only maintain but create these solar areas and wind areas to get this power. Instead, they're rolling it back to oil and gas and coal and all these big money stuff that paid for a lot of their, you know, certainly donated a lot of money to certain politicians to make sure that they're in power. And they'll pull back any regulations on this. and let them run free and also drill more and do all more things to our environment. So now you're stuck in his place where the United States could have been, you know, maybe

not the leader in the world, but certainly could have sort of fostered brand new industries and could have been a manufacturing place for some of these new industries. Now he's trying to roll the clock back into like you suggest 50, 100 years ago in manufacturing. That's what he wants to bring back. And that makes sense because they're conservatives, right? And conservatives want to conserve what was before instead of embracing something new. And, you know, the idea, they're going to scream about subsidies. They're going to say, oh, well, you know, we're not going to pay for these electronic subsidies

or any of that stuff anymore. And you're like, yeah, but you guys do oil and gas subsidies all day. Thank you. All day long. Twice on Sunday. And you catered the market to them. Like, it's a meritocracy that only coal can win. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking about because the tax subsidies for solar panels is going away. Your solar panels have to be, in order to get the federal tax subsidy, the solar panels, as I understand it from everything I've read, the last nail has to be in your roof, and they have to be installed by December 31st of this year, or the federal tax subsidy goes away. It's sunsets. It might actually be before that because I did read an article that they're trying to claw back

some existing monies that have been already delivered out to the states, but that's what's happening. So I contacted a solar company because I was like, well, I've always wanted to put solar on my house. It wasn't a project I was planning to do this year, but it's a project I was planning to do. I contacted them and like, yeah, we've got like, I basically missed the window to get it in this year. So it's not going to happen. I was hoping, but it's just not going to happen. And I think like, all right, well, now I'm not going to do this solar project. I'm not going to do the solar project because that subsidy doesn't exist. That subsidy accounts for like a third of the cost. That's a giant subsidies. So it's a giant tax subsidy that would be meaningful enough to make the difference for me

between I can do it versus maybe I've got to wait a few years or not do it at all because the money difference is so large. And I was thinking about that. And one of the arguments that you hear all the time, and I listen to a whole podcast making this argument, it's like, well, if these were really viable industries, they wouldn't require all these government subsidies. But like you suggested that oil and gas industries have been subsidized literally forever. forever. If you look at why is gas, like if you buy a gallon of gas versus the equivalent of a gallon of gas in Europe, our gas is way cheaper. It's not even close how much cheaper it is. People marvel when they come over at the low cost for gasoline here versus in Western Europe.

Even when it's expensive for us. Yes. Even when it's expensive for us to get. And it's because we subsidize it. We massively subsidize it. So it's like when we're comparing energy to energy, We've got a nascent industry which requires some amount of nurturing in order for it to flourish. Well, that's normal. And that amount of nurturing and the amount of funding that needs to go in it continues to shrink. And we've seen enormous drivers that have moved the cost for things like solar on your roof way down. I mean, 10 years ago, seven years ago, the cost for these projects was astronomically higher. The technology wasn't as good.

They didn't produce as much. They were much more fragile. We're solving for those problems and making better and more sustainable products because the money to do it is there. The incentives, the products follow the incentives. Now we're turning all that off. In my work, so I work in the real estate industry, and like one of the things that we do is we work on some multi-billion dollar projects that are often like giant wind farm projects and giant solar farm projects, things along those lines. huge, huge amount of business over the last four years during the Biden administration. Huge amount.

I mean, like, and you drive, the entire landscape of central and southern Illinois is transformed now by these giant wind farms that are, they dot the landscape. That's gone away. I don't want to say it's reduced. It is gone. It is literally gone now. All of that work has dried up completely. And it's like, what are we doing this for? What are we doing this for?

He wants to punish a group of people. And that's what you've got to think about every action that he does is to be spiteful. Like all of the actions that he takes up is to be spiteful. Why are there terrorists? Because he doesn't want to be, he wants to show that he's powerful and he also wants to push around other countries. He wants to do it out of spite. It's not because it's good for anybody. It's not like anybody's like, man, this is great.

We're crushing it. There's nobody out there who thinks that. And, you know, got to point this out with tariffs, too, which is something a lot of people don't bring up is, the moment those tariffs go away, don't think your price is going to go back down to what it was. Yeah, man. Don't think that if I'm paying now $2,000 for a bike, let's say, an imported bicycle, right? They're importing this bicycle from, I don't know, where they make bicycles. But let's say they're making it from Italy. It's coming from Italy.

It was, it was, let's say, $1,600, but now with the tariffs that it's $2,000. $200, there is no way that the retailer is going to take that price down. There's not a chance that price is going anywhere down after those tariffs go away. That's very true, man. What's going to happen is we've just increased the prices on everything forever. So now these are your prices. Don't think Amazon, who is the purveyor of so much Chinese bullshit, is going to take those prices down when it comes to it later on.

That's very true, man. They just won't do it. There's not enough competition in our system to make it work anymore. So what's going to happen is those companies are just going to fucking sell you the thing for the tariff price after the tariff goes away if it ever goes away. You said something right there that I think really bears repeating. There's not enough competition in our system anymore. We are at a point of convergence where the consolidation of power in, Virtually every industry continues to grow, right?

So whether there are media companies, whether they're food companies, it doesn't matter what they are. The consolidation of those companies into fewer and bigger giant Uber corporations. This is very gilded-age shit. Like we've done, we've already run this experiment. We did this already. We know it works out. We know it works.

So we're doing it. We've done it. that now the sort of invisible hand is feckless. It can't do shit, right? It's busy jerking itself off. The invisible hand's nothing anymore. So you're exactly right. Like, why would craft foods, which owns, like, most of the brands, right? Like, they own an enormous number of brands. Like,

why is Kraft Foods? What is their market incentive to reduce prices if, one, they know you'll pay the higher price, and two, there's nobody lowering their prices to create competition. to drive prices to a steady sort of like acceptable consumer midpoint. That's not going to happen. And it's real easy,

it's really difficult to have sort of like informal collusion if you've got 500 competitors. It's really, really easy to have informal collusion when you have three competitors. And I'll offer one more quick anecdote.

Like I remember, again, when I worked at Circuit City, Circuit City price matched Best Buy, Best Buy price matched Circuit City, right? So right down the street was Best Buy. Right down the street is where I worked. We knew their prices. They knew our prices. How do we know their prices?

We sent someone over there with a piece of paper and a patent. They walked down, they wrote down the model numbers of everything they sold that we sold and what they were selling it for. Then they did the same thing. They had a shopper come in. We knew who the shopper was. Shopper comes in. They writes down our prices.

And then they make sure their prices aren't any different. because they don't want to, they had that 110% price match. We had the same 100%. So they don't want to do that 110% price. You don't want to give to anybody a 10% discount. So everybody just matches prices. It's not formal collusion. It's informal collusion.

There's only two big players in the major electronics retail space at the time. And our prices were essentially always the same. That's just how it works now for everything. So your fucking loaf of butternut bread, it's going to be $4. And that's it. That's it. Because Kroger owns everything now. That's the price now.

And it's never going back. It's never going to go back. Why can't you be like the captain of Storsky and Hodge? You know, when you come in and you haul me into your office and you ball me out because you're sick and tired of defending my screwballed antics to the commissioner? Well, the truth of the matter is I don't report to a commissioner. I report to committee, some of whom are appointed, some elected, and the rest co-opted on a biannual basis.

It's a quorum, so to speak. A quorum. This story is from ABC News. Texas Democrats to return after government ends special session that included redistricting sources say. Legislators say they feel like they accomplished their mission. They're supposed to be coming back now this weekend, although I saw another story that

said, nope, it's back on. So I have no idea whether or not Texas is going to go through with this mid essentially mid-decade redistricting, which is something that doesn't happen. This doesn't happen. This is literally, should be against the law.

Right. It should be against the law. If it goes up to any court, any court sues them after they do this, it should be immediate where they say that's not what you do. We don't do that. There's nowhere that that's written. That's not how it's done. We're not doing it. That's it's overturned. And it should go to the Supreme Court

and those fucking losers up there should look at it and say, yeah, I agree with that lower court. We're not even going to hear it. I won't even hear it. I agree with them. Go ahead. Just just, just, it's what should happen. That's what should happen. That's not what would happen. No.

So the reason why all this stuff has to go through is because we don't have, there's no checks anymore. There's nothing there to stop this from happening anywhere else in our system, right? One of these, they're supposed to be a checks and balances, right? There's supposed to be a thing that is the throttle and the governor on these things, right? We should be able to say that the Congress can look over and say, hey, you can't do that. And there should be some sort of teeth behind that. And then there should be the president should stop them.

And the Supreme Court should go over and be like, don't do this. And none of that. It's all in collusion now. Now everybody's together. And so if the president says something and then a state decides to do something and then the Supreme Court is full of a bunch of losers and cowards

then what you have is a president who has complete executive authority to look at a state think of what I'm saying here to look at a single state and say change your fucking congressional stuff change it. Change it to what I want it to be right now. And that's the

kind of power that we're letting exist in Washington right. Yeah and to your point before. Where's my small guard? Where are my libertarians at? Yeah. Where are you guys? We need a shirt.

We need a shirt. Where my libertarians? I would wear this shit out of that shirt. I would wear this shit out of that shirt, man. Because, man, they're nowhere. They're nowhere. They never were anywhere. They're still arguing about GamerGate or something. Yeah, exactly.

They were always lying. So now they're just like, I should just be quiet. Yeah. I should just be funny. Don't remember that I'm a libertarian. You know what? I'm going to fucking hang out with these bears. They're quietly hiding their snout.

Black flags. They're feeding piles of donuts to bears in the woods and fucking whatever experiment they're running. Fucking bunch of goddamn losers, military militia, dip shit assholes. I just see this happening. And I think, you know, I know that there is other, we talked about this last week, there's other people, other states that are saying they're threatening, we'll do it too. Don't make us do it. We'll do it too. But like, like you said last week, we're just not going to win that. There's no way to win that. You're not going to win that. You're going to lose every single congressional seat that is midland in any red state. You'll lose it. Any midland congressional seat. They normally throw a couple of, they throw you a couple of bones in a couple of these

bigger, larger states. But if they go and they wipe out and they take five seats away, because right now they have, what is it, 22 to 7 or something like that is the number right now in Texas? It's like 22-7 or 23-7. something like that, they want five more seats. So it'd be like two or three. And who is going to, who is going to look anybody in the eye and say, Texas is that lopsided? When you look at voting patterns and you see most of the major metropolitan areas, of which there's several in Texas of real significant size, and they're blue as fuck. Yeah. Right. We know that there's actually, like Texas was verging on being a purple state. Yeah. So if you lopsided out to where,

it's like, you know, 282 or some bullshit, right? However, that number will shake out. Like, you know that you've cheated. You know that you are not representing the people. You know that what you have done is subverted democracy. Yeah. And really, genuinely, the only way you can,

the only way you can keep power and keep winning is by cheating and cheating and cheating and cheating. Yeah. And what's so interesting is, is like, you had a whole group of people that were willing to follow you in November. because they voted in all these different people. You didn't have to cheat to win.

Oh, I mean, you did cheat over years and years and years of gerrymandering and other things and, you know, voter suppression, etc. You did cheat. But I'm saying like, like, you're willing to even go farther than that to not fulfill any of the promises that you had. Yeah. To just throw all those away and change a bunch of shit and make it even worse. You're like, well, I know they're not going to vote for me next time.

Right. Yeah. Because we're really fucking it up this time. We sort of slow, glacially fucked it up over the Reagan years through Bush and all, through the bushes up till now. But now they're like, fuck that. Let's go fucking full on climate change. Yeah, man, here we go. Just burn it all.

Like, light the glaciers on fire. Here it is. I also have something to say. I have done nothing wrong ever in my life. I know this. And I love you. I love you too, Daddy. Money, please.

My money. The stories from Huffington Post, Jim Cook slammed for disgusting gift-giving meeting with Trump. The Apple CEO presented the president with a unique piece of glass held by 24-carat gold during a celebratory event Wednesday in the Oval Office. I think it's important, like what's important to me about this story is to see all of the tech industry bend the knee. Yeah.

Yeah. that's what that's to me that's the most important piece yeah they are afraid these are people who are supposed to be technocratic elites they should be immune in many ways they are already rich they are unbelievably powerful they are i mean apple is something like a trillion dollar company if i'm not mistaken i could be but i don't think i am like they're a trillion dollar company and yet they're bending the knee not good man no we're in we're in a weird spot right now where there's a bunch of and this This is exactly what Trump wants. And these people know exactly how to manipulate them, right?

Yeah. They come in, they bend the knee. They say to him, oh, you know, Mr. Trump, you're the best ever, blah, blah, blah. And then he immediately just does whatever they want. He has always envisioned himself as sort of a mafia done. Yeah. As like a mafia guy. You come in, you kiss the ring.

You tell me, you know, I'm funny, but not funny that way. And then sit down. And then I'll give you something. Once you show me the proper respect, now I'm willing to tell you, okay, well, you don't need to worry about the Vig this week. Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't need to worry about it this week. I'll take care of that for you.

I know that guy's bothering. I'll take care of it for you. Go on and go get yourself an Italian sausage sandwich sandwich from the, but seriously, that's what he wants to be. He wants to be that guy. And so now he's got that kind of power, and every single powerful person has to come and beg him for, you know, for please help me, you know, give me clemency. Yeah. And think about, too, what this means about the corrupting force of nearly infinite money. So what I mean by that is, you know, if you start playing with numbers in the billions,

tens of billions, hundreds of billions bigger, right? Those numbers stop making sense in all the rational ways that most people think about money, power, and the valuation of a company, right? they start doing weird things. The money doesn't scale properly. It starts to get really, really weird. And just all you have to do is you'll have to download a calculator to do it because your calculator on your iPhone won't actually do this. But like start playing with things like, you know,

start with a very, very large number that's into tens of hundreds of billions. And start playing with annualized rates of return. And then start like looking at that on a per diem basis and start thinking about how that money multiplies upon itself. right? And if you use money for what it is, which is a stand-in for power, these are unbelievably powerful people. And yet they bend the knee. Why? Because they want more of that power. They're unwilling to be just unbelievably rich. They need to be that next level of unbelievably rich. And part of it is a little forgivable. The system requires it.

What I mean by that is like Tim Cook, if he doesn't do all the things to raise shareholder value, you he'll just be fired he's out and they'll just get somebody else to do it so it almost doesn't matter who tim cook is tim cook is at some point too because the system requires you to perform in these ways and you literally cannot perform in other ways because you have a legal fiduciary responsibility to do these things like they'll just get a new tim cook it could you're as a robot yeah it could just be a boston dynamics tim cook yeah yeah just put a fucking flamethrower on a dog and make it the fucking CEO of everything. If I could get a flamethrower, a dog, robot in the White House town.

Oh, I would vote Flamethrower Dog. I would vote for that in a second. I'm pro-flamethrower dog. I would vote for it for my senator. I would vote for my car. I would vote for my dog catcher. Dude. Flamethrower dog for president.

That's it. Flamethrower Dog. I want to see grassroots flamethrower dog. Work its way up to the ranks. We've replaced all the regular mirrors in the White House. house with these black mirrors. Let's see if they notice. This is my weekly plea.

I would like out of the simulation piece. Whoever's listening, the simulation has gotten to the point where I am wishing for flamethrower dogs. That's it. So I would like you to not ignore my pleas anymore and take me out of the simulation. Hey, for real.

Like, if you're worried that if you pull the plug, I die, I'm good with that, right? Like, hey, just to say it, loud. If I get a tingling in my left arm and a pain in my chest, I'm not picking up my phone. I'm not calling for help. I am. I have the flamethrower dog on Steve down. I'm just saying like, it's going to come and finish the job. I'm going with it. I'm going with it. You know, this is one of those things, though, when I see this, I'm like, there's so many different companies that have lost my business. Yeah. I'm like, you lost my business. You lost my business.

You lost my business. This is another one. Yeah. Apple lost your business. next phone. I'm going to keep my phone, obviously. I'm not going to like, like fucking smash it or something. Like burn somebody's jersey because they got traded. I'm going to keep my phone until dies. But you'll go Android. But I'm going to go something else next time. I don't feel like I'm going to get, I won't get an Apple product anymore. Yeah, I feel like, I feel torn about that. On the one hand, like I don't buy my phones. My work pays for them. I think I have an option maybe. I used to have an option of staying with doing Android. I'm not sure if we still do. But even if I did, the Google CEO has bended his knee.

It doesn't, like, you'd have to find a somebody who didn't. Right. And that's true, too. So, like, if there's, if there's no market, if, like, every single phone provider out there did it, then I, I'm stuck, and I got to make a decision. From, from, like, I've had an iPhone since they started, or not since they started, since I started. Since you started getting it. Right. So since, since, since, and I know

everybody's like, oh, they're, you know, these other phones are way better. And I'm sure they are. Like, I'm sure there's, there's, there's better phones out there that I'm not getting all the stuff out of, et cetera, et cetera. But I'm used to the way it works. Right. You know what I mean? Like, I don't want to have to learn how another thing works. I want to just be able to be like, this is how it works and I know how it works.

I don't have time in my day to learn a whole new, like, language system on how things work. So I, that's the ecosystem that I'm stuck in. And that's the one I use. I would use something else if I could. Right. Or if it wouldn't be so much of a burden, but I just don't. Yeah. Well, and I, like, I lived, I did, I used Android forever until I switched over like four years ago to iPhone.

And I feel like now, if I look at them, it's like there really is only two ecosystems. Yeah. One's Google, they've bent the knee. One's Apple, they've bent the knee. You're fucked. Yeah. What are you going to do? Samsung.

Yeah. But they're, but that's a Google phone. That's all Android. Like, it's just, you're right. Because it doesn't matter who the OS is still Android. The OS is still. So, yeah, you're still eating shit. I have to get a Ubuntu or a Linux phone.

You got to get an old, yeah, like you could get a Windows phone if they still made them. Well, I could go back and get one of those old-timey rotary dial phones and just carry it around. Just carried around with a cord. Carried around with a cord. Yes. Asking for people for their jack. You know, I borrow your jack. You want the solution to inflation?

Hi, friends. Marshall Lucky here for New Deal used cars where we're battling inflation not only by fighting high prices. Not only by murdering high prices. but by blowing the living shit out of high prices. Yes, sir, you heard me right. Now, here's an example. 1973 Cadillac Coup deville for $62.99. That price is too high.

Yes, sir. This story is from the Hill. South Carolina Republican. High prices are for the good of the country. Now, I will say that high prices were not for the good of the country. when prices were rising under the Biden administration. It's very true, Tom, but it's different. It's different now.

Look, high prices will be good for the country when I pull them out of the hat and they're not a practice. Look, before we were in the black, now we're in the white nationalists. Oh, my God. Let me read what he said. He said, I think a lot of people are seeing higher prices. Our family's in the construction business. We've got a lot of our timber from Canada and other countries.

Yes, it's higher. Steel prices are up, but it's for the good of the country. Okay. How? How? I like that he just says it, but he doesn't do the second part. I just want to reach out and I just want to grab their lapels, Tom. And I just want to craft them and I want to say how.

And then I want to shake them until they answer. And I want to vigorously shake them. I want to shake them like a fucking martini. I want that little olive inside of there to bounce all over the fucking place. Oh, my God. Make that brain pan a dirty martini space. I just want to smash that. olive around in there.

It infuriates me so much because it's like literally the thing you ran on. Like literally the thing that convinced, you know, so many people in this country, I don't know how, that you were going to bring down prices, that prices were too much. Trump literally stood in front of like a

supermarket sweep tight table and pick up bacon and be like, what is this? Is this an animal? Why does he even know what he was looking at? You got to use your ID to buy groceries. He's like, I love Hormel. And he's like holding it up. But this is a guy who had used this as a club to beat Biden to death with it.

And now here we are. And they're saying, yeah, there was never, ever, ever going to be any change in this. And we don't care. Yeah, they don't care at all. The goal was always to extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts, right? That was the goal. The way that they intended to pay for it was to create a regressive tax on the poor. in order to funnel money up to the rich.

That's a regressive tax. And tariffs literally just do that. And the problem with tariffs is once you turn tariffs on, you can't just turn them right off. It doesn't really work that way. It's not going to work that way. So these are here to stay. Yeah.

And even if you turn yours off, what if they don't turn those off on us? And then we're stuck with that on us from now on. People don't buy your products because there's tariffs on them. And you've made a big mess. And now somebody is going to come along and clean it. And this is just what it fucking is now. man. Say no to drugs, say no to communism, and always practice safe sex by not doing it.

New York Times, Mexico's president says U.S. forces are unwelcome in her country. The Mexican government thought it had turned a corner and cooperating with the Trump administration on combating the cartels, having launched an aggressive crackdown of its own. So this is a response to Trump being like, yeah, we're just going to send American troops into Mexico. And that's an invasion. Yeah, that's literally an invasion. That's an invasion. We're going to invade Mexico. We're going to do it like just kind of.

So we're just doing a just-the-tip invasion. Well, I think that the D.C. thing's an invasion too. It is. Right? So it's the same thing. Like, I think that there is a group of people in this country because he's got a huge support base. It's not that he's not supported. There's a ton of people who support him, right?

I think those people just really love bullies. My whole life, I always thought that bullies were not. like bullies were the bad guy bullies like my dad always told me stories about you know like don't be a bully and if a bully ever picks on you you got to fight back and you know like like there's like there was like a whole masculinity thing

about bullies when we were young right there was like a whole arc about bullies don't be a bully yourself and if you're ever picked on or you ever see somebody else picked on you need to stand up to the bully there was all that was a that was like if there were commandments for masculinity for us growing up

that would be one or two. Yes. Right? That's why the luck dragon chases them into the dumpster at the end of

the never-ending story. Everybody remembers it. But seriously, like a Christmas story, he punches the bully, he knocks him down and beats him up and he's screaming or whatever.

There's a million stories of the bully getting his comeuppance, the bully being a bad person. Trump is nothing but a bully. Yeah. And there are people who idolize this man.

Yes. And it's not a small amount of people. Yeah. And it's not a small amount of people. that I don't say and maybe they're too stupid to realize it. I don't know. But when did like just like there's so many things that get turned on their head, when did we think that being the bully was a good thing? And it's not like we haven't always been the bully, right? It's not like America hasn't always been a bully. I get it. But we didn't, we didn't. But we didn't identify like that.

I don't think as as truthfully as we do now. Yeah, I think I think that's a really interesting point. As you're talking, I guess what I'm thinking of is a couple of things. I think, I mean, I immediately thinking of the people that I know, mostly online, because I thankfully don't know anybody in person that is a Trump supporter. I literally don't know anyone in my life. Thank God. That's a Trump supporter. But when I think about the attitudes and like what people see and what I see reflected, I think that there is an enormous contingent to people who already see themselves as the victim of bullying. And this Trump is their guy that fights back against the bully. And what's interesting is that, Trump has done such a good job of blank slating himself that it's whatever somebody feels bullied by. Trump is the guy who's going to fix it. So if I'm a white man and I feel bullied by feminism because I don't want to have to, you know, be a good person, you know, right?

Like, just being honest, I don't have to be a good person. I am having a hard time living in a world that has, you know, changed in ways that don't value my authority. authoritarianism, you know, like all that, like we've talked about this stuff. Like, Trump represents a way to fight back against the bullies of feminism. Trump represents a way to fight back against the bullies of cartels who are poisoning our kids. They already see themselves as victims. I don't think they see him as a bully.

I think they see him as the guy fighting the bullies. I think what Trump has done very astutely is he has blank slated himself in so many spaces that whatever somebody feels aggrieved by, he gets to be the guy. who swoops in and fixes it. So I think that narrative is still alive. The other thing that concerns me about this is that you cannot infinitely divide and dilute your military and still have your military do the thing it's supposed to do,

which is to defend your country against foreign problems. If we are sending our national guard into New York and Baltimore and Washington, D.C. and Chicago and, you know, L.A. and Seattle, etc, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And then we're sending our, you know, special forces across the southern border into Mexico. We're doing all this stuff. If you're Putin or China or someone else,

aren't you rubbing your hands with glee, watching us spend our time, energy, money, and lives, using our military to fight ourselves, to essentially fight problems that don't matter, to run our resources ragged? Like, this is, like, funny to them. think this was funny. I'd be like, yeah, I won the disinformation war. You did exactly what I wanted you to do. I'm reminded of like, after 9-11, it's come up close in the show. After 9-11,

you know, I remember being like, why the fuck did that happen? And then like, I would listen to and read, what had been Laun's say? Like, what are his goals? And he essentially, I remember reading something where he was like, look, you know, like, I'm going to do this. And then you guys are going to spend trillions of dollars coming over here and spilling your blood in the sand over here. And then we were like, Great idea. Let's do exactly that. Hey, can we make that guy a cabinet member? Yeah.

Yeah. Because he's just going to decide what we did. Right. And he did. And he decided. Yeah. You know, I'm reminded when we talk about using special forces in Mexico to go mess with these cartels.

I'm reminded of the story that you told about the bunker busters. When you told the story about the bunker busters about how nobody really knew the capabilities of those bunker busters, we kind of knew, but we didn't know. And they were kind of mysterious, right? You're like, oh, well, maybe they're going to. these could be really dangerous. This could be a really powerful weapon in the United States arsenal

and people might decide maybe we shouldn't do that because they could use a bunker buster on me. What happens if our special forces goes down there and get their ass fucking handed to them? And it's very possible. What happens? Now I've heard, like there's an ex-special forces guy

that comes on Joe Rogan shows that's talked up and said, oh, they're in for a world to hurt. These special forces guys don't fuck around and they're going to come down and wipe them out. Maybe that's true. Maybe it's not. I don't know.

But what happens they get their ass kicked? Yeah. What happens if you lose a bunch of them. A bunch of them go down in a helicopter. A bunch of them get shot up. A bunch of them get kidnapped and shot on fucking camera. What happens then? Yeah.

What do we do then? Because you're spending your wild cards. Yes. These are the most valuable Uno cards in your hand. Right. And you're throwing them out there first. Yeah. That's a real, I don't think that's a real smart.

What that tells me is that he doesn't know what he's doing. Yes. Yeah. Like, one, this is illegal. Yeah. One, yeah, I mean, we are like, yeah, we're unpassive, but yeah, you're absolutely right. And I just want to stress that, like, you can't condemn Putin's invasion of Ukraine and not condemn an invasion of Mexico. 100%.

You can't. 100%. Like, I know it's not a territorial land grab yet, but one, it might be. You don't know. You know what this fucking guy's going to do. And two, it doesn't matter. We don't get to take our guns and shoot them on your land. I agree.

Like, that's a problem. Yeah. But I think you're exactly right. You know, I've read a bunch of pieces and there's a lot of disagreement. And you never know exactly how things are going to go. Ukraine's a great example of that. Everybody's like, it's to be over in six weeks. You know, Russia's going to take Kiev in six weeks.

It's been four years. What is that done for their military? Right. You know, like for the standing of their military in the world. What has people, you know, the, the tier system moved them down from, you know, a tier down to C tier now, you know? Absolutely. So I think.

Depending on what you read, it might go this way, it might go that way. Undeniably, if you look at the history of armed conflict between the cartels and existing forces within Mexico, there have been many instances, many instances, where cartels have beat back the Marines, the Mexican Marines, Mexican Special Forces. They have taken control of big chunks of cities. they have very sophisticated weapons and tactics. I don't think this is a walkover. And like, you know, there's also the problem of like militarily,

it's not easy to go on somebody else's turf. Yeah. How do you tell who a combatant is? There's all those problems. This is not cut and dry. And, you know, just like people that are local, the insurgency stuff that happens, those people are on their grounds.

They know what they're doing. They can blend into the population, easier than you can. It's so, it's such a hard mission, such a, such a bad thing to do to people who are in our military. Yeah. Because you want to show somebody how tough you are. And like, the success or failure of any mission is built on intelligence. And if Mexico doesn't support this action, if Mexico, if Mexico was raising its hand and saying, we need help us. We would then have the support of the entire Mexican intelligence community. How do I identify who the bad guys are? Well, we have people on the ground. We've got intelligence.

What if you're not welcome? Right. What now? Right. So now I'm going to go there. I'm going to be like, all right, well, go get the bad guys. Well, who are the bad guys? Well, no one's going to say anything. You know, it's like, how do the cops solve a fucking murder if nobody talks, right? Like, this is going to be harder than we think. Everybody thinks

to the fighting part. Yeah. But it's the intelligence part. They don't think about all the other things that lead up to that. Yeah. That's going to wrap it up for this week. We're going to be back on Thursday with a long-form show. So check it out. It's on scams.

So you're going to want to check that out. It's coming out on Thursday, but we'll be back with a full show on Monday. And we're going to leave you like we always do with the skeptics creed. Credulity is not a virtue. It's fortune cookie cutter, mommy issue, hypno-babelon bullshit. Couched in Scientician, double bubble, toil and trouble, pseudo-quazi alternative, acupunctuating, pressurized, Stereogram, pyramidal, free energy, healing, water, downward spiral, brain dead, pan, sales pitch, late night infotucatainment

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