Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 913: More Gunman Conspiracies

Episode Date: May 4, 2026

Investigators Offer More Details of Gunman of Gala Dinner Attack 3 days after correspondents' dinner, FBI still unsure who shot officer outside ballroom Democrat on Trump's ballroom: 'My constituents can't afford f—ing groceries or utility bills' Trump ballroom: Ashley St. Clair exposes secret group chats for MAGA's messaging. Trump Erupts in '60 Minutes' Interview: 'I'm Not a Pedophile' - Yahoo News UK U.S. to issue commemorative passports with Trump's picture for America's 250th birthday : NPR James Comey charged with threatening Trump's life in '8647' seashell post Oil Price Surges as Effects of War Reverberate

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. From Glory Hole Studios in Chicago and beyond, this is Cognitive Dissence. 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 gas is five bucks a gallon. Sure is. Today is Thursday, April the 30th. Boy, there's a lot that's going on. Hey, let's start with the Voting Rights Act. Do you remember that? Because it's in the past. Yeah, I do remember it. There was a shining moment in our country where we thought, hey, you know who should have rights? people other than white people. And then we got a bunch of white people and one black guy on the Supreme Court and they all said,

nah, what do you need that for? Well, yeah, so here's the thing. The Voting Rights Act was dismantled by our current Supreme Court in three separate rulings. They broke it into three pieces. They didn't fully say that the Voting Rights Act itself is canceled.

and in this, but they stripped it of all of its force and effect. It doesn't have any effect anymore. So it's gone. And in this latest ruling, they tried to pretend that this ruling was a narrow ruling. But the effect of the ruling, despite their attempt to write a narrow opinion, literally nobody on any side believes that it will have a narrowing effect or a narrow effect. So the Voting Rights Act was implemented, very obviously, in order to protect. the rights of minorities both to vote and for the system to not be structured in a way that even

if they do vote, their vote structurally will not count or won't have any force in effect. Because that's something we kind of have a history of here in the states. Yeah. Yeah. We've sort of structurally done a good job of making their vote count as little as possible for a very long time. Yep. And the Supreme Court basically said, and like seriously, like the majority opinion essentially said, we've solved the problem of racism. We don't need this anymore. That's not like, I want to be super clear. That is not what the Supreme Court is supposed to do.

They are supposed to rule on the constitutionality of the laws that Congress enacts and passes. They are not supposed to decide that a standing law reaffirmed many times by multiple Congresses just isn't necessary anymore. And so it doesn't, we're not doing it. Just fucking, they, that's not even supposed to be a function of the goddamn Supreme Court, man. What, what I think is the most egregious is that Alito in his, in his ruling, put four pages of him dusting his hands off after he fixed racism. He put that right in there.

And I think that's egregious, in my opinion. You know, you're dust in your hands. I've been like, I fixed it everybody. And then it's just, there's no, there's no, nothing of substance. it's just the sound of him dusting his hands off. Jesus Christ. You know, here's what I want to say, and I was a little harsh a couple weeks ago.

I had a comment to the people who voted for Trump, and I told them to please stop voting. Don't do it again. And I just want to point out to anybody who might have heard that, you know, it was a little harsh, admittedly a little harsh, but I want to point out, I don't even have to say this anymore because you won't have the chance in the future.

What they did. Right, yeah. was they made it so that they could lie to you. And, you know, maybe you're looking in the mirror now, like the Simpsons, and you're like, I was beaten by the best or whatever. You weren't. But they made it seem like they were going to end the wars. They were going to lower prices.

They were going to lower gas. They were going to fix trade. They made all these promises, right? And then they fucking, what they did was they elected a guy who came in and he He went after anybody who was his political rival or politically tried to attack him in any way. They went after. He went after them because that's what he wanted to do. Then he wanted to aggrandize himself.

And we're going to cover a bunch of stories today to talk about that. And then very specifically, he wanted to enrich all the people that he thought were worthwhile. So all those things were what he had planned to do. Everybody told you that that's what they were going to do. And then, but what they got you on was they said, Well, you know, all you got to do is just vote for us this time and then we're going to get all these things fixed. Well, they didn't fix them. They exacerbated the problems or made it worse in almost every, in almost every instance, they made it worse.

But now they don't need you anymore, okay? They knew that they were going to fucking plummet when it came to approval ratings. They knew 100% once they started to fuck with these levers because they weren't, they know they're not smart enough to fix it. what they are is smart enough to enrich themselves and fuck you in the process. And that's what they were going to do from the jump. And they did it.

And now in the future, when you change your mind and you're like, you know, I just don't know. I'm kind of up in the air. I'm not sure if I'm going to pick Kamala or if I'm going to pick Trump. It seems like Trump wants to lower the prices. He doesn't want to get in these forever wars.

Maybe I'm going to pick him. Or maybe you're one of these accelerationist people who think, you know, we just got to tear the whole system down. And both Tom and I were screaming and saying, you know what, you might not get a chance to fix it in the future. There's a possibility that you might not get that chance in the future.

This is one of those nails in the coffin. This voting rights dismantlement is one of the nails in the coffin of your ability to change your mind in the future. He told you. He told you only ain't you go vote for me one more time and then you'll never have to vote again. He literally said it out loud, folks. He said it out loud to you.

Yeah, well, but again, like these, there's this like, fucking constant apologism that goes on around Trump where everybody says, he doesn't mean what he says. He always means what he says. He's not that smart. He always means what he says. And most of the time he tries to do or does the things he said he was going to do. He's not the guy he shows you he is.

You just for some reason refuse to believe that he is the guy he keeps showing himself to be. All these ghouls are telling us. you who the fuck they are. Nobody's hidden anything from you. Nobody has hidden any of this. All of this was on display from fucking day one. They broke a bunch of campaign promises. Absolutely.

But their character has not changed. Their motivations have never been obscured. Yeah. Man, there's no fucking time machine. So there's no do-over. There's no go-back season now. Now what we don't have is the Voting Rights Act. And if we want to get something like it back,

we have to try to pass a piece of legislative. as ambitious as that again. What is the likelihood of that happening? And what's the likelihood of a... We can't get... We cannot cancel daylight savings time. We can't even pay the fucking TSA workers, Tom. Dude, is that still happen?

I don't even... Here's the thing. I don't even know right now if that's still happening because, like, at some point, I just forget about how many rings of hell we are deep into this thing. I just genuinely don't even know. What they're counting on to is this, that truly nothing is more boring than redistricting and gerrymandering conversations for the general public.

If you are not deep into politics and strategy and you are just some regular fucking wake up, go to work person, you know, you want your life to be impacted, mostly in positive ways. And somebody wants to come along and say, hey, you know, here's what's actually happening. They're redistricting. and when they redistrict, they're going to draw those district lines in a way that advantages one group over another. Now, it used to be that they couldn't do that if they disenfranchise people

who were, you know, in a minority group, but now they've changed. People's eyes fucking glaze over. People don't be a lot, like a huge segment of the population does not know what district they're in. They don't know what redistricting means. They don't understand how gerrymandering works.

That's, this is boring, really like, pundit level shit. Yeah. And most people aren't pundit-level people. They're just fucking people wake up and go to work. They're counting on that. They've always been counting on that. If they do things at this sort of boring, look at what Mitch McConnell did.

Why was Mitch McConnell so effective? Because he understood that the arcane rules of the Senate could be manipulated to gain outcomes without having to go through a voting process. That's why Mitch McConnell was fucking brilliant. He understood that, like, if you knew the rules, enough and they're complicated and they're boring, there won't be a giant outcry, and I'll still be able to manipulate and flip the table and do everything I want to do and not get you to do the things you want to do. We won't even have to take a vote on it. We'll just skip that part.

We won't even do those things. And he taught everybody how to do that. He created a playbook for this is the same thing. Do things that are boring. Do things that are hyper-technical. Do things that try to have a conversation on the street corner with the average person about They're just going to be like, I don't know, fucking, what is that? Nothing. And they're going to win. And they're going to strip people of their rights and people who have been stripped of their rights won't even know it.

Yeah. They won't even know it because they're going to think, well, I can still go to my polling place and vote. So how have I lost anything? And it's like, Jesus, I, like, I, you have. Yeah. Well, and if you, if you, if you, if you dilute my vote into all the other people around me and then you raise the power of the votes.

of all the people around me that aren't me, that changes the power of my vote. But to them, you have to spend so much time trying to explain that to them because of our strange system and how we district and how we choose things

that they want, they'll tune out. They'll look at you like, and they'll do the flip thing like you're doing it on TikTok. You'll start to tell them and they'll reach out and they'll take your nose

and they'll flip you up because they want to see the next thing. It's real. They don't even care about what you have to say to them. So, yeah, it's going to be a disaster. And just like we said, you can't fix it as easily as you thought you could. You thought, oh, well, you know what?

If we just get these corporate Democrats out of there, then we're going to be sitting pretty because, well, the Republicans will fuck the system. And then these corporate Democrats, we're going to expose them for who they are. And then what will happen? We're going to just turn the page. And America's going to become a socialist paradise. and all those people who screamed and cried about how, you know, these are they, every party's the same, et cetera, et cetera, and we'll now guess what you got?

Every party was the same until they packed the courts with people who were going to take your rights away. Yeah, that was really smart of you. Really great job on that. Did you know that it's illegal to say I want to kill the president of the United States of America? It's illegal. It's a federal offense. It's one of the only sentences that you're not allowed to say. And now it was okay for me to say it right.

then because I was just telling you that it's illegal to say, I want to kill the president of the United States of America. I'm not actually saying it. I'm just letting you know that it's illegal to say that. It's kind of like a public service. I'm letting you know so that you don't accidentally go out and say something like that. All right. So obviously we have to discuss the attempted assassination number three, the third attempted assassination. So we start our show last week with, hey, this attempted assassination of Trump, people are saying it's a conspiracy theory. And then before the show releases or the night it releases, there's a, oh, by the way, there's a attempted assassination attempt that people think is a conspiracy theory. Everybody thinks

every assassination attempt is a conspiracy theory. Yeah, I guess that's true. Everybody thinks it. Yeah. And like, here's, here's the space that we're in, though. I've been thinking about this, quite a bit lately. Here's the problem, I think, the unique problem of the space that we're in. We've created an environment where one side of the argument has said that whether it's vaccines, whether it's elections, whether it's the size of a crowd, whether it's whether or not nuclear materials in Iran have been obliterated, whether or not it's any question at all. every fact is simultaneously true and untrue. That there is no reason ever to trust what the, like, well, the guy showed up to the, the ICE

agents killed him because he was trying to murder somebody. I mean, the number of lies that come from the administration are genuinely countless. Sure. They're countless. And they're on big things and they're on little things. And there is a, there is literally no reason at all to believe that the administration is not, lying about anything, anytime they say anything. All the time they could they should, you should look at them askance constantly, constantly. And that environment that we are forced to live in

breeds this shit. It is the perfect soup. It is the petri dish for rampant speculation. And that is the part, that like, I think it's perfectly okay and reasonable and makes all the sense in the world to say, I don't trust anything coming out of the State Department right now. I don't trust anything coming out. Like, whatever they, I don't even trust the FBI with fucking Cash Patel in charge of it. I don't trust any of that shit. There is no reason to trust any of that shit. I'm there with you.

I get it. Yes. But then the second part is the part I won't do is I won't then insert my own. That's the key. That's the key. Yep. What I'll do is say, hey, man, I don't know what happened. and that's where I have to stop myself.

Like what I won't do is just say, but I think this other thing instead, because like I don't have a different reason to actively think the other thing, right? So I might have plenty of doubts because we're supposed to, we should at this point. You have no reason to trust. I do believe that.

Like, okay, sure. Like, maybe it happened the way you said it did. Maybe it didn't. But I don't know better. Yeah. I don't have a different story to replace with, we just have a problem with narrative void as human animals. I don't think we like narrative void.

That's interesting perspective. It reminds me of when they were talking about Alex Pretti and they immediately showed it, they showed a picture of his gun afterwards. They said he had this gun on him and it was a SIG model that supposedly misfired a lot. And I thought immediately, I was like, how do we know that's his gun? How do I know that that you didn't have anybody else except for the people? people who were involved investigate this. When other people came, when the people who, you know, run the state government came to look at stuff, you push them away and said, you couldn't investigate.

This is our investigation. We're investigating ourselves. We're going to, we're going to police ourselves, and we're going to investigate ourselves. And so they did. And after it was all over, people were all, there was a bunch of people, very specifically, Joe Rogan was talking a bunch about how this gun misfired. And that means that you're allowed to shoot people. I don't even want to get into that argument about how dumb that concept is. Just a crazy concept and opening the door to so much, I don't want to even get into that. But even if, let's presume, how do we even know it's his gun? I don't even know if it's his gun. But like you, I won't put myself in that position to be like, well, that gun was planted, this and that, you know, all these other like conspiracy theories that I

could throw in there. There's no reason to do that. The problem, of course, is that their motivations and the ways in which the things come together where there's anomalies that people can reach in and pull apart like Goatsey, the reason why they do that is the reason why they're able to create these conspiracy theories is because every single situation like this is very anomalous in itself.

So it's not very often that someone tries to kill the president or tries to, nobody's ever stormed the correspondence dinner before. So we don't have, anything to look at. No baseline to compare it to. We don't have those things. What we have is a very anomalous situation. Trump never attending these things and then deciding to attend this one, right? He's been in the president at this point for five of these. I think this might be his fifth or six that he's had the opportunity to attend and he's this is the first one he's come to. And this happens at it. Why is that? Well, you know, like there's a lot of reasons why you

it might be happening, you can't put in there, well, he did it because he wants to stage something. That's a thing you can't decide. You can't make that distinction. You can't say, well, that just so happened that there's a weirdness to it. And that weirdness plays into exactly what I want to be true. So I'm going to use that weirdness to make the thing I want to be true more true. Nobody died at this one, right? We were talking last time about how somebody died at the one in Butler. Well, nobody died at this one. another needle pull, right? No, wait a minute, nobody died. Hold on a second.

Someone was shot. We can't figure out. We'll talk about how they can't figure out out who even shot the guy. We'll figure that. We'll talk about that in a second. Suddenly there's this, uh-oh, wait a minute, there's another piece, anomalous piece I can talk about.

Oh, it seems that there was a coordinated effort afterwards to talk about the ballroom. Again, we'll get into it in a minute. But all those pieces make it so there's hand holds. And people use those handholds to pull things apart and then insert what they want to be true in those spaces. Yeah. Like the White House correspondence dinner. Like, oh, like Trump showed up to this one and that's suspicious. He hasn't shown up before. Yeah, sure. All right. But like if nothing had happened, would you have said, boy, I really thought he was going to get assassinated. Because no, you would not have thought that, right? Yeah, exactly. So it's an after the fact rationalization that, like, like, you.

you were not suspicious of first. So when it happened outside of this event, it actually wasn't suspicious. So suspicious things are suspicious, absent the final result, right? That's just how they, or you're like post facto putting this stuff in, right? That's just, and I get it. Like, the other thing, too, is that the right has been leveraging conspiracy theories now in an active, institutional and systemic way. for a decade plus.

Yeah. And I do understand the temptation to now be opportunistically conspiratorial as a reaction to the conspiratorial leveraging that has happened on the right. Do you know what I mean? Sure. Now I think there's like a group of people on the left who are like, well, they've been doing it to great effect. And now if I do it, there might be a practical effect to minimize this and to not allow

Trump to leverage this event for his political advantage. So let's use that. Now here's the thing that I'm genuinely wondering is, has the well been so poisoned that conspiracy theorism is no longer about saying things that are true or trying to say, I believe this is true, but is conspiracy theorism now just another like tool or rhetorical lever that we use to persuade a populace. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that the second one might be more true than the first. Yeah. I mean, they've cultivated this with the do your own research stuff.

They've cultivated this time and time and time again to not listen to authority. Whatever you do, don't listen to somebody who knows what they're talking about. Do your own research and find what you want to believe and then confirm your own biases based on how you want to believe it. So we know that that's how they've been doing it. for a long time. That's how they've been talking to people. That's how they present information. You know, and I think one of the things you touch on, and rightly so, is that the reason why

I think a lot of people want to lean into conspiracy here is because they are so opportunistic, right? Because of their opportunistic tendencies when it comes to these things, people immediately think, well, they want to create these opportunities. They don't want to just organically. wait for something like this to happen. They want to create an opportunity so they can use this sort of thing

and can sort of use this as a lever to try to get the things that they want. I want to remind people, they just get what they want anyway, everybody. Yeah, that's true. Like, the thing is, is like, they're going to get what they want anyway because they control all the levers of government.

They control all the checks and balances in government. They get what they want in the first place. On occasion, they have to crawl on the car, but it doesn't, it literally doesn't bother them because they have no shame. So none of that stuff even matters. Any of the, the oversight stuff that happens, that's literally nothing. They yelled at Heggseth for four hours yesterday and he smiled in their face. He smiled and he and he laughed and he had it such a grand old time getting fucking yelled at because he knew there's nothing they could fucking do to him.

They called him incompetent to his face and he's like, whoa. I'm going to go chug a beer. I'm out of here, folks. And it doesn't matter to him a wit. So remember that if we're trying to, again, create these motivations for they're trying to do this so they could do a thing, understand they didn't need this diversion. They could have just done the thing without it. Yeah, Trump was always going to get the ballroom. Yeah.

Right. So the conspiracy theory that I'm seeing most often is that this whole thing was done. as a setup in order to get Trump to get his ballroom because a federal judge recently ruled against him and like made it more difficult. Two things I don't believe about that. Why I think that's intensely intensely implausible. The first is to your point, a federal judge ruled against him. That's not a final ruling.

It doesn't necessarily mean shit. It's a minor obstacle. Also, guys, remember, he already demolished the East Wing. They need to put some there. Yes. Cecil. They're going to let the pigeons in if they don't. Right.

Dude, like, think of it this way. If somebody goes up to your house and they bulldoze your garage down and they fucking leave a great big gaping hole in your house and then you apply to the zoning board and the zoning board is at first like, well, all right, you don't want to rebuild a garage. It looks like you want to rebuild, you know, a two-story addition to your house. We're not approving that. You're still going to get something like the city's not going to be.

like, yeah, I guess we'll just leave the White House with this gaping fucking ulcer wound hanging out. He's going to get what he wants. He was always going to get what he wants. A federal judge, it'll just move up the fucking food chain. It'll go to the Supreme Court. They rubber stamp literally every single thing that he wants. They're also now under pressure to create a solution because he caused a problem. Yeah, he caused the problem. So everybody knows, unless you're an asshole, that he's going to get this ballroom. That is all, that was a foregone conclusion. And they knew. And the people who are going to count,

the reason why people are saying this is because it seemed to be that there was a coordination after this particular attack to say on Twitter, and a bunch of these people immediately were like, that's why we need the ballroom. That's why we need to open my mouth wider that. So for Trump's balls, I got to give him his ballroom, you know. But in any case, that's what they did, right? So there's a bunch of people.

But that just means that there's a group text amongst these influencers. That's all it means, guys. is that they all recognize that there's a, I got a wedge now and I might as well use it to try to put out this message. Hey, everybody, if you have an opportunity tonight, post about how Trump needs his ballroom. Yeah, man. And like, two other quick things. Like, you also have to believe, one, that there was no way he was going to get this ballroom

if we didn't do this assassination fake, right? Because the stakes are super high. If you get caught, it's a big scandal. I know, it's a huge. We've got, we've got to get, but there, guys, look, it was 100% sent dead in the water if we don't do this thing. You can't believe that. You cannot and should not believe that. You also have to believe that the Patsy is willing to go to jail for life. Sure. So that somebody can build a ballroom. That is a crazy cell, right? Like this guy,

what is, you come to me and you're like, all right, man, I'm a fucking, I'm a maga true believer. I'm here to fight for the cause, man. I'm here. Sign me up. I got my fucking trucker hat. I'm ready to go. What do I got to do for you guys? All right, you're going to have to, we're going to stage this whole attempt. And we really need you to do this. Or Trump will not get his ball ring. And you're like, fuck yeah, God damn it, man.

Fly me in on an American Eagle. I'm going to wear a flag while I do it. I mean, like, come the fuck on. That is so insane. Well, or they're just orchestrating the entire thing. And that person isn't a real person or that's a secret person who's like, a CIA agent who they're just going to pretend they prosecuted. Again, all this stuff needs to, like, you have to make so much room for it.

That it's just, it feels like so much work. They don't need to do this work. That's just more work. They already proved they don't like to do work. Why would they go to the trouble to do all this work? It doesn't make any sense. And bro, like we have also the leakyest White House in American history. Oh, yeah.

They can't keep a secret about anything. There is a leak constantly. But in order for this conspiracy to work, we have to hold two things in our minds at the same time. You have to hold in your mind the idea that the administration is so incompetent that the only way that they can get their fucking ballroom built, which is way higher stakes than anybody should ever have thought. The only way they can get their ballroom built is if they do this because they're

incompetent to shepherd it through in other channels. However, they're so incredibly competent that they can pull off what has not. literally there's no historical example of a conspiracy like this at all in America. Right. So if this were true, it would be the only example of its type, size, and complexity. Yeah. So, and again, we have an incompetent, leaky administration that somehow is fucking on hard lockdown, but then yet some of the proof proof being offered is like all of these people dropping clues.

none of that makes any sense. Like go, stop, stop. None of that makes any sense. What is much more likely is that we have an opportunist in chief. Yeah, that's almost certainly it. And here's the thing. One of the ways in which you can look at this

and say, the reason why I don't think that's true is they just don't even know who shot who inside of this particular gunfight that happened. supposedly a person was shot and they had to be taken to the hospital. They haven't determined yet who shot him. They don't know because they collected all the guns. They're not quite sure who the person is or they're at least not telling us.

If this was all staged, they would already thought that out. They would have that answer for you and then they would have the staged results that you can look at. Instead, the FBI, who we could all look at and be like, yeah, probably compromised. I mean, come on. Like, fucking Cash Patel's probably chugging beers with the wait staff during this entire thing. Are you kidding me? But instead, what we do is we say, okay, well, the FBI is holding this investigation to figure out who did what, and they can't even figure it out.

They would immediately just be immediately saying, oh, yeah, it was the guy who did it. Yeah, we had his gun and it showed him, and he shot him. they would immediately know. But instead they're just like, well, I don't know. Do you have the bullets? I don't have the bullets. Do you have the bullets?

That's a great point. If there is uncertainty in the narrative, it should tell you that the narrative is not under control. Yeah. Right? If you have a conspiracy, you have a controlled narrative. You have a fully controlled narrative.

Every piece of that should be orchestrated. Every piece of that should be explainable. All the actors would be able to, even if things were anomalous, they would be able to explain their part of it because anybody with any sense, again, we have to posit that this group of people is competent enough to do the conspiracy. So they would do the next thing, which is they would sit in a room and they would game plan out the ways it could go bad. And they would write out how they're going to spin that narrative if something goes wrong.

Because anybody with any fucking sense would do that. But the fact that the narrative is unclear, it's the same thing with the Butler-Pennsylvania thing, is like, if you read articles, and I have, if you read articles to try to understand the shoe, you will come away not understanding the shooter very well. It's a really unclear motivation. We don't really have a good idea who that person was and what made them tick and why they. Well, like if you had a conspiracy, that person would be clearly ideologically left in a way that allowed you to use that person in a caricaturizing fashion. The fact that we don't have that is actually the best evidence that that's not a conspiracy.

What you have is an incompetent secret service. and like let's check if that's true. Yeah, we've got like 15 years now of a compromised incompetent secret service. It's a group that has been under fire and under scrutiny and had scandal rocking it for the last decade plus. So again, like which is more likely? The question I have for you, and this is something that just occurred to me when we were talking is given all the rest of the stuff that we were talking about, is a conspiracy, is using

conspiracy now a valid rhetorical or political tool? Is that a valid way to sway people? Clearly, the right has embraced it. Sure. I think the left is also opportunistically embracing it to some degree. I think so, too. Is it a valid tool? I don't know, but I will say this. The comments that I saw pretty much everywhere after this happened was, oh, it's fake and staged. It's fake and staged. What I saw was nobody cared that somebody ran in with a gun and planned to shoot a lot of people, right? In a, in a spasm of political violence, nobody said, man, that's fucked up.

Holy shit. We shouldn't be doing that. Instead, it was, oh, a fake and staged, fake and staged, fake and staged. And so literally it ran itself out. This blew itself out faster than it was told. I posted it to a text chat group I'm with with a couple of people. And their response, these are normally pretty smart, astute people, their response was it's fake and staged. Oh yeah.

Haley's first response was like, now I'll believe it when I see it. Like everybody, but I think that's kind of what I mean is that the well that we use to hold truth has been so damaged and so poisoned, that now people don't even want to go to it, right? Like, the idea of trying to find out what really happened is actually not really of maximal importance anymore. What's of maximal importance is whether or not a narrative, it's not whether a narrative is true, it's whether a narrative is useful. Yeah.

And the public, I think, has become exhausted by being used like this. Yeah. And we're just like, and then, you know, when an event like this happens and then the opportunist in chief and all of it. of his sycophants immediately seize upon it and they try to make hay out of it, it just exhausts people further. Sure. It's just like, oh, fucking more of this.

And, like, I honestly don't blame people for being exhausted by trying to pretend that truth is something we should be worried about. We've become immune to political violence because, like, when it happens from the right to the left, and it's happened many times, murders, kidnapping plots, horrible shit. Like, the rights, like, yeah, it's fucking funny when, you know, Nancy Pelosi's husband gets fucking smashed in the face with a hammer. And, like, you know, like, they make jokes about this stuff, man.

They, like, make jokes about, like, Gretchen Whitmer nearly being kidnapped and killed. Make jokes about Democratic Congress people being murdered. Yeah. You know, an acts of political violence. So, like, we're just at this place where, like, political violence has become almost uninteresting unless it's like useful. Well, I will say, you know, when you said, you know, do we need to embrace this sort of thing or should this sort of thing be embraced?

I will say, you know me 100% no. I know you. A hundred percent no. And I think like the reason why we shouldn't be leaning towards this stuff is because suddenly if we start saying that about President Trump, right? Oh, fake and staged, fake and staged. you're giving other people the opportunity to say the same thing if somebody kills Alexandria Ocasio-Crotris next week, right?

If somebody murders her and then they're like, oh, fake and staged, she's gone, she went to Canada. That's all fake and stage. And you give them the opening to minimize the thing that should be a landmark moment. It should be a moment where everybody pauses and reflects and says, this is terrible. We shouldn't be, like, I don't think,

a guy running in with a shotgun and a bunch of other guns to the correspondence dinner is a good thing. Okay? I don't think that's a great thing. I think that's really terrible. I think that the fact that we're at the space in our government where multiple attempts have happened against Trump's life because he's so genuinely terrible at the things he does. And he very much antagonizes and attacks people is a real bad thing. And it should, instead of making it seem like he's embattled, maybe some of this administration should be looking inward to the things that they're doing

to incite a group of people to try to commit political violence. Maybe there should be a little inward reflection of the things that they're doing. But it doesn't cause that. And you saying fake and staged will make it so that never happens. And it certainly won't happen with the next person. Because now you're opening the door for it to happen with him. you're definitely not going to be able to close that door once it's open. No.

And I ask the question, because I think it's an interesting question, but I don't want people to think I believe that it is a good or valid way for us to conduct political discourse or create a political persuasion. You know, I'm worried that it is going to become commonplace. Yeah. I'm worried that despite my reservations around it, I'm worried that the utility of it seems obvious. The other thing, too, is that these events, they create cover for people who barely need it to commit violence. Yeah. And as state violence, right? So, you know, these moments that

occur, they create cover for the Trump administration to choose and decide and create and name and target enemies of the state. And he is so hell-bent on doing that. That, like, we, that is, is the backfire effect of all of this. Exactly. And it's not, there's no benefit to us on our side to doing that. Yeah. No benefit that outweighs the risks. So you mentioned like we'll just briefly give people if they haven't read it. There's a couple of stories.

A shot was definitely, like one shot appears to be fired from the assailant's shotgun. It was a shotgun shell loaded with buckshot. Buckshot, if you're less familiar, is like a shotgun has like a shell rather than a bullet. casing. It has a shell, plastic shell. You can stuff just about anything that's about an ounce into that shell. Sometimes it's one piece of lead. That would be a slug. Sometimes it's several smaller pieces of lead or copper or whatever. That would be buckshot. Buckshots typically nine pieces in a typical like double up buck. And then you can have different amounts of shot going down from there in size. Yeah. You have like bird shot, which is a bunch like hundreds of

BBs in the end. Right. Yeah. So there was an expended shell casing. So he did take it. There was a shot fired. There were five shots fired

from the Secret Service. None of them hit the attempted assassin. So they missed all five times. It looks like the guy just tripped and fell. Yeah, it looks like he dumped it. He dumped his books, yeah. So, but a Secret Service agent was hit in the body armor. And there's a piece of like a

fragment, like a bullet fragment, not bullet, but a fragment, a projectile fragment embedded in his body armor, and they don't know what it's from. And that is made me laugh when I read it, because we don't know what it's from. I don't want to tell you what it's from. I don't know. But like, I've shot a lot of shotguns. You've shot a lot of shotguns. If it was a piece of buckshot, that's a pretty significantly sized round piece of metal. And they don't deform dramatically dramatically like a bullet does. So you would know. You'd know.

You would likely know. So I think like one of the Secret Service agents fucking shot and it ricochayed or shot another Secret Service agent. What else could have happened? They went to poke him in the eyes and he held his hand like this and it just got the thing. Couldn't get in there. That's the problem. Yeah. Plus like this guy, the Secret Service agents were behind him when the Secret Service agent was shot.

this guy was running forward they said at about nine miles an hour he was fucking book it if you watch the video man he was moving and he fell there's no way he could have turned and fired yeah like unless you're jason statham the jason stave him could do it right john wick maybe but other people know not this fucking guy this guy's like a fucking i t guy or whatever from california he tripped he tripped and he fell he was booking tripped and he fell the gun probably went off i think one of the Secret Service agents didn't know his head. He was like, and he just like jumped and shot his friend.

Yeah, man. And then everybody like ran into each other. And then they tried to carry the guy out and they ran through a piece of glass that someone was carrying a piece of glass across the hallway and they take the stretcher and they run right through it. It's like a whole thing.

What do you say, Toby? The truth. Looks like shit. That's where I love children, no guile. It does. look like shit. All right. See, so when I got wind of this story from NPR, I immediately went down to check the expiration dates of my passport for myself and my wife.

Because I was like, we're getting ours renewed. Yeah. I'm not going to end up with one of these. I already got mine renewed this year. It's only for, these are commemorative. So they're very small run. So you would have to like physically request something like this. Thank God.

This is from NPR. U.S. to issue commemorative passports with Trump's stupid fucking picture for America's 250th birthday. And that's what it is. This is unprecedented. No other president is in there. The only time they have images of president is like when they have the image of the Mount Rushmore. And those people have been fucking dead for a long time.

But here's what I would do if I was president. I would keep these around. And I would change the picture to him and Epstein. And I would put it in. I would be like, yeah, you can get a commemorative Trump one. But it's Trump and Epstein. And it's him pointing the girls out with him like, like sucking on his top. lip where he's looking at one of the girls like,

oh, God, yeah. He's like, he's got the fucking goofiest face and he's pointing at him and Epstein and him are both looking at the girls. That's the one I would use. I would use with him with his arm out

and Epstein's face on it. I'd be like, yeah, no, that's what you're going to get. If you want a Trump face, that's what you get. That's the one I would put together. That's on every, that's on every,

I would renew my passport early to get that one. Yeah. That would be fucking great. I would put that one out there. I feel like, I feel like what you do after Trump,

if there is an after Trump. I feel like what you do is you just do all of that shit. Because if you, as a Democrat, start doing all this stuff, everyone will push to make laws that you can't do it. Right. It's true. Letting him do all this shit. Right. They're going to, he's going to make a torn out a ballroom. Well, if you, if you take that and you replace it with a picture of like somebody pit, like you put a fountain. Let's say you replace it with a fountain. And it's Trump's face. And then you, you just put a bunch of Russian hookers around him pissing on him. That's the fountain.

Right. If I did that, then they would make a ruling. They'd be like, no, no, no, no, you can't do this. You can't do this. Well, then you're just like, okay, well, nobody gets to do this in the future then. Nobody gets to just unilaterally decide how we're going to have the office of the president, how we're going to make that look. That has to go through some sort of process in the future.

That was what you do. Same thing here. If you're going to put your face on there, be like, great, we're really going to put your face on. there. Yeah. And then you make them eat it for a little bit. And then they're like suddenly, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, hold down, we got to change the rules on this.

You got to change the rules so that somebody can't do the things he's doing again. Every single thing this guy does to aggrandize himself and he's creating a fucking arch. He's fucking putting his picture on things. He's signing shit. He shouldn't be signing. He's putting his name on different things. Get rid of all that.

And then also make it so it's making fun of him. him and then suddenly they would change the rules. They would make it so that that sort of thing doesn't stand anymore. Because if you don't, what you're going to do is you're going to have a fucking poll. What is that? A fucking tug of war back and forth between, oh, well, it's a Democrat person now. Now it's a, because I don't want fucking any Democrats name on the Kennedy Center. There's not a fucking, not a single one I want to.

I don't want a single Democrat in my fucking, I just want the, in my candid passport. Fuck you. You work for me. I don't want your fucking face in there. Who the fuck do you think you are? Fuck off. Yeah, man. This is some fucking Kim Jong-un shit.

Yeah, man. You know, this is some dear leadership. We are, we are in a place where, like, that stupid motherfucker's on, he's going to be put on a coin. He's on your fucking passport, potentially, like, he's on all kinds. He's constantly putting himself on shit. He's fucking personally signing, not personally, but like, his signatures, like, showing up on, like, tax refund checks or whatever. Like, no, no to all. that shit. No, that's dear leadership. That is all dear leadership. Tell me how that's different

than dear leadership. To your point, who works for who, man? Yeah. I'm happy that you're happy, but the place where you're supposed to have the toilet paper, you've got this little shelf with three sea shells on it. He doesn't know how to use the three seashells. I can see how that could be confusing. So they're giving another, they're taking another swing. James Comey this time because he took a picture of seashells on the beach. Yeah. Cecil. I'm not even fucking kidding.

If you look at it, it's literally just says 86-47, 86, meaning get rid of, and 47 being Trump. And he put that in seashells and he took a picture of it and he posted to his social media and he got indicted for it. That's the America that we voted for. That's the America that we voted for in the last election. that's what 80 million people or whatever said, yeah, no, that's the kind of thing I want to do. That's going to affect me in some way, right?

That's the thing that whenever any of these people who talk about all these grand ideas that Trump had that he's failed on every single one, whenever one of these people talk about it, all they wanted to do was empower him to attack people they didn't like. And then they wanted excuses to vote for him. That's all it is. That's all this ever was. They just wanted to attack people they didn't like, and they wanted permission to do it, and Trump gave him that permission. Yeah, man. That's exactly it.

That's exactly it. James Comey, they try to go after him, and they failed because there was fucking nothing there there there. Just like they tried to go after like Letitia James. There's fucking nothing there there. They tried to go after the woman, I forgot her name, who sat on the Fed Reserve Board. There was nothing there there. They are failing over and over and over and over and over again to get indictments because there's nothing there. There's like a phrase like that they, you know, a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich and they can't get a fucking grand jury to fucking actually like go through with these indictments.

This is nothing. This is seashells on a beach. Who the fuck is like? And they're saying, by the way, that that was a death threat. That was a death threat to the president. Death threat to the president. 86 means to kill somebody evidently to them. Like it's multiple meanings, man.

Like 86 to get rid of, hey, let's 86 that fucking engine out of this car and get a new one. Right. Like, that doesn't mean we're going to kill it. Yeah. Right. You're not killing everybody that worked on the project. It's fucking seashells on a beach. Yeah, man.

It is the flimsy of shit. It's so flimsy. Anybody who looks at this that is not a complete asshole. sees this for exactly what this is. This is political retaliation. That's all it is. And it's not going to go anywhere, man. Can you imagine being seated for a jury?

You're like, okay, I got to stop what I'm doing. I got to not have my fucking work day. I got to not have my day with my family or home life. I got to drive to the fucking federal building like an asshole and sit in a fucking jury and listen to somebody tell me how fucking seashells are a threat to national security. Well, I'll tell you what. Oh, guilty.

I'm going to vote guilty. I'm the dumbest fucking human beings. It's ever lived on earth. I'm so exhausted, man. Seashells on a... It's not even the seashells. It's a picture of seashells. What you need is, if you're with that lawyer,

you need a lot more than just three nose. Because there's going to be a lot of people that are going to come in and you're like, nah, not that person. Now, that person actually has their shoes on the right feet. We need a different person. Come on, man. Who's going to say yes to this?

Who's going to be your guy? You would have to go to the deepest part of Trump country, right? You'd have to literally, in order to get the jury for this, you would have to stand outside of one of his rallies, and you would still need more than three people to reject it. You would still need more than three people to say, I can't have that person on my jury. Even if you stood outside of his rallies

and recruited the jury from there, I don't think you would be able to do it. Because, I mean, even still, you have to look at this and say, what is the, what's the reason I'm here? for? Why am I here? Why would I listen to this? And what is the argument? Like, how long could this, you need a whole jury to sit there for how long to hear somebody try to tell you that he wants to have him killed? Because he posted something on social media in seashells on the beach? Are you fucking serious right now? And like, can we contrast that with the actual death threats that Republicans?

Do you remember when Marjorie Taylor Green had posted a Twitter like a fucking like sniper reticle over like Democrat faces. And she was just like, ah, it's a joke. No, my bitch. I'm just kidding. And like Donald Trump, you know, has made how many comments about something should be treason and people should be hanged?

Yeah. Like, there are actual death threats on the right that happen on the fucking regular by by empowered people currently in positions of authority. and then you got like James Comey, who I think when he took this picture wasn't in charge of fuck. He was in charge anything. He was just a dude at that point

and he took a fucking seashell photo and we're just like, oh my gosh, seashells. Mike, how much fucking testosterone do you have that you're afraid of a fucking seashell photo on Instagram? And one of the reasons why people were so up in arms about Biden

is because they, like, especially if you listen to Joe Rogan, they're like, they were weaponizing the justice system. They were weaponizing the justice system against Trump. They ran him into the New York. And first off, the federal government had no say of what happened in New York, right?

So, like, the federal government wasn't involved in that New York case. The New York case looked at state law and they looked at how he was running his election and how he spent his money to pay off a porn star and how he... Jesus Christ. Very specifically, that was a felony

because of how many times it happened. It was a felony because of how many times it happened. of the technical reasons behind it, and he was charged with all those felonies and found guilty of all those felonies, right? And yet they still tried to say it was Biden who weaponized the Justice Department against him. Right. It was Biden who did this against him. Biden was, and so they were saying that they're going after him. They're weaponizing justice department. Where are you now? Like, where are you now? If that was your principle, if I was like, this is where I plant my flag on the principle of the government shouldn't be

attacking citizens if they're not doing anything wrong and you shouldn't be weaponizing these levers of justice against these people, that's a fine principle to have, right? I think you're shockingly misinformed in using the wrong language and not understanding how courts work and not understanding the implication of how dangerous what he was doing, all those things, right? But you're shockingly misinformed on one sense. But even if you were principled, where the fuck are you now? Where are you at?

Like, where are all these people who are screaming? The Justice Department is being weaponized by Biden. Where the fuck are you when they're trying to indict people for shit that they should never, ever, ever be indicted for? Like fucking putting seashells on a goddamn beach. You know, I have a question for you about that then. So because immediately when you're talking, I'm like, oh, well, I mean, I don't think anybody at this point believes any of the things that they're saying. I really am like at a place where maybe this is crazy. You can't know the operation of other people's minds, but just hear me out of it.

Like, like, it's like, have we, have we gotten to a place where everybody has just decided that whatever is pragmatic? That's the principle. Yeah. So that we decide on the outcome that we want. And then whatever we have to do to justify getting to that outcome is fine. The principle is winning. That's the only principle that is. actually held by any of these people.

Well, and all the rest of it is just justification nonsense. Well, hypocrisy only works if you can feel shame, right? Hypocracy only works if you feel like that principles matter, right? Because look at, just look at how they handled the Supreme Court, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there is no easier way to define and show how somebody could be hypocritical than to watch Mitch McConnell, and one breath say we're not going to fill Scalia's seat until after the election.

And then he doesn't. And then we get Gorsuch in there because Trump, they waited for Trump to get elected so they could change the seat. And then three months before Trump is out of office, Ginsburg dies and he does the exact opposite thing. And when asked whether or not that's logically consistent, he laughed at the report. He laughed. He laughed because he's like, no, just do what the fuck I want because I was going to do the thing I wanted anyway. I just needed a justification for all you losers out there who need some sort of justification. I was going to do what I wanted anyway.

That's it. I was going to do any. I was literally going to do what I wanted anyway. I just need to try to placate you in the moment with a justification. But the thing is, like, that works for politicians. That's fine for politicians. What I'm talking about is all the pundits, right? You don't have, the only position you have is then holding Trump's balls.

Like, that's the only position you have. Because the rest of the time, it's like, like, if you're, trying to lie to me that you have some sort of principles. And then you're just like off in the distance, just making it up as you go along. I'm going to catch on to that eventually. But it's just so crazy that nobody's calling these people out who were literally saying this in order to get Trump elected. And now they're fucking silent about it.

Yeah. But like I would extend my thing all the way down to the pundits. Cecil, I would extend my, I don't know, fucking theory of bullshit. I would extend my theory here all the way down to like your crazy uncle at Thanksgiving. Like, because I've seen it, I've seen it even at the ground level. We've seen it was how many, how many First Amendment and Second Amendment issues have we seen now? Yeah, no, you're not wrong. You're not wrong.

Applied only when they want the answer they want. You're not wrong. And they're, so they hold on principle as long as the principle ultimately means I got what I wanted. There are a few squeaky wheels with some of the Second Amendment stuff, like what the pretty stuff when that happened. but for the most part, most people on the right were like, fuck around and find out. But the thing is,

is like, if that person was somebody on the right and they were concealed carrying, and everybody on the left said, well, they were concealed carrying. They would be like, you can't infringe on my shit in a minute,

they would have a shit in their own hands and rubbed it on their face that have been so mad about it. Yeah. I think the rhetoric is just there to give them, like, to soothe over their own internal discomfort. Yeah.

I'm holding out for, something better. I figure, fuck it. While I'm at it, why not just shoot my buddy? Take his job, give it to a sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, barma village, club of baby seal, hit the hash pipe, and join the national god. I can be elected president. Hey, Cecil, you fill up recently? Oh, man. Fill up at the pump, buddy. Look at this map. This map is crazy. There's no place in the United States that look like, from my cursory glancing at it, that it was under 380. Not a single place that gas was under 380 in the States. Yeah. And that's,

by the way. I know that other countries might hear this and be like $3.80 for a gallon. That feels like, but we subsidize our gas here because it's, we have to. So yeah, it's like an, it's an insane price for gas here because our tax dollars already pay for it. Yeah, we're at a place now where because of choices that we made entirely, gas prices are approaching the highest that they have been in both recent, in modern history. Right. So gas right now is in many parts of the country is closing on $5 a gallon, $6 if you have to use premium. This is in a country, by the way, whose minimum wage is still fucking like nothing dollars an hour. Yeah. Yeah. So like a gallon of gas is all of your money, like an hour's worth of work for a gallon of gas. So it is absolutely fucking bonkers. And the thing that makes me nuts is like, yes, gas was more expensive at one point, barely.

under Biden, but that's because of a global pandemic. It was actually because of the Ukraine war. Oh, is it because of the Ukraine war? I think so. I think it was when Ukraine invaded. Because if you look, it's like 22 is when that spike hits. That is right. And I think the spike hits because the world oil market was shocked because everybody

immediately stopped buying Russian oil. That is very true. Do you think that's why it is? I think that's why it is. I'm sure. that that's why it is. I think you're exactly right. The timing is, I'm wrong about that. So another conflict that we had nothing to do

with, and Biden had nothing although all these people would be like, well, they were marching on the border. They were they were manipulating Zelinsky to start that war, blah, blah, blah, blah, all these fucking idiots who swallowed the fucking op-ed that Putin wrote

all those idiots, all those idiots on Twitter and all those people who visit Joe Rogan, they all think it's our fault that that war started. But genuinely, if you're thinking person, you know that it wasn't Biden's fault that that war started. It just so happened to happen on his watch. Yeah. And here, we've got a problem that we spent, you know, somewhere around $25 or $30 billion

on the war in Iran. Our gas has gone way the fuck up. We have made zero progress on literally any of the stated aims of this war at all. All we've done is create a problem. Yeah. Like we replaced a hardline regime with a harder line regime. That didn't work out great. You know, there's literally not been a single thing you could identify as a win at all.

Not one thing. Nothing has been gained strategically or otherwise. And now we're just paying this economic price for it. And the whole world is paying it. This is a problem entirely of our own creation. All you had to do is not do this. And it would be fine. You know?

Like, if you just, like, this is how I live my whole life, man. I wake up and I don't do anything at all. And then I hope everything turns out okay. and then like a lot of times that works I would be a great president they'd be like what do you want to do today I'd be like I'm taking a fucking nap man set this shit on autopilot

and it's like there's a lot of delicate you know we're talking about you know maybe spinning plates or some sort of top or something there's a lot of these things that sort of they have their own equilibrium right like the economy itself for the most part is a juggernaut it's a big thing it's got a lot of moving parts

if it's in its own sort of it has its own sort of balance and its gyroscope is in the right spot it'll stay where it is for a long time it takes a lot of nudging for you to really fuck it up and what Trump did as soon as he came in

is he flipped the table that the gyroscope was on right? Oh man that's exactly right now he flipped the table he flipped the table here he flipped the table there. He did the same thing here. Gas prices could have just been gas prices, right? It might have just been that it was okay.

But instead, as soon as he got in, he started doing things that, one, he said he wasn't going to do, but now he's doing them, and now you're going to pay for it, you're going to pay for it very specifically, right? Before it was sort of this amorphous like someone's going to pay for it, right?

Right. Like before it was, oh, well, the minorities will pay for it or whatever. But now it's going to affect you. It's going to affect you very specifically. So, you know, the leopards ate their face moment is going to be you looking at your credit card bill at the end of the month when you're like, how the hell did I spend $900 on gas this month? And it's because you live 70 miles from work because there's no way you could afford a place nearby. Well, it's starting to look a lot better. It's really starting to look a lot better because you got, if you're going to spend, you know, $500 on gas, you might as well just add that to your fucking living expenses and travel and live.

live closer to where you work. Because if not, it's just such a bad, it's just such bad management. You just, it, you don't have to do this. And add into that, everybody, he's raising all your prices on gas and you got to pay, we already pay for that because we're all paying for it through our tax dollars already. So it coming up is, is a bad thing for us. Add into that the amount of money that they're spending on this war. That's all money that you were complaining that they were sending.

that they were sending over because they were sending fucking rubbers to Africa or whatever before and you were fucking so mad and pissed off that somebody was trying to like mitigate terrorism

by showing people Sesame Street in other countries and they were spending like a million dollars on that and you're like oh my God I'm fucking so mad at every NGO in the world

they're roaning the world Elon's going to come in and he's going to wipe the floor with him and he's going to take away all this stuff and then they do and it was nothing. It was like fucking pittance, and they've already spent like $25 billion on this war.

So you've already been fucked twice. They fucked you, and then they rolled you over and fucked you again. Man, like, we're, we've done so much stupid shit with respect to this whole thing. Like Scott Besson came out and said, like, gas prices aren't going down until 2027. I don't know if that's true or not. I don't think I have any reason to trust Scott Besson. Trump came out and called Scott Besson stupid for saying that. So I think you could read from there that nobody knows what the fuck is going to happen.

Nothing good has happened, right? I remember I texted you this week that every time we do a war like this, the other thing we have to remember that we do is we show the entire world, including our enemies, all of our cards. Yep. Here's how we do war. Here's how long it takes us to, yeah. Here's how long it takes us to run out of bombs and missiles.

And here's when things start to affect our economy. And here's, we show everybody. And if you're anybody, you're taking notes right now. And you're finding all of the little gaps in the armor. And we're showing you exactly where they're good at this. We're bad at this. We can sustain this for this long. Then we run out of this kind of munition.

We're worried about being able to replace this kind of, you know, anti-aircraft or anti-missile defense technology items. we're showing the whole world all of our weaknesses every time we do this. It is always in our national deficit. It is never to our national benefit to show our enemies our fucking hand. We're playing poker with the cards out on the table when we do this for our enemies. And why? Why? What did we get?

We fucking got nothing. Yeah, well, it's Trump wanted to show how tough he is. This reminds me of like when you were in middle school and there was that one kid, with the growth spurt and everybody's like, Jesus, that guy's huge. Look at the size of that guy. He's so big, he's so big. But he was like a meek kid

who got punched in the face once and fell over. That's what you're doing with our military, right? It's like this, you know, like, you're a big badass until you have to fucking, until it comes time to put up. And now you're like, oh, you know, you could hide behind yourself a lot

other than that. You could basically hide behind all this, this technology and smoke and mirrors and leaking out this thing. Look at how fast. this jet goes, look at how fast this missile goes, and look at how we can shoot this thing out of the sky, et cetera, et cetera, from the shit that you leak out.

But once the rubber hits the road on some of this stuff, they're shooting down our planes. They're shooting shit down. Like, are you kidding me? Like, they're not invincible. They have to go rescue people. Like, what the fuck? Of course that's going to happen.

Of course that's going to happen when you meet with another force in the world. And Trump is just so fucking stupid. And all the people behind him, I guarantee that, like, I don't know whether Trump, Trump is in control of what he wants to do with this or not. But I will say this.

There was no way that Heggseth was going to get that job. Change the fucking thing to the Department of War and then not start a war. There was no fucking way that was going to happen. There was no way. That dude was bloodthirsty from the moment they fucking put him in there. You knew it was going to happen. You knew he was going to do this. You knew he fucking had a fucking hate on for a lot of people all across the world.

And this is just a moment for him to go out and show how tough he is. hope that guy suffers after this is over. I genuinely hope that, you know, maybe you pardon him for his actions or whatever, but I hope somehow that there is some comeuppance for that guy because he's a disaster and he's a diabolical disaster. All right, that's going to wrap it up for this week. We'll be back with a funny show. I think this week we're going to try for a funny show.

Maybe it'll be next week. I'm not sure exactly when things land, but we'll be back on Monday with another show. So 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-Babillon, 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 info-docutainment. Leo Pisces, Cancer Cures, Detox, Reflex, Foot Massage, Death and towers, tarot cars, psychic healing, crystal balls, Bigfoot, Yeti, aliens, churches, mosques, and synagogues, temples, dragons, giant worms, Atlantis, dolphins, truthers, birthers, witches, wizards, wizards, vaccine nuts. Shaman healers, evangelists, conspiracy, double-speak stigmata, nonsense. Expose your sides. Thrust your hands. Bloody, evidential, conclusive. doubt even this. Thanks for tuning in.

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