Cognitive Dissonance - Episode 924: The Straights of Hormuz

Episode Date: June 22, 2026

Inside Trump's White House, the Epstein Files Caused a Freakout - The New York Times What to know about a deal to end the Iran war | AP News Donald Trump on $300B fund for Iran: 'People can decide to do that'

This episode of Cognitive Dissinance 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. Sporting live from Glory Hole Studios in Chicago and beyond. This is Cognitive Dissanance. 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 at. Today is Thursday. We're back to a Thursday today. We are again recording a part. That's, that's, that's, that's, that's on me. We had to move the schedule around a little bit. Today is the 17th of June, 18th of June. 18th. And Cecil, we've got a brand new concept of a plan out there, a memorandum of understanding. Yeah. Man. What a fucking thing that is. So happy that we were able to dominate Iran the way we were, push them into the corner that we did,

and extract from them violently this deal that is completely in our favor. I think that that is, if there's anything like, look, I don't like Donald Trump. I think Donald Trump is terrible, but did he show his power here, Tom? I mean, like a powerful 80-year-old man who just watched guys get knocked out on his Lawn went over there and told them what's up. And they said, yes, sir. Yes, sir. How high, sir?

How high should I jump is what they said. I mean, in Trumpian fashion, he did promise that he would accept nothing less than the unconditional surrender of Iran. Unconditional. And that's what they said. They wrote it in there and they had their mom sign it and they handed it over. They constructed them. And we're going to put it on America's fridge.

We're going to hang it with a magnet on America's fridge. They had nuclear-enrich crayons that they wrote it in. I surrender. It was amazing. I just want to like, I want to start by just trying to remember and trying to remind everybody of the various shifting goals. And so on the one hand, so when we think about any kind of an exchange like this, we bombed a school full of children. Yes. Right?

We, thousands of lives were lost. Iranian lives were lost. 13 American service members lost their lives. Many, many more were wounded. A lot of innocent people, completely innocent people. Children were exploded, murdered. The economy of the entire world has been damaged severely. We destroyed much of the infrastructure over there.

Tremendous amount of infrastructure damage. many of the most severe effects of the energy shock will be paid by the poorest and most vulnerable peoples across the world. I listened to a show the other day about the toll this is taking in Africa and people are literally dying. They're starving to death in Africa. There's a direct result, direct result, one-to-one result of this war in Iran, right? So there's a lot on these sort of what this cost when we look at cost benefits. And there's more that we missed. Obviously, There's so much more. Thank you.

So much more. Tom could go on for probably a half an hour listing all of the downstream effects of something like this. So you got all that. And then what did we want from it? Well, we wanted the unconditional surrender of the Iranian people. That was truthed out. We wanted a complete and total regime change. Yes.

We wanted a destruction of and cessation of their missile capacity. We wanted a destruction of and cessation of their nuclear. enrichment program. What we got instead was none of that at all. Yeah. Right? The regime did not change.

We killed the Ayatollah, and then Ayatollah's son is in charge, and he's actually way more hardline. Yeah, and he's way more hardline. Yeah, exactly. Second verse is a little harder. Second verse has a harder guitar riff. Yeah, exactly.

Like their second album is like way fucking heavier. They're like, all right, fucking double down on the double bass. Like, here we go. A brand new distortion pedal for this one. Yeah. Like we moved from a regime that had a lot of pragmatists that were a part of that regime, which is why they were able to reach compromise as part of the Obama deal,

to a regime that has no pragmatists left in it by all readings that I can find and is a bunch of fucking like crazy theocratic hardliners. Nice. So that's worse. That's just objectively worse. I will point out that this may endear them to us because we have a bunch of crazy Theocratic hardliners over here. So it may be more endearing to have somebody who's like us somewhere else.

That's right. Yeah, maybe it's just like, oh, I recognize my own. Here it's white supremacy, Christian nationalism. Right. It's Islam. But you know what I mean? Six of one. So we did not get the regime change.

We did not get anything remotely approaching the complete and total surrender. We did not get a cessation and destruction of their missile capacity and their missile production systems. we did get like an agreement to arrive at an agreement that would eventually perhaps kind of maybe yield a dilution of their enriched uranium. We got to save the date for that. That's exactly what we got. Put it on your fucking fridge.

Get a good magnet. Put it on your fridge. Save the day. And invite your wife. Sometime before 2050. Yeah, right. Right. So, like, we got, we got a, like, a winky face around diluting their nuclear enrichment or their nuclear materials.

An emoji-filled email, yes. Right. You can't even say that, like, we got the straight of Hormuz because, like, that was open before the war. Sure. Yeah. So that's just a fucking net zero. Right. Right.

Like, that's, but what we did is we taught them that they can close it anytime they want, and that works. Feels like a difficult lesson that we learned on the world. Yeah. We're just like, here's a powerful thing you have now. And they're like, awesome. Thanks. You could, that's totally worth bombing one of our schools. We don't value girls anyway, you know? Like, we're an Islamic hardline nation. Girls aren't even really people here. We just moved right into checkmate, didn't we? Wow. That was stupid. Man. And then, like, we're also going to remove our blockade. We're going to allow them to sell oil internationally in a way that they were not allowed before. We're going to remove sanctions. We're going to pump somewhere in the neighborhood of $24 billion in currently held funds to them. Can you refresh my memory really quick? I'm sorry to keep interrupting you. Yeah, no, no, it's fine. But can you refresh my memory?

How much money did Obama unfreeze when they- $1.7 billion? Okay. Is that more or less? Let me do some quick math. 24 minus 1.7 equals 24. is bigger. It's fucking like, it's over 12 times as much money.

The alligator's mouth is like, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum. And then that's not even all because then also we are helping to establish a $300 billion restoration fund, which Trump says is going to be primarily funded by other Gulf states. We'll see if that even happens. Oh, yeah, yeah, sure. But like, we're going to make Mexico pay for the wall. Like what, like, what the, what the actual living fuck? What the, like, what the, Cecil, somebody has to explain the living actual fuck about this deal.

Well, hold on now. What about, I read in one of these. Yeah, what am I missing? Neither the missile arsenal nor Iran support for its allies appear to be on the table in the upcoming. Thank you. Thank you. Very important. that very important like that was a like so that's like mostly what israel wanted right the israel

component because like they were the ones that like really kind of nudged us into this thing right the israeli component they're like hey we got to destroy their missile program because they have the ability to shoot fucking missiles at us and then you know we've got to like destroy and like dismantle their proxy network you know across these these different territories and the u.s was like absolutely. As soon as they unconditionally surrender, we'll fuck them into that too. And then we're like, okay, so we drafted a rough draft version one memo that says we promise we'll think about and we won't even include this as part of it. You know what's so funny, Tom? What the shit is this?

Do you remember, you know that knockoff conservative onion, the Babylon B? Oh my God, yeah. So they had a post that I saw on our conservative that was hugely upvoted on our conservative on Reddit. And the post was, victory. Trump Secures Reopening of Straight that was already opened before the war. Victory in big letters. Even his own side is like punking him for the trash that he tried to put out in this. He, what he tried was a legacy building maneuver to try to make it seem like Donald Trump was the powerful person on the world stage that could do and take out any regime that he thought that would benefit in some way the partners, not even the partners in the United States, really, because I think a lot of people were like, this is fucking stupid.

But, but, you know, I think what he wanted to try to do is he had his ideas. about who was evil and what countries were evil and what countries he was going to go after. And he decided to do it, I think, as a legacy building maneuver to try to make it seem like he could take out whoever he wanted. But the thing is, it's a lot harder than just bluster. It's a lot harder than just saying you did something. He can do that over here all day long with all kinds of different things. And think about all the different. ways in which Donald Trump has lied to the American public about things that he said he did or didn't do.

He's lied tens of thousands of times and it has no effect on him whatsoever. He has lied tens of thousands of times to the people here. And often his base gobbles up every lie. Like he is regurgitating. They're all baby ducks and he's regurgitating the algae from the pups. or whatever into their mouths, and they love it. They love his lies, his bluster. They adore it.

The thing about doing that on the world stage is that it has real world deep, deep consequences. Often the people here in the United States don't feel some of these consequences from the lies that he makes and the things he does here very quickly. Like the turnaround time is a lot longer. So you don't feel the damage. as much damage. There's a sort of weakening of all of our systems, right? But there's not like a collapse. This was essentially a collapse of the gas prices that most people were used to paying. Even when it got up to like $4 a gallon, $5 a gallon, I know people all across the globe are laughing

when they hear that price. But for us, that's a lot of money to pay for gas because we don't take care of our roads with the tax dollars. So it's a big deal for us. to pay that kind of money, and then we also pay other fees because of that. So there's a big deal for us. And I think people are feeling the real sting of his actions, and there's nothing he can do to get out of it. Even his own side. Like people from Fox News are asking him hard questions.

People on Fox News are saying this was a total flop. So even his own side is like, oh, my God, this is the worst. And everybody else knew it was going to be bad. It's not like you needed to be Karnak and hold an envelope to your head to guess whether or not this was going to be a bad call. This was going to be a bad call from the very beginning. He also has the most incompetent people underneath him that you could possibly find. And it's because they're all sycophants, right? Their one endearing quality to him is that they suck up really, really well.

They're like super amazing suckups. Every single one of his cabinet meetings, everybody has to. spend five minutes like cheers like cheersing him like holding a toast to him before they finally say the thing that they're supposed to say they have to like you know like

fucking talk about how amazing is and all this you done all this thing and wouldn't be impossible without this guy over here if you don't do that if you don't do that song and dance you're not part of the club well what skills does that take versus the skills of like somebody who's actually good at their job none of those people are good at their job

None of them. They're just massive sycophants. And all they do is just suck up to Donald Trump. So, of course it's going to be bad. Of course, when he has pressured to do something that is difficult, it's going to be bad. And of course, when it gets difficult, Donald Trump is going to fucking flee from it and do whatever he can to get out of it because he's bad at his job. And he was always going to be bad at his job.

And we all knew it, man. Yeah, man. We all fucking knew it. Yeah, there's no, like, if there's no, like, if there's, There's no ability to pretend that you're surprised and still be an honest person. Yeah. Right? You don't get to have that.

Like I will say, like, you don't get to have, I'm surprised and I'm also honest. You can be, I'm surprised, but I'm fucking stupid and I'm dishonest. And all I really care about was like, like, fealty and genuflection. If that's who you are, then fine. That's who you are. It doesn't matter. I want to, I want to just offer some additional numbers and context before we abandon this.

like we're abandoning everything else. So, like, first of all, the memorandum of understanding basically just says we're going to make these super basic agreements. And these are really just kicks the can down the road 60 days. And Trump even said, like, you know, I also just might bomb them some more later if I feel like it. I mean, he essentially said just like, yeah, if they don't behave, whatever that means, then I'll just start bombing them again.

There is no restriction. So the Strait of Hormuz is open. And by the way, J.D. Vance, I listened to an interview with J.D. Vance. It's straight, not straights of Hormuz, you stupid asshole. You can't even get that right. He says straights every time. It's the straight of Hormuz. He's obsessed with the straights, Tom.

So you got to give him that one. It's true. All right. I'll grant it. I'll grant it. So, like, the Strait of Hormuz is open and there will not be tolls initially. But they will, they're holding back the option of, fees, which are tolls. So there's going to be tolls through the straight, which is going to increase energy costs

across the board. We may still end up bombing. They haven't really decided on anything as far as any of the thorny, sticky issues. There's nothing remotely approaching a victory lap here. And let me just tell everybody what this costs. And you have to put this into context. Remember the opening salvo of this administration when Doge rolled in and said, let's start cutting some costs.

Let's start firing some people. Let's destroy this department and that department. Dismanal everything. Fiscal responsibility was a big deal, according to them. The biggest deal, this is what everybody on that side was fucking gobbling up, their fucking mascara was running, they were clucking with that fucking shit down their throats.

The whole first six months, while Doge had a bunch of fucking undereducated, dumbass, 18-year-old dipshits with fucking chat GPT decided who got to come to work tomorrow. Right? So this cost $29 billion in direct costs. That's what it costs in direct costs. It costs about a billion dollars a day.

There's been somewhere in the neighborhood of $132 billion in total economic fallout in the United States alone. According to Brown University, $59.2 billion more was spent at the gas pump since this war started. That's about $451 per U.S. household. So imagine knocking on the door of every household in America and saying, hey, can you write me a check for $452? In exchange, we'll go to war with Iran for fucking 45 days. And here's what we'll get out of it. I wrote it down on this memo. How many people are writing that check?

Fucking nobody's writing that check because it wasn't fucking worth it. we also burned through a huge amount of our inventory of advanced missile defense interceptors. These things take years to replenish. We will not have those missile interceptors replenished for a minimum of two to five years. Okay. And everybody knows it because I know it. So if I know it, our fucking enemies around the world also know it. They know not only do we not have them for our own use,

They also know that we can't export them or sell them to our allies across the world, which makes the whole world fundamentally less safe. It's a big deal to run through your fucking munitions and the whole world watched you do it in real time and it took less than two months. It makes you look like a fucking paper tiger, Cecil. And if you're China and you're thinking about Taiwan, for example, now is your time. Now is it. And they can just do that if they want. And we'll say, well, that sucks. And that's what we'll say.

Finally, the inflation numbers, we talked about this last week. I won't harp on it too much. But inflation's back up over 4%. Yeah. And it will go down. It'll take some time, but it will go down. But it will not go in the negative. We will not have deflation.

So again, those costs are baked the fuck in. Prices for everything is the price for everything. And it's only going up. It's it. So what do we get? We got fucking nothing. This is a worse deal than the Obama deal by orders of magnitude, literally 12 times worse in terms of the financial cost. How many lives?

I mean, this is an absurdity. This is a black stain on American policy and diplomacy and international relations. Donald Trump's been a mess since he's took over. He's been awful since he took over. He instituted a lot of crazy shit. He's been winning in the courts. he's been attacking the United States democracy in any way that he can.

We're not done with that. He's been attacking immigrants in this country. He's been attacking U.S. citizens in this country. So we're not done with that either. This is something he is desperate to be done with. We're going to be talking about something else that he's desperate to be done with the Epstein files here in a few minutes. But there's a couple of things that Donald Trump is very,

is these are going to be the legacy making things. Not the changing of the pool colors. Not the building of the, not the building, the destruction of one wing of the White House and the hoping of building a new portion, not the arch she wants to take 270 days to build that's going to take 16 hour days each day to do

or 400 days or something crazy like that. None of that stuff is going to be the legacy building. stuff. What about his punchy, punchy birthday party? The punchy birthday party, that's a, I mean, it's not anything. It's just like, I mean, it's not anything. It's just, it's all it is a spectacle. I mean, like, that's what it was. It was just a spectacle to, to, so, and it's also made very specifically to anger people, right? Like, they wanted to make people mad with that. That's all they wanted to do. They just wanted, they want to defile the office so much that it makes people on the other side mad. And when they do that, they, they also lower the bar for any,

future person to come in, and they all, on their side, very specifically, and their side gets a kick out of it. They think it's funny. This is a group of people whose idea of comedy is somebody said something that was a lie. And that's

funny to them, right? It's funny because it made you mad or whatever. That's not, that's not humor. That's bullying, right? That's not humor. That's just you laughing and being sadistic or whatever. That's not anything. That's just, that's just a moral defect on your part. That's all it is.

I just want to catch my fish, drive my fish, drink my fish, not wake up to all this fish, like the same kind of fish. I hunt with just killed another fish. I just want to cut my fish, feed my fish, is where my fish. Be told if I tell my fish, order that little boys ain't little fish. And this next story is actually a great example of, you know, like an issue that is causing, I think the Iran War and Epstein are two major wedges in the right. And so Cecil, you found this terrific article from the New York Times magazine inside the White House freak out over the Epstein files. This is a very lengthy and exhaustive article about the sort of response to and lead up and organization and strategy that the white.

White House underlings undertook to bury this story. I was sent this story by Michael Marshall, the person who I do the No Rogan experience with, very specifically because of the Rogan angle. So there's a piece of this we'll get to later where Joe Rogan's name comes up. And it's an important piece of this puzzle, right? Joe Rogan isn't in the Epstein files, but he was, it was definitely somebody who they were looking to to help try to destroy this narrative that, you know, this administration is trying to hide stuff.

It all sort of starts during all of their lead-up to the election, right? All of the pundits that were on that side, at that point before they were podcasters, now, guys, they're part of the administration. So, important point, podcasters are now part of the administration, really important pieces of the administration too. I know. Those people leading up to it and all the, a lot of the,

I mean, even J.D. Vance, I mean, even the vice presidential candidate at the time was talking about the Epstein files. It's important to get these things out. This is going to be something we do. Trump on Lex Friedman's podcast said that he'd be open to it. You know, he said the same thing, similar thing on Rogan's podcast.

when he was interviewed there. So these is a group of people who knew that if they could get this group of conspiracy theorists that love this conspiracy so much on their side as a voting block, it's a big deal.

And they knew that they could reach them through these audiences, right? Through curated audiences like Cash Patel's audience, curated audiences like Dan Bongino's audience. Curated audiences like Lex Friedman and Joe Rogan's audience, if they could get those messages out to this conspiracy, Manosphere, Epstein-obsessed group of people, they would have a good reason for people to go to the polls and pull a blever for Donald Trump. Right. And so they used it

to the best of their ability to try to hype it up. This is a thing they're going to do. And then once they got in, they got called on it, right? They got called on it. This article starts by talking about the situation in the room. Donald Trump's not in the room, right? And this is also really telling, right? Donald Trump is the focus of what they're trying to protect. There's a group of people in the White House trying to protect him. And I'm not saying that that's unique to a Donald Trump White House. Almost certainly, every single White House has a small group of trusted officials who are spending their time reputation laundering the person who's in office. They're doing everything they can to make sure that the person who's in office isn't under some sort of scandal. And if there is,

they're going to try to quash it as much as possible. So I'm not saying that's unique to Donald Trump. Donald Trump isn't in the room, though. I wonder how unique that portion is. I wonder how unique it is to not have the person who is part of this be in the room. And I think it's because he's unworkable. You cannot work with this man because what he's doing is constantly just making bad decisions. So they have to kind of shoe him out of the kitchen so that they can finish the dish, right? Get out of here. You keep on adding too much salt. Get the fuck out of here.

So they keep chewing him out because they don't want him in the same room with them because he's not a smart person. He's not a, he's an id. He will just say things. So they have to keep him out of the room. and they're in code red in the beginning of this article because the Wall Street Journal is going to publish the letter that is in the birthday book, and this was big, big news last year.

They were going to publish this letter. And this is bringing down the walls around them. Well, and like, I want to add something. So the room that they're in is the situation room. That's an important point. And it's an important point because that is, the that is the oh shit room that people go into where like nobody can even bring their cell phone, right? That's the room they go into to watch like body cam footage of fucking seal team six

taking out Osama bin Laden, right? Like that is the room that like you gather into when there is a fucking emergency. And imagine, imagine what that says when the emergency is, hey, we're going to find out potentially what the connection is between the president and a pedophile. Wow. Let's all gather together in the situation room. If somebody said, like, we're going to figure out what they, like, how deep the connection is between this pedophile and Tom Curry. You can go to any room.

You could have that conversation at the fucking McDonald's. It doesn't matter. You have plenty of time. There's literally no connection. So, like, you're already starting at a place where we're assuming. there's something here and we can't let anyone over hear it. So like that automatically tells you there's not nothing here. Right.

If there's nothing here, you don't have to have a secret conversation about the thing that didn't happen. Yeah. You don't have to do that. You only have to have super secret conversations about things that like potentially did happen or we're not sure if they happen. Like that should tell you kind of everything you need to know about at the very least the fucking moral character.

Yeah. Where the people who most care about you and most want you to succeed and most think, and these are guys that are most on your side and they're like, hey, man, there's a pedophile over here and you're like, shit, let's not talk about that where anyone can hear us. What the shit is that? Yeah. I just found just the context of the space of the conversation to be so framing and so, like, important.

I just needed to bring that up. I also like really want to point out that what happened is these, this is a classic case of conspiracy dogs catching the car. Yeah, for sure. Right. So they believed in the run up to the election that they could say any kind, any crazy shit they wanted. Didn't matter what the crazy shit was. They could say any crazy shit they wanted. And like they were never actually going to have to contend with that crazy shit.

because the speed and fickleness of the news cycle essentially meant that whatever you said on Tuesday at 3 o'clock, by Wednesday at 9 a.m. didn't exist anymore. It was functionally irrelevant. So you don't have to say true things. You can see you can repeat over and over a bunch of bullshit lies. And then when you're tired of them and those lies no longer functioned for you and for your narrative and for your side, then you simply stop talking about them and talk about the next thing. And it has worked. It's a playbook. And they ran the shit out of that play. What they didn't realize was like, one, it's not a conspiracy theory if there's truth to it. And like, they kept talking about this secret cabal and these people who are super, you know, tied up with Epstein and, you know, this pedophile network at the highest levels of government. And like, they, so they created all that, right? They stoked that fire. They fucking laid that kindling. They fucking did all that work. They poured gas everywhere they could poor gas. And then they figured, well, we'll just walk away from it when we're tired of it, when it has no more value. The problem is that, like, the Epstein stuff has real connection

directly back to their guy, not imaginary connection, not supposed connection, but actual one-to-one connection back to this guy. So there's something there, there. And that's different than conspiracies where it's all just fucking made up. When it's all made up, you can walk away at any time. there's never going to be a set of facts which emerge on something that's made up from whole cloth that are going to embarrass you because truth never mattered in the first place. This is only a problem when the facts themselves don't support your position. And so they found themselves in this incredible place where they never probably imagined that they would find themselves where the conspiracies that they were peddling

suddenly started to not only be partially true or to have some truth adjacency, but then we're directly connected to the guy that was peddling the conspiracies and profiting off of those conspiracies. And now they're stuck. Now they don't know what the fuck to do because they underestimated that like some people actually really care about this stuff, whatever it is, whether it's Jewish space lasers or, you know, pedophile cabals or whatever, there are people that care. And you made them care and you riled them up and you poured that gas and you told them they

were right and you did all that work. And now they care. And you can't just say, well, now I don't want you to care because it's inconvenient for me. Yeah. That doesn't know how it works. Yeah. And what I talked about during the Iran segment was how he surrounds himself with a group of people who are pretty much mostly incompetent. But they happen to be amazing sycophants.

And what he did here was he did the same thing. So he doesn't have a really good PR person in the room. He doesn't have anybody who's going to be able to handle this for him. They're solutions. Some of these solutions, I just want to read aloud, right? I just want to read what they had. Vance floated two colleagues, an extraordinary PR gambit, that the White House enlist Tucker Carlson to interview Epstein's long-time girlfriend

and co-conspirator Jelaine Maxwell in prison. It might help the president if Maxwell was willing to state that Trump had never had any part or wrongdoing with Epstein. How did that work out for them? Do you remember this? I remember that she did say this. I remember this so well. Yeah, she did say this.

She said this. She wound up saying this. She wound up saying this in many hours that she was interviewed. And what happened afterwards? She got transferred to a different prison, right? She got an easier deal than she had before, right? So what they were trying to show you was that they had sort of, look, guys, there's nothing behind the curtain.

And then they go ahead and shift some pieces around and move things around. Jady Vance isn't good at this. What could possibly, what good could possibly come from something like this? You're basically saying, let's open this up and see if it stinks afterwards. Yeah. Like, that's not a really good plan. That's a terrible plan. Jady Vance is not a very smart person if he said that aloud and thought that was a good idea.

If he thought this is going to be the thing that clears somebody. That's going to be the guy who's going to be standing probably with a bunch of other Republicans on a stage in a year, and he's going to be arguing his case to be the next president in the United States. And that was a solution that he came up with. Yeah, imagine, imagine, like, framing this, like, honestly, right? Imagine saying, like, hey, guys, we should get a different pedophile and sexual abuser and get her to help longer our narrative about how our guy isn't a pedophile and sexual

abuser. Right. Right. Like, like, there's no, no person is, like, you know, who's crazy. credible, Jelaine Maxwell. Right? Like, of course she's not.

Like, what world are you living in where your credibility? You are like, hey, we're in such a bad spot, guys, that I think will actually gain credibility by riding the credibility coattails of a convicted pedophile and sex abuser. What the fuck? What? That's like, that's like Johnson and Johnson being like, hey, P. Diddy, would you be our fucking baby oil spokesperson?

person. We'll give you a fucking baby oil contracts to Diddy. There's just commercials. Him slip sliding on a slip and slide on a bunch of a baby oil. Oh, God. What an insane PR move. It's the, I mean, like, genuinely, like, could you imagine sitting in that room and not bursting out laughing when somebody says something like that as if that is the solution

to the thing? They come up with other options. their other options are to try to unseal grand jury testimonies because they knew that there wasn't anything in there that the public already hadn't seen and it was also hard to do. So if the judge said no, who cares? If the judge says yes, there's nothing in there. So it's like, cool, why don't we do that and make it like so like it's a big deal? And then if we get cock blocked, we'll just say, hey, we were cockblocked.

We tried. We dare our best. Our due diligence. So it's actually kind of a smart thing to do. right? That was a smart move. Yeah. Release something that is, that is trash.

Either way, if they release it or don't, you're in the clear. You're essentially in the clear. And then the other one was to send the Justice Department to question Maxwell, which is what they did. So they flopped and didn't do the Tucker thing. And actually, to be honest, that's way better. Because could you imagine the Tucker thing? Oh, my God. If it was Tucker instead of just the Justice Department lawyers going down and having to

talk to her. It would have been so much worse than what it actually happened. Like, J.D. Vance was like, hey, can we stack landmines on top of each other and stuff on them? Like, how stupid are you to think that that was the solution? They even came up with a shoddy solution for these two things. One of them, not a bad idea. The other one, terrible solution, and they did them both, right? Then they wind up saying, okay, you know what we're going to do? we're going to get all of the people who are MAGA influencers. And we're going to line all those people up. And we're going to have a dog and pony show here at the White House.

We're going to have a big fuck-all thing where we invite them to the White House and we talk to them about the Epstein files. And we give them these big binders, these binders that everybody sees and everybody thinks, oh my gosh, this is going to be amazing. So in the room is MAGA influencers, Mike Sernovich, I don't know if I'm saying that correctly, and I don't care. It doesn't matter, right.

Liz Wheeler, Colin Rugg, and D.C. Drano. What the shit. And they give them these books that Pam Bondi and her office have go ahead, went and created, right? So they, they, the Trump comes in and he hands them these dumbass Cyrus coins or whatever. Trump's Cyrus coins. And he's like, here's some coins. for you kids. Hey, I don't spend it all in one place.

And then he pitches their cheeks and he leaves the room. And then they get handed these binders, binders, right? And I want to read this because it's too good. Then the Attorney General and her team walked into the Roosevelt room carrying boxes. Bondi and Brad brought binders and handouts for the influencers. Her aides would later tell colleagues that the FBI had prepared them with the assurance that they contained revelatory details about the Epstein files. Someone in her staff said, watch this. This is cool.

This is going to be epic. But as Bondi's staff started distributing the binders, blood pressures of the other officials in the room skyrocketed. They had no idea what was in the handouts. The Attorney General was distributing something she was calling the abstain files that had not been vetted by anyone in the White House. One official opening the binder began flipping through papers to see Trump's name and it was mentioned, if it was mentioned anywhere,

a few pages in right in the middle of the page, there it was. One of Trump's aides hastily steered the influencers out of the White House, telling them that the content of the binders was embargoed until after the president's news conference with Kirstarmer. But the communications office would be more than happy to talk about the files afterwards. As the influencers left, they snapped selfies in front of the White House, holding their binders, quickly posting pictures to them on social. social media.

Here's the last paragraph. Like some others in the White House, Bondi had either grossly underestimated or simply been blind to the voracious appetite of the MAGA base for the information about Epstein. Her binders contained information about him and his activities, flight logs,

contact list, summaries of items taken from his residences after 2018 arrest and other material, but nearly all of it had been previously released. Bondi had somehow simultaneously, oversold the tribulized Epstein files, and now the influencers were made to feel like dupes. So they bring these influencers in to be like, look at what we're going to do for you, and then they give them essentially nothing, but they didn't even bother to scrub Trump's name

out of it. Like, I mean, like, genuinely, how incompetent could these people be? If you gave them a zipper, could they operate it? Maximum incompetence, Cecil. because Bondi is absolutely just fucking going rogue here. She is absolutely, she's like, she has gone completely road. Nobody knows what she's. There's a bunch of people in the situation room.

She's not one of them from that initial meeting. She just does this thing. And this thing she does is like not part of their broader strategy conversation. Nobody knows what's in it. Way to go. It backfires because like everybody who looked at it. So, like, also, we just have to, everybody who looks at it says, like, this is all previously released information. For the most part, this is nothing.

Like, this is just a rehash in a new binder. Like, you, you put this in a fucking Lisa Frank trapper keeper that did not actually help give us new information here. This is fucking nothing. Heather Locklear, thank you very much. Like, it's just, it's got some, like, cartoon dolphins jumping in a sunrise on the front of it. Remember those old dolphins? Yes. They were, like, futuristic.

And they had like a, yeah. Lisa Frank was the designer of all of them. I was talking about, I was like, I had a girl on mine. Oh yeah, Leah. Well, Heather Lockleyer, kind of thing. That's a way better binder. But like, so that, and all of that was just nothing.

Like, all of that was just nothing. And it wasn't part of the larger strategy. And Cecil, they didn't, it's not like they gave this to serious journalists. They invited a bunch of fucking influencers who were taking selfies with it. They also brought. They also, just really quickly, they also invited the most group of petty people they possibly could. Yes. And if they feel aggrieved, that's a real problem.

Yeah, yeah, right. When you can't satisfy people whose only interest in this is non-journalistic but is self-promotional, right? Because that's what influencers are. Sure, yeah. Let's be super clear. These aren't journalists who are doing serious work in a trained way, right? because they care about being the fourth estate and the intense responsibility that that creates

and all that. It's not any of that. They're fucking taking selfies with this stuff. So what that also tells you is they also felt very strongly like, look, we don't really have to take this seriously. And that's why we invited a bunch of non-serious people to be here. Because we have no respect for you.

We have no fucking respect for you. What happened afterwards was a huge backlash, right? So they, of course, think that they can quell this by having someone with a binder walk around with material that was already released, right? And it wasn't vetted either.

It turned out to be a nothing burger, but it's so funny because it shows you the relationship that these people have, which isn't one. They just don't have one. They're not a cohesive unit. They're all trying to be the largest catfish on Trump's ass. So like they don't have a cohesive plan

to do anything because they're all trying to body each other out so they can get on the asshole and suck up stuff like fucking human centipede. So all these people are fighting amongst themselves in a lot of ways, right? They're all trying to curry favor from Trump more than the other guy. So of course they're not going to work together. Then they have to do something. So they release this shit. People are pissed.

They have to do something. So here's another piece. With full transparency, a non-starter, a small group of White House and Justice Department officials decided to draft a memo that would explain why the department was not releasing any further information about Epstein. But even the process of composing the memo was fraught, in part because no one wanted their name on it. Nobody wanted their name on it.

What a fucking, what does that tell you, man? Everything. I mean, like, these guys can't even write a memo together and decide someone's going to put their name on it. None of the, every one of these people is pushing the other guy on the hand grenade. Yep. Dude, that is, that's another important piece of framing, right? Nobody wants to say, I'll stake my career.

And again, remember how basic the stakes are, right? At the end of the day, the central question is, is the actual president of the United States connected in an unseemly way to a pedophile? Yeah. That is, if we aren't like certain of the absurdity of that question and the answer being a hard no, if ever there's like a point where like, I don't know, man. I'm not going to write my name on the evidence locker.

What the fuck, man? Like, I feel like, if you asked me, like, hey, everybody you know in your life, would you be willing to say that dude's not a pedophile and write your name on it? I'd be like, yeah. Because if I have any inkling that somebody's a fucking pedophile, I don't work for them. Or if they ever were, I don't work for them. I don't talk to them. We're not involved together.

I'm not supporting them for a thing. And here you've got like, I don't know, guys. The facts don't look good. Who wants to write their name on this? And everybody's like, not it. Not it. We know we've been lying about shit for a long time. And now this shit has come home to roost.

And we're going to have to take some accountability and responsibility for misleading the public for a really long time. Pam Bondi said, like, the fucking Epstein files are on my desk. When she gave out the fucking trapper keeper, she's like, this is just the first of many more documents, which I will be releasing. All of that was just lying. It was just lying. It was just straight up, like, making things up.

And then they release a tape that has pieces of it missing. And they, they essentially, like, they couldn't have bungled this harder, right? They couldn't have bungled it harder. One really snarky line I want to read from this article because I fucking love it. The memo that's getting passed back and forth, Cash Patel weighs in. He says, thanks for the edits. I still believe this is the correct vehicle forward. Patel wrote with the occasional typo.

I want to talk about Dan Bonino. Oh, I do too. Oh, God. Oh, I want to talk about Dan Bonino. Dan Bonino, the whole time that all this is happening, right, is like, you guys are a bunch of fucking idiots. What are you doing? Yeah. And then they do stuff.

And then they're like, well, we're all in it now. And Dan Bonino's like, I'm not fucking in this. I told you this was a bad idea to start with. This was a terrible idea. You're all fucking idiots. I'm not supporting this. You fuck this. thing up from the start, Bongino yelled.

The way you've been talking about this, the dumb fucking charade with the Epstein files, they're on my desk nonsense, all the promises to all the folks out there. And then he fucking left and was going to resign. It had to be talked down. Yep. And like that yelling that he did was to the chief of staff. Right? Like who is essentially a proxy for the president in that moment.

And the chief of staff was like, hey, you're either with us or against us. And he was like, well, fuck it. I'm against you, man. And he left. I don't have a lot of respect for this guy. I don't have a lot of respect for this guy. But I will say the way they depict him in this article, I'm like, he seems like the only relatively sane one. He seems like the only person who seems relatively sane. Because basically, he's like, he's like, I'm not in on this. And she said, from this point forward, we're all in. We're all going to agree to move forward. Are you in or not? And he's like, no, this is not my plan. I'm not part of it going forward.

Forget it. I'm out of here. He stormed out of the situation room and onto the West Executive Avenue where he climbed into the back Patel's armored SUV driven to directed the driver to take him to FBI

headquarters. And so eventually he does sort of come down. But he was so mad. And here's why he's mad, everybody. I told you earlier, this administration, the top levels of this administration as podcasters.

Privately, he seethed. In conversations with confidence, he lamented what his job had cost him. Millions of dollars in podcast revenue, family time, his audience. He's getting torn apart over a strategy

he opposed from the start. I just want to say, millions of dollars in podcast revenue tells you everything you need to know about the right-wing podcast machine. There's a reason. why all these guys are willing to lie for all these people,

and it's because there is so much money in right-wing podcasting. I could have retired years ago if I was a liar. If I was a fucking liar, I could have been on the other side and been like, hey, man, Donald Trump, whatever. And those people, they make more money than they can fucking count. They make so much goddamn money. This guy is saying it costs him millions of dollars in podcast revenue, I do not doubt it.

I do not doubt it a single bit. They're giving, you know, Joe Rogan hundreds of millions of dollars of deals at Spotify. So you're talking about millions and millions and millions of dollars that are being poured into this. And it's a huge market for these right wing podcasts. The left wing, man,

we're just struggling to get by over here. Yeah, well, I mean, kind of this thing, like what we need is a Russian disinformation state to fucking hit our, hit up our fucking Patreon. Yeah, right? We gotta fucking get that Dave Rubin money.

Exactly. Like Dave Rubin, Tim Poole, these people are making $400,000 an episode. You know that they were doing the same thing with Bongino. You know that guy's getting paid different ways.

The reason why, like I think a lot of these fucking people are making the shit ton of views on YouTube is almost certainly because they're targeted by things to artificially boost those views to make it seem like these things have more validity.

I cannot see it in my, when you listen to some of these podcasts and I've been subjected to some of these terrible Zoom calls that these people have. They just literally sit in their kitchen and the microphone is like, maybe they left the laptop in the fridge

and they're talking at the kitchen table. It sounds terrible. And they're just sitting there and they have nothing to say and they get millions of views in these videos. And I'm like, how is that possible? How is it possible

that someone's, so untalented with such bad equality, with nothing to say, winds up getting this many views. And is it because they have a very similar viewpoint to other people who want to see those views promoted other places? I can't prove it. But I will say, I can't see anybody watching that for pleasure. Yeah. No, I agree with.

Like, look, they're not getting this kind of money because of the quality, right? That's your point. Like, the quality, the analysis. Yeah, it's bad. It's bad. So they're not, they are not, they're not wildly popular because they have a unique and interesting take that's well informed and interesting. That's not the case. They have a low quality show. They just are an echo chamber of the same bullshit. They're not actually going through and doing any deep research. What they are doing is plugging themselves in to a self-referential or a boris of disinformation and money and idea laundering and, you know, narrative exploitation and all of that, which is very well funded. All of that is extremely well funded. There's also a lot of people that are in that space that come into it with money sort of pre-assigned into that space, right? Tucker Carlson walked into it with an audience plus riches, you know, like Steve Bannon, like he is a big fucking deal ahead of time. Like he's been around

the block for a long time. These guys also do a really good job of promoting into each other's nonsense, right? So there's a cohesiveness that I will say is beginning to break down. And part of what has broken it down is that at some point, the same thing that I said at the beginning, at some point when you've built your house of cards on a bunch of lies and then facts actually come out about those specific claims and you've told people to care about them. you're fucked, right?

So, like, Iran is a great example. I'm, you know, we're going to do this isolationist shit, you know, America first, super isolationist. We're not, and then immediately we're going to go, you know, we're going to go to war with Iran. Your gas is going to be five bucks a gallon. Oh, fuck. I can't believe your other thing you were saying. You know, we're going to, we're going to, there's a secret cabal of, you know, Democrats eating baby faces underneath the White House or whatever.

Like, okay, that's not true. But it turns out that there actually are connections all over the place with some very powerful people with this pedophile. Oh, shit. Well, that doesn't reflect well on us. How do we bury it? Now we have to backtrack on it. And then you're stuck, right? Because you're stuck in a vicious cycle.

These guys have been lying and the point of the lie for a lot of these influencers. And that's all that they are. Sometimes those influencers become like, you know, FBI directors. But like the point of it was always just a grift. Yeah. The message was never important. The truth of the message was never important because this was never anything approaching like journalism or analysis or honesty.

Those things were always not even tangential. Those things were casualties of this cycle. Yeah. Right? Those things die in this news cycle. One of the quotes from Bongino, which I think is amazing, he talks about all the money he left and all this stuff. I raided, I gave up millions of dollars.

It's all disappeared because people think, we screwed up something with Epstein. And then he paused and he said, this is going to be President Trump's Iran Contra. And I was like, maybe Iran will be President Trump's Iran contra. Maybe we could just take a pen and cross off Contra and be like, this will be President Trump. Iran.

It's almost adorable that they think there's only going to be one. Yeah. I know, right? I want to bring up, you know, before we close out, because I think it's important. I want to bring up the Joe Rogan connection because J.D. Vance knows that this is political poison. He knows that this group of people who they have cultivated. And like you have said, they basically said, you know, man, we're going to, we're going to, I can't believe this fire is so hot after they touched it. Right. They played with it so long. And now they're like, man, this fire is super hot.

But they didn't realize the dragon that they had woken up. They didn't realize what they did. And so then they do. And now they're like staring down the barrel of all of these voters who decided that they would vote for Trump because they wanted to see some sort of transparency and a few of his other, I hate other people that you hate similar policies. So they decided let's vote for him. He seems like he's not fulfilling this major problem.

promise, and this is one that they're holding him to, right? They don't hold them to anything else, but they're holding him to this one. Right. And so Vance realizes this is political poison. He decides, I got to call up Rogan. Let's see if Rogan will have Todd Blanch on, the president's former lawyer, to talk about the Epstein files. Rogan isn't interested. He's like, I'm not going to do it. But I'll have you on if you want to come on, Vance and talk. And Vance was going to go on, and he was going to go talk to the, you know, the Manosphere, all the Manosphere audience there to talk about that and also talk about something else. So he's going to talk about the Epstein files and something else.

That never materialized, by the way. That never happened. Who came on during all of this was RFK and they talked about something completely different. So the one person from the administration that did make it on was RFK. But Jady Vance never made it on a time. He never, he's obviously on a speed dial with Rogan because he's having conversations with him. They're having conversations with each other. But there was not a resolution.

to this, and Rogan himself, what happened on his shows, and I can tell people if you're interested, we covered this on the No Rogan Experience. We did two full episodes on the Epstein Files. And what we did was we covered Joe Rogan from the start of when he heard of them being released, which was like January 31st show, all the way through a couple of weeks' worth of these episodes being released and him talking about it. And what happened was is initially his thoughts were, this was a honeypot operation. What's happening is that Epstein's a spy, and he's getting blackmail material on all these people

that he's blackmailing by procuring young girls and women for them, and then he's going to use that against them in the future. That's what he was. So this ignores, of course, all the real victims of Epstein and just talks about the salaciousness of what he can make a conspiracy out of. Then, as time goes on, he interviews crazier and crazier people, And one of the people was like, it was demonic, and he basically regurgitates to Joe all the Pizza Gate stuff back up.

But instead, now it's Epstein is involved in it, right? So he says all the same stuff that came up with Pizza Gate, but now it's Epstein, and Joe takes it and runs with it. And by the end of the second week, he's talking about how demonic Epstein was, how he was involved in ritual sacrifice, and how he ordered sulfuric acid to melt bodies that he defiled instead of, you know, it being for his,

reverse osmosis system on his island, no, there's no reason you would need that much even though they checked and that, he got fact checked on the air and he was wrong. But there's, like, Joe is coming up with other conspiracies to do. So, and every single time we found Trump's name mentioned,

Joe would change the subject in a sentence or two. Whenever Trump's name came up, Joe would change it. But whenever Bill Clinton's name came up, he had a really great Bill Clinton impersonation that he knew. Oh, look, I've been on the jet 19 times. 26 times I was on the jet.

So he had a routine already set up when it was going to be Bill Clinton. But as soon as Trump was mentioned, he changed his name off of that subject real, real fucking fast. And I don't know, after seeing the behind the scenes, I wonder how much of that was this call with Vance that made him realize they're listening

to everything he does and he doesn't want to have to deal with that shit. Yeah, I think that's a couple of things I want to just yes and to that. It's important, I think, to say out loud that anybody willing to launder these lies is as responsible for the lies as the people telling them. Absolutely. 100%. There's no difference in culpability. If you are willing to create a space to launder somebody's bullshit, you are absolutely a part of the conspiracy to create the bullshit, right? Because what you've said is, awesome. I've got a great medium to allow us to broad.

your misinformation. Let me help you plug into that medium. Let me use my machine to enhance the volume of your lies. So Joe is not indirectly responsible. I want to be really clear about that. Joe is perfectly responsible.

He is as responsible in this situation as anybody else if he volunteers to launder this stuff. Now, like you said, they didn't actually do it. Like Vance did not actually come on and launder it through here. but he was fucking willing to.

Yeah. He was willing to have him on, right? He was willing to say, yeah, you can use my fucking car to drive the dead body around. Right? Not wrong. That makes him perfectly responsible. And in fact, in some ways, it kind of makes him like potentially even more responsible. Because the reason you would go to a Joe is because you recognize that his influence helps to not only launder,

but to broadcast and enhance your image. Without him, you actually don't have as many options. You need someone like Joe. So Joe knows that and is leveraging that for his own personal gain. Whether that personal gain is financial or ideological doesn't actually matter. It makes no difference, right? It's the same thing. So I think that's a really, like it's important to say like Joe Rogan, we already are past

that he is a just asking questions guy. But now you have to say he is part of the. establishment. He's not helping the establishment. He's part of it because he's the guy they think of and turn to when they want to help launder their misinformation and clean the system up. That's fucked up. That's incredibly fucked up. And like, your point about like Joe Rogan constantly moving away from Trump, I think like he has to. Right? Because he's not a just asking question. He would be able to move. He would be able to stay on Trump. If he would be able to stay on Trump if he was really truly agnostic, right?

But he's never really been agnostic. And you guys, I'm no Rogan, have really proved that. You've shown it and you've demonstrated it. I think a lot of people still think that he's a kind of agnostic middle space. He's an every man sort of just asking questions. But that's a lie. That's a veneer. And you know that because, like you said, he can't stay on the topic of Trump.

He'll stay on the topic of other people. He has to do that because his reputation is now, at least in part, tied to his endorsements and his implicit like laundering of those messages. So he's actually stuck there. I also think he would get a bunch of negative messages from the people who have adopted his show, right? Yeah. So all the people who have died, he says he never reads the comments, but I think he does. And I think the comments that he reads very specifically are from right wing Twitter.

And if he catches shit because he's talking shit about Trump, he doesn't like it. So every time his name comes up, he almost always tries to avoid it. In some cases, he can't, right? There's no way to talk about Iran right now and not talk about Trump. It's impossible, right? You can't do that. But you can do it with the Epstein files, right? You can when the Epstein files come up and he does it every time he gets an opportunity.

So it shows you that Joe Rogan is a bad actor in this, just like everybody else is, right? And maybe it's not for, you know, it's probably not for simple reasons. It's not just because he's being paid or it's just because it's this. It's just because of that. I think there's a lot of complex reasons why he's part of this group. but I think like at a certain point you hitched your wagons and you're stuck and I think he's stuck.

I think he's stuck with having to try to do this because now he's he's not just reputation laundering for them. He's reputation laundering for himself now because he's the one who endorsed it. That's going to wrap it up for our show this week. We're going to have a patron show on Thursday that's releasing, but we're going to have a regular full show on Monday and we're going to leave you like we always do

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