DeProgram with John Kiriakou and Ted Rall - Brown and MIT Shootings Linked | DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou

Episode Date: December 19, 2025

Political cartoonist Ted Rall and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST. Today we discuss: • Trump reacted to the news that the alleged shooter at Brown and MIT by suspending the Green Card Lottery the suspect used to enter the U.S. Meanwhile, Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan found guilty of felony obstruction. • Lessons Unlearned: DNC Chairman Ken Martin quashes its 2024 election autopsy. • Trump reclassifies cannabis as a less dangerous Schedule III drug.• More than half of $18 billion in taxpayer funds spent on 14 Medicaid programs in Minnesota were probably stolen since 2018.

Good morning, if you're in morning place. It is Friday, December 19, 2025. This is the program with Ted Rawl and John Kariaku. Thank you for liking, following, and sharing the show. A little bit of news for the YouTube side of the viewing audience. We've been approved for membership purchases. will it be explaining a little bit about that. But basically what it means is that there will be a YouTube equivalent of the Rumble premiums.

So we'll be able to, if you, for the people who are allergic to Rumble, and as Robbie has explained, you should come over to Rumble because it's better for John and I, and therefore better for the show. But if you don't want to do that, you know, it's a free country, sort of. So you can, you know, you can do it over on YouTube. It'll be $6.99 and you'll get premium stuff. We'll explain all the details about that. Let's see, Robbie West is going to be back on the board in about half an hour.

He's always got a thing. He's got an early morning obligation on Friday morning, but then he'll be here at about 9.30 Eastern time. So anything that goes wrong between now and the next 30 minutes is my fault. And that could well happen. Okay, so nice to see you, John. Good to see you, Ted. So let's talk about, here's the basic. news we have for today. And as always, please feel free to chime in with your questions,

comments, and so on in both the live chats on YouTube, as well as on Rumble, as always. So there's been some reaction to the news that basically the ever-growing problem with Portuguese-on-Portuguese violence in the United States has led to policy changes. So basically, this Portuguese suspect who allegedly shot up a classroom at Brown and then murdered a professor, a nuclear physicist at MIT, and then himself basically had been harboring a grudge for all these years. Anyway, that's all the connection. We'll break that down. And in response to that, President Trump has suspended the green card lottery that has been in effect for many, many years. Many, many years. We'll talk about what the green card lottery is, whether it's coming

back, with pros and cons, all that. I am personally kind of just amazed, but not surprised that the DNC had just decided to quash its 2024 election autopsy, because after all, what is there to be learned from an after-action report? Right, exactly. And may I add, they? are they are purposefully or purposely i guess is the appropriate word in this case they are purposely squelching this because they don't want the public to know that they are split on these social issues like like trans rights and and federal money for trans medical care and all this stuff all this stuff that lost them the last election exactly They don't, they're trying to pretend that it's not controversial.

Right. Yeah. And I think there's, and there's, I think there's other aspects to it as well, which we'll get into. And President Trump has reclassified cannabis as a less dangerous drug. I think that's important. And the story out of Minnesota, which at first, John, I didn't really care about, Medicaid fraud, the scale of it is too big to ignore. I mean, basically over half of the 18. billion dollars spent on Medicaid in the state of Minnesota over the last seven years.

Apparently has gone, poof, has been stolen. And it's being enjoyed in Mogadishu as we speak. And, you know, I'll tell you one of the things that bothers me the most about this is it's not being covered on CNN and MSNBC. Yeah, and I hate to say this. I mean, look, my first instinct as someone who loves social programs and think Medicaid and Medicare are very important programs was to say, oh, God, I hate that this happened.

But my second thing is, like, we've got to make sure this doesn't happen again. It's not about covering it up or you can't cover it up. I mean, that's the other thing, too. There's no point covering it up. But also, you want to improve the system. Anyway, John, do you like to, let's see, I'm going to look at the feeds and see if there's anything we need to talk about any questions we want to get to before we get into stuff.

Okay, so how long is that drive for? from Brown University, which is in Providence, Rhode Island to Boston. It's not far, it's like about two hours, I'd say. What would you say? Not two hours. Yeah, that's right. Petlantis 48 saw a really interesting video

that said that this Trump ballroom construction is a cover for an expansion of the PEOC bunker. Yeah, I heard that. No, that's not on the country. The bunker's not over there. The bunker's on the other side. What's over there is the entrance to the tunnel to the Capitol that was last used by Nixon. Was the bunker, was that Dick Cheney's secret undisclosed location?

I don't think so. I thought that he went out to Mount Weather. Ah, yeah. All right. John, another question for you. From James Gimales. Yes. One of your take on Senator Marino's bill to remove dual citizenship for all U.S. citizens. Well, I have thoughts about that, too, since I'm a dual citizen also.

I must have gotten 20 texts from other Greeks. They're going to have to take this from my cold dead hands. Does it pass or is a DOA? That's right. No, not going to happen. I mean, it could happen, but screw them. What would you do? I mean, so you have Greek citizen.

You have your Greek passport. I have my French passport. Would we just dip and go to France and Greece or whatever anywhere in Europe and just leave? Or would we, I mean, if you had to choose one, what would you do? I don't even know. I mean, I would be torn. On the one hand, I'd be, I mean, I don't, I'm an American. I'm born in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Right. You know, I don't want to leave the United States. But on the other hand, if the United States is doing shit like this, I don't know if I want to be here. Exactly. Exactly. I don't know. I mean, my kids are here. so I'm stuck, but it would make me very, very angry.

Yeah, I mean, you know, John, you know what my take on this is? This is one of those rare times when APEC is on our side because all of the joint American Israeli citizens would be up in arms over it. Oh, my God. Oh, my God, yes. They would not let it happen. So, all right, not one of those things that, you know, you see very often. all right so um okay so uh okay so uh in two pain says it's 45 minutes from providence to boston

no that's it is that true um that's i guess you'd have maybe if you drive fast and there's no traffic um i don't know seems like it's a couple hours to me because it's like four and a half hours from new york to boston let's see so um let's see okay this is a good question Nicholas Franco's for you, John. What language would you recommend to learn? Arabic. That's an easy one. That's an easy one.

Arabic is spoken in 19 countries as a first language. And it would open up doors for you. You can't even comprehend. It's the smartest thing I ever did. And let me add. What Chinese, too, I mean, that's sort of the future of business. But for me, I have zero interest in East Asia, zero interest in East Asia. And so, yeah, Arabic for me.

And let me add, it is 57 minutes from Providence to Boston, 49 miles. Okay. All right, here we go. Another question for you from Ali. John, question about the CIA. Do people that cover questions as analysts necessarily have to speak the language of the country they cover? No. Or have studied it in higher education?

And most of them don't, which is a shame because, oh, my God, I remember sitting in a briefing. It's like two days before we're attacking Iraq. And I give the morning briefing to the director, all the deputy directors, the associate deputy directors. We're on this big conference room. And then, sorry, I had this oral surgery the other day, and I'm spitting out pieces of stitches. Oh, God. Anyway, good time. Yeah, it's just grand.

So I can only eat so many mashed potatoes. I haven't eaten anything because I'm tired of oatmeal and mashed potatoes. But anyway, so there are all these Iraq analysts, not a single one of whom speaks or single word of Arabic. And they're talking about ticrit. And I whisper to the kid next to me, it's Crete. Yeah. Not tick risk. Even I know that and I don't know any Arabic.

And then they'll say, Nineveh. They're in the area of Nineveh. It's like not Nineveh, you moron. It's Nineveh. They can't get any of the names right. It would just drive me crazy. And then there was this constant fight.

And I apologize for getting down in the weeds. But the people who are in charge of the geographic place names, they also don't speak the language. So they tried to force us to say, al-Basra, al-Mosol, okay, then that's fine, if that's what you're trying to force us to do, then why don't we say Al-Quaite or al-Bahrain or Addoha? Why is it okay for some to actually do the Arabic name and not okay for others to do the Arabic name, you morons?

There's no consistency. And so I just did whatever I wanted. Well, John, that's analogous to how in the news media, somehow if, a name or a word is in Spanish. Even if you're a non-Spanish speaker, you're supposed to say, Alexandre, Ocasio, Cortez. Yeah, exactly.

Oh, my God, there was a book that Charles Crowdhammer wrote about exactly that. The book was like, why do liberals always try to use a Spanish accent when saying the names of Spanish countries? Like, did you see the news from Nicaragua? Totally.

Honduras. And I catch myself doing it too. And I'm like, wait, wait, wait, I'm doing that. We don't say like, oh, Moskva or Paris, you know. Or Deutschland. Right. Roma. We don't say any of those things.

Oh, I hate when people do that. Oh, my God. It's really, it is a funny affectation for sure. Hair Mayden Incorporated says seems ridiculous not to be fluent in a language of a country that you're covering, particularly for nuance, exactly. True. Exactly right. Everybody should be trained in the language of the country that they're covering,

especially if you're going to spend the next 10 or 20 years working on that country. Yeah, not to mention if you have to read stuff that's in the source language, right? Yes. Rob Steiner, I mean, John, did you ever have any interaction with Catherine Gunn, our GCHQ whistleblower? GCHQ is, correct me if I'm wrong, the NSA of the UK, right? Yes. Back in 2004, she leaked a document that the U.S. was bugging world leaders to get them on their side to go to war in Iraq. I'm proud to say that Catherine's a friend of mine.

She was absolutely heroic in what she did. The pounties in the U.K. are far worse than what they are in the United States for revealing classified information. But she did something that I think was a great public service to all British. citizens. She told them where their leaders stood on Iraq and why they stood there. Hmm. Yeah. I'm very proud to call her a friend. Frasmataz says after the second played hate the World Trade Center and as the threat to Washington became clear, Cheney was evacuated from his office by Secret Service and taken to the presidential emergency operation center, a bunker beneath the White House.

Is that where it was? He was there for most of the day, coordinating the administration response alongside national security officials. Later in the day, he was moved to a series of undisclosed locations, which he later revealed included his official residence, his house in Wyoming, and Camp David.

So he was hopscatching around. By the way, John, we've never talked about this. I always felt it was a very bad look for the president and for the top leadership of the country to be missing from the airwaves all day on 9-11. Totally agree. The whole country was in a state of panic. Yeah. It was, I mean, it was just kind of like, come on, one of you guys, I mean, even if we just seen Bush on Air Force One, that would have been fine.

That's right. Just a word to calm the nation, you know? Yeah, we're on top of it. We're working on it most. Here's what we're doing. Yeah, it's going to be okay. Cooper doopers is try some Greek yogurt, John. I'm sure that's crossed your mind.

I am at the very bottom of my giant jug of Greek yogurt right now. With Greek honey from Crete on top of it. F.E. So, thanks for the two bucks. What was your favorite secret identity or cover story you enjoyed as a CIA operator? I was on a plane one time from Milan to Sophia Bulgaria. And I never talk to people on planes. I just want to mind my own business, read a book, watch a movie, whatever. I'm on this flight from Milan, and there's this big, fat Italian university professor next to me.

And he wouldn't shut his flap and gums, the whole flak. And he kept asking me questions. And I'm giving him one word answers. I'm kind of rude. Like I keep going back to my book. And finally, he says, well, what do you do for? a living. Oh, God.

And I'm undercover, right? I'm in with an alias passport on this trip. And I said to him, look, I smuggle women and cigarettes from Eastern Europe. Are you happy now? And he goes, well, like this. I don't think I approve. I said, I didn't ask for your fucking approval. Now, shut your mouth.

And he just kind of, he sat there like this the rest of the time. that was the most fun I had with cover whenever I had you know people buzzing my door in New York City wanting to come up and talk about Jesus I was always like I'm sorry this house worship Satan that's great America so let's see

seems oh yeah so Ali says I'm not really sure but learning different dialects is like learning completely different languages. The vocabulary is so vast that the biggest issue I see with even formal language is different. I'm going to go that far,

but it is a big deal. Our first year in Arabic, we learned Fusha, which is high standard Arabic. It's the educated Arabic that everybody speaks. Like Jordanians? Yeah. Well, the Yemenis are the closest to Fusha.

The Saudis claim that they are, but they're not. And then my second year, I studied Khalidji, Gulf dialect Arabic, which is far more difficult.

It's, it's, it's got a lot of Farsi in it and just weird words that don't exist anywhere else. I asked this guy one time, my first day in Bahrain,

I said, Kif Haleck, how are you? It literally means what condition are you? Khamalik. And, What is your condition?

And he says to me, I forget what he said. Oh, Kulishizain. Kulishizane. And I recognize that as an Iraqi thing. Everything's cool. And then two days later, he says to me, Shlonek, which is kind of a contraction for Shulunek.

What color are you? And I looked at him and I said, I don't understand. He says, shlonek. And I said, I don't know the response to that. And he says, Ina fog a nachal. I said, I'm sitting on top of the palm tree. And he said, yeah, that's what we say here in Bahrain.

I said, I ask you what color you are and you say I'm sitting on top of the palm tree. He said, yeah, that's, how are you? I'm great. Like I'm on top of the world? Yeah, top of the world. Yeah. I was like, okay, talk the palm tree. Learned something new every day.

No, the palm tree would be a, it seems like an uncomfortable place to sit. There's, those leaves be spiky, but what do I know? So, Robert Schoyer is asking if we already covered the Brown MIT connection. Also, this Trump fusion deal is interesting as well. Thanks for the kind words. I think we should get into that, right? I mean, so basically the allegation here is that a Portuguese, American dude, held a, basically shot up a brown classroom, then shot a nuclear professor,

a nuclear physics professor at MIT, then went to a storage unit and decided to blow his brains out there because, you know, the last thing I want to see in, when I, in this world, as I close my dying eyes, is a storage unit. You can see that again, man. So I guess, you know, we were speculating about the target here. here. Do we believe this story? I mean, I never like it. It always robs me the wrong way when the alleged shooter, it ends up dead, either shot by the cops or committed suicide. It always bugs me. Now, on the other hand, you could see why someone would do that. Your life is

effectively over. You know, you're going to be spending the rest of your life, you know, like Luigi Mangione in a bunch of hearings and talking to lawyers and going through appeals and warming the inside of a prison cell. So I could see why you might just say, fuck it, I'm out. But does it bug you at all? Yeah, it bugs me. On the one hand, it bugs me because there's not going to be justice.

People, the victims and the families of the victims are not going to feel a sense of justice. Because this guy's never going to go in trial. They're never going to know why he did this. So it's going to be difficult for them to receive closure. And on the other hand, you know, there's something satisfying about making the arrest, sending the guy to trial, having him judged by a jury of his peers. And then we get answers. The public gets answers to its questions.

Like, what would possess him to do something like this? This guy went to school from 1995 to 2000 with the MIT professor. So where are we talking about a 25 or 30 year? grudge? Did they have a grudge? Yeah. And then, no, I'm with you on that. I mean, I feel I keep, I always think, you know, that our sentencing is way too long and too draconian. I always wonder if we had a system that looked more like one of the

Scandinavian countries, if people would be less likely to want to do suicide by cop or just old-fashioned suicide. If they might want to be like, you know, I'll have to do my eight years or whatever. But, but. But, you know, life, there will be a life for me at the end of all this. And if they would be likelyer to stick around and then thus be available to answer questions about what led them to this. Yeah, I think you're exactly right. Space jockeys, John, zero interest in East Asia. That's a bummer for me.

I always thought it would be interesting to hear you talk about China and the CCP politics, Japan, too. Yeah, sorry about that. You know, I tried. I went, I went to, I've been to East Asia a number of times. And it's, it's lovely. It's beautiful and tropical in many cases and, and there's plenty to do and the economies are advanced and great museums and beaches and such. But I, ever since I was a kid, I've just loved the Middle East.

I love the history. I love the culture, I love the food, I love the music, even the poetry. I just, I love the Middle East. And then, I don't know, I go to East Asia and I hear tonal languages and they mean nothing to me. Arabic to me is, the Arabic language is like poetry to me because it's very, very mathematical in its construct. Right? So every word in Arabic derives from a three language. letter root, a three letter verb. And so on my first day of Arabic, the teacher wrote 33 letter

verbs on the board. And he said, if you can learn the 10 cases of these verbs, you're going to speak Arabic. And he was exactly right. It took months, four or five months for it to finally click in my head, that everything is like a mathematical problem where, The verb is the very first word in the sentence, and if you know the verb, you know what the rest of the sentence is. It just clicked one night. I remember dreaming in Arabic for the first time. I had been in training since August, and it was April, and I had a dream in Arabic, and it wasn't gibberish Arabic. It was actual Arabic that I understood myself when I was saying it in the dream.

And I woke up and I remember thinking, ah, I'm going to do this. This is going to work out. You know, I don't believe in mysticism. I don't know how you feel about it. But I always wonder about things like this, like your affinity for Arabic and Arabic culture. My parents never understood it. In a foreign, you know, in a previous life, you know, I mean, because I mean, like, it's like that way for me in Central Asia. You know, I mean, I love everything about it, the food, like you said.

And like something, you know, I don't have a lot of practice doing it, but man, horses love me and I love horses and I do great on them. And I don't really know why. And, you know, I take to the language really well. The food is like, you know, even the food that people hate like fermented mares milk. Ah, yes. I've heard about that. I love it. I can't get enough of it. Have you had tea with with yak butter? I have, yeah. Is that any good? I like it. Most people hate it. Most people are like, I would like to try it. Yeah. To me, it's like, well, part of the secret is these are meant to be, these are foods that are meant to be consumed at high altitude. And it makes a difference.

Interesting. So if you're like in the mountains of Tajikistan, high in the Pamirs, it just seems to like take the edge off the effect of altitude. What do you make about the fact? And I've got a bunch. We have a bunch of more questions to answer. But what do you make of the? fact that Trump has suspended the visa lottery system. I mean, I never understood the lottery system

anyway. I can explain the lottery system. Tell me. Ted Kennedy created the lottery system. And it was designed initially to give Irish citizens an inordinate leg up on everybody else in the world. Really? Bring more Irish into the United States. I have to. So the quote, so, because it's a Quota, right? Like there's a certain number of people per year per nationality, right? Like X number of Irish, X number of Italians and so on. And it can be years after you apply that you actually win the lottery. I have two friends, two Irish friends. One actually accepted the visa and came to the United States and is now an American. The other married a Bahraini friend of mine and she ended up not accepting the visa. Instead, they've been married. since I went to their wedding in 1995. They're in Bahrain with children and grandchildren now. But everyone's got to be vetted, right? I mean, so, I mean, the vetting process is the same.

So what is the, is there any reason other than just rank partisan politics and, you know, the anti-immigration push for Trump to, you know, draw a bead on this particular program? I mean, it seems so reactive, like this. guy came in this way okay fine that program is to blame right it's so i mean it's simplistic even by american political standards it's not right i mean that these people are vetted right right i got a consular commission i went through the consular course it's freaking hard if you're not an american it's hard to get into the united states in in bahrain our embassy was very very small so we had to double up

Sometimes I was assigned as the economic officers. Sometimes I had to cover political. Sometimes I had to cover consular. Sometimes I had to cover uses in communications. So there was a period of two or three weeks where I was the acting consular officer. And if you're, for example, from India and you apply for a visa, you have to bring a filing cabinet full of documents to back up your visa application. bank statements, letters from employers. I mean, it's ridiculous how much vetting is involved.

And then I tell you to come back, you know, four weeks from now, so I have time to go through your paperwork. It's very rare for us to just, you know, somebody comes up to the window, I want a visa, here's the application, here's the hundred bucks, and you just stamp the passport. And, you know, they're human beings, human beings snap sometimes, whether they're American or foreign. And, I mean, there's nothing much you can give.

There's no way to control for that, like this Portuguese guy, assuming that he's everything they say that he is. The arch angle, sorry, the arch angle, forget it. Am I the only one that's surprised, the next part, by the way, for the 499, that is, am I the only one that isn't surprised that Noam Chomsky was friends with Epstein? The guy is a creep. Keep up the amazing work. May I say something about that? that? Yeah, I have stuff to say too. Go ahead. So I know Noam Chomsky, not well, but we've exchanged emails. I can tell you just as a person, Nome Chomsky's a dick. He's always been a dick. He's a dick to everybody. And when a reporter

asked him to explain, you know, his relationship with, uh, with Epstein and his, his response was, you know, go fuck yourself or whatever it was that he said. That's, no, Chomsky. So the answer is no. We should not at all be surprised that he's implicated in this Epstein scandal. And then when other people say, oh, no, Chomsky, they never actually met, except maybe once at a party and Chomsky had his money invested. No, I don't believe that. I don't believe that or not. While we're on the topic of Epstein, how about that David Brooks? Yeah. So David Brooks, columnist, center-right, for the New York Times.

You know, here's the thing. He met him. He apparently at least hung out with him at a party, right? At least once. I think that he did have as a, he wrote about this multiple times and basically was like, this isn't a big deal and we shouldn't be paying that much attention to it. And he never once mentioned, oh, by the way, I met him. I mean, the New York Times is saying that.

there's no obligation to disclose. And I suppose technically, that's probably true. This reminds me of like the, but it's kind of like you should just know better. It reminds me of one of, it shouldn't be a rule. It's obvious. You're, you know, like if, I don't know, if I were writing about a random person in the news and I had met them, I would mention it in my piece, like I've met this guy. Right? You know, transparency. It's all about transparency. It's relevant to the readers. The readers not to mention you might have insight and you could even just say look he seemed fine to me i didn't know um that's fine just say that like you know but like it's you know i didn't know he was a lech whatever um how are you supposed to know yeah i mean i mean to me his silence on this is very is suspicious

i agree with you i think it's suss i don't know if it's a firing offense but i would say like you know it's a double secret probation offense i mean if i'm at the time If I'm his editor at the Times, I'm displeased. I'm like, what else are you not telling us? Agreed. Jweed Monsani, 81. By the way, oh, in terms of Chomsky, I should say, full disclosure, I had a funny story about, like, blurbs. So when I put out one of my very first books, I reached out to, you know, your publisher's like,

oh, can you get anyone to blurb your book at E-Lefties? So I reached out to Chomsky, and he wrote back. to me and said that he didn't know anything about cartooning. He wrote back. He's like, I don't, I'm afraid I don't know anything about this area. Six months later, he gives a blurb to my big rival in editorial cartooning Tom Tomorrow. So I decided in my next book to just quote, I don't read, I don't know anything about this area. That's great. Noam Tomsky on the back of my book. I did. That's great. It's on the back of the book. And so I was like, I'm a cartoonist. I can do anything whatever i want right that's the whole point of being a punk rock cartoonist then um so then

like 10 years later my new publisher was friends with with chomsky and reached out to him and no one had heard about what i did and he goes just to avoid dead doing something like that again i'll give him a blurb oh my god so i'm like yeah whatever um judey mons Sini wants to know, John, if you think that Shia has Islam has a terrorism problem as does, like Sunni Islam does. Elements of it do. Sure. You know, the American Embassy in Beirut didn't blow itself up, nor did the Marine barracks. So, yeah, you know, it's, I think it's not necessarily about the mainstream sects of, of, of,

Sunni Islam and Shia Islam, I think it's like in any, like in any religion. I mean, there are radical Christians and radical Jews and, you know, people are people and some of them are bad. Right. No question. So let's see. What size, Gabriel wants to know, what size military force would have combined? Oh, by the way, if you guys also want to let us know if you'd want to do another call-in show, let us know because we're, Yeah, that was fun. It was really fun for us, but it's not fun for us if it's not also fun for you guys. So it could be a one-air, it could be a multiple-time thing. We're thinking of doing it again, though, a lot.

Gabriel wants to know, what size military force would have combined Russian-Asian force need to be to overrun Europe, I'm laughing, where cities like Rome, Berlin, and Paris would be occupied in a matter of weeks. I say that's fucking impossible. these countries are nuclear powers right um there's just going to that it'll never get to that point i mean nazi germany wasn't able to do it and they started in the middle of europe right and they couldn't occupy all the whole thing they didn't have switzerland that's right france was too much to too big to to chew off right they that's why they had to have a vishi

um so it's not possible i mean i agree not possible i agree not possible possible. That's another reason why I think it's ridiculous. The whole NATO, you know, scare stuff about Russia is ridiculous. Like, then why do you have nukes? What's the point of this? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Oh, here we go. Frasmataz, is it possible, John, to live, to love Arabic and hate Hebrew, just as a language? For me, it's the Israeli accent. It's so fake. Why does it have a Frenchness to it? Hey, hey, hey, watch. but it does have a frenchness to it but their arabic is but their grammar is arabic no yeah their grammar is arabic yeah yep excuse me um you know it's funny i the hebrew accent bothers me as well but not everybody's hebrew accent it's it's the it's it's Israelis of European origin of recent European origin who I think have that what to me sounds slightly French in the pronunciation of some of the consonants but but Middle Eastern Jews

don't speak Hebrew in the same way what's the linguistic connection between I'm afraid of I confess ignorance here between Hebrew and Arabic oh they're both Semitic languages so The construct is exactly the same. So are they from, are they all descended from Sanskrit? Yes. Okay. Mm-hmm. So, yeah, I mean, you can see the similarity.

I was, I was at the CIA with a, with a guy who just had this crazy facility for languages. He was Jewish and he learned Hebrew as a child growing up and going to synagogue. And then when he went into Arabic training, it was just like, boom. By the way, Hebrew. He spoke Arabic, just like. that. Nobody spoke Hebrew until the 1870s. That's exactly right. Okay. For 2,000 years. Dead language. Nobody. So how do they know how it's supposed to be pronounced? It's just like sort of like when they dig up like sheet music from the 1700s. Right. And they, and for music that was played with

instruments that don't even exist now. That's right. And nobody knows what it was supposed to sound like really, right? I agree. So I mean, isn't Hebrew kind of just made up? Isn't it possible that if there were a time machine and you, you know, sent like Benjamin Netanyahu, you know, back to, you know, back to Jerusalem and in like, you know, 50 BCE that they'd be like, what the fuck are you saying? We don't understand anything you're saying. Exactly right, man. All right. Just curious. The whole thing's very strange. All right. Kyle says, I speak good Alsatian and no one understands my fascination with Alsace. I totally understand your fascination with Alsace. Alsace is incredibly interesting and bizarre, and the food is cool, the people are interested.

Any place that's gone back and forth between two cultures in different wars is always interesting, you know? I agree. Somebody also wrote a second ago about dialects in Greece. Absolutely true, man. In fact, my family comes from Rhodes, and a lot of my relatives, all of my relatives and Rhodes speak with Rhodian accents, which to me are difficult. And I can say this because I'm Rhodian. It sounds kind of low class next to sort of the national Attican Athenian accent. I don't like, I don't like the Rhodian pronunciation of a lot of words. Don't like it at all. Frazmataz is asking you another question. How do the Zionist slash Israeli government

used the Sykes-Picot Accord over the last 100 years and it's even relevant anymore seems like they're sledge-hammering it they're covering it up is what they're doing. I think that's right, yeah. Yeah, I mean, the legitimacy

of Israel, such as it is, right? They claim it's all about like, well, you know, our roots go back here for thousands of years. It's like big whoop. I mean, by that standards, I mean, you know, the Russians can claim, Finland, right? Exactly. It's like, so

what? And but people have moved, people have moved around a lot over the last 2,000 years and very few people are still where they started. At that rate, you know, the, you know, I don't know, it's like the people who left the

Franks and the movement into, from Germany into France, I don't know, this could go on and on. But it's a British colonial, it's a British settler colonial project. It is. It is. And it's not just there.

It's all over the world. Yeah. Ted, do you think that it's the Yiddish influence? It must be the Yiddish influence. Of what is the Yiddish is? This odd French-like pronunciation of Hebrew. Yeah, that's got, you're right. That has to be it, right?

Yeah. Well, Yiddish is a Hodgepodge, right? Yeah, it is. Russian, German. They originated, I think, in Hungary. Yeah. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

It's basically a pigeon. Yeah, it's like a pigeon. Where was I? I was in like Papua New Guinea or something. I think I was in Papua New Guinea. And I was in this hotel and there was a, you know, the do not disturb. On the one side it said do not disturb in English. And on the other side, it was written in Pigeon, which I had never seen before in my life.

And it said, you, the letter you, no, can, K-E-N, come, C-U-M, in. You know can come in. I kind of like that. And I was like, hey, okay. Yeah. I mean, you know, there's a lot of, we could stand more phonetic, actual phonetic pronunciation in the English language. Frazmataz said, I always told my dad not to trust Nome. You know, here's my thing with Nome. It's politics. Everybody thinks he's like a socialist, and he's not. He's not. He's a, he's really sort of a liberal libertarian is what he is. He's a liberal And the only reason he became so famous was because he's Arodite and he was from MIT and he was a leading opponent of the war in Vietnam.

And that's really what it boils down to. He's not a leftist. No. He's actually very much a capitalist if you read the articles about how much he forked over to Epstein to invest for him. Yeah, no, he's totally a capitalist. And it's not just like personally, I mean, even ideologically, I mean, he does not favor the overthrow of capitalism.

No. MT-16, thanks for the 20 bucks. John, did you have any downtime when you were in Pakistan? I know the hours must have been very long tracking people down. I actually had a little bit of downtime in Pakistan. So what I did, I had one Saturday morning that I was free. So I drove up into the foothills of the Himalayas. And I came upon a tree that was completely.

completely filled with monkeys. And so I parked the car, got out of the car. They all, like, perked up. I was taking some pictures. And then one of them started screaming at me. And it made all the whole tree full of monkeys start scream at me. And so I just got in a car and drove away. The Himalayas are absolutely stunning.

You've never seen anything like them. Or I had never seen anything like them. And did I have any other downtime? No, actually. No. It wasn't unusual to work 14, 16 hours a day. That was actually the norm, and that was seven days a week. So I just had that little block of four hours, and I was able to go see a tree full of monkeys. I mean, I found Pakistan, I liked the northern areas, right? I agree. I agree. I like Casimir. And I'll add, too, that. that the food in Pakistan is absolutely wonderful. Yeah, that's true. And I can't replicate the chai.

It kind of drives me crazy. It's the only tea I like. I hate tea, basically. I'm not a tea guy. I'm a coffee person all the way. My one exception is Pakistani chai served that's been boiling for hours and served in a metal cup. Right.

Right. So, like, it's so like if you're run down or depressed or tired or whatever, altitude sickness, you get one of those things. You're just like, like Popeye with spinach. It's amazing. Yes, indeed. All right, let's hit some more stories here. Shall we talk about cannabis? Yeah, I'm happy about this. This is exactly the opposite of what I expected Donald Trump to do. Donald Trump is famously anti-substances, whether it's alcohol or drugs or whatever. Understandably so. Understandably, he had this family thing. His brother, you know, was a, was a long-time alcoholic. And yesterday, he lifted some of the restrictions on cannabis, which is going to be great for everybody you know if you've got cancer or glaucoma depression this that the other thing or you just want to get high it uh it makes it a lot easier my my concern my biggest concern and really probably it's my only concern about weed is the fact that like people who are you know stoned while

driving they're under the influence but there's no way to for them to be tested reliably yeah Yeah. And then if you can't test them reliably, then you have to rely on the cop giving you the, you know, the little test to follow your eyes and touch your nose and then forget it. You're screwed. By the way, so like, yeah, I had that happen in L.A. where I got pulled over at like 3 o'clock in the morning. I was weaving all over the Hollywood freeway because my GPS was doing that thing like, you know, second to the left lane. No, wait. I meant all middle lane. Wait, I meant love lane. So, like, you know, like trying to find it. And anyway, the thing is, he made me read the, recite the alphabet backwards. And I was remember just thinking, you know, I can't, I can't recite the alphabet backwards. I was like, I bet a lot of people can't do that. Stone cold, sober at like 10 o'clock in the morning. No, no.

Those tests, by the way, are just complete garbage. Yeah, they are. They are. Yeah. Yeah, I, I, and by the way, Ray says they drive slower, Ted. Yeah, they do. And by the way, driving slower isn't always safe. safe. Believe me, if you're on the New Jersey turnpike where the average speed is 80 and you're driving 40, that's not safe. No, that's impeding the flow of traffic. Yeah. Yeah, my mom got a ticket for that in north of Cincinnati, where it was a 70 zone or a 75 zone. She was driving like 45 and she got pulled over. And I was like, mom, I don't understand. You drive 75 in a 20.

Just imagine you're in a school zone when you're on the highway. It's the same thing. Oh, my goodness. So, I mean, you know, we know this is a result of the cannabis lobby. So is it basically just a net good. I mean, look, the thing is, John, there is concern. We do have to talk about this, that, you know, today's weed isn't the weed of our high school days. It's much more powerful.

And there's been, particularly for younger. people credible reports of psychosis yeah that's kind of a big deal now this uh dr phil's been yelling about it for the last couple of weeks well so yeah i mean it's funny to me there are people who like on fox who were complaining about like the smell on the streets of new york oh wop man you got worse things that they got worse smells on the streets of new york trust me here we call it dc barbecue Wasn't D.C. one of the very first decriminalization locations? Yeah, right around the same time as Oregon. Yeah.

I think it's like the D.C. law is weird. You're not allowed to smoke it in public, even though everybody does. And even at home, you're not allowed to smoke it on your front stoop or porch, but you can smoke it in the backyard, which is just makes no sense to me. people are accusing me of what I just said is not true it is true but it is true if it's not true you're gonna have to you know fess up put up sure I've never been in any city that smelled as bad as Paris though Paris is bad just people just removing themselves anywhere they happen to be standing it was like Delhi in that respect yeah well there's yeah and there's dog poo all over the place I think France I think Paris is a smelly

city because of it's in a bowl. It's in a trough. So there's no good air circulation. You know, when it was a Roman city of, what was it, it was Lute, it was Lutus and before that, I forget what the Latin name was. But in Roman times, being assigned to Paris was considered a demotion because the weather sucked. And if you were a Roman official and you fucked up, they sent you to Paris. The British embassy here in Washington gets a 15% pay differential for the heat in the summer. They get an extra 15% of their salaries because it's so hot here. At least it's not like whatever buzzy bug was causing Havana syndrome. Yeah, whoever said that they've got, they've got a godness says I'll send sources. All right. And you know, everybody,

who listens to the show knows I admit when I'm wrong, which certainly has happened, and it will happen again in the future, and I may be wrong now. See, but what I've read, though, too, supports what you said, that it's far more potent today than it was in the 70s. Yeah, I'm not a user. And I'm not either. And I am a totally have never believed in criminalization of any drug, and certainly not cannabis.

And I have a lot of my friends who use them. it. So it's not at all uncommon for me. I just, and I've been around it a lot, so I don't have any, but it is just objectively true that, you know, the measurement of THC and all that is just, it's so, yeah, so like for example, Johnny Shanks a lot says it went from 1% to 30% plus THC. I mean, I think, I think people who've been smoking for years may not realize because they've been smoking for years. It's like the, you know, it's like the frog in the pot thing. You just don't, you know, you don't realize it. Yeah, like if they increase, like, well, you know, John, an example of that is the alcohol content of wine has sort of increased slowly over the last 40 years. I mean,

you know, wine, six, seven, eight percent alcohol by volume wine wasn't uncommon when you and I were like in college. Now it's at least 12. It's 12. 12 is standard. And, you know, I don't notice. I mean, you know, the more the better yeah right as far as i'm concerned um anyway uh thank you sharpie one of the few non-grifting podcasts literally ever here's my here's monopoly money 50 yeah i don't know if we could figure out how to grift we would it's just not our way um uh so speaking of grift that's a good segue let's talk about minnesota john i mean this is just It's disgusting. Tim Walls should be impeached.

Not because this thievery happened on his watch, but because he went after the whistleblowers who reported it. He fired some. He initiated prosecutions of others. Wals has to go. You're right. It's a violation of the Whistleblower Protection Act. Yeah.

Not to mention, they were right and he was wrong. That's right. Exactly. On those grounds alone. And not to mention also, it's like, you know, you're, okay, you're not personally in, charge of all this money, right? But you're the governor, right? The buck stops there. You run the state. Like, when you've got over $9 billion in, you know, federal estate funding

that vanishes as a result of this ongoing, sophisticated years-long scam, which probably predates 2018, you know that. It's like, then that's on you, right? You failed to supervise. You failed to appoint people who were competent enough to make sure this wasn't going to happen. I mean, I always say fraud and waste are like the price you pay just to have welfare, you know, a welfare system. And I'm okay with that. But within reason, you know, it's kind of like, you know, it's one thing like if your supermarket has 2% of the stock is getting shoplifted. But if it's half, you're in real, I mean, that's ridiculous. Yeah.

Agreed. So, I mean, and to make it work. worse. This money apparently went to, you know, a Shabab or Al-Qaeda or people that, you know, mean us harm that are that are actively targeting Americans, our own tax money. So the boom has to be lowered on a whole bunch of people in Minnesota for this, starting at the very top with the governor. Well, yeah, that's a good point. So, it's it's bad um yeah so i guess the argument here is that like technically speaking there's some people who say that today's weed is no um is no is no stronger but i mean look the thing is

is i knew people who smoked weed in in high school in college and the weed was a joke it was like chopped in with oregano um it was like you know you could tell it was like not the real thing yeah i remember the oregano thing yeah i mean you know you know you know you look at like a beautiful bud now like that you get from like a high end dispensary and it's like got this rich fecund smell i mean i have a strong sense of smell i can tell the difference and i have sense memory i remember what we'd smelled like it looked like in 1979 it ain't the same no i think it smells much stronger now than it did back then too in addition to being different it's just stronger now. Yeah. Well, it's obvious because it's regulated. It's in and there's real

competition in the marketplace. I mean, everything happened that needed to happen. I mean, it was garbage before and it was, I mean, people mixed in. I mean, I knew guys who ended up overdosing on on angel dust in the 80s because it was mixed in with the weed because the weed probably didn't even have any weed content in it, right? So government, having this be a legal product is better for society. It's better. No question about it. I mean, But I just do think that, you know, I wish we knew more about it. I agree. Yeah.

Okay, so shall we talk about the DNC, our favorite entity? I'm so mad about this. The Democrats are just such frauds. They are frauds. So they did this internal investigation about why they lost and how they lost. the 2024 election and they had been saying we're going to do this thing we're going to release it we're going to have this national debate about the future of the party and then they said no we're just going to cover it up we're not going to release it to anybody

and we're all just supposed to say oh okay uh no worries then we'll just take your word for it yeah well i mean so here's the thing i mean i bet it's a first of all you know that report's going to leak. Because you know there's people inside the DNC who are very displeased about this. The DNC is, you know, obviously it's the corporate wing of the party. And like

you said at the top of the show, John, they're trying to quash the reality of the schism within the Democratic Party as if that's going to help. But I mean, John, I mean, I assume the CIA did after action reports whenever there was a fuck up or a success, right? So that you learned what went right, what didn't go right, what should you replicate, what should you

differently. I mean, most political parties do the same thing after a campaign, even if, I mean, I would hope the Republicans do the same thing after 2024. Why would a party commission this report? What could be in that report that's so explosive that he decided to quit, the DNC chairman decided to sit on it? It has to be about cultural. issues. It has to be because there is a real split. The polling. In the Democratic Party. That shit pulls really badly. Really badly. Really badly. And they know it and they don't want to admit, they don't want it to come from them. That's right. That's what it is. And John, we've got just a couple minutes left before we call it a week. But I think we'd be remiss if we didn't talk about this judge,

Hannah Dugan. She's the one who, we can now say not allegedly, she's the one, she's just been found guilty of basically trying to spirit out a defendant in one of her cases to try to avoid them falling into the clutches of ice who were hanging out outside her courtroom. She obviously pissed off about that and to try to, it didn't work, but basically she's found guilty of obstruction of justice. It was a split jury. decision. Obviously, she's going to appeal. She's basically saying that she was trying to maintain decorum in her courtroom. ISIS is saying it's safer to apprehend people at their court hearings than out on the street. Yeah, I guess so, because they have to go through like metal detectors and

stuff so you know they're not carrying a gun or anything like that. But I mean, obviously, you know, if you're an undocumented worker or illegal immigrant, whatever you want to call them, you're stupid if you go to a court date these days, right? So, I mean, that's really the takeaway. Anyway, what do you make of this judge? I mean, to me, what she really is guilty of is civil disobedience. She probably is guilty of this law.

Yeah, I, I'm not surprised that she was convicted. I'm disappointed that she was convicted because I agree with you. This was an act of civil disobedience. she was trying to stand up against what she believed to be federal overreach and it nipped her in the butt. Yeah, I mean, so she's kind of a hero. I mean, it's interesting,

they interviewed the foreman of the jury and they asked him how he felt and he said, I don't feel good. So I assume it was one of those things where we had to find her guilty because the law was clear, but we think she's a good person. That was my read.

Yeah, yeah, and that and a couple of bucks will get you a coffee. Indeed. Well, you know, doing the right thing, as you know, this is always like the, it doesn't always have great legal consequences. Right. So, John, always a pleasure.

Thank you so much for another great week here on D program. Enjoy the weekend. Thanks, everyone for your support. Please, like, follow, and share the show. We'll be back Monday at 9 a.m. Easter time. We'll be here all week. Well, actually, we're taking Christmas Day off. But we will be around every other day, including Boxing Day on the 26th.

So tune in for that. Stay tuned for the TMI show with me, Ted Raul and Manila Chan, coming right up after this. If you're on Rumble, you'll be whisked away magically by The Raid. If we're on YouTube, you've got to actually make an effort and type a few things and find it over there. Thanks, everyone. Robbie West, see you in the background there. See you on the other side. Bye, John.

See you. Bye. Bye. Thank you.