DeProgram with John Kiriakou and Ted Rall - Iran to US: We’re in Control | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas

Episode Date: June 29, 2026

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM EST. Today we discuss: • The war is not quite over: After the U.S. and Iran exchange airstrikes and Bahrain and Kuwait take hits, Iran insists it is “in control” of the Strait of Hormuz. Both sides now say they will “stand now for now” as peace talks continue. • 50,000 Venezuelans are missing after a pair of earthquakes. What responsibility does the United States bear for the death and destruction, following decades of sanctions? • As France and other Western European countries bake under the worst hear wave in history, more than 1,000 people are dying from the heat every day. Funeral homes are overwhelmed. Most are elderly. MERCH STORE: https://www.deprogram.live https://x.com/tedrall https://x.com/JamarlThomas LIVE ON RUMBLE: https://rumble.com/c/DeProgramShow SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/show/2kdFlw2w8sSPhKI8NRx8Zu APPLE MUSIC: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/deprogram-with-ted-rall-and-jamarl-thomas/id1825379504

We're watching D. Program with Ted Rall and Jamaral. Thomas, it is Monday, June 29th, 2026. Thank you so much for joining us. Good morning, J.D. How are you doing? I'm doing okay. What's going on, man? Doing okay this morning? I am doing okay. I'm kind of afraid. You and I are both, I think, going to be suffering major heat wave this week. But I'm a little scared. If it's over 65, I'm uncomfortable, so I'm going to be very, very uncomfortable. It is 44 degrees here, and we have a high at 57 today. You can try all you want. I'm going to cry all you want.

Cry, cry, cry. No, July the 4th, it will be up around 90. So this is Montana. We just pack everything in one week. All four years. It doesn't matter. It's crazy. So, yeah, it's expected to be 100 degrees in New York City on Thursday.

So with the heat and index because the humid due goes, why not? But that's nothing compared to what the Europeans are dealing with, which is one of our stories today. Over a thousand people a day are dying in France. Whoa, whoa. You say over a thousand a day? A day. It's closer to at least 1,200 a day are dying in France from the heat from the heat wave. And, you know, it's so bad that funeral homes in Paris are now overwhelmed and bodies are having to be.

be shipped outside of the capital to be processed. I don't get it. France is a modern state. How on earth? It is. Well, the thing is, of course, it's got a lot of old infrastructure. Maybe we can have some French chatters come in and talk to us. But it does have old, you know, obviously there's a lot of those old buildings on the outside

are also old on the inside. A lot of people still don't have air conditioning. We talked about this last week. There's cultural biases, even a much of the air conditioning. biases, even among people who have air conditioning against turning it on. A lot of people live the old-fashioned way. I mentioned my cousin, who's quite well off. She has central air.

She's very reluctant to use it, even when it's blazing hot. She has a dryer. She doesn't use it. She hangs her clothes inside the house, you know, like she's a 19-year-old college student or something. And it's like, what? I don't understand. You have a dryer. And you're rich.

So, you know, what? What? Use your dryer. I get. Right. Like when I was in Albania, I was hanging my clothes on the line. Like, God, man, when I was traveling, I was like a different person. It's like, you're hanging your clothes on the line. You're watching power usage. You're like, yeah. You're in Albania. But, yeah, France is a more advanced country. But I mean, I'm always reminded of the fact that, like, look, I'm not, I'm old, but I'm not that old.

I'm 62 years old. When I went to college, my, my girlfriend at the time, She spent two semesters abroad in Paris, and she lived in a cold water flat in Paris and had to go to a municipal public bath. I don't think those exist anymore in order to shower. And so it was not uncommon. She had to, I mean, when I went to look at apartments, when I graduated from college in the early 90s,

here in New York City in St. Mark's Place, there were still apartments that, like now that's a very expensive place. in the East Village. But there were apartments where you shared the bathroom down the hall with your other tenants. There were a lot of apartments that had the bathtub in the kitchen. And I'm so stupid growing up in the suburbs in Ohio, I had no idea why the bathtub would ever be in the kitchen. I assumed it was a plumbing issue. Then later, I figured, duh, okay, now I know why it's in because you boil the, there was no hot water back in the day. So they boiled, you boiled the water on the stove when you took a bath and you filled it up

and then you added hot water, right? So you didn't want to be like lugging the hot water from the kitchen to the bathroom. But anyway, the thing is, it's like, so France is, I mean, it is also true that their power rates, their power rates have gone way up ever since the Ukraine-Russia conflict and the destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline. So there's a lot, it's kind of a perfect storm. There's a lot of old people who are most of the casualties. This is kind of similar to what, you might remember this 10 years ago when there was a big

heat wave in Chicago, not for the first or the last time, and old people be dropping like flies. And I think often these are people who are maybe starting to suffer from dementia or whatever, and they don't kind of have the wherewithal to go turn on the AC. and old people are even more prone to dehydration than, you know, people of average age. And so they, you know, they end up succumbing. They don't even really realize it. It's like the boiling frog thing. So, yeah, so it's a national crisis.

There's a political aspect to this. A lot of French pundits and podcasters like us are saying, listen, this is lack of solidarity. Like, we're French. Like, we're part of our culture. is we're supposed to be chucking in on our neighbors and making sure that they're okay. It's the French way, and we've been falling down on the job because we've become too insular and selfish,

and we're no longer, you know, we have the equality and the liberty, but we don't have the fraternity part down. And I thought that part was cool, interesting. I guess that's one angle. I guess I would look at it in a political sense and a sense of infrastructure. Like, I guess to me, this is out.

This seems to be outrageous in a country like France. Like, that number is amazing. Even if you take an elderly into account, 1,200 a day is a significant number of people that are effectively. Probably 100 to. Yeah, that's, that number is just breathtaking. And like I said, you would think, look, even if you have an affinity against using air conditioner or central air, if it's 100 degrees outside, you're going to use central air, right? Like even me, when I was in Indonesia, it was like 90 degrees at night. Most of the time, I would just sit there and sweat through the sheets.

But there were days where I was like, okay, I'm cutting that on. Right. Like, I guess my point is it's, it sounds like if it's an infrastructure issue for why that would happen, not necessarily a personal will issue, if that makes sense. I think it's wrong in that. I think there's, I think you're right, but I think it's also, you know, it's a cultural thing as well. There's the, you know, people aren't used to the idea. I mean, the thing about France is it's really like a sweet country in terms of like, you know, it's geography.

It has great soil. It has a great climate. It's moderate. You know, it has access to the sea on three different sides. It's got a bunch of, I mean, it's just great for agriculture. The French are kind of like living in this place where they feel like the land has always been good to them. But the climate's changing. And, I mean, this heat wave is literally the worst heat wave in recorded history in Western Europe.

Spain, Portugal, West Germany are all also Western Germany, I should say, are being brutally, brutally scorched. The U.K., they're seeing temperatures like they've never seen before, and they're just not prepared for it. I mean, it's kind of like, it reminds me when I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, a lot of places in the 90s, and it's probably, still true. They either didn't have or they didn't turn on air conditioning in stores, restaurants, cafes, apartments. And people would say, well, it's never that hot here. And then I would say, well, it's that hot right now. And they'd say, well, it's never this hot. It's like, it's this hot every year, every year. And like back then it was that hot for, say, a month or a month and a half. And I think the truth is that people felt like, it's four to six weeks. You just tough it out.

It's, you know, like, it's not that big a deal. You're not going to install a major appliance to deal with something that only, you only have to worry about, like 10% of the time. I think that's what's going on. But the problem is it's not 10% of the time. And when it hits, it's, you know, it's a life-changing event. Like, a tornado might only take up a small fraction of your life, but it's a game changer, you know? Right.

Right. Right. No, that's a good point. It's like, yeah, 10%. If it's existential, then the fact that it's 10% is a big deal. Right? That's not matter. Yeah, it's Europeans and Americans are different on this. We just are. Like, the way we look at this stuff is different. I told you, I saw it with my ex. Oh, I want the door open. I want the windows open. I don't care if it's cold outside. And I'm looking at you like, are you out of your mind? And then I become that way just in, you know, there is. Look, I like fresh air. I hate the way this apartment is because I can't open my windows in this apartment, and it sucks. I hate that. I hate that. It's just the way the windows are. Tells where the windows don't open or.

It's like a cathedral. It's like a church. There's like a sunroof that goes all the way up to the roof. It's several stories. You would have to, like, what, use a chair to break out the window or something? There is no way to do it. It's, oh, you made for the window. So this window goes several stories high.

Doing a chair, it's not going to do it. I don't even know if it opens. I haven't even tried. Wow. That doesn't seem safe. It's like also, I don't understand why hospital windows. Maybe some physician can explain this to us. Why the fuck do hospital windows not open?

Probably they're trying to maintain the integrity of the room. Oh, it might be the, it might also be the infection thing. I can answer that question because I worked in the hospital for like 16 years. So there is a concern that if a patient gets bad news, that they may try to defenestrate themselves, and then that's a insurance liability. So that's why. It's not due to the infection. It's because there were-

When you code the suicide, like- Oh, that's seriously, that's the concern because part of what- The patient jumps out the room, it's like you have cancer. And he's like, let me get this done. Yeah, then I'm piecing it out because what is this a way that they try to mitigate their liability for insurance. Well, they could do the crack thing, right, where it opens up to, you know, six inches. Yeah, they could, but they don't. So it's just like, okay, so just in case, this is how this is going to be because they don't,

the problem is that so many Americans who are very, who are very sue happy, like to ruin stuff for everybody else. That's all the reasons why medical bills are so high because doctors have to assume that everyone that they see is going to sue them. Right. That's all part into the cost. So that's the answer. That's why they never admit wrongdoing.

My mother had a dentist who slipped and then poked through the roof of her mouth. And, you know, she was like, I'm not going to sue you, but can you fix it? But he didn't even want to admit that he did it because then if he fixed it, and then that would be kind of a tacit admission that he did it but he did it yeah but that's i can still sue you you're not out of you know i'm just choosing not to sue you yeah but that's the problem is people make mistakes and people make irrational decisions or they get given no they're giving bad news and so if if you have to defend your profit margin against people who would otherwise take it from you then you have to assume that everybody it's kind of the

way that police are trained it's it's it's you're not there to police the population you're there to assume that the population is hostile that's why you have that's why i have a military has police yeah i always to that point i always want to tell cops you know you think you're you might think your job is to get home safely every night and that's not true your job is to make sure i get home safely every night and it's like but they don't but they don't view it that way i don't think that way i mean they looking at that stuff is order you know if you need to die so they can get home safely yeah like no that's not how it is and by the way the hospital thing they should be sued when they f up i mean i had a doctor when i was younger i think it was i was very young maybe 18 19 years old

and he goes in and i come to the hospital i tend to be asymptomatic when things are wrong so even if i look okay like a cat and i remember he doesn't an exam, I'm having stomach pains, and he's like, well, you look okay. Now, we strongly believe that he was drinking. We strongly believe he was drinking. Six hours later, he runs back into the room and he's like, we need to do surgery immediately. You have stomach blockage and we need to remove the blockage. And he screws the surgery up royally, royally, really Fs the surgery up, like, messes it up to the point where even in his notes, he's like, prognosis is very negative and very poor. And for several years after the fact, I had stomach pains, my stomach wasn't right,

everything else, another doctor had to go in, found it, fixed it, and pointed out how bad the other doctor did the surgery. Do you think either doctor would admit to that? No. No. Yeah. Yeah. Well, well, I mean, this is all true. Some comments. Let's get through those. Marie-Lore, and by the way, just a little housekeeping. We have TMI coming up at 10. We've got Q&A show with Robbie and Jamarle, not me today at 12 noon. I'll be back on the Q&A on Wednesday.

I'll be doing the regular show tomorrow. But anyway, I've got a doctor's thing today, speaking of doctors. Hopefully he won't fuck up, but I can't imagine what he could do, really. Anyway, Marie-Lore, the biggest problems about heat in Paris, are a lack of green space is commensurate with the amount of buildings. You know, it's true that Paris is a bit of an asphalt jungle.

Even in the Gauden Publique, which are the public parks, there's a lot of gravel. There's not like, you know, there's not a lot of grass and trees. I've always said that if I became mayor of Los Angeles, that would be my number one job is to put trees all over Los Angeles. I mean, just to reduce the temperature. There's other things, too. I mean, like all roads and rooftops, black tops should be banned because it retains heat in cities. It should just be, it's more expensive to do white concrete, but, I mean, white pavement,

but it should just be required. I like green spaces too. Agreed. Yeah, I like green spaces. And then there's a thought about if you put like green spaces on roofs, you also cut down an amount of heat and that type of stuff. Yeah. I mean, yeah, there's all sorts of experiments, too, with like green spaces on roofs that some of the, some of the generation of the photosynthesis can be harvested to help power the building, which is cool, too. I have a question for you, Ted, I'm under kind of derailed the show. Just mentioned you put trees in Los Angeles if you became mayor.

Probably is this a desert. So if you want to conserve water, why would you do that? Why not just abandon the city? And people shouldn't live there. That would be better. But assuming that the city was not abandoned, in other words, in the unfortunate real world that we live in and where we don't really plan ahead for anything, there are trees that don't really, that don't need to be watered regularly. Yeah, but not going to be big shade trees. Like, you're not going to have conifers or oak trees there. I mean, let's be honest. You'd be better off of cacti. But, I don't know.

I mean, you've talked about this before. There are places. Don't generate any shade either. There are places that people live here in major cities. Those cities should not exist if your idea is to preserve the climate and protect water. L.A. is one of those places for sure. Nobody should live there. Agreed. People do. Okay. So anyway, Philip Blair, the French are getting too Americanized.

Well, maybe not Americanized enough. If you said, Ted, you know the heat wave is a Putin evil plot. I think actually Putin would have liked this heat wave not to. happen because it would have meant that the Nord Stream pipeline was still operating. Putin has in the weather. Marielle, what are your thoughts on CBDC digital currency? It's going to happen no matter what, but what could you do to combat it? And thank you very much for the $5. I'm sorry, what is CEDC? What's what I don't know what that is CBDC digital currency? What's that?

Hold on. I'm looking that up. I know the digital currency is. I don't know what the CDDC or whatever. Central bank, digital currency. It's a form of a sovereign currency issued by and backed by a central bank. Both are issued by the central bank. Cash is physical. This is just digital. So in other words, it's still a dollar but there's no...

It's just about a central bank. A particular country. Oh, man, this freaks me out. I hate it. I definitely not to derail the show. This feels very biblical. Right? Like it's um like this I don't like what you say Ted Raw. So maybe your access to the digital currency market just evaporates one day. I mean the way that they've been doing the debanking stuff either in the UK and Canada even in the US. I mean when we were at the network they were debanking us in the way that making it difficult for payments and everything else to go through.

That's terrifying. The moment that you get a government that doesn't like something, that you're saying or something that you're doing, would you really believe that the Trump administration wouldn't use this against this political enemies? Of course they would. Or any administration. Or the Biden administration. They would definitely do it and be morally justified in the way that they or self-justified and the way did they try to explain it and justify. I mean, that's, I don't know, man, we're getting into a weird space. We just stay away from it because it is the ultimate debanking. Just like what you just said.

I mean, if you want to control somebody, that's how you do it. Yeah. I don't like where Robbie has to say so now Robbie doesn't have access to money. Unless you want to join me with my communist revolution, I don't see how we avoid this. I mean, like, this is the move. I mean, basically, we are already basically in a cashless society. A lot of airports have like snack bars that don't even take cash. It's not even accepted.

It should be illegal to have any place that doesn't accept cash. You know, most people, most people don't go to the ATM, hardly ever anymore, right? They buy everything with their debit card, or their credit card. So I just read in the New York Times a consumer advice column talking about checking fraud. I've been a victim of checking fraud. when I mailed in a rent check, someone stole it from the, from the mailbox, which incidentally was the mailbox that was directly in front of the post office, right? It wasn't like a far-flung mail. Someone fished it out, changed it, cashed it.

And I had to, and I lost, you know, my entire $5,000, which was my rent at the time for like months. And I basically fought and fought and fought and finally I got it back. But like the point is that fraud is right. if you ask any banker about it, they say, well, that's your fault, Ted, because no one should write checks anymore. That's what the New York Times says now. The Consumer Advicecom, checks are obsolete. No one should write them. So, you know, so you, in a cashless society, I mean, you know, there's no Bernadine Dorns anymore, which I guess might be a good thing, depending on your point of view, not on mine.

But, like, you know, you can't live off the grid. You are in the system permanently. You know, you, nobody has cash to pay you. You can't spend it. And they can just turn you off with a flip of a switch in the same way that like Hillary Clinton turned off Edward Snowden's, you know, passport while he was in the air and trying to change planes in Moscow. Wow. Wouldn't a common society require some kind of a cash society?

Because one of the biggest problems that the Soviet Union to run into would be that. some people, despite the best surface of the state, still would work harder and earn more money. And so they created that whole imbalance that you can't happen to communist society. No, that was a so. First of all, it was, they never claimed to be communist. They said it was the union of Soviet socialist republics, right? The Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Ted. Yes, the Communist Party means that it's a, so the goal of socialism is communism.

But only one maniac has ever claimed to have achieved that, which was Paul Pot and Campitia. and he eliminated cash and all that. But under socialism, there's still cash, you're still savings accounts. If you want to have a side hustle, you can, you can accumulate money, you can become rich. Socialism does not prevent any of those things. It just sort of mitigates a lot of the worst effects of capitalism. Then you'd want this, because that way the state would be able to dictate how much money everyone has to ensure equality.

Well, that's not true. I mean, the state, like the thing is, the state disseminates. the salaries, right? Not everything, small businesses. If you own a pizza shop, you're not owned by the state. You know, that's yours. But like big enterprises, you know, big essential services, like let's say a national airline. Yeah, that's owned by the state and they issue the paychecks. But what you do with your paycheck is up to you. If you're like very cheap and you don't spend a lot of money, you're going to save more money and that's yours. I mean, and you, and there's interest-bearing accounts and You can invest things.

There's stocks. Everything, all of that stuff exists under a socialist society. Yeah. It's not a, is not a, is not a, is not a, is not a, is not, it's not, it's not, it's not, the communist man is something that you're not, we're not going to see in our lifetimes, even if we have a revolution tomorrow, you know, like, you know, the, um, the cash thing is, I agree with you. This is going this direction in any way you look at it.

Like, it doesn't. And I feel this way about a lot of stuff. Like, we are. whistling past the graveyard without necessarily digesting what the technology is and what it means in the large society. We just kind of experiment. Like social media was an experiment, right? Nobody thought about, okay, what does this mean going forward? AI, same thing.

There's no national discussion, right? What bugs me is that we never, I mean, it seems to me like, let's say AI now, right? It should be like, we should be every few, there should be like in the news, like, you know, a blue ribbon panel. of tech experts from the left and the right, from Silicon Valley, academia. They're all meeting in Washington to have a confab. They're going to be meeting for 30 days to debate and talk about the future of AI. The president and members of Congress will be receiving their report. Then there's congressional committees who will be considering all this.

There should be documentaries that are like 60 minutes should be like we're doing our all AI show today. we don't have any national discussions. People just do shit and it just shows up. Like, you know, you're like you're on Google and suddenly like, oh, Google now has AI on it. And you're like, oh, who decided that? Nobody? We do shit that we think is profitable. That's a difference. Like meaning we don't, it's not like, it's not random. If that makes sense, it's in a direction. It's not random. How do we make profit? And that becomes, I mean, again, this is the whole capital of this country thing, right? How do we make profit? How do we make profit? How do people get rich. And then the government says, hey, we like that AI stuff because we can put it

in the drones in order to go kill people with it. And so the tech company say, hey, we appreciate that you appreciate us. And so we're going to build this out in order to do X and Y. Meaning it just goes. It takes a life of its own. It's not random. It's moving in a direction because the whole point is profit. But there's never this kind of evaluation of like profit at what costs. Never. And the cost is usually to us. I mean, like if you think of, think of an AI system where you can put into cameras that would automatically track various people all throughout the United States. And maybe you, as Ted Raw, as you're moving through wherever you're going to New York and everything else, I mean, that's terrifying. Like the moment that you can

create agents to do stuff that you no longer as a human being have to do or have to evaluate, oh, we're in a different world. Yeah. And the thing is, there's not even any pretense of any kind of, you know, nobody asks the people of San Francisco. in a plebiscite, whether they wanted self-driving cars, they just showed up. It just did it. They just did it. Right. So there's, I mean, call it whatever you want.

It ain't a democracy because these are big life changes. And the American people aren't even really being informed, much less consulted on any of it. I mean, if someone, in most little towns, if someone wants to put in a strip mall somewhere, you know, there's at least the semblance of community board hearings. Now, granted, the developer. make sure that a fat envelope, you know, hit is passed to all the members of city council. I get that that's how that happens. The vote is predetermined.

But at least they go through the motions of pretending that people, and sometimes people even get things canceled. That's just not true, like on the state or national or federal level. Yeah. That's a free country. It's like I told you that I think it's like two years ago now, no, the height of the migrant influx. No, we had. Ted, you've been here in Calaisville. It's a tiny little town.

We had buses dropping off hundreds and hundreds of migrants. We don't have any place to put them. And they were bringing them here in the middle of October. But when are it, like, I don't know how many of them froze to death and died because there's no place to put them. And so we're finding bodies just outside of town. People were showing up on buses in New York City in the middle of like a major cold snap

when it was 10 degrees wearing flip-flops from like Venezuela, or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, Robbie, why were people, I'm sorry, where were these immigrants coming from? Because I thought Republican governors lived in, like, DeSantis and what's his name in Texas, they were sending them to Democratic states, Montana. I have no idea.

But, I mean, there are buses of them, and they just speak a word of English. I mean, they're Hispanic. I mean, Ted, you've been here. Yeah. It's a very small town. 100 people would make a big splash right yeah it's and and there were there are hundreds and hundreds of them just being dropped off just west side of town there was a little place called westgate mall and they're just dropping them off and uh this is and this is

like the most tight places in the country yeah yeah no it's it's uh october the winter starts here in october our first snow typically starts around my birthday and the last can be in june right It's snowed yesterday. Yesterday was June 28. Yeah, I mean, yesterday, we were at church yesterday, we had the heater on. Wow. Yeah. I mean, it's, you know, people look at a postcard in Montana.

Like, oh, this place is great. We'll just ship all these migrants here. It'll be fine. Look at all these wide open spaces. Look at all the room. Well, part of the reason why it's so wide open is because Montana will kill the hell out of you. Right. That's the thing, right?

Like, people are like, oh, why do only 20 million people live in Kazakhstan? which is the size of the U.S. east of the Mississippi River. It's because it's hard to live in Kazakhstan, right? Yeah, no one asked us. No one got no, there was no consent. This stuff just happens. And the next thing you know, people are,

they're stacking bodies and people are like, oh, those racists, they might not help the migrants. There was no physical way for us to do it. All right. Let's keep, let's do it some comments, please. Philip Blair. Too many doctors are greedy, evil bastards. Robbie, my grandma was a registered nurse for decades. I'm going to skip.

Okay. John D. Cackelan, $1. Thank you so much. JD Social Credit, $1,000. That's what it is. I mean, whether it's, there's something problematic about, I mean, I don't know. There's something problematic about this. This stuff gets just more and more tyrannical.

And technology makes it easier to be tyrannical. And it's almost like if you're, you know, this gets into the whole question about technology and people ask whether it's good or bad or evil or whatever else. And it's like it just represents you, whatever your society is. Meaning however you are as a population and as a public, the technology that you guys develop is going to be a representation of what that is. And if that's a trend towards authoritarianism, if that's a trend towards finding more effective ways of killing people

or finding ways of killing people without necessarily having the human conscience built into it. Like, it's just a representation of us. And unfortunately, we are really fucked up as a population. Thank you. Thank you also for the dollar donation from FU So. Bring on Midwestern Marx to discuss socialism and communism. The right and the Americans have been propagandized

and have no understanding. that's a good idea. Mr. A. Lee, I know someone who's been canceled by the government. He can't get an ID to get a bank account so he can rent a place. He's been homeless since the Libya adventure. I mean, it's so, I mean, look, everybody who's, and this is true, like, what is it, one out of six American males will be in the prison system. Yeah.

They're canceled, right? I mean, you have these fucking laws that say that you have to tell your prospective employer that you've been convicted of a crime. And some even require you to say that you were. arrested for a crime, which means that you might have been exonerated, but it doesn't matter. You have to, you know, you're guilty even after having been proven innocent. That's wrong. I mean, you should, you know, when you've done your time, you've served your death to society,

it should be done. I mean, as it is, you have a hole in your resume to explain. Well, wait a minute. I don't know if I agree with that. Like, say, for example, so if you wouldn't want to know if a person was a rapist, that you're bringing into your company that has multiple women in that company. Of course. Or let's say if someone was a convicted pedophile and, you know, whether it's carrying them as a school employee. No, I get it. Or like, you know, I think the argument could be, you know, if it's germane, if the crime was germane, like they're convicted of embezzlement.

Do you hire them in a bank? And a bank, right. And I get it. But I guess this comes down to we're going to have to weigh. the rights of an employer to know everything about you or to know more about you than they would know about someone else versus the right of a person who convicted, who was, who committed a crime and is now trying to start their life again. And I mean, I'm always pro-worker. I mean, I've got to say I think that's a more important consideration. I mean, if a person's like, let's say a person's a rapist. And like, okay, well, in their danger of raping again, then I guess the question is,

why are they out? Right. It's like, it's like sort of like if someone's a convicted pedophile and like, well, I'm not satisfied with putting them on a list and, you know, a Megan's Law list and putting them on the web and just, well, you know, anybody can see who they are, but they're still out and about and they could do it again to my kid, right? So I'm, I'm not. I'm just, you know, I'm I'm not cool with that. So if someone still represent, people shouldn't be released if they're a danger to the community. But if they're not a danger to, if they're released, it should be assumed that they're not a danger to the community. And therefore, I don't think it's anyone's business.

I know, but how would the state know that? Like, I would just say, know what's in charge. They don't know. You know? I mean, it's hard. Parole board shit is hard, which is why parole boards tend to be hardasses because the easy answer is to just be. like just keep them in, you know? I mean, that way, like, you know,

you don't end up with a Willie Horton type situation. Yeah. I guess my thing is there's no way for the government to really know what's in a person's mind. And even with a ball board being a hard ass, well, yet. Well, they do have devices that they can like, you know, they're limited in regards to it. Like if a person's thinking of a camel

and there'd be a camel on the screen and it's kind of foggy, foggy way where the computer's trying to analyze their thoughts. Fair enough. Right. There's no way to analyze thoughts in a coherent way yet where you can know what's in a person's mind. And I'm not even certain, even if you know what's in a person's mind, you can know if they're still rapy. Right. Like rape may be a moment, maybe a thing of the moment. It may not be something that they're thinking long term. There are all sorts of things that I can think in the short term. Yes, I need to do better with my diet. I need to eat less. I need to do better with so and so. Give it a week. Right. Like if you, if you You have me on a lie detector and I'm like, are you going to go to the gym? I'm going to say yes. And you might you might pass, yeah.

Yeah, I'll pass, but I'm not going to the gym. I guess that's my point, right? Like, there's no way to know as a flat fact whether the guy that raped multiple people is still going to be rapy when it gets out. And as an employer, you have a responsibility to protect your other workers as opposed to bringing some rapist onto your staff or somebody who will. raise this onto your staff of women, you have a responsibility to mitigate that risk, though, right? I mean, like, if you have a lot of cameras in the workplace, if you don't have, like, lots of nooks and crannies where people can be cornered.

I know. Or just not the guy. The person is, like, warned or laid off, right? Why not just put him down? I mean, we put down mad dogs. Think about what I just said for a second. So to your point, J.T, like, no, we can't know what's in someone. one's harder as what's in their mind.

Say, for example, if six years ago, I dated some girl, we hooked up, and then she decided she, that, that was a consensual and that I raped her and I go to jail. Basically, I get M-toed. Right. That's a different bar than me breaking in someone's house and raping her. True. So I think it should be that mitigating a circumstance, right? So if I, if someone gets M-toed, then you just, okay, here's what happens.

this is the issue. It is what it is. On the flip side, though, if you have someone who is a violent criminal, then why we're having this conversation? Because that person should not be breathing anymore. That person should be removed from their moral coil. That is the responsibility of the state. Yeah, I don't buy that. I do. I mean, there's a gradient to that, right? It's not. If you're breaking someone's house and you raper, you forfeit your ability to suck air on this planet. That's the That line. Where do we draw that line? So because if breaking into their house or raping hers, where you draw the line. Oh, so it's just the rape and that for where we kill people. What about drug addicts? Well, I've been very consistent on this, but drug addicts, if you're addicted to drugs, you're a victim. You have a disease, you're sick.

The person who's selling the drugs, basically, I would take a page out of China's model or Singapore or any other a bunch of East Asian countries. You sell this poison to my population. You die. But you're selling, you are marketing murder at that point to a hopeless or to a broken person. That's marketing murder because it sounds like you're going on a killing spree. Who else do we kill?

I guess that's what I'm getting at, right? I am not for just wanton murder by the state of people that the state deems that he wants to just kill. Well, some murder because there's just a child, right? So you're, no, you're tried. You get convicted. State's still murder and killing people. I mean, you can call it whatever you want.

It's still the state going out and wantonly killing people who it deems undesirable. It's just legalized murder. We'll say this for the, for the Q&A, but no, I think that this is something that's very, this is a hill let it 100% die on. If you are a predator. We'll be executed on. Yeah. You get put down. All right.

Let's do a few more. Let's do a few more. You can perfectly believe that. You got to talk about Venezuela. Okay, so Marial, thanks for the $5. Yuval Noah said in the future, there'll be new future inequality in the future biological humans versus enhanced BCI humans who will have power, not people. So it depends on whether you believe the brainship is going to be a thing, whether you believe telepathy or, let's say, enhanced,

enhanced telepathy is going to be, like meaning if you believe that there's going to be this kind of transhuman changeover in some particular fashion, then maybe. Kind of like a Gattaca thing. You can upgrade genetics in order to make people smarter, better, stronger, etc. And then the base model human being is going to be at a disadvantage. It's kind of like Gataka. Let's talk about Venezuela. It looks like 50,000 people may have died or more.

that's the number of people officially missing according to the Venezuelan authorities. That's a socialist society, so they have a pretty good sense of who lives where. Everybody's registered. So the question I have for you, J.T., I was thinking about the years of brutal sanctions that have been imposed on Venezuela, going back at least to Hugo Chavez under George W. Bush. So over 20 years of these devastating sanctions that have included things like rebar, which is, you know, there's those steel bars that basically hold up concrete buildings. I've got to think, look, Venezuela should be a rich country. Venezuela has some of the biggest natural resource, oil resources in the world.

It's by far the biggest oil-producing country in the Americas. It should be wealthy. It should be like an emirate. And therefore, a wealthy country is going to have high standards of construction. It's going to have really well-equipped first responders with the best possible equipment in to respond to situations like an earthquake like this, two earthquakes back-to-back. It's going to have, I mean, you get what I'm saying, right? They're going to have the best medical care. They're going to have the best backup generators. You know, rich countries have better shit and they do better in a natural disaster like this. How much of the blood that of the people of Venezuela is on American's hands. I mean, I'm reminded of being in Afghanistan in 2001 in a hospital where the doctors told me that due to Bill Clinton's sanctions between. between 1996 and 2001, they couldn't even get a fucking band-aid, something that the U.S.

government denied that, but everything was sanctioned, including medical supplies. So a lot of Afghans died in hospitals who would have survived easily if they, if not for Bill Clinton. We helped kill those people. I mean, this is not something, now even like liberal quote-unquote outlets like NPR, like, look at us. We're so nice. We're sending first responders to Venezuela, which is nice, but too little too late.

We're back to the culpability argument. Yeah. And if we really want to make that argument that people should be killed as a result of the behavior, how are we not culpable? Like, meaning, I agree with you, is my point. Think of the number of people that have been murdered based on policy alone. If you're talking about the Afghanistan thing and the Band-Aid, well, what about the thing? in Madeline Arbery, effectively saying 50,000 kids or 500,000 kids dying was acceptable because of, quote, U.S. policy, unquote, in this case. And Venezuela is making similar

arguments about attacking Iran, like, oh, we're, you know, we can, yeah, we have to kill some Iranians, but it's worth it because it'll liberate them and make the Middle East safer, blah, blah, blah. I guess my thing is, how does that, like, how is the American public itself now culpable for this. We have effectively allowed a government to murder and kill without consequence from standpoint of the way we look at tomorrow. We've had like massive demonstrations with millions of Americans in the streets every single day in the national strike shutting down the economy. Oh, wait. No, that didn't happen. Yeah, we don't because we don't care. Right. We know what our government is doing. We don't care. This is very hilarious. And I do compare us to Nazi Germany in this

case. We allow our government to go out, murder, kill, maim, and for all intense purposes, we are talking about Xbox, video games, sex, and whatever else we're doing and the thing. We don't care that our government is effectively using the power at the disposal of the country itself from tax dollars and those type of things in order to basically murder and kill around the globe. And to your point, you're absolutely right. Venezuela has been under sanctions for God knows how long. rich nation. And they try to make the argument, well, they're socialists. That's why they're like that. Bullshit. Also, sanctions had nothing to do with it. They're sensual. Yeah, it's nonsense. No, socialism doesn't work. No, socialism probably works fantastic. That's what you're worried about.

That's why you're imposing sanctions. Yes. And that's what we did what we were doing in South America regards to the kill squads, knocking over governments, those type of things, like this kind of provocative action in the South in order to maintain control of South America. This stuff was issues of policy, leave countries to their devices, and those countries will be something else. But at the point where we're putting sanctions and political pressure and all this other stuff, yeah, we tried to destroy the state. And you can imagine anything that falls down from that, meaning environmental disaster, people going hungry, those things are directly related to U.S. policy with regards to Venezuela. And obviously, that policy has made their situation that much worse and more fraught. Agreed.

Yeah. No, I mean, it's heartbreaking and horrible. And, you know, like, again, like if I were engaged in this, if I were a capitalist trying to prove that capitalism was superior to socialism, I would take, I would follow the dictat of like, when your enemy is fucking up, let, stay out of the way and let them fuck up. You know, I'd say like, oh, socialism is a failure. You know, just leave them alone. Then you could literally be like, hey, look, they collapsed just like we fucking said they would. We didn't do anything to them. But, you know, look at the Soviet Union. Oh, the Soviet Union collapsed. We invaded the Soviet Union months after the revolution. The U.S. Marines invaded. We sabotage their pipelines and their oil refineries. We sabotage their economy. We sabotage their gold,

their dominance of the gold market. We never stopped fucking with them. I mean, that's the main reason their economy collapsed. Agreed. Yeah. But I mean, but that's the capitalism thing that doesn't, it's not about fair competition. No. I mean, it never is. I mean, this goes, look, this was something I had to learn during Sanders. Right. The Democrats for the longest time will make the argument, we're on the same side. We're together. You should vote for us third way Democrats. And when you are in a position of

political power. Over to your favor. Yeah. And that's not the way it work. That's what's what's going on now. I've got to ask you about this. I'm sure you've, I assume you've seen it. Forgive me if I'm wrong. So, Mamdani, one of the things that people are forgetting and kind of has national Democrats freaked out, one of the untold stories that you might only be hearing here on

this show is it's not just that there's six, now there's now three Democrats making a total of six Democrats who are Democratic Socialists or Democratic Socialist aligned. Mamdani supported backed Squatty type people in New York. But there's now going to be 14 additional Democratic socialists in the State Assembly and the State Senate who in New York in Albany, who also were backed by Mamdani. It was a clean sweep even at the local and state level for Mondani's people. So the National Party, the DNC, is freaking out. and the 13 Congress top Democrats signed this like really, I used to say, very gay, like a statement where they said like, we're not socialists, we're capitalists.

And all this, that's a quote. And all this basically like, Pablo, like, you know, basically saying like, well, we don't, you know, don't go democratic socialists. And I'm thinking, whatever happened to like, we're a big tent. We, you know, like, you've got to support Joe Biden because otherwise Trump's going to win. And like, whatever happened to that, like, we keep doing that. We keep turning up for, you know, the centrist's, the corporatists because they guilt us into it. And then it's like, oh, well, we want a few. Like, suddenly that's a fucking crisis.

It's burning all over again. It's ridiculous. It's what you always say, J.D. They never stop. Well, they're worried about being supplanted. Right. Like if you and I, like basically, it's like, okay, when you're in charge, then we're on the same team. Right.

I get some level of political clout. It's a disaster and you need to destroy me. So you can maintain your political position. Right. Right. This works as long as you can convince me that we're on the same team. But that's an intelligence operation. That's a psychological operation.

That's not about reality. The same thing is true in pretty much everything. Even in world affairs, the same thing remains true. We will act like as capitalists. We believe in rules. We believe in a market. We believe in all of these things. We believe in fair competition.

Until China comes about and you realize, oh, wait, China can effectively build everything that we need for the world and they can basically build it themselves. Okay, well, now we have a problem. And now we need to change the rules because the rules are not necessarily in our best interest currently. That is just the way it works. Meaning people need to know that going into it, that that's the way it works. You guys are on equal exchange now because they're in charge.

If it ever became a situation where you started to gain credibility because of the rule set, they are going to want to change the rule set, which is what's happened. Why do we put up with that shit as adults? You would never, in like, you know, when kids play like a baseball game in the neighborhood and some, and there's always that one kid who tries to change the, rules just for himself and he usually gets punched in the face um look why do we put up with that i don't understand well i think part of it is it's a psychological operation if you're from a particular generation you may accept the argument because you don't know that that argument is a fake

argument is there just so you can shut up and play ball you don't know what they don't know what they're missing it reminds me of when you know i went to college twice right 81 to 84 then They threw me out and I came back and finished 90 to 91. So when I came back in 90, so when we were in the early 80s, Reagan was getting rid of student grants and like hell and replacing them with student loans. When I went back to second, so there were protests against that.

When I went back the second time, of course, that ship had sailed, the grants were long gone. And then they were trying to increase the interest rates on student loans. So people were like fighting for their student loans. And I was trying to tell, fellow lefties, well, guys, we should be pushing for grants because we used to have grants. And it's like, well, these kids didn't know that. I mean, they were 12 when all that happened.

So like, yeah, you just don't know what you don't know what it used to be like. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, she didn't, you know, the federal labor standards, the federal fair labor standards act is the dump is the last time that there was major reform of labor law in the United States. She's like, oh, that was like, you know, what, 40 years ago. I was in the 30s under FDR. And back then, unless you supervised someone, which meant you were in management, you got a 15-minute coffee break in the morning, 15-minute coffee break in the afternoon,

and guaranteed time and a half over 40 hours a week. Now, that's still the law. That law has never been changed, right? But who gets it? Nobody gets it. I mean, basically, unless you work for like a great union, you know, a great union job, like you're one of the 4%. you know, nobody gets it.

And it's, yeah, it's gross. You don't know what you don't know for a particular generation. And that knowledge is used against you constantly. Totally, totally. Let's do some more comments. And then we will move on to Iran, which where things are definitely sort of coming up, JT. style. All right. Mariel.

I'm happy to say that, by the way. though I have to smile on my face. I know you're not. I know. Thanks for the two Canadian dollars. Since 1950, Africa has had over 220 coups. That's kind of crazy. If you so, capitalism loves socialism when dumping their losses and costs on the people. Yes. Yeah, they socialize the costs. Yeah. Thanks very much for the dollar. Okay, so let's talk about that because we don't want to, we definitely want to make time for that. So Iran, there were strikes over the weekend, both between Israel and Hezbollah, and, of course, between the U.S. and Iran also hit Bahrain and Kuwait. Basically, it's kind of like, well, is it a ceasefire if everybody's still fighting each other?

Obviously not. But basically the main takeaway here is that Iran insists nothing has changed. We still control the state of your moves. You guys need to adhere to the terms. Basically, Israel and the U.S. keep testing Iran. I'm going to say everything that you said was predicted would happen, has happened tomorrow. And the, I mean, the only thing that's happened that I said would happen is that Iran would stay firm and would not, like, they would just stay the course because they know they're, They're in the catbird seat.

I don't know. I mean, where do we go from here? They say that for now, they're both sides are going to stand down, and they're going to resume those talks they have about, what, 54 days or something like that to wrap all this up. I mean, you know, it's not a long time, really, considering the complexities of the issues in hand. But, again, Israel is the problem here. Israel is just they just won't accept peace. So really, I'm going to argue the war is no longer between the U.S. and Iran or even between Israel and Hezbollah.

The war is between the U.S. and Israel and whether the U.S. can control their dog or not. And I don't know the answer at this point. I will. Okay. Okay. How much time do we have? Okay. All your.

Okay. The U.S. is not trying to control his dog. The U.S. doesn't care about what his dog is doing. The U.S. was fine with what Israel was doing before the war. It's fine with what Israel is doing now. And I would argue the evidence of that is the deal that Lebanon puppet government of the U.S. just made with Israel, also proxy of the U.S., where they basically carved off southern Lebanon to effectively allow Israel to occupy and murder wantonly.

as much as they want with the entire point of saying to basically to Iran of, hey, Lebanon, pay no attention to the fact they're a puppet of the U.S. has just made a deal with Israel. So your memorandum number one that all wars stop no longer applies to southern Lebanon. That is what the U.S. just did. So this idea that the United States is trying to corral its dog, Nantes, they've effectively allowed the dog to occupy with this kind of legal fiction of a deal between a puppet state and Israel. That's why Israel has begun on a killing spree. The question becomes, okay, what does Iran do about this? And Iran, for its part, has effectively allowed Southern Lebanon to be separate.

I mean, I don't know if that's a show of limits of strength, limits of power from the standpoint of Iran. I don't know. I agree with you that they're going to control the straight, the United States, and the skirmish tried to wrestle the straight away from Iran, effectively saying if you attack a ship, we're going to attack you. And Iran is like, okay, that's outrageous. We're going to respond in kind for any attack that takes place because this is our, we control the street. I mean, it's fascinating when you look at it and the breakdown of it

and how this is unfolding. I think they're going to be more skirmishes. If Iran has already said, if a ship goes through in a way that we tell it not to, we're going to hit that ship. And we're going to be more brutal towards those ships. ships going forward in order to just make the point that the United States does not control the straight. Yeah, I think they're going to be more skirmishes. Yeah, I think I don't see any. I think only you'd have to be a maniac to argue with that, right? And there's like, no question there's going to be

more skirmishes. I mean, the whole, I mean, of course, the big question is, will the whole deal breakdown entirely? That's that part. From my understanding, Iran has getting, what, $12 billion dollars of their own money. And no, it is not going to buy fat cows from the United States and fat pigs or grain or stuff like that. But there's also, but there's some question as to whether they're getting

part of that $300 billion, like the first tranche of maybe $150 billion in investment reparations from the Gulf states. I think that's what the hits on Kuwait and Bahrain were about. Oh. Oh, I

see what you mean basically. Well, from my understanding, they were paid off from some of these states to not hit their infrastructure. But Bahrain at the military base for the United States and Kuwait also, military base. So they're going after the bases that they believe is launching these attacks, or at the very least to show a force. So it's 10 o'clock, so we've got to wrap it up. JT. and Robbie are going to be back in two hours with the Q&A show. I'll see you guys tomorrow at 9 a.m. Stay tuned for TMI coming up right now. Thanks, everyone. Bye, JT.

Talk to you, see. Bye-bye.