DeProgram with John Kiriakou and Ted Rall - Netanyahu: “Iran Tried to Kill My Son” | DeProgram with Ted Rall and Jamarl Thomas

Episode Date: August 25, 2026

Conflict reporter/writer/cartoonist Ted Rall and political analyst Jamarl Thomas deprogram you from mainstream media every weekday at 9 AM ET. Today we discuss:• Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claims Iran tried to kill one of his sons, but gave no details about ​when the alleged plot took place, which son was targeted or how ‌close it came to being carried out. Netanyahu's oldest son, Yair, lives in Miami.• The Supreme Court cleared a roadblock for Trump's push to restrict mail-in ballots via the U.S. Postal Service, but a separate nationwide injunction keeps the rule blocked for now. The administration's proposed rule for mail-in ballots could scramble the 2026 midterms by forcing local and state officials to adopt an untested federal system on short notice and potentially undermine confidence in U.S. elections.• British Prime Minister Andy Burnham says the U.K. will help Ukraine make its own long-range missiles by sharing classified technical information for British components. Burnham, who was in Kyiv for Ukraine’s Independence Day, said defense firm MBDA will release details on U.K.-made parts for the SCALP missile to Ukraine to help the country assemble the weapons.LIVE ON YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/@DeProgramShowLIVE ON RUMBLE: https://rumble.com/c/DeProgramShowhttps://x.com/tedrallhttps://x.com/JamarlThomas#tedrall #jamarlthomas #news #politics

Good morning. It's Tuesday, August 25th, 2026. This is D-Program with Ted Rall and Jermarl Thomas. And by the way, it's my last day as a 62-year-old. So feast your eyes on this young, this young thing. The last day of 62. That's right. That's right. Only two more years till official seniordom, where I qualify for all sorts of discounts. not just at CVS. So that's very exciting. Thank you. Well, we'll see you tomorrow.

I mean, that's... Yeah, you will. Yeah, I'll be here tomorrow. All right. So, by the way... We need to do a song for that sound, for that soundtrack. It's too good just to have as an intro.

We should have like a deep program song. We're like we need a singer. We, us. You mean you and I should sing? We should have a sound. where I do a verse, you do a verse, Robbie does a verse, and we the D program soundtrack. But with the same, with the same instrumentals. Same instrumentals.

I don't know what it would be, though. I mean, I'm terrified. I guess maybe I could filter my voice through AI to make it sound like less shitty. That would be something about screaming and fighting for love or something. I don't know. Where are you leaving me? There's a song Thursday has this line. He says, you can slip my throat and with my one last dying breath,

I apologize for bleeding on your shirt. I bought that album immediately when I heard the song. I was like, oh, that's epic. That's so epic. That is pretty epic. No question. I'm a throat and with my gas last breath. I apologize with bleeding on your shirt.

Jesus. That's awesome. Awesome. Well, so I guess, first things first, maybe, sort of. I guess it's going to be, according to Trump, this isn't even in the run-up. We're going to be, it's going to be the lake, not longer Lake Ontario, it will be the Lake of America, because we're no longer doing business with Canada. This is very fascist stuff, right? Like, just instead of actually having real things, we're going to just pretend. And I even have a hypothesis that part of the reason that America chose Trump is because America in psychology, like the id of it in a medicines, understood things are getting worse. Things are getting worse. And you have a carnival barker who says, hey, no, no, no, no, no.

You don't really look fat in that dress. You look fantastic in their dress. You're beautiful in that dress. No, no, no. The streets aren't looking bad. They're really nice. They're great. They're almost made of gold.

It's almost like your honest perception of things is things are getting worse. Things are getting more expensive. Things are falling apart. Things don't work the way they typically do. Congress is obviously full of cheats and liars and corrupt psychopaths, etc., etc. And yet, you bring on a guy who, tells you the world is great and not just that I can make it even better. I think it's I think there's something to that promotion over reality and that was part and parcel to the reason I think they put in

Trump. I mean obviously Democrats were horrible and any you know if you had potato running against Trump the potato would have had a better chance that a Democratic party but there's something to the psychology of Trump that I think fits over this idea of a declining country. But Maybe I'm wrong with this. Maybe I'm looking too far into it. One little thing you've got to do. It says they can't see us. You're fixed.

You're fixed, Ted. Okay, cool. I got you. Don't you worry. You took out the, yeah, okay. Well, that's the problem whenever you're in a dark room with two well-dressed black men. It's just all. Anything can happen, man.

You can get crazy. Yeah, Ted, I gave you your black card on honor of your birthday Eve. Thank you so much, thank you so much, I'm welcome. Yeah, happy birthday. I was wondering if we could make it five minutes in without saying something offensive, but I guess not. Not with me here.

No, no, certainly not. So, no, look, I really, I think there's something, you know, I mean, yeah, this is, of course, you know, the emperor has no clothes thing. When I read the story as a kid, and I loved fairy tales, I used to reread them all the time. And that one never made any sense to me when I first read it. I literally didn't understand it.

I understood, like, the Chinese brother who drinks the lake a lot better than I understood, or a Rapunzel in her hair. I understood that. I get it. But I was like, what do you mean? Like, he has no clothes and everybody's pretending like he does. Like, you know, and here we are, right? I mean, that is where we are.

And, but I think, yeah, there's something really profound and I think important about that idea. Like, because we can't have nice things, we could pretend like we have nice things. And I was also thinking about this renaming pension that Trump has, like not only naming things after himself, which is kind of like Turkmenbashi, but like renaming the Gulf of Mexico, which I'm pretty sure the naming of the game, the name of the Gulf of Mexico, the naming of the Gulf of Mexico predates the establishment of the nation state of Mexico by a lot. And, you know, even the fact that we now call ourselves Americans, you know,

that's relatively new. In the 1800s, Americans didn't call themselves Americans. They were like, we're citizens of the United States. That's a Teddy Roosevelt thing where he was like, it was part of imperialism to basically be like the whole shebang, the whole Western Hemisphere. That's all us, even though it's all the Americas, right? I mean, it's north, central and south. So, and, you know, now Lake of America, I think, I don't want everything named after my country, even if I love my country. I don't want like things named.

I think it's cool that Lake Huron, Huron is. not named after something American. You know, it's named after a tribe. Like, that's cool. I like the fact that it was the Gulf. I like it is the Gulf of Mexico. It always will be. It's, I mean, it's kind of like, but what is that, right? Like, it's, like, we're not going to make any, I mean, we live in a world where even the incoming speaker of the House, who's a Democrat and is going to have considerable power, he doesn't meet with, you know, he wants. He wants to be. You know, he won't endorse members of his own party who are an ascendant like Abdul al-said, but he will meet with, he will meet with, you know, with, with, with, with, uh, with, uh, jared Kushner. He will not endorse

Medicare for all, but he will discuss tax cuts for the rich. I mean, so it's kind of like we can't have nice things so we can have fake things. Is I, is that kind of what you're saying? I'm, I'm, right. We can't have nice things so we can't, so we can't, so we can't fake things. And we will choose somebody who, would, lie to us about the reality of things. Nobody is going to call that Lake on Lake of America, whatever the hell names it. They're going to call it Lake Ontario because that's course it is. Right. And you know, it's like as opposed to the reality of like, for example, instead of saying we're going to have Medicare for all, I'm going to ensure that each person has health care or we're

going to have a government system where we ensure that each person has health care. Okay, that's one way of doing it. The other way of doing it is what we're going to give rid of Obamacare. and we're going to have big beautiful health care. How are you going to do it? We'll do it. Trust me. Okay, those are two different things. One is reality.

The other one is optics. Donald Trump's entire life has built on optics. Look at me. I'm rich. How great I am. This is Trump Tower. This is Trump, everything. Trump just puts his name on it.

Right. It's not even it. Yeah, most of those buildings do not. He doesn't own. They don't want it. It's just he licensed the name. Yeah. And they,

We elected somebody who is in purely optics. Reality doesn't matter. Just optics. And I hate to tell America that that's not the way to get nice things. That's not going to work. It doesn't work that way. Right. So we have a Potomkin, we have a Potomkin nation, a Potomkin president.

Yes. Yeah, it's... The country recognizes that it's declining. And its response to it is the fall into delusion. And Donald Trump is the guy for that level of delusion. I think now the public realizes, okay, this doesn't work. I mean, you can tell us that gas price is okay. But if you've noticed, Donald Trump just got to the point of just saying, well, I mean, America just says except the gas price.

Or, well, you can't buy $30. You only can buy two. Which on some level is a recognition and acknowledgement. Your prices have gone up. He doesn't want to say it. But it's true in every framing of the things that he's effectively putting out. I mean, I don't know. Maybe I'm reading too much into it. But there's some, I don't think so. Maybe I'm looking at it in the opposite direction.

Trump was elected. Trump is doing these things. But I don't know. But the thing is, he was, that might be an interpretation, save for the fact that he was returned. He's one of the, he's only the second president in American history to have a four-year interregnum and then yet be returned after, by the way. one of the most disgraceful interregna that you could possibly have, right?

Yes. So, I mean, this man was- I can't explain, by the way. My model of thinking of the world can't explain him winning again after trying to overthrow the election. Donald Trump should be in a cage right now. True. Yeah. Like the idea that a president uses the power at his disposal to do that.

And by the way, Congress would have backed him, meaning the republic. I don't think America fully grasped how close they were to a fascist takeover of America. You would have got the House of Republicans, the House of Representatives, would have backed Trump on us. He had the votes. Yeah. Throw it in the chaos. Ironically, if it wasn't for January 6th, we may be in a different space.

True. Yeah. No, I mean, that's, that is true. It's, I mean, the thing is, it all seems so unnecessary, right? It's like it's a cycle of history. It's probably inevitable, but it isn't inevitable. I mean, look at where China was after the death of Mount Seton. I mean, it was up the creek, right?

I mean, it was in a world of pain, but they turned it around, you know, in a big way. And they're really successful now. It is possible. You know, society can make a collective choice. The problem is Americans don't behave collectively the way the Chinese do. You know, the Chinese could all recognize the problem. them and be like, yeah, all right, we'll all get on board and fix this, you know. Well, we're also a capitalist country, which is a different model.

Like, maybe it's in the bricks, and their behavior is built into the bricks of it. It's almost like if you had a little bit of, like I always think of people as a little bit of code that is responding to the environment and that code develops based upon the way the environment is in a way that its own biases are built into it. Okay, well, we're a capitalist system. Self-interest is just built into it. What is in my personal best interest? Narrow, short-term personal quarterly self-interest, yeah.

Exactly. Do you want to talk about, well, let's get some comments here. Let's get some comments here. All right, so first of all, thanks, Manchow for the dollar. John D. Cockfeller, happy birthday, you old fuck. Thank you yourself. How old you are. No, it's like, it is, you know, it's what people say.

You look in the mirror and you're like, I mean, I actually think, you know, I don't know, I'm probably diluted. I feel like I don't look at over 61, but, you know, I mean, I feel like when I was a kid, you know, 62-9-9-year-old guys did not look like I do. So I feel like okay. And, you know, and I can still, you know, I can still bang out a 30-mile bike ride, right? So I feel like I'm okay. Jamaral, so you're saying America's become an old, ugly, fat, broad, F. U.S. says. I wouldn't put it towards me. women. I wouldn't have an old and ugly. Old and ugly for sure.

Narcissistic, hubristic. Head up its own house. I guess it's kind of like me, right? When I was younger, I was like, I was a monster at chess. And then you stop playing. But you still think you got it. And you go into a tournament and you get wrecked. Right. Yeah. It's like when Debbie Harry from Blondie, she, took time years off to take care of Chris Stein, her partner and bandmate. He had some kind of crazy disease. Anyway, when she did they rebooted Blondie in the late 80s, it took her, I'd say 10 years to get her voice back because you know just she wasn't. Her instrument wasn't there. Yeah. It's like I played chess when I was a kid every day for hours. And if I needed to sit

into a tournament and play a game for six hours, I could do that, and then go into the next game almost immediately and play for another three or four hours. The instrument was in point. It's like you've gotten so accustomed to this. It's a muscle memory. When you stop, it goes away. Well, it's like, honestly, it's like if you took, like if we took three months off from this show and came back, I mean, we'd be fine, but it's like, it wouldn't be as good as the fact that we did it yesterday, you know? Yeah, it takes a well. It just does. And so, It's like if the U.S. is, put it this way, things aren't magically done. It's not like the United States is just magically what it is.

This idea of it being indispensable doesn't just come out of the ether. There were factors that were built into it. There was a workforce. That was attending to a workforce. That was the New Deal. There were things that effectively made workers' lives easier and better that made this country what it was. When you stop doing those things, you stop getting the results of those things. And when you have a corrupt country with a corrupt level of politicians that only really care about their own self-interest or the self-interest of people who are paying them, okay, well, this is the country you get.

It sucks. You can't have nice things because Elon Musk needs a trillion dollars. You can't have nice things because Nancy Pelosi needs to make a huge amount of money off the stock market. Or Hakeem Jeffries is being paid fully by the Zionists. And so, you know, you can't have nice things. Medicare for all is cheaper and it will prevent 100,000 deaths a year. Hakeem Jeffers. Yeah, I'm not for that. As if it's a purely conceptual argument. Well, because if someone's not sick, they're no longer a customer. So why would you ever do that?

I mean, think about it. Medicare for all, people are still sick. But, yeah, but the thing is. With Medicare for all? But it's just a deal, issue of dealing with your population and the illness within that population to make sure everybody is. healthcare health care because of more customers well the problem is for for Medicare for all is that the government is actually incentivized to actually get people cured so that way the debt

not by the cost no no corporately is not is not so high the current market that we have that's why he can jeffreys is all in so you know you can't have this is because the people who pay him want you sick that's why he's never going to get you Medicare for all that's why the republicans are never going to get you Medicare for all. That's why the Democrats never will. And that's the biggest problem. The point that I'm making is the government is not going to make, take action to see whether or not somebody is cured from something or not. It's almost like it's just behaving like an insurance company. Well, the point that making is it's taking out the deal. No, I get that. But the point that I'm making is it's never even going to get a hearing. It's never going to get out of the crib. It's going to be

aborted like, no, month eight. It's because the, the, the, the, the, the, the, both political parties, their donors are incentivized to keep sick people sick. That's the point. That's why it's never going to get a vote. It's because the oligarchs will never allow it because they'll cut into their sweet, sweet profits. We need more Luigi's. Yeah, that's true. Quit slacking.

Yeah, we do. Did you see Hakeem Jeffries trying to be rocket. his boys from the hood look on his video? No, it didn't. Oh, my God. So, Hakeem, he decides to go Brooklyn. He's standing clearly in front of a project. And he's like with his phone wearing his green Yankees cap, which, by the way, just saying,

Hecim, I know we know you watch the show. Green's not a good luck for you, you know, other colors. I hate green. Green's bad for me, too, so it's not just you. Anyway, also the Yankees. You're not green. Why are you wearing a green hat? I don't understand. Anyway. So, and he's like basically released a three-minute video trying to, you know, worry himself out of the wet paper bag that he got himself into for secretly meeting with Jared Kushner. And, you know, it's kind of like, well, what's the difference between, you know, that and, you know, Mayor Mamdani meeting with President Trump. Okay, so the difference is Mayor Mamdani did that in front of cameras.

and Hakeem Jeffries was slinking around like he was cheating on his wife and got caught by the New York Times. There's a difference here. It's the secrecy. But anyway, Democrats, so he's kind of like basically like, oh, like, don't worry. Everyone in the Trump cartel will be held accountable. Like, I'm worried. I don't believe you. Nobody should believe you.

But, I mean, obviously, the fact that he felt compelled to do this, tells me that he's really, he's worried. I mean, there's a lot of talk in, you know, Dem World, and I have lots of friends who are high ranking in there, you know, even sort of DNC types, they want him gone. They're sort of, they just don't think he's a good look for the party anymore. I thought diversity was our strength.

Like, stop putting black people into a position because they're black. I think Jeffers was always a bad choice. He was always a good. He has a charisma of a used condom. He is not good for that particular position. Say whatever you want about Nancy Pelosi. She understood the position. Yeah.

And she wielded it like an iron fits at times. Other times the velvet glove. This is not Rarok Pelosi, but I'm talking about from the standpoint of competence and efficiency. He is pointless. Well, as the resident black person on Deep Programme, I mean, how do you feel about the fact that establishmentarians constantly like to elevate lame black people at the expense of non-lame black people, right?

Like Condoleez-or-Ros. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's not like, meaning you could have found a black person to actually do the job with. Yeah, who'd be good at it, right? And there's plenty of. Right. So like, but you're choosing people who are sellouts each and every time.

And you're making us all look bad. But that's not a bug. That's a feature. Oh, for sure. That's a feature. Hey, who's the most mofo here? here that just so also happens to be black. Oh, Hakeem,

we need you to do this job. Right. They need you to do this job. Yeah, there are other people that can do that job. They should be a leadership challenge. Yeah, rock your inner Brooklyn here. Give me a break. I mean, it's sad, you know. Like, if you're really Brooklyn, you know, you don't need to work it.

Bernie's been a Vermonter for 50 years. He's still a Brooklynite. Yes. Yeah, you can hear it in a, Right. Yeah. Do he sounds? Do he talks?

Do we act? Yeah. The rough demeanor. How can Jeffries was lucky to even be elected to Congress? I mean, speaker or, you know, speaker apparent, that's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, well, I guess the catch becomes, do you think there's going to be a leadership challenge?

Because just because he's doing this now. That always weakens the party. Look at what happened with the Republicans, right? I mean, Johnson is such a weak speaker. And it's partly because of the, you know, the constant challenge. challenges and also that they you know he was that he but he overthrew what's his name um i just kept McCarthy McCarthy yeah yeah they never the republicans never kind of really i mean i should say congressional republicans never recovered from that it's i mean the the vacuum

that space has been filled by the executive branch as a result true but this space was always going to be filled by the executive branch yeah but it happened quicker that i mean yeah it's sort of like uh yeah what caused it i don't yeah but but it was a manifest it all happened at the same time. Yeah. I mean, the catch is, though, but if you only have like two or three difference between Democrats, you're always going to have someone a weak speaker, right? Or maybe I'm wrong with us.

Well, no, I'm wrong with it. That doesn't have to be true. The Democrats or the Republicans could be united around a particular figure. That doesn't matter one or two. No, you're right. You're right. It has historically happened. If you have a weak speaker.

If you need to give rid of a weak speaker, you need to give rid of a weak speaker. Hageen Jeffers is a weak speaker. Yeah, well, that's true. And the thing is that in the modern era, the Speaker of the House is also the, is one of the, or perhaps the de facto leader of the party. I mean, that's certainly the case now when the DNC is $2 million in debt and has nothing going on. And I mean, who could even name a single member of the DNC, right? I mean, so, I mean, and you don't have a Democratic president and there's no clear leader of the party. It would be, I mean, I got to say, who's the leader of the Democratic Party right now, I'd have to say it's Hackeem Jeffries.

Which is not good. Because I don't think anybody would say that. Right. I'm saying you're right because he's probably the most high profile Democrat. Yeah. But that's not good. That's not good. It's not Mr. McConnell.

It would have been at one point. But basically Mitch McConnell doesn't seem to even be phoning it in anymore. I mean, he's... I don't even know what he is. Yeah. I'm assuming he's still in a nurse of him. Maybe he's dead. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, sorry, I wasn't thinking of Mitch McConnell. I'm thinking of, what's his name? Chuck Schumer. That's who I was thinking of. Oh, Chuck Schum. But, yeah, Mitch McConnell may be dead. Yeah, I wasn't even thinking about him. But, yeah, Chuck Schumer, though, you know, he's phoning it in.

Yeah, the Palestinian in the Senate, according to Donald Trump. I wish. All right, so let's see. We have a few more. Maybe Bluth-Funk. Thanks for the dollar. The myth of American Accept. is foundational to the American narrative.

Removing it would be too destabilizing, right, the shining city on a hill. And we do not have a culture of reflection. We're in a gray gardens situation. I like the gray gardens comparison. It's a good point. I mean, but, you know, children got to grow up. I don't mean that as a pejorative. You mean, at the age of 250, it's time to fucking, you know, get out of the house

and get a job. How is China? How old is Persia? How is Russia? These are like thousand years old countries. Hell, even Britain is like over a thousand years. Yeah, Russia is what? Maybe 800 years old, basically. I thought it was over a thousand. I mean, because it comes out, I mean, yeah, it depends on how you measure. Yeah. But I guess my point is we're 250. Yeah. Yeah, we're now officially old enough to know better, I'd say. I don't know. Yeah, if you start with Rurik, because he's the one that made peace with the Eastern Romans and adopted Eastern Christianity and married a Byzantine princess. A lot of people, that's where they start Russia over the Kiev and Rus. So by that measurement, so like about 1100 years old.

Yeah, I just as a Macaugham. Well, that's why Crimea for them is so important. It's like Texas is for us. And that's literally where the Cyrillic alphabet comes from. That's where the religion comes from. It's where the idea of Rus even came from. rose from Crimea. That's why they would never give it up. Right. No, and it doesn't want to be given up, right?

They consider themselves as Russian. Yeah, they're Russian. They are Russian. Okay, so let's talk about... I don't have the excuses for us in the sense of saying they were young, but there were factors that allowed us to prosper in a way that we prosper. But, dude, reality is what it is. It's not about how you feel. I mean, I would love to have working kidneys.

I don't have to live either way. And America has to kind of come to terms with reality because you can't really change anything. I'm an alcoholic. I recognize I'm an alcoholic. And why do they say that so they can move forward from being alcoholics? Because it is what it. Yeah, you basically are like, it is what it is. I am what I am.

It is. Yeah. So Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu is saying it is saying something that like foreign leaders often say, which is our enemies are trying to kill us personally or this case, you know, so we had Bush say like, they tried to kill Iran, tried to kill my dad. Now it's like, that's how he said it. And now it's like, and now Netanyahu says Iran tried to kill one of his kids. No details about when this supposed plot took place. Which kid it was, he only has boys or how close it came.

He does have a kid who lives in Miami. So. I think he had a kid in the military also. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, I think, or at least he used to. So, I mean, you know, this is, I mean, I call bullshit on this, but no details. I don't believe you. I mean, and it's also like, I mean, it's sort of like, let's just say for the sake of argument, like, there was a thought about doing this.

Okay, well, first of all, Netanyahu, I love that the counterfeit. factual here. Like, oh, well, that crosses a line. Okay, I agree. It crosses a line. Obviously, it leaps way over a line. But so does blowing up the Supreme Leader of Iran with his entire fucking family, you know, in the same room, right? I mean, he killed, he slaughtered an entire family. And the current and his son, who's now the new leader, watched his dad and all these relatives get killed. But there's no talk about that. It's like, oh, boo-hoo, we're supposed to feel so sorry for you, but for this thing that may possibly have been something that the Iranians were scheming about, but may not have been. But like, you actually did kill them.

I mean, you know, according to Old Testament rules here, Robbie rules, I mean, the Iranians would have every right to kill his kid. Yeah, I don't understand his complaint, to be honest. Right. If he's, if one of those kids are AdiF soldier, then he's a baby killer. But a Why would I care if he gets killed? He put on the uniform. He's fair game. If they try to kill one of his other kids, again, I don't know why I would care. Nanyahu is a mass murderer.

And the idea that he is in one sense committing a genocide in Gaza is trying to do this same thing in Lebanon and is doing something very similar in southern Lebanon, not to mention the lunatic animals in Gaza or, let's say, in the West Bank, that Netanyahu is ostensibly under control of because the IDF effectively protects lunatic settlers as they go about deranged, degenerate behavior in the West Bank. Why on earth would I care? Now, he may be putting this in an Israeli audience, and Israeli audience may care because, again, they're also 80, 90 percent psychopaths. But, yeah, I agree with you. Why would anybody else care?

It's like, dude, you've been wiping out families. You've been taking out apartment complexes. And the argument that's coming out of Israel is they're effectively animals and dogs. So we shouldn't necessarily care about the number of people, women, children, babies, or anything else that we're effectively slaughtering. Okay. Well, even putting the slaughter aside, what about the rape in your prisons? Like, meaning the deranged, degenerate behavior is so expansive. that it's breathtaking for the guy at the head of that to complain about.

They tried to kill my kid, man. Did they? Did they? Oh, that's terrible. That's, boo. I will lose tenths of a second of sleep thinking about this. I am very sorry for you. Right, I'm very sorry.

I could recommend a good therapist. Yeah. Yeah, so sad to be you. By the way, just a little bit of housekeeping. So we accidentally posted the wrong merch URL on the site because it's not my fault. It's not tomorrow's fault. I won't say.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. There's no I-N-T. We did it. Yeah, okay, we. I'm a married man. You can blame me. It was the only married, the only married man on the deep program team, I am uniquely qualified to take...

No one else would have JT or me. You better watch what you say or not to get to trouble. Do you all hear it? You better watch what you say. Yeah, be careful. Be careful. Be careful. You hit the red line.

I always walk up to the red line. I always walk up there. And for those you who doubt it, Y'all just heard it. Yours truly is indeed married. She's showing handcuffs in the background. She's like, always.

She's right there. She's like, hear the handcuffs here, the dildo. Don't fuck up, Robbie. I will beat your white button. I don't see that.

I don't hear her, though. All right. So, listen, we have to, so the URL is actually, I've now posted like the wrong one twice. The last, Okay, so the actual URL is for the merch, which actually looks great.

Trent designed some very, a cool mug and three t-shirts. Go check them out. They are at my... They're at deprogram.m.myspreadshop. I'm not so comfortable with the name of My Spreadshop. It sounds vaguely suggestive and not in a good way. Dot com. So it's deprogram.com.

my spreadshop.com and we're going to be updating that. So the stuff that you see will not be up there forever. So if you want it, go get it. Get it now while you can. And I'm always suggestive. Suggestive of what? I don't know. Spreading? Like go ahead, you know, spreading your, I recently had to spread my ass cheeks for that surgery. So, you know, it's like I'm still sensitive about this thought. Fair enough. It's like, that shit was traumatic. It was. I mean, oh my God, it hurt like crazy. But it some, I mean, I have to admit, I was so looking, do you ever have a search of a thing? You probably have way too much medical shit for this to be true about you. But every now and then, like, I'm like, oh, like, I have something like I want removed.

And it like, like, like, they're freezing off a wart or something and it's hurting. And I'm like, oh, yeah, that's it. Like, that's it. Like, that's it. Like, make it really hurt because that means it's leaving like fuck you you're out no i don't know okay all right that's just that's just okay all right deprogram dot my spread shop dot com go check out that merch okay i'll leave that up for a while um okay we have a few um let's see a man child uh the mob craves incompetent uh incompetent confidence um let's see uh hakeem means wise it says anarchist sody show i love names People so often have the worst names. Unless Akeem Jeffries is a wise ass.

Does Jeffries mean ass in Scottish or something? I have no idea with that what Jeffries means. P.W. Walker, come on. Jeffrey's rapping through the alphabet was peak. He was wrapping through the alphabet. No, he was. I'll leave it to you to go watch it. You should go watch it.

We can talk about it tomorrow. He did that? Wait, wait, wait, he did that? I'm not commenting. Okay. Oh, holy shit, there's no way. No comment. Netanyahu, so all right, so enough of stuff like that.

Wait, wait, wait, we can't just leave that. God, man, he's making a parody of himself. Why does a black man need to wrap in order to show his blackness? No, it's ridiculous. Well, also, why is he in front of the projects, right? That too, which, I mean, he's making millions. I don't even think he drives by the projects. Never.

Never. Yeah. That's amazing. That's amazing. Because what it means is I need to show my black bona fides. I'm hood. I'm street. Right.

It's like, dude, why do you need to do that? Just be. Well, it's so, it's so stupid politician. It's like how, I mean, you see it to some extent with people. Like Hillary Clinton, you know, like assuming like a hokey, like, you know, she'll have like a blacky voice if she's in front of a black church or, you know, or when she was in Arkansas, she'd try to contrify her voice. You know, Bush, the whole thing was a schick, right?

He had a Connecticut accent. And then he lost his first race for Congress or whatever it was. And he literally said, with God is my witness, I will never be out-cuntrified again. And every now and then you hear. George W. Bush, like, laps into, you know, sort of Connecticut, Yankee speak and catch himself. And, you know, Obama certainly changes his voice all the time. I mean, so they, I mean, Trump's always Trump. I don't think he knows how to, he doesn't know how to, he wouldn't know how to code switch

in any way, shape, or form, right? He can't. Wow. That's just amazing. That's amazing. I watched it, but that's amazing. Yeah. Well, yeah, anyway. Okay.

All right, so let's talk about the midterm elections. So Trump has a hard-on for mail-in ballots. The Supreme Court basically said, okay, you can continue with this attempt to rein it in. But basically what happened was the states that are already starting to mail out their first. It's August 25th. The election is way less than two months from now. the various state secretaries of state are having to mail out mail in battle it's especially because

people travel for election day and there's many states where the ballots have to be received by election day in the mail the males aren't that fast anymore so there's some some of these ballots are being mailed out like in a week so the states sued early to try to get some clarity from the supreme court about whether this would actually be true or not Basically, what the Trump administration wants them to do is to check all mail-in ballots against a national register to be maintained by the Department of Homeland Security of all registered voters. This despite the fact that elections are not administered by the federal government under our constitutional system. So the Supreme Court did not rule on the constitutionality of this, but basically the Supreme Court did say, well, you guys sued too early on a technicality. And so we're going to have to kick this can down the road.

But the states were trying to sue now so that they could fucking figure out what the fuck they're supposed to do. You know, this was kind of like a practical thing. So we're heading into a situation where within two or three weeks, by the time that the Supreme Court gets around to ruling on whether the elections can be federalized in this respect and controlled by the post office, which is controlled by a Trump political hack postmaster general, the ballots will already be in the mail and things are going to start to look dicey. And we don't really know what the Supreme Court is going to do here. I mean, constitutionally, it's really crystal clear. But it's also, you know, they've ruled against the Constitution a number of ways in favor of Trump recently. You know, not.

So it's kind of like, what is this really about? I mean, yeah, it's going to sow all sorts of confusion. Obviously, there's very few people. who vote. This is not about ballot integrity. This is not about preventing illegals from voting because they don't vote in significant numbers. So what is it? I mean, I've got to think that this is all a predicate to creating such a confused situation that this will provide more of an excuse for the administration to argue that the elections should be nullified because they're not going go the administration's way.

I think a few things are taking place. Do you remember the Heritage Foundation? I can't think of his name, but there's a famous video where he basically says, I don't want everybody to vote. Elections aren't won by the side with the most voters. Yeah. They're won by the people who get to the voting booth. And I don't need everybody to do that because I effectively want to win.

Basically, if the Republican Party wants to win elections, then don't get out of this mindset of we want everybody to vote. You need the people to vote who will vote for you, which is basically what he vote on this point. And if you think of it, this has been Republican playbook with the, I mean, the entire point of the Voting Rights Act, right? It was because they didn't want certain groups to vote.

And even now, this idea of voter IDs and all of this other stuff that they would bring up. In one case, I think it was in Ohio, you could have a gun license, but a student license wouldn't necessarily work. It's like, okay, well, that's kind of weird. Why wouldn't my student license be okay? Or why wouldn't my other form of ID be okay, but a gun license?

Okay, who's most likely going to have gun licenses? Well, right. Like I'm gun licenses. I mean, this was playbook. It's been playbook. How do we keep people from the voting rolls? And even that stupid plan that they had where they were like comparing last names in order to figure out whether or not they were going to allow the vote to go through.

Okay, all of this stuff was nonsense. All of this stuff was how do we get our people to vote and prevent their. even if it's by two percentage points because an election can be decided by two percentage points. And now you get Trump, who's in the position of authority, who's trying to assert powers that he doesn't have. It's not up for the federal government. If you want to pass a law that says, okay, we're changing the voting system in the United States, where this is now oriented around the federal, you can do that. Well, actually, you couldn't.

It would be unconstitutional. Why can't you make an amendment? You'd have to amend the Constitution. Right. You amend the Constitution. I guess that's my point. If you're going to do it, do it right. He is trying to do an in run around this and effectively saying a list that is most likely inaccurate. Right. Almost certainly. By which you decide whether a person is eligible to vote.

So you are telling me that that list is 320 million Americans and every last American is on that list. I don't believe you. Well, I mean, look, I have spent a lot of time talking to Greg Pallist. He was the author of The Best Democracy of Money Can Buy. I've worked on a couple of books with him, and I know all about, like, he's told me all about all the tricks, mainly Republicans. Democrats have some, too, that they use for voter suppression. And they're amazing.

You know, and there's stuff like, okay, so, I mean, in fairness, there's a lot of things about the American system of voting that really doesn't make sense. For example, if I move, if you move, you don't have to notify your former board of elections that you no longer live there. You still are on the rolls. You could show up on election day and drive to your old district and vote in both places. I mean, you know, if you got caught, it's a felony, you shouldn't do that. But you could do that pretty easily, administratively. Most people just don't. And And the thing is also the voting records are not identified discreetly, for example, through a social security number or national ID because we don't have that.

So, you know, John Smith born on January 1st, 1970, you know, is hard to distinguish from another John Smith born, you know, on the same day. And that and so on, right? They're comparing signatures. In many cases, you don't show ID. You show, you know, you just sign. And it's like, well, people's signatures change. And also the old lady at the voting booth at the polling station isn't a handwriting, you know, analysis expert, right?

So there's a lot of things that are kind of dumb that way. And when people die, they stay on the rolls. That's why the Republicans make hay like, oh, there's people who are 160 years old. Yeah, but they're not voting. And nobody's trying to vote under their name, right? But it is not a great system. I mean, it is kind of stupid in many ways. If they want to change it, change it.

If you want to make it more transparent, make it more transparent. But the thing is the caging thing, so they do stuff like caging. So they'll be like, okay, so we want to make sure there's a lot of states where felons can't vote. Which, by the way, I think that's outrageous. I think felons should totally be able to vote. Like, so you're still a citizen, you know. So, you know, I mean, why shouldn't a felon be allowed to vote? But the point is they're not allowed to.

And so they'll be like, oh, so, you know, they know that a disproportionate number of people rotting in prison or who are felons are people of color. They think most of them are Democrats, so or likely to be Democrat. That may or may not be true, but they think that. So they run the list of all the names and they do a side-by-side comparison, right? And so everybody with, you know, they compare the felon names to the registered voter names. And they just automatically purge everyone's name who compares to the first. name, right? So let's just say you have a very common name in, like, let's say a very common black name. Well, so all those people in that state get purged. And then they show up to vote.

And it's like, oh, well, don't worry, you can fill out a provisional ballot, right? It never gets rid. It's never counted. It's the only time provisional ballots are counted is if you were in a Bush v. Gore-type recount situation, then they would eventually go to the provisional ballots. But they just sit in a box sort of like. Like, you know, there's not enough of them to change the results, so therefore we don't count them. And they do that. There's so many, like, fucking games they pull like that. Even if the birth dates are different, they don't care.

You know, it's like, they could be, like, off by 20 years. I mean, yeah, they're, I mean, it's interesting. It is funny because on the one hand, I don't think voting makes any difference. But on the other hand, man, they sure play a lot of games to stop people from voting. Right. If it didn't make a difference, then they wouldn't do these games. I think what the point is. It's about the illusion.

It's about maintain the illusion because if... I mean, I view that the illusion is important, but I'm also making a point of saying that the illusion matters. It's got... Have you ever watched the movie, Dave, where the president has, there was a guy that... Oh, I've always wanted to watch that. Is it good? It's okay.

But the point that the movie is making... it is true. If you think of Dave as voting, and you can say, well, Dave doesn't ultimately matter. Dave is a stand-in for it. But the key point is, if the American public actually got engaged, they could use the device. They just don't. They could, but I mean, this kind of goes back to what we're talking about yesterday. I mean, the American people is, they're too depressed, they're too demotivated, they're too drugged up to actually take a stand and take back the power that they gave away. I mean, to your point, we 100% could corporately stand up and say, no more.

We're done with this. Boomer go home. We could 100% make that happen. And the way to make that happen without violence would be the voting system. I agree. But I agree that it's pointless. I mean, this is theater. The whole reason why the federal government, you know, Trump and everyone else goes out and they do all this stuff about voting.

is because they are trying to convince the few people that still believe that the institution is solid, that it still matters. That's why. That's why they're doing this. I mean, really what we need to do, if we're going to change the Constitution, if we abolish the 17th Amendment, that would go an awfully long way to restoring actual power to the states and bring back a federal system. Until we get to that point, then this matters, because you have, because you have, you have. 100, we have 100 miniature presidents and then one guy who's just a little bit above the rest of them. And nothing ever gets done because they're all paid by the same corporate backers. I mean, even federal system, you still get governor. And you're assuming that the governor would necessarily just take over the role in the same way of the president now.

That's true. Just to be a smaller area. I mean, look, just to be very clear from my point of view, I don't think they do this for no reason. I think part of it is theater. but I think part of it is also they want legitimacy because that is what the vote confers. And if they can somehow mingle it in a way where it still looks like they're legitimate, they want to do that. The legitimacy matters.

Sure. And to your point, if you stop the voting thing, then you're in a world of shit. So I agree with the theatrics, the actrics matters. If it asks me, why do I think Trump is going through all of this? Yeah, I agree with you, Ted. I think it's so confusion. I don't know if it's to nullifference. the elections is dangerous.

I would just say that. If that's what Trump's game is, well, I'm going to create all of this confusion. I'm going to create chaos. I'm going to do all of this. And then at the end of it, I'm going to nullify elections. That is a civil war.

Yeah. You don't believe me. You don't think that's true. Oh, I don't believe it's true. I've 100. And I think that we are well on our way. I think as when people figure out, and I think there's something to be measurable,

we already have record high numbers of people who don't engage. Yes. When that number increases, like say 80% of the total population and no longer votes, that's when you know that the gig is up. And at that point, the government's going to start making some other decisions about removing the facade of democracy and actually installing a strong man. It's like kind of like what Bassett was saying yesterday. You talk about, well, we're not going to prosecute anyone on the Epstein list.

We're not worried about that. If you were concerned about what the electorate thought, you had never, as a high-ranking official in the administration, come out and say that because you're saying that the rule of law does not matter to us. It may matter to you, Joe citizen, but doesn't matter to us. Our priorities are completely different. Trump said the exact same thing about Argentina. Argentina's dying.

Well, I'm sorry, Mr. Trump. I thought you're president of the United States, It's not Argentina. Could you please explain to me where your legancies lie? That's the point that I'm trying to make here is that when people figure this out, that's when this train goes off the rails finally. And the United States, then there's not to look in the mirror as a corporately, as a nation said and determined, are we going to be one unified nation anymore or are we going to fragment because you can't have both.

Either you have rule of law or you have law of the jungle. If you're right, Ted, this is going into fuckery. Yeah, it's serious fuckery. I mean, because you're right. It's going massive confusion. I did. You're doing this a couple of months

before the election is insane. And the idea of the Supreme Court that I don't know why for the life of me, anybody looks at the Supreme Court as an impartial actor that blows my mind that people still do that. Not now. I hope not ever, maybe, but not now. Definitely not now.

At one point maybe. Hell, no, not now. I mean, you know, even just the way that, you know, it was a tradition up until the time when I was a little kid that if a Supreme Court justice who was viewed as, let's say, as ideologically aligned with either liberals or conservatives were to die or return, retire, that they would be replaced with someone similar, regardless of what the ideology of the president was. So I remember, you know, like, let's, I'm pretty sure Nixon had a vacancy to fill.

And some liberal, like, died. And he nominated a liberal to replace him because that was the way you did back then. Just the fact that that's changed, for example, and that it's been weaponized. It's just, I mean, you know, obviously it's got. and really extreme. I mean, the Supreme Court ruling that says that Trump has basically almost blanket immunity as president to do anything he wants, which, by the way, I just, I don't really read it that way. That's certainly the way he reads it. That's why he's involved in all the crypto grifts and all that stuff. But, you know, even just the fact that the Supreme Court hasn't

felt it hasn't been compelled to make a public statement, sort of just saying, by the way, or issue like a, you know, a clarification. By the way, we didn't really mean you can do anything you want. We just met like your official acts as president. You have immunity while you're president. And after that, you don't. But, you know, I mean, it's basically a blank check. It's, it's pretty, it's really extreme. It's not really a blank check. It's, it's, our government just works on good faith and kind of like French. But we don't have, when, When good faith is in absentia. I mean, did you see that thing I posted in the live chat in the chat this morning,

the deportation bus graphic? Okay. Let me see if I can put this up. I'm pretty sure I can. But just to make a point, the good faith, I mean, just like the French in the Second World War, when they went charging the Germans with machine guns, they were working on military doctrine. The military doctrine was the way they looked at the world in regards to the military. They got it wrong and they got killed for it.

I'm saying we work on good faith, which is insane that we continue to work on good faith. From the Supreme Court's point of view, if you want to take out the president, you have impeachment. That is your metric for doing so. Okay, but again, the Congress is full of idiots and corrupt psychopaths who are completely beholden to Trump. They're never going to do it regardless of what Trump does. So it's like the remedy for it exists and the Supreme Court things that on us to do it. You can take them out. Okay, so this went out on the official X account of your president of the United States.

This morning. The magic deportation bus. What's magic about it? Well, I mean, so there's the kids all locked up in the back. And there's like a, I mean, basically it's like 1970s, early 80s, you know, Saturday morning cartoon artwork, obviously generated by AI, obviously by some 24-year-old. on their staff, who, and it's basically like, look, we're deporting everybody. They're making fun of deporting children. They think that's funny.

I mean, they were making fun of murdering people with drones. I mean, when Donald Trump murdered all those people at the religious ceremony in Yemen, he put it on his sex account and was like, hey, ain't this funny? Like, he was making jokes about murder. And from my point of view, the market public should look at this with a certain amount of horror. It's just, I mean, even if you're totally, look, everyone here is in favor of strong borders. Yes. And I think, you know, certain people should be deported.

I don't think kids should be very high on that list. But the point is that, like, there's nothing fun or funny about it. It's not cool. And it's like making fun of these people is it's vicious. It's cruel. It is. You know, I think the Republic see it that way. Well, because I'll tell you why Trump's doing this.

He knows that he's losing the Iran war. He's bogged out in Ukraine. He's got a crap ton of problems. He's pissed off the base by bailing out Argentine farmers by flooding the country with cheap Argentine beef. Because his buddy Malay is such a complete failure that his country is falling apart. And so what he's doing is he's trying to change. He's just trying to change the conversation. That's what they're doing this.

Joe's not deporting people. I know, my thing is, whether this is true or false, meaning from Sam, what the graphics are trying to convey, you think that the public would be horrified by it. The style. It's the style. It's the tone. It's the temperament. It's the president of the United States.

This is the official government-paid web account of the White House, you know, the People's House. the people's house. If you're more interested, if you're more worried about how you're going to pay your rent next month, do you honestly think that you're going to be scrolling your life, you're going to be looking at the X feed of the White House? The answer is no. True. Sure.

Yeah, I'll give you that. So I mean, that's why. What this is, this is for the punituary. This is for the talking head class like us. Oh, look what Trump did. To try and try to get us to talk about deportations, which, by the way, he's, not even doing properly to distract from his actual real failures that are directly impacting the everyday people here in the country.

Well, let's talk about another weird thing because we only got a few minutes left. So Prime Minister of Great Britain, Andy Burnham, now says that the U.S., sorry, the U.K., which is basically the U.S., will help Ukraine make its own missiles, long-range missiles, not that it'll really make a difference for any time soon. But they're going to give them classified technical information for British components so that they can do this. Is that weird to you, Jamar? It is to me, given the fact that Ukraine is ranked like number like 137th by Transparency

International and is like a notoriously corrupt country where many of the weapons that we sent them ended up for sale on the dark web. and have turned up in war zones around the world. I mean, do you really give a country that, I mean, you definitely can't trust the Ukrainians not to sell this tech to the highest bidder? I mean, why would we do that? What do you mean, why would we do that?

Well, I mean, why would the Brits slash the Americans decide to give the UKEs this shit? They're desperate. They're about to lose a war on a massive level. And this war, from the world's perspective, is going to be seen as NATO failed. NATO lost. For every bit as existential as it is for the Russians from the standpoint of NATO as an organization. What does NATO mean if NATO can't win a war, not even against all of the combined Soviet Union, but against Russian individual?

They are desperate. And as you point out, it's not going to matter in the least. with all the problems that Britain have at their disposal, the idea that Burnham come on and then basically take a Kier-Starmor move is the height of absurdity. For one, good luck on Ukraine trying to get the parts and the pieces to even make those, considering their ports are blocked. Two, if it gets to the point where Russia starts to cut off the ability for Poland to transport items into the country, good luck on even giving the materials to even make these.

The UK can do whatever it wants. This is going to have no effect in real terms. Even those dumb flamingo missiles are being shut down, left and right. So they can do it. I don't know how they're going to get the missile guidance to get from point A to point B. I'm very skeptical about whether or not this actually has any legs to it ultimately. So we'll see. I mean, they may try to do it, but they're desperate.

They are fundamentally desperate. Ukraine is blocked off. It's being destroyed by Lansing Air. their ports are completely blocked, or at the very least predominantly, if not 99% blocked. They're being surrounded on the ground militarily with Kromatour Slavians being surrounded, and more to the point even when Russia takes Dunbass. They're still going after regions of Sophrosia, et cetera, et cetera. Many, these are areas on the battlefield that Ukraine has no capacity to stop the Russians from advancing on.

And, of course, by air, Kiev is getting hit. nightly with no capacity to defend anything, meaning any missile. Russia can send up a paper airplane and it will hit a warehouse to devastating effect. Yeah, it is. Yeah, screwed. They're desperate. I think this is. With that, we will be back tomorrow, 9 a.m. Eastern Time, as we are Monday through Friday, 9 to 10 a.m.

Eastern time. Thanks for liking, following, and sharing the show. We appreciate your support. Check out the new Patreon page, which I put the URL up before. and I'll put it up again tomorrow. See you later. Stay tuned for TMI with me in Manila. Bye.

Happy going, guys.