Some More News - Even More News: Supreme Court OKs Racial Gerrymandering (As Long As You Pretend It's Not That)

Episode Date: May 1, 2026

Hi. Ken Klippenstein joins Katy, Cody, and Jonathan to talk about the Supreme Court effectively overturning the Voting Rights Act, the White House Correspondents' Dinner suspect, Janet Mills dropping out of the Maine Senate Race, and what got cut out of Donald Trump's "60 Minutes" interview.PATREON: https://patreon.com/somemorenewsMERCH: https://shop.somemorenews.comYOUTUBE MEMBERSHIP: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvlj0IzjSnNoduQF0l3VGng/joinMother’s Day is Sunday, May 10th and bouquets are selling out fast. To claim your Double Roses offer before they’re gone, visit 1800Flowers.com/NEWSSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Hi, on today's episode, we talk about the Supreme Court, tearing apart the Voting Rights Act, the political leanings of the White House correspondent dinner suspect, and Janet Mills bowing out of the main Senate race with Ken Klippenstein. Hello and welcome back to even more news, the first and only news podcast. My name's Katie Stoll. That's right. Don't look it up. You can look up, Katie Stoll. That's fine. Just the show and stuff.

I'm Cody. Hi. Hello. Hi, Cody. Hello. Very exciting guest with us today, everybody. A journalist who wrote for The Intercept and the Nation and who now writes for his own clip news, it's Ken Clippenstein.

Hey, guys, happy to keep the, the CK sound going here for the people on the show. And Jonathan is also here. And Jonathan is also here. Hi, yes. Jonathan, have you ever considered changing your name to like Cade or Colin? Just getting rid of the entire sound and cadence of my name and just going with Cade. Collinthin. We'll workshop this.

You know what? Jonathan, your name's good. Don't let anybody make you feel bad about that. There's one thing you should know about our show is that our fans love Jonathan and there's There's only respect And there's nothing we can do about it There's nothing we can do about it We've tried

The J brand that stands out There's some contrast there You know it's gonna stop it's gonna stop the scroll Before we dive into the news Ken How's it going? How are you doing? Mandeling all of this

We were joking off camera before we started I feel like Gilligan on the island Like jumping up and down And being like hey over here Try to look And I've been doing increasingly debasing things to try to draw attention To things like NSPM 7

So I'm glad that that shows like yours actually do pay attention to it. I don't have to... Thank you. Don't have to make a big show about it. Yeah. Yeah. We were just saying, we're all so impressed by Ken's work here.

And it does feel as though you're routinely... Not feel. You are routinely putting out vitally important information that nobody else is getting. You're doing the hard work of, you know, getting the FOIA requests and getting information that is vitally important and nobody pays attention. It just goes over that. No, I really appreciate it. No, it's not entirely fair my criticism

because independent media is fantastic about it. I don't have any problem getting invited to shows. It's just like the kind of legacy outlets don't seem to give it the attention that it deserves. It's totally normal to just classify as domestic terrorists, anyone who is anti-capitalism or has hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family.

Or who aren't Christian? Or who aren't Christian. Even when they are, it's very obvious that they, anyway. In case you're watching this and you're like, the guest just praised a thing for them covering and I have no idea what they're talking about. That's what we're talking about. NSPM 7 is their thing now. We'll get more into it later in the episode and explain what we're talking about and why it's important to know about. I think a lot of our listeners

They Oh yeah they get it You know what we're talking about But before we get to that We have to address The most recent breaking news Which is SCOTUS's Gunning of the Voting Rights Act

Jonathan, why don't you set us up More upholding of the Voting Rights Act If you want to take Samuel Alito's word for it But no No I don't either In a six to three rules They're saying that Louisiana was actually, if you think about it, kind of discriminating against white people when courts tried to force them to have two majority minority districts to reflect the fact that one third of Louisiana's residents are black. Samuel Alito wrote that that's an unconstitutional racial gerrymander because they were just the original map that shoved everyone into one district.

which would be a Democratic district and all the others would be Republican, that's just partisan gerrymandering, which is fine and that you have to prove intent to discriminate by race. And it's just kind of oopsie-dazy just so happens that Louisiana is very racially polarized and that white people tend to vote Republican

and black people tend to vote Democrat. So the intent was to do a partisan gerrymander and it just so happens to racially discriminate. and then Elena Kagan in her dissent pointed this out that the basis should be what is the effect of this, not what is the intent,

even though the intent is kind of bad. Well, we know the intent, but it's harder to prove the intent. But again, just a lot of logistical pretzling by the Supreme Court to do the thing that we knew they were going to do that they wanted to do for a long time and effectively gutting the voting Rights Act in that it's going to be impossible to prove that you're doing a racially based

gerrymander unless someone is dumb enough to say it, which they might. They're pretty dumb. I mean, these days, I feel like the president, yeah, he comes out and openly says things. They probably shouldn't imperiling his court cases. There might be a true social post that just gives it all away, yeah. Yes, unless somebody happens to say the right combinations, which could be the president saying of words that brings this issue up, sure, but I think we've seen the president blatantly admit to things left and right, and it doesn't seem to move the needle or matter at all,

at least with the makeup of Congress being as it is. This is just depressing. It's not a surprise. It's one of those not so slow motion trains that we've seen coming. It's wild to see the architecture that has existed for the legal architecture of like, you know, this is civil rights era stuff. like, just like Roe v. Wade just like melt away. And it's like clearer that we're going to have to establish a different architecture. But then you look at where the Congress is at. And it's like they

won't even fight for the stuff that's there, much less this new vision that needs to happen. Yeah. So much work has to be done. And then work has to be done before that work is done too. And they're just not prepared to meet that moment, it seems. Obviously in certain places, California and Virginia already voted to kind of push back on the redistricting thing. Like, okay, if you're going to play by these rules, we're going to play by them too. And it does seem like this is another event that is making more and more people wake up that we're going to have to go farther, like into the depths before we get a national gerrymandering ban. And that's only going to happen once Republicans are convinced that it won't help them anymore.

the Congressional Black Caucus is calling for a vote on the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. But the fact of the matter is is that any legislation that Congress passes, the Supreme Court could just, you know, find a way to say like, nah. And there's no reason to believe that they wouldn't at this point is the other part of that. Because, I mean, they've gone rogue here. you know, they're bucking what Congress has established and setting a new set of rules here. And the Supreme Court in the 80s, by the way, which said unanimously, I think, that if the effect is racial discrimination, that's enough. But we call it, they updated the Gingles framework because they have. Well, it's like whatever the name of the case was for years ago.

Engels framework. Yeah. Well, yeah, we got an hour on the gingles framework. Oh, yeah. Well, it's part one of our three hour. Yeah, yeah. Gingles. Episode, check that out.

I mean, there's not even a pretense anymore of pretending that the GOP would want to court minority voters, I guess. Well, what if they got to lose? What if they got to lose? That's the phrase. That's the thing. They get to lose. Yeah.

Oh, what if they get to lose? Yeah. They're also, you know, they're always all over the place with the gerrymandering issue. The whole, we've talked about this before, just the whole Republican apparatus not being honest about it. They got their marching orders. I saw. I'm going to read three tweets from you from three different Republican people. Oh, good.

Sounds fun. Yeah, it's really great. We have tweets. Yay. We love tweets. This, I don't even know this person. I love that we still call them tweets. I appreciate that.

Yeah, well, what else would we call them? What are they? Now, X's posts? I don't know. It's just called them posts. They don't know. So many employees there refer to them as tweets and retweets. Like somebody's complaining about a function like, well, if you're going to quote tweet it, what do you mean if you're going to quote tweet it?

You worked at X. What are you talking about? Quote X? Oh. Yeah. It's absurd. Okay. Tweet number one, must be exhausting for Democrats to support gerrymandering in Virginia one week, then oppose it after a scotist decision the next week.

Here's another tweet from Nancy Mace. Must be exhausting to champion racial gerrymandering one week, only to discover it offends you the next week. Here's a tweet from Scott Jennings. Must be exhausting to be for gerrymandering one week and against it the next week. Everybody sounds like bots. Isn't it weird that like after Ashley St. Clair revealed? Oh yeah, they have these like giant text threads where the messaging goes out.

That those texts are not including, hey, mix up the language a little bit so that they don't know. Put it through chat GPT and say change the language. Yeah, I put this through. chat GPT to make it. You can't do that to make it a little different. Just to personalize it. Yeah. Yeah, it's like the spam emails you get.

It's, I remember reading when it's like, how is this still broken English? This is like one good use case for AI. Right. There's a tool now where after you get your chat GPT text, you can put it in and it'll mess up a few things so that you, that does. Are you kidding? Stop. No, I can't remember what it's called.

But it's like, like, Sculpify or something. You know. Humanify your chatchy BT language. To make it look just shitty enough so that a human could do it. Oh, God. Well, we're in hell. That's cool. Scott Jennings, we got to him so quickly this time.

Usually it takes 40 minutes to bring that up. Yeah. Okay. He's that guy so bad. This is resulting in a lot of immediate shuffling in the South. Louisiana's putting their house primary where votes are already being cast on pause so they can redraw the map. That feels that it shouldn't be legal to try to change things right now at this stage of the game.

To cancel elections? No, it doesn't feel like that should be legal. Cancel an election that's going on. Florida wants to go from a six to five map to ten to one. And they literally, they could put it to a vote, I guess, but they literally have a law in Florida called like the Fair Districts Act. They voted in 2010 specifically to not draw a map. to favor or disfavor any political party. It's so clear.

It's so explicit. Like you couldn't. The language couldn't be more direct. And maybe the Florida Supreme Court will just be like, yeah, he can do that. You know, like it doesn't matter anymore. Just in general, I think you're seeing, I mean, we talked a lot about this war, not popular. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.

They're going to continue. You're going to see more and more of stuff that is unpopular, that even with their base. and I'm not saying that their base isn't happy about this to some extent. But it doesn't matter if Florida already has a law, they're going to do it anyway. The will of the people is irrelevant at this point. I still feel hopeful about midterms. I still think that there is a ground swell. I still think that it's not going to be good for the GOP.

Yeah. I mean, there's a reason they're trying to do all this stuff before the midterms because they know that it's going to not be easy for them. But to what, you know, you guys Ken brought up earlier, you know, creating a new architecture, a new framework. I wish I had faith in the Democratic Party to step up to the plate. You know, there are so many things. The list keeps getting longer of things that need to be fixed once they regain power. And I don't have faith.

I don't that they will do. requires political will. Yeah. There has to be such a massive, cohesive effort from the Democrats to address all of these things. And they just, I mean, because. Although in terms of the germany thing, they have actually shown a little bit of bite, which is a little heartening. But it's just there's so many things across the board that they need to show that they have the same sort of attack mode as this.

because there are too many, too many fires. Maddie Glacius says we should just only focus on anti-Trump messaging. No, only that. Sorry, I know. You're really fired up about the C. You hate that tweet so much. No, it's just, it's just so representative of this moment and our lack of leadership and the inability to read the room and understand what people desperately want and need.

We're fucking done with this. bullshit. We need bold moves. We need health care for people. We need to be addressing people's actual quality of life issues. And then all of a sudden, all the people that don't vote will show up. But they're just going to keep doing the same old song and dance. They can boldly say that Trump is bad.

Yeah, they could boldly say that. They'd be right. He is. A winning strategy for one moment in time only. I want to read Iglesias's tweets. talking about this. Oh, good. Just to, you know.

No one's ever said that, but okay. The one thing every smart elected official that I talk to agrees with is that Democrats can't just be anti-Trump. They also need a strong affirmative vision. And honestly, I am very skeptical of this. And then another one, Trump is fantastically unpopular. I think that if you could convince people that electing Democrats would be a victory for narrow anti-Trumpism that cleaned up corruption, that's more compelling than big policy change.

What are you talking about? Everyone's like healthcare, please. But whatever. You already have the anti-Trump vote. That's a bag. It works sometimes. It doesn't work all the time. So add something else to the box of tricks.

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Claim your double roses offer before they are gone. And visit 1-800flowers.com. News. That's 1800flowers.com slash news. We should talk a little bit more about the White House Correspondence dinner suspect. Can you have been on top of this? You've talked to people who knew him or know him. He's still alive. And the more and more we're finding out he was a much more moderate liberal type

than some sort of extremist or weather underground type. that obviously they would like him to be. Yeah, they wanted to be Antifa. Yeah, but you talked to like a bunch of people. What did you find out about him specifically? Yeah, I talked to people that knew him from his time being a tutor for students in like math and science. And also people that knew him when he was at Caltech, the elite science and engineering school in Pasadena, his former classmates. And it was striking because it bore no resemblance to what the

Trump administration I've been saying. So I'll go down the list here. One of the first things Trump said in several different interviews was this guy was motivated by his hatred. That was the word he used, hatred of Christians and Christianity, which, you know, echoed in my mind is Trump's National Security Directive, NSPM 7, in which he defines speech-based predictors of future acts of terrorism as being in part anti-Christian sentiment. And so I don't know if that's what's ricocheting around in Trump's head, if he's trying to. you know, bolster the case that he made in that directive, or I don't know what's going on, but he said that. And I looked at the manifesto that the attempted assassin put out or has been

reported. And what's amazing is there's like four separate references to Christianity. And he's contextualizing the entire act as a Christian act. And he's like quoting scripture. Like this is heavy theological stuff that he's writing in that. And when I talked to his former classmates at Caltech, they said that this was a longstanding thing that Christianity was central to his life and his personality. So there's absolutely zero evidence that he was anti-Christian. And what's more, there's a ton of evidence that he was extremely Christian. So that didn't bear out. And then also, like you said, this idea that he's some, you know, Symbionese Liberation Army, like 1970s radical or something. You can go through some of his cash social media posts on

Blue Sky, his Twitter posts as well. And just based on my conversation with his friends, that is absolutely not the case. He criticized the Democrats bitterly saying he wanted Schumer pushed out. And I counted three different occasions he called for there to be a third party created. It's absolutely true that he was motivated by animus towards Trump and the Republican Party in the administration. But a part of the story that's been completely left out is that he also didn't like the Democratic Party leadership. And if you look at attitudes, that's generally the case. Trump is very unpopular,

but so is Democratic Party leadership. So he's actually way more towards just kind of an average guy in a lot of ways. Like his education and level of intelligence, as described to me from people that knew him, was certainly above average, but his political attitudes were not off the spectrum at all. I think he probably held a lot of liberal views on things,

but to say that he's some card-carrying Democrat, that's just not true. Part of what was interesting to me in your piece, peace and this moment in time in general is this transition that seems to have happened in this man's life. You talk about how he was a part of the Nerf Club and was really against the militarization of Nerf guns. You know, and getting into conflicts within that community just saying there's no need to, you know, make your weapons look like real guns. This is fun. And that somewhere this has shifted.

for him. And I think we can look around and see it happening. You know, pick any number of examples of moments that could radicalize a person. And, you know, we see it with Luigi Maggioni and, you know, these extreme actions taken by relatively normal people. And people are getting radicalized. And it's terrifying. And nobody's really paying attention to it is my point. Like you're quick to say this is extremism. Yeah, it's really self-serving on the part of the establishment because then they don't have to take responsibility for the political climate that they preside over. They can just say, oh, it was some guy I had schizophrenia. I mean, Trump is literally going on television and saying, oh, this is some sick guy who had some deep seed of problems.

I couldn't find anyone who had anything negative to say about him. And everyone I talked to was horrified by it and thought, but they were shocked. They said, I don't see how the guy I knew could have done something like this. Nobody could understand that. And this is radically different from the psychological profile of a shooter at any point before. It's usually, you know, like a loner, someone spends a lot of time online or, you know, a young, downwardly mobile young man is isolated from a community. This is guys the exact opposite of all of that. And so was Mangione, another very well-educated person who I interviewed his former friends, too, couldn't find a negative word about him.

And I really tried. I'm not cherry-picking. I get all these angry people on social media that are like, oh, you're glorifying. No, I'm literally, this is literally what I couldn't find anything derogatory about him. And so in a way, that's more alarming than if it was just some fringe person, because there's only so many fringe people. On the other hand, people with this set of attitudes, there's a whole lot more of them. And if it's that broad, that's a systemic failure of the system. And I think what these different shooters have in common is the sense that the political system is not

responsive to them and they even say in the manifesto of the shooter we're talking about now he said well it feels like there's no other way it feels like no one else is doing picking up the slack as he put it and here's the thing you know most people are not going to undertake an act of violence i certainly don't believe in that but can anyone look me in the eye and tell me oh yeah the system it'll work if you just engage the system i couldn't tell someone that with a stray face so the question to me is how do we make it so the system is a place that people want to bring their grievances to, instead of feeling like they have to do something like this. And that's something that nobody wants to talk about because it indicts the entire system.

Yeah. And it's truly the only question that people should be asking if they want to address the very real reality of political violence in this country and how it's ramping up. It's because people feel hopeless. And there's no recourse. And as we've already established, it doesn't really matter what the people want, what they vote for, because the people in charge are going to do what they want to do and protect the system at all costs. And I'm saying that about both parties. And there is a sense of desperation.

It is getting worse. Nothing makes it better. And I don't, again, I agree. There is nothing in me that advocates for violence. I will say that till the day I die. But what do you expect? to happen without recall we can look at history look at let them eat cake you know people will go to extremes to change their situation if no one's listening yeah even if even if those like their beliefs because

that's the distinction I think people need to sort of start to realize is like this isn't like this isn't an extremist in the actions but not in the beliefs like it's not like oh you're you've got like some extreme ideology no it's like normie stuff. But the extreme part is the action taken to do anything about it. As that happens more and more, it's harder and harder to say, like, oh, there's this like fringe guys. We need to like, we need to crack down the internet. So like, or whatever. These are just people who are increasingly frustrated. And we're also in this time where I always see, you know, we've talked about this too, where, well, the system is sort of like slow by design. You know, the processes that we have in place are, you know,

incremental and we we that's how the system was built and that's true but that's not the world we live in anymore and you can say that as much as you want but if people are uh experiencing fast changes and all these other ways where everything like nine 90 things happen every single day and there's all this technological uh progress and everything is faster and faster and faster and faster and faster and faster on the internet, then you can just say, well, the system is built to be slow, but that's not good enough anymore. We are in a world where those don't line up. So you're going to have this sort of like incongruity, like we're like, you just can't like live in that governmental process while everything else around you is so fast. It just doesn't make any sense

to people, I think. Well, yeah. And the, the two options are slow government. process with Democrats in charge and nothing really gets through and everything gets stalled at every turn or what we have now where the president rules by truth social post and executive orders and you know actively is trying to be a monarch thinks of himself as a monarch and it's very hard to rule that way when that's not how the system was designed and also when a huge portion of your population is toting guns like it like there's there's a lot of people. There's tens of millions of people who hate this man and there's tens of millions of people who've got multiple guns. Unless something gives here, someone's going to try something once in a while

and they're not always going to be these like rabid extremists the way they're trying to paint basically anyone left of center. None of the assassinations or attempts have been committed by somebody with a clear ideology in general. I mean, this guy was the clearest, right? And this guy was the clearest, but he wasn't an extremist, as we've established. He was like a blue sky liberal, and he was not even particularly active on blue sky. But that doesn't stop this administration, yeah, the people from lying or trying to put everything under the umbrella of NSPM 7.7.

I got the acronym right, and that's because I read it. Ken, every time I try to remember it, I make up something new. No, it took me a few days of reporting on it to just not mix up the letters. It needs better branding. Everything needs better branding. NSPM 7, eyewitness news. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, it's this view that the dissatisfaction that we've been talking about

represents some kind of organized insurgency, and one of the most alarming parts of reporting on this over the past year or so, and getting close to people in the admin, like people that work closely with people in the admin, is realizing they really believe this stuff. Like when you hear these things about, you know, Antifaz being, they have, what is it? They have safe houses and they're being financed by George Stores.

I thought for sure, this is just rhetoric. There's no way they believe that. And I get closer and I realize, oh my God, a lot of these guys literally believe that. And that's why they keep face planting with these, you know, soaring promises to the mega base of, oh, we're going to catch whoever put up, you know, the foreign act. You see this, the director of, what was it, there was some senior intelligence official

who was actually investigating supposed foreign involvement in Charlie Kirk's murder, for which there is absolutely zero evidence. And he later realized that. But then they keep face planting because they tell the base, okay, we're going to find whoever is responsible for this. And they can't find it because it's literally just what it looks like, the one guy. Yeah. So it's a deeply irrational group of people against even their own interests.

And we're seeing that again with this shooting. They, once again, the attorney, the acting attorney general said, we're going to find out about other parties involved when there's absolutely zero. It's like they can't believe that this is just an organic thing. Yeah, they need it to be this organized sort of. I feel like some of it is because there's such projectors. They love to project and assume like, oh, if you're, like, will we do this internally? So clearly you're doing it too.

and I feel like there's a little bit of that maybe where they know like, well, they're like these sort of like organized sort of like right wing groups and things like that being infiltrated by, let's say, the SPLC, who has informants and then they give that information to the FBI and they do anything with it. And so they assume like, well, clearly like anything bad that happens that the left does, surely Obama is involved or something like that.

They always make these huge promises. It is very disheartening to know that it seems like some of them actually do believe it because it does seem so much like they just say that because they know it gets their base all fired up. And they also know that when they inevitably don't arrest Obama for the 20th time, they won't care. Like they're not going to, they're going to still be on board. They're going to still be like, yeah, we'll get them next time. But yeah, that's not good. There's some fascinating and horrifying, something psychological happening here to live with that cognitive.

dissinence of continuing to bang that drum and seeing no evidence of it. And yeah, it's, it's alarming to you hear that they believe it sincerely. It's a real loss to the public because people can't voice opinions and have it treated as just on its merits. Like, I'm sure we've all had the experience of being accused of being, you're a Russian bod or you're a Chinese bot or something. It's like somewhere along the lines, people stop believing that someone could just believe a thing and maybe you can disagree with it.

Maybe it's even a dumb thing. but it wasn't necessarily implanted in your head by some shadowy actor. And that increasingly characterizes all of political discourse now. You know, it's like we don't address the actual thing anymore. And that's exactly in part why these shootings happen. People feel not heard. And then irony of ironies, the response is, oh, actually, there must have been some group behind him. And they're once again not being heard.

And so there's this kind of tragic irony to it all when the press can't even just look at what this guy very clearly has written down in his manifesto. Yeah, like each new. a potential assailant believes that they're the first because they think the previous ones might be fake. After Butler, this suspect retweeted stuff

suggesting that the Butler, Pennsylvania shooting on Trump was staged. Now, that was a couple years ago. He might not still believe that, but like... But that's crazy. This is a smart guy. Yeah.

Yeah. But like, you will see a lot of smart people like just casually saying like, oh yeah, this didn't happen. This was fake, and I think you go down a really dark road with that. This isn't an official percentage that I'm going to say, but at least half the people that I just personally know that I respect think it was fake.

Do you guys remember the day of? It was the top trending thing was inside job or something, because they were convinced, oh, how could the shooter have missed so closely? It must be this. And I felt like I was going, because, again, people that are nice people and are not like ranting like Alex Jones types like and it's just like what is going like where is this coming from because it's so much broader than just again it's no longer a fringe thing fringe phenomenon and it's part of our desensitization to it in general dismiss this is fake dismiss this is fake then there's an out there's a a way to say no it's not like that that's it's all in it's but there's but it's it's it's it's a it's a but it's it's a it's a is a real thing and it is a problem for all of us. Also, I think it's not unique to him or because of him, but it, like, he's definitely

made it worse, of course, referring to the president. Like, he's the conspiracy guy. He accuses everybody of everything. He, like, the whole movement is like, that's a false flag. That's a false flag. He's the, he's the TV guy, right? He does the spectacle stuff. And he wants to do this event to get PR, whatever.

And so I think it's easy for people to go like, oh, of course. he would do it and like as well and I think that the fact that it's this weird like conspiracy president makes everybody more susceptible to just sort of thinking that that is going on it feels like it's because he's been doing it for so long and accusing everybody of everything that when anything happens in his direction people a lot of people will just assume like oh yeah he's a liar Like they're doing the false flags now. And that certainly doesn't help at least. Somehow it is more comforting to people to believe that shadowy groups are controlling everything

than to believe that things are pretty chaotic right now. The systems are breaking down and people are snapping and taking extreme dangerous for everyone measures. Should we go on to another fun topic? You know, we brought up something. about SPLC and I wanted to read, because I don't think there's footage of it, but I wanted to read some of what got cut out of Trump's interview on 60 minutes.

Boy, yeah. We wanna react to that. Was it like a third of it was cut? Yeah, two thirds of the Trump interview on 60 minutes was cut out. It was like, it was like 14 minutes, and it was 40 minutes total. It's interesting, and yeah, you read it,

I do think it's interesting because this is like, the kind of thing, it's like, I'm kind of glad they cut that. because then you don't have him saying it to a bunch of people who will believe it. Not that they don't already believe it, but... It's also just like it doesn't look well. So he started talking about no kings

and what they aired was him saying, you see the reason you have people like that is you have people doing no kings. I'm not a king. If I was a king, I wouldn't be dealing with you. He says that to Nora O'Donnell. That's bad enough. Don't say that.

Also, yes, you would. You love doing this shit. Of course you would. You would do. You would do the same thing you're currently doing is talking to Nora O'Donnell. He calls the news every day to talk for two hours. Like he loves this. Why he's president.

Okay. But then he keeps going and they cut this out. So he says, and he starts going into other topics. So you've got to try to follow the weave here. You know, I'm not a king. I see these no kings which are funded just like the SPLC was funded. You all that southern laws financing the KKK and lots of other radical terrible groups. And then they go out and they say, oh, we've got to stop the KKK.

and yet they give them hundreds of thousands and even millions of dollars. They work. It's a total scam run by the Democrats. It shows you that like Charlottesville, Charlottesville was all funded by the Southern Law. That was a Southern Law deal too. And it was done to make me look bad. And it turned out to be a total fake. It basically was a rigged election.

This was a part of the rigging of the election. Well, this is the same thing we were just talking about. They don't want to face the reality of that these groups exist and have existed on the right. And so, oh, it must be some shadow. actor put on a mask and pretended to be us or something. It's like no one can deal with anything. I don't know what it is. Like face the essence of things.

Yeah. Yeah. It's just like they have the reality that they want to live in and nothing. You know, they had their, this is a boon that I guess Cash Patel gave them. Yeah, you say that there were some informants being paid. Then the president hears that. It was like, oh, so the whole thing was fake. They tricked me into saying they like, like,

The idea that they tricked him into saying that both sides, like, had good people. He's like, I take it back. They were bad because they were paying by the Democrats. I actually hate the SPLC. Like, those were all, you know, it's like they didn't trick you into sympathizing with the Nazis. You chose to do that. You didn't have to do that. No, they were very fine people when I thought they were Nazis.

And now that I know they were paid for by the Southern Poverty Law Center, now they're not very fine people. And also it, Charlottesville, was a rigged election, whatever that means. Okay. Well, so that's the other thing is the words don't mean anything anymore. And so when he says that was part of the rigged election, he just thinks that people saying things about him that are bad are rigging the election because it paints him in a negative light, right? Like he has his reality and it's like, well, if you say I'm bad, that's in my mind a lie. and you're lying about me,

so you're trying to rig the election. That happened years later. Obviously doesn't make any sense, but that seems to be what his thinking is. If you are saying anything about about him that he wants you to think is a lie that is part of rigging the election. You see, elections are like golf

where you've got to all be silent and let the guy take a swim. See, I didn't know that. I had no idea. Thanks. Except I can say that they're eating the dogs, that's totally fine. That's not rigging anything.

That's just me saying. something bad. But the way you react to it, depending on whether or not I win the election that could have been rigging. There's that phone call he made to that Georgia Country Club

where he's like, you need to get rid of five of my strokes. I just need five. I just need five. I just need five. I just need five. Take it away. I don't know who said this.

Maybe it was Jonathan or Cody maybe that it was a good thing that they edited some of this out. I mean, yes and no. I'm of two minds. Perhaps. But I do want to point out two things. So this interview came out and the clips start getting shared on the Twitter.

A lot of people are like, see, CBS isn't pro-Trump. You know, they've got this interview or whatever. And I'm like, well, no, look, they really heavily edited it. Yeah, they made him look better. They can look better than what he did. And also, I thought he had a problem with him being edited. Well, he's king. He doesn't matter.

It doesn't apply to him. I thought that was a problem. He didn't want to be edited. Why isn't it a problem? Nora O'Donnell was like, you have to leave in the part where he says that he's the pedophile rapist. You can't cut that out. I'm walking.

If you cut out me reading the quote from the manifesto and him saying, I'm not a rapist. And then she goes, oh, you think he was talking about you? Think he was talking about you? As a journalist, you have to keep that in or else you walking. That's your opinion, sir. Yeah. Wonderful moment.

Ken, when you're talking to people for your stories, I just can't imagine that's an easy task, keeping your patience in check and fostering these relationships. It's like being a therapist. You do a lot of listening or maybe like a bartender is a better way to put it. Actually, why I've done a lot of this reporting on these shooters is like I asked myself, what would cause someone to do that or like try to be, try to be open-minded to like what and just, okay, let's pretend for a second that this wasn't just a psychotic break. What might it have been?

And that's helped me a lot, not just in the case of the shooters, but like people whose views I strongly disagree with too, you know. Right. Yeah. What led you to this? How could you, how could a person actually think this instead of like, oh, they're all liars, you know? Yeah, there's usually some kind of a path that you're kind of like, oh, okay, I get that. And that's my point is like this. I found that like stuff can be dealt with, but you have to like listen and try to like understand, you know.

Yeah. I know. I agree with you completely. And it's a very difficult thing to do at this moment in time. And I'm not saying that everybody needs to adopt that. But I think it's important because if you're ever going to have a conversation with somebody where you get heard, you kind of have to listen. Gas went up for like the most in like a single day, the most ever yesterday. But whatever.

We'll see whatever. I mean, you know. Yeah. I was just following the gas buddy guy yesterday. It was like losing his mind. The gas buddy guy's like, I've never seen this. It's up 80 cents in Ohio. Well, it's going to be up more as we are weighing, I guess, apparently more strikes.

Surprise, surprise, these peace talks, these negotiations aren't going great. It doesn't seem. It's hard to know. It's hard to get accurate information as always about anything, especially the Iran War, I would like to just, again, shout out Ken being so very ahead of the curve because I remember you talking about how this was going to happen. I appreciate that. I was criticized.

I was criticized a lot for a story that I had years ago where the response was like, oh, the military plans for everything. It doesn't mean anything that they're planning for this. And it doesn't plan for everything in the same way. It takes resources to do exercises and drills and train people on things. So if there's a higher intensity than there has been in the past, that tells you something.

And so the die was cast for a lot of this stuff in the first Trump administration. On the very last day, this is barely reported, there was an architectural change to how the Pentagon functions. Historically, Israel has been under the combatant command that's called European Command. And it's kind of weird because it's like,

wait, what is the Middle Eastern country doing in European command? The whole point was to keep it separate from the Arab nations that the U.S. partners with and to prevent conflict from happening between, like prevent pretty much exactly what ended up happening. They took that and moved them into what's called Centcom, which is like the Middle East Combat and Command. And that has enhanced intelligence, sharing, coordination, cooperation, and basically incentivized the U.S. military to more closely align with Israeli interests than at any of the point in U.S. history. But that shift in the last day of the Trump administration was barely reported, little understood. Biden came in, didn't reverse it, accepted that security architecture. And the end result of that is that the stuff that Israel is focused increasingly becomes

the stuff that the Pentagon is focused on. And somebody who's supposed to kind of stand up to the combatant commands and tell the president, sir, they're telling you this, but you might want to think about this. That historically is supposed to be the Secretary of Defense, which is supposed to be a civilian role, but Trump picked a military guy. And so it's the fox watching the henhouse because it's a military guy having to stand up to the military, which he comes from. And so HECF has emerged as one of the most hawkish voices in the administration vis-a-vis Iran, where the civilian leader is supposed to be representing the president's civilian interest. And it's been a total breakdown in that respect. So a lot of what we're seeing here, it didn't happen

overnight. The die had been cast long before and unfortunately there's this tendency to respond to problems when the pot has kind of boiled over rather than when you have a chance to do it beforehand. If only people were subscribed to your stuff. Yeah, subscribe to your stuff. It's also interesting because when all of this did boil over and all of a sudden it's on everybody's radar and all of a sudden overnight people are doing their best to become experts on this straight of whormuz yeah and you know which I include myself in you know even though I was reading your warnings but you're like oh I got to catch up and and there could be elements of it too the last person in the room with Donald Trump actually Jared Kushner really advocated for

whatever whatever story we've been fed might be partially true but the reality is that no this is this has been a long time coming in at least within this administration, they have been actively preparing for this eventuality, which is shocking because it's going so poorly. And it doesn't feel like a planned operation. Yeah. Yeah, it seems like it was kind of a sporth moment thing they didn't prepare for yet they did. And that they did.

Another thing I'll just shout out that you talked about is how the Pentagon was dictating messaging. to satellite companies and whatnot. Last week, we do see reporting finally that, oh, yes, actually the damage in the region is far more extensive than we ever knew. Yeah, no, it's a crazy story. They're basically censoring these companies. So what they would say is, oh, we're not censoring anything. We simply ask these companies, which, by the way, are contracting to the Pentagon and competing for future contracts. We simply ask them, oh, please don't put this out there.

And in the story, I had a leaked slide from, I think it was U.S. Space Force, which has a really central role in a lot of this for, like, intelligence targeting from like the geosatellite stuff that they get to then send to the Air Force to strike things. But it was a slide that was just, it was like a briefing thing. It was kind of like, don't say that something was destroyed. Say that it appears as though. So wild. Yeah, the target was affected or something. They have these euphemisms that they use to like soften the damage that is like very serious in the Gulf where a lot of U.S. bases are based and the Gulf states themselves are not a fan of what's going on. So it's basically

censorship and it ends up affecting what everybody reads downstream because the stuff that they end up seeing then, like either there literally won't be, I mean, there are satellite companies that have never withheld anything and they're doing it for the first time now. People are, and it's ridiculous because the whole argument is supposed to be, oh, it's for operational security. You can buy all that stuff from China. In fact, people do that. So it's not like it's secret. It just means that it's not coming from, so there's no good reason for it other than just reducing public visibility into what's going on. You mentioned Hegseh. Do we want to watch some of these Hegseth clips because he's going on, he's, he's on one all the time every single day.

Sure. I'm going to pause in there. I'm going to give you a chance. You're disparaging me that I don't care. I'm asking you whether you think they're liars or not. You and you are disparaging me that I don't care about the passing of our troops. Nope. I ask you a thought they're liars. Terry. That's disparaging and smearing in every way. Nobody cares more about the fate of our troops. Nobody cares about the health of our troops. Mr. Secretary, Nobody wants to bring them all hope more than I.

I understand, but he controls the time. He controls the time. You could control your answer. Just the kind of hot head I want in charge of the military troops. Just the kind of person that can't keep his cool when asked a question. Perfect. It's always fun when they have, when like, the chairperson is a southern lawyer stereotype. Like, nah, no, say.

Secretary Hegseth, I do believe, if you can keep your answer in a calm and orderly fashion, the gentleman from Vermont can continue. I just think of the chicken from Futurama. Yeah, yeah. Hyper chicken. Not a bad backwoods hyper-chicken planet. Oh, yeah, he's not doing it. He's not great.

It's really dangerous. Like, the Secretary of Defense, that is supposed to be civilian oversight of the military so that the military doesn't run, like, U.S. governmental affairs. and they put a military guy in charge of it and not even a military guy who has any, like, I think you're retired at Captain. Not a serious military guy. Yeah, like, it's bad enough if you put it in a general

because it's a whole mindset of like, you know, they're a hammer and they see nails. That's just how it, that's why you want to have a civilian. Who also sees nails everywhere, but I get your point, but like Rumsfeld was hardly not seeing nails all over. Sure, a bit of a hammer guy. Sure, it's supposed to be a guy with a different, you know, mindset that can kind of question the

because the Curtis LeMay thing that's what they're there to smash things. That's what the military is for. So you want to have a guy who can question that and when you put someone like this in charge that video is exactly why Trump picked him because he looks combative and he can project, you know, the appearance

of something that's really happening action like contra the inaction that everybody feels everywhere else and so he's very good at achieving you know that vibe but he's very bad at the main point of being a sectev, which is standing up to the brass. Yeah, it's very alarming to see him talk kind of any, any time, any day.

And like I said, like that's why Trump got him. He's out there. He's also talking like him saying nobody cares more than me about, et cetera, and so forth. So he's doing his job that he was hired for, but not the job that he has. If you just get angry enough and rely on a few key phrases, you can wriggle out of any question. I guess, you can just cause a scene and chaos and not ultimately have to answer. Yeah. I really, it's always funny.

Vance is doing this a lot recently, too, just adopting that, like, nobody cares more about this than me. He said it about the Epstein Files, questionable, actually, and aliens a few times. Like, nobody's more obsessed with this than I am. Wait, what? I never heard that guy say anything about that stuff until, like, last year. Yep. Yeah, he said it last year, and then he said it like six months later, almost verbatim.

Like, I'll get to it. No one loves this stuff more than me, but I'll get to it. I'm going to look into it. I don't have time. I love to get Ken on the job of digging into the alien human hybrids. Why they're talking so much about this. God, the half-breaths. It's so annoying.

But that hasn't bubbled up lately if it was really such a big deal, you'd think. It went away for a little while, didn't it? That's interesting. I wonder if there's anything going on in the news at the time when it's bubbling over. Yeah, that is interesting. They wanted to talk about that instead. Uh-huh. Just what an alien human hybrid would say.

Oh, right? Hey, why? About what are you talking about? Should we end things on a little bit of, a little Janet Mills, a little. Oh, yeah, that's the news. Yeah. Main governor, also Senate candidate Janet Mills, has dropped out of the Democratic. Democratic primary there, paving the way for Graham Platner to become the nominee. Mills was,

is 78 and was trailing by a wide margin and announced to that she ran out of money. And so the Democrats, like the Democrat account and everything, they've endorsed Platner. They're on board. They're like, let's beat Susan Collins. But it took a long time to get to this point. They really wanted an establishment person in there and they didn't bother them that she was 78 and not speaking progressively the way the Democrats of Maine would have preferred. I actually want to point out how extraordinary this is. This guy didn't have any political history. He beat a two-term governor who was the favorite candidate of Democratic Party leadership.

Chuck Schumer was trying to steer donors her way, doing everything he could behind the scenes to make this happen, lobbied her to even run. she herself is a sion of a multi-generational political family. And this guy, Platner, I really think the public just blew out of the wall. Everybody was like, no, we're not doing that. Despite like this, you know, Apo Research Salvo launched against him, the likes of which, I mean, that was uglier than I can think of in the last like 10 years maybe. Like they went balls to the wall to try to beat this guy and nobody was having any of it.

It's really interesting. It is really interesting. Yeah. Fascinating to watch. Running out of money and just like, yeah, it's... No one was buying it. Like, it's like the democratic establishment, they have the same approach that they've always had,

but it's just not working anymore. It reminds me of Mamdani, where it was like, do you remember all this stuff about, oh, it's going to be the end of the economy, and he's going to pull the US out of the Israel, the Israel relation will end. All this stuff. And it's just like nobody was buying it.

No one was wanting to hear any of it. Yeah, it doesn't. work anymore. They used to do that stuff and people would be like, oh my God, like we better be responsible and listen to this, you know, and it just, I don't know what happened. It doesn't work anymore. I think, yeah, it helps when you have the sort of the person being attacked, like not buy into it and not like react to it in a defensive way. I mean, Mom Donnie's obviously a very, very, very, very talented politician, so he's able to sort of navigate that. But even Plattenor, I feel like, aside from obviously like the, uh, the unsavory tattoo stuff,

he's not, he's kind of ignored everything and just sort of like, no, I'm going to say the things. I'm going to say the things that people want to hear, whether or not you believe he believes them. He's saying those things and the fact that she is not. And they're going by this old playbook. I think just, you just ignore it. Just say what needs to be said. The humerus of the party leadership to me was insane not to have some 50 year old.

Like I looked at the numbers. If she had won the election mill. she would have left office at 86 years old at the end of her first term in the Senate after the Democrats lost the presidential election basically because Biden went dropped it's like have you learned nothing? Nothing.

They don't even care. It's crazy. They don't even pretend. Diane Feinstein died in office. You know, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Speaking of all the stuff we've talked about. Four Democrats have died in office this term. It's so wild.

It's completely outrageous. It's like political malpractice is what it is. Like it's, you know, But it's the Democrats continuing to not learn lessons or not listen to, you know, their constituents over and over again. Yeah, health care. They didn't run on that at all. It was the last election. Nobody was talking about it.

I thought about this. This was the first election in my adult life, this last presidential election, where health care was not central to it. Think about it. Obama. And then in 2020, Biden tried to take up some of that stuff. it certainly was litigated in the primary. This was the first time that wasn't an issue. Then Mangione happens in December, and everyone's talking about health care.

You know what I mean? It's like these things are connected and the establishment just doesn't want to see it. And like so they couldn't get behind their messaging to try and stop a mom, Donnie or a Platner. But to your point, we're done. I'm not listening to it. Are you going to be on our side or not? Are you going to help us get the person elected? or not.

Just don't worry. The DNC has done like an internal autopsy of everything and they have a report that you can get a vague summary of if you'd like to go to their website and you do have to give them your email address in order to get that information. But it's all out there. Don't worry. Is that the one that says that not separating from Biden on Israel damaged her campaign? The report that allegedly.

does say that Gaza was a big issue for voters, but we can't know for sure because they haven't released it and they will not be releasing it, even though the guy who can and should release it said that he would release it. That was like his whole thing, wasn't it? His whole thing was that they didn't release it last time and we will this time.

It's very important. Yeah. Well, they can't release it and then ignore it. Yeah, exactly. They could release part of it and pretend they release it, then you can ignore it. They could redact big parts of it. Redact a whole bunch of it.

to protect. Someone, if there is, you know, a disgusting drawing in there that you have done as a birthday card. Yeah,

you don't know. You're going to make assumptions? Maybe there's victims? I don't know. Who knows what is? You know how you get invited to a birthday party and you're like,

I'll get my long-term friend a card. And then you draw a disgusting picture where you refer to a mysterious, beautiful secret between the two of you. You know how you do that? I don't.

The point is, I don't know about that actually. I'm not familiar with that sort of behavior. Oh, God. That should have been the end for that guy. The number of things that should have been it is like... But like that card, man. That card is just so disgusting and obvious what's going on.

Anyway. Ken, it was a real treat having you here today. I could spend five hours going through your articles and talking about it. Instead, I think people should go subscribe to your substack. Can you promote that or whatever you want to promote? Yep, it's just canclopdesign.com. And fortunately, it's such a weird name. There's probably not anyone else is going to come up if you type that in to your Google.

But thank you. And I follow you guys forever. So it's cool to finally get to meet you virtually. Yeah. Likewise. Love to have you on again. Yeah. When you're right too early again.

Cassandra occurs. It's going to keep. happening. I mean, if there's one thing I can say confidently is you'll be ahead of the curve if you follow Ken's work. Then you'll have something smart to say when it finally comes around and the media gets wind of it. So, thank you, Ken. And thank you, everybody. We will be back next week. And in the meantime, remember that we love you very much. Much. Much.