Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
One of the things that I have observed as an attorney who practiced, who was a trial attorney for 34 years, is that Judge Burchen is making such blatant, blatant reversible He absolutely knows that a conviction in this case, it will be reversed on appeal. | |
| And it's as though he's attempting to do that because he knows that no such appeal would actually take place. | ||
| Prior to November, yet he would have a conviction on the books, which is the classic, and I think in this case, exposes the way in which they are using lawfare against President Trump. | ||
| I have never seen a judge make the kind of errors that this judge has made in this case before. | ||
| And I think he recognizes that a conviction, it would be overturned on appeal. | ||
| That is what our criminal, what our justice system has turned into because of the law fair being waged by the Democrats. | ||
| It has to end. | ||
| I need to call this out. | ||
| We, collectively, prosecutors, are pushing the boundaries of due process here. | ||
| The general back and forth in the courtroom today was the defense lawyers. | ||
| Defense lawyers saying, Your Honor, Please, tell the jury specifically what the other crime is, right? | ||
| Prosecutors have to prove falsified records for another crime. | ||
| Defensors were begging him. | ||
| They have to know what the other crime is. | ||
| And prosecutors were saying, no, let's keep it very vague and general. | ||
| It's a bizarro world. | ||
| I know that there is some aggressive reading of the New York statute that says, well, the jury doesn't really have to know what the other crime is. | ||
| But to me, that suggests that the DA's office is hellbent on getting the conviction now and worry about that as a fallout. | ||
| In a corrupt New York courtroom, Justice Merchant will deliver on January 10th what amounts to a judicial shrug. | ||
| Unconditional discharge, they're calling it. | ||
| No jail time, no probation, not even a fine, just a headline. | ||
| After the massive 2016 porn star Hush Money case rolled across the lower thirds of the Mockingbird media, increasing in intensity into the 2024 election cycle. | ||
| The 34 felony counts essentially adding up to a rollercoaster ride all the way to January 10th, 2025. When Justice Merchant... | ||
| We'll perform his judicial tap dance and we'll all pretend this isn't completely bullshit and batshit insane. | ||
| Say it's not a Me Too case. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is not a Me Too case. | |
| I mean, I wasn't assaulted. | ||
| I wasn't attacked or raped or coerced or blackmailed. | ||
| They tried to shove me in the Me Too box to further their own agenda. | ||
| And first of all, I didn't want any part of that because it's not the truth and I'm not a victim in that regard. | ||
| That's not what she's saying now. | ||
| She's talking about he was bigger and blocking the way. | ||
| It's all the Me Too buzzwords. | ||
| She said there was a power imbalance of power for sure. | ||
| My hands were shaking so hard. | ||
| She said she blacked out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And Mr. Trustee, I think that you testified that in all of your years of experience, you've never seen a circumstance where a defendant had a gag order imposed against them. | |
| Is that correct? | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| And would it be fair to say that while such an order is intended to guarantee a defendant's Sixth Amendment right, it also at certain times could raise First Amendment issues? | ||
| It does. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| In Bragg's political persecution of Donald Trump, Judge Merchant instituted an unconstitutional gag order against the defendant, President Trump. | ||
| Yet Judge Merchant has levied no such order against any of the other trial participants like Michael Cohen who continue to publicly attack Mr. Trump. | ||
| Mr. Hamilton, is the gag order issued by Judge Merchant a significant departure from the normal order of business and does it reveal the First and Sixth Amendment tensions which underlie this case? | ||
| It most certainly does. | ||
| Of course, now incoming FBI Director Cash Patel can get to the bottom of allegations regarding Judge Juan Merchan's daughter, Lauren Merchan, who reportedly received up to $93 million in donations from the Democrat Party over the course of the Trump trial, allegedly including over $1 million from Hakeem Jeffries. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Significantly profited from this case, to the tune actually of $93 million raised for her Democrat clients. | |
| Clients that include a member of this committee, Representative Goldman, I should point out and put on the record. | ||
| But also, authentic campaigns of which Lauren Mershan, the daughter of the judge, she runs this firm, Authentic Campaigns. | ||
| And was paid nearly $12 million for her work this cycle for her Democratic colleagues. | ||
| Thursday, January 9th in the year of our Lord, 2025. And you're listening to The American Journal with your host, Harrison Smith. | ||
| Watch it live right now at band.video. | ||
| I think it's time to blow this thing back and get everybody in the stuff together. | ||
| Okay, three, two, one, let's jam. | ||
| Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the American Journal. | ||
| I'm your host, Harrison Smith, coming to you live this morning from Infowars headquarters here in Austin, Texas. | ||
| Holy goodness, we have a lot to talk about today. | ||
| We, of course, will be talking about the fires in Los Angeles. | ||
| We'll be talking a lot about the fires in Los Angeles. | ||
| It's one of those things. | ||
| We keep talking about this. | ||
| Conspiracy, maybe not the right word for this. | ||
| I like Alex Jones' phrase for it, administrative terror. | ||
| I think that's accurate. | ||
| Easily predictable, easily preventable, if some very common sense precautions are taken. | ||
| But the left is a little bit too concerned about the gender and sexual preference of the firefighters to do anything like, I don't know, fill the reservoirs. | ||
| Did you know keeping water in reservoirs is actually white supremacy? | ||
| I don't know if you knew that, but thank God we're defeating that boogeyman. | ||
| We're defeating the specter of white supremacy by burning California to the ground. | ||
| We'll rebuild it even better as a utopia. | ||
| We have just tons of shocking footage from this, and again, we'll get into all of it. | ||
| I put in a lot of stories today to the show notes about this because we really have to take it from every angle, and we're going to have to do it as quickly as possible because we have two very great guests today. | ||
| We've got Steve Friend, the FBI whistleblower at 10, and we'll be joined in studio by Kirk Elliott at 9.30 to break down the economic forecast of the incoming Trump presidency. | ||
| We'll also talk about Trump's rally on the 19th before inauguration. | ||
| And inauguration itself, I've been getting some inside info from sources in DC about some very disturbing concerns that the security state has. | ||
| Apparently that whole city is just on a knife's edge right now. | ||
| Everybody incredibly anxious and expecting some major attack, likely with drones. | ||
| And they're frantically trying to figure out how they could prevent such a thing. | ||
| They really don't have anything, no real good method for stopping drone attacks. | ||
| So, you know, the lessons being learned on the Ukraine battlefield may be coming home at the end of this month. | ||
| So we just have an infinite number of videos and articles to get to, so let's get right down into it. | ||
| Here it is, your Daily Dispatch. | ||
| All right, here it is, folks, your Daily Dispatch for Thursday, the 9th of January, 2025. From ZeroHedge.com, Inferno Chaos LA Fire spreads to Hollywood Hills. | ||
| 2,000 buildings destroyed, over 130,000 people evacuated. | ||
| Just to give you some rundowns, there have been new fires cropping up throughout the night. | ||
| The Palisades Fire has burned 17,000 acres with 0% contained, while Eaton Fire has expanded to 10,000 acres. | ||
| Also at 0% contained. | ||
| The newest fire is the Sunset Fire in the Hollywood Hills area. | ||
| In fact, the fire has consumed the park land around the Hollywood sign. | ||
| Very symbolic activity going on there. | ||
| 2,000 homes, businesses, and other buildings have been damaged or destroyed. | ||
| Musk says SpaceX will provide free Starlink terminals to areas hit by the LA wildfires as there are hundreds of thousands, upwards of 300,000 people. | ||
| We've been without power for days with no forecast as to when power may be returned. | ||
| And of course there are fears that arson may be responsible for at least some of these, which I think is a pretty good guess. | ||
| We'll get into that. | ||
| Obviously our prayers go out to the people affected. | ||
| People have died from this and huge swaths of some of the most beautiful parts of America have been utterly decimated, totally destroyed. | ||
| Are now just cinder and ash. | ||
| And we'll get into that. | ||
| We'll get very much into that here in just a second. | ||
| Meanwhile, Oregon makes drug use on public transit punishable by one year in jail. | ||
| Congratulations, Oregon. | ||
| Making your way, baby step by baby step, back towards some semblance of sanity. | ||
| Individuals who use illicit drugs on public transit in Oregon face up to one year in jail and a $6,250 fine. | ||
| The new law took effect January 1st and aims to restore public safety to the transit system following years of open use, open air drug use that sparked an increase in lawlessness and violent crime. | ||
| Yes, folks, the experiment of making absolutely everything legal and not punishing people doing drugs out in the open in front of your children's elementary school, that experiment has failed mere months after it began. | ||
| And they're now slowly but surely worming their way back to, you know, biggie. | ||
| basic civilization. | ||
| So congratulations, Oregon. | ||
| Well done. | ||
| Meanwhile, Gateway Pundit has this story. | ||
| It begins, China cuts undersea internet cables to Taiwan. | ||
| In September, a group of journalists were hosted by Taiwanese national security experts to discuss the developing crisis of Chinese aggression towards Taiwan. | ||
| The portion of the week-long visit at the Institute of National Defense and Security Research, the Taiwanese defense and security think tank, contained an urgent and compelling message saying, quote, We will be quarantined within six months, and the first steps of the operation will be China cutting our undersea cable to interrupt our communication with the world, was what senior research fellows at the Institute shared. | ||
| Their observations were prescient because that has now happened. | ||
| China's gone after one of the main undersea cables connecting Taiwan with the world, and this, of course, follows the infrastructure attacks in the Baltic Sea by Chinese ships in October of 2023 and November 2024. A Chinese-associated ship has now destroyed a major undersea cable off Taiwan. | ||
| Now, if you don't watch this show, you probably didn't hear about the Chinese vessel destroying internet cables in the Baltic. | ||
| But if you do watch this show, this shouldn't come as a surprise to you. | ||
| And again, I have been predicting for a while and continue to be more certain in the assertion that 2025 may very well bring Direct war between the United States and China, maybe over Taiwan or maybe on the US mainland itself. | ||
| Meanwhile, EU will not tolerate a Trump takeover of Greenland, warned France and Germany. | ||
| France and Germany have warned Donald Trump that the EU will not tolerate the US invading Greenland. | ||
| I don't know how to tell them this, but they can't stop us. | ||
| There's that. | ||
| Oh, they're not going to tolerate it, are they? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We're just not going to fund their military. | |
| Yeah, it's like, well, do they want to tolerate existence? | ||
| Do they want to be around in the next little while? | ||
| Because, yeah, they're going to have to tolerate it. | ||
| They're going to have to tolerate it real hard. | ||
| And we'll get into that, too. | ||
| I got some thoughts about the whole Canada, Greenland, Trump land grab. | ||
| That I'd like to discuss with you all. | ||
| And maybe this was it. | ||
| Maybe this is why the Greenland talk was dangled out in the first place. | ||
| Maybe it was bait to get the EU to come out against it. | ||
| Because now we have leverage. | ||
| Oh, you don't want us to take Greenland? | ||
| Great, then let's talk. | ||
| What are you going to offer us to not take Greenland? | ||
| Because I want to remind you... | ||
| You actually can't stop us. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So... | |
| Are you going to start paying for your own security now? | ||
| How about you start paying for your own security and we let you keep Greenland? | ||
| How's that sound? | ||
| I'm trying to figure out why Trump is all of a sudden and with almost... | ||
| You know, exclusive focus talking about Canada and Greenland because it's not what we voted for. | ||
| I mean, it's just like, what is this? | ||
| What is going on? | ||
| I don't think he actually wants to take over Canada or Greenland. | ||
| I think there's a wider play here, but we'll get into it. | ||
| We've got a lot of speculation about it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
One of the funny thing is that most Greenlanders, actually like a vast majority, when polled a year ago, like over 60% want to leave the Dutch government. | |
| So it's not that we want Greenland. | ||
| It's that Greenland wants us. | ||
| Yeah, it's Denmark, not the Netherlands. | ||
| But yeah, I don't blame them. | ||
| I don't blame them at all. | ||
| And frankly, it's going to be fun. | ||
| It's going to be fun to have Greenland. | ||
| Maybe we'll rename it. | ||
| Maybe Trumpia. | ||
| Should we name it Trumpia? | ||
| Just Trump. | ||
| I mean, we named Washington Washington, right? | ||
| Maybe we'll just call it Trump. | ||
| What if we just called Greenland Trump from now on? | ||
| The state of Trump. | ||
| Yeah, we'll get into it. | ||
| We'll get into that. | ||
| Finally, we have this. | ||
| UK government caught using psychological nudge unit to counter heat pump skepticism. | ||
| UK government has taken a controversial step in its campaign to promote Climate-friendly heat pumps by imploring the Behavioral Insights Team, a group known for psychological manipulation under the guise of, quote, nudging public behavior. | ||
| This move, which cost taxpayers £100,000, seeks to counter what the government claims is widespread misinformation about heat pumps at Technology Central to Britain's net zero agenda. | ||
| So the story encapsulates a lot of stuff, and we may get into that more if we have time, but... | ||
| I don't care as much about heat pumps, but I do care about the government using climate change to impose nonsensical behavior on its citizens and using psychological behavioral units and sophisticated psychological operation tactics to sway public opinion over something so arbitrary and minor. | ||
| It's a signal for what awaits us in the future on a much larger and more important scale. | ||
| So that's your daily dispatch. | ||
| Brought to you, of course, by Dr. Jones Naturals. | ||
| DrJonesNaturals.com is where you go and get yourself some of the best-selling products ever from InfoWarsStore.com. | ||
| Dr. Jones Naturals now has TurboForce Plus and Vitamin Mineral Fusion, both of them in a combo pack, on sale for 30% off. | ||
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| Get the Vitamin Mineral Fusion and the Turbo Force. | ||
| Really maximize your energy and health throughout the day and know that you're helping to support this singular outlet for truth and free speech and justice in the American way and everything that Superman stands for. | ||
| Now, I got more videos than I could ever show from the... | ||
| Fires in California. | ||
| We can go over the numbers. | ||
| It's absolutely massive and unrestrained. | ||
| 0% contained of the Palisades Fire or the Eton Fire. | ||
| The newest fires have cropped up in Sunset in the Hollywood Hills area, including the parkland around the Hollywood sign. | ||
| There's a lot to say about this. | ||
| They're blaming it on climate change. | ||
| We can get into how absolutely asinine that is. | ||
| They're also blaming it on Trump, I'm pretty sure. | ||
| I'm pretty sure this is Trump's fault. | ||
| Somehow, some people are blaming it on direct energy weapons, as there are a lot of similarities between this and what happened in Maui. | ||
| And, of course, the main problem is that there's no water, that there's no water to fight the fire. | ||
| As a consequence of two things, deliberate policy from the California Democrats who refuse to do anything preemptive or proactive in order to minimize the possibility of and ability of fires to spread. | ||
| And two, just your basic run-of-the-mill incompetence from the Democrats as they are just completely off the mark on absolutely everything. | ||
| Their priorities are Skewed beyond recognition, and the people that they celebrate and choose to put in charge of things are just absolute mental incompetence. | ||
| They're mental incompetence. | ||
| I'm trying to use the word retard less, but I'm telling you there's just not one that works better. | ||
| There's just not one that's more applicable than they're all retarded. | ||
| So these are the two problems that we're facing. | ||
| It's the fire, sure, but it's... | ||
| Liars and frauds and morons in office and their inability or unwillingness to do anything normal and good. | ||
| See, natural disasters come in a few different flavors. | ||
| Some of them you can only prepare to endure, right? | ||
| Tornadoes, you can't exactly predict. | ||
| You can't really do anything once they touch down. | ||
| All you can do is, like, hope that you already have a storm shelter built and go underground and wait. | ||
| Like, that's pretty much all you can do. | ||
| And then you just try to survive. | ||
| Hurricanes are like the floods in Appalachia earlier this year, a place that has never really experienced catastrophic flooding. | ||
| And a once-in-a-millennia event can simply wipe entire mountainsides off the map. | ||
| And it's horrific, and you just got to endure it and deal with it and try to rebuild after. | ||
| Fires are a little bit different. | ||
| Fires are a little bit different. | ||
| Fires happen in this particular part of California every single year, like clockwork. | ||
| There are preventative measures you can take, like clearing out the dead brush. | ||
| There's measures you can take that you can activate once the fire happens. | ||
| And by the way, this is something that you should do in your personal life as well. | ||
| See, if a storm comes and our house floods, like, okay, we'll try to throw sandbags. | ||
| There's stuff you can do just in the moment to try to save your stuff. | ||
| But other than that, I'm not about to build a storm wall around my house. | ||
| There's not too much you can do about that. | ||
| But we have a fire extinguisher in our kitchen. | ||
| We have a fire extinguisher in our laundry room. | ||
| We have smoke detectors throughout the house. | ||
| When there are fire risks up and over to just normal life, like say you have a Christmas tree that is one of the main causes of house fires, you know, loaded down with lights, Christmas lights that you've had for 30 years that spend most of the time jumbled up in the attic. | ||
| There are things you can go, okay, well, this is an extra risk, so we need to be extra careful, and we need to take extra precautions, and maybe we need to move that fire extinguisher from the laundry room to the living room in case the tree goes up in flames. | ||
| There are things you can do. | ||
| There are precautions you can take, and if you don't take those, I'm not saying that you deserve to have your house burned down, but I'm also not particularly surprised by that. | ||
| So that's why you don't park in front of the fire hydrant. | ||
| Has done absolutely everything wrong. | ||
| This is the equivalent of somebody who has taken all of the batteries out of their smoke alarm because they couldn't understand why it was beeping every 30 seconds. | ||
| It's the equivalent of people who have thrown away all of their fire extinguishers and also not paid their water bill or their phone bill so they can't call 911 or spray water on the fire. | ||
| And also, they still have their dried up Christmas tree from Three months ago, sitting constantly with the hot lamps burning on it. | ||
| So it's like, well, okay, I still feel bad. | ||
| I'm still sorry that your house went up in flames, but you want to take a little bit of responsibility for this since this type of stuff is both predictable and preventable? | ||
| No? | ||
| No, you're going to blame climate change? | ||
| Great. | ||
| And you wonder why we're having these problems. | ||
| So let's get into some videos, shall we? | ||
| Let's talk about just some of the insanity that has led to this conflagration and this total disaster. | ||
| But where do we even begin is my question. | ||
| Where do we even start? | ||
| I think let's start with clip number 14 because this sums up a lot of it in one very convenient package. | ||
| Clip number 14 is a reporter contradicting Rick Caruso. | ||
| He's a billionaire who ran for mayor of Los Angeles and lost. | ||
| He's been going on Fox News and telling everybody about the fact that there's no water to fight the fires, that they open up the fire hydrants, and nothing comes out because of, again, either deliberate malfeasance or basic incompetence from the current government of Los Angeles. | ||
| Let's go now to clip number 14 where this guy attempts to contradict Rick Caruso and then is immediately proven wrong. | ||
| By the firefighters themselves. | ||
| Let's watch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Former LA mayoral candidate and real estate developer Rick Caruso criticizing the city's response to the windstorm and fires. | |
| He says officials should have been more prepared. | ||
| The real issue to me is twofold. | ||
| We've had decades to go remove the bush in these hills that spread so quickly. | ||
| And the second is You've got to have water. | ||
| And my understanding is the reservoir was not refilled in time and in a timely manner to keep the hydrants going. | ||
| So that's a failure whether on DWP's part or another city agency. | ||
| But this is basic stuff. | ||
| This isn't high science here. | ||
| And it's all about leadership and management that we're seeing a failure of. | ||
| And all of these residents are paying the ultimate price for that. | ||
| Despite what you have heard from Caruso, no firefighters have told us that they are running out of water. | ||
| And let's go out to Gigi Graciette. | ||
| She is live in Pacific Palisades. | ||
| I know your signal's not the best, but Gigi, what can you tell us? | ||
| Well, firefighters have told me they have no water on this block, and you may be able to make out the ember storm that we're in the middle of right now. | ||
| This house is going to be a total loss. | ||
| They have no water to put on this fire. | ||
| They are standing by because they're trying to stave the home that is next to it. | ||
| Yeah, so they don't have any water confirmed by the people on the ground who are trying to find water to fight the fires. | ||
| You know, they're trying to cover it up. | ||
| Because again, this just goes into what we talk about all of the time, which is you can't let anything supersede the agenda, the plan, the party's talking points. | ||
| This is climate change. | ||
| That's the reason this happened. | ||
| And if you discover actually the reason is the incompetence of the government, you need to shut up. | ||
| You need to not say that. | ||
| The media understands. | ||
| They need to counteract that narrative because it's true. | ||
| And they can't let that get out there. | ||
| Let me just tear through some of these headlines real quick. | ||
| Let me just give you the rapid download of what's going on. | ||
| I love this response from Viva Frye. | ||
| Somebody says, this is the type of rhetoric you're getting from the leftists. | ||
| They say, you know, they ran out of water. | ||
| No one's to blame. | ||
| Learn how things work before trying to make it fit a narrative. | ||
| And Viva Frye replies, yeah, don't worry, guys. | ||
| They ran out of water. | ||
| No one is to blame. | ||
| Yeah, these things just happen, folks. | ||
| They just run out of water. | ||
| You know, what are they supposed to do? | ||
| Store the water in reservoirs? | ||
| That's racist. | ||
| I already told you it's racist to do that. | ||
| So they're standing up against white supremacy. | ||
| And they're just running out of water. | ||
| I mean, you know, what? | ||
| Is somebody supposed to be in charge of that? | ||
| No, sometimes water just runs out and there's nothing you can do and it's nobody's fault. | ||
| It's everybody's fault for not eating bugs. | ||
| Remember, we have to eat bugs to save... | ||
| Water or something. | ||
| I'm still trying to wrap my mind around what the climate change talking point is. | ||
| Of course, Daily Wire has a story. | ||
| There's nothing they can do. | ||
| Firefighters stymied as LA hydrants run dry. | ||
| Former Los Angeles Mayor Rick Caruso ripped into Democratic Mayor Karen Bass, saying that absolute mismanagement by the city caused the city's fire hydrants to run dry as the area went up in flames. | ||
| Which, yeah, just like I was saying earlier, if you have a... | ||
| If you have a fire extinguisher in your house and you don't refill it or recharge it and you let it sit there for 10 years and then when a fire happens, nothing comes out of the fire extinguisher, that's your fault. | ||
| That's your fault. | ||
| So just extrapolate that to the city. | ||
| I think Libs of TikTok had the best all-encompassing response to claims of climate change. | ||
| When it comes to the LA fires, don't you hate it when climate change appoints a DEI hire to run the fire department, gives away fire equipment to Ukraine, stops critical controlled burns, defunds the fire department, refuses to build more water reservoirs and store water, cancels fire insurance, mismanages forests and brush, and fires firefighters for refusing the experimental vaccine. | ||
| Don't you hate when climate change ruins everything? | ||
| We'll get back into it on the other side. | ||
| Stay with us, folks. | ||
| Welcome back, folks. | ||
| This is the American Journal. | ||
| We're talking about the California wildfires, the Palisades Fire, the newly emerged Hollywood Hills Fire. | ||
| Supposedly some production facilities have burned down. | ||
| I'm resisting the urge to consider this as some form of righteous judgment. | ||
| Because after all, Despite the fact that most of the people having their homes destroyed are Hollywood scumbags who voted for this and are getting what they deserve, I also feel bad for the people that are losing everything, especially people that have been in their homes for 60, 40 years, only to have it go up in flames and insurance not cover it, which looks like what's going to happen. | ||
| I'm just going to continue to tear through some of these headlines, just to give you the... | ||
| The full spectrum view on this. | ||
| So to continue, it's not climate change that caused all these terrible policies. | ||
| And yes, wildfires are one of the things that you can actually plan for, prevent, and be able to act on instantly if you've made the proper preparations. | ||
| They've got other priorities in California. | ||
| Meet Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristen Crowley. | ||
| She boasts about being the first female and LGBTQ fire chief in the LA Fire Department. | ||
| Promoting a culture of DEI is her priority. | ||
| Does this make you feel safer? | ||
| And yes, she says, creating, supporting, and promoting a culture that values diversity, inclusion, and equity while striving to meet and exceed the expectations of the community are Chief Crowley's priorities. | ||
| And she's grateful for the opportunity to serve the city of Los Angeles. | ||
| Well, she's halfway there. | ||
| She's halfway there. | ||
| She's created a supporting culture of diversity and inclusion and equity. | ||
| It's just that whole striving to meet and exceed the expectations of the communities where she has fallen extremely short. | ||
| I mean, like, ridiculously outrageously and catastrophically short. | ||
| So this might be sort of an either-or sort of thing. | ||
| You might either be able to promote diversity and inclusion or... | ||
| Have a competent fire department. | ||
| Turns out these two things may very well be mutually exclusive. | ||
| Now, we'll choose to interpret this as being the obvious and inevitable side effect of prioritizing things like gender, sex, and race over competence and ability. | ||
| And blame this on DEI, because unlike our enemies, we're not going to look at the sex and gender of the people in charge and make a judgment on that. | ||
| Because if we were to do that... | ||
| We'd see that it looks like any time you put a lesbian in charge of something, they ruin it. | ||
| So, black women mayors, maybe not the right path to go down. | ||
| That would be a bigoted thing for me to say, wouldn't it? | ||
| No, instead, it's because these people have no ability to achieve on their own and have to promote DEI policies for their own interests. | ||
| Because, actually... | ||
| Rising up to the standard and being competent is outside of their ability, quite frankly. | ||
| And in fact, I had a video from one of these ladies, from one of these women talking about this. | ||
| I'll have to find that and go to it. | ||
| Yeah, let's go to clip number seven. | ||
| The LAFD recently created its first DEI Bureau Assistant. | ||
| So this person, I guess, every day, all day, for eight hours a day, five days a week, just roots through the Los Angeles Fire Department and tries to find reasons to get rid of white, straight, Christian men. | ||
| So that's a position in the LA Fire Department right now. | ||
| And we see the outcome. | ||
| Let's go to that clip, number seven now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So I want to reach down and bring you up. | |
| And that's kind of something that stuck with me. | ||
| Part of that work means speaking up for those who can't. | ||
| Over the last few years, LAFD has dealt with a fair share of controversy and Larson not afraid to sound the alarm. | ||
| I chose to speak out pretty much by myself about the issues of sexism and racism within my department and the need for change. | ||
| I don't think there's any question that our department is the best at fighting fires. | ||
| We do it better than anybody in the world. | ||
| But when it comes to the personnel side, we have some issues, and they're not insurmountable, but they need to be addressed and fixed to the best of everybody's ability. | ||
| All right, so racist black lesbian sees the biggest issue as the racial composition of the fire department. | ||
| However, she acknowledges that they're absolutely the best. | ||
| We are absolutely the best. | ||
| Fire department in the world at fighting fires, and we're extremely white and male. | ||
| We're absolutely the best, but there's an extreme lack of diversity. | ||
| There's no diversity, and we're the absolute best, and that's a problem. | ||
| Do you see where I'm seeing an inconsistency here, a bit of an issue? | ||
| Don't get me wrong. | ||
| We're the best in the world at fighting fires. | ||
| It's just we're mostly composed of white straight guys. | ||
| And that's a problem, I guess. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Politico, in January of 2019, wrote a story calling Trump a bad person because he's repeatedly antagonized California's forest management for not doing enough to prevent forest fires that have devastated the state. | ||
| And, of course, Mike Cernovich reposts this saying, yeah, Trump was right, though. | ||
| That's what you're actually saying is that Trump was exactly right, and we are seeing the continuing fallout of These people being incapable of doing anything right, ever, even when Trump points it out to them. | ||
| L.A. Fire Chief Kristen Crowley warned Mayor Karen Bass last month that the $17-plus million she cut from the department's budget, quote, severely limited the department's capacity to prepare for, train for, and respond to large-scale emergencies, including wildfire. | ||
| Yes, they removed $17 million from the Firefighter Department. | ||
| Probably to give it to homeless drug addicts so they can get clean needles or something. | ||
| Something ridiculous. | ||
| Something unnecessary and outrageous. | ||
| And probably, to be honest, contributed to the fires themselves as I'm fairly certain they were started by homeless people. | ||
| I'm fairly certain of that. | ||
| Now, we've got other we've got other speculation as to what could have caused these fires. | ||
| But regardless of what sparked them, the reason that they're spreading so devastatingly is because of the incompetence of the mayor and the fire department and everybody in Los Angeles or California as a whole. | ||
| Let's go now to clip number eight, because this is Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who was in Ghana, by the way, when this all broke out. | ||
| What the hell she was doing in Ghana? | ||
| Literally nobody knows. | ||
|
unidentified
|
She was there for the coronation of their king. | |
| Really? | ||
| She's there for the corner? | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's word on the streets. | |
| Well, that's a whole other set of issues we don't even have time to get into. | ||
| When she returned to her city on fire, to the place that was once a functional civilization, she was asked questions and had the weirdest response I've ever seen in my life. | ||
| Let's go now to clip number eight. | ||
| This is L.A. Mayor Karen Bass being asked about... | ||
| The horrible decisions she made that led directly to this absolutely horrifying natural disaster. | ||
| Let's watch. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you owe citizens an apology for being absent while their homes were burning? | |
| Do you regret cutting the fire department budget by millions of dollars, Madam Mayor? | ||
| Have you nothing to say today? | ||
| Have you absolutely nothing to say to the citizens today? | ||
| Elon Musk says that you're utterly incompetent. | ||
| Are you considering your position? | ||
| Madam Mayor, have you absolutely nothing to say to the citizens today who are dealing with this disaster? | ||
| She's just acting like she doesn't hear him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No apology for them? | |
| No, nothing. | ||
| See, what she needs is a prepared statement written by somebody else to read. | ||
|
unidentified
|
While this was unfolding back home. | |
| So she's just pretending she doesn't hear him, totally ignoring him. | ||
| It's just the weirdest strategy. | ||
| There's something just inhuman about these people. | ||
| They're like a robot. | ||
| Like, did you try saying, OK, Google, before you asked her these questions? | ||
| Maybe she needed an activation word to understand she should be responding. | ||
| I don't know what's going on here. | ||
| But yeah, she just stares blankly ahead while being asked very reasonable questions. | ||
| It's just shocking. | ||
| Honestly, it's bizarre beyond belief. | ||
| We can take it down, but she just doesn't respond. | ||
| You know who does this to me is my three-year-old nephew, where he'll be like crying or something will happen. | ||
| You go up and you're like, what's going on, buddy? | ||
| And he just like stares at you. | ||
| And it's like, what's going on? | ||
| Why are you crying? | ||
| What happened? | ||
| And he just stares. | ||
| And you're just like... | ||
| I know you can hear me. | ||
| What's happening here? | ||
| What is this? | ||
| What is going on? | ||
| There's something not human about it. | ||
| It is very disturbing. | ||
| It's very disturbing, to be honest with you. | ||
| Other people have noticed this. | ||
| It's a tactic. | ||
| It's a strategy. | ||
| They need something prepared. | ||
| They need to be reading something off because they don't trust themselves to be able to respond to these things and not say something that will make headlines across the world. | ||
| So instead of even like the weirdest thing is that the human thing would be to go, hey, no comment. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I'm trying to deal with this. | ||
| I don't have time for this. | ||
| We're working as hard as we can. | ||
| Everybody's saying this very seriously. | ||
| It really wouldn't be hard. | ||
| Like make me mayor of L.A. | ||
| I'll actually respond when talked to like a human being or a dog or anything with hearing. | ||
| Like it's, it's, it's very weird. | ||
| Very weird. | ||
| And again, what it represents is just the really universal incompetence of these people. | ||
| It's not just that they're bad at their jobs. | ||
| They're bad at just being human beings and being normal. | ||
| And if they were actually in charge of anything, they'd be able to respond to this stuff. | ||
| But they're not. | ||
| They're just spokespeople for the people actually running these things. | ||
| And if they aren't given talking points and a statement to read... | ||
| By the way, I didn't even bring in the video, but she does go on to read a statement at a press conference, and she just pulls a straight-up Biden where she's reading out the instructions on the teleprompter, saying, all of this information can be found at URL. It's like, no, you're supposed to read the URL where people can find this stuff. | ||
| But again, it's like there's something just inhuman about them. | ||
| It's like a robot, like Chad GPT. It doesn't really understand what it's saying. | ||
| It just knows... | ||
| Sort of that the words sound right in order, but it's not actually comprehending what it's saying as it's saying it to you. | ||
| So it makes perfect sense for her to say, you know, all this information can be found at URL. Like if you were a thinking person who's actually saying things, trying to convey information that you understood, you wouldn't say something like that. | ||
| But if you're just an automaton who basically subsumes her own will in... | ||
| The instructions of their superiors then yeah, they just go full Ron Burgundy. | ||
| It's very sad. | ||
| Meanwhile, California insurers canceled policies months before Los Angeles wildfires. | ||
| State Farm, one of the biggest insurers in California, canceled hundreds of homeowners' policies last summer in Pacific Palisades, the same area which is now being ravaged by a devastating wildfire. | ||
| The move was justified by the company as an attempt to avoid financial failure as the frequency and severity of wildfires is growing in the Golden State, especially in at-risk zones. | ||
| But as multiple fires currently burning through Southern California threaten to cause devastating losses for residents, many will likely need to rely on... | ||
| This is another, like, cycle that we constantly have to go through in America. | ||
| And recently, only since, like, the socialists have taken over and just are ruining everything. | ||
| Do you know why there are food deserts in the ghetto? | ||
| Do you know why there aren't any nice stores where you can just pick things off the shelf and go pay for them? | ||
| at a reasonable price in the ghetto why it's all just stop and goes with metal bars on the window it's because they refuse to police those areas and so shoplifting is a gigantic problem for the stores and so insurance companies won't insure stores in those areas because they'll lose money on the on the deal and so then the stores can't operate because they can't get insurance because the government isn't doing anything to prevent the theft that causes insurance claims it's the same thing happening here If the government, | ||
| the people in charge, people empowered to do this sort of thing, were to actually proactively take fire preventive measures, then the people could be insured. | ||
| But they don't. | ||
| The risk becomes massive. | ||
| The calculus doesn't work out for insurance companies to offer insurance anymore. | ||
| So they don't. | ||
| You can't expect insurers to... | ||
| You know, insure incredibly dangerous things when they're pretty much guaranteed to lose all of their money on it. | ||
| Like, insurance is an algorithm that they have to run. | ||
| The risk over the reward. | ||
| The likelihood of catastrophe and the cost of that versus how much people pay in every month. | ||
| And at a certain point, people can't afford to pay outrageous sums to cover the insurance that's necessary for places that are fire-prone and that do absolutely nothing to prevent fires. | ||
| Is this complicated? | ||
| This shouldn't be complicated. | ||
| Honestly, it's not the insurance company's fault. | ||
| I wish I could blame the insurance companies for this, but it's financially suicidal to insure places in California that do nothing to prevent fires. | ||
| This is obvious. | ||
| Skelton, this is from the LA Times, Skelton... | ||
| This is from January of 2023, actually, so January two years ago. | ||
| GOP claims about Prop 1 projects mostly off-base, and this is where they're talking about the billions of dollars, $7.5 billion in a bond that was issued eight-plus years ago, thinking the state would build dams and other vital water facilities, but it hasn't built zilch. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Just like the train. | ||
| I mean, it just happens over and over, just like the homeless. | ||
| They spend $10 billion on homelessness and homelessness gets significantly worse. | ||
| They spend tens of billions of dollars on high-speed rail. | ||
| There's no high-speed rail. | ||
| The rail doesn't even exist, let alone the train to run on it. | ||
| It just disappears. | ||
| Or the U.S. government that takes billions upon billions of dollars to build high-speed fiber internets to rural areas lays absolutely zero feet of fiber, does absolutely nothing, and just wastes billions of dollars. | ||
| I don't even understand how you can waste billions of dollars, but they do it over and over and over again. | ||
| And we're left holding the bucket, the empty bucket, because they didn't fill it up with water, even though they got $7.5 billion to do that. | ||
| Time.com had the story in all the way back in November of 2014. | ||
| Ten years ago, this story was published in. | ||
| California election $7.5 billion drought water bond Prop 1 passes. | ||
| In addition to re-electing Governor Jerry Brown by a wide margin, California voters also endorsed his top priority approving a $7.5 billion water bond. | ||
| It meant to shore up the state's ability to cope with drought conditions and increase its water storage capacity and protect drinking water. | ||
| Absolutely nothing was done in that regard. | ||
| $7.5 billion down the proverbial and, frankly, literal drain. | ||
| In a situation distinctly similar to the mudslides and the flooding in Appalachia, the required equipment was all sent to Ukraine, leaving Americans at a loss when the disaster happened. | ||
| Which would be fine if we had more than enough to go around if what we were sending to Ukraine was actually surplus. | ||
| But it's not. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| It's what's necessary for dealing with stuff here at home. | ||
| Just like the money that we send over is necessary for dealing with stuff at home. | ||
| L.A. Mayor Karen Bass cut the fire department funding by $17.6 million just a few months ago to focus on homeless spending. | ||
| Wow, I guessed that and I was right. | ||
| I said that as a joke, but it's true. | ||
| Focused on homeless spending, this was just months before wildfires turned the city into a hellscape. | ||
| Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass faced scorching criticism Wednesday as it was revealed that she cut the city's fire department budget by $17.6 million ahead of this week's devastating fires. | ||
| She prioritized funds for its massive homeless population that largely went unspent, according to a report. | ||
| And this, of course, is sort of a compounding issue. | ||
| As we have clip number 19 here, we can play quickly. | ||
| It's almost certain that the fires themselves were started by homeless people, by the way. | ||
| Let's go now to clip number 19. It's pretty short. | ||
| We can loop it. | ||
| But there's a homeless person on a beach yesterday lighting a big old fire. | ||
| So, you know, yeah, this is what and all of these fires started in like public camping grounds, like public park places, like the trails around the Hollywood Hills sign that are open to the public and the home of homeless people. | ||
| That's where the latest fire cropped up. | ||
| And it's the same anywhere where any city in America that allows homeless camping like this, this is what happens. | ||
| In Austin, you know, I have the Citizen app. | ||
| I get an alert every single day, usually multiple times a day, about small brush fires. | ||
| I myself have had to call the fire department because homeless camps near my house have gone up in flames and there's just unintended fires. | ||
| Smoke is rising out of the forest. | ||
| You don't have to call the cops or the fire department. | ||
| Hopefully they get there in time to put it out before it spreads to the homes. | ||
| But it's almost certain that these fires were either started on purpose by arsonists like Antifa, because that is just the pattern that we recognize. | ||
| It happened in Oregon. | ||
| It happened in Washington State. | ||
| It happened in Canada with all the massive fires cropping up there. | ||
| And people actually were charged and went to jail for arson because they went around starting those fires. | ||
| It's not unlikely that the same thing happened. | ||
| In Los Angeles. | ||
| And again, we're dealing with a either or, but both are bad. | ||
| And the outcome is exactly the same type of situation where, yeah, maybe it's climate extremists going around because this is what they do, right? | ||
| They're like, they're not taking climate change seriously. | ||
| We'll show them. | ||
| We'll show them how dangerous climate change is. | ||
| And then they go around starting fires to blame on climate change. | ||
| It could be something radical like that with Antifa starting fires on purpose as a form of just straight up terrorism. | ||
| Or it's homeless people in the massive, you know, homeless crisis, the cold weather, you know, blanketing the United States. | ||
| The homeless people don't go to the shelters because they want to keep doing drugs. | ||
| So they're out camping, start fires, the fires spread, your whole city burns down. | ||
| That would be incompetence, whereas the, you know, purposeful arson would be malicious intent. | ||
| But regardless, the outcome is the same and the cause of it. | ||
| In both regards is leftist politics and liberalism as a whole. | ||
| This is from NPR back in June of 2023. Firefighting is mostly white and male. | ||
| A California program aims to change that. | ||
| Oh, and change it they did. | ||
| They had massive success in changing the demographic composition of the fire department in L.A. from competent white guys to everybody else. | ||
| Actually, we have a couple. | ||
| I'll probably go to the video on the first five of Adam Carolla going off about some of this stuff. | ||
| But I got two clips from him. | ||
| First, clip number one. | ||
| This is Adam Carolla testifying in Congress about having applied to be a volunteer firefighter in California and being rejected because he's a white male. | ||
| Let's watch. | ||
| Geez, I want to talk about my white privilege so badly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I graduated North Hollywood High with a 1.7 GPA. I could not find a job. | |
| I walked to a fire station in North Hollywood. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I was 19. I was living in the garage of my family home. | |
| My mom was on welfare and food stamps. | ||
| And I said, can I get a job as a fireman? | ||
|
unidentified
|
And they said, no, because you're not black, Hispanic, or a woman. | |
| We'll see in about seven years. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And I went to a construction site and dug ditches and picked up garbage for the next seven years. | |
| I got a letter in the mail sent to my father's house saying, your time has come to do the written exam for the LA Fire Department. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I took it and I was standing in line and I had a young woman of color standing behind me in line. | |
| And I said, just out of curiosity, when did you sign up to become a fireman? | ||
| Because I did it or a person seven years ago. | ||
| And she said, Wednesday. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That is an example of my white privilege. | |
| It's funny, people, yeah. | ||
| It's actually appropriate. | ||
| It's all the female minority firefighters standing in front of the burned-out husk of a burned-down building. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know. | ||
| Might not be sending exactly the right message, but who am I to say? | ||
| Who am I to say? | ||
| It's funny, you think maybe he's exaggerating there, but like, you know, I have it on video when I tried to go get the monoclonal antibodies for COVID, and it's like, you might not realize it if you're not a white man, but yeah, sometimes you go places and people tell you, you can't do this because you're a white male. | ||
| I know nobody will, but white males actually have to experience this in America these days, but it does happen, and people are pretty upfront about it sometimes. | ||
| So I believe him that that's exactly how it happened, and the outcome is what you see today. | ||
| Meanwhile, 113 LAFD firefighters were removed from duty without pay for failing to meet the city's vaccination mandate. | ||
| Because remember, it's not enough that you be a non-white gay person. | ||
| You also, if you're going to be a white guy, if you're going to be so... | ||
| So bigoted and stubborn as to be a white person. | ||
| You can at least be submissive to outrageous demands. | ||
| You can at least surrender your bodily autonomy to psychopaths that want to fill your blood with poison, right? | ||
| You have to be willing to obey without question. | ||
| Only when you prove you are a simpering loser who can be pushed around, then maybe you'll have a chance. | ||
| To be a firefighter. | ||
| But if you do something like stand up against an outrageous demand, a bad instruction, then, you know, you can't be trusted to put out fires. | ||
| So, sorry, Malibu can't exist anymore. | ||
| Sorry, guys. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Malibu has to go away forever. | |
| Because white guys. | ||
|
unidentified
|
My name is Ted Ross, Chief Information Officer at the City of Los Angeles. | |
| As you know, we live in a world full of urban challenges. | ||
| From traffic congestion that takes our time and pollutes our environment, to natural disasters that threaten the safety of our communities. | ||
| To address these challenges, Los Angeles looks to smart city technology that can positively transform our urban environment. | ||
| While not a silver bullet, technology provides solutions that were previously unavailable to the generations who lived before us. | ||
| It is technology that enables transparency in our policing and gives a powerful voice to our diverse communities. | ||
| It's technology that innovates alternative energy sources to reduce pollution and limit our carbon footprint. | ||
| And it is technology that provides ultra-high speed internet connectivity for LA residents and businesses to do amazing things. | ||
| Technology enables the city of LA to efficiently and ethically improve the quality of life for our residents, businesses, and visitors. | ||
| In other words, when done right, technology makes us smarter. | ||
| That's why the city of Los Angeles strives to be a smart city. | ||
| And there's never been a more important time for Los Angeles to be smart than now, as we prepare to host the world in the 2028 Summer Olympics and Paralympics. | ||
| Technology has transformed almost every facet of our lives. | ||
| According to the Pew Research Group, 81% of Americans connect with each other through handheld smartphones, and 71% are active on social media. | ||
| Our nation has fundamentally become digital, connected, and online. | ||
| Likewise, at the city of Los Angeles, technology is fundamental to how we function in managing traffic, planning our communities. | ||
| Engaging our constituencies and protecting our residents. | ||
| Through the coordination of both existing and emerging smart city technologies, we are positioned to transform the way we live, work, and move around LA. In LA, we believe smart cities are much more than software you purchase or sensors that you install in the cityscape. | ||
| A smart city is an integrated, intelligent, urban ecosystem comprised of multiple ingredients that must work together for the benefit of the public. | ||
| This would include, first, smart city infrastructure. | ||
| This is the physical technology used to deliver smart city technologies, such as Department of Transportation's ATSAC Traffic Management System, which uses 4,500 connected traffic intersections to reduce travel time by more than 13%, or the Public Works Street Lighting's 165,000 LED street lamps that saves $3 million a year in electricity. | ||
| Our smart city data tools. | ||
| This is the ability to share information across the smart city when you need it, where you need it. | ||
| Such as sanitation's clean streets program that proactively improves street cleanliness across 6,500 miles of LA streets. | ||
| Or our data science federation, which every semester matches university data scientists in training with LA urban challenges. | ||
| Third is smart city digital services. | ||
| Which are the apps and websites used to digitally deliver city services to the public, including the award-winning MyLA 311 mobile app, providing access to 1,500 city services through your smartphone, or the ShakeAlert LA app that provides up to 45 seconds of advance warning of a coming earthquake. | ||
| Fourth are smart city connectivity and digital inclusion. | ||
| This is the work that we do to ensure that all L.A. communities and businesses have access to the Internet. | ||
| It includes the distribution of over 5,000 computers by the City of L.A. to families in need through our Our Cycle L.A. program. | ||
| And finally, is smart city governance. | ||
| This is how we coordinate investments and smart city efforts across all of our 42 city departments. | ||
| In fact, the city of Los Angeles is a founding member of the I3 Consortium, along with the University of Southern California and 90 other partners, which has built an open source I was watching a video yesterday. | ||
| People who couldn't pay their, were struggling. | ||
| They were begging for help. | ||
| We can't pay our student loans. | ||
| We don't have enough money. | ||
| And then the guy talked to him and was like, but you've spent $10,000 on Disneyland in the last year. | ||
| And they're like, well, yeah, we got to go to Disneyland. | ||
| It's like, how about you get the basics settled first before you start worrying about running high-speed internet trains to your hobo-villes. | ||
| I mean, this is called priorities, folks. | ||
| And California is just entirely out of whack while it exists, you know, for now. | ||
| The second hour is on. | ||
| This is the American Journal, Infowars.com, band.video. | ||
| I'm trying to move on from the California fires now. | ||
| I just... | ||
| I want people to recognize like we really have moved beyond the age of conspiracy. | ||
| Conspiracy is necessary when you have a generally upstanding and decent and responsible public. | ||
| When you have a media that actually cares about telling the truth. | ||
| Then you have to conceal things. | ||
| Then the bad people in charge have to do all sorts of shenanigans in order to pull off schemes on the public because if any outside force were to know about it, then they could blow the whistle and it could all get blown up and you have to keep things clandestine and concealed. | ||
| But we've reached a critical mass of bad, dishonest, scheming, hateful, greedy people. | ||
| We've been overrun. | ||
| So at this point, conspiracy is not really necessary. | ||
| Because you have to remember, people running these ops are human beings, and they are just like you and me. | ||
| So just put yourself in their position and go, okay, if they want to burn down California, if they want to burn down a large swath of LA, do they need to use space lasers? | ||
| Would that be their first? | ||
| You know, a resort? | ||
| Or could they just, you know, let it happen or have a homeless person start a fire or just pour a gallon of gasoline on the forest floor and throw a match down and let the incompetence of the L.A. government do the rest? | ||
| You know, if they're engaged in these schemes, these are the types of decisions that they're making and they're having to weigh the pros and cons, the likelihood of getting caught versus the Facility of doing it in a way that's underhanded. | ||
| And if I was them, I wouldn't worry about the space lasers. | ||
| I would just have a homeless person do it. | ||
| Personally. | ||
| Like, that's just me. | ||
| Also, I just keep seeing people online talking about the tunnel system under LA. Every city has a tunnel system. | ||
| Let's just lay that out. | ||
| Like, even cities... | ||
| That don't have basements have tunnel systems. | ||
| Houston, Texas, very high water table. | ||
| Nobody in Houston, outside of River Oaks, outside the really fancy neighborhoods, have basements even. | ||
| Yet, there are giant tunnel systems under downtown Houston, open to the public, and ones that are closed to the public. | ||
| In Austin, there are old tunnel systems that you can still get into under certain establishments on 6th Street and stuff that run straight to the Capitol. | ||
| They've been there for... | ||
| You know, 100 plus years. | ||
| We saw when there used to be a place called Old School Barbecue. | ||
| I think it's something else now. | ||
| But I did the graphic design for them when they first started. | ||
| And my wife painted a mural in their basement. | ||
| And there in the basement was a, you know, a graded doorway to the tunnel systems that ran straight to the Capitol under Austin, Texas. | ||
| Every city in America has tunnel systems. | ||
| Just so you know. | ||
| There's a lot of talk about the L.A. subway system. | ||
| This is not... | ||
| These are not related. | ||
| I hate to tell you these are not two related things. | ||
| They've got the tunnel system. | ||
| Let's say that celebrities and bad people use the tunnel system. | ||
| There's tunnel systems between the Playboy Mansion and the Getty Museum and the Palisades. | ||
| Let's say that's true. | ||
| What about the tunnel systems means they'd want to burn down the ground on top of the tunnel systems? | ||
| What would they be trying to cover up? | ||
| If they want to destroy evidence of the tunnel systems... | ||
| They can just collapse the tunnel systems. | ||
| They could fill it up with cement. | ||
| There would be no need to start a giant fire and burn down all of Malibu because of the tunnel systems. | ||
| That just makes no sense. | ||
| You're getting off the mark a little bit. | ||
| Some things do still need to be exposed. | ||
| Some things are still clandestinely managed behind the scenes. | ||
| Not everything is out in the open at this point. | ||
| But for the most part, we're not dealing with conspiracy and... | ||
| Dishonesty from the people in charge. | ||
| We're dealing with just basic incompetence that is an inevitable outcome of the underlying moral foundation of the left. | ||
| The focus on identity rather than competence. | ||
| The deliberate exclusion of qualified people because they're straight white males or women or whatever. | ||
| This is part and parcel with the overall Stupidity of the left. | ||
| Like, it's really not all that complicated. | ||
| And this is more of just a basic, surface-level reality that I hope people can realize and come to terms with. | ||
| And again, there's a great rant by Adam Carolla that goes into this. | ||
| But we just don't have time to get into it today because I'm about to be joined by Kirk Elliott in this hour. | ||
| In the next hour, I'll be joined by Steve Friend, FBI whistleblower. | ||
| So I don't really have time to play that full video. | ||
| But you should watch it because he's making the argument that basically these people that are all far leftists that have lived in Malibu and been above and outside of the effects of their policies that most normal people will. | ||
| I should plug my substack because it will be on my substack. | ||
| Go to harrisonhillsmith.substack.com. | ||
| And if you sign up, you'll get all of our videos, and you'll see it there. | ||
| You can also just search Adam Carolla on X, and it'll probably be the first thing that pops up. | ||
| But the point that he's making is these people who vote Democrat over and over, and again, we've talked about this every day for the last month, is the trend happening now of leftists who are totally immune to... | ||
| Thoughtful consideration of their policies until it affects them personally. | ||
| We've talked about this with Anna Kasparian. | ||
| We've talked about it with Eric Adams, mayor of New York. | ||
| I mean, tons of leftists. | ||
| It's like they are totally blind to the reality of their policies until it affects them personally, and then suddenly they get it. | ||
| And it's like, did you not have the ability to think that this could happen, that maybe other people are being affected in this way, especially when it's those people telling you? | ||
| And saying, hey, my neighborhood is being ruined because of these homeless people. | ||
| And they're like, shut up, bigot. | ||
| And then suddenly their neighborhood gets ruined with homeless people. | ||
| And they're like, oh my god, this is such a big problem. | ||
| Or the Black Lives Matter. | ||
| Like, wow, you really care about stuff more than people's freedom? | ||
| That's why you have insurance. | ||
| Too bad. | ||
| Let it burn. | ||
| And then a week later, these rioters are getting close to my home. | ||
| Somebody needs to do something about this. | ||
| So there's something with leftists where like... | ||
| They have to be personally affected by their own policies before they can recognize how utterly stupid they are. | ||
| And then even then, it's sort of iffy. | ||
| They don't even get it half the time anyway. | ||
| And so what's going to happen is you've got all these leftists, Democrat dyed-in-the-wool, crypto-communists basically, who are going to try to rebuild their homes in Malibu and find that the regulatory system is completely prohibitive and they're not going to be able to rebuild their homes. | ||
| They're going to have to sell it at... | ||
| Just massive loss. | ||
| Like, they're all going to lose $10 million because of their own government. | ||
| And they're all going to go to the left. | ||
| And he relates it to Bill Maher, another one of these people who, I guess, you know, total far left. | ||
| He still is, of course. | ||
| All these people, they never let go of their, you know, underlying communistic intuition. | ||
| But apparently he tried to build, like, solar panels on his house. | ||
| And the government just wasn't letting him do it. | ||
| And he finally realized, like, oh. | ||
| This sucks. | ||
| The government sucks. | ||
| It's stopping me from doing something very good. | ||
| This is terrible. | ||
| Why did we vote for this? | ||
| So, hopefully now, the Democrats, the lefties, the highfalutin elite in Hollywood, living in Malibu, may come face-to-face with the reality of their own policies from here on out. | ||
| But we'll see about that. | ||
| We'll see how that goes. | ||
| Alright, I do have to move on from this. | ||
| But there's so much to say about it. | ||
| So we know that they fired firefighters for not having the vaccine. | ||
| They ran a big DEI program. | ||
| They took $17.6 million from the budget just a few months ago to give to homeless people, and then the homeless people never got the money anyway. | ||
| It just was taken away from the firefighting capabilities. | ||
| They let the reservoirs run dry. | ||
| They did nothing to retain any of the... | ||
| Massive amounts of rain that were dropped on California earlier last year when there were massive flooding and mudslides throughout the state. | ||
| The leftists point to that and go, see, this is climate change. | ||
| We had crazy storms in the summer, and then in the winter we have fires. | ||
| And it's like you realize you could have saved some of that water, right? | ||
| You could have actually done something to prevent that water from being washed out into the ocean at a million gallons a day, but you didn't. | ||
| Because climate change and you're actually causing all of this, it's all so freaking insane. | ||
| But on top of all of it, the Biden administration ordered LA airspace to be closed to firefighting aircraft for over a day during his visit, allowing Historic Blaze to burn out of control. | ||
| So yes, apparently Biden was visiting his grandson. | ||
| Biden's got to sniff a baby, shut down the airspace, even for firefighting aircraft. | ||
| Just completely absurd. | ||
| And where it really gets troublesome, I hate to tell you, is, again, this is all compounding, right? | ||
| So, LA wildfire economic loss estimates top $50 billion. | ||
| $50 billion. | ||
| Billion dollars. | ||
| Okay, that's absolutely massive. | ||
| Of course, I don't need to tell you how much carbon this is releasing into the air, by the way. | ||
| It's a lot. | ||
| This is like a decade worth of car traffic in the United States up in a single afternoon because they refuse to take the necessary precautions to prevent this sort of thing from happening. | ||
| Of course, at least two people have been killed. | ||
| Hundreds of buildings, well, thousands of buildings at this point destroyed. | ||
| Zero percent of the fire contained. | ||
| AccuWeather, which estimates losses between $52 and $57 billion, added that if the fires spread to densely populated neighborhoods, the current estimates for loss would have to be revised upward. | ||
| And so far, the fires are 0% contained, with new fires cropping up in the last few hours. | ||
| And again, we covered it earlier, but State Farm, amongst other insurers, Paused coverage in parts of California or raised premium sharply after the 2017 and 2018 wildfires led to huge losses for the industry. | ||
| The companies have said that they're concerned about outsized financial loss due to the growing risk of more frequent and severe wildfires. | ||
| So last spring, State Farm, one of the largest private insurers in California, said that it had canceled 72,000 policies in the state, about 40% of which covered homes. | ||
| Many of those cancellations were in high-risk, upscale neighborhoods in Los Angeles, including Pacific Palisades, the area currently affected by wildfire. | ||
| But here's the little twist to it. | ||
| Here's the extra layer of government incompetence leading to this eventuality. | ||
| The company said in April that it would insure California homes again if regulators adopted regulatory changes to make it easier for insurance insurers to raise rates. | ||
| So let me explain how this happens. | ||
| You've got insurers, fire insurers, who have to go and determine the risk versus reward, the premiums versus the likelihood of payout for certain areas. | ||
| They see that the California state government is doing absolutely nothing to prevent wildfires. | ||
| Correctly predict, as so many people did, including Trump, that on the current path there would be massive and devastating wildfires in these areas that if they were insuring everybody there would bankrupt the company and nobody would get paid out because there'd be no money because it's not financially sound investment for them. | ||
| Unless they're able to raise rates. | ||
| It's a cost-benefit analysis and if the likelihood is that high and the cost would be that much, then the... | ||
| Premiums are going to be extremely high. | ||
| But then the government steps in and says, actually, we have regulations that say you can't take your premiums that high. | ||
| And so they go, okay, then we're not offering insurance coverage. | ||
| So the government fails to do anything to prevent the fires. | ||
| Then they impose regulatory burdens on the insurance companies to artificially keep their premiums low. | ||
| That makes the whole thing a financial wash for the insurance companies. | ||
| So they just withdraw coverage entirely because, again, It's not like a choice that they can make. | ||
| If they were to insure everybody and everybody's house goes up in flames, then nobody's getting any money because the insurance company is going to go out of business and go bankrupt. | ||
| And all those people would have paid into insurance and got nothing out of it because the risk was too great. | ||
| And again, this is just a cyclical thing. | ||
| It's a multi-layered thing where they would be able to cover these places if they could charge outrageous and extremely high premiums. | ||
| Then it would justify the coverage. | ||
| But the government comes in and says, no, we're going to set your premium cap artificially low. | ||
| So the insurance companies say, okay, well then we're not insuring these places. | ||
| And then the place goes up in flames and the people responsible for all of this every step of the way blame climate change and act like if you'd just been eating bugs and driving Teslas for the last decade, this wouldn't have happened. | ||
| Utterly retarded. | ||
| Sorry, I mean just very stupid. | ||
| But actually retarded. | ||
| And this is where it gets even... | ||
| Even just worse because it's the liberals and it's just they make everything worse at every level, every step of the way. | ||
| From San Francisco Chronicle, why giant insurance losses from LA fire could impact entire state. | ||
| Because now that they have completely failed to uphold their basic obligations of trying to do things like prevent wildfires or have water there to fight them once they break out, the state government is just going to take all of those losses from their bad decisions and all of the homes that... | ||
| We're uninsurable by State Farm because of their terrible policies, and they're going to take all those losses and then disperse it to all of the normal taxpayers that actually live responsibly and actually buy themselves fire insurance. | ||
| It's kind of just the same way they do absolutely everything, where people take out ill-advised student loans, can't pay them back, and then it's on the backs of us who didn't go to school to... | ||
| Pay those back to the bank, courtesy of our tax dollars through the U.S. government. | ||
| It's just the same thing over and over from these people because fundamentally, they're bad and wrong. | ||
| As Los Angeles confronts a series of wildfires, some experts say could be the most expensive in California history. | ||
| The state's beleaguered insurance industry also faces the possibility of further destabilization, with implications far beyond the fire zone. | ||
| It's a type of perfect storm situation that experts have worried about. | ||
| Massive fires burning through the expensive homes, many of which are insured through California's FAIR plan, the state insurer of last resort. | ||
| So far, there are no comprehensive estimates of the damage and the potential costs, with strong winds continuing to fuel the flames. | ||
| Firefighters are focused on saving lives and structures, with a full damage tally to come later. | ||
| Climate scientist Daniel Swain believed it could be the costliest firestorm the nation has ever seen. | ||
| The number of buildings burned is likely far higher than the initial estimated release Wednesday morning of 1,100 structures destroyed. | ||
| And now the count is upwards of 2,000, closer to 3,000 at this point. | ||
| Importantly for insurance, the destruction includes plenty of high-end homes with significant replacement costs belonging to celebrities and other wealthy people. | ||
| The ramifications could be felt across California. | ||
| Most importantly, the massive losses that insurers face could translate to increased rates for people across the state, particularly in the areas affected by the fires, but also beyond. | ||
| See, it's not your fault that these people are incompetent and not doing the basic thing to... | ||
| You know, protect their home and property from insurance, but you will be paying the cost for it. | ||
| But you will be making up for their shortfalls and their shortcomings because you live in California, and California is a socialist nightmare. | ||
| A new fire has erupted as of this morning. | ||
| Studio City is now on fire. | ||
| This is just north of Hollywood. | ||
| There's also the Hollywood Hills Fire and Studio City Fire, both of these breaking out last night, although not connected, apparently. | ||
| So again, crisis of governance is one thing they're calling it. | ||
| Alex says administrative terrorism, which I think is an even better claim of this. | ||
| Then, of course, there's claims of don't politicize this, as if it's politicizing something to point out, hey, we told you you should be doing this as the government. | ||
| Here's your responsibility. | ||
| You failed to uphold that responsibility, and now we're suffering the consequences. | ||
| That's not politicizing anything. | ||
| That's pointing to the actual downstream cause of the fire in the first place. | ||
| But they don't want to be at fault. | ||
| They don't want to be held responsible for all of this. | ||
| Now there is, just while we're on it, before we move on, just as a final note here, there are some interesting images coming out from the fires. | ||
| From this article from the Daily Mail, it says all the celebrities who've lost homes in the devastating Los Angeles fires. | ||
| And there are these videos, these photos. | ||
| Of the absolutely devastated, destroyed, just nothing but cinder and ash remains of formerly million-dollar homes. | ||
| And I do happen to notice, I can't help but see, that there are things like blue garbage cans that are the only things unaffected by the fire. | ||
| So there is that. | ||
| So again, this is something we saw in Maui, and it's something that we've seen sort of across the world. | ||
| And it has to do with the frequency of the... | ||
| We saw this again in Maui with houses with blue roofs not being burned while every other house did. | ||
| And as you scroll through these images of the fires, there is a very strange occurrence that blue things are just sitting unburned. | ||
| Well, everything else around it, like this one here, again, another one, not a trash can this time, but just some sort of blue tarp. | ||
| Everything else around it is gray-brown ash, but the blue tarp stands out in dramatic contrast as having not been burned. | ||
| So there may be something to this, and of course the trees in the background unburnt while the house itself is burned down to the ground, basically. | ||
| So there is that. | ||
| I will mention that because it does seem a little bit suspicious and the type of thing that even if you Never heard of directed energy weapons that affect certain colors and other colors aren't affected because of the frequency of the beams themselves. | ||
| Even if you didn't know that or hear anything about that, you still might look at this image and go, well, why is the blue trash can not burned? | ||
| Why is the blue tarp not burned? | ||
| And why is everything else except for the trees on fire? | ||
| So I do want to mention that. | ||
| That is a thing. | ||
| That is a thing that's happening. | ||
| There's also this story that we're not going to get into here. | ||
| Maybe I'll get into this more tomorrow. | ||
| How this billionaire couple stole California's water supply. | ||
| And this is just one aspect of the story, but basically California's water rights are completely dominated by corporate interests and diverted from where they're needed. | ||
| And that's the same across the entire United States. | ||
| We've covered the story just last year of a town in Florida having water restrictions while... | ||
| Like some ridiculous number, like 30 million gallons of water a month was handed over to like Hyundai to build cars. | ||
| They need tons of water for that. | ||
| So this is a very common thing throughout the United States too, the priority in water rights to international corporations, literally corporations like owned by Saudis and stuff. | ||
| So we're not going to get too much into that, but that's another interesting thing. | ||
| You might want to visit the Substack to see, harrisonelsmith.substack.com. | ||
| Oh my God, we have so many other stories to get into. | ||
| So we're going to move on now from that story, the fire story. | ||
| I think what we'll do here in the last minute or so before we welcome Kirk Elliott. | ||
| As we go to clip number 20, because this has to do with climate change and the ridiculous things pursued in the name of climate change, clip 20, the media is ridiculing Trump for saying wind turbines are killing the whales, but a huge number of whales have been killed just this month in a totally otherwise inexplicable confluence of situations. | ||
| Let's go now to clip number 20. I saw another whale had washed up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's becoming a pattern. | |
| Is it the windmills? | ||
| Is it the pounding of the seafloor? | ||
| How many whales is it going to take? | ||
| There aren't many places where the North Atlantic right whale can go. | ||
| It's destined to extinction. | ||
| It sounds like they're going to like mild drive. | ||
| What the United States is looking at is thousands of wind turbines in an area that our whales, our dolphins, our marine life, where they live, where they migrate, where they breed. | ||
| It's only when they started going into the wind lease areas that we believe that the whales are dying. | ||
| So those red dots are whale deaths. | ||
| Precisely. | ||
| What a scandal. | ||
| Thrown to the wind is the documentary there. | ||
| 12 whales have washed up in December alone. | ||
| Last December, in one month, 12 whales were found dead on the beaches off of these new offshore wind farms. | ||
| Killing the whales, folks. | ||
| I mean, we should probably stop that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm Mike Fody, and I'm from Buckingham Township, and I honestly don't know what country I'm living in anymore. | |
| You made the statement. | ||
| Of course, you heard it so many times tonight. | ||
| People violate the laws anytime they want. | ||
| And you said it so cavalierly, so arrogantly. | ||
| Of course, Mr. Harvey voted with you. | ||
| Can you look at me, please? | ||
| You disrespected the other voters. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| A little bit of respect. | ||
| You know, I agree. | ||
| You don't get punished anymore. | ||
| That's where the country is because of the losing liberal left policies. | ||
| One state steal less than $900. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| I go to Home Depot the other day to buy a tool. | ||
| It's locked up. | ||
| I ask the guy why. | ||
| Oh, they come in in shopping carts, they load it up, and we can't stop them. | ||
| We're not allowed to do anything. | ||
| They're the garbage policies you people endorse. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Oh, but you know what? | ||
| If you're a conservative Christian grandmother and pray outside an abortion clinic, you get 10 years under the FACE Act. | ||
| That's the fact. | ||
| That's really fair, isn't it? | ||
| So let me tell you something. | ||
| Thank God, on January 20th, there's a new sheriff in town. | ||
| Amen. | ||
| I know this pains you losing liberals, but you're going to have to get some TDS training. | ||
| It's called Trump derangement syndrome. | ||
| Because there's not going to be any more DEI. There's no more men and women's sports. | ||
| There's no more men and women's locker rooms. | ||
| Can you imagine your junior high daughter self-conscious about her body and she has to change or take a shower next to a naked man? | ||
| These are the sick policies you people endorse. | ||
| So that's gone. | ||
| There's not going to be any more rapists and murderers coming over the border. | ||
| And I just got word that the killer, rapist, illegal immigrant just got sentenced for killing Lake and Riley. | ||
| See, that's something you should cheer for, guys, not just look at me. | ||
| No more illegal aliens on the voter rolls. | ||
| That was a great one, wasn't it? | ||
| You're fighting to put them back on? | ||
| That's just great. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| I know it pains you, but thank God Donald J. Trump is going to reverse it all. | ||
| And by the way, please stay with these policies because 80% of Americans don't want them, never did, but you guys are too dense to understand this country is founded on Christian values. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| A very, very powerful speech from just some random father concerned about his community and his nation and where it's going. | ||
| Very powerful stuff, and we love to see it. | ||
| And more of that. | ||
| We want more of that, folks. | ||
| If I can encourage you to do one thing, it's, yeah, take your arguments to places like city council meetings and give them an earful because you know what the deal is and they don't. | ||
| Welcome back, folks. | ||
| This is the American Journal. | ||
| I'm Harrison Smith, joined in studio. | ||
| Right now, by Dr. Kirk Elliott, he's been safeguarding clients' assets with Precious Metals for over 21 years. | ||
| His firm, Kirk Elliott Precious Metals, serves over 18,000 clients all over the world and in every state and has reallocated billions of client assets into Precious Metals. | ||
| You can find them online at kepm.com slash gold. | ||
| That's kepm.com slash gold. | ||
| And give them a call, 720-605. | ||
| That's 720-605-3900. | ||
| Welcome back, sir. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| It's great to be back with you. | ||
| Well, glad to have you back. | ||
| We've basically spent the whole show talking about the fires and just the wide variety of leftist failures that are necessary to achieve this horrific result. | ||
| You understand finances a heck of a lot better than I do, and I understand you were watching the show earlier. | ||
| Am I right to say that these insurance companies are just financially precluded from covering these areas because of the government not doing enough to prevent the fires? | ||
| To me, I'd love to be able to blame the insurance companies. | ||
| I'll hate a corporation as quick as any leftist, but here it seems like it's impossible. | ||
| Financially, it'd be impossible for them. | ||
| To insure these places that are almost guaranteed to go up in flames and cost them millions of dollars each. | ||
| What's your financial analysis of what's going on with the fires and insurance especially? | ||
| I mean, already just in LA, we're talking billions of dollars in losses, right? | ||
| Well, insurance companies don't have that. | ||
| So then we always have to realize, well, the ball is going to roll uphill somehow, right? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Allstate, State Farm, whoever is insuring houses out there can't pay for it. | ||
| What are these people going to do? | ||
| Are they just going to be out? | ||
| They're going to ultimately go to the government. | ||
| The government's going to provide some kind of a stimulus. | ||
| They're going to print more money. | ||
| It's going to cause more inflation, right? | ||
| But I think that the devastation is why did they leave to begin with? | ||
| This is where economics and politics always meld somehow. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So they left because They didn't have any stinking water mitigation to actually put out fires. | ||
| It's like, if I were an insurance company, I wouldn't do that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, I wouldn't say, oh yeah, we'll insure all your multi-million dollar houses and there's no way to put out a fire. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| It's just crazy. | ||
| It's like, yeah, please insure my car. | ||
| I do the derby on the weekends where I crash my car deliberately, but please insure it. | ||
| It's like, no, no one's going to insure your car that you deliberately crash. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| It is, and I think when you start talking about politics, this is why Trump got elected again. | ||
| I think people are starting to wake up to these horrible policies, and now when you've got a very liberal state. | ||
| The very liberal governor with very liberal people who elected these liberal people, right? | ||
| They're gonna realize, wait a second, why did we vote for this, right? | ||
| So I think they're even gonna start waking up to the fact that something's gotta change, just like Canada did when Trudeau was gone, just like what happened when Trump got elected. | ||
| It's starting to happen. | ||
| All over the world. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's exciting to me, but it's sick and disgusting that it would take stuff this catastrophic to get people to wake up. | ||
| And then the twist to this is that they've got this excuse in their back pocket that they're always quick to use. | ||
| Well, it's climate change. | ||
| It's not these terrible policies we've pursued, even though, I mean, the layers you can go down, because it's like the homeless problem, which homeless camps were probably the... | ||
| You know, cause of this fire, the DEI training, I mean, it all goes into, you know, this all contributing to this conflagration. | ||
| But you gotta wonder, like, are they gonna wake up? | ||
| Are they gonna realize how insane all of this is? | ||
| Or are they just gonna blame climate change and go, yeah, you know, really the problem is we should be eating bugs, and that's what we take away from all this. | ||
| It's very frustrating that they've got this, I mean, climate change is the most brilliant concept that... | ||
| That these people ever came up with because it allows them to ignore all of the actual causes and just say climate change. | ||
| Well, here's what I think comes next. | ||
| And I think it is going to cause people to have a huge outcry and fear is going to start running rampant because there's a couple motivating factors why people do anything. | ||
| That's greed and fear, right? | ||
| So what happens when the insurance companies can't fund all the stuff? | ||
| They're eliminating their cash. | ||
| Right. | ||
| To pay for these claims. | ||
| Where is the cash sitting? | ||
| In banks. | ||
| Well, banks are already undercapitalized. | ||
| They don't have enough. | ||
| FDIC, like we talked about a few months ago when we were recording, that FDIC only has 1.17% of all deposits covered. | ||
| And why do banks fail? | ||
| So banks fail because simply they have more withdrawals going out than they have deposits going in. | ||
| This could be the biggest withdrawal of money that banks in LA have ever seen. | ||
| So when people now realize, what, I lost my house. | ||
| A, I didn't have insurance on it to begin with because the insurance company canceled it last year. | ||
| Or the insurance companies go out of business. | ||
| They start taking withdrawals out of the banks. | ||
| I think we're going to see a run of banks that start to fail. | ||
| Cascading effects. | ||
| It is the domino effect. | ||
| The conversation of, well, what about the Federal Reserve? | ||
| What about FDIC? Is it even a reasonable entity to have around? | ||
| Which I don't think Trump necessarily wants it around. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And so I think the timing of all this is going to play into people's freedoms. | ||
| Really, really well, but it took a catastrophic event to get there. | ||
| Yeah, and it's a bummer that it did. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, the number of sort of downstream effects is... | ||
| I mean, hell, maybe this will be like Appalachian. | ||
| They'll all just get $750 from the government and they'll tell them to stiff it. | ||
| Of course, that's not going to happen because these are liberals and leftists and they're going to get served one way or another. | ||
| But I know Trump knows all this and he's trying to deal with it, but... | ||
| I worry that he is pushing us towards the digital ID, digital banking system that the globalists have wanted. | ||
| I mean, this is the problem with globalists is they set up these win-win situations for themselves where it's like the system that they established was meant to fail in order to usher in an even worse system. | ||
| And it's like, but the system that is up is failing, so you kind of have to find something new. | ||
| but they have their, you know, prepared correction, which is digital ID, which is what we've been fighting against the whole time. | ||
| I mean, what do you think the threat of digital ID and digital currency is? | ||
| And do you think Trump is going to implement this? | ||
| Because this to me is like the biggest threat, but I don't see, I don't see a way out of it with bricks coming up. | ||
| And I mean, it's all, it's all complicated, but just what's your take on Trump's moves in terms of getting away from the fiat dollar and maybe moving towards a more digital currency? | ||
| Well, I think that, I think he's fully on board with that. | ||
| But, but. | ||
| Don't take that as necessarily a negative, because the negative part of digital money is central bank digital currency, where it's centralized, right? | ||
| Where when something is centralized, they can control. | ||
| That's the goal of CBDCs all over the world for the Bank for International Settlements, the World Bank, the IMF, the United Nations. | ||
| They want people control. | ||
| But they will use situations like this to start ushering in. | ||
| Their diabolical plan, right? | ||
| So what Trump is, I think, looking at is decentralized digital money, right? | ||
| Which is why some of the key positions he's putting in, pro-crypto-type people on his cabinet and things of that nature, what do they want to do? | ||
| See, this is where I have a precious metals company. | ||
| And when you look at cryptocurrency and you look at precious metals, they're very similar yet very different. | ||
| It's weird, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, because how are they similar? | ||
| People go into crypto because if it's a decentralized blockchain called Bitcoin, for example, it's private. | ||
| It's getting out of the system, right? | ||
| That's why people go into it and then they want the growth. | ||
| Why do people go into precious metals? | ||
| Because it's a private transaction and it has the opportunity for growth. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| See, those philosophical things are similar, but yet they're so different. | ||
| Because you look at the danger of digital money, and that is it doesn't take much for you to not be able to access it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Even something as simple as ATMs. | ||
| What happened in Florida and North Carolina when the power went out for 10 days? | ||
| People couldn't access their money. | ||
| They couldn't access the ATM machine. | ||
| So something similar could happen there. | ||
| But the good positive part about it is moving away from a central bank digital currency, which I think Trump knows that is coming globally. | ||
| But we can have an option. | ||
| It's almost like a dual currency system is going to start to emerge. | ||
| And we're well underway. | ||
| So I was doing some research before the show, and you look at something like XRP. It's a very good technological platform for cross-currency transactions, and it's uber cheap and crazy fast. | ||
| So JPMorgan Chase, they actually... | ||
| Approved using XRP for mortgage and credit card payments. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| Amex, American Express, is now using XRP for payment processing. | ||
| Bank of America is now using XRP for internal payments. | ||
| The Federal Reserve just recently, like within the last couple of days, they're choosing XRP for digital payments under the FedNow program. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| And then Amazon is partnering with XRP. So you look at this. | ||
| What does all of that say? | ||
| Does that say that there is a move to move away from central bank digital currency? | ||
| I would say so. | ||
| Because all of this is decentralized blockchain type activity, which getting out of the SWIFT system is what this does. | ||
| XRP is a replacement for SWIFT. Okay. | ||
| So explain to us what XRP is for those that don't know. | ||
| I, of course, understand it completely. | ||
| But for those out there who don't know, what is XRP? Just give us the rundown on what it is exactly. | ||
| So you've got like three major networks. | ||
| You've got the Bitcoin blockchain channel. | ||
| You've got Ethereum, which actually is you can do smart contracts on that. | ||
| So anything that has a contract, you could actually build on an Ethereum platform. | ||
| So it's not just a token. | ||
| It's a system. | ||
| And XRP is designed to move money quickly and inexpensively. | ||
| And securely. | ||
| And securely. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So this is why, imagine if you go to the bank and you want to send a bank wire. | ||
| Well, how long does it take? | ||
| I mean, it costs like 40 bucks, generally. | ||
| And then it takes a little bit. | ||
| It takes hours. | ||
| XRP technically doesn't cost anything, and it can happen in a second. | ||
| This is why these payment platforms want to use it, because it's going to save them money. | ||
| But this, to me, is the move away from fiat-based central bank money creation that we've known since the Federal Reserve started. | ||
| And what's exciting to me is Trump, I believe, is putting the people in place to make this happen. | ||
| So what does this mean? | ||
| I think central banking, as we know it, is going to be a thing of the past. | ||
| Now you start to put in the mindset of people. | ||
| For example, most of my clients, 55 plus. | ||
| They're not going to touch cryptocurrency with a thousand foot pole. | ||
| They don't understand it. | ||
| It's hard to set up a digital wallet. | ||
| They don't get it. | ||
| They don't trust it. | ||
| I trust gold. | ||
| I can hold gold. | ||
| So here's where you could have people starting to use gold or silver. | ||
| Actually, gold is not a good payment thing. | ||
| It's too expensive, right? | ||
| Silver as a means for barter. | ||
| Or how about this? | ||
| How about the combination of both? | ||
| Starting to have stablecoins, which is like a cryptocurrency that doesn't have the rapid fluctuations every single day because it's backed by something that's tangible. | ||
| I think that's where the global economy is moving. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Is getting away from paper money. | ||
| And I think it's happening like right now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's interesting because, again, you know, obviously if they can get digital currency, especially in a centralized way, I mean, that's... | ||
| That's the mark of the beast, right? | ||
| That's like the end of resistance because if they don't want you to go protest, you're not going to use your money to get the car to go protest. | ||
| It really is as simple as if they get the centralized digital currency with the biometric IDs, that's game over for us. | ||
| This almost seems like a way of preempting that. | ||
| Almost in a flip side of the strategy they take, right? | ||
| When there's some new technology like the internet that comes out that gives the people, the average person, this massive access to information, the powers that be don't try to restrict the internet. | ||
| They try to get out ahead of it and establish social networks as containment zones for people. | ||
| They try to preempt the new technology. | ||
| It seems like we're kind of trying to do that, where we know centralized digital currency is coming, and so you're trying to get out ahead of it and create a decentralized currency. | ||
| So you're not trying to resist the inevitable. | ||
| You're just trying to, you know, prevent them from achieving what they want with it, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| It absolutely does. | ||
| And see, there is a danger with, even with decentralized blockchain cryptocurrency, right? | ||
| And that is, if you have a centralized exchange, like, I'm not saying any of these are good or bad inherently, but like Coinbase or Kraken or Gemini or whatever, right? | ||
| So your tokens, your Keys are everything. | ||
| They're housed in the centralized exchange. | ||
| They can shut that off. | ||
| Just like what Coinbase did to anybody with a Russian IP address back when the Russia-Ukraine conflict started saying, you can't access your funds. | ||
| Or they could cut anybody off for any reason and say, nope, you just can't withdraw funds. | ||
| Well then, what good is it? | ||
| If you can't use money, it's not good. | ||
| So even in crypto, and most people aren't, I think, adequately trained on this. | ||
| You've got to start moving that out of the centralized exchange into a cold storage wallet, like a little ledger device. | ||
| Yeah, physical. | ||
| Because then it's not on that centralized exchange. | ||
| It's a decentralized, decoupled wallet that now you can start to use. | ||
| That's where the safety of crypto comes in. | ||
| And to me, that's the same as the safety of owning gold or silver. | ||
| You actually have it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I think what we're seeing globally is this move towards getting away from government control, getting away from these central banks that can actually control everything, and having independent money, putting money back into the hands of the people. | ||
| And this is what's exciting about what Trump is doing. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of naysayers, right? | ||
| It's like, oh, he wants... | ||
| No, he doesn't. | ||
| The way that he's doing it is, I think, paving the way to get people into something that's safe. | ||
| And you look at gold and silver. | ||
| Why in the world, Harrison, would central banks around the world be allocating into gold by the hundreds or thousands of tons? | ||
| Are they? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Even on this dip that we've had in metals since the election. | ||
| You know, it kind of came down because everyone said, ooh, Trump is going to actually grow the economy really quick and stocks are going to explode and bonds are going to explode. | ||
| And why do we need gold and silver? | ||
| Well, the dust settled pretty quickly, like within three weeks. | ||
| And people realized, well, Trump is going to do great things for America. | ||
| But the rest of the world, what's great for America isn't necessarily going to be good for the rest of the world. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So now we've got this global debt pandemic. | ||
| That spiral that we're going into, and Trump can't fix the unrealized real estate losses in China. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He can't fix all the debt in the United Kingdom, in the Eurozone, right? | ||
| But he's going to fix America. | ||
| So once people and hedge funds and big banks started to realize, okay, honeymoon's over here, the rest of the world is going to stink. | ||
| And tariffs... | ||
| are going to bring inflation into America. | ||
| But there's a good inflation and there's a bad inflation. | ||
| Inflation is a byproduct of a growing economy. | ||
| As more people are working, as wages go up, they can sustain higher prices and more people are spending. | ||
| So that brings inflation and that means a growing economy. | ||
| If wages can keep up with inflation, which is what Trump is going to do, then inflation is fine. | ||
| The horrible inflation that we've had over the last four years and actually ever since the Federal Reserve started is the kind of inflation where wages are coming down their way They're not keeping up with inflation and people are losing purchasing power day after day after day. | ||
| And you look at the Biden economy, for example, wages are coming down, unemployment was going up, and they were printing money like drunken sailors. | ||
| And so that created this huge chasm that people can't afford to live. | ||
| Just since in the last four years, because we're now interest rates are to slow down that inflationary growth, the cost of actually living in a house has gone up 300%. | ||
| Right. | ||
| In four years. | ||
| So here's where Trump's policies, I think, are absolutely incredible. | ||
| Going back to what the Founding Fathers envisioned for our country, which is we didn't have an income tax in America for like 100 years after we became a country, right? | ||
| More than that, right? | ||
| Almost 200? | ||
| It was a long time. | ||
| It wasn't until 1913. So going back to the way the Founding Fathers envisioned it. | ||
| Using tariffs to fund America isn't a Trump idea. | ||
| It's the Founding Fathers idea. | ||
| He's just going to capitalize on it, right? | ||
| So what does that do, though? | ||
| It shifts the burden of funding America, all of our entitlements, all of our expenditures, our Department of Defense, whatever, to other countries. | ||
| Because then they will be paying for it. | ||
| And if he gets his way and eliminates income taxes, this could be the biggest boom. | ||
| For America ever. | ||
| Because people's bottom lines will increase. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| We'll have more money to spend. | ||
| And these other countries are going to pay for it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now that comes with political retribution. | ||
| China's not going to sit back idly. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If we slap a 60 to 100% tariff on their goods. | ||
| If Mexico, if we do 10 to 20% on them. | ||
| Europe, if we do 10 to 20%. | ||
| Canada, right? | ||
| This is why Trudeau basically had to leave because of the... | ||
| Trump's tariffs. | ||
| Trudeau was one of the worst leaders of a country ever. | ||
| I mean, it was so bad. | ||
| Religious freedoms, freedom of speech, they're all gone the way of the dodo bird. | ||
| And so his economy stunk. | ||
| And so now when you put tariffs on there, he basically got ousted out. | ||
| This is where Trump is having an impact and influence already, even before he steps into the White House. | ||
| The rest of the world is starting to realize. | ||
| This is a game-changing moment if we go to tariffs. | ||
| Because he's actually putting America first and expecting other countries to pay for having access to our gigantic unequaled market over here. | ||
| Well, it's just incredibly interesting. | ||
| And the more I learn about economics, the less I feel I understand. | ||
| But if there's one thing that doesn't seem to change, it's the reliability of gold and silver. | ||
| And it's like, I just always want to go back to that just to be like, I can hold it. | ||
| It's valuable. | ||
| Let's go back to that. | ||
| Incredible stuff. | ||
| Dr. Kirk Elliott, KEPM.com slash gold, 703-605-3900. | ||
| Thank you so much for joining us, and I hope Trump has all the success that we need to survive this. | ||
| I do too. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| All right, folks, we'll be right back on the other side for the third hour of American Journal. | ||
| do not go anywhere folks. | ||
|
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Welcome back ladies and gentlemen. | |
| It's 10 a.m. | ||
| Central Time, which means we are now in the third hour of the American Journal. | ||
| Thank you so much for being here with us. | ||
| Of course, you can support us by going to drjonesnaturals.com, getting yourself some TurboForce and Vitamin Mineral Fusion, two of our top-selling and, frankly, most delicious products. | ||
| I wonder what they taste like combined. | ||
| Wait a second. | ||
| I've just had an idea. | ||
| What if you combine them? | ||
| Could the human body even handle such a thing? | ||
| Find out yourself by going to drjonesnaturals.com and you get 30% off that combo pack with two of our top selling products of all time, Vitamin Mineral Fusion and Turbo Force Plus, 30% off when bought in combination. | ||
| You can also go, of course, to thealexjonesstore.com to get some incredible supplements there as well as just some awesome merchandise, some hats and t-shirts and hoodies and all sorts of awesome stuff. | ||
| Go to thealexjonesstore.com slash Harrison to let them know who sent you. | ||
| I'm going to go to a video here. | ||
| This video you have likely seen on our show before. | ||
| He's one of our favorite people out there today telling the truth about geopolitics, everything from Israel to Ukraine. | ||
| Professor Jeffrey Sachs. | ||
| We, again, have showed videos of him and entire speeches of his that are 20 minutes long because he's got such a comprehensive and impressive and well-informed view on the situation. | ||
| He's not... | ||
| Some radical dude that got famous for being outrageous on the internet. | ||
| He is a well-established, pretty much mainstream talking head in these, not just on the news, but actually in the big meetings. | ||
| I mean, he's been a diplomat and ambassador. | ||
| He's a professor. | ||
| He knows what he's talking about. | ||
| And he was, for a while, sort of an establishment guy. | ||
| He broke from the establishment and started to tell the truth about Ukraine and Israel and so many other geopolitical conflicts that America is on the wrong side of, to be frank with you. | ||
| So we're going to show this video. | ||
| The video in itself is something that I would want to show anyway because it's just good and right and solid. | ||
| But it's newsworthy today in particular because Trump actually shared this video. | ||
| Information Liberation has the story. | ||
| Trump shares video saying Netanyahu conned America into war with Iraq and is pushing war with Iran. | ||
| This is very, very, very nice to see Trump post something like this because one of the main reasons I've always voted for Trump is because he's anti-war, war because he is interested in protecting America and not interested in sending Americans overseas to die in some you know pointless adventurism and you know recently he's been not so solid on that there | ||
| People in his administration or he himself have made overtures about putting Iran back in its place and really unleashing Israel and this type of stuff where you go, What's going to happen? | ||
| Once he's in office, is he going to take us to war with Iran? | ||
| That would be a betrayal, really. | ||
| I was going to say it would be supremely disappointing, but really it would be a betrayal of everything that he's stood for since he began running. | ||
| So to see him share this video, I think, is very meaningful, very important, and very good in looking into the future and determining whether or not we get drawn into a full-fledged World War III by attacking a place like Iran. | ||
| When Donald Trump is tweeting out videos like this, I, for one, am very comforted by that. | ||
| Let's watch the video. | ||
| They did focus groups on the war. | ||
| They wanted the war all the time. | ||
| They had to figure out how to sell the war to the American people. | ||
| How to scare the American people. | ||
| It was a phony war. | ||
| Where did that war come from? | ||
| You know what? | ||
| It's quite surprising. | ||
| That war came from Netanyahu actually. | ||
| You know that? | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| And the way it is, is that Netanyahu had from 1995 onward the theory. | ||
| That the only way we're going to get rid of Hamas and Hezbollah is by toppling the governments that support them. | ||
| That's Iraq, Syria, and Iran. | ||
| And the guy's nothing if not obsessive. | ||
| And he's still trying to get us to fight Iran this day, this week. | ||
| He's a deep, dark son of a bitch, sorry to tell you. | ||
| Because he's gotten us into endless wars. | ||
| And because of the power of all of this in the US politics, He's gotten his way. | ||
| But that war was totally phony. | ||
| So what is this democracy versus dictatorship? | ||
| Come on. | ||
| These are not even sensible terms. | ||
| So again, just incredible that Trump would tweet that out. | ||
| I mean, typically, I don't know if Trump tweets are the most newsworthy thing. | ||
| In this case, they definitely are. | ||
| This was a shot across the bow for Netanyahu and Israel in the war with Iran. | ||
| Donald Trump sharing a video that calls Netanyahu a deep, dark son of a dog. | ||
| That's a good thing for peace. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| This is the American Journal. | ||
| I'm your host, Harrison Smith, coming to you live on Infowars.com, band.video. | ||
| Rumble, however you're finding us, thank you for being here, and I'm very, very happy to welcome my guest, Steve Friend. | ||
| Steve Friend is an FBI whistleblower. | ||
| He's co-host of the American Radicals podcast on Rumble, and he's the best-selling author of a book called True Blue, My Journey from Beat Cop to Suspended FBI Whistleblower. | ||
| Welcome to the show, Mr. Friend. | ||
| Thank you very much for having me today. | ||
| It's my pleasure, and we have a lot to get into, but just to lay the groundwork here. | ||
| You went through something that we talk about quite a bit, the politicization, I guess you could call it, of the FBI being taken off of Human trafficking and child exploitation cases to focus on domestic terrorism. | ||
| You became an FBI whistleblower in 2022 after making protected disclosures to Congress about the FBI's questionable and manipulative investigations of the January 6th protesters. | ||
| This, of course, is all in your book, True Blue, my journey from beat cop to his admitted FBI whistleblower. | ||
| But just for our audience that hasn't heard the ins and outs of this story, tell us, you know, what led to you sitting in front of me today instead of... | ||
| You know, being in the FBI headquarters, what happened? | ||
| What was your experience at the FBI that led you to want to blow the whistle? | ||
| Well, it's certainly been a very interesting 28 months of unpaid indefinite suspension here. | ||
| But my path to the FBI started when I was a police officer in Georgia. | ||
| Did that for a number of years. | ||
| Eventually was hired by the FBI in 2014. But because of my law enforcement background, they sent me to a remote location in Sioux City, Iowa. | ||
| To investigate Indian Country. | ||
| So I investigated violent crimes on Native American reservations in Northeast Nebraska for about seven years. | ||
| And that was really important to my overall decision to come forward because I got a lot of repetitions investigating cases. | ||
| I opened about 200 cases in seven years. | ||
| Arrested 150 violent criminals. | ||
| Was a member of the SWAT team, kind of doing my thing out there. | ||
| Eventually transferred to Daytona Beach, Florida, which is where I currently live. | ||
| Took a transfer to work on child exploitation. | ||
| I was basically told that child pornography was not a priority. | ||
| My assistant special agent in charge said that. | ||
| It was supposed to be referred to local law enforcement to work, and I was supposed to focus down on the largest and most important investigation in the history of the FBI. So I got my first look at those cases, and it was immediately apparent to me that there are a lot of problems. | ||
| I'm a big believer in due process. | ||
| Don't think that it is the prime directive of the FBI to be the judge, jury, executioner. | ||
| I think that due process means that you follow the process, you're a system idealist, you follow the law, the Constitution, and then that person has their day in court. | ||
| That's a victory. | ||
| Regardless of a conviction or an acquittal, as long as you do your job the right way, that's fine by me. | ||
| But it was immediately apparent to me the FBI is not doing that. | ||
| Instead of opening up one case on January 6th, they opened up thousands of cases, one for each person, spread them around the country to create the false political narrative that we've seen that domestic terrorism is on the rise when it's basically people who were involved in First Amendment protected activity at the Capitol on January 6th. | ||
| And then also they were going to send a SWAT team to To arrest someone who was a January 6th defendant who had pledged to cooperate with the FBI. He had been interviewed, said what he did, said, I'll cooperate, let me know what you need. | ||
| And the FBI didn't talk to him for 18 months and then said, we're going to send a SWAT team to his house. | ||
| And that, to me, had the hallmarks of a Ruby Ridge type thing. | ||
| So I came forward with those concerns, said that I had a reasonable concern that we were violating some civil rights, some due process rights, endangering the public safety. | ||
| And then also cited the training that you get as an FBI agent where you go to the Holocaust Memorial and they teach you there that if you believe the agency is off the rails that you have to throw the flag because, you know, it didn't start on the first day with Auschwitz. | ||
| It only got to that point little by little when police just followed orders, presented all those concerns, and then ultimately was told in a sit-down meeting with my assistant special agent in charge that I had training, I had an oath of office, and I I was supposed to be doing what I was doing, but my real duty was to the FBI, and I should set an example for my children and just follow orders. | ||
| And they facilitated my removal from duty in September of 2022. Wow, yeah, and I mean, the whole thing is so fascinating, and it fits into what we say all the time, and it's not just a, it's almost cliche at this point, but it's because it's true. | ||
| We don't have an issue with the rank-and-file FBI people. | ||
| I've interacted with them in my personal life. | ||
| I used to work doing movies in D.C., and we'd have the FBI there overseeing and watching what we're doing. | ||
| To a man, they're all patriots. | ||
| They're all very professional. | ||
| I didn't get the feeling that these guys were happy that they'd be put on a domestic terror thing and taken off the child exploitation, but it's the leadership of the FBI that directs them. | ||
| If they're not following orders and they're not in the FBI anymore. | ||
| So I think it's important to sort of understand exactly what we mean when we say... | ||
| It's not the rank-and-file FBI, because the rank-and-file FBI is people like you. | ||
| Can you talk a little bit more about sort of the methods that they use to pressure you to go along with it? | ||
| And whether that's right, that the rank and file FBI are generally good, patriotic, upstanding people, but they get sent down, they get instructed to do things that are totally outrageous and then pressured, as you just pointed out, be a good example for your kids in order to not speak up and keep their head down and be a good example for your kids in order to not speak up and keep Can you talk a little bit more about just sort of the psychological method by which these good patriotic people are kept doing nonsensical or sometimes outright evil things? | ||
| I think there's a level of coercion and compromising that goes on that's undeniable at this point. | ||
| I would even quibble a little bit with you about being worried about the brick agents there. | ||
| I know people call them the rank-of-file. | ||
| On the inside, we call them the brick agents, the street agents. | ||
| But there's a A vetting process. | ||
| Fidelity, bravery, integrity is the motto of the FBI. You're supposed to be vetted as someone of integrity. | ||
| You're supposed to be vetted as someone who, if you believe that Auschwitz didn't start on day one, it's incumbent on you to throw the flag. | ||
| And people have just put their heads down and said, well, I'm doing my thing here. | ||
| But to your question at large, the FBI is able to compartmentalize responsibilities really well because it's such a large organization. | ||
| You're talking about close to 40,000 people, close to 14,000 agents. | ||
| It's a pyramid. | ||
| And when you get to the bottom of the pyramid within the brick agent class, they can give you the most minute responsibility. | ||
| So to my particular case, the January 6th guy who they were going to send a SWAT team to arrest, they said, Steve, your only job that day is to drive him. | ||
| He's going to be arrested. | ||
| He's gonna be put in handcuffs. | ||
| He's gonna be put in your vehicle. | ||
| You're gonna drive him from his house to court and drop him off. | ||
| That's all you're doing. | ||
| So you could see, unless you're willing to take a step back and look at the full mosaic, then you could say, well, I'm just Uber. | ||
| I'm not doing anything wrong. | ||
| There's no violation from my standpoint. | ||
| But, you know, I said, look. | ||
| I'm putting the person on the train to Auschwitz. | ||
| I'm part of the problem here. | ||
| And I think a lot of people are not willing to do that because it's a really sweet gig to be an FBI agent. | ||
| You are underworked and overpaid. | ||
| Once you're five years in, make it about $135,000 a year. | ||
| You get 50 paid days off a year. | ||
| You have three paid hours a week to exercise, three paid hours a week to work on your mental health and your mental fitness. | ||
| And they're always putting things out there where there's like popcorn events and Sloppy Joes and go watch a movie. | ||
| And on Friday at 2 o'clock, it's called Federal Friday. | ||
| Everybody just kind of leaves the office at that point. | ||
| You're the most interesting person in every single social engagement just about, unless you're talking to somebody who works for InfoWars. | ||
| I mean, that's a little bit more interesting. | ||
| It's a sweet gig, and people don't want to give that up, and people will just delude themselves with things by saying, like, look, I have a mortgage to pay. | ||
| I have families to feed. | ||
| I have these other obligations, and I don't want to give that up. | ||
| But, look, I've always said I would rather have hungry children than morally bankrupt children, and unfortunately, I'm in the vast minority here, as there's only been a few of us have been outspoken and have come out. | ||
| Yeah, I'm so glad you brought that up, just like... | ||
| How cool it is to be an FBI agent, because that was the impression I got. | ||
| Let's not forget, it's not only all the things you just mentioned, you know, you're the most interesting person in the room, you're well-paid. | ||
| I mean, you go into an FBI building, it's like marble on all the bathrooms, brass fixtures. | ||
| I mean, you really feel like you're somebody important when you work at the FBI or even around FBI people. | ||
| But on top of that, you have actual legitimate authority. | ||
| I mean, there's not a lot of people that you can be with where we'd be filming on the streets in D.C. and a cop would come up and go, hey, what's going on? | ||
| Do you guys have a permit? | ||
| And the guy that we're with in plain clothes can go, step away, officer. | ||
| I outrank you. | ||
| And it's like, okay, how many people do you know that can tell the officer, the police officer on the street, nothing to see here. | ||
| Move along, sir. | ||
| And that's what FBI agents can do. | ||
| So I always got the impression that it was like, okay, you're given this incredible power, this incredible authority. | ||
| And I think not all humans are fit to handle that type of authority and ability to sort of be above the law in some cases. | ||
| And they sort of deal with that and justify that by saying, well, I'm just following orders. | ||
| I'm not here this arrogant person doing whatever I want, imposing my will on other people. | ||
| I'm just a vessel for the authority above me. | ||
| So as long as I'm doing what I'm told, and as long as I'm just fulfilling the instructions of my superiors, I don't have to worry about the psychological sort of disconnect I have with imposing my will on people. | ||
| Or being more important than everybody else. | ||
| It's not me. | ||
| I'm just a fixture of this wider power structure. | ||
| I don't know if that makes any sense, but do you know what I'm saying? | ||
| Is there something to that in that the authority that they have and the power that they have, people almost offset the responsibility of that by saying, I'm just following orders, so it's not me doing this. | ||
| I'm just a vessel. | ||
| Do you understand what I'm getting at there? | ||
| I think there's a confusion about... | ||
| Their best practices and then the antiquity of error and justifying its perpetuity by saying things like, well, we've always done things this way. | ||
| And they haven't done them always this way. | ||
| But I'll give you one of the perverse incentive structures that sort of gets people on the wrong track. | ||
| The FBI has something that they call integrated program management. | ||
| IPM. It's about 10 years old. | ||
| It was actually a McKinsey consulting idea that the FBI brought about. | ||
| It is a quota system. | ||
| So there's now a quota in place that every single year, every field office around the country, 55 field offices, they go through integrated program management, which breaks down into field office strategic planning and threat review prioritization, all these very government-y sort of terms that get put out. | ||
| But basically they say, how many arrests do we have to have this year in any particular violation? | ||
| Gangs and drugs and white collar and public corruption, domestic terrorism. | ||
| What tools do we have to use? | ||
| How many wiretaps do we have to have this year? | ||
| They set the metrics for themselves so that they can achieve those metrics. | ||
| And it turns law enforcement incentives on its head because you elect the sheriff to bring crime down. | ||
| If he doesn't do that, he loses his job. | ||
| But the FBI is incentivized to actually juke the stats and bring crime up. | ||
| So that they can go back to Congress and say, look at all the good work you gave us, $12 billion last year. | ||
| What if you give us $13 or $14 billion? | ||
| And think of all the good work we can do again. | ||
| And people work smarter, not harder, which is what they did with J6 and other cases like that, where they had one case where they said, hey, let's just open up. | ||
| A thousand cases so that we can hit our metrics for the last few years. | ||
| And the grossest part is that there are senior executive service members at all the 55 field offices, the boss, they get bonuses. | ||
| There's a compensation attached to pressuring their subordinates to hit the numbers. | ||
| So it was not an uncommon conversation to hear, hey, do you think you can get a wiretap on that case? | ||
| Because we haven't hit our wiretap numbers yet. | ||
| Oh, hey, you have that case with four bad guys? | ||
| Why don't you open up four cases with one bad guy and just copy and paste it? | ||
| Because we have to manipulate stats because the boss has to get her bonus. | ||
| This incentive structure that's in place now, and people just kind of say, well, this is how we do things. | ||
| And, you know, I, at the time, even being in for a couple years, was thinking, like, look, as long as I'm putting bad guys in jail, I don't care if it's one case or seven cases, whatever it is, I'm getting to the end result of an actual proper investigation being done here. | ||
| There's a manipulation, and as a result of that, we're all suffering because we're taxpayers, and then there's the politicization and the weaponization that we've seen in the last four years. | ||
| Yeah, and of course, as you describe it, when you were on the reservation or when you were doing the Native American work, you were putting violent criminals in jail. | ||
| jail. | ||
| I'm sure you were, you know, feeling fulfilled when you were going after, you know, child abusers, things like that. | ||
| Like that's real. | ||
| That's what we need the FBI for. | ||
| And I'm glad that we have an FBI to go after people like that because the local police just don't have the resources to handle some of the sophisticated networks. | ||
| But then you get taken off and put on a domestic terror case that some dude that walked through the Capitol. | ||
| It's, I mean, you can't be the only one feeling a little bit, you know, bewildered by this in the FBI. | ||
| What do you think the general atmosphere is? | ||
| I mean, I mean, I don't know if you could even judge it, but I mean, are most people in the FBI just going, oh, let's just get through this because, you know, this is kind of absurd? | ||
| Or are people, you know, really committed and going, we're hunting down domestic terrorists here. | ||
| They broke into the Capitol. | ||
| I mean, overall, what do you think the sentiment is just for your average FBI person out at a field office? | ||
| Well, outside of Washington, D.C., where they're having temporary agents go there, where they're the true believers, that they're actually calling it the capital siege, and they're going after seditionists, the people in the field are basically... | ||
| At the whim of Washington, D.C. The conversations I had with people who had been doing it even longer than me. | ||
| So I got brought in to do it October of 2021. So the event was nine months in the rearview mirror. | ||
| They were saying things like, look, we were sent these leads by Washington, D.C. They were telling us how to investigate our own cases, which is outside of the regular procedures and policies. | ||
| And then we interviewed these people and we sent back what we did to Washington, D.C. And we're just hoping they tell us to let it go. | ||
| We don't want to do it. | ||
| They were at the victim. | ||
| They're at the mercy of what Washington, D.C. was mandating them to do on their own cases, which is really one of the elements of my whistleblowing. | ||
| I said, look, my name is on the case, and I have no investigative control over it. | ||
| Do you trust me or not? | ||
| Do you have such a macabre view of me that you don't think that I'll do the work unless you tell me how to do it exactly? | ||
| I want my case to be buttoned up, and if it is a righteous case, I'll be happy to bring that investigation forward. | ||
| I'll be happy to go and testify in court. | ||
| But if I'm asked by a defense... | ||
| Agent Friend, you're the case agent. | ||
| Did you do any investigative actions on this case? | ||
| I'm going to have to answer no. | ||
| And that's going to make us look really bad. | ||
| And if the person's a bad actor who probably deserves to be convicted and we violate his due process rights because we didn't tell them that we did that. | ||
| Then that's a problem for me because I'm a professional and I want to have the most buttoned-up case possible. | ||
| But the FBI doesn't do that because they're going into a star chamber in Washington, D.C. where the juries are convicting people within minutes. | ||
| They've actually had stories where people were on multiple juries of multiple January 6th cases. | ||
| This is a ridiculous bastardization of our due process, and I don't know if there's any way to take corrective action at this point on these cases other than just a blanket pardon. | ||
| Well, that was my question, not just on these cases, but is there a way to fix this? | ||
| I mean... | ||
| In the fantasy world, if you're given a magic wand and are told, okay, fix the FBI, I mean, what does Steve Friend do? | ||
| Is there a way to correct this? | ||
| Do you need a magic wand, or is there a more mundane way to fix this? | ||
| What is Trump up against right now? | ||
| Is he going to be able to fix the FBI, do you think, in a top-down fashion? | ||
| You know, I've been on record for the last two and a half years saying that the FBI had to be shattered to a thousand pieces and scattered to the wind. | ||
| I didn't think there was any way back. | ||
| I do think, though, that Kash Patel, if I'm going to give the old call a try... | ||
| Him at the director's seat because of his unique background coming from both the prosecutor and defense. | ||
| I think he has a healthy appreciation for the power that is actually at the government's fingertips. | ||
| But just some very early day one type of things that a director Patel could do that would go a long way to bringing the FBI into more of an objectively good force would be, one, eliminating the IPM, the quota system that exists. | ||
| They have to eliminate the intelligence branch, which exists, where the FBI just collects intelligence on Americans for no reason at all. | ||
| They have to do away with their Appendix G of the Domestic Investigations Operations Guide, which allows them to open up a counterintelligence investigation on any American who they believe might be the victim of a foreign actor who is recruiting them. | ||
| So they can just investigate anyone that they want. | ||
| The assessment that came out of the Patriot Act, which allows the FBI to open an assessment, which is basically an investigation of any American for an articulable purpose. | ||
| No reasonable suspicion, probable cause necessary. | ||
| That needs to be done away with as a policy. | ||
| The DEI hiring that goes on. | ||
| They are hiring nothing but communists and DEI employees at this point. | ||
| They're all in for the 30 by 30 initiative, which says 30% female. | ||
| In leadership by 2030, but elements of that are just cultural Marxism where they say things like job knowledge tests are discriminatory, so you don't need to know anything about the job. | ||
| Physical fitness standards are discriminatory. | ||
| Grooming standards are discriminatory. | ||
| Those sorts of things. | ||
| They had to get rid of white culture with the 30 by 30 initiative, which is a belief in the English common law and showing up on time. | ||
| Those sorts of things. | ||
| That needs to be done away with. | ||
| I think that would go a long way as far as fixing the culture. | ||
| And then you can get into the way you need to break down the organization. | ||
| And I think that there's a healthy conversation that should be had that the FBI should not actually possess firearms. | ||
| I think they should be an investigative agency, unarmed, and should aid and assist local police, sheriff's offices, police departments, tribal, state. | ||
| And then do what the sheriff needs them to do because the sheriff knows the crimes afflicting his area. | ||
| He loses his job if he doesn't do them. | ||
| The FBI could be there as a force multiplier. | ||
| And then you wouldn't be worried about an FBI SWAT team coming to get you because... | ||
| They wouldn't have a SWAT team. | ||
| And if the FBI had an investigation that they carried forward and the sheriff said, no, you're not going to investigate that person over there because that's clearly First Amendment protected activity, then it'll be a waste of time for them. | ||
| So I think that that's a real conversation to be had. | ||
| It's not unprecedented. | ||
| The DEA has unarmed investigators. | ||
| I think the FBI should probably follow suit. | ||
| I think that's a great idea. | ||
| I haven't heard that one before, but I actually really like that, and I can see that being implemented and being successful. | ||
| That's very interesting, actually. | ||
| I hadn't thought about that. | ||
| I'm going to have to think about that because I like that a lot. | ||
| Man, you hear about the DEI stuff and it's like, you hear everything else that you've said so far and it's like, oh man, we're really in a bad position. | ||
| Then you hear about the DEI and they want to get rid of white culture, which we know how they define it. | ||
| It's literally like pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and like you said, common law or belief in Christianity. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| All right, well, this is the font of everything. | ||
| This is why everything is going down. | ||
| It's because the culture itself has been undermined and subverted. | ||
| And again, it stinks because I want there to be an FBI that I can trust, just like I want there to be a mainstream media with power and gravitas and prestige. | ||
| I want there to be a New York Times that I can trust. | ||
| But all of these organizations and institutions, long-storied and have these amazing histories, and they've all been taken over, subverted from the inside. | ||
| They're not fit for purpose. | ||
| And unfortunately, we either have to shut them down or wholly reform them. | ||
| And it kind of stinks because I want there to be an—I like the boys in blue with the hat and the whole, you know, G-Man thing. | ||
| That's cool. | ||
| It's Americana. | ||
| It's necessary for the amount of crime that we experience. | ||
| But it sounds like it's all just been gutted over the last few years, and it's going to take a massive move back. | ||
| We're going to go to a commercial break here in just a second. | ||
| My guest is Steve Friend. | ||
| He is a whistleblower from the FBI. This podcast is called The American Radicals Podcast, and that can be found on Rumble. | ||
| And you can follow Steve Friend on X at RealSteveFriend. | ||
| And yes, it's spelled just like friend. | ||
| It's friend, RealSteveFriend on X. And we'll be back on the other side, and we're going to talk a little bit about the New Orleans terror attacks. | ||
| I understand you have some good information on that, but I did want to take a moment to remind you that everything you see on InfoWars, including the incredible guests that we get day in and day out, Is only possible because you go to thealexjonesstore.com or drjonesnaturals.com. | ||
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| More with Steve Friend on the other side. | ||
| Don't go anywhere, folks. | ||
| Welcome back. | ||
| Ladies and gentlemen, this is the American Journal. | ||
| I'm your host, Harrison Smith, joined today by Steve Friend. | ||
| He is an FBI whistleblower. | ||
| He's the co-host of the American Radicals podcast. | ||
| You can find that on Rumble. | ||
| Again, that's the American Radicals. | ||
| Search that on Rumble and you can follow him on X at RealSteveFriend. | ||
| We spent the first portion of this interview talking about just sort of the FBI in general. | ||
| But let's talk about some of the recent events that have caused people to question the ability and legitimacy of the FBI. | ||
| And it's crazy how fast the news cycle goes these days. | ||
| I don't need to tell our audience, but it was just a little over a week ago that a man with an ISIS flag on his truck drove that truck down Bourbon Street at like 100 miles an hour and killed over a dozen people. | ||
| And yet it seems like now the only thing anybody's talking about is Trump buying Greenland and the fires in L.A. | ||
| So let's stick to the New Orleans terror attack that happened just a little over a week ago. | ||
| I want to talk to you about this anyway, and just during the break, I searched to see what the latest was, and it just so happens that the first story that pops up is from Fox News, and it's this. | ||
| Hapless FBI shows in New Orleans terror attack why bureau reform is necessary, and they... | ||
| Are very unkind to the FBI and, of course, the statement made by the second-in-command there at the New Orleans field office wearing a jumper with a nose piercing and telling us it wasn't a terror attack despite the presence of an ISIS flag. | ||
| I mean, this is just another example, isn't it, Steve, of the failure of the FBI to prevent attacks like this and their failure to take responsibility afterwards, and it just contributes to the overall mistrust that the American people have. | ||
| In what is supposed to be our premier federal law enforcement agency. | ||
| What is your take on the FBI's actions before and after the attack on New Orleans? | ||
| A bureaucracy. | ||
| The B stands for Bureau. | ||
| Success for our bureaucracy is always in growth, in budget, and in power. | ||
| And I think that... | ||
| You're going to see, and we have seen in the last week since this attack happened, a really dangerous conversation. | ||
| Because we had this conversation about a quarter century ago, on September 12, 2001. Right. | ||
| And that was when Americans were put for a decision for, do you want liberty or do you want security? | ||
| And we chose security. | ||
| We passed the Patriot Act, which... | ||
| Gave us what we are now seeing, the slippery slope we're actually at the bottom of. | ||
| Because I've compared this in the past, the FBI to Skynet from The Terminator. | ||
| So if you watch the movie, Skynet is artificial intelligence. | ||
| It becomes self-aware. | ||
| It is not good. | ||
| It is not bad. | ||
| It just is. | ||
| And when it becomes self-aware, it determines that the greatest threat to Skynet are the people because they can unplug it. | ||
| Similarly, the FBI... We empowered after September 11th because we said that we wanted security. | ||
| We gave them these massive powers, massive resources, and they came ultimately to the conclusion that the threat to the Bureau, because its ultimate success is in growing the bureaucracy, were people who wanted to pare that back. | ||
| So for me, when I see the argument that people are making, they get partial credit. | ||
| When they say that the FBI should not be in the business of being the arbiter of wrong think, should not be going after moms who went to school board meetings, There should be a period at the end of that sentence rather than a comma that says, and going after another group. | ||
| Because even if the other group has a factually evil ideology like this individual in New Orleans, ultimately the bureaucracy of the FBI will never ever... | ||
| Give you security because it's frankly impossible even in an alleged land of the free like we currently live in. | ||
| And you're going to get what they do have now. | ||
| And that's a weaponized system that goes after people who are small government minded. | ||
| It's a system in which the FBI has developed its own national security space where they have identified people and they slapped them with labels like anti-government, anti-authority, violent extremist. | ||
| That's the latest. | ||
| Domestic terrorist subject. | ||
| An agave. | ||
| Anti-government, anti-authority violent extremists, by the FBI's own definition, is someone who has a perception of government overreach or negligence. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| They can open up an investigation of you as a domestic terrorist. | ||
| So my ultimate concern here is the fact that we're going to be put for a decision yet again, and we're going to empower these bureaucracies yet again. | ||
| When they have a track record of failure, they're not doing what they need to do. | ||
| Not saying that there isn't a place here for the federal government, but mostly what it has to do is stop entrapping Americans in these fake terrorist plots to hit its quotas and actually do the work of supporting local law enforcement and fortifying high-traffic data. | ||
| Stop sending money to fake NGOs that are actually fronts for the Taliban. | ||
| Secure our border to prevent millions of potentially bad actors from streaming across. | ||
| Those are legitimate functions, but there needs to be a mindset change here within Americans because freedom is actually inherently dangerous, but unfortunately I think people are going to default into that 9-12-2001 mindset. | ||
| Well, and they are. | ||
| You're exactly right. | ||
| And it's, of course, a feedback loop of this because as they fail to prevent violent attacks and the violent attacks happens, that gives them more ability to ask for greater surveillance or greater ability. | ||
| That doesn't work, so you get more violence attacks. | ||
| And it is a feedback loop. | ||
| And again, this isn't even speculative. | ||
| The day after the attack, I believe it was the New Orleans mayor came out saying, you know, the problem here is we didn't have enough surveillance. | ||
| We need a UK-style CCTV, I think was his exact quote. | ||
| You know, just constant surveillance everywhere, CCTV cameras on every corner. | ||
| And it's like, even just looking out on the face of it, it's like, well, how would that have protected these people? | ||
| How would that have stopped the truck from being driven down the road? | ||
| You would have been able to watch it from CCTV, but... | ||
| Are you saying that you would have been able to somehow prevent the truck from doing this with CCTVs? | ||
| I mean, the argument doesn't even make any sense. | ||
| The same thing's happening in New York, where you have all these violent attacks on the subway. | ||
| The governor sends a National Guard down there. | ||
| So this is just, again, the feedback loop. | ||
| The crime goes up. | ||
| They militarize the police, essentially, send them down the subways. | ||
| And her latest statement, Kathy Hochul, after, again, on January 1st, some guy was pushed in front of the tracks randomly. | ||
| And she's saying, well, we need more surveillance. | ||
| It's always the answer. | ||
| The answer is always less freedoms, more surveillance, more control to the federal government. | ||
| And it's just an obviously bad feedback loop where they're not doing what they're supposed to be doing, but they're being rewarded for it with greater power and greater capabilities and greater surveillance. | ||
| How do we break people out of this mindset? | ||
| Because at the same time, I understand it. | ||
| If you can't go walking down Bourbon Street on New Year's Eve without feeling unsafe... | ||
| You got to do something, right? | ||
| So it makes sense that people, they want something to be done, but the only thing ever being offered is, you know, less freedoms, more control, more surveillance, more power to the federal government. | ||
| So how do we break out of this cycle? | ||
| Well, you hear the conversation all the time, particularly on the political right. | ||
| They'll say that America isn't a country and that we're an idea. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think you have to go beyond that. | ||
| America's not an idea. | ||
| It's an action verb. | ||
| You have to do America, right? | ||
| That requires you to be uncomfortable and inconvenienced at times. | ||
| And I'm not saying that you have to get into a covered wagon and traverse the continent like they did over a century ago where you looked at your five children and said, there's a pretty good chance a couple of you are going to die from cholera, but we're making the trip anyway. | ||
| I'm talking about basic things like carrying a firearm, getting trained with that firearm so that you're proficient. | ||
| Be your own first responder because when seconds count, the police are minutes away. | ||
| They're going to do their best. | ||
| But there's no guarantee there. | ||
| The answer is actually us. | ||
| We need to engage with young men, the vulnerable people who... | ||
| Both bad actors, like terrorists, like to indoctrinate and radicalize. | ||
| And then also the government likes to identify. | ||
| The FBI loves to find young men, particularly those under the age of 18, and get them in a vulnerable state, emotionally disturbed, lonely, and then get them to make the worst decision possible and say, hey, look, I know you're not predisposed or capable of actually carrying out an attack, but if I tell you that I'll give you the bomb, will you push the button? | ||
| And then we get them as a terrorist. | ||
| We need to engage with those young men and tell them it's okay to be a man in this society. | ||
| And you should probably go out and touch the grass and stop looking at the screens so much where the people that are bad actors either from ISIS or from the FBI looking to get an ISIS stat are waiting for you. | ||
| So I think the answer is there. | ||
| Beyond that, I'm a big believer in the doctrine of the lesser magistrate. | ||
| You need to engage with your local police departments and find out what their capabilities are, where their shortcomings are, and how you can best augment that. | ||
| You can volunteer. | ||
| You can just engage with them in a community fashion. | ||
| There just needs to be an expectation from our federal sources, from our federal agencies, that they're not there to actually be weaponized against us. | ||
| If they just did nothing, it would be better than what they're doing now, which is proactively going against and going after people who are just interested in exercising their First Amendment rights to worship the way they see fit or to speak out or to assemble. | ||
| If that didn't go on, then maybe the see something and say something modicum that we've had might make sense. | ||
| Strange and sketchy and threatening. | ||
| You shouldn't feel afraid about going to tell your local authority or even a federal authority about that. | ||
| But now people are because they know, well, I'm going to be connected to this. | ||
| The FBI is going to open up an assessment on me because they can say, well, I'm a connected person to this. | ||
| So I'm just going to keep my mouth shut. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And of course, this just goes across across the board. | ||
| We talk about all the time. | ||
| It's like I'm not even that I in a perfect world. | ||
| I wouldn't be that concerned with things like surveillance or, you know, even like algorithmic stuff on online. | ||
| You know, it's I'm not against that as a as a thing in and of itself. | ||
| It's just the way it's used is always against, you know, if you try to upload a video of Alex Jones to Facebook, they hit it immediately. | ||
| I mean, they got the algorithms to take that down right away. | ||
| And then you hear there were 100 million examples of child sexual material exchanged on Facebook. | ||
| And it's like, okay, you have all this capability, but you're clearly not. | ||
| Putting it where it belongs. | ||
| If all they were doing was going after criminals and drug dealers and pedophiles, I'd give them all the power they'd want if they'd use it responsibly, but they never do, so you can't give it to them. | ||
| You can't give them the power. | ||
| And when you talk about the trade-off, it seems so obvious to me. | ||
| Things like free speech, it's like, okay. | ||
| The risk of having free speech, it's a little dangerous. | ||
| You might get offended. | ||
| You might be offended. | ||
| People might say things against you or your identity that you don't like and hurts your feelings. | ||
| That's the risk you take having free speech. | ||
| The benefit you get is you get to think your own thoughts and you get to discuss things and you get to have a say in your government. | ||
| So it's like, that's worth it. | ||
| It's a little dangerous. | ||
| It's a little uncomfortable, yes. | ||
| But what you get in return is invaluable. | ||
| It's impossibly precious. | ||
| So, you know, it's the same thing with freedom. | ||
| The freedom to not be surveilled, to have privacy, to have private property, to be able to follow your conscience regardless of what the government thinks about it, that's incredibly precious and valuable. | ||
| And if it makes things a little bit dangerous because the FBI can't watch you 24-7, that's a trade-off I'm willing to take. | ||
| And I wish more Americans were willing to go down that. | ||
| Just slightly more dangerous, but ultimately so much more beautiful and... | ||
| You know, precious path, but people don't seem to be, you know, willing to do that very much, do they? | ||
| No, they don't. | ||
| Unfortunately, I think people are too sort of addicted to comfort at this point. | ||
| And then there's also a mentality shift that we've had that we've all been living with for the last two and a half decades, post 9-11, when the mission creep really started to set in. | ||
| I mean, before September 11th, national security looks like we're going to protect the continuity of government, we're going to protect and defend the Constitution, and we're going to respect civil rights and civil liberties. | ||
| But after 9-11, it changed. | ||
| It said no American can ever be harmed again at the hands of a terrorist. | ||
| It's a zero-fail mission. | ||
| And a zero-fail mission requires despotism. | ||
| It's not even an achievable mission. | ||
| You can aspire to live in Mayberry in a utopian society where nothing bad is going to happen, but the fact of the matter is that bad people will always, always figure out ways to do bad things. | ||
| So it's the ultimate Ben Franklin question. | ||
| Those who are willing to give up their liberty for security wind up with neither. | ||
| Because it's an impossible goal to actually reach, and now all you've done is given these tools and powers to a government which inevitably comes to the realization that its greatest threats are those that want to curb those very powers and resources, and then they will Oh, my God. | ||
| The buzzwords. | ||
| We're being taken over by buzzwords. | ||
| But you're exactly right. | ||
| And that's why the Founding Fathers would today be on the enemy list. | ||
| I mean, it's really symbolic of how far America has fallen, is literally, quote. | ||
| And I remember, look, back to, you know, I was. | ||
| Making movies for the FBI, I was a script supervisor, and so I would help go through and help to write things. | ||
| I'd be going, guys, you've got your bad guy in this movie? | ||
| Quoting Thomas Jefferson, is that really the signal you want to send? | ||
| You've got the bad guy, the domestic terrorist, going, the tree of liberty's got to be watered by the blood of patriots. | ||
| And it's like... | ||
| You're saying the bad guy is Thomas Jefferson here? | ||
| I mean, clearly they've gone off the rails a little bit. | ||
| They don't understand the fundamentals of what makes America great, who we are, like why we even exist in the first place. | ||
| It seems like they're... | ||
| They're utterly out of whack. | ||
| In addition, you talk about hitting quotas and they go in and they radicalize people or they find people who are potentially radicalized and they say, well, what if we make the bomb for you? | ||
| And they have to fulfill all of these legal obligations where we have to ask them if they're sure three times. | ||
| It's almost like a magical, occultish kind of ceremony where it's like, did you tell them three times? | ||
| Are you sure you want to do this? | ||
| Because you have to do it three times and then it's legal. | ||
| It's very bizarre how that works. | ||
| But not only are they hitting quotas, they then get the talking point. | ||
| Until everybody realizes that Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping was a total hoax by the FBI, for that time period, they get to say, well, domestic terror really is a problem. | ||
| They tried to kidnap the governor. | ||
| So they're getting talking points to the mainstream media that then can be used to bolster their agenda further, right? | ||
| So all of this is intertwined, and I think a lot of things they do is in order to get the headlines to sway public opinion. | ||
| Do you think that's accurate? | ||
| I've devoted my social media account to basically pointing that out for the last two years, that all the FBI does is try to generate headlines for itself. | ||
| So inevitably, if there's something going on in the Middle East, that they will come down with some sort of an indictment of actors who are over there who are in a non-extradition country, right? | ||
| Or they will take local cases from local police officers who make the arrest, and now that all the danger is gone, they will just adopt that case and take it federally. | ||
| And then you take it to... | ||
| I call it the playbook. | ||
| The playbook's very simple. | ||
| The FBI finds a vulnerable person, someone who is emotionally disturbed, lonely, low intelligence, indigent, something. | ||
| And then they have the confidential human source, the snitch. | ||
| Contact them, a person who's paid by the FBI and only paid for being productive, finding them red meat, fresh meat to go after. | ||
| And then they groom that person for however long it takes. | ||
| In some cases, it's five or six years. | ||
| And then they introduce them to the undercover employee, the undercover employee who then says, hey, for the exact amount of money that's in your bank account, because we've already subpoenaed that. | ||
| We can get you exactly what you need to go do your worst idea, which you were not predisposed to do and not capable of doing but for our involvement. | ||
| And it's getting very blatant at this point because they used to actually black out the names of the agents. | ||
| They're actually proud of it. | ||
| They're putting the names of the agents on these cases, and some of them are shocking and disturbing. | ||
| They're going after teenage boys and waiting until the day they turn 18 to then drop the arrest on them. | ||
| Or something else. | ||
| I mean, there was all the talk after Butler. | ||
| The assassination attempt, that there was an Iranian connection to that. | ||
| Well, if you paid attention, they tried to fit a square peg in a round hole on that one because there was an arrest the day before Butler of a terrorist subject. | ||
| So you would think it would be the day after, but it was the day before, but they hoped people didn't pay attention to that. | ||
| That case was a Pakistani who came via Iran to Dallas, Texas, and the FBI Dallas sponsored his arrival. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Not because of anything he'd done at that point, because you would think they would just arrest him. | ||
| Maybe it's easier than trying to extradite him from Iran, which is impossible. | ||
| No. | ||
| They let him then operate for three months within the interior of the country, go to New York with a plot that undercovers gave him, that he was going to organize a protest outside politicians' houses involving multiple dozens of people as a distraction, and then have a female unknown. | ||
| Enter into politicians' houses to steal classified material, which just, I guess, in his mind, happened to be laying around, and then exfil out. | ||
| And then he would hire some hitmen who he would find at nightclubs to carry out a rotating, roving band of assassination attempts that may or may not include Donald Trump. | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| For the low, low price of $5,000, which he didn't have. | ||
| It was an emotionally disturbed person who they entrapped and allowed to operate in the interior of the country for multiple months. | ||
| And never for a moment did they think that maybe he will not follow every breadcrumb that we give him and he'll just grab a giant butcher knife and stab someone or hop on an F-150 with an ISIS flag and drive into a crowd of people. | ||
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Right. | |
| Or maybe grab dad's deer rifle and climb up on a slightly sloped roof that's not being looked at and take a shot. | ||
| They never think about these sort of things, and there's collateral damage. | ||
| And that's just one case. | ||
| I've been covering these by the dozens, and they've been going on nonstop. | ||
| Over 90% of FBI counterterrorism investigations involve that level of entrapment. | ||
| It just doesn't fit the legal standard. | ||
| But in spirit, it is entrapment. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| And, you know, we covered that story that you're talking about. | ||
| I didn't know all those details. | ||
| I didn't know about, you know, going to New York and the protests. | ||
| I hadn't heard any of that. | ||
| But, you know, we did cover that this guy, he would have been stopped at the border. | ||
| He would have been turned away, typically. | ||
| But the FBI actually gave him a pass and said, no, let this guy into the country because they knew that he was up to no good and he could be a feather in their cap. | ||
| After a few months, they would capture him and they knew they could. | ||
| It's just, it's... | ||
| It's such a blatant, it's not just a playbook, it's play acting. | ||
| It's a show they're putting on for us. | ||
| And it's very dangerous. | ||
| Because obviously, you know, they're relying on the ignorance of the subject, but there's no saying that the subject doesn't look at the fake bomb that the FBI gives them and goes, this bomb isn't real. | ||
| I'm going to go make a real one myself and carries out the plot on his own outside of the control of the FBI. I mean, that's a huge risk for collateral damage. | ||
| And I wonder if that didn't maybe happen with New Orleans because, you know... | ||
| The favorite thing of the FBI is to give people a dummy bomb, is to get them to go, because then you really got them. | ||
| You go, look, this guy thought the bomb was real. | ||
| He planted it. | ||
| He tried to detonate it. | ||
| There's no question as to whether this guy was a violent guy. | ||
| He actually tried. | ||
| We just gave him a fake bomb. | ||
| And with New Orleans, there were apparently all these bombs. | ||
| The story from the local station there in New Orleans, New Orleans terror attack suspect used explosives that could have killed hundreds, NBC reports, but none of the bombs went off. | ||
| Again, to me, this just... | ||
| On a surface level, has the hallmarks of a FBI entrapment investigation. | ||
| Do you think there's any legitimacy to that? | ||
| Do you think these explosives were real and just didn't go off? | ||
| Or do you think maybe this could have been an FBI entrapment situation like we're discussing that went a little off the rails? | ||
| Yeah, I think that there's a hybrid here in my mind because I understand what you're saying, but what the FBI is really good at is once you touch that button, that's when the flashbang comes at your feet and they arrest you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I think if I was going to speculate, I think he was on their radar, like he might be being groomed for this. | ||
| But then he went off script, like so many of these others I think I'm fearful of doing. | ||
| And look, I'll give you even one more. | ||
| Cole Bridges was a soldier. | ||
| He wasn't a soldier to start with. | ||
| An informant for the FBI talked to him and convinced him to join the U.S. Army, which means the FBI had an open investigation of a terrorism subject. | ||
| Open. | ||
| And then either colluded with the DOD or withheld that information and got him to join the army. | ||
| And he was there for a year and a half before they sprung the trap on him for providing support to ISIS, where he was from Ohio living in Georgia, but giving ISIS advice on how to take down New York or how to take down special forces when he wasn't a member of special forces and had never been to New York. | ||
| And the only people he was talking to were undercover agents of the FBI. But it also meant that for a year and a half that he was in the army, he had access to live ammunition on a firing range. | ||
| He just turned to his left, turned to his right, and shot someone who'd signed the dotted line and was there as a true patriot. | ||
| These are legion, these amounts of entrapments that are going on here. | ||
| But the FBI doesn't consider collateral damage. | ||
| They ought to hit their quota. | ||
| And they are getting their press statements. | ||
| And most people aren't really reading into the details of these cases and saying, hey, hold up a minute. | ||
| That doesn't make sense. | ||
| And maybe if there's going to be a silver lining out of the tragedy that happened in New Orleans, that people are going to look at a more skeptical eye and maybe not give this agency the power that it is seeking in the next iteration of the Patriot Act that we'll probably get from the... | ||
|
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Yeah, I think you're exactly right. | |
| I think people are waking up to this threat, and they do. | ||
| The FBI relies on not just the ignorance of their subjects, obviously, not realizing that they're being entrapped or being led along a false road, but the ignorance of the American people not looking into the details and just taking the headlines at face value. | ||
| And I guarantee you, if I went out on the street right now and asked people about the Gretchen Whitmer kidnapping, probably half the people would go, oh yeah, those radical Trump supporters tried to kidnap the governor, and that's what happened. | ||
| We have no idea the FBI was behind it because they never read the follow-up stories. | ||
| They read the headline that the FBI wants them to read. | ||
| And then they never do research further into that, which is why I think what you do and what we do is so valuable because if Americans knew, if they had the full spectrum view of how these things went down, they would never stand for it. | ||
| So I'm so glad there's people like yourself. | ||
| Hopefully there's others like you in the FBI that will either become whistleblowers or help to change the culture from inside because I do think we need an FBI, just not this FBI. Again, thank you so much for coming on. | ||
| Steve Friend, FBI whistleblower at RealSteveFriend. | ||
| On X, on Rumble, his podcast that he co-hosts is The American Radicals Podcast. | ||
| Thank you so much for joining us today, sir. | ||
| You got it. | ||
| Have a good day. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| You too. | ||
| Powerful stuff, folks. | ||
| And again, it just goes across the board. | ||
| All this stuff, whether we're talking about the FBI or subways in New York and Kathy Hochul or the way that the fires went down in California, there are these... | ||
| These fundamental similarities that they share that if we can illuminate and understand and get the wider public to understand, we can actually avoid all of this. | ||
| And if nothing else, that should give you hope because people are waking up. | ||
| Everybody's asking questions. | ||
| Nobody takes anything at face value anymore. | ||
| There's a danger in that, that people can go off the rails and start believing nonsense because nothing is trustworthy. | ||
| So I'm glad that we're here to hopefully steer everybody in the right direction and maintain sanity in an increasingly insane world. | ||
| That's going to do it for us here on American Journal. | ||
| Go to thealexjonesstore.com slash Harrison. | ||
| To let them know who sent you, go to Dr. Jones Naturals. | ||
| Take advantage of that two-pack and stay tuned because Alex Jones is on in 90 seconds. | ||
| Don't go anywhere, folks. | ||
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