Mike Baker debunks claims of a vanished shooter’s body post-assassination attempt while critiquing media bias, like CNN’s softball Harris-Walz interview and Democrats’ rapid return to attacking Trump despite calls for civility. He highlights election integrity concerns—Texas purged 1.1M ineligible voters, yet fraud remains rare—and questions U.S. interventions in Libya/Afghanistan, where abandoned weapons fueled conflicts. Baker links Middle East instability to Iran’s proxy wars and doubts Ukraine’s territorial gains, contrasting with Rogan’s skepticism of Democratic spending shifts. They also dissect COVID-era censorship, ultra-processed food risks (e.g., McGriddles triggering heart attacks), and Harris’s leadership gaps, from "defund the police" flip-flops to unaddressed mental decline. Frustration with institutional distrust—FBI, Secret Service, CIA—and unreleased files like JFK’s lingers, underscoring a fractured political landscape where tribalism overshadows transparency. [Automatically generated summary]
But I was telling Emily, I was telling my wife the other day that I consider that a really good thing because like, oh my God, this is like two minutes into it and I've already mentioned the podcast, The President's Daily Brief.
I think it's in our wiring, in our DNA, because we always had to look out for threats.
So you find things that you perceive are threats or things that are going to be a problem, and you get angry about them, and you do it on social media instead of in the jungle.
With the Trump thing, though, I was surprised at how, because it was about a day and a half, maybe, maybe it was 36 hours, of, oh, fuck, how could this happen?
Look what we created, this environment.
We have to be more civil with each other.
And that was a big push from the Democrats, right?
You remember Biden and Harris talking about We've got to be more civil.
We've got to dial it back and turn down the temperature.
And that lasted, for that side, that lasted almost no time at all.
And, you know, now to be fair, neither side really stuck to the idea.
I would argue, if Trump...
If Trump had just said, you know what, from a strategic point of view, maybe it's not me, maybe it's not what I want to do, but from a strategic point of view, if after that attempt had happened and he had just walked that civil line and said, you know, I've had a reflective moment, and if he had kept the high road, think about the disparity there, because the Democrats, first of all, they would have gone crazy because they wouldn't have known what to do, but they also wouldn't have been able to help themselves.
So they would have turned into, you know, they would have thrown the hand grenades again, as usual.
And then you would have had Trump over here being the reasonable one and being the reflective and civil one.
So, first of all, there was sort of this, I've served for 24 years.
He's not really saying that.
His supporters and the people on the Democrat side say, well, he served for 24 years.
Yes, he did, okay?
But it's the National Guard, and that doesn't mean, I'm not disrespecting at all anyone who serves in the National Guard.
It's a very honorable thing to do.
I'm just saying they're kind of conflating just like he did with his rank or these other things the idea that somehow he was You know over there for times 24 years in the military You know he's working as a school teachers you point as working as a coach look the guy could be a great you know who knows He could be a great guy.
I'm just saying that There were statistics that said upwards of 70 plus percent of people have padded their CVs So what he's done isn't unusual But it's very much, you know highlighted now.
Look, I've got a service line in the company, Portman Square Group.
I am a marketing machine.
Good job.
Thank you.
But we have a due diligence group that does nothing but, right?
Background investigations, due diligence.
And so they spend a lot of time looking at people's CVs or resumes.
It's a shocking number of people, and sometimes it's not really nefarious, it's just, okay, maybe I misspoke, or maybe I did put something in and I over-egged the pudding a little bit, but then like 10 or 15 years down the road, you've kind of ridden on that for all that time, and we've seen that happen where people suddenly get called out, right?
Yes.
You know, I don't read too much into the fact that he padded his resume.
I think it is just very disrespectful that he didn't push back on the idea that he was overseas deployed in combat or that he claimed that he retired in a position.
I mean, I think they gave him a Master Sergeant title or rank when he retired, which is just one step below.
Well, he's also seen Joe Biden get away with it, right?
Joe Biden has gotten away with lying about his record, lying about his accomplishments, from the beginning back when he was running for Senate.
I'm sure you've seen that old video where he confronts the guy and tells him he's got a higher IQ than him and how he graduated at the top of his class.
I hope it's a hard-hitting interview where they ask...
I tell you what, actually, what I would love to have them ask first is, okay, Vice President.
I guess you have to say Madam Vice President.
Okay.
How long were you aware of President Biden's mental decline?
Because right up until the last minute, you were talking about how sharp his attack he was, and how vigorous he was, and how he was better than men half his age.
What I don't understand is how people aren't marching on Washington with pitchforks and torches over the fact that this small group, her and who else, Anita Dunn, the Chief of Staff over at the White House, Clayne, a variety of, that cabal's not that big, of people who had daily contact with President Biden.
And they just lied to the American public for a significantly long time.
And we were getting shit on left and right during the campaign, where I was like, when I compared him, I said, Biden being president is like having a flashlight with a bad battery and going for a long walk in the woods.
Anytime you called it out, because we all saw it, like you said, we're all heading in that direction.
It's probably the one thing we all have in common.
and grandparents.
Yes.
And so we knew it intuitively, right?
Every time you saw him and he made a slip up or he faltered or he just kind of started staring off into space or he moved the way that he was moving, like you've seen your grandpa move, we knew it.
But if you dared bring it up, you were just, I mean, you were just kicked in the ass, right?
And suddenly, somehow you were ageist, and you were, you know, hyper-partisan, and you were just, and you were MAGA. The epitome of gaslighting.
Well, I think his last fuck you was saying that he wants Harris to take his place.
That was his last fuck you, because from what I understand, they wanted to have a primary, and they wanted to pick their own person, and they didn't want to have Harris.
I take it back because I'm sure it will be a series of hard-hitting questions, and they won't let her get away with anything, and it's all going to work out fine.
Look, all she's got to do is beat the Biden debate bar, and people are going to say, yeah, she nailed it.
Who is the woman, well, she has some sort of a connection to the Biden-Harris administration, the woman who is, find that out, Jamie, the woman who's moderating the ABC debate.
Which by the way, I should say this, if you are having one of those days, there's a study that came out about creatine.
Creatine, which most people think of as like a muscle supplement, which it is, but creatine actually helps performance when you're sleep deprived, significantly.
I just don't think that, you know, people are that curious anymore.
And certainly on the Democrat side, the one thing they're always very good at is just doing what they're told and following a message, sticking to the message and worrying about winning.
Yeah, you'd like to think that people are really concerned about the quality of their leaders, but I think it is more about winning, again, at least on the Democrat side.
Sometimes I question whether the Republicans understand that.
I really do, because there were some people that posted a deceptive video, deceptively edited video, that made it look like Tim, you know, he has a son that has some disabilities, and it looked like he was yanking his son In a mean way, but he was really just trying to get his son to not hit his head on the teleprompter.
So the teleprompter is this clear thing, the kids are walking towards it, and he just gives him a pull this way, like, let's go this way.
And they just took that clip, like, oh, I bet he's mean.
And it's becoming more and more difficult because, you know, Generative AI and and just a willingness to kind of disappear down a rabbit hole and believe whatever you you want to believe right nobody's questioning all this shit so but it is whether it's coming from Outside influence and you know,
we know the Iranians are very active right now the obviously the Russians and Chinese are always interested in screwing us up so but Yeah, people if they don't do it themselves It's not as if this idea that the government is going to tell you what's good and what's not to read is amazing, right?
They just arrested the Telegram CEO over in Europe.
Yeah, and I think, well, look, honestly, I think there's some people in the States that if they thought they could get away with it, they would.
That's what they would be pushing for.
But with this, with Pavel Durov, I think they were really upset with a couple of things.
One is that Telegram has a history of not cooperating with criminal investigations, right?
Not releasing information or complying with requests from whomever it may be, right?
Europol, Interpol, anyone.
And so they basically figured out a way to say, look, because of your inability or your failure to moderate the content on your platform, on Telegram, We're going to criminally charge you, perhaps.
I suspect that's what they're going to do with this, but I think you're right.
I think the outrage said, okay, well, let's let him go for now.
Yes, and it was, look, the whole thing, the protocols that weren't followed, the process, the fact that it was a cock-up of monumental proportions leading up to Thomas Crooks taking those shots, And then the afterwards, right?
Then the way that they handled it was another series of, still to this day, this series of mistakes that there is no justification for.
You can't, look, doing security at an event like the Butler Rally back in July where Trump was shot.
Right now there's people out there going, I don't think he was shot.
I'm pretty sure he wasn't.
So I think it's not rocket science, right?
It's very labor intensive and detail oriented, but you're not building a spaceship, right?
You're going through the same process that you go through every time you have one of these events, right?
And so you have a political rally like that.
And it's not a national security event.
So it's not the DNC. It's not the RNC. It's not the Super Bowl.
It's not the Olympics.
Those are national security events.
You have a year plus to plan and prepare.
Get all your resources together and figure out your game plan, your site surveys, all the rest of it.
You still have time with these political events.
Don't have a year, but you've got sufficient time.
And they do it over and over again.
And it's not tough.
So you do a site survey and you say, okay, he's going to show up at Butler.
Let's get out there.
And the Secret Service has primacy.
They work with local state resources if they need to heavy up the security and they don't have the available resources.
But they have the primacy.
So they go out and the site survey, that whole process, the risk-threat assessment in the survey, is where you identify your timelines and your resources and your deployment of resources and all the various things, your command and control center, your communications protocols, all those things.
But it's over and over and over again.
There's a methodology to it.
And the Secret Service, you know, they do this all the time.
So it does lead you to wonder how many more events in the past have they been, you know, not buttoned up and they just got lucky because there wasn't a shooter.
But there's no way to excuse what happened because it was such a breakdown of events.
And then afterwards, in the hot washing, in the briefings that they did provide, then going up on Capitol Hill and Kimberly Cheadle, the now departed director, It was a classic lesson in how not to do crisis communications and she should have been the director who's now gone she should have been out on the on the rally grounds that afternoon that evening sorry and with a team and with the agent in charge and it should have been
very clear to the press all around that they were out there doing the investigation assessing what had happened And people would be responsible.
If Biden got winged in the ear the same way, and they took him out, and the whole deal, and, you know, they shoot the guy, and there's an investigation, it would have been...
On the news constantly, constantly, for weeks and weeks, it would have been lead story every night.
More information in the assassination attempt on President Biden.
They're starting to develop a narrative that says, you know, for the past couple of years, people were concerned about his mental health.
There were a couple of people, I think, that had an acquaintance with him that were saying, well, we just assumed he was bipolar or depressive.
He had researched depressive disorders.
That was on some of his electronic gear.
And so, yeah, I mean, that could be it.
But again, the bottom line is the whole process, command and control, resource deployment, communications process, all of it just completely fucked up on that day.
And usually when you have a problem of that magnitude...
With security, it's never just one thing.
It's a series of things that compound.
And, you know, but then, you know, the acting director, Roe, you know, he goes up there and, you know, it was a few weeks back now, but when he first showed up to say, I'm the acting director and I'm going to go up to Capitol Hill and answer your questions, which he didn't really do, you know, they were talking about, well, it's almost impossible to get all the elements talking on the same frequency, right?
The local police are talking on their frequency.
Secret Service talking on their frequency, counter-sniper teams, maybe they're operating on a different channel.
You can't combine those.
Well, of course you can.
I'm just telling you for a fact that there are capabilities out there and available to allow you to get everybody talking on the same sheet of music at an event like that.
Government, I tell you this, government hates to hold a press conference when they don't have all the facts, right?
They're just not comfortable with it.
And particularly something like this, the idea that the acting director kept saying about, well, we're not going to get out ahead of the investigation.
But I do have to say this, and I say this as a credit to CNN. It seems like they have made a concerted effort to be more balanced.
And I think this is in the aftermath of firing Don Lemon and Brian Stelter and all those people over there that people were frustrated with.
I think they have made a concerted effort.
There was a gentleman who was talking about that everyone's blaming Trump for things, but that the Democrats have been in control of the White House for 12 of the last 16 years.
Somebody, as I guarantee you, put everybody on the polygraph over there and see, like, somebody could just be a researcher or a producer or whatever.
They're talking because you know the DNC and the campaign team have been, ever since they agreed, okay, let's do this interview, somebody's been beating on somebody to say, okay, well, where are you going to go with this?
Yeah, well, I think what happened, a couple of things is, with CNN moving possibly this idea that they're moving a little bit towards the center, and I will say, you see more negative comments from the left, right, about CNN. I think they're pissed off sometimes with CNN because they're not as hardcore.
Because they're trying to move a little bit more.
I think that's a revenue issue for them, because I don't think they've made money since they've been around.
But I think they're realizing that maybe there's more profit margin a little bit further towards the center than where they've been sitting.
Again, I think this interview that she's going to do, I get it.
I understand.
Why wouldn't you want to be in a comfortable spot?
I think it's very bizarre that she's doing a joint interview with Walt.
If you want to show that you're ready for the job and you could possibly be the first woman president of the United States, and then you say, okay, my first big interview, I'm going to sit here with this dude.
But have you seen the Project Veritas deep dive into that?
Where they go to people's houses and they ask them, did you donate $150,000 because he's registered donors?
And he's like, goodness, no!
I didn't donate any of that money.
So there's all these donations that at least Project Veritas is claiming, and these people are claiming, we're not theirs, and that they're throwing money into this pot, and they're attributing it to all these people that probably don't even know it's being attributed to them.
And you think about, yeah, if there was a way to take money out of it, if there was a way to enact term limits, and there was a way to have a meaningful third and fourth party completely change the landscape here, I would think.
And I think for the better.
I don't think there's any...
I mean, in my mind, I don't think I can be persuaded otherwise, but...
I just don't see that happening.
Who's gonna vote against their own best interests, right?
You look at the money that these politicians can make, and they can walk out the door, multi-millionaires, On salaries, that doesn't make any sense.
That's the other thing you need to get out of there is insider trading.
Yeah.
unidentified
Well, I think it's important that we all participate.
And so they're all kind of getting to that point, and they're just like, I'll walk into the elevator yesterday with Sammy, and we get in there, and the door's closed, and he just goes, whales on me.
If you're doing those kind of things, and you're working off a script, and you don't have a script, and you're just out there talking to people, you're gonna misspeak.
And you'll have the people who, okay, sure, you've got to program this shit and you've got to, you know, curate all the stuff that it's picking up.
But now it's collecting just AI-generated shit, right?
It's not like it's going out there and getting the world's greatest human literature, right, anymore.
Now it's just scooping up all this shit that AI produced.
But I worry about kids, right?
And, you know, the ease with which they can now put together an essay or a college application or whatever the fuck it is, I think we're just raising, you know, maybe we're just raising the next generation of morons.
My kids have had kids in their class get busted for papers that they wrote on AI because they're so dumb they don't realize like someone could just put the same prompt into AI and get the exact same verbiage.
And they do have, I mean, professors and teachers have, you know, the ability to use certain apps that will scan and see whether these things have been pulled together by AI. But I think it's like a lot of other things.
is going to stay ahead of the defensive capability, right?
Right.
So you're going to get better and better and better, and the defensive ability to judge what's AI generated in the world of academia is going to lag.
But it is.
Yeah, I do think, and then going back to what we were talking about, the level of disinformation coming into November is going to be shocking, I think, for some people, even if they haven't been paying attention.
But a lot of people don't because a lot of people don't have the time.
Yeah, I think when we get there, when we wake up and the election results are announced, you know, three weeks later.
You should not be able to vote here without an ID. Just like you can't get a driver's license.
You have to have your fucking birth certificate.
We have paperwork.
It's there for a reason, because people are full of shit.
There's a lot of fraudsters out there.
And if there's a way to mitigate fraud, and the most important thing that we do, which is choose a leader, it's one of the most important things we do.
We exercise our right to vote.
And if you're gonna fuck with that, and if you are willfully making it so that it's easier to deceive people, That's crazy.
So they found a bunch of people, I think a half a million that were registered to vote that were dead.
And then there's a bunch of other people that were registered that were ineligible.
And so the way they're framing it in Texas, the way I saw it framed in one newspaper that Ken Paxton is going after Latinos because he doesn't want them to vote.
1.1 million ineligible voters removed from Texas voter rolls.
So, in terms of our system, I interrupt you to tell you how awesome you are, but the system that we have, is there any evidence that you can point to that says, this doesn't look right?
Well, what I was going to say was that, while I don't have evidence to a particular moment in time, As someone who's done a lot of fraud investigations, you look for the opportunity to commit fraud, right?
And it's like what you were just saying a moment ago, right?
If you can button it up and make it more secure, why wouldn't you, right?
And so we've created an environment where there's definitely potential for fraud There's no doubt about it.
More so than if you had voter ID, or just you had to provide ID to show citizenship, and if you did it in person, and if you got the results, and you didn't have massive early voting, and you didn't have drop boxes and ballot harvesting, but...
So we've got a process now that has created a wider playing field for people who may want to commit fraud.
And so I'm a cynical person, so that to me says, yeah, there's going to be fraud, or there has been fraud.
Don't have specific examples, but I just know from looking at a lot of fraud over the years, That's the way it works.
Voter fraud has been a real problem from the beginning of voting because people are creepy and people like to game the system and they like to cheat and they like to steal and they like to do things where their side wins and if they can figure out...
Look, just think about the way they talk about Trump, the existential threat to democracy, kleptocrat, all these crazy terms that they use.
They can call him Hitler And then everything you do to keep Hitler from being in power is a good thing, including fraud.
Well, it was primarily an issue with the gay community in the beginning.
So in the beginning, when they tried to call it a national health emergency, they tried to do this a couple of years ago.
In the middle of COVID, when people were starting to be a little bit more active and less worried about COVID, they tried to push this monkeypox thing.
Yeah, and they did say that the most recent, which was just, you know, within the past couple of weeks, I believe, alert or crisis alert for the entire continent of Africa was because it was more virulent.
Yeah, and so because it was going to be more aggressive or because it was proving to be more aggressive than they call it, but I forgot that they changed the name to MPOX. Did they drop the national or world health emergency?
And I'm not just scared because I want one side to win.
I'm scared because I think that by overzealously wanting their side to win and doing it so in a way that really isn't fair, that you set up a precedent where anybody can do that in the future.
And they think they're justified in doing that.
There's a lot of people that think 2020 was stolen, and Trump has said it over and over again.
But by the way, Hillary said it in 2016, over and over again.
You know, not being a lawyer, but I would think that you had conflicting things because you would also have someone in government, you know, almost bragging about the fact that, you know, look, we're getting this disinformation taken down during the pandemic.
And so, yeah, Zuckerberg coming out and making this statement, I agree with you, it is huge.
It's sort of Zuckerberg going, eh, what are you going to do?
You see some wild shit on Twitter, but you have to see the horrible shit if you want to see everything.
If you want to see everything, that means even things you don't agree with and don't like.
That's part of free speech.
And this is what Musk has been saying, and I 100% agree with him.
And I wonder where we would be if he hadn't bought Twitter.
I really do.
Because there wouldn't be a platform like that where anybody can freely talk about anything and not worry about being Your account getting taken down and getting in trouble with the government.
I was going to say, it's neck and neck, or Trump may have a two-point or three-point lead in a place like Georgia, but for the most part, she's pulled even and is slightly ahead.
Well, somebody knocks on your door, they call you up and say, are you going to vote for Trump?
You know, there's a lot of people out there that, you know, may decide, okay, I'm going to vote for Trump, but I'm not going to tell you I'm going to vote for Trump.
But I think even above and beyond, if people can do that and keep their shit together and not get into a violent situation, we're still going to be dealing then with four years of Of just dysfunctional bullshit, right?
I don't know that it would have opened the door for a victory.
Look, I like RFK Jr. because I think that he believes what he believes, and that's hard to find anymore.
I always said this about Bernie Sanders, which is crazy, but I at least appreciate the fact that Bernie Sanders is consistent in his socialist beliefs.
And also, when Michelle Obama was saying, you know, I think she was saying her mother or grandmother was always suspicious of people who took more than they needed.
Look at, you know, I haven't seen the latest figures, but I'd love to know the current personal wealth of AOC. You know, the bartender who turned congresswoman.
Yeah, there's a shit ton of hot spots going on right now, and it's all down to Iran.
I think we've talked about this once or twice before, and I think I've been accused of promoting regime change, which I'm not.
I'm saying, well, okay, I am.
But it should happen inside, right, from within.
And you'd like to think that one day, and I'm sure that every administration in the U.S. for decades now has been imagining that it would happen, that it'd be a popular uprising that would actually change the regime.
And then you might actually get something that could resemble long-term peace.
But right now, all this crap that's happening related to Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Islamic Jihad, militias in Iraq and Syria, it's all down to Iran.
And just over the past four days, this past weekend, Hezbollah and Israel had the largest exchange of fire that they've had in ages.
And you have to go back to actual war between the two.
And I will say, this is the amazing thing.
And this is why I think people always say, well, how come Iran hasn't retaliated for the death of Ishmael Hanyeh when they took him out in Tehran?
Part of me thinks that the reason they haven't is because that operation to take out Chania in Tehran, he was in a safe house on an IRGC compound in Tehran, right?
So you would imagine that's a pretty secure place, right?
It's pretty buttoned up and it's a safe house that Chania had been to in the past on a handful of occasions.
So The idea that Mossad and other elements of Israeli intelligence could develop assets in Tehran within the IRGC that allowed them to carry out that operation,
if they did, I'm not saying they did, but if they did, It's remarkable and it shows the depth of their abilities in terms of identifying targets for possible recruitment and then working those targets and then recruiting them and then tasking them.
You had to get inside a safe house in an IRGC-guarded compound in Tehran.
They had to have assets who were willing to walk in there with explosive devices, because there's more than one, and put them in there.
Those folks, you know, got off the X. They got out of country, you know, you would think.
And they had to have a trigger there.
They still had to have an asset who could say, you know, go or no go, because Kanye is now is back in the safe house at, you know, midnight or 1 a.m.
or 2 a.m.
And so it's time to, you know, cross the red wire with the green wire.
And...
That's, you know, amazing.
And so I think, in part, that has completely, you know, freaked out.
Maybe it says, how old am I? Freaked out.
They're so freaked out.
The Iranian leadership and the IRGC, they don't know what the depth of that penetration is by Mossad and others.
And so the idea that, you know, this is happening, and I guess the point there is, Then you look at what they did to the Hezbollah commander, Fuad Shukr, in Beirut.
Getting him to move, he was in a building, a multi-story building, and they wanted him to move up to his residence, which was on the top floor.
And he was in his office, which was, I think, the second floor of that building.
And they were able to orchestrate a call To get him to go up to the top deck so he could be an easier target and they could minimize casualties and took him out.
You have to recruit people who are in a position to be able to do that, who have access, who can tell you things, who can identify something as simple as, you know, his routine.
You know, he typically goes upstairs to the top deck at 7 o'clock or whatever.
Or you have to have someone who's willing and has got access to make that call to get him to go upstairs.
But then, this massive barrage that took place over the weekend between Hezbollah and Israel.
Amazingly, the leader of Hezbollah, a fellow named Nasrallah, he has said, in the wake of that, he's talked about their attack, and he said that the timing of it was a quarter after 5 in the morning.
5.15 in the morning, we're going to launch this barrage.
At 4.55 in the morning, Israel sends about 100 jets Over the border to attack launch sites, right?
So once again, they had this intelligence, this advanced knowledge, right?
So I think that and a variety of other hits that they've been able to accomplish, Muhammad Deef and some of these other characters.
I think that the Iranian regime and the RGC, they're just, right now, there's a level of paranoia.
It's like the old IRA days.
The IRA was worried about infiltration, you know, back in the Troubles.
And it created a lot of infighting, right?
It created a lot of disappearances.
And you're getting that, too.
A number of IRGC people were interrogated about, you know, they were trying to figure out where's the leaks here.
And that just leads to an ever-widening circle of interrogations and disappearances.
So, and that infighting, I'm not saying it's bad.
You know, it's like getting a cartel to infight, right?
Start killing each other.
Anyway, so that's one thing that I'm thinking, because people are always asking, how come Iran hasn't retaliated for the Hanye hit yet?
And part of it is also, I think they're worried about legitimately getting into a direct conflict with Israel.
They understand that the U.S., regardless of where the Biden administration may be and how less they would like not to be in that conflict, they're going to have to be in the conflict.
And so Iran can't win that.
And so I think they're worried about that as well.
So there's reasons behind it.
But, you know, there's a lot going on.
Israel's just launched a massive operation in West Bank.
So they're up in the northern portion of the West Bank going after militants up there.
And Hamas and Islamic Jihad and some others operate in the West Bank, even though the Palestinian Authority runs it.
So they're up north.
They've just moved in overnight, basically.
And they're going after terrorist elements up there.
But Iran has been shoving weapons into the West Bank, you know, because what they want to do is, if you think about where Israel is, you think about Gaza's on the west side, Hezbollah's up north, West Bank's over on the east.
They want to create more of a front on the east side, right?
And they basically got them You know, engulfed, right?
And so they want to, they've been funneling weapons and resources into the West Bank for, well, for several years.
They've got smuggling routes going through Lebanon, going through Syria, going through Jordan.
So I guess my point being, all this shit is down to the Iranian regime and the IRGC. So when people talk about, we've got to get a ceasefire, we've got to work for a lasting peace.
Unless you get rid of those guys, there's no lasting peace.
Now, what happened during when Biden was in office, I guess he's kind of still in office, where they released somewhere in the neighborhood of $6 billion to Iran that they had tied up?
And it can be used for humanitarian purposes only.
And we're doing that in part because, look, they've had a policy of appeasement towards Iran for the entire Biden administration.
And, you know, they've been desperate and they've been very open about wanting to get back into the, you know, the 2015 nuclear agreement that was created under the Obama administration.
But the idea is, look, they essentially gave $6 billion, they advised the Iranian regime that you now have $6 billion available to you for humanitarian purposes, which, you know, it's all fungible, so it frees up other money, right, that they can now use to Help to resource the Houthis or help to resource Hezbollah or Hamas.
They don't make a secret of it, right?
It's like Putin talking about how he wants to recreate the old Soviet Union in some fashion.
The Iranian regime has stated over and over again they want the destruction of Israel.
And that's why they built up all these terrorist elements.
They've got the same objective because their puppet master is Iran.
I don't want to oversimplify this, but it's not that hard to oversimplify because it's just the way it is.
Iran is at the top of this thing and they're causing all of this instability because ultimately they want to see Israel removed from the map.
Which sounds to me like genocide, but, you know, it's Israel that's constantly accused of genocide.
They're driving the narrative.
The other side, Palestinian supporters and others have been very good at driving the narrative.
And so, I don't know.
So, anyway, point being, is the Middle East is a bit of a fucked up mess.
So I give you a lot of credit because nobody ever talks about Libya anymore.
It's a hot mess.
And we kind of agreed with the French and Italians to go in there and get rid of Gaddafi, even though he was, you know, for a while, he was helping us out in counterterrorism.
I don't want to make more than that that it is, but, you know, he was there and he would provide some assistance related to counterterrorism.
Suddenly it would say, oh, sure, we'll help the French and Italians.
They were the only ones with any national interests in Libya to speak of.
That's where I'd go if, like, when there was Ukraine footage, a lot of crazy shit that you could see, you'd get it on Telegram, because they wouldn't censor it.
And I don't exactly know how Telegram works, because I don't use it that much, but I guess you could start a channel, and then anybody can kind of go to your channel, and you could post things.
Is this it right here?
Yeah, this is it.
Decoding Qaddafi's death.
I can help you with that.
So this is just them having him captured and he's bleeding and they're beating the shit out of him.
And just in a short period of time, if all you do is look at what she's saying in a limited fashion, because she hasn't said much, about her positions on things, compared to what she did say, again, same thing.
Leading into this interview, you would think that's a lot of fodder for the person that's handling the interview, Dana Bash or whoever.
Anyway, so, man, I can disappear down a rabbit hole quicker than anybody.
So she's all in on EVs just a handful of years ago.
She's, goddammit, we got to be all electric vehicles by 2035 or 2040. And she's on news shows talking about this.
This is my policy.
This is what I want.
And now her staff is saying, oh, no, she never did that.
They just, they don't see anything wrong with telling people Here's the truth.
Don't pay attention to anything that we did before.
Don't pay attention to the fact that she's been vice president for all this time.
She has nothing to do with the Biden administration decisions, even though she was there, even though President Biden said, oh, usually she's the last person in the room when we talk about these important things.
And now they just want everybody to buy this bullshit, right?
Because she's younger and she's a woman and there's a good vibe.
How would they have come up with any other decision?
Because if you think about, what's his name, Shapiro in Pennsylvania, or Wes Moore, or these other candidates, even Gavin Newsom, although he doesn't have a hope in hell, Pete Buttigieg, who I think always fancies himself to be president.
I know this sounds wrong, because what I really want is I want the Republican policies, again, for national security and other purposes, to be in place and to actually focus on important things down the road.
And I don't want price controls.
That's another thing, by the way, that she's walked back.
Or her team has walked back.
She came out with the price control idea for food, for groceries.
And they've just made some moves in a different section of Russia.
Not the Kursk region, but the Belgorod region.
And so they've had some incursions into there, like they may think about, maybe we're going to open up a second front.
And it's, I mean, it is fascinating.
The Russians have had, Putin initially kind of dismissed it a little bit.
You know, he was sort of like, ah, it's just a one-time thing.
Then they hung in there, and then they've established supply lines, and now there's 200,000 plus residents in that region, the Kursk region, that have been displaced.
So what do you got?
You got a lot of population upset about this, right?
So now you got more news internally that isn't a good thing for Putin.
He's always worried about, you know, sort of popular unrest like any dictator would be.
And so, I mean, it is fascinating.
And they've been, you know, they've been using U.S. and NATO munitions So remember there was a first two years, the Biden White House was like, nope, you can't use U.S. munitions for striking targets inside of Russia.
And then recently, it was, okay, just along the border.
And now, you know, fuck it, they're well into the Kursk region.
And, you know, so it's very fascinating.
It's also very worrisome, right?
You've got Belarus has put a third of their military on the border that they have with Ukraine.
And Belarus is run by a guy named Lukashenko, who's basically a Putin puppet.
So, you have to wonder, are they going to try to, you know, stretch Ukraine resources thin?
How long can they hold territory inside Russia?
I mean, I would argue that basically this is a ploy, and it seems like that's the way it's playing out with some comments from Zelensky over the past couple of days, that it's a move to try to strengthen their hand, you know, force Putin to the table to come up with some type of negotiated settlement, right?
And Zelensky came out and said, look, I've got a proposal that I'm going to present to Biden or whomever's in charge at the UN General Assembly Week in September, I think it is, in New York.
And he's being more open about now in the past day or so of talking about how this move into Russia is all about creating a better negotiating situation for them.
And he's right, right?
The only way you get Putin to the table And get something meaningful for Ukraine is if he's feeling pain.
And this is causing him some pain, right?
This is causing him to kind of rethink strategy, to worry about, again, sort of internal some dissent.
Well, I think it is possible to resolve it, as long as, again, as long as Putin feels like he needs to find a settlement.
If he was making headway...
Look, don't get me wrong.
They've had some successes in the eastern side of Ukraine, where they've been, you know, making an offensive against the Ukrainian military.
So while the Ukrainian military has been advancing and having some success taking and holding some territory inside Russia, at the same time, they've been having some real difficulties in the Donetsk region and on the eastern side of Ukraine.
And, but if Putin feels sufficient pain, then yeah, he'll, they'll find a settlement.
I think that settlement is going to look frustratingly like what the lines looked like before this whole conflict started.
They're not going to give up, Russia's not going to give up Crimea.
They're not going to pull all their military, all their personnel out of the eastern side of Ukraine.
And so I think at the end of the day, and this will probably frustrate a lot of people who've been putting Ukrainian flags on their Twitter handles and waving flags and saying, we stand with Ukraine.
It's not going to look like Ukraine gets all its territory back.
It's not realistic.
So I think that's what the settlement's going to look like.
But look, I look at this from, there's a lot of people out there, right?
Rightly so, there's a lot of people who dissent with the whole idea of why are we helping Ukraine, right?
I'm not going to wander into that minefield, right?
I'm just looking at it from an operational perspective.
If the US wasn't helping Ukraine, Putin would own Ukraine by now, for sure.
There's just no two ways about it, right?
Even with NATO support, NATO's been very good, EU's been very good.
Without US support, Putin would have Ukraine.
So some people could care less about that.
Okay, it's based on your experiences.
Other people think that's a horrible thing.
And so I don't know, I'm just saying operationally, you know, if you look at it, you go, okay, our decision is we can't afford to lose Ukraine to Putin.
So therefore, we're going to dump a lot of resource and assistance in there.
You know, so, you know, Bob's your uncle.
I personally don't think, you know, Putin's the sort of person who stops when he gets something, right?
His next thought is, okay, now what?
Because he's been very clear.
Just like the Iranians are clear about wanting to destroy Israel, Putin's been talking for years about trying to rebuild the Soviet Union in some fashion, right?
Not the whole thing.
So, you know, I take him at his word.
I think he's pretty serious about it.
But I also get the point why people say, well, holy fuck, why are we spending all this money on Ukraine?
You know, that's why I'm not running for president.
It's such a strange way of rationalizing things when the left has always been anti-war.
I mean, that's where things got real weird.
The left has always been pro-free speech and anti-war.
And they're essentially the party that's trying to silence people under the guise of misinformation and disinformation, which a lot of that shit turned out to not be misinformation and not be disinformation.
Especially the COVID stuff with Jay Bhattacharya and Martin Koldoff, all these different people that got Removed from Twitter and censored, Alex Berenson, who's in a lawsuit right now with the Biden administration.
You know, all those people, without Elon Musk buying Twitter, they would essentially have been silenced.
So all these dissenting opinions were legitimate people from Stanford and Harvard, and all these people were labeled as kooks.
Which is just goddamn crazy and very fucking dangerous.
Very fucking dangerous.
You're allowing corporations to dictate what is true and not true, depending upon how it's gonna reflect their bottom line.
When you say things like, you know what, a lot of the things that people on the opposite side, from where the progressives and the left sit, They turn out to be right, right?
Whether it's Hunter Biden's laptop, whether it's the bullshit of the Russian dossier, whether it's issues related to COVID, right?
And the idea that people aren't able to speak their mind, right?
And that somehow the Democrats have decided that they're okay with censorship, because really, the government needs to tell you what's safe to hear.
It's like the Democrats supporting the war and the Republicans questioning whether it's a good idea.
It's just strange to see how people just immediately abandon all their principles and side with whatever their party's saying.
That's when you realize that it really is just a tribal thing.
Because the left silencing free speech and the left not recognizing that they were lied to by these corporations because they had originally sided with them and they had made these statements and they don't want to walk these statements back and it's too difficult to say that you were wrong.
And then the pro-war stuff, it's just the whole thing is...
And the fact that...
You didn't have better use for that $175 billion?
You don't think they could have done it to help up?
What about our infrastructure?
What about our inner cities?
That money couldn't have been invested in the United States?
Like, disc degeneration, which is what happens to old people.
They're just smaller and smaller.
And I want to deny that I'm older, but goddammit, I'm fucking shrinking.
And my back hurts.
And one of the reasons why my back...
It's like years of jiu-jitsu, too, and weightlifting, but your discs get smaller.
They get smushed-er, and your spinal column gets closer and closer together.
And, like, there was a race car driver, and...
He was one of the guys who did Le Mans back in the day, and they got him in his original race car to take a lap around Le Mans, and he couldn't fit the pedals anymore because he had shrunk four inches since the time that he had...
But the point is, we have a massive health crisis in this country.
The obesity crisis is really legitimate.
And it's terrifying that it's so prevalent and that no one's doing anything about it.
And this is one of the things that RFK wants to do when he gets into office.
He's talking about seed oils and he's talking about a lot of different things that are like terrible for health that are ubiquitous in our diet and to put some regulations on that stuff and to recognize that these are real issues and to inform people that these are real issues and not just let these big food companies just keep I saw a fucking article today in Time magazine Wait a minute, Time Magazine is still out there?
Time Magazine is still out there.
Wow.
See if you can find this cover, this article.
It was, are super processed foods really bad for you?
It all started in the summer of 2023 when author and infectious disease physician, Dr. Chris Von Tuleken, was promoting his book, Ultra Processed People.
While writing it, Von Tuleken spent a month eating mostly foods like chip soda, bagged bread, frozen food, and cereal.
What happened to me is exactly what the research says would happen to everyone.
Von Tuleken says he felt worse, he gained weight, his hormone levels went crazy, and before and after MRI scans showed signs of changes in his brain.
As Von Tuleken saw it, the experiment highlighted the terrible emergency of society's love affair with ultra-processed foods.
That kind of fucking language drives me goddamn crazy.
In other words, the vast majority of Americans, particularly the millions who are food insecure or have limited access to fresh food, they also tend to be lower income and people of color.
As well as the massive diversity of foods that can be considered ultra-processed, a category that includes everything from vegan meat replacements, which by the way, are really fucking bad for you, and non-dairy milks, which by the way, are really fucking bad for you.
To potato chips and candy, which, by the way, are really fucking bad for you.
How can this entire category of foods be something we're supposed to avoid?
Because it's not fucking food!
It's not nutritious food!
And if you eat non-nutritious food, you get fucking sick.
Imagine, like, linking that to racism and inequality.
It wasn't in Australia, because everybody's a Bruce or a Sheila.
So you couldn't do that.
But you know what else?
Well, never mind.
I was about to start talking about words you can't say.
I got in trouble with my kids because I was driving down the road and I said something and the oldest boy was like, Dad, I don't think we can say that anymore.
And I said, really?
And then I found myself like George Carlin driving in the truck with all three of the boys just reeling off words and they were horrified.
Because they've grown up now in this environment, right?
Yeah, but going back to that fucking thing about processed foods, that sort of shit is what I hate because you're absolutely right.
Rather than try to help people by talking the truth...
God forbid, right?
We say, well, we've got to protect them.
We don't want to shame them.
We don't want to marginalize them.
So instead of talking and saying, look, we know that you have, you know, that it costs more or whatever, but here's the honest to God's truth about it.
These foods are, it's a slow walk to death, right?
But anyway, so she talks about these price controls on food as if somehow that magically is going to sort problems out.
It will just make this whole issue of access to food worse.
It just fucks things up in terms of the supply chain.
And so that's why, I mean, she's not doing it, but her team is already walking this back, an idea that she had just thrown out at the DNC. We're going to do this.
The other bullshit, all these other ideas, but $25,000 for first-time homebuyers.
I guess I get cynical because I don't see how it changes.
I look around and I think, well, how does it get any better, I guess is the question, right?
And it's certainly not going to get better in the next...
Short-term cycle right and I maybe Maybe if well, I don't know I don't know how you I don't know how you get people out of the trenches right now It's like World War one and you get them to kind of stand up and at least make a little bit of move towards each other and Say okay, we gotta we gotta figure this shit out.
We got a lot of serious problems There's more crises overseas right now that we had in a very long time shit that could really really Get fucked up pretty quick, right?
Whether it's what's going on in Russia and, you know, something happens, the next thing you know, Putin decides, ah, fuck it, you guys are lobbing U.S. missiles deeper into Russia.
I think it's time for us to, you know, deploy something.
We don't even know who's running the White House, so let's give it a go.
I don't know.
And you've got the Middle East, which I think people always assumed, well, that's a self-contained problem.
It's just there.
The chance for that to go sideways, you know, right now, right?
I mean, if they're successful in, you know, encircling Israel, by meaning that, you know, they dump enough weapons into the West Bank and they get some of their militant elements there to take, suddenly you got a three-front war with Israel?
At some point, there's going to be some really undue pressure on any US administration to step in.
That shit gets ugly.
We got thousands of people crossing the border who probably have really bad nefarious intent that we don't even know who they are.
Millions, but I'm just saying, in terms of actual people who may be on the terror watch list, you got a lot of people who have come across.
The vetting that goes on on the southern border is minimal at best.
They don't have access to international databases.
It's not like they're getting people crossing in from China or crossing in from, you know, Turkey or Pakistan or, you know, I'm not picking on any particular country, but pick a spot and work with those home country liaison personnel to say, what do you got on these people, right?
They simply are checking to see whether they're listed in the U.S. criminal database.
And if they're not, it's like, fine, here's your appointment.
You know, we'll see you in court in a year and a half or whatever.
And, you know, so while common sense would make you think, well, I'm sure actually they'll be, you know, they'll be fact-checking themselves, and they'll be thinking about these things, and they'll be more reflective and more analytical.
What I'm scared is that people become accustomed to the fact that the president's not in control of the government anymore and that that's okay.
That's a scary thing, too, because whether you like Biden or don't like Biden, like Trump or don't like Trump, at least you attributed the commander-in-chief.
You were like, that's the guy.
That's the president.
And now it's like, well, if he's not the president, because he keeps going on vacation now.
And again, you know, I guarantee there won't be that question tomorrow night with one of the two potential successors to be the leader of the free world, supposedly.
That question won't exist.
It won't be, well, who?
Tell me about the decision-making process.
If the president some time ago said that, or the White House said that he's really good from 10 to 4, you know, 10 a.m.
to 4 p.m., And things don't get better over time.
They get worse.
How is he doing now?
And if that's the case, what's the decision-making process like at the White House?
And what kind of role are you playing in it?
And by the way, can we ask one more time, when did you know that he was in decline, and were you just telling the American public the complete opposite?
He's not fucking Sharper's attack.
So when did you know that, and what was the decision process around that in terms of deceiving the American public?
Look, one of the things that Trump should be very thankful for is the rules that they established for that first debate with Biden, the only debate with Biden, where they said, okay, we're going to cut the microphones off, you're not allowed to speak.
And so I'm not sure whether that's the case for the 10th September debate with Harris, but it does look like now her campaign team is arguing that she should be able to have notes, right?
And again, people will keep going the same thing every time I say this.
Trump!
Look, I'm not talking about Trump right now.
I'm talking about over here.
I'm talking about the other contender.
And I don't know.
And more than that, I just worry about the policies that, again, they haven't enunciated many of them, but I do worry about what they've thrown against the wall so far.
A lot of these socialist-leaning ideas are very disturbing.
And there's another thing that she's talked about, about equity as opposed to equality, and literally talking about equal outcomes, which is fucking insane.
That's insane talk that doesn't work, because you're not going to have equal effort.
The whole reason why this country works, the whole reason why capitalism works, is because of competition.
That competition should be fair, but there is a reason why some people succeed more than others, and a lot of it has to do with effort.
There's a lot of luck involved, there's a lot of nepotism involved, but also hard work.
And if you want to have equality of outcome, you're going to have no incentive for people to work hard.
You know what, to that point, my youngest boy, Muggsy, was telling me, he came home from school, this was towards the end of last year, And he was kind of chuckling to myself.
I said, what are you laughing about?
He goes, oh god, it was funny.
And he talks just like this.
He says, it was very funny.
He says, we had a project in class where the teacher, I forget which subject it was, but anyway, the teacher handed out A paper, a test.
And he explained, okay, here's a test.
I know it's a snap test.
I know you guys weren't expecting it.
You know, just, you know, but I want you to, you know, do your best.
He says, and, you know, you weren't expecting it, so I'm going to take all the scores and I'm going to average them out, right?
And that'll be, you know, how you do.
So my boy sits in the back there and just doesn't do fuck off.
He got like one question answered and he was like, well, fuck it.
Because he's smart enough to think, all right, you know, fine.
If all we're going to do is take all the results and smoosh them together and everyone's going to...
And when they found out what had happened, because they had really tried it, and they had gotten very good grades, and then there's Jack with like a two out of a 100, and he gets the same result that they did.
Exactly.
He was like, look at me!
So he said, no effort, I got what you got.
But he saw it, right?
And I thought, well, I'm not sure whether I'm proud of that or not, but I think it's entertaining.
I mean, I think that one thing that they're obviously Probably somewhat happy about, they gotta be happy about it, is that moving into the election, you know, it does look like the Fed's gonna cut rates, right?
And I'm sure there's gonna be a lot of people on the right who are gonna say, oh, of course, the Fed's doing that for political reasons, right?
I mean, to me, it sounds a little bit like, you know, National Treasure, that movie with Nicolas Cage, where, you know, the secret book that they have, and they open the book, and they read what all the presidents have told them about things.
You should watch it.
It's actually a very funny movie.
But, yeah, what do I think it means?
I don't know.
Is Trump speaking in hyperbole, or is there some...
I think that there's this tendency on the government's part.
Once they classify anything, it's really tough to get them to back off of that.
It's really tough to get them to declassify information.
I would argue they should, right?
At this point, nobody is still alive, right?
And so you would think at this point, they'd say, ah, okay, fine.
There can't be a sources and methods issue here, right?
They can't be like, well, we're worried about if we open up this file, even if there's not like some smoking gun that said, You know, they did it, right?
But even if it's just on the margins, like Lee Harvey Oswald went down to Mexico.
We know that because, you know, meet with the Russian embassy down there.
We know that because we had an asset who, you know, reported on it from inside the Russian embassy, whatever it may be.
They're all dead.
Right?
So I would argue just, yeah, fucking declassify it, let it go.
Of course, I'm going to say what everybody expects me to say.
The agency, and I can only speak from that point of view.
I can't talk about the Bureau or Secret Service or others, but the agency does some tremendous work in pursuit of protecting national security interests.
And that was, you know, look, Carter put Stansfield-Turner into the agency basically to try to...
You know, I would argue dismantle it, right?
And that was, so there was a period of time when, and also after, of course, after World War II, they just shut down OSS. It was like, yeah, we don't need it, right?
So would that create a moment where the public is saying, fuck this, we don't need it, we'll just maybe, you know, we'll see.
But I guarantee you, something bad would then happen.
And they would say, well, we need to reconstitute it in some fashion.
I don't know because I think there's a lot of time between now and then.
And look, someone Whether that guy was acting alone or whether or not he had help, someone tried to kill Trump at least once.
There was an interview where Trump was outside talking to someone and said, I've been told we shouldn't even be out here.
We shouldn't be outside.
There's some issues.
So there's probably other threats.
We know that there was an Iran assassination attempt.
There was something involved in that that was stopped.
I guarantee there's people that want him gone.
And to say now, I know what's gonna happen in November, things change so quickly, and it's so nuts, and our memory's so short, and everything happens so fast, and the news cycle is just flooded with new things constantly.
Look at the short window of time from Let's go with the 13th of July, the rally when it was shot, through the RNC, right?
From the perception, I was out in Milwaukee for something else, but I was out there during the RNC. Everybody, 100%, was convinced we got this in the bag.
Short period of time later, Harris is supposedly in the lead.
Biden's gone.
He's pushed off the surface there, and she's in.
So you're right.
Between now and then, fucking anything, maybe the aliens visit.
But I always wanted to get your perspective on things because you're one of the few people that actually knows what they're talking about with these things.