BBN, Jan 15, 2026 - A FINAL GLOBAL SHOWDOWN is Coming, and America will be Lose
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Welcome to Brighteon Broadcast News.
It is Thursday, January 15th, 2026.
I'm Mike Adams going to explain quite a bit of what just happened because it's all related.
So gold and silver took a plunge, and there's a very specific reason why.
Silver had hit $93 during the day yesterday, and now it's dropped something like 8 or 9%.
It's down to $87 or so, or maybe lower.
We could do the math on that.
Maybe it's almost 7%.
This happened as a reaction, also oil plunge, as a reaction to Trump backing off of his plans to attack Iran.
And the reason Trump suddenly reversed course and backed off from his plans to attack Iran, of course, at the request of Israel and Netanyahu, and he was prepared to do it.
Have no illusions.
He was prepared to do it.
But Russia issued a severe warning to the United States.
And we're going to talk about that severe warning.
And also, we're going to talk about Russia's ultimate plan to use nuclear weapons against Europe and probably against the United States.
And I've got a clip from Tucker Carlson explaining some of that coming up here as well.
First, I want to tell you that I've got a really bombshell interview today with a whistleblower named Dale Whitaker.
He's a whistleblower.
He used to work for a gold company, a gold retailer that he says was ripping people off.
And he has done extensive investigations.
He's published a book.
And now he's naming names.
And in today's interview, he's about to name the names of various gold retailers and some of the celebrities behind those retailers, including Glenn Beck.
Dale's going to name them, and he's going to describe what he says is a pattern of fraud and misrepresentation that is victimizing thousands of mostly elderly conservative Christians.
That's who's being targeted, is older conservative Christians.
And as Dale says, they are being built for their life savings in these wildly dishonest, apparently fraudulent gold deals.
And we're going to cover all that today in great detail in that interview coming up, and you probably don't want to miss it.
So first, we're going to get to the whole Russia-Iran situation.
And I've got that packaged as a separate special report.
We're going to jump into that right now.
Here we go.
So let's talk about Iran.
Of course, Trump and Israel and Netanyahu want to completely destroy Iran.
And what's been happening lately is that the CIA and Mossad have been infiltrating Iran and providing weapons and coordination for provocateurs to start a bunch of protests in Iran and then to kill people, including killing law enforcement in Iran.
And that's been happening over the last week.
And of course, it's a completely external force.
And the entire reason that Iran's currency has been plunging is because of Western sanctions and also coordinated globalist banking attacks on Iran's currency.
So this is all external.
And it's all part of a color revolution carried out by Western forces.
It's a regime change operation to try to overthrow the leadership of Iran, the Khomeini, or Khomeini.
I think that's how you pronounce it.
The Ayatollah.
And then Israel would control all the Middle East uncontested, and the gateway to Russia would be controlled by Israel.
And Israel would control the Strait of Hormuz and effectively the Persian Gulf and the Sea of Arabia and all the routes and resources, etc.
That's what this is all about.
So everything you are told about Iran by the West is a lie.
Of course it is.
Just like everything you were told about Iraq.
Weapons of mass destruction, yellow cake, uranium, whatever it was.
It was all made up.
Weapons of mass destruction.
They fabricated all of it then, just like they do now.
Only idiots believe anything that Western governments tell them about the Middle East.
So what's really happening is just an attempted color revolution overthrow.
And Trump was poised to bomb Iran.
And the B-2 stealth bombers were already stationed at the Diego Garcia military base there.
And also, by the way, carrier group has been dispatched to the area.
I think it's in the Red Sea right now.
I'm not sure exactly where it is, but it's somewhere around there.
And Trump was ready to bomb Iran.
And he even tweeted out on his truth social, which should just be called Trump Social, tweeted out the people of Iran should overthrow their institutions, overthrow their government, basically is what he's saying.
So he's actually calling for an insurrection of a foreign nation and he's meddling in foreign nations, even though he campaigned on getting us out of such conflicts in the Middle East and he campaigned on peace.
He has, of course, given the finger to his entire base and he's doing the bidding of Israel.
Well, guess what?
Russia issued a stern warning to the United States and caused Trump to back off.
Trump backed off the attack plans, held a press conference, said that he now realized that Iran wasn't killing as many protesters, which is just a cover story, and that we're not going to attack right now.
And then other information came out that the U.S. really couldn't achieve regime change, which is exactly what Scott Ritter has been saying for days, and that the U.S. wasn't really prepared to do this, etc., etc.
That's all a cover story.
The real reason is because Russia threatened to nuke Europe and the United States or strike with Oreshnik missiles that could not be stopped by the United States.
So Russia issued a stern warning with a statement that I'll get into here.
So the Russian foreign ministry issued a public statement, but I also suspect that there was messaging behind the scenes that said the United States will face, quote, disastrous consequences if it engages in fresh aggression towards Iran.
And that these disastrous consequences would also spill over into global insecurity.
Russia said the situation is dangerously volatile and that it could push the entire region toward wider instability.
It also said that the United States has no right to claim that there's civil unrest inside Iran as a justification for military strikes.
But of course, that's what the U.S. always does when they want to bomb somebody.
They say, oh, we're going to free those people by bombing their country.
And then Russia said that the United States should be under no illusion about the repercussions, saying, quote, those who plan to use externally inspired unrest as a pretext for repeating the aggression against Iran committed in June of 2025 must be aware of the disastrous consequences of such actions for the situation in the Middle East and global international security.
But Iran itself issued another warning and said, quote, we will respond powerfully to any kind of attack against us and will not allow anyone to threaten us.
And he talked about all the U.S. bases in the region and that any country that assists Washington, D.C., probably including Qatar, would be viewed as legitimate targets.
So here's, in my view, here's what's actually happening.
Trump has been running around as a crazed bully conqueror, at least for the last few weeks.
He's threatening Greenland.
He's threatening to militarily invade and conquer Greenland.
He invaded and kidnapped the president of Venezuela and is trying to take over Venezuela's resources, oil and minerals, and much more.
And now he's threatening to bomb Iran, even though last year he said that we're done bombing Iran and we already destroyed their nuclear program for years to come and it's done.
And basically he told Netanyahu, we're not going to bomb Iran anymore.
We did it.
We bombed Fordau.
We destroyed their nuclear program.
You don't have anything else to worry about.
But of course, Trump is entirely controlled by the Zionists.
And so the Zionists keep pushing to destroy Iran along with Senator Flimsey Graham.
And so this has been building for a while.
Oh, we've got to bomb Iran, bomb Iran.
And what finally happened, the boiling point was reached where Russia, and I would imagine China behind the scenes, although China is a little more diplomatic.
But Russia has drawn a line in the sand and said, we will not allow you to destroy Iran.
And if you try to, essentially, I'm paraphrasing, that we, Russia, will destroy you or we will stop you.
And Russia has the means to do that.
And so does China.
Specifically, Russia can sink U.S. aircraft carriers using Oreshnik missiles.
Russia has hypersonic missiles that can also destroy U.S. aircraft carriers.
In addition, Russia can strike any target anywhere in the United States of America, including deep underground bunkers, probably the ones under the White House.
So even if Trump goes 10 floors underground or whatever it is, that Orashnik missiles could reach that far and turn everybody down there into vaporized dust.
And Russia is just about at that point.
In addition, Iran itself has enough missiles to destroy every military base of the U.S. in the region.
And there are roughly, I don't know, 50,000 U.S. troops stationed in that region.
So imagine a very high casualty rate.
Probably at least 5,000 to 10,000 U.S. soldiers would be killed in such an attack.
And then Israel would probably be destroyed.
Because Iran held back last year after the so-called 10-day war.
They stopped the missiles.
But since then, they have been doubling down and tripling down and getting ready with a lot more missiles.
And they very nearly destroyed Israel last year.
And they can do it.
If Iran is attacked, they will unleash absolute destructive hell on Israel, on U.S. military bases, and possibly on U.S. naval vessels in the region.
And Trump won't be able to do anything about it.
The first U.S. aircraft carrier that is sunk with 5,000 sailors on board, that will be devastating to America's morale and to the Trump administration and to the fake war secretary, Pete Hegseth.
I mean, they're all actors at this point, so, you know, geez.
Russia has basically said, stop being idiot bullies.
And if you continue, we're going to start striking you.
We're going to deny you the military infrastructure to wage these attacks to continue to provoke wars of aggression against foreign nations.
And probably right now, the people of Greenland are happy to hear that because they're trying to figure out how they're going to defend themselves against foreign invaders who would, of course, be U.S. troops.
And I did put out a pop quiz today on social media.
I said, look, if the United States invades Greenland and seeks to militarily conquer and occupy and steal Greenland, do the people of Greenland have the right to defend themselves against a foreign invader by shooting U.S. troops?
And then I said, your answer to this question says everything about you and whether you have any principles at all.
Because, of course, every nation has a right to defend itself against foreign invaders.
There is no automatic God-given right for the United States to just go around the world and invade everybody and bomb everybody and steal everything and pillage everything and rape every country.
No such right exists at all.
And so obviously every country has the right to defend itself against foreign invaders.
And that includes Iran.
And now Iran is very critical to Russia for a number of reasons.
Not only is Iran a very strong trading partner with Russia, but look at the geography.
You know, Iran is the gateway between, you could say, at least the Western Middle East, or the gateway between Africa, the Middle East, and the East, which includes Russia and India and China, etc., and all of Southeast Asia.
If the West conquers Iran, then that would be a devastating blow to the Belt and Road Initiative, by China, to trade, by Russia, to the oil supply of China, to the entire region.
And at this point, the big boys are stepping up and saying no.
And that's why Trump backed down.
Trump was just read the riot act, basically, by Russia.
So when Trump backed down, then gold and silver plummeted and oil plummeted because everybody figured, oh, okay, the bombing's not going to happen right now.
Which is a good thing.
We don't want to see more war.
I would rather gold and silver be lower and have no war than to have a bunch of bombing and see silver spike above $100 an ounce, which it already did in Shanghai yesterday.
The Chinese price for physical silver went over $100 an ounce.
Now, it's interesting because I was asking the question just the other day.
I was wondering at what point does the world, the rest of the world, decide that putting up with the shenanigans of Trump and the United States is not just Trump, it's Biden, it's everybody.
I mean, it's all the leaders.
You know, at what point is it no longer worth it?
At what point does the world say we just can't allow the United States to continue to bully the world and bomb everybody and run assassination squads, CIA operations, color revolutions, all kinds of fake news media lies involving everything from Ukraine and China and Iran.
At what point does the world say enough is enough?
We're just going to have to bomb America.
And it looks like that moment is almost here.
That they've decided that one more, one more step, you cross this red line, you bomb Iran, then we're going to take you out.
And the thing is, the Western leaders, Trump and Heg Seth and all these other morons, they have no idea.
They really don't know how weak America is from a military perspective.
They're still living in the past.
They think America is so strong that America can just do whatever it wants because they're acting like that.
And the rest of the world is just stunned watching America like, you don't really have that much punching power.
Yeah, so you can sail aircraft carriers around the world.
Yeah, you can bomb, you can launch some missiles, you can kidnap presidents.
You can't fight a land war, and your missiles run out in two weeks in an actual engagement with China or Russia.
You don't have great artillery.
You don't have hypersonic missiles.
You don't have a Reshnik.
Your aircraft carriers are decades old, except one of them, which sometimes works.
You know, the newest one.
They're sitting ducks.
They're just like giant floating football fields, actually larger than a football field.
Pretty easy to target.
Both China and Russia can take them out and sink them within minutes.
So the U.S. is arrogant and incompetent.
And it's run by lunatics right now who think they can get away with anything they want in the world.
They're talking tough.
And America is about to get kicked in the balls and punched in the nose hard is what it looks like.
And obviously, Trump keeps allowing Netanyahu to twist his arm and drag him into more attacks on Iran, which brings up the question of the Epstein files and what do they have on Trump.
And why are the Epstein files always covered up?
Every few months we get another story.
Oh, we found more files.
We're going to release those.
But not yet.
We have to redact them all.
And then a couple months later, Trump says, what Epstein files?
It's all a hoax.
And then a couple months later, oh, we found more files and it's the Democrats.
You know, it's a total mind game that they're playing with those.
What's in the Epstein files?
This is something that's very compromising to Trump, obviously, and to his entire administration.
So Netanyahu has total control.
And it took Russia threatening Trump to get him to back off in this case.
So Trump's not in control at all.
The real battle here is something that my friend Michael Yan said.
The real battle is between Zionism and China.
And Russia being an ally of China in this case.
And the United States and the UK being tied in with Zionism.
Trump's not in control.
Israel's in control.
And China and Russia are working together to try to prevent World War III right now.
Even though the United States keeps wanting to escalate, escalate, escalate, because Trump needs a reason.
He needs a reason to cancel the election.
He needs a reason to declare martial law.
He needs a reason to reset the currency, which is failing every day.
Hundreds of billions of dollars of secret bank bailouts have happened over the last just 30 days.
Friday night, Saturday night.
Oh, here's another 90 billion.
Here's another 70 billion.
It adds up.
That's happening right now.
We're on the verge of a banking collapse.
I mean, they're holding this empire together with bailing wire and duct tape and bubblegum at this point.
It's not going to take much to cause a cascading collapse of the whole system.
And meanwhile, Trump is pushing the envelope of bullying the world and bombing everybody and seeing what he can get away with.
And he's about to get checked hard.
Now, Russia is not only prepared to bomb the United States and to take out key strategic targets, for example, probably refineries, probably to completely destroy the Pentagon, probably to destroy the White House, to strike Wall Street, on and on.
But of course, military bases all over the world.
You know, Russia can take out every single U.S. military base or major base in Europe and in the United States.
They can take them all out in a matter of a few hours.
And there's nothing the U.S. can do to stop that.
Not a thing.
So Tucker Carlson's got a video where he's talking about Russia also being willing to nuke Europe, specifically the UK and Germany.
The two countries whose leaders most deserve that kind of reaction, by the way, because they keep pushing war.
You know, oh, you want war?
Really?
You want to beg for war, Starmer, and all you idiots that are running France and Germany?
Really?
You want war?
Well, Russia seems to be saying, okay, you know, sign here, confirm that the terms of agreement.
You wanted war.
Here comes a nuke up your ass.
Goodbye, Berlin.
Goodbye, city of London.
The whole world will cheer, actually.
Russia will become the most popular country in the world by destroying the city of London with a giant nuclear mushroom cloud.
You know, even Trump would probably cheer.
Finally, got rid of those pedophile vampires over there.
The UK government, which has been running the censorship schemes and the money laundering and the child trafficking and the human trafficking at levels that are off the charts.
The UK government, most evil empire in the history of the world, could be destroyed by Russia in minutes, in less than 20 minutes, actually.
And it would be a turning point in history, a positive turning point.
The world would get better when you take out the pedophiles with a giant Russian nuke.
At least that's what Russia believes.
So let's listen to Tucker Carlson explain this in his own words.
Here it is.
Russia, and prepare yourselves because this is the global headline.
Russia is actively considering the use of nuclear weapons against Europe.
Not against Kiev, against Europe, specifically the UK and Germany.
Just taking out the UK and Germany with nuclear weapons.
That's a fact.
Now, we're going to explain why we know that that's true in a moment.
And at the end of this open, we're going to play an interview we did a few hours ago with a man called Sergei Karnagov, who is a longtime political advisor to Vladimir Putin and one of the most famous public intellectuals in Russia, been around for about 35 years.
Advised Boris Yeltsin, you know, 30 years ago, more than 30 years ago.
And in that interview, he says point blank: yes, if the Ukraine war continues at this tempo for a year or two more, we speaking apparently on behalf of the Russian government, on behalf of his friend Putin, or at least someone who's very familiar with President Putin's thinking, we, Russia, will eliminate the UK and Germany with nuclear weapons.
Now, that's a headline.
No one wants to see Qatari gas wellheads blown up.
No one wants to see killing of any kind or destruction of any kind.
But taking out the two most important countries in Europe, both of which have big American bases, lots of American personnel, of course, international banking, Germany being the economic engine of Europe, London being the banking center of Europe, really of the West, along with New York.
And of course, these are two ancient countries with which we have close ties: history and kinship and genetics.
We're going to take them out.
We're going to eliminate those countries with nuclear weapons, saying that right into camera.
So that's a pretty big story.
Have you read that story?
Has anyone mentioned that to you?
That the most famous public intellectual in Russia, a close friend of Vladimir Putin's, exactly the same age, the two were born a month apart, have known each other a long time, is saying in public that Russia plans to use nuclear weapons against Western Europe.
Russia is going to blow up the UK and Germany if things don't get resolved soon.
You probably haven't heard that.
It hasn't actually been on the front page of the New York Times.
I don't think the Times of London has mentioned it.
No one seems to be paying any attention at all to the biggest story of our lifetimes, potentially.
And that's very odd.
All right, there you go.
Tucker Carlson explaining that yes, Russia has come to realize that they will have to nuke and destroy the UK and Germany.
And really, Western Europe has given Russia no other choice.
How many times has Russia said we want to stop the war?
We have terms for peace.
Here they are.
These are non-negotiable, but we're willing to stop the special military operation.
How many times has Keir Starmer or Boris Johnson before him said, no, we want to fight.
Keep on fighting.
We have to destroy Russia.
We have to pillage Russia.
We have to take Russia's resources.
Same thing with Germany.
Same thing with France.
Macron is an idiot and a psychopath and other things.
Plenty of adjectives for that guy.
And Western European leaders are actually a suicide cult.
They are running a suicide cult.
At first, they wanted to just commit their own suicide, sort of a self-induced energy collapse.
When the United States blew up their Nord Stream pipeline, Germany celebrated it.
I mean, Europe just stood there, said, yay, we lost our affordable energy supply.
There goes our industry.
There goes Mercedes-Benz.
There goes all the glass plants in France.
There goes Basif in Germany.
Goodbye.
And the European leaders celebrated it.
Hey, it's good for global warming to collapse our industry.
So, you know, they're running a suicide cult.
But now they've escalated that to Russia-assisted suicide cult.
They want Russia to nuke them.
They're literally begging for it every single day by using words and phrases like, we have to destroy Russia.
We have to steal all of Russia's money, the 300 billion or whatever, 200 billion from Euro clear.
We have to steal all their money.
We have to take all their resources.
We have to, you know, bomb and assassinate Putin, etc.
These are actually little secret messages begging for Russia-assisted suicide.
That's what that is.
And Russia at some point is going to oblige that request.
Now, probably not right away, but who knows?
Things could accelerate dramatically.
And while I personally, I don't want to see anybody harmed.
I don't want to see anybody nuked.
I'm not calling for violence, but I will state as a matter of fact that if the city of London is completely nuked, the entire world will celebrate.
And a great evil will have been eliminated from this planet, a satanic evil.
So, you know, sometimes the only way to exorcise the demons is with high-yield nuclear weapons.
And that's what Russia has figured out.
So that day could be coming.
I'm not hoping for it.
But I'm trying to explain it.
Why, why that's happening?
Russia is not going to sit there and just be relentlessly attacked and pillaged and have all their money stolen.
They're going to strike back.
And they've demonstrated that they can.
I mean, they struck Lviv, a city in more western Ukraine, with Oreshnik missiles.
Destroyed a massive underground gas supply hub, they claim.
The missiles can reach beyond that.
They can reach Poland.
They can reach Romania.
They can reach Austria.
They can reach Washington, D.C. There's no limit to the targets that Russia can destroy.
So don't be surprised, folks, if you wake up one morning and find out, well, Trump gave in and let Netanyahu talk him into bombing Iran.
And so we unleashed a bunch of B-2 stealth bombers against Iran.
And then out your window in the morning, the giant mushroom cloud, because Russia said, well, okay, that's it.
We've had enough.
We're going to bomb you now.
The U.S. can't survive nuclear war.
U.S. is barely surviving right now.
Russia can survive nuclear war for a number of reasons.
I mean, number one, they still have the old fallout shelters.
We don't.
Russia has an air defense system that can intercept a lot of incoming nuclear missiles.
We don't.
Russia has modern ICBM technology with maneuverable hyperglide vehicles.
We don't.
I mean, it just goes on and on and on.
Russian people are tough and capable.
They can survive hard times.
Not Americans.
Americans are weak, pathetic, hyper-privileged.
Uber eats generation.
You know, yeah, Americans won't survive it.
And then for all the American people that think, oh, we're going to roll around the world steaming across the oceans with our Navy.
Well, it's not steam.
It's nuclear power for the aircraft carriers.
And no one can stop us because of our aircraft carriers.
Yeah, except a giant hole in your aircraft carrier from top to bottom.
From the you know the what do you call it?
The flight deck all the way, punching through the five floors or whatever it is, punching all the way through to the bottom and beyond into the ocean, to where there's like 20 to 30, you know, six foot diameter gaping holes in your ship and your nuclear reactors are leaking radiation all over the crew now and seawater is coming in.
Guess what?
Your aircraft carrier will be at the bottom of the Red Sea or the Mediterranean or wherever it happens to be.
It will be a radioactive, off-limits, you know, one day a diving curiosity.
Let's go explore the sunken USS whatever.
Forward.
You know, that's what it's going to be if Trump keeps pushing.
The world's not going to sit back and do nothing.
See, here's the other mistake.
Trump and his neocon morons, they think that they think Iran is Libya.
I mean, the U.S. military couldn't even defeat the people in Afghanistan.
We retreated, ran with a tail between our legs and left behind tens of billions of dollars of equipment, handed it over, and just ran off and left all our own agents behind and all of our own informants behind.
And they all got tortured and murdered.
And the U.S. said, oh, well, too bad we have to evacuate.
U.S. can't even beat Afghanistan.
You think the U.S. can beat Iran?
Really?
The U.S. couldn't win in Vietnam.
The U.S. didn't defeat Adolf Hitler.
Russia did that.
I mean, what has the U.S. done?
I mean, the U.S. military has become pathetic.
Yeah, you could kidnap a leader if there's a prearranged agreement to allow that to happen because it's all theater at this point.
But you can't actually fight a real war and win it.
But Trump doesn't know that.
So he's going to act as if the U.S. can defeat any enemy anywhere in the world.
And he's going to find out that he's, I mean, he may be the biggest bully on the playground, but there's a silent MMA expert on the playground who will take you to the ground and put your neck in a leg triangle and squeeze until you're choked out.
And that's Russia.
And that's exactly what's going to happen if Trump keeps pushing.
Sure sucks to be a U.S. soldier stationed in the Middle East right now or on any aircraft carrier because you're basically part of a giant floating target that just screams, sink me, sink me all over the world.
It's coming.
There's a showdown, okay?
There's a giant global showdown coming.
And it's going to be unleashed all at once.
It'll be a currency war.
It'll be a kinetic war.
It'll be a cyber war.
Everything all at the same time.
And that's why all the top players, mostly China, Russia, the United States, are in this kind of free-for-all, last-ditch panic, grab everything mode.
We've got to get the oil.
We've got to get the silver.
We got to get the rare earth.
We got to get the sea lanes.
We got to get everything now because it's all going down.
It's going to be a showdown.
Don't confuse that with a hoedown, which is a kind of a southern dance celebration involving alcohol and sketchy people.
That's a hoedown.
This is a showdown.
So here's my prediction in this.
Whenever this final showdown happens, the U.S. loses.
The U.S. loses for a number of reasons.
It doesn't have industry, not on the scale of China.
It doesn't have the factories.
This isn't World War II any longer.
The U.S. doesn't have the rare earths.
The U.S. doesn't have the work ethic that China has.
Remember what I said yesterday in China, Jojo Liu, 996, 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six hours a day.
Joe Joe Liu.
That is the work ethic in China, not in America.
America simply just flat out cannot compete.
Doesn't have the missiles, doesn't have the robots, doesn't have the drones, doesn't have the hypersonic missiles.
It's got an old outdated Navy, old outdated ICBMs that may or may not even work.
That's what the U.S. has.
The U.S. will lose.
The U.S. doesn't even have a reputation internationally anymore.
Trump has made sure the entire world hates America.
Every country that isn't under the thumb of America hates America.
Nobody wants to use the dollar.
I mean, some are still forced to use it, but nobody wants to.
Everyone's looking for alternatives to the dollar.
Our reputation is destroyed.
There's no trust in the U.S. There's no trust in the dollar.
No trust in treasuries.
At this point, the Fed has to basically create all the money or fake currency to keep buying the treasuries.
Nobody wants to buy them.
And the West is resorting to just stealing money from Russia or pillaging the wealth of Venezuela.
These are not the kinds of activities that win friends and influence people on an international scale.
These are the kinds of activities that make you the enemy of the world.
The whole world can't wait to stop you.
Kind of like the Third Reich in World War II.
The whole world wanted to stop Germany.
And eventually they did.
Well, who did?
The Russians.
Again, the Russians did.
I've got one more video to play for you here, and then I'll wrap up this report.
This is former CIA agent, John Kiriaku, who was interviewed on, I don't know, he's interviewed by Ted Raw, it looks like, a partisan channel, maybe.
The DEPROM program.
I'm not sure exactly.
Anyway, I'll play this clip.
Listen to John because this guy is sharp.
He knows what he's talking about.
He saw it up close, firsthand, in the CIA.
Listen to what he has to say.
CNN, the Wall Street Journal.
I looked at them all last night and they're all saying, oh my God, it's murder in the streets in Iran.
Oh my God.
This human rights organization is saying, you know, 172 dead.
Okay, that human rights organization is based in London and it's funded by the Israelis and Iranians in exile.
And then, oh my God, there's this other human rights organization.
It's saying 500 dead.
Yeah, that one's in Washington.
And they take money from the CIA.
So you can't.
So there's no reliable information.
There's no reliable information.
Now, are people being killed in Iran?
Absolutely yes.
But think of this too.
Do we know that these people aren't being killed by Israeli-backed protesters?
Because the Israelis have been bragging over the weekend that they're the ones backing the protesters.
And I'll add another thing that literally no one is reporting.
Protesters set on fire 48 fire engines in Tehran.
48 fire engines so that they cannot respond to fires.
Why?
Because it's the Israeli-backed protesters setting shit on fire.
And this is just to make it worse.
Now, the thing is, okay, so for people who are listening and are thinking, okay, John's being conspiratorial and blah, blah, blah.
Let's not forget that we know that Iran is riddled with people on the Mossad payroll because of the fact that they provided the targeting information for the Israeli-U.S. military attacks against atomic scientists and military sites in Iran recently, right?
We know that.
We talked about here on the show before any of these protests started about how Iran has a serious Israel problem in terms of infiltration.
So I just want to, you know, provide a little context there.
Yeah, I just, my, I think my point here is to remind everybody that there are two sides to a story.
And we're only getting the Israeli side.
Right.
The Israelis are backing Reza Pelavi.
The Israelis are backing these so-called human rights organizations.
The Israelis are the ones demanding that U.S. policy be that Iran doesn't have any missiles.
So we just have to be very careful to.
All right, there you go.
It was kind of cut off there, but you get the idea.
Just like I said, everything you're being told about Iran by Western media is a total lie.
Everything, top to bottom.
You're living in an empire of lies if you live in a Western country.
It's an empire of lies run by warmongering lunatics who are arrogant and incompetent, and they don't know that they're about to be defeated.
By the way, China is going to win the race to superintelligence via AI.
Russia has already won the race on super weapons, which is the Oreshnik system that virtually nobody in the West still even understands that technology, how complex it is,
how capable it is, how it doesn't even use nuclear warheads, but can devastate and atomize targets deep underground just because of kinetic energy and the special alloys that are used in the actual warheads that have a certain compression rate that unleashes a wave of total destruction that turns everything into dust.
I mean, it's a very advanced science, actually.
America is incapable of doing it.
Absolutely incapable.
There's nobody in the United States that is smart enough to do that any longer.
In the 1970s, yeah, not anymore.
Everybody's dumbed down.
So what's the solution to all of this?
Well, I've said it before.
It's very simple.
Stop bullying the world and start engaging in trade.
Reform your domestic education system.
Have an honest money and currency system domestically.
And then eliminate the federal income tax so that innovators and entrepreneurs in America can start to create amazing new things, including new technology, some of which can be used for national defense.
You can't bully your way to global strength while your country is weak and failing domestically through stupidity and currency collapse and social strife and so on.
It doesn't work.
But that's the path that Trump has us on, is the path that the Democrats had us on, the path that Obama had us on.
Well, his path was to try to destroy America.
So the outcome of this is not in doubt.
It will be the end of America.
The final showdown will see China and Russia as the victors, and the U.S. Empire will cease to exist.
And so will the British Empire.
It will be the end of Western civilization as we know it.
And that probably isn't too far off.
And Trump is accelerating us on that path.
So, you know, prepare accordingly.
These events aren't going to kill all of us.
Just a lot.
But those who survive will need to learn how to make it, how to thrive, how to rebuild.
And that's why I'm focused on all that information right now with our free knowledge base, our free book engine website, brightlearn.ai.
You can download and create any book you want on any topic completely free.
We have 20,000 books published there now, by the way.
They're all free.
A lot of books about how to rebuild civilization, how to live off-grid, how to create your own food supply, all kinds of things.
So check that out and prepare accordingly.
Things are going to get ugly.
Thanks for listening.
All right, we are continuing on that happy note that I just finished up with there.
Let me give you some good news in contrast to that.
So you know how, do you listen to audiobooks at all?
You know how Amazon bought Audible a few years back and Amazon runs Audible.
And you know they have digital rights management for all their audiobooks, right?
So you buy an audio book.
It could be $5, $10, more, $20.
And then you run the Audible app and then you can listen to your audio book until the app stops working.
The app stops working, you can't listen to it at all.
Or if you need an upgrade and you can't upgrade and they have a bug or they have a problem or it loses your account connection or you forgot your password, trying to log in again, etc.
There's a thousand reasons why you won't be able to listen to the audio books that you paid for.
Well, there's got to be a better way, right?
There's got to be a way that's more fair, especially to those of us who have purchased the audio books.
And Amazon has also been known to remotely delete books.
They've deleted books off Kindle devices, remotely.
They've issued a command at their servers and then in one case, literally the book 1984 disappeared off of everybody's Kindle devices.
Yes, ironic, isn't it, that they did that to the book 1984.
Memory holding, the book that's about memory holding.
So what's the better way?
Well, of course, I've come up with a better way.
And the book engine, the book platform that I built, which is called BrightLearn.ai, which thousands of you have used.
We now have over 6,000 authors who have used it to publish well over 20,000 books.
It's approaching 21,000.
And we've got, I don't know, coming up on 140,000 downloads and many more reads, etc.
Well, I have begun the process of audio book generation for that system.
And in fact, I'm looking at a console right now.
It's generating, it's still in the testing phase, but it's generating audio for the book called Vanishing Vaults, the ultimate guide to advanced caching and misdirection for hiding gold and silver.
So once this is done, which might be a couple of days, maybe over the weekend, you'll be able to download or listen to the entire audio book.
And when you download it, you'll have to just enter your email address and it'll email you a link and you can download it and it downloads as an MP3 file.
That MP3 file is on your hard drive.
And there's no way that I or anyone else can take it away from you.
So not only are all the audio books completely free from Brightlearn.ai, but they can't be taken away.
Can't be censored.
And I started with this book, Vanishing Vaults, because I know a lot of you have gold and silver and you're wondering how to hide it.
How do you protect it?
Well, I did a whole book on that with very detailed instructions.
And so I decided, given the value of gold and silver right now, this would be the perfect book just to turn it into an audio book and let everybody download it.
So coming soon, each day in our Natural News email newsletter, which you may want to subscribe to.
If you're not already subscribed, that's at naturalnews.com.
Just click subscribe.
Then you will receive in the daily email briefing, you'll receive a link each day to a free audio book.
Every day.
One per day, five per week.
Okay?
So that's, let's say, $50 worth of free audio books every week.
And you'll also be able to go to the website books.brightlearn.ai and you'll be able to see which audiobooks are available right now.
Now, full-length audio books are actually expensive for us to create.
We have to pay all the tokens for text-to-speech, you know, voice generation.
It's not inexpensive, especially when you consider a lot of these books are nine chapters or 15 chapters.
You know, they can be, in some cases, they can be hundreds of thousands of words.
So this is not inexpensive.
But that's why we're not doing it for all 20,000 plus books.
We're doing it initially for selected books.
But I anticipate that audio book tokens or audio, you know, text-to-speech tokens will become a lot more affordable over the next 12 months.
And as that price drops, then we'll be able to produce more and more audio books and then ultimately in different languages as well.
So this is me keeping my commitment to you to bring you free knowledge, decentralized content without DRM or digital rights management, where you can download the PDFs, download the MP3s, store them locally, listen anytime you want.
And even if the cell towers fail, even if the internet fails, whatever fails, you know, the software fails, it's a glitch, you can't update this or that.
You can still play the MP3.
You can still view the PDF as long as you have something that's got electricity that's running.
That's my goal.
See, the corporate system wants you tied into their cloud control.
I want you to be completely decentralized where you don't have to pay any money and you don't have to have my permission.
You don't have to check in with the server.
You don't have to log in to play the audio.
None of that garbage.
I believe in actual freedom.
Not the bullshit veneer of freedom that is given to you by corporations and governments and all the other players.
I believe in actual freedom, freedom of information, freedom to learn, freedom of knowledge, sharing.
Knowledge is power.
I want to give you that power by giving you that knowledge in a way that can't be taken away from you.
That's what this is about.
So that's coming soon.
And again, the first book will be Vanishing Vaults.
And I'll give you a link to that once that's up and running.
And by the way, the download for the audio files, for some of these books, the download can be pretty substantial.
It can be 200 megabytes, or in some cases, more, 400 megabytes, 500 megabytes.
So just be prepared.
And these aren't even big.
It's not like a high bit rate either.
These are 128 kilobits per second MP3 files, which is standard.
You know, it's decent quality.
It's not high fidelity for music, but it's decent quality for voice.
I think it's a 24 kilohertz sample rate.
And like I said, 128K bit rate.
or kilobits per second.
But they can still be substantial.
So just be prepared for that.
And as always, the way that you can help support us, should you choose to do so, is to shop at healthrangerstore.com and get your storable food, your emergency food supplies, your high-end nutritional supplements.
We've got black cumin seed.
We've got turmeric.
We've got iodine.
We've got freeze-dried fruits and vegetables.
And a lot of people in their food storage, they're missing the fruits.
You know, the freeze-dried strawberries or mangoes, which are delicious, or bananas or apples or what have you, or raspberries.
We have blueberries, freeze-dried blueberries in number 10 cans.
People love them.
They eat it like candy.
And this contains the vitamin C that's missing from most storable food.
If you think about it, most storable food does not have fruit, you know, because fruit's expensive.
It's cheaper for the storable food companies to push, you know, textured vegetable protein with MSG, salt, and sugar.
And call it, you know, French onion soup mix or whatever.
That's a bunch of GMO corn maltodextrin crap with MSG in it and yeast extract.
You know, it's like, ugh, I wouldn't feed that to my dogs, you know?
But anyway, you can upgrade your food storage with us at healthrangerstore.com.
All right.
Now, let's see what else.
Gold and silver.
I promised an interview for you here today with Dale Whitaker.
Before we get there, I want to mention a relevant story.
Let's see.
Here it is.
It's being reported that Costco is limiting precious metal sales to something like one coin or one silver coin per customer.
Maybe that's per day.
There are some dealers that are saying they're out.
They can't get the silver.
They can't get it from the U.S. Mints, for example.
But I talked to Chris Olson, the founder of Battalion Metals, well, co-founder with Tucker Carlson.
And Chris told me they still have metal and they've got, of course, plenty of junk silver, which is the pre-1965 coins that are 90% silver.
Those are at a very low price right now compared to historical pricing.
That's actually the best deal right now.
That won't last very long.
Probably within six months or so, junk silver premiums will go much higher than they are right now.
So that's the best deal at the moment.
And Battalion Metals has plenty of that.
Plus, they've got other coins in stock right now.
So you can still get silver if that's what you want from Treasure Island.
Just go to metalswithmike.com, metalswithmike.com, and they are our sponsor, our only sponsor for gold and silver coins.
And use the discount code Ranger when you make a purchase, and they will waive the shipping insurance fee.
And that will save you some.
Not a fortune, but a little bit.
And it also helps support our infrastructure so we can keep bringing you free amazing audiobooks like the one on how to hide your silver.
You see how it goes full circle.
It comes back.
Man, i'm watching.
My science paper ingestion engine has been running all day.
I'm looking at it right now like, oh whoa, no wonder.
Hold on a second.
Okay, it just ingested another 47 000 science papers and it's got another hundred thousand to go, oh my goodness.
Well, hold on a sec, I better check the.
I better check the RAM on the index engine, because sometimes that stuff gets out of control.
Let's see.
Oh okay yeah, we're still under 20 megs on that.
That's good.
CPU is still keeping up.
Okay, we're okay for now.
That's good.
I have to keep an eye on all these services, make sure everything's working.
But I would imagine that by tomorrow, the number of science papers in our engine that is, that's used to create books at brightlearn.ai or that's used to help answer your questions at brightanswers.ai the number of science papers is going to be 200,000.
I mean, right now it's probably over 150,000 and there's, so it's probably going to be 250,000, come to think of it, within another day or two.
By the way, I I I did fix an issue with brightanswers.ai where, if the API was busy, some of you were getting errors that said like the API limit has been reached or something.
That's because of our classification prompt.
That's checking questions and deciding how to route it and yeah, we we hit limits on that because of well, a bunch of reasons.
So I fixed that with some fallbacks and that's working better now.
So anytime you see bugs on the tools like that, rest assured I've got staffers that are checking those tools multiple times throughout the day and they report any kind of errors to me and then I unleash the AI agents to fix those errors and that's how that works, so any kind of problems won't won't last long.
If you see an issue, just have patience with it, and don't forget to check out our new rendition of what used to be Censored.news.
It's now Bright News.ai and there's some really amazing new features coming for that.
We don't have them in place yet, but because i'm i'm working on the audio books right now and then the translations of books and so on, but eventually i'll get back to the Bright NEWS site and i'm going to roll out some pretty cool new features there for you.
Okay, I have something else to share with you.
I forgot I was going to say this earlier, so remember that that battery company out of Estonia well really Finland well, I guess they're located in Estonia and the.
The founder of this is named Marco, I believe.
That's his name.
And remember, he made these pretty outlandish-sounding claims about their battery technology, claiming that it would have like 400 kilowatts per kilogram energy density, 100,000 cycles, that it had no thermal expansion under use, that it could be charged at a rate of 10 C, that it would work in a temperature range of minus 30 C to plus 100 C while losing no more.
than 5 percent of its capacity.
It could be charged in less than 10 minutes from zero to full, etc etc.
Right, so all these claims and of course, you and I and everybody else at the world is going that sounds impossible, impossible.
Well, I was at my lab yesterday working with a really talented, high-level, published PhD scientist who's an expert in a number of things such as ion chromatography.
In fact, I've got a whole new cool thing to show you.
I'm going to film a new video in the lab, and we've got a new method for glyphosate quantitation that no longer needs to use the triple quad instrument with crazy chemistry on the gradient for the mobile phase gradient for the glyphosate method.
Use weird columns and everything.
We have a new method that's based on ion chromatography combined with a simpler instrument, a single quad mass spec.
And we've achieved actually better sensitivity.
We can quant glyphosate at a lower level.
Anyway, I'm talking to this scientist who also happens to be a vegetarian.
So I gave him a bunch of our cool vegetarian products from the Health Ranger store, and he really appreciated that.
Just as a side note, although he was not at all fond of my dog, not a dog person, a science person, a vegetarian science person.
Anyway, I asked him the question because he told me that he used to work for Samsung and a bunch of other high-tech companies.
And his specialty was actually many, I forgot exactly what he said, but definitely ion chromatography involved in battery anode and cathode composition.
And we talked about dendrites and we talked about Samsung's new silver carbon anode technology with the thin film technology.
And then I said to this guy, said, hey, have you heard about the new Donut Lab battery claim out of Estonia?
He said, no, I haven't heard about it.
What is it?
So I gave him the specs and everything.
And I said, and they claim they don't use lithium at all.
No lithium.
And he laughed and he said, okay, that's impossible to do without lithium.
You must have lithium to achieve those specs that you just said.
So whatever they're telling you can't be true.
So, and this is a, like, this is one of the top scientists in the world in ion chromatography and ion composition.
He worked on battery teams.
I mean, he's worked for numerous companies over his vast career.
He's published over 100 science papers.
This is a top guy in this area.
And he says that the Donut Lab battery can't be true because it has to use lithium.
So anyway, I thought I would share that with you because most people have concluded that the Donut Lab battery also can't be true.
That somehow they're exaggerating or they're hoaxing or whatever.
People have had different accusations against the company.
But according to the guy I talked to, it's not possible.
So that's too bad because I was really hoping to have kick-ass batteries.
Oh, here's something else that's hilarious.
So I was checking out some online videos about some other people that did deep investigations into this battery chemistry.
And there's a woman who apparently did some deep, deep investigation into the founders and the funders behind this company, the Donut Lab and their motorcycle company that Verge is called.
And anyway, the whole history of all these people.
And I could tell she had no science knowledge whatsoever when she said that the way batteries work is that when you connect them, the, what does she say?
The anode generates electrons, which are tiny particles that flow out of one of the contacts of the battery and they flow through your motor and then they flow back around to the other side of the battery.
And I couldn't stop laughing.
I'm like, oh my God.
She thinks that electrons flow down the wires.
Oh my God.
And she thinks they're particles.
She thinks electrons are little particles that flow down the wires.
Like she thinks that high voltage power lines that are over your head are actually delivering little electron particles that were produced at the power plant 50 miles away.
And that like the power plant produces the electrons and then pushes them through the wires.
And then they shoot down the wires until they get to your motor.
Like, are you kidding me?
There are people who still think that.
Like, well, how does alternating current work then?
Now, I know that batteries are direct current, but even in DC, electricity doesn't work like that.
It's not little particles flowing through.
It's not little particles pushing through.
It's not how it works at all.
It's all about potential.
Reminds me of when that senator said the internet was like a series of tubes.
And the email is like tubes.
And then you send an email and it goes in a bunch of little tubes and then it arrives in a tube.
And then the person opens the tube.
It's thinking like maybe a drive-through bank situation, you know, where you put your paperwork in a tube and it gets sucked through a tube, you know, into the bank teller.
Like, that's a series of tubes with air suction, you know, that's a series of tubes.
But that's not how the internet works, and that's not how batteries work.
That's not how electricity works.
My goodness.
You know, in fact, just to prove that to you, if you're wondering what I'm saying, did you know that there is literally no physical connection from your house to the power grid?
Did you know that?
There's literally no physical connection whatsoever.
Because somewhere in your neighborhood, there's probably a big green box sticking out of the grass in somebody's yard.
You know what's in that big green box that says like high voltage danger?
A transformer.
And did you know that in the transformer, on one side of the transformer, there's a bunch of wires that come from the power grid.
And then on the other side, there's wires that go to your house in the neighborhood.
And did you know that those two sets of wires never touch each other?
Did you know that?
They never touch.
I mean, yeah, they're all coiled up and wrapped around a certain number of turns and coils depending on how much voltage translation you want to achieve.
I mean, there's copper in there.
Yeah, sure.
They don't touch each other.
So there's no way that electron particles from the power company can get to your house because they're not even connected.
You're like, well, how does electricity work?
It's called induction.
I mean, there's a whole series of videos you can watch on that.
If you want to know how power gets from the power producer, from the coal plant to your toaster, believe me, there's no physical connection at all.
So, no, it's not a bunch of electron particles that are like going down the wires at the speed of light.
It doesn't work that way.
I'm just shocked that people don't know that.
People think electricity works like garden hoses, you know.
Doesn't just go down the hose and then I turn it on and it comes out the other end.
Nope.
Nope.
That's not at all.
Because electrons are not water molecules.
You know, as a side note, you ever wonder, like, how do people think generators work?
Because, I mean, really.
So you have, let's say you have a gasoline generator in your garage and you start it up.
And I think most people realize there's something rotating in the engine.
Something is probably turning, right?
So there's like a wheel or there's something turning.
And then the question is, how does that become alternating current?
You know?
Yeah, go get them.
Go get the ACDC.
Okay.
My dogs are on patrol.
They're listening to coyotes or stuff.
But yeah, if it turns, how does that produce electricity?
Where do the electron particles come from?
Huh?
Do they come out of the gasoline?
No.
No.
There are no electron particles.
Otherwise, you'd have to have like an electron particle tank.
Like, you'd have to have a pile of electron particles.
You have to funnel it into the tank so that it could feed that down the wires.
There's no such thing.
It's funny to me because this woman that was in this video, I think she said she's, yeah, she was a journalist.
That's exactly what she said.
Well, no, one.
That explains it right there.
She's a journalist.
They don't know anything.
She probably writes the text section for the Wall Street Journal.
Doesn't even know what electrons are.
Whatever.
I mean, we live in a dumbed-down country.
That's for sure.
Man, these science papers that we're ingesting right now, this is good stuff.
Look at this.
Here's one of the titles of the Instanton Universal Moduli Space of N equals to Supersymmetric Young-Mills Theory.
Did you know that?
There's a paper.
Here's one.
Synchronization and MSW sharpening of neutrinos propagating in a flavor-blind medium.
Uh-huh.
Oh, that's from the Journal of Nuclear Physics, by the way.
Let's see.
What are some other ones we have here?
These are amazing.
Constraints on the tachyon condensate from anomalous symmetries.
Yeah, I was worried about those anomalous symmetries.
Did you?
I saw some in the mirror the other day.
So these anomalous symmetries.
I didn't know they had a tachyon condensate, but you learn something every day.
Super field effective action in the non-commutative Wes Zumino model.
And then, okay, here's another.
The hadronic decay of a vector meson from the lattice.
Okay.
Man, if these are needed to write books, then I'm wondering what people are prompting in the book engine.
Like, tell me how to build a time machine.
Oh, well, guess what?
We have those papers.
Oh, look, here it is.
Gravitational radiation from collisions at the speed of light.
A massless particle falling into a, and then it's cut off into a what?
Into a what?
A massless particle falling into, did it fall into the electron pile for the generator?
I think that's what it fell into.
Obviously.
That's where the electrons come, the electron particles come from, from the power plant.
They come out of the oh my goodness, this stuff never ends.
Well, I'm going to have to have my tachyon condensate checked.
Obviously, that's what's gone wrong with the podcast.
All right.
Oh, yeah, I owe you an interview.
So let's go to that next.
Thanks for putting up with my lame attempt at comedy.
And I'll be back with you tomorrow.
We've got more interesting stuff coming up.
Be sure to check out all of our tools, brightlearn.ai, brightanswers.ai, and brightnews.ai.
So check it out and enjoy the rest of the show.
So it all starts when someone calls and wants to purchase gold from a company.
Then essentially persuaded to buy coins that are completely controlled by the companies.
And they're told that these coins are better coins for their investment.
But the reality is much different because these guys have a huge vested interest in selling you these premium coins.
These salesmen are making a lot of commission.
Just perspectively, if you have $100,000 and you're investing that into these coins, that salesman could walk away with a $10,000 paycheck right then and there.
And this is where the start of the scam comes in.
They sell you the overpriced assets and they tell you that they're better assets for you.
Watch out.
Don't get ripped off by some gold grifters.
Welcome to the show today.
I'm Mike Adams of Brighteon.com.
And today we have a very special guest, a whistleblower, a former CFO of a major gold retail company.
And he's now the author of a very important book called The Gold Grift.
His name is Dale Whitaker.
He joins us here today to talk about what he's been working on for seven years now, trying to blow the whistle on how innocent people are getting ripped off by dishonest gold retailers.
We want to show you how to get honest gold retailers and honestly purchase gold and silver if you choose to do so at fair prices, but not get ripped off and taken for your life savings.
And that's happening.
So welcome to the show, Mr. Whitaker.
It's an honor to have you on today.
And, you know, I applaud you for being the whistleblower and having the courage to do what you're doing.
Welcome.
Thanks, Mike.
I appreciate it.
Thanks for having me.
Well, thank you.
My goodness.
This has been a long time coming because I've interviewed many other people in the gold space who have told horror stories about what's happening, mostly to people on the older side who are being taken for their life savings.
But could you, let's rewind and you tell us what's happening because you saw it.
You were in it and you, you know, you blew the whistle.
So tell us what's actually been happening.
So it all starts when someone calls and wants to purchase gold from a company.
And they're basically, they call and they want to buy typical gold bullion, right?
Gold bullion, eagles, gold silver eagles.
And they're then essentially persuaded to buy coins that are completely controlled by the companies.
They control the mintage.
They control the premiums.
They control the spreads.
And they're told that these coins are better coins for their investment.
And, you know, as a as a general rule of thumb, I would say most people take that advice at face value and they believe that the person on the other end of the call is offering them solid fiduciary advice.
But the reality is much different because these guys have a huge vested interest in selling you these premium coins, what they call premium coins, fixed mintage coins, numismatic, semi-numismatic.
There's a bunch of different interchangeable terms for them.
But these salesmen are making a lot of commission, you know, sometimes upwards of 10, 15% commission plus bonuses on the gross amount of the sales.
So just perspectively, if you have $100,000 and you're investing that into these coins, that salesman could walk away with a $10,000 paycheck right then and there.
And that's crazy because if you're buying gold that's priced honestly, even the dealers' margins are a fraction of that percentage.
Yeah.
And this is where the start of the scam comes in.
They sell you the overpriced assets, gold, silver, platinum, and palladium, even sometimes in some cases, and they tell you that they're better assets for you.
And again, the average investor doesn't know better.
They're really relying on the advice of the salesman and expect that they're trustworthy and that they have their best interests at heart.
But the reality is they have their own interests at heart and the interests of the company at heart.
So they sell you these coins and they tell you in a lot of cases, hold on to them for three years, five years, seven years, 10 years.
And the reason they do that is because they often mark up these coins over 100%, 150%.
I saw one recently.
I'm working a case right now where they charged over 450% on silver.
Unreal.
And they tell folks that these are better investments.
And they use a lot of confusing language.
They tell them that there's tax incentives and there's tax reasons for doing this, which is not true.
There's a whole spiel they go into to earn your trust.
And now once they've earned your trust, they sell you these coins.
So they sell you the coins.
And let's just say that they've marked the coins up 100%.
Once those assets hit your custodial account, a lot of people then realize, hold on, I invested 100,000, but my custodian's saying they're only worth $50,000 or $60,000.
Where's the rest of the assets?
So when they call the company and say, hey, I bought $100,000 worth of assets, but my custodian's only saying they're worth $50,000 to $60,000.
They say, oh, no, that's just the spot value.
They have more value over and above that.
So when you go to sell, you come back to us and you sell at our spread, et cetera, et cetera.
But what ends up actually happening in reality is you go back to sell the coins to that company and they give you spot.
So they give you the same value that the custodian's valuing them at.
Whoa, okay.
So I've heard from other people in this industry who I've interviewed that I think we both know that, yeah, in some cases, people are paying 300% more per ounce for silver often than they should be.
So like today, right now, silver is like $88 spot, let's say roughly.
And premiums are going up substantially.
It's probably not crazy for a premium right now on American coins to be even $12.
I don't know where the premiums are, but that would actually put a silver coin at like $100 right now at honest retail.
But then there are these dishonest retailers you're talking about that might charge someone $200 or $300 for one ounce of silver.
That's what you're saying, right?
Correct.
Actually, just a couple of days ago when silver was floating around 84 bucks, I know there was one retailer that was selling a two-ounce coin for $188.
So I think that premium shakes out to be about 70 to 80% off the top of my head.
It's pretty astronomical when you think about it because it's for a two-ounce coin.
And that's another thing that, because I saw you kind of go, huh?
Well, I'm trying to, exactly.
And that's the catch, right, Mike?
Because you had to check yourself.
You had to go, wait, oh, no, that's more than 80.
No, but it's a two-ounce coin.
That's what they're praying you on, right?
They don't sell you a one-ounce coin where the math's easy to do.
They sell you these fractional denominations that are weird, like one and a quarter, a quarter ounce.
I saw a third ounce gold the other day.
Yeah, exactly.
So, so, and then they do this because when a customer's on the film with them and they're purchasing the coins, it's a lot harder when you have a fast-talking salesman to do the math on the back of an envelope or take notes and go through and do the math while they're talking you through this trade that they want you to execute when they're using these fractional denominations.
And if you were to call the question, go, oh, no, no, you're not, you're not doing it right.
You know, this is how you have to do it.
And then they'll fast-talk you again.
They'll confuse you with terminology.
And it's all part of the scheme to get you to buy the coins that they want to sell you, that they have a vested interest in selling you.
So basically, on the other side of the phone is not the wolf of Wall Street, but the wolf of Gold Street.
You know, this is like a fast-talking junk bond salesperson that's talking people into handing over often their life savings into this, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the, I think that's the apt analogy, right?
Is this a boiler room type sales floor, kind of the same thing?
You know, they have pejorative terms that they use for folks who won't invest in these coins.
They call them bullyheads, like bullion bullyheads.
You know, there's high fives when they manage to basically rip someone off on the sales floor.
The, you know, fist bumps and so on and so on.
And in some cases, it was in the metals.com case who were another gold company that did this that were sued into the ground.
There was, they had posters in the, in their staff room.
They had like this lottery machine.
I mean, it was all like a hype to get these guys to sell as much as possible and make as much money as possible at the expense of the folks on the other line and their retirement funds.
I mean, it's really egregious what they're doing.
Okay, but there's another aspect of this I'd like you to speak to.
And you don't have to name names, but these aren't just sort of sketchy flyby night names.
These, my understanding is that many of these companies that you're describing, or these kinds of operations, are taking place at gold retailers that are sponsored by mainstream, well-known, almost celebrity type of people.
Is that true?
Yeah, it's unequivocally true.
In fact, I have a list right here.
You know, you talk about naming names.
So let me just tell you who have been sued for fraudulent practices.
Lear Capital was sued by multiple state attorney generals.
They went through Chapter 13 bankruptcy.
They had to adhere to all of these standards.
And I'm now working on a recovery for someone who, after their bankruptcy, after all of these standards were applied by state legislators, are still doing the same thing.
Then American Hartford Gold, Goldgate Capital, Oxford Gold Group, Red Rock Secured.
They were sued by the SEC and CFTC for, and they were indicted for $76 million.
The owner of that company, Shade Johnson Kelly, was the VP at the company I worked for, Augusta Precious Metals.
And he quit, stole the lead base from Augusta, went and started Red Rock, and then were subsequently indicted and sued into the ground by the federal authorities.
You know, this is someone that was at my wedding.
I know this individual, right?
Whoa.
Then you have regal assets, Rosalind Capital, Safeguard Metals, Merit Financial, which a lot of these companies spawn from.
They went bankrupt in 2014 when they were sued by the city of Santa Monica.
Moving on, a U.S. Money Reserve, Vault Metal, Wall Street Metals, Metals.com, who I just referenced a few minutes ago, Fisher Capital and Langmore Capital.
And so these are the ones that have had lawsuits against them in the space.
So look, there are, to your point, there are a lot of conservative voices who what I call shill gold for these companies because they make hundreds of thousands, oftentimes millions of dollars a year to do so.
And I've reached out to many of these folks.
I would say probably 90% of the large voices I've reached out to and said, hey, I can provide you all the evidence to prove that these people are defrauding your viewers and I get crickets.
Wow.
Wow.
Okay.
So just as background to our audience, I think, I mean, I've mentioned it publicly.
I was offered, you know, $100,000 a month to promote exactly one of those companies you mentioned.
And I turned it down because I did research and found out some of the things that you're finding out.
Also, it's also public knowledge.
Chris Olson talked about it here that Tucker Carlson was offered a massive amount, tens of millions of dollars to push gold for an unreputable company.
And he turned it down because Tucker Carlson has principles.
You blew the whistle on this courageously and at great risk.
And now you're naming names.
And I just want to be clear that just for the lawyers watching, you mentioned all those companies have been sued doesn't necessarily mean that they were all criminally indicted or anything like that, but they've all been sued at some level.
And some of them have been, as you said, criminally indicted.
But if that's the case, why is this still happening?
I don't understand how this is still going on if the states and the federal government are putting some of these people in jail.
How is this still happening in America?
Well, to be clear, I wouldn't say to be clear first, no one goes to jail.
And that's another part of this that just absolutely boils my blood is they are indicted by the SEC and the CFTC and sued into the ground, but they never really pierce the corporate veil and go after personal assets for recovery or anything like that.
So essentially, if you've invested in one of these companies that has gone bankrupt, your assets are worth melt.
So that 100% premium, 200% premium that you've paid, there's absolutely no way for you to recover any of that premium.
Whoa.
So that's the first point I'll make.
Now, the second point, and it's a very good question.
Why have they not done anything?
Well, Mike, I want to know the same thing because I've spoken to three separate congressional offices and their staff, one of which told me that I needed to find a lobby group, which to me is just insane.
I mean, I am the lobbyist.
I am the guy saying, hey, there's a problem here.
And I have victims all lined up with testimony that are willing to go to Congress and testify in front of Congress as to what happened to them from a lot of them from a lot of these companies that I mentioned.
And so I don't understand why they won't do it.
And now I will touch on something that becomes a little controversial and I understand.
Anthony Weiner, the disgraced New York ex-congressman, had a bill.
He had a public feud with Glenn Beck in the 2010s.
He had a bill on the House floor to try to, I don't think the bill went far enough, but it was a good start on trying to get a wrap and a handle around this issue.
Now, that bill died in Congress and he went to jail because he's not a good person.
I think people know why.
But the question is, why is it that after he had that public dispute about Goldline and then Goldline were subsequently sued by not just the government, but also a lot of individuals?
Wait, was Goldline promoted by Glenn Beck?
Goldline, yes.
And he viciously defended them publicly for years.
And then at the end of the, once Goldline actually got sued, Glenn Beck went silent on Goldline, which, you know, no one could blame him, but he went silent on Goldline.
And then very recently, I think about a year and a half ago, Lear Capital engaged him and he takes another sponsorship.
And it just blows my mind.
I do not understand why when one gold company has done this to your viewers and you have defended them publicly and then been proven wrong in a court of law, why you would ever engage with another company.
Now, to be clear, Glenn Beck was not listed on that lawsuit, but the gold company that he was selling gold and defending publicly was, and they were indicted and sued.
And then, again, chapter 13 come out the other side.
And for all intents and purposes, from what I've seen, people sending me, they're doing the same thing still.
So it sounds like what you're implying is that Glenn Beck should know better because he's already been associated with a company that was accused of a lot of wrongdoing.
And you're saying that the company he's promoting now is on your lists of companies that are also being sued because they're accused of engaging in this activity.
And let me just say for the record, I've never found Glenn Beck to be a person of integrity.
So I'm not surprised by any of that.
But am I correct in what you're saying?
Here's what I'm saying.
What I'm saying is, if I have defended publicly for years a gold company who were then subsequently sued by individuals and by the government and then were criminally indicted by the government and then had to go through this whole process to come out the other side and then I ceased to engage with that company, why would I ever engage with another company ever that sells gold, right?
Ever.
It just doesn't make sense.
Now, the new company that he engaged with, Lear Capital, they were sued by more than 10 states in a joint AG lawsuit against Lear Capital.
What was the outcome of that?
They were sued.
They went through Chapter 13 bankruptcy and there was a bunch of rules imposed upon them in order for them to fix their practices.
Now, I can tell you that they never fixed their practices because I'm working on a recovery right now for someone who purchased from Lear Capital post-bankruptcy, and they still sold them crap coins at massive markups and huge spreads.
If you were to take a guess, how many Glenn Beck listeners got ripped off?
It's, I mean, it's incalculable.
I don't know.
You know, I think that, yeah, so I've been speaking about this issue, Mike, for seven years or trying to, trying to get the word out as much as possible, trying to engage congressional legislators and lawmakers on this issue for about seven years.
And it's been really, really hard because it's hard for me to get in front of a big enough audience to get a true grasp on the totality of this.
Now, I think, you know, you have Andy Sheckman at Miles Franklin, you have Chris Olson at Battalion, myself.
You know, we're all working on these recoveries.
And I think they were very shocked.
I think Andy was shocked and Kevin Hauser over at Miles Franklin.
I think Chris was shocked really at how egregious and how much scale there is in this.
But it's in within the, I would say, at least thousands.
And that's just the Glenn Beck listeners, right?
Then you go back and you go back to all the folks who peddle Birch Gold and Goldco and so on.
I mean, it's the scale is, I think, so unimaginable that we wouldn't, we won't know until we know.
In your analysis, then, is this mostly targeting people on the older side because they maybe they can't, you know, their cognition is waning because of their age.
They're easy to fast talk or confuse.
But because I've heard stories of elderly people handing over their entire retirement savings to some of these gold companies, and the very next day, it's worth half or a third of what they wired in terms of money.
I mean, they're getting taken.
Yeah.
And it, so it, so I'll tell you what, who we targeted when I worked at Augusta.
So our marketing strategy was 50 plus conservative Christian.
There you go.
That's it.
That's who we targeted.
50 plus conservative Christians.
50 plus.
Now, but that isn't to say that it's exclusively folks at retirement age or in retirement.
There are plenty of folks in their 40s, you know, professionals with quite a bit of money too, who I've helped recover funds for as well.
So and a lot of this comes with a lot of shame and embarrassment, right?
Because these are, these aren't dumb people.
These are your normal, everyday, hardworking Americans who just trust that these companies are going to have their best interests at heart.
And they really don't.
And so when you are a podcaster or a trusted right-wing voice and you put your name behind a company, your viewers trust that.
And what these companies are doing is they're exploiting that trust and saying, oh, yeah, you know, Glenn Beck's great, for example.
And, you know, Glenn, Glenn and our company CEO golfing all the time together.
They'll allow right lie about things and use that as leverage to get you on side and say, hey, look, we're trustworthy.
If Glenn trusts us, then everyone trusts us, right?
There's no reason to believe otherwise.
Wow.
And so it is a massive problem, but I would say it's not exclusive to elderly folks, but that is the target market.
So, and you explain all this in more detail in your book, The Gold Grift?
So my book details how this happened, how I came to work for the company, Augusta, and how I came to find out that this happens and how they do it.
And then the backside of my book are steps to recovery that folks who think they've been scammed can utilize to try and get their money back.
And it really is just a very short, concise version.
I wanted it to be a short book.
It's about 150, 160 pages.
I wanted it to be a very short read for folks so they could get to the meat of the issue, realize if this happened to them, and then start working on steps to get their money back.
Now, I want to give out your website also, dalewitaker.com.
And Whitaker is just spelled simply here as it shows Whitaker.
Also, I see on your site, you have a free gold buyer's guide.
And I don't know what's in that, but I imagine you would be giving people information on how they cannot get ripped off.
Is that it's exactly that.
It's like, hey, avoid these things.
Look for these things.
If this happens, stay away, right?
One of the big things that I would like to state here is if you have a bad gut feeling, if you're on the phone with the salesman and they're really pushing you hard and you just have a bad gut feeling, just walk away.
Just go, hey, no, trust your gut.
90% of the time, your gut's telling you to do the right thing.
So just trust your gut and walk away.
I cannot tell you, Mike, how many folks have read that guide, have read my book and said, you know, I just knew something was wrong.
And I just, I couldn't put my finger on it and I just trusted them.
And that's what it comes down to.
I've observed something too about the Christian conservative community in general, which is that, you know, most Christian conservatives are themselves good people who follow moral values.
They lead in their own lives a life of morality.
And so they project that onto others.
And if others begin to use those trigger words, the Christian words, oh, you know, blessings to you.
And Jesus wants you to do this or whatever.
Those trigger words are used to manipulate Christians very often into thinking, oh, this person on the other end of the phone is also a Christian.
He shares my values.
Therefore, I can trust him.
Is that a fair assessment of some of what goes on?
Yeah, that is a fair assessment.
And what I would even say as well is a lot of these folks will portray themselves to be Republicans and conservatives when in fact they're the exact opposite.
A lot of these guys don't care about politics at all.
And if they do, they want Democrats to be in office because typically gold and silver rally when Democrats are in office and people will flock to the gold market when a Democrat is elected because they're concerned about the fiscal policies that Democrats put forward, right?
So they'll use any tools in their toolbox.
And I think what you, including lying, and I think what you said is absolutely true, is we as Christians like to think that we are equally yoked when we are talking to other people.
But the reality is that it's an unequal yoking with other people because we're holding them to the biblical standard and we think that they are holding themselves to that standard.
And that just simply isn't true.
We need to be more cautious as conservative Christians when engaging with folks, especially when it comes to your life savings.
You have to question everything.
You know, this isn't a trust but verify situation.
This is a, you know, verify and then trust, right?
Make sure what they're telling you is true before you invest.
Yeah.
And I would say a very simple thing for people to do is if you're quoted, here's a dollar amount and here's how many ounces of silver you're getting, regardless of what kind it is.
Bars, coins, special coins, numismatics, whatever.
If you look at that number and you do the math and you're not getting a good value per ounce, like if you're paying $200 per ounce for silver, something's wrong.
I mean, isn't that just like just a simple first glance?
Like, wait a second, this is wrong.
It is.
And a lot of the times they won't put the actual prices in writing for you up until you actually sign the document to purchase.
So they'll do everything they can to not give you that price.
They'll do everything they can to not put it in writing with you until the time comes for you to sign all of the documentation and the disclosures.
And so one of the big things to do is get the prices in writing and then take that pricing and go and shop it with other dealers.
Go to Miles Franklin, go to Battalion, go to SD Bullion, go to AppMex, go to all these websites, find the prices on their websites.
And if you cannot find the pricing on their websites, then you know something is wrong.
One of the big triggers and one of the big red flags that I, in my guide in my gold buyer's guide that you'll see is if a company will not disclose the pricing of their coins, just don't buy from them.
Yeah.
No reason for that.
Well, and I also want to ask you, you mentioned some names there of some of the more reputable dealers.
I'd like you to offer some of those names.
Now, of course, in full disclosure, our sponsor is Battalion, which is co-founded by Tucker Carlson and Chris Olson, a group I've worked with for many, many years.
I would not ever work with any company that ripped off customers, period.
So I trust Battalion and they have all their prices online in real time and they'll give you actual prices on the quotation.
And in fact, Battalion and Andy Sheckman, who I've had on the show many times, they help people rescue funds from some of these scams and schemes that are going on out there.
But could you, from your research, give us just some of the names that you think have a good reputation and have earned it?
I would say stick to those four.
You could probably throw Jam Bullion in there too.
So, AppMex, Miles Franklin, SD Bullion, Jam Bullion, I think they're all good, reputable companies to price match against each other.
I mean, what you should be doing is going to each of these sites, pulling up the same exact coin and then saying, okay, who has the cheapest price?
And look, if you prefer to do business with one over the other and they're not as competitive, call them and say, hey, these guys have this coin at this at this price.
Can you guys beat it or match it?
You know, I prefer to do business with you.
Right.
And that's the way that the market works.
Everyone expects that.
Everyone expects that competition at this level and at this volume.
And, you know, oftentimes in the real bullion space, they're fighting over pennies.
I mean, they really are.
That's how thin the margins are.
No, I know.
I've had conversations with Chris at Battalion about, you know, they can move hundreds of millions of dollars of metals and make almost nothing off of, you know, and that's like, that's how the customer knows really they're getting an honest price because the people on the other side are not getting rich.
They're not doubling or tripling the premiums on your coins.
They're not high-fiving each other.
They're basically saying, oh, man, you know, this is a lot of work.
I got to, I got to take calls late at night.
People are panicked.
Like, can you talk about that for a moment?
There's a there's a fear factor in people right now.
Like, and oh, Asian guy, Asian guy videos are going crazy, like all over YouTube.
I saw that.
Right.
An Asian guy, some of the stuff he says is, is like completely made up.
Other stuff is like, yeah, that makes sense.
But some of it's made up.
And so people panic and they call and panic buy.
Can you talk about that factor?
Yeah.
And they, a lot of the sales in this industry actually, they prey on fear.
And I'm not talking about the legitimate guys, but I'm talking about the guys who will gladly take half of your retirement from you.
They prey on fear.
And the Asian guy that's going around, I'm 90% that's 90% sure that's AI.
Oh, yeah, it is for sure AI.
You can make that 100%.
Yeah.
And I'm 90% sure that it's probably one of these companies that do this.
Because this is another thing that people don't realize is whenever you search like top gold IRA company or top gold company, right?
And you get these websites that list the top five gold companies and you have, I don't know, let's say Augusta Precious Metals, who I work for at the top, I can guarantee you that that is them paying to have that website either made or it's an affiliate of theirs who is making the website and listing it that way.
And what you'll see is they'll list all of their competitors who do the same thing on the same website.
And then they'll say, hey, this is the best one for these reasons.
This is the best one for these reasons.
But the overall pick is this company.
And so they do this because they're trying to build legitimacy outside of their own company and outside of the conservative voices to say, hey, this is why you should purchase from this company.
And so you'll happen upon like what seems to be a third-party consumer review website of someone, I don't know, that portrays themselves, has news articles, things like this about the gold industry.
But oftentimes those are sponsored, if not directly funded by these companies.
So beware of that too.
As for the fear-mongering, we should, as Christians, never let fear control whatever we do.
We should never do that, right?
We're called to denounce fear.
Fear is not from the Lord.
It's from the devil, right?
So we need to be very cautious.
If we have concerns about something, sit down and think through it methodically.
Don't be worried about the price fluctuating a dollar here or there, a couple of dollars here or there while you're trying to make a decision that could really impact the rest of your life.
Because again, this comes back to this is your retirement funds and you need to be making a very sound decision.
So talk to your tax accountant, talk to your attorney or financial advisor, whoever it may be, and ask them, hey, do you think this is a good idea?
Why or why not?
Right.
Go to as many people as you can and get as much information as you can before you make that decision.
Well, but sadly, these scammers out there are harming the overall reputation of gold.
And it's causing, you know, mainstream media can point to stories like what you're talking about and say, see, we told you gold is all a scam.
Silver is all a scam.
You should buy treasuries, you know, like, which treasuries are a scam.
I mean, come on.
In my opinion, it is backed by nothing, backed by nothing.
Gold and silver are real money, but the scammers give it a bad reputation, don't they?
They do.
And this is part of why I think that as we move forward and as this story grows and folks like yourself, Mike, are willing to have someone like me on to expose this, because it is a contentious issue on the right where, you know, I'm a conservative, you're a conservative, and we're talking about other conservatives pushing assets that are defrauding their viewers.
This is a hard thing for me to talk about and to break through on the narrative on because people say, well, I don't think X person would ever do that.
And it's like, okay, but you have to look at the facts.
And so when I present you with the facts, the amount of people that go, holy cow, this is insane.
I was taken by this and I'm going to write a letter to X influencer and let them know is staggering.
Now, what I think, to your point, the really big problem here is that not only are they taking a billion to maybe $2 billion a year of liquidity out of the market and actual dollars too of available dollars to spend from legitimate companies, which impacts the economy massively because it doesn't just impact the economy at the point of sale.
It also impacts the IRS's ability to tax those dollars when these guys take their RMDs and start taking distributions for their retirement.
Because you think about it, if I had $300,000 invested in bullion and the market appreciates 200%, I have essentially a 200% gain, 195% out of 5% spread, give or take, right?
Now, if I have that same, if I have that same initial investment, but the premium that I was charged up front is wiping out a ton of my value, that's less taxable revenue for the IRS.
True.
So there's no downside to the government coming in and setting some regulations on this industry that is completely unregulated for anyone.
The upside for the investor is you have way more money at the end of the day in your retirement.
And the upside for the IRS is you have more taxable revenue in the future.
Now, I'm not saying advocating for more taxes.
I wish we could abolish the IRS completely.
But the reality is it impacts everyone.
And it also impacts the legitimate dealers because there's less dollars out there for them to go and get in business to invest in their and in legitimate coins.
So it impacts everyone.
All right.
Let me throw a counter argument at you here.
I'm sure you've heard this from various people.
Someone, maybe, maybe like the company that you used to work for, maybe they would say, well, we're not forcing people to make these decisions.
They choose to wire us the money.
They choose to engage in this decision.
They want the numismatics.
They want the weird two-ounce coins.
Like we're not, you know, we're not robbing them.
We're not criminals, et cetera.
What would you say to that kind of argument?
I would say that if you're not intentionally trying to defraud people, why would you steer them away from bullying, typical bullion products?
Why would you even have these fixed mintage premium exclusive coins in the first place?
Why not just sell them bullion?
Why do you push so hard when people call and want bullion to get them to what they call flip, flip them into these other assets?
Well, it's because you know that all the money to be made are in these fixed mintage premium exclusive assets.
That's where the money is because they're relying upon low volume, high margin rather than the high volume, low margin that the legitimate dealers operate off of.
And so, and then the second thing I would say to that, why don't they keep all of the call recordings, including the sales recordings?
And why do they only keep the recordings of the confirmation of the person agreeing to purchase the assets that you've sold them?
Oh, they do that.
They only keep that.
They do that.
So that's another thing too.
So then the other, and then on top of that, what I would say, the third thing is, why is it that you put all this jargon and these massive spreads in your transaction agreements, but then you don't disclose those over the phone to people when they're purchasing?
Why do you not tell them that you're going to make 10% commission on their deal?
Why do you not tell them that the spread is essentially arbitrary?
So if you were to lobby for some basic regulatory oversight or laws, would you demand that the salesperson disclose their commission, among other things?
What would you want to see?
I think that's a good start.
I think there's a lot of things that we could do.
In talking with some folks too, they seem to think that we might not need to do anything regulatorily.
I don't know if that's necessarily true, but what I think is we just impose the same type of standards that we have on the stock markets, maybe not as stringent, but that, hey, you have a fiduciary responsibility to disclose all fees, everything that you're going to earn, your margins and everything else on your coins to the consumer.
Why is there no fiduciary responsibility in this industry?
For example, and this is an analogy I like to use, there are as many regulations on me selling coins to you than there are you going to buy a shirt at Walmart.
There's no, there's nothing.
So there's a few ways, Mike, we could have a new bill that codifies some regulatory fiduciary responsibility, which I'm in favor of.
And look, I'm not a like a pro, I'm a very limited government type guy, but the reality is this is where government needs to step up and this is where the government needs to function is to protect the consumer, right?
And so I'm so you could go that route.
You could clarify the internal revenue code where it tells you what coins can be invested in your IRA, because this is the big part, right?
It's not cash deals that were worried about you going investing $10,000 at your local mom and pop shop.
It's your IRA funds that they're targeting, your retirement funds.
So if we can clarify that portion of the RSC, that might be a quick fix, right?
We might be able to shut these guys down overnight.
So there's many ways we could skin that horse.
And to be honest with you, I'm in favor of any and all that will put an end to it.
Okay.
Okay.
But like you said, we don't want to operate in an environment of a regulatory overburden that would create new friction in legitimate sales of gold and silver.
And there is, you know, the buyer, if you go buy a used car, you have a responsibility as a buyer to make sure you're not getting ripped off.
If you buy a house, you have a responsibility to make sure you're not getting ripped off.
And that's why I love what you're doing here, educating the consumer, because if we create enough education and decentralize this knowledge, then these companies that try to rip people off will lose sales.
You know, just free market principles will drive people away from the ripoff artists more and more, right?
But then we're talking about the elderly who are often very, You know, cognitive decline is a thing.
And then there's junk silver, which nobody can do the math on junk silver.
It's like, what is it?
90%?
Is it 91%?
It depends what year, what coin.
Wait a minute.
How many ounces?
Face value versus what?
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
That's confusing to everybody.
Yep.
You're coming.
So I'm with you.
And I understand the regulatory overburden, which is why it's important to engage with legitimate companies, big companies, right?
Big companies like AppMex, Jambullion, SD Bullion.
Let's bring the retail side to the table, the legitimate retail side to the table and say, okay, we have a massive problem here, guys.
How do we tackle this without putting too much of a burden on you, but where it protects the consumer?
Right.
Right.
There is a way.
There is a way to balance this.
And look, we have a Republican Congress right now across the board.
If there's a time to get this done, it's right now because this actually protects their constituency.
And this is why when I go to these legislators, I'm like, guys, it's your constituents.
It isn't the Democrat constituents that are investing in this stuff.
It's your constituents.
You need to protect your constituents from this.
Right.
And like you said, it is a tough thing and it's a balancing act.
But again, I don't see another way around it.
I don't know that information alone, Mike, will be enough because how do we combat the folks?
How do we combat the commercials on Fox News when Fox News won't talk about it, but they're taking millions and millions of dollars in advertising revenues from these companies when people, the people that we're talking about, you know, the 70-year-olds and 80-year-olds, a lot of them don't consume independent media.
They're still on Fox News.
They're still on news.
Oh, you're right.
I forgot people still watch fake news.
Yeah.
So, yeah, and that's right.
Like the Trump, the Christian conservative Trump base is all over Fox News.
So you're saying, and again, I really don't watch Fox News, but you're saying that a lot of these companies that you named are advertising on Fox News?
Yeah, absolutely.
Of course.
Our budget for At Augusta was about a million and a half, I believe, for Fox.
What pre-wear?
And we would buy remnant.
So we weren't buying a year, a year, a million and a half a year.
But we would only buy remnant because we were like mid-tier, right?
We aren't the top dogs in the space by any stretch of the imagination.
We were like mid-tier.
So, you know, you figure we had a million and a half.
And that's just our Fox budget.
That's not Newsmax.
Whoa.
Right.
That's not these other.
Newsmax runs ads for some of these companies, too.
We would buy targeted emails from them.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So we would sponsor an email essentially, and then they'd send it out to a specific segment.
Really?
They sell their email lists?
I mean, they sell.
Well, you don't get access to the list, but you say, hey, we want to buy.
Yeah.
Yep.
We want to buy this segment.
I mean, this is how this is how typical media works, right?
You buy in and you give them a bunch of money and then they'll run an ad for you.
Well, we don't do that.
We don't let people buy access to our email list.
That's something that's you never get direct access, but they send it as a sponsored email.
Yeah, but we don't do that either.
I mean, we never, but okay, I get it.
But have you had?
I'm with you.
I mean, I'm with you, but this is just the nature of the beast.
See, I guess I've been operating in a world of high integrity for so long.
I'm actually shocked at some of the things you're saying that there's still going on.
Because those are things I would never do.
Right.
But we're looking at this as individuals with individual consciousness.
We're not looking at this as a corporation who only care about their bottom line.
Wow.
Right.
And the other, the other side to this is, you know, I've reached out to, I've reached out to Hannity and Bill O'Reilly when I was at Fox.
I've reached out to all these guys.
I mean, and I get crickets.
I don't get any responses.
And look, someone said to me the other day, who's going to listen to you?
You're a guy on X with 3,500 followers and so on.
But I'm bringing the receipts.
I'm not asking you just to take my word for it.
I'm bringing you documentation to prove that this is what happened and how I can tie all of these companies together in a centralized part of Los Angeles.
I'm going to give you a nickname.
You're the Mitch Vexler of gold.
You're the whistleblower.
Mitch Vexler is blowing the whistle on property taxes all over the country, how it's a total scam.
You're like the Mitch Vexler of gold, like blowing the whistle.
But let me ask you this.
Have you received legal letters or threats from Augusta, Goldco, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, any of these people?
Any legal pushback?
No.
No, I haven't.
So Augusta threatened me initially when I started going public after I filed my whistleblower complaint, told me to return their property.
And I said, sure, I mean, send me the FedEx label.
I'll box this stuff up and get it back to you immediately.
And then they never did that.
And then I just ignored them and they sent me another letter.
Hey, we take this, your ignorance to our prior letter to be an admission of guilt.
I'm like, take it however you want.
I mean, I don't care.
I can prove everything I'm saying to you.
So, you know, if you really are going to claim that I'm defaming you, sue me and let's go to discovery.
Sue me and let's go to discovery.
Oh, yeah.
And then I know who to subpoena.
I know who to get in front of the judge.
So let's do it.
And again, the companies that I'm listing here, Mike, I'm not just saying that they are doing this.
They have been sued for fraud, whether that's by the government or a government agency or whether that's by an individual.
So all I'm saying is, hey, if there's no substantiation to my claims, if everything I'm saying to you is not true, then how is it that I have tens venturing on hundreds of people who have reached out to me individually and said this happened to me, right?
I have more witnesses than I could handle, right?
I mean, it's just the, so again, it comes back to, do I want to be sued?
Of course I don't want to be sued.
But if you think that I'm defaming you and I'm telling you, look, and I'm not saying, so I guess we should clarify this.
I'm not saying that Glenn Beck is directly complicit in defrauding people that watch his show.
That's not what I'm saying.
What I'm questioning is, why would you engage in his instance?
Why would you engage with another gold company after the gold company that you originally were sponsored by were sued into the ground for deceptive and defrauding their viewers, deceptive practices and defrauding of viewers?
Why would you ever engage with another company?
That's the question I'm asking.
And I want an answer from Glenn.
I want to know why you would do that.
It does not make sense to me, right?
And then, especially when Lear Capital have been sued into bankruptcy by the state attorney general's office.
I'll say publicly, if Glenn Beck wants to come on my show and answer that, I would welcome him.
Same thing with any of the companies you mentioned, Goldco or whoever.
If they want to come on and answer what you're saying, they have an open door invitation.
I'd like to hear their response to these accusations.
But according to what you're saying, and you're not the only person I've heard this from, actually, I've been aware of this for quite some time.
And Andy Shackman knows what's going on as well.
But it seems like there are hundreds, if not thousands of documented cases of people who believe, they believe they have been ripped off by these various companies.
Would that sound like a correct estimate?
Yeah, which is what, yes, absolutely.
And this is exactly why I don't have fear of speaking out because I know the truth is on my side.
I know it is.
So, and look, could I be wrong?
Sure, but I know I'm not because I lived it.
I went through it.
I understand how it works.
I've been behind the curtain.
I know who the major players are.
I know how they do it, what they do.
I know their tactics.
Again, let's go back to just that rudimentary example I gave you.
Why is it that they don't save the sales calls and all of the things that the salesman say to the customer, but then they get the customer on a recorded line with an administrator after the sale has been made by the salesman to record the person saying, yes, I agree to this.
Yes, I agree to this price.
Yes, I agree to this.
I have the recordings of Augusta doing this.
I know they do it.
I have the recordings.
This is why he won't sue me.
So, you know, and I know he's seen all of my content.
I know he has.
So is there anything that you are gaining from blowing the whistle on this other than a few copies of your book, which I would not imagine is going to be a number one bestseller?
You know, I mean, I want to be clear.
I'm glad you wrote the book.
It's very important, but it's not going to be the most popular book.
But is there anything that you're gaining from this?
No, what I gained was a clean conscience.
That's it.
I mean, I gave up.
I was being paid about $150-ish thousand dollars at the time per year at Augusta.
I walked away from that with no contingency plan.
You know, writing my book was a long process.
You know, I had to pay editors to help me edit.
And, you know, I've never written a book before.
I needed help.
So I, you know, employed editors to help me write it and go through and make sure it's factually correct.
And, you know, it's a process.
It took me probably eight months to sit and write the whole thing.
And that's with help.
Right.
So I didn't, you know, and look, full disclaimer, I make like $2 a book.
It was never about book sales for me.
It's about establishing that this is fact and that I can prove it.
So you're building profits for people most of the time.
Unless you have millions and millions of followers and you're selling a book at 30 bucks a copy, then you're making some money.
Right.
That isn't me.
Right.
Ask what you're doing now professionally then to earn money to live.
Yeah.
So I'm a tax accountant.
So I've been in accounting for 18 years now.
So I'm a tax accountant.
I have a small practice.
It's just myself.
My wife also has a business, a cleaning business that's fairly successful.
So we do okay.
It was touch and go.
She wasn't working when I initially left.
She had just been recovering from a bad, she got hit head on by a teenager when, what, about a year before I quit Augusta, she got hit head on and she had, you know, fractured a couple of vertebrae.
And so she was on the road to recovery.
So she wasn't working at the time.
And it was fine.
You know, we were, we were doing okay.
It wasn't a big deal.
But, you know, once I made that decision to leave, my wife was just like, you got to do it.
You know, she was fully supportive.
She said, I'll go back to work.
And it just was never a question.
Your background in accounting obviously would have been very useful to understand what you're describing as the schemes.
Sounds like.
Yeah.
And this is what one, you know, this is one of the big questions.
And I think it is an apt question.
People say, hey, you worked there for years and you never realized this was a problem.
Well, in the book, I detail how, you know, I'd never worked in the gold industry.
I didn't really know anything about it.
So my entire worldview on this issue was crafted by my experience at Augusta.
I see.
And it wasn't until Isaac called me when Isaac, the CEO of Augusta, called me and asked me to manipulate the spread, increase the spread on coins for a 5,000 coin silver deal that we were purchasing back from a client who had purchased from us.
He had called me and said, hey, I want you to increase the spread.
And by increasing the spread, you're decreasing the amount of money that you give the client who had purchased these assets.
That's when I realized something was wrong.
I'm like, hey, you know, because you could argue.
So you could make the argument.
And I don't think it's a good argument, but you could make the argument.
And I guess this is how I justify it to myself is, look, if we're charging you 100% Premium on a coin.
But then when we buy it back to you, we maintain that same 100% premium on the coin, and then we apply our spread, right?
That's the same as buying an ounce at any given time at the same markups at any given time, and then just applying a spread.
That makes sense.
But when you're violating the agreement that you have with your customers that's in the transaction agreement that says that we have 29% spread, which is still massive, I understand that.
But we have this 29% spread and then you're arbitrarily changing it on a per-purchase basis.
That was the minute I was like, hey, this makes no sense.
And I just said, hey, I'm not going to do this.
You do what you want.
Keep me out of it.
But, you know, I don't want any part of this.
I don't want any hand in this.
I don't know whether he did or didn't.
I didn't track it.
And then my wife was at again.
She was working from home at the time.
And I came upstairs after we'd hung up and I said to my wife, I was like, something is terribly wrong.
I mean, I was like flushed with adrenaline.
I mean, I remember it so vividly because I was just shocked.
I mean, I was like, holy cow, we are doing the same thing that Merit Financial did, which is the company that Isaac used to work at as a salesman prior to starting Augusta.
Merit Financial, of course, who I mentioned earlier, that was sued by the city of Santa Monica into the ground into bankruptcy.
So that's that's unusual for a city to sue a company like that.
Typically, it would be a state or even the federal government.
But I just want to clarify that for any, maybe any DA that might be watching or any state or federal authorities that are watching, you are willing to be an expert witness to testify against the companies that you claim are engaged in these illicit practices.
Is that correct?
100%.
Yep.
And you can bring a long list of customers who were provably harmed.
Yep.
Absolutely.
And you touched on a very so when you said that it's unusual for a city to sue, you're right.
And so at the time, and I detail this in the book too, at the time when Isaac, so I flew down.
So I'm in Washington State.
I'm in Spokane, Washington, right?
So I was working remotely.
And so when I would fly down twice a year, maybe sometimes three times a year.
And when I was down in December of, I believe this would have been 2014, we were talking about looking for office space.
And I was like, hey, okay, sure, that's fine.
What are we looking for?
And he said, well, I don't want office space in Santa Monica.
I want office space outside of Santa Monica because the city attorney, I won't use the exact verbiage that he used, but the city attorney is basically a ladder climbing politician that is going after gold companies to basically pat his resume.
Now, at the time, I was, I would say, politically homeless.
I didn't really engage in politics at all.
So when I hear that, growing up in a family who has a massive distrust for politicians, I just said, oh, okay.
I didn't really question it.
I just said, oh, okay, makes sense.
You know, I know these people exist and this is how this works.
And so I didn't really question it too much.
And, you know, in hindsight, there were a lot of red flags along the way that, you know, now in hindsight and you put those together, it's like, oh, of course.
I mean, duh.
They didn't want to be under the jurisdiction.
Of course, this is what they were doing.
I see.
All right, Dale.
Well, we are up.
We're out of time here.
Let me give out your website again, Dale Whitaker.com.
And your book is called The Gold Grift.
It's available on Amazon and booksellers everywhere.
And I encourage our viewers to check out your website.
You've got the free report here.
And that you, and by the way, you do know our sponsor, Battalion, to be one of the reputable companies that you named.
You named several of them.
And I appreciate you being very open about that.
Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap this up?
Yeah, so typically, I'm glad you brought up battalion.
So, after my interview with Andy Sheckman and my conversations with Tucker's team and with Battalion, Battalion actually engaged me to try and help folks who have been through this process.
So, if you are looking for help, I typically would tell you to go to my website.
But if you could just go to battalionmedals.com forward slash tricked and fill out that form.
That comes directly to me.
It helps me keep everything in one centralized area.
No cost to you.
The agreement between Battalion and myself was that we would, my role would be specifically to help you guys to get as much money back as possible.
So, if you feel like this might be you, if you're uncertain, please fill out that form and then I can help you guys directly.
And I can do an analysis on your account and help you through that process.
And you do that without any fee.
Yeah, there's no fee to the customer.
So, Battalion and I, Battalion, have engaged with me.
They've hired my services to handle because they owe me a ton.
So, they're paying me a nominal fee.
It's nothing crazy.
No, no, you handle this.
I'm not sure if you can do that to attempt to recover and rescue.
Correct.
Yep.
And that's something that Chris wanted to engage me with because he felt it was such a powerful tool.
You know, in reading the back side of my book, he said, Hey, what if we help?
What if we engage with you to do this for us, for our customers?
Oh, okay.
Wow.
I didn't even know that Chris approached you with that.
So, that's great to know.
And I'm not surprised because Chris is also a very high-integrity person who has a philosophy that we agree with, even kind of a Ron Paul philosophy of honest money.
So, it's great to know great people like you.
So, thank you, Dale, for all that you're doing.
I'm honored to meet you.
Please let us know if anyone gives you any legal hassles.
I'm happy to have you back on the show to talk about what's going on.
So, keep in touch and, well, actually, just keep in touch anyway.
I'd like to know what's happening in this area.
Appreciate it, Mike.
Thanks for having me.
All right.
Thank you, Dale.
All right.
So that was Dale Whitaker, everybody.
Again, his website is Dale Whitaker.com.
And you can check out his book, The Gold Grift, at booksellers everywhere.
He also mentioned, and I will mention our sponsor, Battalion Medals.
You can reach them.
You can go through MetalsWithMike.com.
It takes you to Battalion Medals, or you can just type in Battalion Medals.
Not everybody knows how to spell Battalion, so sometimes that gets a little tricky.
And I think Dale said if you put in battalionmetals.com/slash tricked, that it takes you to a form that you can fill out.
If you think you have been tricked or taken by some dishonest dealers, then you can fill out that form and battalion medals and Dale will help you.
I do want to mention again, Battalion is a sponsor of ours.
I conducted a lot of due diligence years ago before doing business with Battalion.
And I have resisted efforts of other gold dealers to take me away from Battalion, some of whom offered very large amounts of money.
We are compensated.
If you use our discount code Ranger, Battalion waives the shipping insurance fee if you purchase gold and silver from them.
And we are compensated with a crazy small amount if you do that.
Believe me, it's nowhere near what I was offered.
It's not even orders of magnitude close to what I was offered before.
But I believe in integrity and honesty.
And mostly I promote gold and silver because I want you to survive the currency collapse that's underway.
I want you to do well.
If you've worked hard, you deserve to keep your life savings.
And that's why I want to have people on like Dale that help you stay educated, stay informed, so you can keep what you earn and make it through these very trying times.
So thank you for watching today.
I'm Mike Adams of Brightown.com.
Take care.
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