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July 9, 2025 - Tim Pool Daily Show
01:03:30
Trump Threatens FEDERAL TAKEOVER OF NYC Over Communist Democrat Zohran
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Time Text
President Donald J. Trump has threatened the federal takeover of New York City if communist Zoran Mamdani wins the mayoral race.
He's also talked about how he wants to federalize, which it's already federal, but take over D.C. And that's interesting.
D.C. and New York are both suffering a lot of problems.
And if Zoran Mamdani gets in, largely due to the ignorance of a dejected population, then I agree Donald Trump should take it over.
Now, there's tough questions here.
Do we actually want the federal government, the president, to start overriding local government?
Yes.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again.
I have seen video after video of people killed, murdered.
I have seen, we have this video out of Philadelphia, 4th of July, people just unloading with, they got nine, what are they, Glocks with switches, they're full auto pistols.
They call those illegal modifications.
Though I think all gun regulation is unconstitutional, the point is, our once great cities are falling into decay and disrepair.
Donald Trump says we are not going to let this happen.
But there are many people that say we can't allow the government to do anything to exert its power to maintain itself, to continue to exist.
Well, the question I ask you is, at what point does it become critical mass?
At what point do the problems in all of our cities, from the ambush on ICE officers and CBP, to the firebombing of pregnancy crisis centers, to the just general gun violence and shootings, at what point do we say we will impose order?
I brought this point up in another segment.
That is, Abraham Lincoln made a decision.
Now, I'm not saying that what we're dealing with right now in this country is on par with the secession movement of a large portion of the country, but Abraham Lincoln saw seven states secede, just seven.
And he said, I will fight.
The question we have now before us is, when do we decide to use the power that we have to control and maintain and protect the American way of life?
That's a question I don't have a good answer for.
Perhaps the answer is now, perhaps it's not.
But if a communist takes over New York, vowing to tax white people, and I'll tell you this right now, Zoran Mamdani is an avowed overt racist incel who is upset at white people and wants to tax them directly, among other things.
Do we allow that to happen in our country?
At a certain point, a leader will say, no.
Abraham Lincoln decided the Constitution be damned.
He said, we're not going to abide by these rules.
We're going to do whatever we want.
In fact, he suspended habeas corpus without an act of Congress, which violates the Constitution.
Only later on did Congress agree.
Why?
Because he was winning.
Interesting, huh?
He could have chosen not to fight.
The union would have collapsed.
But he chose to fight.
And for this, he's actually considered to be one of the most popular presidents, if not the most popular president.
Now, I see this growing threat of communism and far-left extremism.
And at a certain point, we must say we are going to use the power that we have to prevent our cities from crumbling.
Now, I certainly don't think we want to go overt authoritarian.
We just want to enforce existing laws.
And therein lies the big challenge.
Where's the line?
Well, let's talk about the news and break down exactly what's going on.
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Let's jump over to the story and get it rolling.
We've got this from the New York Post.
Trump threatens federal takeover of NYC if communist Zoran Mamdani wins the mayoral race.
President Trump threatened to use federal power to seize control of New York if the communist mayor is elected.
Quote, if a communist gets elected to run New York, it can never be the same.
But we have tremendous power at the White House to run places where we have to, Trump told the Post during a cabinet meeting.
New York City will run properly.
I'm going to bring New York back.
I love New York.
We're going to straighten out New York.
It's going to, maybe we're going to have to straighten it out from Washington.
Trump, who in his first term threatened to yank federal funds from the big Apple for allegedly tolerating lawlessness, did not identify what authorities he might invoke to seize control of city operations.
We're going to do something for New York.
I can't tell you what yet.
We're going to make New York great again.
Also, we're going to make it great with the country, great again with the country.
Trump added that I'm not getting involved when asked if Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa should drop out of the race.
Cuomo does have capability.
He's running, but he got knocked out of the Democratic primary.
You have Eric Adams, the current mayor.
You have Cuomo, and you have Curtis Sliwa.
And Curtis runs every four years.
He seems to be a fixture on the running scale.
Trump said before calling Mandani not very capable in my opinion.
He's a disaster.
He's got the Democratic nomination because that shows you where the Democrats have gone.
He actually wants to take over the grocery stores of John Katzimatitis.
Katzimatitis, Trump said.
Now, hold on.
What's actually happened is Zohan Mandani wants to create government city-run grocery chains where they will not pay rent, will not pay taxes, and they will not run on a profit motive.
So all the goods will be sold at cost.
Good luck running a for-profit venture.
The end result of this, as I've explained and many have explained all the time, is that in a vacuum, we're talking about New York City and not anywhere else.
We're talking about one city.
It will be increasingly difficult to compete with government-run grocery stores.
Eventually, the private-run grocery stores will stop being able to stay open.
Let's say you have 10 grocery stores.
One of them becomes government-run.
There's no more profit.
So let's say milk goes from $4 to $350.
People will decide, I'll travel the extra few blocks to go to that grocery store because I save money.
And they do.
The other grocery stores, they're going to lose a small percentage.
It could be 5%.
But that percent means the person running the store might say, look, I was barely making money as it is.
And so they decide we're shutting down.
Or they decide to move and relocate.
The CEO, the chief of Gristides, the grocery store, says they will shut down and they will leave if this happens.
Now, it's not going to happen overnight, but this is going to happen because it is difficult to compete with subsidy.
Katsimosaidis actually called me the other day.
He's concerned.
His stores are going to be taken from him.
After discussing New York, Trump threatened a federal takeover of DC, which has been self-governing since 1973.
We could run D.C. I mean, we're looking at D.C. We don't want crime in D.C. We want the city to run well.
We're thinking about doing it, to be honest with you.
We want a capital that's run flawlessly, and it wouldn't be hard for us to do.
And we have a good relationship with the mayor, and we're testing to see if it works.
I say do it.
First of all, the feds should be running D.C. Trump should be running DC.
D.C. is a pit.
It has become crime-ridden and sad, really.
It's sad to see what's happened to our great cities.
Trump now has direct authority over a federal district and he can choose to run it.
D.C. is not supposed to be run by some independent city outside of government.
It is a federal jurisdiction.
There were originally not supposed to be people living in this area.
It was supposed to be largely that this is a federal district that existed because there were concerns among the states that if the federal government operated from within one of those states, the states could exert authority or undue pressure on the federal government, giving them priority over other states.
So they said, we will carve out the specific jurisdiction that is federal territory so there is no state that controls us.
That being said, the surrounding areas still have a lot of the employees and they still do exert that authority.
They weren't able to get past it.
Now that there is a political structure within the federal district of D.C., the Democrats there do exert authorities over all of the politicians.
The federal government should take it over.
I mean, it is federal government, but I'm saying the executive branch should be running it along with the federals.
There should not be an independent city running in that place.
Look how poorly they've managed it.
Vice President J.D. Vance said over the weekend that Mamdani's victory drives home just how much the voters in each of the respective parties have changed.
If President Trump's victory in 2024 was rooted in a broad working and middle-class coalition, Mamdani's coalition is almost the inverse of that.
This is a guy who won high-income and college-educated New Yorkers, and especially both young and highly educated New Yorkers.
But he was the weakest among black voters and the weakest among those without a college degree.
That's an interesting coalition.
Maybe it works in the New York Democratic primary.
I don't think it works particularly well in the United States at large.
Well, let me show you this.
Trump has warned New York will never be the same.
Trump has threatened to arrest Mom Dani if he doesn't cooperate with ICE.
I agree with all of it.
He has threatened to take over DC as well.
Now we have this clip from J.D. Vance addressing Zoron Mamdani.
J.D. Vance brilliantly explains the radical left's obsession with Zoron.
Let's actually hear it from the man himself.
I may not speak for many of you, but I was once comforted by these contradictions within the modern left.
How could privileged whites march around with a straight face decrying white privilege?
How could progressives pretend to love conservative Muslims despite those Muslims views on gender and sexuality?
But the answer is obvious if you think about it, and it's a very, very dangerous and very sad answer.
The radicals of the far left, they don't need a unifying ideology of what they're for because they know very well what they're against.
What unites Islamists, gender studies majors, socially liberal white urbanites, and big pharma lobbyists, it isn't the ideas of Thomas Jefferson or even of Karl Marx.
It's hatred.
They hate the people in this room.
They hate the President of the United States.
And most of all, they hate the people who voted for that President of the United States.
100% correct.
And this is, as I've explained, wokeness for a long time.
The challenge that I see largely with our political space and our political factions is that I feel like everybody, and often myself included, are several steps behind what is actually going on.
And I think deeply about these issues and these debates and why the ideas are held.
There are questions that I ask of anyone who posits an understanding of these systems or proposes a solution to the problems we face.
So I'll start with this example.
What is wokeness?
People have often said over and over and over again that wokeness is critical theory, critical gender theory, critical race theory, and I have asserted that is not correct.
Why?
As J.D. Vance has just pointed out, it makes no sense that Islam, the second biggest religion in the world, is an oppressed group.
But the argument that is, no, but they mean here in the United States, still doesn't make sense when they apply their same logic to the Middle East.
Ukraine and Russia.
They say, Ukraine is a small nation.
Ukraine getting support from the military-industrial complex in the United States.
The U.S. and Ukraine and the NATO allies that they claim Ukraine is an ally of is massively more powerful than just Russia alone.
It is not this idea of the oppressed and oppressor.
That is a surface-level excuse that omits facts and logic.
So when someone says wokeness is critical theory, that doesn't explain why the Jaguar commercial, which was not political, just postmodern art, was called woke.
Because there is an overlapping ideology.
There is a general hatred for America, American values, the American flag.
So I can put it simply.
Wokeness as I see it, when I ask all these questions, simply becomes this very broad system.
It is cult-like adherence to the liberal orthodoxy, to the social orthodoxy of liberals.
That is, it doesn't matter if Islam doesn't like the LGBTQ.
It doesn't matter if the military industrial complex is pro or for it.
All that matters is they are all opposed to you.
That means when Jaguar releases a commercial showing a bunch of gender non-conforming weird art people, the response is, that's wokeness.
Why?
Because it's a rejection of American modern tradition and American contemporary, or I should say not contemporary, but the American image.
So there's another car commercial, I think it was Volkswagen, I'm not sure, where it was just a woman driving her car and the brake slam, and then it showed her, you know, the woman who was crossing the street, was in the hospital giving birth to a child.
That was seen as being American values.
It is not so much any one of those issues.
But again, as J.D. Vance points out, all of these different ideas, which seem to be at odds with each other, are unified in hating you and hating America.
So be it just art that rejects the American tradition, be it a statement that says there are no men or women, or a statement that your religion and Christians are bad, it is unified only in America being the plurality or the majority.
They hate you and the voters and Trump, those who want to make America great.
That's why it seems their ideas are all contradictory.
Which brings us to the current state of where we are.
Now, Rep.
Andy Ogle says he wants to send Zoran Mamdani back denaturalized because he lied on his forum, on his N-400 forum for immigration, because he's a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists, but said he wasn't a communist.
He'll argue it's not the same thing.
Now, I want to show you this.
Let me see if, let's start with this.
This is a post they say, and it's purportedly from Zoron Mamdani.
He is a racist incel.
And I don't use the word incel to mean generally like disdainful.
I mean, he is a man who struggles with women, who hates white women.
He hates white people.
This is purportedly from his writings, though, I want to make sure it's clear.
This is what it's purported to be online.
Saying that he has been forced to personally grapple with inconsistencies.
Oh, yeah?
He says, I sit in class not knowing whether to correct everyone's mispronunciation of an Indian woman's name.
I usually do, but today I'm tired.
I'm tired of being one of the few non-white students in the classroom, if not the only one.
I bring up race in discussions only to see the thought flicker in my peers' eyes and on their tongues.
They sigh without a sound.
I've brought up race again.
I've sidetracked the discussion.
I've chosen to make an issue out of it.
I grow a beard only to be called a terrorist.
I pronounce the H in my name only to hear muffled laughs.
Clothing becomes exotic once it clads my body.
Cotton shirts are called the chicies and sandals ethnic.
While I am now comfortable in my own skin, I can remember wishing for whiteness my first year when I thought certain types of girls were impossible to talk to due to my skin being more kiwi than peach.
Months later, I remember thinking that attraction might only be possible when a girl had a thing for brown guys.
He has internalized racial issues, which aren't real and don't exist in this country.
He's a racist against white people.
He has vowed to, I think, where we have it here.
Here we go.
Socialist mayoral candidate Zoran Mamdani under fire for a plan to tax richer and wider neighborhoods.
And then, of course, we have this.
He said, the invisible hand of the market, my ass, the hand is white and wearing a ring with a conflict diamond on it.
It's a quote from Harikan Dabolu.
I don't know what that is.
But it's a post he made referencing that comment, that quote.
31% of New York City is white.
He's repeatedly expressed hostile views towards white people.
So let's go to where he's currently at.
He's now publicly saying he doesn't want to dismantle the police, even though he's called for defunding and dismantling the police.
But where does that bring us?
This is a man who has deep disdain for America, American tradition.
He is personally slighted and has internalized the fact that his skin is brown.
He came here as an immigrant and he's upset the country is majority white.
So he has disdain for white people.
He wished to be white.
He wanted to be white so bad, but he couldn't.
He could not be.
So instead, he says he'll tax white people.
They should pay more taxes for being white.
Indeed.
The argument now is this.
Should Donald Trump use federal authorities to take over New York City?
And I say, yes.
There comes a certain point when you must ask yourself, when are you willing to use power and to what extent?
Now, what the left will do as they continually run roughshot over this nation, insult its traditions, bury those traditions, what it seeks to do is tell you, you are the bad guy.
You are the empire and you are evil.
I love this idea.
The argument of the empire did nothing wrong in Star Wars.
Now, I like to use Star Wars as an analogy because it's how you communicate with liberal millennials.
This is actually the example they used.
Yesterday I was talking about this in the regime change plan that former government actors, former government employees are employing.
They refer to themselves as the Liberal Alliance and Donald Trump as Darth Vader.
Well, the reason why there's an argument over the Empire doing nothing wrong, it's actually, obviously the Empire did.
The story is that they were blowing up planets and enslaving people.
But the argument is this generic view of a rebel alliance against the machine omits the greater picture of why things actually happen.
In fact, there's an interesting argument in Star Wars.
I don't know if it's true because I'm not really a fan.
I don't like Star Wars at all.
But in the extended canon which they got rid of, the reason the emperor was mechanizing the galaxy with authoritarian rule is because there was an extra galactic threat that was going to come and destroy their galaxy.
Or something like that.
The point is this.
What the left does is they tell you, you are like the villains of movies.
Don't be like them.
Darth Vader is evil.
But I mean, let's take a look at the story of how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader.
An unelected council of religious zealots.
Okay, let's just chill the language down.
An unelected council of religious faction that worked militaristically within the government of the galaxy.
The leader attempted to assassinate the duly elected chancellor because he opposed his religion.
That's actually the story of Star Wars.
Now, the point...
I hate Star Wars.
I don't hate it all.
It's just not, I'm not a fan of it.
The point is this.
They use these cultural tropes to make conservatives fear the exercise of power and authority.
Republicans are then terrified to be called fascists, so they never exercise authority.
And the left does all the time.
They arrested Donald Trump's lawyers.
I can't stress this enough.
Donald Trump wanted to challenge the election, as is anyone's duty and responsibility.
If you feel the election was wrong, challenge it through a legal mechanism.
So Trump said, I'm going to hire some lawyers.
This is the legal means by which we challenge elections, and we'll do it.
He did not say, I am going to by force take over this country.
So he had lawyers in Wisconsin.
He had lawyers in Georgia.
Jenna Ellis was charged with two counts of RICO for simply writing a letter for Donald Trump.
She gave him legal advice and drafted a letter and they said, you were party to a conspiracy.
And she pleaded guilty.
Now, her being weak-willed isn't the point.
The point is they are evil, dictatorial, and fascistic.
They seek to take our cities from us, burn them down, and create these whack-aloon policies that result in hardworking people having their lives destroyed.
And by you saying, I will not abide, they tell you you're a fascist and you're Darth Vader.
You're the emperor.
You are the evil boogeyman from the stories of years past.
I say, or you're Abraham Lincoln.
A man who suspended habeas corpus in violation of the Constitution and arrested a third of the Maryland legislature because they had Southern sympathies And then decided to invade states that sought to secede from the Union.
And that's what happened.
The South fought yes because they didn't, they seceded because they wanted to maintain slavery.
Slavery is wrong.
They wanted to put slavery in their constitution.
That is wrong.
That is morally and just a violation of what this country was supposed to be about.
Now the question is, when do you decide to fight?
And in this instance, there are people in the South to this day who say that the Union was wrong and evil, and it was the North's war, the Northern War of aggression against the South.
I actually make the argument, there are difficult decisions to be made.
But Abraham Lincoln is praised for preserving the Union and helping to maintain what would become what at the time was and is now the greatest nation that has ever existed in terms of wealth, power, and ideology.
Though it's false, nobody's perfect.
We try to improve upon them.
But is the argument that Abraham Lincoln should not have suspended habeas corpus?
He did it in violation of the Constitution.
He had no congressional authority to do it.
It's a congressional power.
The president can enforce it.
They only later voted on it and retroactively granted him legal status.
An absurdity.
But he did it.
And he arrested politicians in Maryland.
Maryland was a slave state.
And he said, we need access from Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, to D.C., and Maryland is in the way.
So they took it by force.
And he's praised for it.
Now, as we stand by and watch a communist say he's going to tax white people or in California, the sanctuary policies where they allow non-citizens to take from the public coffers and alter the structure of our federal government through counting illegal immigrants in the census, at what point do we say Trump should take action to secure and maintain the union?
Fair.
Maybe it's not now.
I don't know when.
I'm just going to argue that history only respects those who are willing to use the powers they have to protect what they have.
If Trump chooses not to fight back, not to exert his authorities and prevent communists from taking control of our cities and destroying them, then they win.
And maybe history will praise those who dismantled and destroyed our cities because those without the power to maintain their system lose it.
There are evil regimes.
Abraham Lincoln was not one of them.
There are evil individuals who engage in revolution.
The Bolsheviks and the communists who took over Russia destroyed that country.
Largely.
It still exists.
It lasted only 69 years because their crackpot ideology killed more people than any other ideology.
Don't forget, Mao Zedong killed more people than anybody else ever.
Communist China, not a good system.
So there is a possibility that those who are evil use force.
But I don't think Abraham Lincoln was evil to say, we will not allow you to persist in this amoral system and separating yourselves from a union by which we sacrificed blood and treasure to admit you.
That was the argument ultimately after the Civil War from Ulysses S. Grant, that the other states of the union sacrificed blood and treasure so that these states could join.
And it was difficult and it took blood and treasure.
That's the phrase they used, but it meant people died and wealth was sacrificed, people's homes were lost.
And you decided upon yourself that you would separate without any payment to those debts.
So they said, no, we reject that idea.
Abraham Lincoln decided to use force.
The Republicans largely choose not to.
At some point, they may have to choose to.
And that's not immoral.
You can still maintain the Constitution and all of its protections, but you have to be willing to enforce against those who want to destroy the Constitution and destroy your way of life.
The Democrats will argue all day and night they are the true arbiters of the Constitution, but they're lying.
They are bringing in non-citizens, counting them towards the census in their states, granting themselves undue power.
And then let's just say this.
They arrested Trump's lawyers.
The only reality that's all that matters is, will the U.S. be willing, will Donald Trump, the Republicans or anybody else be willing to use the powers granted unto them to protect this country?
Suppose we'll see.
But I'll leave it there, my friends.
Coming up, we have to talk about these floods in New York, now New Mexico, and cloud seeding.
That's right.
Theories abound that cloud seeding caused the floods.
And we'll be joined by the CEO of a cloud seeding company that actually, as reported by NBC, did engage in cloud seating operations just two days before the floods.
Interesting.
And the media says it's not his fault.
He denies any.
He says, we couldn't have done this, but let's talk about it.
Let's figure out what's going on.
Smash the like button.
Share the show with everyone you know.
That interview will be up at 4 p.m. at rumble.com slash TimPool or youtube.com slash Timcast.
Don't miss it.
Thanks for hanging out, and we'll see you all then.
As for everybody else, let's get to that story.
We have this story from the AP.
Fact focus.
No, weather modifications did not cause the deadly flash floods in Texas.
A question that many are asking.
Two days before the flash floods in Texas that killed over 100, and the number is going up, as well as many little girls.
It's a sad story.
There was a company that engaged in cloud seeding operations.
Many on the right have said it is these actions that has resulted in this flash flood.
Now, the AP says no, but you know what?
We are so sick and tired of being lied to that we don't trust these institutions.
So when the corporate press comes out saying it's not possible, don't be surprised when no one believes it.
We saw something similar in Dubai.
Let me, I think I have the Dubai story here.
The weather experiment that really flooded Dubai.
Well, the story here was that there was cloud seeding done in Dubai, and then of all places, it flooded.
So many people speculated that cloud seeding had caused the problem.
What's the argument that it wouldn't?
Well, the CEO of a cloud Seeding company that actually did cloud seed in Texas days before the flood says they could not produce nearly enough rainfall to contribute to what caused this flooding.
And I will say this: New Mexico also is dealing with flooding.
And as far as I can tell, there's no cloud seeding in New Mexico.
I will also additionally add, yo, we flooded for real.
Yeah, we flooded here in West Virginia.
It's not as bad nearly, but we have had such an intense amount of rain, I kid you not, we had to get a pump for our basement and we were pumping water out of it.
And it was actually crazy.
It caused a short.
And we were talking with the contractors and companies we work with.
We were like, what's going on?
And they were like, the groundwater level is rising dramatically because of how much rain we've gotten.
It's unprecedented.
The amount of rain in West Virginia has been absolutely insane.
It may just be that we got a period of extremely heavy rain.
Now, here's what I don't like in all of this.
We'll talk to this cloud seeding CEO in just a moment.
He's coming in.
He's going to tell us about what's really going on from his perspective.
But the issue is on the right, they're saying it's cloud seeding, on the left, saying it's climate change.
And I'm like, dude, sometimes it rains.
There are periods of great storms and hurricanes.
They happen.
And one particular incident is not indicative of any deep state conspiracy or this mass global upheaval of weather.
You've got both, and they've decided to make it whatever it is that fits their political agenda.
I don't think it's global climate change, and I don't think it's cloud seating, to be completely honest.
However, I do think there are, well, to be honest, the cloud seating is more reasonable an argument than the climate change one.
I think climate changes.
I think it's happening.
The question is, if it is man-made, can we even do anything about it?
I'm not going to purport to know the answers of whether it is or is not man-made.
I won't assert that.
The only question I have for the politics is, why are they insuring homes in Miami Beach and offering 30-year mortgages on them if they think the water is going to rise and wipe them out?
So clearly, the insurance companies and the banks don't believe in climate change.
Or at the very least, they don't care, I guess.
Well, let's do this.
To get into the issue of cloud seating, we're going to pull in the CEO of this cloud seating company.
This is Augustus Dorico.
I'm probably pronouncing it wrong, but hopefully not.
Who actually, they say, was engaged in cloud seating.
So we're loading up the interview now.
I got to click a few links, which gets it all booted up.
And then it loads.
It's loading.
And here we go.
Augustus, can you hear me?
I can.
How's it going, Tim?
Thanks for joining me.
Thanks for having me.
Would you like to, for those that don't know who you are, introduce yourself and what your company does?
Yeah, sure.
My name is Augustus DeRico.
I'm the founder and CEO of Rainmaker, which is a next-generation cloud seeding company that flies drones into clouds and disperses material that makes clouds rain or snow more for the sake of saving farms, ecosystems, cities, and industries that are at risk of drought.
So I think it was NBC that reported.
So correct me and them if it's not true.
They said your company cloud seeded in Texas two days before the floods happened.
Is that true?
So that is true.
And I should also say immediately thereafter that that cloud seeding operation and all of Rainmaker's operations had nothing to do with the floods that ensued.
And so just to give you context on what cloud seeding is a little bit more first and then the timeline of events as it relates to the flood.
Cloud seeding relies on finding clouds that exist, right?
It's not chemtrails, right?
If you see a long streak in the sky, that has nothing to do with cloud seeding.
It's not dimming the sun either, which is another real technology called solar radiation modification.
Cloud seeding is a water supply tool invented in the United States in the 1940s that farmers have been using, that governments have been using for decades to enhance their water supplies.
In Texas, there are municipalities and farmers that contract with us to produce more water for their crops themselves, for rain on their crops, to replenish their reservoirs, to recharge their aquifers.
Because if you look at Texas, obviously it does not need more water right now.
But the Ogallala aquifer is radically depleted.
As of just June 24th, there was severe drought throughout a lot of the state.
And so these entities, these farms and municipal governments, they contract with us to make more rain when there is drought.
We were flying a cloud seeding operation for about 20 minutes on July 2nd at about 1 p.m. Central Time.
That cloud seeding flight seeded two clouds where we dispersed about 70 grams worth of silver iodide.
That's material we use.
And that's like 10 Skittles worth of material.
We seeded those clouds and then they then precipitated and dissipated over the course of two hours after.
So those clouds themselves were gone.
The aerosols that we dispersed precipitated out and dispersed away.
They didn't remain in the atmosphere long after.
We then saw the National Weather Service issue their flash flood warning at about one in the morning on the 3rd.
We, as cloud seeders, are regulated by the state of Texas with something called suspension criteria, which means if there already is risk of flooding, if there already is too much moisture on the ground and any more rain could cause flooding, if the reservoirs are too full and could spill over and cause flooding, then we're legally required by the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation to suspend operations to do no harm.
And not only did we act in accordance with Texas state law and stop before those operations happen, our meteorologists were capable enough to identify that there was going to be risk of flooding before we were required to suspend operations and then had no effect whatsoever on the remnants of Tropical Storm Berry that did blow in and induce the floods that occurred.
And just for context on scale too, real quick, the best cloud seeding operations that we've seen to date, either from our operations or from the best in class research at universities across the Western U.S., those cloud seeding operations produced tens of millions of gallons of precipitation over the course of about an hour or two, distributed over hundreds of square miles.
The flooding that occurred, that system dumped like three to four trillion gallons of precipitation.
So one, we weren't operating during that storm.
Two, the air soles that were Dispersed in the prior day could not have persisted long enough to affect that.
And then, three, even if we had been seeding during that system and we weren't, there's no way that cloud seeding could have produced as much water as we saw from that flood.
Let me ask you real quick: the area that you guys did cloud seed, is that close to the areas that experienced flooding?
So we were flying about 150 miles southeast of the areas that experienced the worst flooding.
So I got to ask, there's flooding in New Mexico right now.
I'm up here in the DC area in West Virginia, and we've had a month or two months of unprecedented rainfall where the locals are telling us it's really, really bad.
To me, it sounds like what you guys were doing on the surface is completely unrelated, as is what you were saying.
And I saw the story yesterday, people were saying it's cloud seeing.
They were cloud seating right before this flood.
This is what caused it.
It seems like a big leap where you have to actually break down what it is you guys were doing.
Then you got to answer a few other questions.
Why is there flooding in New Mexico?
And why is there heavy rainfall in Appalachia?
I don't want to say unprecedented, but it's a, I mean, no joke, the amount of rain we've gotten has been really insane.
So we're in an elevated position and the groundwater level was ridiculously high.
And I had to get a pump for my basement.
But so let me ask you this then.
Let's talk about scale.
The operation you did, when you do this stuff, you send out a drone, a couple drones.
How many drones is it?
We'll fly like up to three drones at a time.
Or in the case of Texas, we do still use airplanes.
Most of our operations, we're using drones because they're far more efficient, but we inherited some planes in Texas and operate with those there.
And you said that you released about 10 Skittles worth of material?
Correct.
10 Skittles worth of silver iodide.
And it's also worth saying, too, just for context and like references, that flight was conducted at about 1,600 feet above ground level.
So 1,600 feet above ground level was about its max altitude.
And so again, for the folks that are concerned about the long streaks that they see in the sky, right, they are sometimes called contrails or sometimes called chemtrails.
I have not yet seen any evidence to suggest there is malevolent government conspiracy to produce chemtrails that are giving us neurotoxins or mind control viruses or chips or anything like that.
I'm totally open to evidence of it, though.
And so a lot of people have sending me pictures of the sky.
But those streaks that you see are occurring around 20,000, 30,000 feet.
And so our operations, our flights, be they with drones or airplanes, are 10,000 feet lower than that, if not 20.
So when you release a small amount of material, it seems like less than a drop of water in the ocean compared to what this flooding and these storms actually were.
But you kind of mentioned it.
Is it possible for a cloud seeding entity to create rainfall that would result in floods of this magnitude?
So the reason why we have suspension criteria is because cloud seeding produces precipitation, right?
And if there are already coincident risks, like a huge system that is going to cause flooding naturally, cloud seeding it would be imprudent, right?
There's no way physically to produce 4 trillion gallons worth of precipitation with cloud seeding technology that exists or with anything that's even been theorized about now.
That being said, there's something that I think a lot of people will bring up in the comments that I want to address transparently, right?
Like I think there's a lot of mistrust around weather modification.
It's obviously very consequential technology and we should, I should, I have to be as transparent as possible to earn the trust of these people that have understandable concerns.
There have been in the past operations that were deliberately intended to cause flooding.
So if you look at Operation Popeye in the Vietnam War, the U.S. Air Force was conducting cloud seeding flights to try to flood out the Hoihan trail.
Now, the fundamental difference between cloud seeding now and in the past isn't just that we use drones.
It's that with radar and specifically new kinds of radar, we can measure what our effect is on the cloud.
Whereas before, you know, you would fly up into a cloud, sprinkle some magic beans, and then maybe it would rain, maybe it wouldn't.
It's hard to say what the effect was.
We can now measure that.
So how effective was Operation Popeye?
It's very hard to say.
But it's worth acknowledging that very publicly because it has been done by the U.S. government before.
And to my knowledge, hasn't been done since.
But again, if there is any evidence of that, happy to engage with people online about it.
I'd bet that governments definitely use weather modifications, be it Operation Poppe or otherwise, for strategic purposes.
And I bet they're still doing it to this day.
Why not?
Like, why abandon that stuff?
But I do think it's funny that your company, which let me just say this.
Your company is getting blamed for this massive torrential downpour because of the concerns about government use of weather modification in the past.
So just to clarify, you said you launched three drones?
In a typical operation, we do, but we flew a plane in Texas.
Oh, okay, okay.
So what was, you talked a little about this.
What was this, like a farmer said, hey, I need some rain?
And what is the scale area that your seeding operation would impact?
Yeah.
So in Texas, our customers are associations of counties and private farming interests that need more water either for their crops or for their reservoirs or for their aquifers, like I said.
So the flight on the second that people have referenced repeatedly and saying was causal for the flooding, that was for the South Texas Weather Modification Association.
I'll also say, you know, I can absolutely handle it.
I feel no responsibility for the flood, obviously, but can handle people accusing me or sending me death threats about that.
To the poor farmers in Texas that are just trying to pay for more rain because their crops will die without it.
Like they are totally Undeserving of the virulent, virulent death threats that they've gotten.
And that being said, though, I am still sympathetic to the people that have lost so much and that have emotions running high.
And I think that people want to find a scapegoat.
They want to find a culprit they can hold responsible for the flooding, because in a world where there was someone responsible, and if you could hold them to account, you could potentially stop this in the future.
Unfortunately, there are still natural disasters.
There is nobody responsible for this here.
And that's more tragic.
However, cloud seeding right now, right, it's used for precipitation enhancement.
It's used to make more water for people that are suffering from drought.
And there's huge droughts that are causing the city of Phoenix to cut off water to residencies right now.
And so we need some sort of weather modification right now with serious regulatory oversight from the state and federal governments.
And like most business owners aren't asking for more regulation.
I am because I want people to feel like this is a trustworthy and beneficial technology.
But all of that to say, yeah, it's used for mitigating drought right now.
It has been attempted to be used for severe weather suppression in the past.
So if you look at Project Storm Fury, this is where the American government, the U.S. Weather Bureau, and Air Force collaborated to seed hurricanes in a totally different manner, but to seed hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean before they reached the Pacific to reduce the amount of rain that would precipitate out of them when they hit the eastern seaboard, and then also to reduce their wind velocities to mitigate their damage.
Now, we didn't have the radar or the satellite imagery at the time to attribute what our effect was.
But if we were to ban this technology now, not only would we prevent farmers across America from having access to water, not only would we put at risk all of the ecosystems and cities in the American West that are deprived of water, not only would we be at greater risk of wildfire, but also we would shut the door on the potential research into the future to mitigate severe weather as well and continue to be beholden to these tragic natural disasters.
How does it work?
How does spraying silver iodide make clouds or make rain?
Totally.
So we don't make clouds.
We can't make clouds.
We take existing big fluffy clouds that have water in them.
We'll fly our plane or drone into those clouds and then disperse an aerosol, like a small particulate, not nanoparticles, but a particulate into the clouds.
And silver iodide, it has a crystal structure that's very similar to ice.
And so water that's in small droplet form, not big enough to precipitate, will freeze onto the silver iodide crystal, grow into a big enough snowflake, break apart, create more snowflakes that all then become big enough to precipitate and sometimes melt back into rain.
In Utah and Colorado, where we also operate, filling up reservoirs and enhancing snowpack, we mostly do snowpack enhancement.
In Texas, it's rain enhancement.
The last interesting thing to say is that with radar, right, specifically with something called dual polarization radar, you can discriminate between liquid and ice in cloud.
And in so doing, measure what your effect on that cloud is.
Is it possible to cloud seed using lasers?
I haven't figured out how to do that.
I think a lot of people have talked about either harp or lasers or sound to like percuss clouds and shake the water out of them.
You know, I am a technologist and business owner, and so a lot of these technologies are peripherally interesting to me, but I haven't yet seen any evidence to suggest that there is.
There was a story a while ago, this is years, a decade plus, where there were discussions about universities publishing positive results for using infrared lasers to trigger rainfall in clouds or things like that.
But I guess just some general questions, I suppose, is, is there a risk from silver iodide being in the water and then going into our crops and going into our land?
Totally worthwhile question, right?
So there's generally like three questions that come up or concerns around cloud seeding.
And one is, are you polluting with what you're dispersing into those clouds?
And so silver iodide itself, like should you eat it hand over fist?
No.
But when we look at the data from decades of programs in the past that are emitting about 50 to 100 grams of silver iodide per operation dispersed over hundreds of square miles, there's already two parts per million of silver in most American soil.
After decades of cloud seeding from these old operations in Utah and California and Colorado, we've only seen an increase in eight parts per trillion above the background amount.
That's like almost an immeasurably small increase.
It's not even necessarily statistically significant, and it's a million times less than what's already naturally in the soil.
So have we seen any adverse ecological, agricultural, or human health impacts from silver iodide from cloud seeding?
No, categorically and like absolutely not.
And that isn't to say that like the notion of a more organic biodegradable material in the future is something I'm not interested in, right?
Like just for the PR, if anything, that seems to make sense.
And to preempt any potential ecological issues, that would be sensible.
Are there any other chemicals used in cloud seeding aside from silver iodide?
Salt, table salt is used.
It's also worth saying like strontium, barium, aluminum.
These things are often referenced in like soil samples or rain samples, and then people accuse cloud seeding of having produced those.
Like we don't use any strontium or barium or aluminum for cloud seeding.
I don't know of anybody that does.
There might be more in the atmosphere now from other pollution, but that actually is worth like driving a point home on.
Right now, we already modify the weather unintentionally in so many ways, right?
Like just take, for example, building a city.
The heat island from a city, from all of the streets that you build and the concrete changes the precipitation patterns and the heat around the city, right?
If we talk about emissions, whether it's to do with like the degradation of the ozone hole in the last century or CO2 or just sulfates that come from our factories, we're already modifying the weather unintentionally right now.
And I think Rainmaker's thesis is that with caution and with regulation and with a mindset of stewardship, We should intentionally try to modify the weather for both humanities flourishing and also creations.
You know, what's really fascinating is I was reading, I've read several articles about the, I guess they call it sort of the terraforming of Vegas, in that we've modified the weather of Vegas in one really simple way.
When a human being flies from their hometown, let's say they're in Chicago or they're in Omaha, into Vegas, they're bringing water with them in their bodies.
And then by virtue of going to the bathroom, it increases the moisture levels in the desert, which then results in an increase in clouds over a very long period of time.
I'm curious if like these are these are considerations in your research, in the work that you have to do in the regulations, the long-term impact of increasing the amount of water.
So I'll put it this way.
If you have an area of farmland, let's say it's in Texas or Utah, and they have an average of an inch of rainfall per year or something, they then say, we need more rainfall, so you come in.
The first question I guess I have is, how much rain do you create in these areas with a sustained cloud seating operation?
Is it going to be a noticeable increase in the, you know, per inches per year?
So right now, a given cloud seating operation, if you look at all the data from ROPS and then from other academic research, produces less than like a centimeter of precipitation on a given event.
And maybe the technology, I'm sure that the technology can be improved meaningfully in the future, but any given operation is not capable of inducing like a flash flood.
It is a de minimis amount in terms of the like length of precipitation on the ground, but in terms of the volume of water distributed over, you know, 100 square miles, that's very consequential.
Like that's a lot of water.
That's tens of millions of gallons from just one op.
With respect to like whether we should be or how we should think about changing the environment, first of all, like before we even think about greening deserts, right, we just have to get back to baseline.
Like there is less precipitation now.
There's less water available now in a lot of these regions like California, the Colorado River Basin, writ large, Texas, than there was 100 years ago.
And so the farmers and the people that settled the West, they had more water than we do now.
And by cloud seeding, we can get closer to or at least back to that amount of water.
Then the second thing as well, is like, how do we think about making more water?
Well, we should do it with a mindset of stewardship, of a mindset of stewardship.
And so I think it's worth saying that another question that comes up in cloud seeding is like, well, are you playing God, right?
And first of all, like in a very material sense, we already modify creation and specifically the water cycle in a whole host of ways intentionally right now for both our benefit and the environments.
Like God, I believe in God.
I happen to be a Christian, but God like made the rivers flow in a particular direction, right?
And then we build dams and reservoirs to store that water and redirect their flow.
God put the salt water in the oceans and we desalinate it and take it out for our interest now.
And also there's water in the ground that was there from essentially the beginning of time that we pump up faster than it would ever naturally come up in springs for the sake of our environment and for the sake of our farms and our cities.
In fact, actually, talk about like unintentional consequences or like unintentionally modifying the weather.
We've pumped so much groundwater out of the earth that the axis of the earth has changed.
Have you ever heard about this before?
The tilt of the earth has changed.
I've heard about cities sinking.
I actually did a report on this.
In California, they pumped so much groundwater because of the drought that small cities were actually sinking several inches.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
And if we don't, here's something really, really concerning.
You know, we had the Dust Bowl about a century ago, and that was awful.
Like that destroyed the lives of so many Americans.
Well, there's an impending Dust Bowl now because of aquifer degradation, right?
We're pumping so much more out of the aquifers than is sustainable.
We're pumping so much more out of the aquifers than naturally percolates into them that as the water levels go down, the sediment compresses and the amount of water you can even store in the aquifers long term is being permanently reduced.
And so if we lose these aquifers, then we lose the capacity to have groundwater ever again in the future.
And so as the oldala in Texas and the Midwest is being drawn down, like we have to produce more water because the alternatives are either not having groundwater ever again or needing to tell farmers to stop farming and making everybody have like two minute showers.
And so again, I think this should be something that there's federal regulatory oversight for, state level regulatory oversight for transparency and the ability for people to ask questions and consent to it 100%.
But if we don't produce more water in the areas where there are droughts, then there are impending disastrous consequences.
I guess just, you know, possibly the last question, maybe it'll lead to more.
But what I was alluding to about, you know, Vegas and the changing of this terrain, the concrete of the city, like you mentioned, it's a heat, what did you call it, heat island?
Yeah, Vegas is this big concrete block.
It's really hot.
But also, they keep shipping in food.
They keep shipping in people, which has inadvertently been terraforming the city and the desert.
I should say the desert.
And interestingly as well, many people want grass.
So they're artificially bringing in gas and then humans bring in this water because they want it to happen.
I feel like, and I don't mean to imply this is a net negative or a bad thing.
Let me just start by saying in the whole climate change argument, there are people that are arguing that an increase in CO2 will increase the speed at which crops grow.
I don't know, whatever.
Make your arguments.
But if you are increasing the amount of rainfall in a particular area more so than it's experiencing now, could it change that type of terrain in some way that we can't predict?
So again, a mindset of stewardship and caution and regulatory oversight is super necessary because this is going to be consequential, right?
What you can see now with regenerative agriculture, which I'm totally in favor of, right?
Like I think we should have way more regenerative agriculture.
If you plant Crops and maintain those crops, specific grasses in areas that used to be deserts.
Those crops will keep more water in the soil and then they'll release natural dust particles that facilitate more cloud formation and subsequent precipitation.
And so you get this virtuous cycle from regenerative agriculture.
By producing more water in a lot of these regions and then growing crops or growing grasses, we can actually retain more water and then get more natural precipitation as well.
So should we do that wantonly?
Should anybody be allowed to do it?
Absolutely not.
But like, are there potential virtuous cycles that could lead to a more abundant United States by cloud seeding?
Yeah, absolutely.
And my hope is that first and foremost, like everybody affected in Texas has prayers and family and supplies sent to them and that they are taken care of.
But then secondly, that nobody takes this natural disaster as an opportunity to drum up political support for baseless claims that would ban a technology that ultimately could help hundreds of millions of people across the United States and then billions across the world.
Man, it must be the weirdest thing to wake up and be blamed for trillions of gallons of water flooding a state.
I mean, that's just, it's nuts.
I know there's a lot of people that just don't like weather modification in general because I think it's hard to understand.
And there are fears that many weather events are disasters.
A thunderstorm could be a disaster for somebody.
The power could go out.
Their basement could flood.
It could cause, you know, could ruin their lives.
So the idea that we would be intentionally doing that, I think to many people, they view it negatively.
But I think you make a good point.
And I largely agree.
We intentionally modify the weather more than just cloud seeding.
But is there anything else you wanted to add before we wrap up here?
I think I would just want to say that if anybody does have questions, if anybody is skeptical, I am doing my darndest to answer every single question that people do pose to me and will continue to do so for as long as it is necessary to build trust and transparency here.
And so if you are concerned, whether you ask questions in good faith or bad faith or threaten to kill me, I'm happy to chat.
Jeez.
I would prefer that.
There's been a lot of it.
But in general, I'm praying for the people of Texas despite Cloud Seeding, not having any responsibility for it and happy to talk with everyone about Cloud Seating's potential.
Right on, where can people find more from you?
You can go to rainmaker.com, which is our corporate website where you can learn more about Cloud Seating and what we're doing.
And you can also go to A Dirico, A-D-O-R-I-C-K-O on my X handle.
Right on, man.
Well, I do appreciate you joining me and explaining all of this.
We'll see you next time.
Tim, I appreciate you, man.
Thanks so much.
That, of course, was, as you learned, the CEO of Rainmaker.
And I'm just going to say, guys, nobody trusts anybody.
And I get it.
There was this big post by somebody posted a quote from What If from Rudyard Lynch, What If Alt History.
What if Alt is?
And he was basically saying everyone's going insane because of the internet.
And the best thing you can do is get away from it now and build up your life and protect yourself and secure your resources.
And he's half right.
He's half right.
I think I'll do a big thing about, you know, record about it and talk about it.
But, you know, the media will claim one thing.
They'll lie.
They'll tell you not to trust what you see with your eyes and ears.
And that's why we end up in this position where people are going to say, hey, these cloud seaters, they were doing this right before the flood.
The challenge is, how do you know?
I certainly don't think the guy should get death threats because that doesn't solve any problems, even if it is the cloud seating that caused the floods.
I think investigation and deep dives and challenging him and having him come on, bring him to debates, make him be part of that conversation is the best way we go about doing this stuff.
But I've got to tell you, man, for the people in Texas, I hope and I pray for the best.
These are tragic stories.
And the people of New Mexico, and I also said, again, we haven't gotten anywhere near as bad because we are elevated quite a bit here where I'm at.
But the rain has been ridiculous.
It's not a joke.
I mean, we have had endless rain for months now, which is, people are saying they've never seen it this bad.
And the groundwater is, I mean, the land where we're at is just, you're walking on sludge.
It's slush.
And then it's crazy, man.
But not to downplay what's going on in Texas, man.
I hope and pray for the best.
So I appreciate you guys hanging out.
We're going to gear up this raid for our friend Russell Brand, who is live now.
Thank you guys so much for hanging out.
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