Badlands Media

Jon Herold spends a big chunk of Thursday's show wrestling honestly with Trump's viral midterm convention promise of a $5,000 dividend to every adult if Republicans keep the House, playing multiple clips of the speech and JD Vance's follow up defense, then pulls up an old Charlie Kirk clip calling Biden's student loan forgiveness "naked bribery" to press the question of consistency. He walks through the math on where the money would actually come from, argues it functions as future taxation either way, and challenges his audience not to become hypocrites just because it is their own team making the...

CannCon and Alpha Warrior break down the most talked about moment from last night's convention, President Trump's proposed five thousand dollar tariff dividend for every adult, with a very specific catch about where you are allowed to spend it. That sparks a genuinely spirited disagreement between the hosts about dividends versus entitlements that runs longer than either of them planned. From there it is a Daily Caller report on Mitch McConnell's wife holding appointments from CCP linked organizations while serving in the Cabinet, followed by geopolitics on a Trump and Putin call about ending the Ukraine war, new construction...

Jon Herold and Burning Bright work through the news of Trump floating a five thousand dollar per adult tariff dividend tied to Republicans keeping the House, and dig into the interview clips defending it against the obvious bankrupting the country criticisms. They also chase down a chapter eleven reference from a viewer that turns into a bit of a scavenger hunt through the clip archive.

There's a mix of lighter material too, including a photo ID mix up joke involving two cabinet officials and an Elon Musk clip revisited for context, before things circle back to bigger...

Trump kicks off the first ever midterm convention in American history from Texas, and true to form, turns a 90 minute speech into a genuine tour through everything: record breaking foreign investment, a proposed $5,000 "Trump dividend" for every adult if Republicans win, renamed lakes and states, and a truly memorable rant about a certain NBA trade. There's the expected roll call of endorsements, Ken Paxton, Michael Whatley, and some pointed, colorful jabs at their opponents, plus a serious, sobering stretch honoring Charlie Kirk on the anniversary of his death and remembering victims of violent crime. Between the applause lines on...

Shipwreck opens with real life updates: a birthday, a new booster club role, and big Halloween plans for her town, before pivoting into politics. She is unimpressed with GOP midterm messaging and increasingly checked out on voting altogether, then digs into the Lindsay Clancy trial and online theories suggesting the case was engineered to drive a wedge between men and women right as trad values were trending again. There is a useful segment on AI generated influencers and how easily fake content can slip past you, plus a thoughtful look at what constant connectivity is doing to relationships. She...

It's just Kwast and Chris Ponder this week for a genuine 50,000 foot view, zooming out from the technical framework to tackle the "why" behind the whole Space Revolution project. Kwast traces 250 years of American history, natural law, constitutional first principles, and the slow creep of power away from families and communities toward central governments, then connects it all to today's information landscape. The core argument: the internet was built to be open, which means it can never truly be made private or secure, so an entirely new kind of information system is needed, one grounded in truth rather than...

Jon Herold covers a fresh batch of declassified handwritten FBI notes revealing discrepancies between what agents actually wrote during Michael Flynn's 2017 interview and the official report used to prosecute him, plus a John Solomon and Steve Bannon clip teasing another major document release timed to this week's GOP midterm convention. He spends a good chunk of the show digging into a striking story where several Anthropic AI researchers publicly warned that out of control AI could pose an extinction level risk within the decade, contrasting it with old Elon Musk interview clips swinging between casual fatalism about AI risk...

CannCon and Ashe dig into a busy morning of coordinated midterm narrative seeding, starting with an Axios scoop on the Republican convention speaker lineup and the anxiety around who is showing up and who is quietly staying home. From there they cover a Hill piece on Trump leaning into trolling his critics, followed by the growing conservative split over a proposal to pay stay at home parents, a debate that gets into questions of populism, government intervention, and who actually decides how families raise their kids. CannCon also gets to prove he was right about daycare pricing after yesterday's...

JB White is back in the saddle, tech hiccups and all, with a show that swings from college football politics to grand geopolitical theory. He breaks down the LSU versus SEC standoff over roster rules and institutional control, weighs in on a chaotic opening weekend of games, and shares family travel stories from a Miami road trip. From there he plays a lengthy excerpt from historian Walter Russell Mead on the four competing schools of American foreign policy and uses it to unpack how Trump's team blends those approaches. Expect his usual take on discernment, invisible enemies and the...

Josh Reid takes the lead solo for the opening stretch this week, walking through why he believes the Ukraine Russia war and the Iran conflict could both wind down before the midterms and what that would mean for Republicans at the polls. He breaks down a fresh executive order reauthorization tied to election security, new declassified information teased for the following day, and a striking clip of John Solomon using the word steal to describe the 2020 election. Once Alpha Warrior joins back in, the two dig deeper into old guard British financial systems, how Iran and China fit into...

CannCon and Ashe in America open on a somber note, asking for prayers for Professor David Clements after a serious heart attack, before wading into the competing election narratives of the week. The main event is David Becker, whose Center for Election Innovation and Research just caught a DHS referral, and whose group hosted a call Ashe tried to record only to end up with 49 minutes of deliberate silence. From there they dissect the ERIC machine: how citizenship data gets stripped out and handed back to states to "guess," why Colorado ended up with nearly 30,000 questionable registrations, and the...

Twenty five years later, Trump stands on the Ellipse with a piece of World Trade Center steel behind him, and delivers what is easily one of the more personal, reflective speeches of his presidency. He recounts being there himself in the days after, being pulled to safety by firefighters as a nearby building creaked, and shares Howard Lutnick's gutting story of surviving 9/11 for one specific reason. There's a Coast Guard cutter dedication honoring a fallen rescue squad member, first responders and military members filling the crowd, and the emotional centerpiece: awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom, posthumously, to a...

Jon Herold digs into the growing conservative debate over a proposed entitlement style program for stay at home parents, playing old clips of Michael Knowles blasting nearly identical welfare style family leave proposals back in 2019 and 2022 to highlight what he sees as a glaring contradiction now that JD Vance is championing it. He connects this to a new GAO report confirming his long held skepticism about DOGE, which found DHS's touted 10.5 billion dollar savings figure actually amounts to a real net savings of just 92 million dollars once replacement contracts are factored in. Other topics include Trump's routine election integrity...

CannCon flies solo for a slower news Tuesday and opens with a candid story about debating a Trump derangement afflicted family member over holiday weekend drinks, plus a programming note about a schedule shuffle coming next week. The news kicks off with a resurfaced Just The News exclusive on border agent Brian Terry's personal journal, which suggests he was tracking AK47 shipments weeks before his murder, and CannCon ties it to a more recent operation where the DEA reportedly watched fentanyl flow across the border without acting. From there it is a genuinely encouraging story about laser weapons cutting...

Jon Herold and Zak Paine kick off Labor Day with a scheduling shakeup announcement before opening the phone lines for a full call in show. First up is a genuinely spicy debate over a proposed stay at home parent subsidy plan, with Jon arguing it's just another layer of government dependency dressed up as a conservative win, and Zak pushing back with a more sympathetic read on the policy.

From there, the floor opens to listeners, including some pointed callback energy aimed at a certain online figure named Alpha who keeps coming up in the chat. Things...

Ashe in America welcomes back Corey from Break the Chains Media, joined partway through by George, cameraman for Wayne's Word podcast, for a firsthand account of a chaotic day at a Colorado student ICE out protest. Corey went in planning respectful "man on the street" style interviews, but things escalated fast once he approached one of the more radical booths, sparking a mob of high schoolers that surrounded and chased him. George's experience was worse, he was knocked to the ground and kicked while filming nearby, and both guests walk through the raw footage as it happened. Between video...

Matthew Ehret pairs up two subjects you'd never expect to share a slide deck: a 19th century Whitechapel serial killer and the modern push to rebuild Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem. He takes on the popular royal conspiracy theory behind the Ripper murders, the one made famous by a certain Johnny Depp movie, and argues the real story runs deeper into Templar revivalist networks, Freemasonic ritual symbolism, and organizations like the Roundtable movement and Theosophy that emerged as the British Empire looked increasingly shaky. Expect a wind through King Edward III's Order of the Garter, Cecil Rhodes, and the long...

Recording from his in laws house on Labor Day, Ghost breaks down the biggest diplomatic weekend in months. Kushner and Witkoff spent three hours with Putin in Moscow, then flew straight to Kyiv to meet Zelensky, and Ghost walks through what a former Austrian foreign minister and a former Bush and Clinton trade advisor both made of it. He also unpacks Scott Bessent's awkward sideline meeting with Russia's finance minister at the G20, connects rising gas prices to what he calls software warfare, and pulls apart a leaked Financial Times map showing Ukraine potentially carved up between Poland, Hungary...

Jon Herold, fresh off a whirlwind Labor Day road trip (and a recent engagement announcement), brings back Matt McDonagh for a deep dive on the ARC AGI 3 benchmark results and what they actually mean for artificial general intelligence. Matt breaks down the difference between AGI and ASI, argues America's biggest AI edge is energy and compute rather than algorithms, and makes the case that decentralized local AI will keep big tech from fully controlling the narrative. The conversation ranges into cognitive warfare, the difference between universal basic income and a wealth backed alternative, skepticism toward tech oligarchs' motives, and...

Ashe in America and Zak Paine fill in on Labor Day while CannCon is off at a veterans event, opening with an honest and slightly spicy defense of civil disagreement between hosts after some chat pushback over Friday's show. The centerpiece is a major development in the election space, as DHS asks the DOJ to investigate ERIC over motor vehicle data that allegedly flowed to a Zuckerberg funded nonprofit across at least nine states, potentially opening the door to penalties and a nonprofit status review. They also dig into stalled accountability for the weaponization of government and why two...

FUD stands for fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and Burning Bright has a theory about why everybody has been kind of a doomer lately. To illustrate it, he went digging through Badlands to find the single most incessant black piller he could think of, then invited him on so the chat can lovingly lift him up and beg him to stop destroying the movement. Enter tonight's guest, doomer extraordinaire Zak Paine, who plays along like a good sport.

With the midterms a couple of months out, the two poke at the thing we are all told we must...

Jonathan Drake dives into Spooner's first two economic propositions, starting with the deceptively simple idea that every man should keep the full fruits of his own labor. From there Jon works through why Spooner sees the employer employee relationship as a subtle drag toward poverty, and why he thinks a nation of entrepreneurs beats a nation of wage earners every time. Expect a genuinely fair minded wrestling match with the capitalist rebuttal to that claim, a clear line drawn between Spooner's thinking and actual Marxism (spoiler, they only sound similar on the surface), and some candid personal reflections on...

Jon Herold sits down for a first-time chat with Gabe of Good Brew, and fair warning, Gabe is a talker. What starts as a friendly get-to-know-you (Outer Banks roots, a detour into why so many businesses incorporate in Wyoming) quickly becomes an enthusiastic deep dive into gut health. Gabe's pitch is that Good Brew took the opposite road from the probiotic boom: instead of forcing colonizing microbes through the stomach where most of them die, the idea is to tend the gut like a garden and support the foundation. He walks through spore-forming probiotics, metabolites, and glutathione production, all...

Jon Herold and Chris Paul kick off with a Netflix documentary tangent about decoy planes and disguised operatives before shifting into one of the more philosophical episodes in recent memory. The centerpiece is a metaphor about a wall everyone secretly knows is black but publicly agrees is white, used to explain how Trump operates inside a collectively accepted false consensus and slowly walks people back toward what's actually true.

From there the conversation goes deep into logos, divine order, and the idea that inversion, presenting things as their opposite, is the core mechanism of deception at every...

Cam Cooksey opens episode 66 (September 5th) in a deliberately loose, laid back mood, promising a less structured, more conversational night as the final Flow before GarVegas. There's Hooks and Harmony recap, a Scales ad that sparks a childhood tangent, and plenty of chat love.

The meat is a media integrity deep dive. Cam walks through the permanent removal of Maria Bartiromo from Fox News and the reporting around Peter Navarro's claim that a top anchor and executive Susan Scott were shielding China and shaping coverage. He uses it to make his central point: every corporate outlet, Fox...

Host Matt Trump (pre-recording on a Thursday after a soundless first take) declares this a costume-changing romp through Burning Man, which is happening in the Black Rock Desert as he speaks. Drawing on his own three-year run (2012 to 2014), he plays internet footage from the festival's 40th year and cheerfully warns you it looks basically unchanged: same bicycles, same lights, same beautiful chaos.

Expect an affectionate, warts-and-all tour: how to survive the desert, the sacred art of the decorated night bike, why finding a "tribe" is everything, and the surprising mix of Bay Area billionaires, Aspen ski bums...

A genuinely heated debate breaks out over whether the anti data center pushback happening across the country is a legitimate concern or just a Chinese psyop, spiraling into a bigger argument about executive orders, farmland ownership, and whether the government could legally seize land tied to alleged foreign election interference. On the legal front, there's a rundown of jury selection concerns heading into the Charlie Kirk and Tyler Robinson trial, and some sharp questions about a media apparatus accused of setting up another "fake election" narrative weeks out. There's also a China threat argument that gets surprisingly candid about...

Jordan and Nate are back live this week, kicking off with genuinely useful talk about mobility work, self experimentation, and using AI to plug in your own blood work and genetics for a targeted health plan. From there it is a stacked news day: Trump's fresh executive order cracking down on meat packing monopolies and opening up direct to consumer sales for small ranchers, plus Trump publicly defending unvaccinated Amish communities amid Pennsylvania's ongoing measles controversy. They dig into a genuinely wild story about a researcher behind a major vaccine autism study pleading guilty to fraud, the FDA cracking...

Ashe in America and Ghost say Season 5, Episode 5 of The Chosen, "Because of Me," picks up the pace in a big way, and they are not exaggerating. This is the episode where Judas's betrayal finally becomes undeniable, and the hosts walk through a tense Last Supper sequence full of suspicion around the table as the disciples try to figure out who among them could possibly turn on Jesus. Meanwhile on the Roman side, Pilate is under pressure, Atticus is forced into an uncomfortable posture, and Claudia is unraveling in her own way, giving the political side of the story...

Jon Herold kicks off Friday with a quick look at OpenAI's new ARC AGI 3 benchmark results before digging into a newly posted DHS letter from Secretary Mark Wayne Mullen to AG Todd Blanche, walking through referrals on QR code voting machines and the ERIC voter data sharing controversy in detail. Ghost joins midway through for a wide ranging geopolitical breakdown, mapping out a theory that Israel is quietly building alliances with Greece and Ukraine as a possible path to open a new front against Turkey, tied into a $3.5 billion Israeli air defense deal in the Aegean. Ghost also digs...

CannCon and Chris Paul close out the week with a report claiming Fox fired Maria Bartiromo over leaked internal texts about the network's coverage of election fraud claims, then turn to a pair of contradictory court rulings that show just how uneven election law has become. Missouri's Supreme Court blocks a new congressional map after the primary already happened, while Justice Kavanaugh declines to put a citizens only voting amendment on Michigan's ballot despite organizers collecting a quarter million more signatures than required. The middle of the show digs into what CannCon sees as a coordinated push to drum...

CannCon and Alpha Warrior kick off with a mic malfunction confession before diving into one of the most heated debates the show has seen in a while. Alpha argues the military and intelligence community are already operating outside the Constitution when it comes to psyops and information warfare against Americans, and that it is a price worth paying to win the bigger fight against the deep state and China. CannCon pushes back hard, questioning where the legal line actually sits between federal law and constitutional violation, and whether ends can really justify unconstitutional means. It gets personal, it gets...

Chris Paul and Burning Bright dig into this 2012 Prohibition era drama with a genuinely stacked cast, and both come away pleasantly surprised by how well it holds up. The pick came from a random YouTube rabbit hole that somehow led straight to Tom Hardy, which feels about right for how these episodes usually go. Expect a solid breakdown of the film's bootlegger versus corrupt lawman setup and why that particular flavor of systems versus sovereigns storytelling keeps resurfacing depending on where the culture happens to be. There's a real conversation about trust in institutions, narrative fatigue, and a pointed...

Frankie Val themes the night around things that just do not add up, and invites viewers to bring their own top picks of the week. First comes the strange news tour, from a maybe rabid fisher cat terrorizing the Northeast (the media can't decide if it's a weasel, a fox, or a squirrel) to the improbable comeback of the CD, which sends Frankie fishing for everyone's embarrassing first album.

The centerpiece is a roughly twenty minute sit down with Dr. Andrew Paquette, the analyst behind the New York Citizens Audit. He walks through clone voter rolls, retroactively...

CannCon and Ashe in America move on to Chapter 13 of The Creature from Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin, and this one takes a hard turn into geopolitics. This week's theme is Masquerade in Moscow, unpacking the secret society founded by Cecil Rhodes, its American offshoot known as the Council on Foreign Relations, and the surprising role outside financiers played in funding the Russian Revolution. The hosts challenge the popular narrative that the Bolshevik uprising was purely a grassroots rebellion, tracing the money and influence back to bankers in Germany, Britain, and the United States, with the Rothschild formula...

JD Vance takes over the podium in his first solo White House briefing since the departure of the press secretary, and it is a marathon. He opens with fraud task force wins, over 2,000 shut down fraudulent trucking licenses, and a new 65 billion barrel oil reserve born out of the Venezuela deal, before fielding a genuinely sprawling round of questions. Expect a candid breakdown of the ongoing Strait of Hormuz shipping standoff with Iran, a defense of why gas hasn't hit $3 yet, some surprisingly personal banter about weight loss and sauerkraut, and a firm but friendly response to questions about...

Jon Herold walks through a detailed timeline theory that Trump may be quietly resetting the War Powers Act clock on Iran for a second time to keep Congress out of the loop, tracing notification dates back to February and July and predicting another possible reset is coming this weekend. He also fact checks Alex Jones' viral debate claims about NDAA Section 219 line by line, reading the actual bill text to show the "co equal to the Secretary of Defense" language Jones cited simply is not there. Other topics include Howard Lutnick's awkward military casualty gaffe and Trump's fiery follow...

CannCon and Alpha Warrior dig into the DOJ expanding its beef pricing investigation from the big four meat packers to eight of the largest grocery retailers in the country, unpacking how a handful of companies came to control most of what ends up on your plate and just how far prices have climbed over the past decade. From there they cover Democrats blocking a proposed constitutional amendment to lock the Supreme Court at nine justices, and debate whether the whole thing is a setup or a genuine effort. The back half includes a DOJ opinion clarifying that states taking...

Jon Herold and Burning Bright open with some personal banter (mystery health scares, homeschooling law rabbit holes) before landing on the real meat of the episode: Russia getting invited back to the G20 for the first time since the Ukraine war started. The guys walk through why that timing lines up suspiciously well with CIA Director Ratcliffe's recent trip to Moscow, and what it might signal about where the Ukraine conflict is actually headed.

There's a deep dive into the mixed messaging coming out of the administration, sanctions talk that doesn't quite match the rhetoric, and speculation...

Shipwreck kicks off with her new obsession, fiber maxing, and how a fiber heavy routine has quietly fixed years of health issues, before pivoting into a rant about surveillance cameras popping up in towns too small to need them. She connects that to a data center fight near her home, complete with a mysterious pro data center billboard nobody will claim credit for. There is a bit on subscription based car features, a fun tangent on whether AI could already be running things, and a detour into philosophical zombies and inner monologues. The back half gets personal: turning down...