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...