uld be illegal. I think he claimed that somebody offered him $10 million to drop out but I don't know about that.

James O'Keefe has another win for his undercover work. He exposed a hundred billion dollar federal contracting scam where minority-owned businesses would get contracts because they could get them because they're minority owned but then they would just farm out the work to other entities. So they would only do 20% of the work and that's what they admit by the way. He got them to admit that directly and they would outsource 80% of it illegally because they're not allowed to do that. And then they would just sit back and collect some extra money I guess. So that was part of a scam where all these minority companies were skimming money off of contracts.

Now as I've told you many times, wherever there's government funding there is massive corruption every time. And there's a very good reason for that. Nobody's checking on it. That's it. If you have gigantic amounts of money sloshing around and there's nobody who's checking on where it goes or how it's used, do you think there's any chance that won't devolve into corruption? No. No, there's not any chance. It's zero. It's exactly zero chance that that does not turn into corruption. Zero. There isn't the slightest chance that that remains a credible system over time. Maybe on day one, but day two, no, by day two the robbery begins.

So I'm going to say for the millionth time, because I feel like I can get this message through. We do not have an idea for a system of government that can protect us from this. We really need a system of government that can protect us from this because it's destroying every city, every program, and it's of course hurting the poor more than the rich. It's everything bad about our country is one thing. And the one thing is we don't watch where our money goes. It's one thing. Do you think that we don't have any way to solve that? There's no way to get auditors. There's no way to use AI, blockchain, something. Well I would argue that the people who are in charge of fixing it are the people who are raping it. So the big problem is that the people who should fix it are the ones benefiting from it and therefore they can never fix it. But if we don't figure this out, I feel like this is the alpha problem that all the other problems revolve around. Even immigration, you would think immigration is sort of a standalone problem, but probably immigration was subsidiary to this problem. Probably somebody who found a way to make money by letting people in. You know, the NGOs were making money by letting people in, not preventing them. So probably every one of our biggest problems trace back to the fact we don't watch where the money is spent. All of it. All of it.

So if I saw Trump come up with some kind of reaction to this as in we're going to try maybe putting some kind of federal. So that's the trouble is that you can't expect the local governments to police themselves. But is there any way you can have the federal government say we're just going to be a watchdog and we won't do anything because we don't have power. We'll only watch and then we'll report. Maybe.

Well what did I tell you about the Gaza ceasefire? Besides the fact that there's no way it's going to hold, of course it's not going to hold. But the other thing that I could have said that you already knew is that the odds of a false flag claim, a fake claim that the other side had violated the ceasefire was guaranteed. We may have already had it because you know there was a report that the Gazans had attacked and then there was a report that Netanyahu had responded by attacking back and then closing the crossings. But then the crossings got immediately reopened. And the reporting is that the US caught Israel in a lie. Now I don't know that that's true. Remember everything's fog of war. So if you hear that the United States caught Israel in a lie that doesn't mean it's true. That doesn't mean anything. It just means that somebody said it. That's all it means. Somebody said it. But the accusation is that it might have been there might have been an explosion of an IED that was an accident that Israel interpreted as intentional. But then with a little bit of research the US found out, uh-oh, that probably wasn't even intentional. Just something blew up that had been unexploded. And Netanyahu very quickly reversed the closing of the crossings which would suggest that he either understood it wasn't real or understood he couldn't get away with it. One of those two things, but we don't know. Anyway I saw that on Matt Gaetz's podcast.

Apparently preparations are underway for Trump and Putin to meet in Budapest even though there's no date for that. And they postponed it because they were not close enough to getting anything agreed on that it was worth it and they're still not. But one of the critical points is that Russia wants to keep all of the Donbass and I of course not being a Ukrainian I had to go make sure I knew what the Donbass was. So the Donbass is the place where essentially Putin already owns it. He's already occupying it. It's the part on the east coast of Ukraine. So it's not a perfect match to what Putin's already conquered but he has 89% of it. So the Russian armed forces control 89% of the Donbass. Isn't that really the end of the question? If he already controls 89% of it he's not going anywhere. Can't we just agree that however this turns out he's going to have the Donbass? I mean obviously Ukraine would have to get something in return.

I think according to the Washington Free Beacon, Jessica Costello, she says that Trump's crackdown on the border has reduced the fentanyl flow. They're down almost 53% compared to last year. Now you might say that just means they're catching less of it. It doesn't mean there is less of it, but it probably does. It probably does mean that they're catching more of it and that's why there's less of it getting through. I don't know. And the reporting is that the cartels have stopped exporting as much fentanyl because of the crackdown. Do you believe that? Again this all the border cartel stuff is also fog of war but it's more like a permanent fog of war. So I don't know how much of reporting I'm going to believe on this topic but it looks like directionally it looks real. I mean the border is pretty sealed tight relative to how it was in the past. So it wouldn't be a surprise if Trump had cut down the fentanyl by 50%. Wouldn't be a surprise. Just don't know.

Senator Rand Paul continues to show what makes him valuable as a senator. Even though he's with Thomas Massie he's one of the two Congress people who tend to be the fly in the punch. I don't know that. But they tend to plague the other Republicans by not being on the same page. But when they're not on the same page, let me give a compliment to Rand Paul. When he's not on the same page it's not because he doesn't make sense. It's not because he's crazy. It's not because he's dumb. It's not because he's underinformed. So when he disagrees with all the Republicans as he is with this Venezuelan drug boat attacks, you should listen to him. You don't need to agree with him. I think this is a case where I don't. But I very much appreciate him. I love that he's giving us this transparency and a different way to look at this situation. Specifically what he says and I can't verify that any of this is true. I'm just appreciating that this version of events is out there. And he says that we're not getting any fentanyl from that part of the world. He says that Venezuela is like a zero fentanyl producer. They are a drug producer but it's the opioids. So he thinks that first of all it's a lie that we're stopping fentanyl. Secondly he says that because of the geography over there and the boats that they're using these would not be the boats you would use to take drugs to the United States. This would be for taking it to some island that would be prepping to take it maybe to Europe or somewhere else. So the other part of it is it's not even destined for the US. It would be too far away, too hard to use those little boats to get it all the way to the coast of the United States. You wouldn't do it that way.

So why are we blowing up boats? Is it to stop the regular opioids? You could argue that that was a good enough reason. But the head of Colombia thinks it's about a play to get the oil. And then somebody else said on X, "No, we don't want that crappy Venezuelan oil because it's too hard to refine." So it's like I don't know, it's thick and sweet or something. So it's hard to refine. So therefore it's not true that the US covets their oil because we have plenty of oil and our oil is easier to refine. However Grok disagrees with that. Grok says that the US actually has the highest capable refineries in the Gulf Coast, right? Close enough. And that our refineries actually can handle that and they can handle it so well that the net effect would be cheaper oil because our refinery is so good that we can take their crappy oil and refine it into a good product and still cheaper than if we had to ship it all the way from the Middle East to refine it. Now at this point I don't know how much we ship from the Middle East because we're the big producer at this point. So I don't know. So I don't know about the economics of it but it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if the US was trying to get a bite of that business. It'd be sort of Monroe Doctrine-ish to put the drug dealers out of business.

So here's what I would say. So Trump is also leaning on Colombia for being a big drug narco terrorist country and the president is saying, "No, no, no. You're just trying to get our oil." In the case of Colombia I don't think it's the oil. I think it's more like Venezuela is about the oil. But here's what I think. I think that this has to understand what Trump is up to. The first thing you need to know is that it is not his obligation to tell us the truth about these military CIA operations. How many of you would agree with that? We'd like to know the truth. I mean I'm curious, but it's not really his obligation to tell us the truth about life and death military secret ops. It's not his job to tell us. His job is to get it right. Right. So when we judge Trump we're going to judge did he do the thing? Did he reduce our risk? Did he make us safer? Did he make us richer? If he does those things, okay, A+, but he doesn't need to tell me what the secret plan is. So I'm left to speculate what the secret plan might be. And so I will do that right now.

I'm a big fan of the Monroe Doctrine which says that the US can and should dominate the entire hemisphere and that we're all better off if that happens. I believe we're all better off if that happens. But what happens if two of the major countries are converting from something like a standard country into a narco terrorist cartel entity that's essentially a criminal enterprise? What would be the best way to handle tha