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it works out. But everything looks smart.
Well, I saw in the Maze account on X, he was reposting a compilation made by Grabian. I want to give credit to him. But Grabian is one of these online meme makers, I guess, and was reminding us that back in 2024, it seems so funny now that the Harris-Walz team was sending out a memo to start calling JD Vance weird. You remember that? And they wanted to basically paint Vance and everybody who's a Trump supporter as weird. And you see the compilation and you can see how forced it was and you can see obviously they had talking points.
Now, does that even happen on the right? Obviously pro-Trumpers often will say the same thing as other pro-Trumpers, but I'm not aware of anybody getting a memo to do it. Usually if somebody hears something that works, they say, "Oh, that sounds good, so I'll just say it too." But I don't think it happens on both sides. If I'm wrong about that, let me know. I've never seen it.
So as a student of persuasion as I am, it made me wonder who came up with the idea. It's obvious that the campaign was probably the one who said do this, but who came up with it? Was it a professional? Here's what I think it was. Now this would be speculation. I think the Democrats, feeling like they're not good at persuasion, hired somebody who claimed to be good at it. And the people that they hired, again just speculation, would try to use science to back what they were recommending.
And one of the things that science consistently shows is that conservatives don't like icky stuff. If something's non-standard, conservatives just go, and that is sort of built into their brains and almost something they can't change. So the idea here would be that somebody said, "Aha, if you look at the science, the thing that would turn off other voters on the Republican side is to know that they were backing something weird." And so far that actually tracks with what I would recommend about persuasion if I were on their team.
But why didn't it work? Because it definitely didn't work. And I speculate that it didn't work because it was so stunningly unnatural. It was so obviously a talking point and not something that they were feeling in any important way, and nobody cares about weirdness. It just has a free-floating idea. So I think the inauthenticity of it made it impossible to work.
But then as I've talked about at length, time goes by and they came up with the idea, or maybe Mom Donnie did, of talking about affordability. Now when anybody talks about affordability, either side, that connects. So that was probably a real good play. But here's the flaw in their plan. Trump has probably had enough time that he could address enough affordability issues that it would sort of take it off the table a little bit. And his technique of going directly at energy prices as a way to make basically everything less expensive, he has time to make that work.
So he knew right away and he tried to co-opt it that if he started talking about affordability and he started doing something about affordability, it would take their main good attack they've ever had somewhat off the table. So he has to perform and we're watching of course as he's doing things that would in fact lower energy costs if everything goes right. And there's probably enough time for that to work its way through the system again if he gets energy prices lower and affects everything. So once again, Trump has a better approach to things.
All right. So we've all been trying to figure out what is the real reason for the action in Venezuela. Is it really about drugs? Well, drugs might be part of it, but I think all the smart people at this point are saying it's not the only reason, and it might not even be the top reason, but it creates the possibility of doing what we wanted to do in Venezuela.
So I was listening yesterday to Glenn Beck. He was telling us his ideas for why we went to Venezuela and it was very persuasive because he's a good communicator and he's a smart guy. So when he described it, the real play was very convincing I have to say. But then as these things often go, I read the comments and I see a pushback on it and I thought, oh well, there might be a problem with the data. So if there's a data problem that would suggest maybe we don't have the right take on this, I'll tell you what that is.
So Glenn Beck's take is that the real value of the Venezuela action is that it would put pressure on China because there's so much oil that comes from Venezuela that ends up in China that it would be putting pressure on China. And if Iran goes at the same time, which looks like it might, I still won't bet on it, but it looks like there's a pretty good chance that Iran will fall. But we could potentially deny China some large percentage of their total energy. If they're denied their total energy, it would be hard for them to mount a war in Taiwan. It would be hard for them to dominate the world if they're struggling for oil and there's such a large percentage of what they get from Venezuela and Iran that that makes perfect sense from a military Monroe Doctrine point of view.
Now when you first hear this argument, it's very convincing, but the problem with the data is I've seen numbers all over the place about how much China is getting from Venezuela. And I don't trust the numbers. So it could be there's not as much pressure on China as we assume it is if the data is wrong.
Now the other piece of data that somebody questioned and made me go
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g to New Atlas, there's a company that's asking for some kind of government approval that I believe they will get to take the type of nuclear reactors that are already in naval ships and have been operating for 70 years without trouble and to use that design for domestic energy production.
Now I don't know if you remember this, maybe I started 10 years ago talking about how nuclear should be bigger and should be more of a focus. And one of the things that Mark Schneider taught me at the time was that we already had a design that was used in the military, the Navy especially, and it didn't have problems and you could build them small and they would be powering battleships and stuff like that.
Now I think the first part of the request, and it's really sort of a two-parter, is that the company wants to take the existing nuclear reactors that are on ships but only the ones that are being decommissioned. So if they're being decommissioned anyway, you know, you don't want to waste a perfectly good nuclear reactor, right? So they want to take those and presumably modify them and stuff but use them. They would take them off the ship so they wouldn't be using them on the ship. They would take them off the ship and repurpose them.
But here's the good part. They also want to build new ones because there wouldn't be enough decommissioned ships to make much of a dent. So they want to take the design that's been proven over 70 years and it would cost about somewhere in the $2 billion range to create a modular reactor versus what we see with the big reactors which could be tens of billions of dollars. So it's smart, it's well proven, and it's economical. And I think they only need approval from the Trump administration to do this sort of thing. So again, optimistic.
Speaking of optimism, one of the products at the Consumer Electronics Show is a leaf blower, an aerospace-powered quiet leaf blower that cuts noise by 70%. Do you know what a plague the leaf blowers are in high-end neighborhoods? I hate to be like a rich person complaining, but there's at least one to two days every week where it becomes impossible to take a nap or anything because either your own gardener is right outside or your neighbor's gardener is right outside and it's so freaking loud.
Now you might say, "I'll bet that's expensive and I'll bet your gardener is not going to want to pay for that." And then I thought to myself, I'll buy it. If my gardener was willing to take this product and it worked, yeah, I don't know. I'm not sure it's for sale. It might be just announcing that it will be. I would immediately go to my gardener and I would say, I will buy this for you if you'll use it. I assume he'd say yes because it doesn't give up anything in performance. Then I would figure out who the other gardeners were, like my neighbors' gardeners, and I would say, you know, you should do the same thing. Just buy one for your gardener and you'll make all the neighbors happy. If they said no, then I would say, at least the immediate neighbors, I would say, well, I'll buy it. You know, I have some extra cash, so let me buy your gardener one of these.
So I wonder if the way it will spread is that the homeowners will buy it for their gardeners even though that's not their responsibility really.
Well, according to science, Ashish Gupta is writing that Stanford's doing a new approach to AI that solves the following problem. Have you ever wondered why AI can create a video of somebody doing something that looks exactly like a person doing something, but if you try to tell the AI to do exactly what the AI is showing in a picture, it can't do it? And the reason is that the videos are created by just predicting where pixels should be on the screen. But what they'd like to do is use the AI's imagination, they call it, where it can create a picture of somebody doing something and tie that to what the AI learns by having it learn by its own dreams.
So before it tries to do something, let's say you want your AI robot, so before it does anything, it first imagines it in pixels and then the part they're working on that I guess they're getting close is to figure out how the AI can learn from its own pixel pattern. So if it created a dream basically, which would just be an AI video, if it created one that was folding a certain kind of laundry, can you say, "All right, learn from your own picture how to do this." So the physics got modeled right. So the idea is to add the physics to what it can already imagine. But most of the AI has passed the six-finger problem. Now the AI is so much better. So maybe that's a big deal.
Well, also talking about my silly state, according to U-Haul, more people are leaving California than any other state for the sixth year in a row. Holy shoot. We have the highest state income tax in America and lots of other problems.
Let's talk about Greenland. Things are changing in Greenland. So Steve Miller was on a show
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. It's called the simultaneous sip and it happens now.
That was really good. But let's talk about the news.
So I assume all of you know by now that there was some action in Venezuela. So I'll give you a little background on it as people storm in and then we'll talk about what it all means.
But I should tell you that after the show, so after the podcast, Owen and Gregorian will be hosting a Spaces afterparty. Now the plan was to, which is very nice of Owen to ask people how I had influenced people, but I think the Venezuela story is going to overwhelm that and that would be okay with me. So don't feel bad if you think talking about Venezuela is more interesting.
So I woke up this morning thinking, you know, maybe it'd be good for me not to be in the headlines for once because I've been in the headlines for a few days. And I look on X and Dilbert is trending. Venezuela gets attacked and Dilbert is still trending on X. So guess I'll have to go with it.
All right. So you know I've often told you that if Trump has multiple options for doing something, he typically picks the option that looks the strongest. And he did it again. So I'm starting to think that you could predict his actions fairly accurately by just saying what's the strongest thing you could do.
Now you might say that the strongest thing would be to send in the whole military, but I would say stronger than that would be to send in special forces of some type and grab the leader of the country and take him back for legal process. To me that seems like the strongest thing, I think. So that's what happened.
So late at night Trump authorized the military, specifically some helicopters. So I guess we sent in the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment called SOAR, known as the Night Stalkers. So I guess we went in strong. There had been a lot of practice, a lot of preparation, and allegedly no casualties on the American side. None.
Now I have not heard if there were casualties on the Venezuelan side, but I imagine there were. So Trump watched the whole operation from some undisclosed place and watched them. I guess we have the ability to go through metal doors and get people. So Maduro and his wife have now been arrested and brought back to America.
Now all the people who don't know anything about the Constitution are going to be arguing with other people who don't know much about the Constitution. And I'm sort of in that category. I'm no constitutional expert when it comes to what we can and cannot do militarily. But the argument is that this is not a military action. It is a legal action and that we can go anywhere to pick up a criminal or an accused criminal, an alleged criminal, and that this should be seen as a Department of Justice action that happened to be supported by a number of entities including the military.
So Pam Bondi is telling us what the charges are. So the charges against Maduro, the ex-head of Venezuela, he's being charged with narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, possession of machine guns and destructive devices, and conspiracy to possess machine guns and destructive devices against the United States. But that last one's weird. But apparently that gives enough cover that Trump can do what he did.
But if he had remained there and fought militarily and tried to defeat their army or something that would be an entirely different conversation.
Now people who are my age or in that zone, you might remember that the US did this in 1989 against the Panama leader Noriega. And we went in, but there was some violence and death there. And we grabbed Noriega. We brought him back to the United States and he was prosecuted and put in American jail.
So this has some precedent in the sense that if you can sell it as a legal system and not a military system, you can get away with it. Yeah, there's some precedent that Obama went after some individuals. So it's different to go after an individual than it is to go after a country.
All right. So apparently the operation was paired with a bunch of strikes on their military and intelligence operations, but that might have been a decoy. It was maybe just a suppressive action. The reporting, which you can't yet trust — remember, it's still fog of war, right? Fog of war. So you can't trust everything you hear about this. So be cautious. Fog of war.
But the reporting at least on Fox News is that the Venezuelans put up no resistance and that some of them just went home. Do you believe that? Do you believe that the Venezuelan military put up no resistance and they just sort of walked away? Maybe. I don't know. That one's a little hard to believe. There may have been some people who walked away.
All right. Well, so Maduro is being in a larger sense accused of being the head of a cartel called the Cartel of the Suns. So the accusation is that he was never a legitimate leader. So it also is not a true decapitation strike some would say because he was never really the leader of the country legitimately. That's more of an argumentative thing.
All right. So there was tons of coordination between the DEA and the military and the CIA and the Department of Justice. So that part's impressive.
And waiting in the wings is his probable or at least possible replacement, a woman named María Corina Machado, who has won the Nobel Peace Prize already for being sort of the opposition. But she would not really have been able to take over the country until Maduro was gone. So allegedly there will be an election. Allegedly that election will be unrigged.
The reality is that especially if Trump believes Venezuela was involved in rigging our elections, and he might, I don't know if he does, there might be a little payback happening here. The payback would be, oh well, good luck with your next election, but we're going to make sure that it goes our way. And when I say our way, I mean America gets a leader that will be on our side essentially. She will be called a puppet. And maybe that's true. Feels like it would be. Yeah.
Marco Rubio has told us that Maduro is not the legitimate leader. So that's kind of important.
All right. Now let's talk about the chessboard. This is the part I find fascinating. How long will it take before some part of social media says this is all Israel and blames Israel? I woke up this morning thinking, well, at least this won't be blamed on Israel. But it might be. It might be blamed on Israel. We'll take you through it.
So there are a number of chess pieces and one of them is that Venezuela and Iran have historically supported each other to get around sanctions and to get around other big economic problems. So Iran would be weakened by Venezuela falling. It would lose an ally. It would lose one way that they could have made some money in case their other sources got dried up.
At the same time, by coincidence, there's all these uprisings in Iran and Trump has said he would, if the protesters get shot, intervene militarily. Now that didn't sound like as much of a threat until you see what he just did in Venezuela. So if you're Iran and you're the leaders of Iran and you're wondering, huh, will Trump really do that? Would Trump actually attack us and depose our leader? Well, nobody knows. It could be a bluff, but if you just watched Trump go into Venezuela as strong as you possibly could, it would be reasonable to worry about it if you were Iran.
So could it be that Trump's timing is either lucky because it would make things go better in Iran, at least for the American side, or is it planned or just purely coincidence? I don't know. But it's definitely going to make people sort of blah blah blah. You know, he only did it for Israel. You know that's coming. So that's not my claim, by the way. So I'm not making the claim that I know why it happened or what the timing was or anything.
But I do wonder if the only reason is about the drugs because so far the Trump administration is making it all about the drugs. But I've seen pushback where people will say, no, Venezuela is not our biggest problem when it comes to drugs. So you wouldn't do all this if it's only about the drugs. I don't know.
He might. Remember I always say he takes the strongest path. So the strongest path would be this. So that would predict that maybe it was about the drugs and this is just the strongest path. Don't know.
Then there's the Cuba connection because Cuba apparently relies on Venezuela for some of their energy slash economic survival. I'm a little bit skeptical that Cuba will fall because of this, but things will get a lot tougher, but maybe. So my guess is it's not about Cuba, but it might be just one of the side benefits that could happen if you believe that Cuba's government falling is a benefit. It would create a lot of pressure for the United States.
However, also on the chessboard and this is not my own great idea, it could strengthen Trump's support among Latino voters. So especially the older ones, they might say, finally somebody did something about Venezuela and that will weaken Cuba and that's what we've been waiting for. But I don't think you would do it just for votes. Again, it could be that that would just be a side benefit.
So what's so hard about figuring this out is that all these countries are connected and it's not entirely obvious if doing something with one country is intentionally about the other countries or it just works out that way. I don't know.
And then there's the China connection. So China gets energy from, let's see, Iran supplies 10 to 15 percent of China's oil and Venezuela supplied or did about 5 percent of China's oil. Now if you added them together at the high side, would that take China's oil supply down by 15, 20 percent? I don't know. And is that a goal or could China easily replace that much oil? Maybe they just get more of it from Russia or something. So I don't know.
But next on the chessboard is Mexico. So the head of Mexico who is also credibly being accused of being in the pocket of the cartels is of course rejecting this military action but not very hard. So there's an objection to it, but they're not going crazy about it.
And it could be that the leader of Mexico is wondering if she's next because it does seem to me that if the US put together a set of indictments, I guess that's what it would be against Maduro, don't you think they're also looking at misbehaving by Sheinbaum, the head of Mexico? Don't you think that some part of the US machinery already has evidence that she's part of the cartel?
So she's probably looking at this and saying, wait, are you saying that they're going to go nab the head of a country because they have a good case against that person? Because that would be her. So whether or not we plan to do that, it would put a lot of pressure on her to do whatever we wanted. So we might say, well, you know, maybe you're next. How about you give us a good trade deal? Or maybe you're next. Maybe you pay for the wall. Whatever it is.
So that's part of the chessboard. And then Colombia, which has so far not been part of the military action, is probably a bigger source of drugs than Venezuela. So Colombia would also be on the chessboard, would also be wondering if they're next. And I think they also have a leader who might be implicated as part of a cartel, right? I think so. Yeah, it puts Colombia on notice.
It basically puts all these countries on notice. So this action has been compared to the fall of the Berlin Wall in that it could have this ripple effect that's pro-democracy or at the very least pro-American. Isn't it fun? I hate to say how much fun it is trying to figure out what's going on but there's a lot of moving parts.
Then let's talk about Taiwan also on the chessboard. If you were China and you watched what Trump is doing right now, would you get going and attack Taiwan or would you say, holy, we'd better wait at least three years until Trump's gone and then figure out what we can do? I feel like if China is smart, and they are, that they say, well, step back. Step back. This would not be the time to piss off Trump because he always acts in the strongest path. So that they wouldn't be able to count on him standing down. I don't know if he would attack China if Taiwan was attacked, but they would have to be worried about it.
All right. Apparently the Venezuelan defense chief put out a quote that said, quote, we will now surrender. We will now surrender. Your leader is gone. You don't need to surrender. Did we ask you to surrender? I don't remember anybody asking, but he has to say something.
All right. So you might wonder in the broader context what is the economic impact of this? So I went to Grok and asked what the economic impact on Venezuela is in this situation. So apparently lots of energy implications. It would allow other countries to be less able to evade sanctions because Venezuela would help other countries evade sanctions if they didn't like America.
And let's see, the geopolitical importance. This is from Grok so I just asked Grok, you know, give me the context. Venezuela has been a key part of an anti-American coalition so that would include Russia and China. But if you take out Venezuela it doesn't take out the whole coalition but it weakens it.
We didn't want Iran to have some kind of a friendly presence this close to our country, and apparently they did because they were friendly with Venezuela. So if we remove the option for Iran to have some kind of a fuller anti-American presence in our hemisphere, that seems like a good idea.
Then there's a military importance. Did you know that Iran transferred drone-making technology to Venezuela and they've been training the Venezuelans since 2006? So that's not good. So that would weaken one way that Iran could get at us.
Yes, my voice does seem raspy. You're just noticing? Good observation. Yes, my voice is raspy. Yeah, you may not have heard the news.
All right. So Jonathan Turley is reminding us that constitutionally this should be fine, but people are going to argue that it isn't.
All right. There will be lots more developing, but did I hit the high points, right? So I was trying to give you the quick chessboard view of it because it's going to be the only news today. The news is just going to be about that.
However, you come here for more than just news about one story. So with your permission, because I don't have much to add to that besides what I said, I'm going to talk about some other fun news stories. I know, I know this story is so interesting, the Venezuela one, that it's hard to imagine if there's anything else happening. But you want to spend a full hour here with me, right? So we'll do some other stories after I take a sip.
Pause for a sip of whatever you got. Sip it if you got it.
All right. So some other stuff. I'm going to be at the risk of boring myself, but it'll give us something to hang out and talk about.
Okay. Anyway, Catherine Herridge, who many of you know as a notable important journalist, she's talking about why X became the center of real journalism and that the mainstream media is no longer the dominant source of news basically. So here's her take on it which I liked. That reach, meaning who sees what, the reach is no longer about cable slots or front pages. It's about access to decision makers and business leaders and highly engaged readers in the same place at the same time. And that's why independent journalism didn't just survive the collapse of trusted corporate media. It moved to X and took the audience with it.
Now she says there's no question that X is the platform with the greatest reach. Now I agree with all that and here's the part I didn't fully understand. That independent media could never have grown unless they also had access to important people and that they also had a way to publish to everybody who wanted to see them. So X allowed them to have a way to get to everybody. So that was automatically going to be better than a media source you have to watch a commercial.
I would add to this that on X it's very easy to not see any commercials. So if you give me a choice of looking at the news with commercials or looking at the news without commercials that's not a contest, right? So X has an automatic business model advantage. But the part about access to decision makers, that is entirely because the podcasters did a good job and they did a good job of networking and especially on X they would get boosted.
So do you think that Benny Johnson would have had such a big impact or Megyn Kelly or the more controversial Tucker Carlson? Do you think any of that would have happened without X? I don't think so. And then once you give them credibility because you're doing good work, then suddenly you can ask President Trump for an interview and he says yes. Or you could ask lower level admin people and they'll say yes because they're not going to be stabbed in the back like the mainstream media would. And they have huge audiences now bigger than the networks.
So yeah, this is a good observation, Catherine Herridge. And it doesn't look like there's any way that's going to reverse, right? And again, like so many stories, you have to add to it. It's only possible because of Elon Musk. Think about how many stories you have to say that about now. All the DOGE stuff, all the fraud stuff. Only possible because Elon exists and was doing the right thing.
Well, here's a story from The College Fix that more than half of UC Berkeley disability accommodations are based on emotional reasons. Emotional reasons. Half. Right. So there are lots of legitimate reasons for people with disabilities to want accommodations. So if you want a ramp, that's a good reason. If you need a wheelchair, access. Yeah, those are perfectly acceptable and desired accommodations.
But apparently people are coming in with psychological and emotional disabilities. One student famously got approval to bring his mother to class. And it's the most disabled people registered at UC Berkeley since they started collecting data.
Now the reason I bring this up is not this particular story. The reason I bring it up is that looking for scams and frauds is now the new national sport. So at least in my bubble, every day I wake up there's somebody searching for a new scam or uncovering a fraud. I'm really happy about that because that's the only way any of this gets fixed. The only way it gets fixed is if people start thinking it's important to find fraud.
Even I didn't think it was important a few years ago. If you'd asked me a few years ago I would have said something like Governor Mike DeWine said that it was just the cost of doing business. You know, I would have looked at it like a 7-Eleven store and I said yeah of course there's theft. Yeah, 7-Eleven store. Of course there's theft. But you know it's not that big a deal.
But today what we know is that it's the biggest deal. It's an existential threat to the entire civilization. And if we don't pay attention to it, that's on us.
Do you know why we're paying attention to it? I already gave you a hint. His name is Elon Musk who boosted recent reports. Well he's boosting a lot of reports from independent media about how bad things are. Would we be in this situation where people are really paying attention to fraud if Elon Musk did not do that or did not exist? No. I think he gets full credit for that. Again, it's really amazing.
And then I'm having a problem reading the news lately because there are so many stories that look like what I've already seen but might not be. So can you tell me is this a news story or did we already know that according to NewsNation that the assisted living facilities — oh, Gateway Pundit is writing about this — that the assisted living facilities are often just somebody's house and there's no service there at all. Did we already know that? Because it feels like a repeat. But on the other hand maybe it's just a new place and a new set of data.
But in my bubble every time I wake up somebody, Republican usually, is uncovering something fraudulent and that's a good thing.
Next, you may or may not be following the story of ActBlue. If you went onto the street and randomly stopped people and said tell me what you know about ActBlue, how many people could answer that question? Now your audience is very plugged in. So probably half, three quarters of you would know ActBlue, but if you don't, they are a Democrat organization that raises money for a variety of Democrat candidates.
But what they do that's special is that they take small donations. I know. I'll get to it. I'll get to it. They allegedly take only small donations from American sources and then they distribute it to candidates. The reality, and they're being investigated for this — I believe Trump has authorized the investigation — the reality might be, allegedly, that they're a fraudulent organization from top to bottom.
And what they really do is they take large donations, maybe from Democrat billionaires, maybe from overseas, and then they pretend with fancy bookkeeping that it came from individuals. Now that would be really illegal, but that's the accusation.
So what if, and again this falls into that category of every day I wake up and there's new alleged fraud of massive scales. We're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars here. And I do believe that it's been demonstrated, correct me if I'm wrong, there's plenty of evidence that one person's address has been used multiple times. That would be illegal because it means it's not real. Or that people who are not actively following politics have been donating allegedly small dollar amounts for years but they don't even know about it. If you go to their house and say did you give money to ActBlue they would say what's that? No they didn't give any money.
So even though it's an allegation, yeah, it's called smurfing. I feel there's a 100 percent chance that they're a massive criminal organization. I also wonder if it's big enough that Democrats could not win anything without them. What would the midterms look like without ActBlue being able to put big money into people's pockets? Different, right? Doesn't mean that it would go a different direction, but it wouldn't be the same.
So that's happening. Also good news that's being investigated.
There's an article in Hot Air by David Strom that guesses something I've been saying. I didn't know if anybody else would have the same observation but he did. It goes like this that the psychology — I'm going to paraphrase. This is not what he said exactly — but the American psychology is that things were pretty good and our systems mostly worked and that we were not sitting inside a gigantic fraud.
Well now that we know about the NGOs and we know about all the Somalian fraud, our brains are primed in a way they've never been before to imagine mass conspiracies being true because the scope of how big the fraud is with the fake daycares and everything else. The scope of that is so big that once you learn that was a real thing and that it's been going on for years and years and it's right under people's noses and people can see all the signs. You could see the smoking gun and it didn't matter. You know there could be news reports and it didn't matter. But now it matters.
And what does that do? This is Strom's observation and mine as well. What does that new psychology do to how we think about election integrity? It changes it.
And I think we need a new name for this. A name for the phenomenon where there's a whole bunch of bad things happening individually but when you catch them individually they don't seem like a big enough deal to change the w
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ive money laundering schemes and probably in this case being used as some kind of disguise for moving in things that could be weapons, for example, maybe it's other terrorists. So it makes me wonder, has there ever been an NGO that was good or are all NGOs just automatically a signal for fraud and a signal for something you don't want to happen? I don't know. But I'll tell you, it does seem to suggest there's never been a good NGO and that every single time you hear about one, there's something sketchy going on probably.
All right. Well, here's a story that was just complicated enough that I don't fully understand it, but I'll try. So according to Jennifer O'Connell writing for Red State, Trump has already this year vetoed two things at least. And one of the things he vetoed was a decades-old legislation that was tied all the way back to John F. Kennedy 63 years ago where they had put together a deal where the federal government would pay for this massive pipeline project. But the way it was supposed to work is that the federal government would pay for it but then they would be paid back over time with interest by the state and local authorities. So on paper it sounds pretty good, right? The locals get a source of water. I'm sure they needed it and it's all funded. But that was 63 years ago. So apparently all they do is they keep kicking the can down the road. I think very little or nothing has been built. So it's a little bit like the allegations about the California high-speed rail. But Trump just canceled it. So I feel like that's the right play because if something has lasted 63 years and they haven't built anything and it probably doesn't have a good audit feature because, you know, one does, and there's probably no way that the feds would ever get paid back. I think Trump can cancel that. So that does make sense to me and it makes me wonder how many things are going to get canceled because they never really made sense or because it's been decades and the money just disappears. So how much of, I don't know how much money was ever allocated to it, but once again, no surprise, we learned that any big federal project or state project is probably just a way for somebody to rob us.
Speaking of which, the Trump administration has extended its ban on child care payments until the states could provide evidence of legitimate spending. I saw this on One American News Network. So the Department of Health and Human Services, which had already suspended these federal payments to one state, I think it was just Minnesota, has now made that a national thing. So do you think that's a good idea? Probably, because as far as we can tell all the payments of this type were massively fraudulent and it probably affected every state and it's perfectly reasonable to ask them for evidence that the money is going to the right place. So it's not that they can't get the money, it's that they will have to demonstrate with receipts and photo evidence and show that the funds are actually being used in the right way.
Now here's my takeaway from that. I'm trying to imagine any other president who could have done this. You know, even though we recently learned that all these things were giant fakes, do you think that a Democrat would have just said, all right, we're going to stop paying all of you until you can prove it's real? No. And I'm not even sure a Republican could have because there would just be so much pushback. But here's why a regular ordinary Republican and definitely a Democrat president could not have pulled this off, which I think will be an important move. The first thing you had to do was dismantle DEI. If you had not dismantled DEI, then cutting funding in this way would automatically be called racist. But Trump is the only one with enough balls to say, you could call me racist if you want to, but I'm still going to do it. So you had to have an anti-DEI president. No one else could have done this. No one else. Would you agree? I'm looking at the comments right now. Would you agree that no other person as president would have had the tools and the right personality and the guts to do this?
Secondly, and this is important, the only way this would get done is if he wasn't in on the scam. Now even if you say, well, no other president was in on the scam, but their supporters were, s
Episode 3060 CWSA 01/02/26
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an unlimited number of people who live in the building or allegedly live in the building, you can vouch that they are legally allowed to vote even if they don't have ID. So in other words, if I understand this correctly, the janitor of a big building could vouch for every person in the building even if every one of them had been illegal. And that's actually a written law in Minnesota. It's a law. Now, when that law got passed, what was anybody thinking? How in the world? Yeah, there's some paperwork to vouch. How in the world did anybody think that was for anything but cheating in the election? What would be the other reason? You know, usually the Democrats say, "Well, we don't want to suppress voting, so we want to make it easy to vote." There's no way. There's no way that that particular law was to stop suppression of voting. That was purely to make it easier to cheat. I would say you can't say that any other way.
Well, are any other states or cities having problems with fraud? Oh, surprise. Real Clear Investigations says that there was some guy, a city official in Austin who had given a bunch of fake contracts to friends that were fairly gigantic, had been doing it for a while. So let's see how much he got. He was using the city credit card which he was allowed to use for city services but instead of doing city services he used it to pay 30 different vendors but the city auditor could only verify that eight of them were even real companies. And of the real companies do you think those are relatives too or people who gave them kickbacks? So most of the money or a lot of it went to places that appeared to be fake. At the same time, the guy who was doing this was earning over half a million dollars a year in salary. So he was overpaid and he was just massively doling out the city credit card to his presumably fraudster friends.
Now, how long ago was the first time you heard me say this? That all local government is criminal. All local government is criminal. And the reason is this because there's always somebody who's in charge of who gets the money and there's never enough audits or security to stop it from happening fraudulently. So again, a lot of money involved, people involved, time goes by, poor auditing procedures. Was this predictable? Yes. If you took a dart and threw it at a map of the United States and hit any city, you don't think this is happening anywhere else? I'll bet some form of this, maybe not as bad, but I'll bet you some form of this is 100% in every city. 100%. Because whoever has the wallet will be just infinitely approached by people who say, you know, if I got a little bit of what's in that city wallet, I'll bet you a lot of people would donate to your campaign. There's no way this system could produce. If you saw it on paper, if somebody said, "We've never had a city before, but we're going to invent a thing called a city, and here's how it will be run." And you simply just drew on paper who has the control, who's watching it, how money flows, how money is allocated. Anybody smart would know that that was a setup for fraud. So the cities are designed in a way that guarantees fraud, guarantees it. And sure enough, that's what we see.
Well, here's a story about further layoffs in the media world. According to The Wrap, entertainment and media layoffs are up 18%. And 17,000 jobs were slashed in 2025. Now what they mostly mean is the traditional media. So there have been some mergers and cutbacks and stuff. So the traditional media took a hit, but I would argue that that's not the bad news it looks like because the independent journalists and the independent media and I would be part of the independence vastly increased. So it's not really a story about less media employees. It's more a story about less traditional fake news stuff we don't want to see media and way way way more Nick Shattles and Scott Adams's and people who are doing a show independently. So I think that is an evolution, not some kind of a problem. And I love the fact that the jobs that are being created are being created by the people creating them. So it's not like a boss had to create a company that hired people. It's more like people like me said, "What happens if I turn this camera on and start talking? Can I monetize that?" Yep. Turns out I can.
Well, according to SciPost, Karina Petrova, there's a study that says that shocking headlines make people skeptical, but that over time they come to believe the thing that was the shocking headline. Does that surprise you? So the idea is when you first see like a headline that says shocking thing happened here or there and then you read it, you go like, well, you know, I don't know, I'm not sure that's true. Yeah, everybody says everything's shocking. So you automatically put some critical thinking on a headline that just seems a little overdone, but then over time you forget where you saw the headline and you start thinking it must be a fact. So you remember the story, but you won't remember your initial skepticism. So it makes it believable over time. I think probably only if you hear it repeated.
All right. We talked about this before, but this just blows my mind. So San Francisco, a city you would associate with being lax on crime, right? So San Francisco, most people would agree left and right that they would be soft on crime compared to other places. But despite being soft on crime, apparently they have this license plate reading technology called Flock, F-L-O-C-K, and it can read license plates and they've got about 500 of them in major roadways in San Francisco, around San Francisco, and that it's centralized. It must be in other cities too. So they have a centralized nationwide database of more than 1 billion license plate reads each month. Now they're being sued by someone who doesn't want them to be able to track you if there's no warrant. So if there's no reason to track you, at least one individual is suing because he says that should only be they should only track you if they have a warrant and these are warrantless. So apparently you can in most cases you could track a car in San Francisco from wherever it starts to wherever it ends up. How comfortable are you with that? Because remember it's tracking everyone.
Well, how in the world do you stop people from tracking their spouse? Don't you think that every engineer who has access to this thing is already tracking their ex? Find out where their ex goes when they go to work. Probably this would put an end to cheating. But it's weird that the most lenient city would be doing this of all things. Now so far all I know about it is it tracks license plates. I don't believe it does facial recognition, but it would be easy to add it. And I don't believe it has a full AI capability, although obviously that would be coming. So if you take a 500 camera system and you can track license plates, you can track faces which I just assume is coming and you can use AI to make it identify and flag things. You have created quite a monster. That is a monster where you're not going to know where does that end up like how bad will that become you know if they do it gradually like well it's just license plates then it doesn't seem as scary but once you realize there's nothing to stop them really from adding facial recognition and AI what in the world could that become I don't know.
So we always talk about this California wealth tax where they're floating the idea in California that some billionaires would have to give up 1% of their wealth per year for five years. So in the end 5% of their wealth would be taken in taxes apparently. I didn't know this but even Gavin Newsom opposes it but Bill Ackman so it might not happen because you know if the governor opposes it he could veto it. Bill Ackman warns that no one would stay if California implements a wealth tax. Now, we've already seen some billionaires in California state t
Episode 3058 CWSA 12/31/25
