058: What the Hell was 2025?

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
I've had a hell of a year. I've had a good year.
I had a miserable year. Back to posting through it, I'm

(00:33):
Jared Holt. And I'm Mike Hayden.
And Mike is in my Home Office right now.
We are yes, what, 6 feet apart? That's right.
I'm looking at, I'm looking at Pierre to my left right now I
can because I got it. I'm speaking in a different
microphone than usual, so I can't actually move my head to
the left or right, but I am looking at your beautiful dog.
Your apartment is beautiful. There's like 7 inches of snow on

(00:56):
the ground. Oh my God, there's and game
counting and counting. I drive.
I had to drive over here at 15 miles an hour, but yeah.
So today we're starting off our year end content.
This was a pretty weird year, I think.
This. Is a polite way to put it.
So on this episode, we're going to try to answer What the hell?

(01:20):
What the hell? What the hell is 2025?
Yes. But first, we got to give a
shout out to our Patreon supporters.
In the Premium and Executive tier, we've got Ginger Squirrel
and Cow. Thanks so much.
And beyond those two tiers, we've also just had a ton of new
signups over the last couple weeks, and that has been so

(01:45):
awesome. So from the bottom of our
hearts, thank you guys. The Dumber the content we
provide in Premium, the more people who seem to want to
listen to it. Yeah, yeah.
We we try to make this show smart, but I think we're just
going the completely wrong direction here, Mike.
Yeah, All right, Jared. So I, you know, my memory is
deteriorating and I think that'll be showcased as we try

(02:07):
to review the year here. But where were you at the start
of the year? I was working and a nonprofit
job that I no longer have and getting a little frustrated
down, if I can be honest with how things were shaping up, and
I'll probably talk about it a little bit more later.

(02:29):
But I continued to be frustratedwith how things would go.
And I was looking for an outlet and we started talking about
bringing the podcast back. That's right.
And that was kind of the main thing on my mind when the year
turned over. Yeah, I was a get.
I was a frequent guest of the podcast.
And then you asked me, do you want to do it?
Because I As for me, I was, I had, I had just filed my book

(02:54):
Strange People on the Hill. I had just filed it and I was
talking to you and I was like, well, here I am like, I don't
know who, who I am anymore. And you're like, yeah, why don't
you do the why don't you do a podcast with me?
Yeah, and you were coming off ofwriting related injury?
Oh yes, that's. That's true.
Like I, I had been stuck like writing 14 hours a day in one
position and then I would, I would go in like lift weights at

(03:17):
like 4:00 in the morning after Iwas done.
And then this was apparently a very bad thing I learned later
because I was reaching for my glasses in like early January
and my arm just like froze up inpain and like pain shot from my
fingers to my shoulder. And I had to like rehab that
injury. It's called a frozen shoulder.

(03:38):
Apparently this is a thing I didn't even know until I got
one. And only now is my shoulder kind
of semi back but slightly damaged.
So like the rest of me. Good to have you off the bench
and in the content on the on thefield of of the content game.
Like a rod, I'm taking human growth hormone.

(03:59):
Well, on January 6th, the anniversary of Something Awesome
will take place. Yes.
The reboot of posting through it.
That's right. Yes.
So that was it. We did it on January 6th, which
is, I didn't even remember we did that, but it's kind of cool.
Yeah, Did something else happen that day?
I. I can't remember.
I can't remember as far as as far as I'm sure everybody was

(04:19):
innocent. Well anyway, we've got a big
list of stuff. Mike and I have just been
working in a Google document. Putting down all the stuff we
can remember happened this year,so there is a lot to get to, but
I mean, we're just not going to remember everything.
So if you have any complaints, Oh my God, I can't believe Mike

(04:43):
and Jared missed this. Please direct those to Mike's
DMS on blueskyoryoucanemailusshitpostshtpostpodcast@gmail.com.
Our executive producer Pierre Turbo, who is asleep on the
floor. And snoring.
And snoring, if you get some snoring in the background,

(05:04):
that's my dog. But he'll he'll be happy to hear
your request. But first, hi, I'm Jared Mike,
you're listening to posting through it the like most like

(05:24):
it's like the most trusted name in news.
That's right, people are saying that.
Yeah, people ask us how we keep our voice sounding, so whatever.
Yeah, whatever. And the secret is like this
great new products. What is?
I don't remember. It's like it's trying to get

(05:49):
some some mouth smacks from that.
It's it's, it's the the all new Red Scare vocal fry vocal spray
it, it keeps our voices really crispy.
Yeah, but now I'm on a benzo black out.

(06:10):
I, you know, use the Red Scare vocal spray to get myself ready.
Yeah. So this is great for when you
want to sound worse. The ingredients are all natural.
It's just ever clear and rubbingalcohol.
Yes, yes, people want to keep making, keep making us do that.

(06:33):
So if you're if you're in our executive tier, you can always
assign us humiliating tasks likemaking us read that.
All right, let's get into it. What the hell was 2025?
We. Are Charlie Kern We can't read
the flame. Yeah, so I don't remember this

(06:57):
one. How about let's start with that.
By the way, there's a lot of these things.
I'm going to say. I just like, I don't remember
what this was. So it's like there was
apparently a truck attack like acyber like these were two.
Separate things. So, OK, OK.
I don't know on. New Year's.
On New Year's Day at the beginning of this year there was
a truck attack in New Orleans. If I'm remembering correctly

(07:19):
they said the guy was like ISIS brained.
I don't know the exact thing. And then the same day, a guy
parked a Tesla cyber truck outside a Trump hotel in Vegas
and detonated it. OK, OK.
Right, OK. It didn't generate that song.
I just remember there being a lot of photographs of, like, a
flaming cyber truck. Yeah.

(07:40):
Yeah, and people were making, you know, jokes about it of
like, you know what a, what a perfect metaphor life, yes or
whatever then. Like a week later, there was
like, you know, horrific wildfires, which sparked a lot
of climate change fears, understandably, 2, two, $250
billion in property damages by some estimates in Los Angeles,

(08:05):
really horrible. A lot of people's lives were
completely destroyed by that. And around the same time, Meta,
the Facebook, you know, rebrand,disbanded their fact checking
efforts in advance of Donald Trump coming.
Around this time, Donald Trump junior also floated out the idea
of buying Greenland. Yeah, I remember that.

(08:26):
Which remember they like, there was a little trip over there
came out that the people that, you know, had the MAGA hats and
we're like, we would love for this to happen just like paid
off the street or something. That's.
Right. That's right.
Yes, I do remember that, you know.
It didn't seem like anything really came of it, but like what
the fuck was that? I don't.
I don't know. It did make me like all the
footage that I would see on the news of Greenland made me want

(08:48):
to visit. It looked like a really nice
place. That's the only thing I really
remember from that. So, yeah, we were all just kind
of waiting for big, big Trump toto kind of take over at that
time. At that time, Hannah Gase and I
walked around DC on the day of the inauguration.
It was, it was like buck freezing.
It was like absolutely insanely cold, one of the coldest I've

(09:09):
ever been on that day. I remember just like just my my
balls going numb out in the coldout there.
And Hannah and I were just walking around looking for a
place we could go. Like most.
It's just freezing Trump supporters wearing some of them
wearing T-shirts in the cold that would say things like, you
know, my president is a felon orsome fucking thing like that.

(09:30):
Because that was like the big thing at the time.
It was like we elected a a felon.
It was like, you know, their version of of Barack Obama
becoming president. Yeah, there.
Was also like a huge gathering of Proud Boys what happened,
right? Which was like, which was
interesting because that group had been at war with itself for
the longest time, right? It's like the chapters that are

(09:52):
rogue and the chapters that are trying to like get the band back
together post Capital Riot. And the ones that showed up were
the ones that like, disobeyed guidance to not do this because
they were hoping for pardons, which they would end up getting
right. And you saw this wave of pieces
of like the Proud Boys are back,the Proud Boys are back.
What have they done since then? Probably.

(10:14):
Joined ICE. Yeah, that's the answer to your
question. Probably a lot of them are like,
hey, I can get paid to be a Proud Boy.
We'll get there in a minute. But day one in office, Trump
comes in, there's this barrage of executive orders.
The Gulf of Mexico is renamed the Gulf of America for some

(10:35):
reason. That is like a day one priority.
All kinds of refugee protectionsare rolled back and also the
pardoning of capital riot defendants, pardoning and
commuted sentences. But the same effect they got out
of jail, yeah. And and, and then also I just
want to point out quickly with the with the whole Gulf of
America thing, they use that to sort of attack The Associated

(10:58):
Press, if you recall and try to force them to change to, to to
not not printed as the Gulf of Mexico anymore.
It was, you know, one of many attacks on free speech we've
seen in 2025. Yeah.
They also attack civil service protections.
They made it easier to purge federal workers by I think the

(11:19):
way they did that was they rescheduled like some of the
employment thing and made them discretionary and then.
There was, of course, the rally in DC where Elon Musk did his
not Hitler salute that looked exactly like a Hitler salute in
front of everybody and it made everybody upset.
And then that he they sort of backed off from it.

(11:40):
And then weeks later, Steve Bannon also did a very similar
salute in front of people. It was a good time for people
who wanted to air out their their their Nazi salutes.
So. Some other things happened.
You had executive orders. Trump signed some transphobic
executive orders. They are, you know, make their

(12:00):
initial push to rollback reproductive rights.
God, this. Is awful by the way, I just want
to just say like this this this month was awful it was I just
remember living through this it was just horrible continue they.
Pardon the guy who was behind Silk Road.
The online drugs illicit pardons.
Were a big thing this year. Removed inspectors general

(12:23):
killing a lot of aspects of federal oversight and what what
else did we have? They start cutting down US aid.
They launch a initiative to target quote, UN, quote campus
anti-Semitism, which largely is just a a very thin veil to go
after Arab and Muslim college students.

(12:46):
And then there was the plane crash outside of the DC airport,
right? Yeah.
Yeah, there was it was like a commercial jet coming in and
there was some military helicopter doing a training
route and they're like, do you have a visual on that plane?
And from what we know, they werelooking at a different plane and
they're like, Oh yeah, sure. We see that if I.

(13:07):
Recall this correctly, Jared. Like the big thing was when it
happened, they didn't seem to know who was in charge of
something like that. Yeah.
And they have that guy who used to be on the real world or
whatever, who is, who is now, you know, head of
transportation, etcetera. Yeah.
This was a really, I just want to say before we move on from
January, this was a really scarymonth to me because they were on

(13:32):
all cylinders and I was kind of overwhelmed by how fast they
were moving. I think when we talk about
looking back over the course of the year, we can say that
January was really in many ways the high point of mega.
They were riding really, really high here.
And it felt like they had a cultural dominance in many ways.
Like it really felt like Baga had taken over the culture all

(13:54):
together. And certainly I was overwhelmed
and concerned about like, you know, what they could do to the
country. And with good reasons.
They've done a really a lot of horrible, horrible things.
But. Well, if you think about like,
their opening message, right, how many conservative
commentators did you hear say, you know, we have a mandate from
the voters and they came in and they were like, this is what the

(14:17):
country wants and we're going todo it all now.
And I think a lot of institutions, and even still, I
would argue some institutions are still bought into that line,
even though, you know, as peoplewill hear as the year goes on,
it's really kind of proved to behollow.
I think we have. So much to cover, so I'll move
on in a second, but I just want to briefly say that the the the

(14:41):
Nazi salute symbolically, I think is isn't really indicates
like just what was going on culturally.
They're just the feeling that they could do this, that they
had this kind of this kind of fascist mandate, right where
they could just sort of be like this now and woke was dead,
right. That's what everybody's like.
Oh, woke is dead and all this stuff, which is, you know, I

(15:02):
don't know if what whether that's true or not.
We need a lot more time to kind of figure it out, I think.
But like it really, it really I,I felt much more afraid of that
than I do now. And we'll get into why, I think.
Yeah. So some other things that
happened in January, there was aschool shooting at Antioch High

(15:24):
School, No. Memory of that just.
In the Nashville area, I believewe have so much stuff on this
list. I'm going to be.
We're going to start. Ripping through stuff, Yeah.
There's there's going to be details on this I might get
wrong, but this is coming from like my best recollection at the
time, folks. But what made that shooting
notable was that it was done by a teenager who had posted all

(15:46):
this stuff online, Sona and Rads, you know, white
supremacist great replacement stuff.
But the teenager was a young black kid.
And as time would go on, we would learn that this kid was
plugged in with other school shooters by this, this woman who
shot up a school in Wisconsin. There was another kid in

(16:08):
Tennessee that looked like he was going to try to do the same
thing. There was really like a burst of
these shootings. And it continues today.
I mean, there's just so many school shootings now.
It's that you can't track all ofthem.
But this burst of school shootings, particularly at this
moment, that was all spinning off of these online subcultures
that certainly traffic and extremist stuff, but really like

(16:32):
at the brunt of it, they're justobsessed with mass murderers and
mass killers and who leaves behind a lot of material for
them to obsess over and emulate and whatever extremists, right?
So. And it's like, wasn't he like
he's a person of color, right? So, so I, I, I just think that
that's an important thing to note because the, the, the, the
type of folks, like the Dylan Roof type people who would want

(16:54):
to like kind of carry on this leg is like, right, like that.
This is revolutionary spirit in these mass shootings is that's
what they believed they were doing.
It's just really funny in a verydark way that a lot of, you
know, a lot of people of color ended up picking up their their
their thing, right? I mean, it's obviously it's not
funny like that, but I just it it it is just shows that like
how this nihilistic, disgusting worldview is not actually

(17:19):
something that that will ever sort of lift up the white race
in any way. It's just, it's just nihilistic,
sadistic, psychopathic shit. I.
Remember on one of our earlier episodes you made a comment in
passing that I think is held up,which is just that this like
multi racist or multi Freudian slip there multiracial fascism,

(17:44):
multiracial white nationalism, even though that sounds like an
oxymoron, is more potent. Well, you know, I want to make a
quick correction. On a previous podcast, I just, I
mentioned that the shooter that was that was in the The Dark
Knight Rises movie theater shooting.
If you recall that in Colorado, someone correctly pointed out to

(18:06):
be, I said the guy was like dressed like a Joker.
Apparently he was not actually dressed like the Joker.
He just had red, red hair. So I, I cracked that.
But the point was largely that the mass shootings that had
happened before Trump's rise, you know, they, they felt much
more just general nihilistic, chaotic, whatever.
And then when this great replacement stuff started to pop

(18:27):
off, then people started to graph that onto their shootings
to give it some meeting. Last thing in January because we
if, if we're going to get through this in a reasonable
amount of time and not drive your listeners crazy, we're just
going to have to keep our foot on the pedal January.
Was particularly crazy and that's, you know, we we have to
mention. That last thing that I think is

(18:47):
important to note in January is this is when a Chinese AI
company called DeepSeek started to really make the US tech
market nervous because they wereable to produce an AI model that
was as or better in terms of reliability and consistency to

(19:10):
what open AI was making with ChatGPT.
What all these companies have told lawmakers and stuff.
Well, we have to, we, we need 7 gazillion dollars and we need
all these data centers because that's the only way to win.
They were able to do it for likepennies on the dollar and be
just as effective with lesser hardware and stuff.

(19:31):
So this was an important moment,right?
Because this hap is happening around the same time that the
Trump administration is bringingpeople like David Sachs and all
these tech guys. That guy socks.
It's so annoying, all these people that have like a
financial interest in making sure the government protects
these companies. And like, eventually, I think

(19:52):
probably the play is that they will bail them out somehow or,
or like soften the blow because they've raised so much money.
There's no way they're going to make it all back.
There's just no model to make that much money, you know?
So in this, really, this was like kind of the first, to me
anyway, like Clear Pierce in theveil.

(20:14):
Where these guys started to get nervous and started to really,
really pick up the pace on trying to cozy up to the
government, yes. This is a good place for me to
introduce you to the song Save U.S.
President G, which is my favorite AI song, and I'm going
to make sure that you clip it here.

(20:37):
OK, so February, yeah, it's my birth month, so I'm well aware
of the fact that it's the worst month of the year.
So there's there's doge cuts that was happening.
That was a big deal. There was the hawk to a coin.
You remember that, Jared? Oh yeah.
We did that episode with Matt Binder, yes.
Yes, where I mean, there's a lotof because because of all the

(20:59):
deregulated crypto and the belief that the Trump
administration would just let crypto people do whatever they
wanted, which is true. That would like there were all
these shitty meme coins bouncingaround.
Crypto was going crazy. And then Jared Skrilla, the
rapper Skrilla, who I believe isfrom Chicago, where we are right
now, released a song called DootDoot.

(21:20):
And in it the Skrilla says 6-7 quite a bit.
And this was the start of what Ithink, arguably is the meme of
the year, particularly among Generation Alpha, who seemed to
like, really, really love. That yeah, I don't really get
it, but let's let's just listen to that part of the song real
quick, bro. Put a belt ray today behind the

(21:40):
way that switch group. I know he died 6-7.
I just bit right on the highway.Listeners, I'll be honest, Mike
and I, we're both too old to to even begin to understand this,
but thankfully we do have some generation alpha correspondence.
Yes, we do. I have two sons and 1 is in 3rd

(22:03):
grade and 1 is in 7th grade. And just for an idea of how I've
encountered the 6-7 meme, the third I've seen 1/3 grader in
Little League go up to somebody be like how tall is Lamello ball
and the person with a 6-7 and they will do a like some sort
of, you know, handshake high 5 afterwards.

(22:24):
So I asked the these these gentlemen, my my sons to explain
this for US 6. 7 is a term used from a song Doot Doot by
Scarrilla and it's also lamella balls height.
A famous basketball player in the NBA.
Also some random TikTok kids said it and went viral.

(22:45):
The main purpose of saying it isto frustrate adults like
teachers and parents 6/7. I'm glad that we have, you know,
we're expanding the posting through it universe.
We have correspondence now, yeah.
They won't let me play the podcast.
I'm going to like to listen to the podcast back just to see how
I'm doing and they'll be like, Idon't want to hear your podcast.

(23:07):
That's your radio voice. This is boring.
That's what I get from them, butI'm glad they contributed we've.
Got also a lot of like AI. Yes, like that President Ji
thing. I gave you just now that's
growing. AI is starting to populate more
and more. We're going to get into that a
little bit later, I think, when when SORA 2 comes out.

(23:28):
But RFK Junior is sadly confirmed that Health and Human
Services, that's a black mark onour country.
JD Vance and Trump met with Zielinski, if you recall.
That was a big deal. Oh yeah.
Gave birth to a lot of memes. Yeah, yeah, they they basically
had him in and just proceeded totry to ritually humiliate him.

(23:52):
Yeah. So.
It's a yes, basically. And, and he said, like, what did
he say? Like, I mean, they stopped just
short of, like, calling him a bitch.
Yeah, So what? Did what did he say was like,
have you ever said thank you? And that became like a really
big meme. What is the actual thing?
He said. Thank.
You once this entire meeting, No, in this entire meeting, you
said thank you today. You went to Pennsylvania and

(24:13):
campaigned for the opposition inOctober.
Offer some words of appreciationfor the United States of America
and the president who's trying to save your country.
Please. You're saying that if you will
speak very loudly about the war,you he's not.
Speaking loudly OK as. This is happening you They're
ratcheting up deportations and it's getting really scary.

(24:36):
This was really bad. Also I got to say the vibes are
in January. February so bad.
Yeah. Horrible.
They're cracking down on asylum seekers and refugee status.
There's regulatory rollbacks of all kinds going on.
They're accelerated. At the time that this is
happening, you start to see the first pushbacks against MAGA in

(24:57):
general like that. There was the whole soy right
thing, Matt. We had Max read on to talk about
it, to sort of define what soy right meant, yeah.
Yeah, it it was kind of the moment where it seemed like MAGA
was losing its cultural cool. It was like the memes.
Weren't biting as hard right? They didn't have libs to attack
anymore. This is the first time we start

(25:19):
to think about Mag as the dominant cultural voice, rather
than something that is pushing back hard against liberalism.
They. Go from being the bold outsiders
and now they control everything,right?
So it's like, are they fighting against themselves?
You're not really fighting against the deep state.
You're not really fighting against liberal orthodoxy.

(25:39):
Everything's your stuff now, andpeople are looking around and
being like this. This is kind of lame.
Yeah, we. See, a lot of panic around this
time around, repression of free speech, which is something that
they were very big on advocating.
And then the whole thing before is that you were biting like
they were biting at the heels ofliberalism.
You're not letting us say what we want to say.

(25:59):
You're not letting us do what wewant to do, right?
And at this time, like this is completely flipped because you
had in Idaho, for example, Teresa Borenfall, who was a
woman who had been who had showed up at a lot of, you know,
events before started yelling back at a town hall that were it

(26:20):
was hosted by Republicans in Coeur d'Alene Idaho.
And this horrific video emerges of these men dressed in black,
Not even police dragging her brutally out of the I forgot.
About this, yes. Yes.
And so she's dragged out of the that event and it's really scary
part because she's a woman and they are treating her like she

(26:42):
is a piece of meat. And I think this really spoke to
a lot of critics of MAGA and opponents of the Magas ideology
from the center to the far left,you know, the whole spectrum of
MAGA opponents. People start to feel really
freaked out about where this could go and how empowered goons
like this might be. Well, Speaking of goons, the

(27:04):
Eric Adams case has dropped around this time.
This is. Big because was we'll find out
this helps give birth to bomb Donnie later.
But yeah, I mean, Adams was really corrupt.
We went we went through that on our episode around them Donnie
in the New York mayoral race. But basically Adams would be,
you know, would would take a bribe of literally a $15
sandwich would be enough for him.

(27:25):
Like he was doing almost anything.
He was, he was spending a lot oftime in Turkish airports
randomly. Yeah.
So he was, you know, he was saved by Trump around the same
time the eagles blow out the chiefs.
Patrick Mahomes kind of, you know, indestructible status is
is removed. He starts to look human all of a

(27:48):
sudden. And what, what was Binder Gate?
I, I I don't remember it at first glance.
So. Binder gate, Something very
important for the rest of the year happened, which is this is
when the White House brought in like Libs of TikTok and Mike
Cernovich. Oh, OK.
I know what this is. OK, sorry.
Like legitimately like, if you think I'm acting on the podcast,

(28:08):
I actually for a minute didn't now I fucking remember.
Yeah. So you.
Had like Jack Pacovic, Mike Cernovich, right?
They had the Epstein files in their hands.
All of. These people that have like.
Thank you for putting the made their bread and.
Butter online calling people pedophiles.
They're like we. Have the truth.
About Epstein, we want. You And then they hand them a
binder full of like, redacted documents that are already

(28:31):
public because of court cases completely unrelated to the
Trump administration. Yeah, here's.
Your here's your Epstein fuck face and.
Then it's like, you know, the classic Q Anon joke of like two
more weeks, two more weeks more are coming.
And this is around the time I, Imean, they get a lot of backlash
because, you know, at first MAGAis like, oh hell yeah, my boy

(28:51):
Jack posobic. He's got the Epstein file.
Yeah, he made. That picture where he's like,
his face was like, it looked like a, like a, like a, like a,
a, you know, like a, if you like, let a, a dishwashing like
sponge dry out for a very long time and it shrinks his, his,
his forehead look like that. And he was like holding up the
Epstein binder, looking very serious.
This was the beginning of the time that we live in now, which

(29:14):
is shit changed. This around the time Pam Bondi
is like we have the Epstein client list, which, as we've
covered on our previous episode,probably doesn't exist a client
list that would be that would bea pretty weird thing to keep.
Yes You know and this rumored client list, which has been sort

(29:34):
of the driver of all these online rumors Pam Bondi's like I
have it on my desk we're going to look at it and then, you know
we'll probably touch on it as wego.
But in the weeks and months to come, the FBI would get and DOJ
would get really quiet and then started to come out and was

(29:54):
like, I think Dan Pongino's words were like, I've seen
suicides and that that was a suicide.
He definitely killed himself. And there's nothing to see here.
And we're not going to be releasing anything else because
think of the victims, you know, because women's safety, that's
something MAGA really cares about, right?
Right. Right, right, and.

(30:15):
And the fan base is is livid. Yeah.
So at this point, USAID is shuttered completely.
Company started rolling back DEIstuff to to to sort of meet the
new cultural moment. Like I said, it really felt like
a sea change at that time. And there are Texas declared A
measles outbreak. RFK Junior is in charge of that.

(30:39):
It looks insane. And then there was the Tesla
takedown protests, which became very big.
Yeah. Lots of protests at Tesla
showrooms and also a lot of vandalism of Tesla chorus.
Indirect response to Elon Musk'spolitics.
That gets bigger in March, whichwe'll get to in a second.
But right now is where you have peak February is like peak Elon

(31:03):
Musk backlash. It is really starting to heat
up. And I think there were polls at
the time that showed he was likeless popular than cancer, and he
was. He was like one of the most
unpopular public figures in America, I think.
Yeah. Like in American history, as he
should be. He is a completely horrific
person. Who it, it looked obvious to me,

(31:23):
this is my, you know, me, just my editorializing here.
But it really looked to me like he bought the presidency to some
extent with the amount of money he spent on it and was given
permission to do some shit he wanted that Trump would just let
him do shit. And that's the way it looked.
There were big pro immigrant protests nationwide at the end

(31:46):
of February and we were startingto see the beginnings of people
feeling comfortable saying fuck this shit, we don't like this,
which is important. Before we flip the March, I was
going to say, which is importantbecause there were very, there
were almost no protests when I went down in in January, people.
Were legitimately scared. Yeah, people.

(32:06):
Were scared into their homes, itfelt like and that made this
January and February months particularly concerning for me.
Like I really felt like, Oh no, Oh my God, that can do anything
to us. And this is where they start to
push back. So March the Tesla takedown
protest really spills over into the way the bag of people would
put it on violence against Tesla, right?

(32:27):
Like people started to key up cyber trucks.
Also at the same time, I just want to point out that I
remember that it's not on the list, which is parts like the
the exterior of cyber trucks started to fall off because it
was found out that they were glued on, which is like, bro,
you paid $90,000 for this. In some cases you paid over
$100,000 for this cyber truck because it has like whatever

(32:49):
trimmings and fixings. Yeah, now you're the exterior of
your car. You could have got a Mustang for
1/3 of the price, which is a very fine automobile in my
opinion. So you've got like these
protests which are just like whatever and then juxtapose to
it, not directly related to it, even though MAGA wanted to try
to claim they were related. You've got the these attacks on

(33:12):
the Tesla dealership. Some of them get pretty serious.
I'm talking like arsons. There were a couple instances
where people fired guns into these showrooms.
Yeah, that's right. That's usually this was
happening in the middle of the night.
The risk to life, you know, putting in my analyst brain, the
risk to life there was like minimal, you know, didn't seem
like they're trying to kill people, but like legit it was

(33:33):
legit dangerous, you know, and some some people got arrested
for it, charged for it not. Going to stay pro or against but
the the the fury against Musk, the fury against Trump growing
and showing was a big factor I think in starting to make these
people go on their back feet, which is again doesn't happen
yet but it is the beginning of people punching back against

(33:56):
this shit this. This isn't on our list, but do
you remember when this was happening?
Like when it was really ramping up, Pam Bondi came out and was
like, we are going to catch the terrorist vandalizing cyber
trucks. And then also remember when Elon
went to the White House and theybasically filmed like an ad for

(34:17):
Tesla? Yeah, that must have been around
March, dude, How do? Well, it's OK, We we, there's
too much shit, but that. But yeah, that, well, I think
it's fair to just say that that's an extension of that,
that that happened. Or just sort of like Trump's,
like Tesla, Tesla or whatever. This is a different panel that
I've had. Everything's computer.
So yeah, the scary stuff continues.

(34:40):
ICE arrests a guy that no one's ever heard of at this point.
Or at least some people have heard of, but it's really local,
which is Mahmoud Khalil that becomes one of the biggest
stories of 2025, particularly for people who are in the
activist community. He becomes the face of free
speech oppression and also the attack on pro Palestinian

(35:03):
demonstrators. When he's arrested.
There are there's also somebody arrested in Georgetown on the
similar grounds. These are people who have green
cards. So this, this becomes, you know,
very, very scary. I obviously know a lot of people
who are on green cards who are also activists and things like
that. It is it's, it sends ripples.
There's also somebody in in the Massachusetts area who is

(35:25):
Turkish, I believe, who is also arrested around that time.
I remember the evidence they cited and that one was that she
wrote like an op-ed for the student paper that criticized
Israel, right? So they were like, we got to we
got to do something and there's and again, like just to go back
to it. You mentioned it earlier, but
like this informs, I think the cultural turn that we would see

(35:48):
through the year against MAGA because this is these are the
people that are like the liberalcensorship, the social media
companies are blocking us from saying whatever, blah, blah,
blah. Meanwhile, once they get in
power, they're using the State Department and, like, federal
agencies to arrest people for writing columns in a student

(36:09):
newspaper. Yeah.
How many people you think read that?
Yeah, exactly. Well, more.
Afterwards, which is which is why there was so much blowback
for them. I think in part because this
was, I think a lot of people whoare more libertarian minded on
the right were disturbed by that.
And yeah, not a great year, actually, I'm starting to

(36:29):
realize. No, no, not too good.
Yeah, OK, So they pardon this guy, Devin Archer.
Who's that? He's a securities fraud person.
And here's a big one, Jared. We start to see the flow of
people into Secot, the El Salvadorian torture prison,

(36:50):
right? We had we had Nikki Ramirez on
to talk. About not not a great moment.
You have 238 Venezuelan people were sent there.
And it includes another big namefrom 2025, which is Abreo
Garcia, who had no real reason to no one had any real reason to
believe that he was a threat to Maryland, the area where he

(37:13):
lived. And their evidence for him being
in a gang was that he wore a bull's hat.
And yeah, it was just like classic paranoid cop stuff,
right? It's it's in the government
early on in the legal battle over this, admitted that he was
supported by mistake, yes, and then tried to retcon it later.

(37:36):
Remember, it was the like captive dipshit guy he made.
He made God. I can't believe Captain Dreamer
made it into the top Captain Dreamer.
For people who who haven't heardthe episode, we did well but
with Steven Monticelli and and Hannah Gays.
Is this just sadistic asshole who has a Twitter account?
X account, Whatever you want to do with what's his name on it,

(38:00):
It was. Like Dave.
Koresh, David. Koresh on it he.
Has a new account. It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter. He's just some guy who posts
selfies of himself and says likethis is what an American is,
even though I think he like he'slike split Canadian, something I
can't, doesn't matter. I don't care, I.
Don't care. But he he had done some weird
stupid stuff and then they used his his slightly distorted image

(38:24):
to kind of prove that Abrea Garcia was MS13.
Yeah, they. Tried to like look at.
Some of this is like a drinking game where you're just trying to
remember what happened this year.
Like, yeah, OK, this some of this shit is so insane.
It was. Like his hand tattoos and there
was like, I want to, I'm going to misremember this, but like a
:) and a pot leaf. Yeah, there's a pot leaf

(38:44):
involved on it and. And they're like, that's proof
of the gang thing. So it's like, OK, so it's like
the government admitted early they're like, yeah, whoopsie.
We accidentally sent him to thislike, forever prison.
But also we don't regret it. Like, like they, they refused to
retrieve the remedy, the situation.
Yeah. And then there was this.

(39:05):
I don't want to mispronounce hisname, but Andre Jose Hernandez
Romero was his name. And he he gets talked about less
than Abreo Garcia, but he was a he's an openly gay makeup artist
and I think hairdresser. Oh, I.
Remember this? Yeah.
And he was also deported. It's really scary and horrific.
I mean, the guy, all the pictures of him, he looks like

(39:27):
completely gentle and, you know,and also looks like the type of
person would be pretty vulnerable in an El Salvadorian
torture prison. But yeah, whatever.
And. And something else I want to say
about flying these people out tothis Venezuelan torture prison
is that the courts were like, what the hell are you doing?

(39:47):
You can't do this. And they tried to go into court
and they're like, the planes were already in the air when you
told us we couldn't do it. Whoopsie.
And then when and then. This is like Stephen Miller
special. Yeah, this.
Is this is like, you know, throughout the whole year, the
Trump administration has been trying to say fuck you to the
courts. Like, you know, the court is

(40:08):
like, hey, you have to stop doing that.
And they're like, well, we're not going to.
So now what? Who's going to arrest us?
Yeah, You know, and this was like a really big one for them.
So they're. Still high on their own supply
and they believing that they're above the law, etcetera.
So and also I always should say that the approval of the Trump
administration at this time was unpleasantly stable considering

(40:32):
they're doing these things, which is also really scary.
So I think it's like a good place to quickly mention that
the ADL became a little subplot and story for people like us in
particular, just because they had sort of ran, They ran
defense in the Mahmoud Khalil case and had shown a lot of

(40:53):
tendencies to side with MAGA despite these horrific human
rights violations that were going on.
And not that I had very high hopes for the ADL as an
institution, but this was particularly shocking.
Yeah, because it's, it's one thing to be like, you know, oh,
OK, they don't want to go after them really hard because I don't

(41:16):
know, you know, they, they want to, we'll talk about this later,
you know, keep training federal law enforcement or keep in the
good graces of their donors who might be right wing, you know.
So it's it's one thing to see them come out and kind of run
some light cover or at least refuse to participate in
condemning things, but it's another thing for them to, like,

(41:37):
cheer the arrest of Khalil. Yeah.
For doing nothing, right, Which has since been vindicated in
court. So how'd that age, ADLII?
Do think that since this time there have been a lot of,
there's been a lot of articles and a lot of different things
and it seems like the ADL statushas been lowered.

(41:58):
But I can't prove that exactly because they still trot him out
onto MSNBC or what is now Ms. Now.
Yeah. I mean, I guess we didn't.
Include, by the way, Jared the the date that MSNBC changed her
name to Ms. Now, not one of the more notable things, but that
does happen later. I mean, from what I've heard
though, ADL fundraising is through the roof.

(42:19):
I, I don't know if that will sustain, you know, if the way
that they're acting with MAGA iscorroding all their
relationships, right? What is there to fundraise on at
a certain point, you know, but right, I don't know.
I am a worker. I don't run places like this
well. We had talked about doing
biographical reporting in through podcasts on some of the

(42:43):
people that we cover generally, and we did our first Who the
Hell is episode on Jack Bezobic in March.
Oh. Yeah, and I.
Will promise to the audience that sometime in 2026 we will do
Part 2 of Jack Bezobic because we ended it.
There's so much to cover with that guy that we will we will
pick that up again. But that was the first time we
ever did one of those. And then later that month we did

(43:04):
Tim Poole. Christy Gnome visited Sakat in
March and did a photo op, and I think that was an important
moment because it showed how horrific and sadistic this
administration really could be. And I don't think it played out
well for them. And the public opinion didn't.

(43:26):
It didn't shift immediately, butI think it was a big factor in
starting to perceive these people as evil.
Well, over in the Middle East, with the blessing of the Trump
administration, Israel resumes pretty steady and violent deadly
attacks in Gaza. One that sticks out is they just

(43:49):
a brutal massacre of aid workersthere.
And then you're starting to see,you know, reports would file in
from different agencies throughout the year, but the
beginning of people noting that,hey, people are having a really
hard time getting food here because Israel's blocking aid

(44:09):
shipments coming in. Yeah.
I. Almost can't talk about this.
I'm so disgusted. But yes, people were massacred
just walking around. People are just getting shot.
It was a very unpleasant thing to see.
And then, well, there was a MahaCommission, yeah.
We need to do an episode about the Make America Healthy Again
stuff. Yes, that is out of my depth.

(44:29):
We'll get somebody good for that.
Yeah, we'll. Have to find a good there.
There are people covering this well, and then there, then there
was the signal gate thing. Oh, yeah, To wrap up the month,
yeah. I mean, Jeffrey Goldberg of all
people was was included in a in a group that was like Stephen
Miller and like a bunch of otheridiots.
Yeah. Just just talking, you know,

(44:49):
having a loose texting conversation about military
strategy, yes. Not the tightest ship, all
right. So we're at April now, Yes.
Huge thing happens in April, which is the release of the
Minecraft movie featuring Jack Black.
Yes. I I didn't see it.
I. Also did not see it.
ICE continued their arrests of green card, green card holders.

(45:14):
Mohsen Madawi was also one of these folks.
Arrested Palestinian men and that was one of the quickest
blowbacks. I think they're there.
There were, because he was released fairly quickly.
Yeah, yeah. They're losing the plot on
these, losing public support forit.
What they're also losing public support for is the Sukkot

(45:34):
Venezuelan torture prison that they're sending immigrants to.
Yeah, I think. A lot of people heard the words
torture prison bandied about anddid not like it.
Garcia, who we mentioned earlier, his story ends up
clashing. You know, like I said earlier,
the Trump administration's in court trying to defend this for
some reason, trying to defend something they admitted early on

(45:56):
was done in error during this time.
The leader goes to the White House and yeah, but Kelly meets
with Trump in the White House. Something big in my life
happens, which is that Rory McIlroy completes a career Grand
Slam by winning the Masters likethe last I.

(46:20):
Don't know, I don't even know who he is.
So just to be. Clear he hadn't clenched with,
which puts him in a very small group of golfers.
And if anybody watched the Masters on TV, that last round
was it. It was some of the most like
entertaining sports I've watchedon TV and golf.
And golf is not like normally anexciting one to watch on TV.

(46:44):
But it's just the way he did it at the end.
Just these like crazy shots on what is notoriously one of the
hardest golf courses in the world to play at tournament
time. He he earned it.
I'm taking. Your word for it.
He's also one of the few people that I know named Rory.
So April 28th. This is a big thing here, Jared.

(47:07):
This woman named Shiloh Hendrix.Oh.
God, yeah, she. Was a mom who looked like she'd
been through some stuff. It just looked like she'd had a
kind of a tough life. That was the that was the energy
that she was bringing. In the video, she's in a
playground surrounded by a person with there's a person who

(47:29):
was filming her. Well, I guess was a Somalian
immigrant or something like that.
I can't recall some whatever it was.
And there was also a child who is a black child and she used
the N word at the camera person and the child.
And this, you would think, wouldbe extremely damaging and

(47:52):
discrediting to her, as it should be.
But it wasn't. And she ended up raising
hundreds of thousands of dollarsfrom basically online white
supremacist, which was a sort ofa scary look into what X can
actually do culturally. Yeah, it.
And this was, I think, another moment where MAGA coming in

(48:16):
being like, yeah, we're the bad guys, and the voters wanted us
to be the bad guys. We're OK with still.
Using the N word on a child, yeah.
Yeah, that's that's another thing, you know, it's maybe
you're following along with MattWalsh or whatever, and then
suddenly he's defending this woman accosting a child with a
racial slur, being like, we're not going to apologize for this

(48:38):
anymore. And something else about the
Shiloh Hendricks thing. This playbook has since been
used as we covered on the What'shis face?
That guy that dressed up as Kenneth.
Moron, Kenneth. Moron.
Yeah, like racist going out doing.
Something dumb facing. Consequences and then turning
around and trying to spin up money like Shiloh Hendricks.

(49:00):
Yes. Yeah.
And few. I I should know, very few have
been successful in the same way that she was.
Yes. She was sort of the 1st and she
kind of it's sort of like look like the start of a trend that
may not necessarily continue. We'll we'll have to see.
But the Glee with which people seem to want to celebrate this
woman made my stomach churn and a lot of other people.

(49:24):
And for anybody who thinks that,like, racism is dead in American
post racial America, I will giveyou the Shiloh Hendrix debacle.
Yeah. So we mentioned earlier charges
against Eric Adams. They were ordered to be dropped.
They are dropped at this time. Then we have the Liberation Day
tariffs, which is where Trump I,I think it was on April Fool's

(49:47):
Day actually. Oh yeah, that was.
Earlier in the month, yeah. It showed up with these poster
boards being like this is all the tariffs that people charge
us and we're going to charge them right, right.
They. Toileted the economy briefly.
I mean, the economy is still in bad shape, by the way, I would
say. But I was saying like the stock
market and everything was really, really leading for a
second, yeah. Yeah, we'll talk about this

(50:09):
later. It's like the stock market is
still OK on the whole, but the economy is bad.
I I don't know enough about thisstuff to really I think. 2026,
I'm not an economist, so I don'tknow, but I think 2026 could be
pretty scary like the we'll, we'll, we'll talk about that
when we get to our year end stuff, yeah.
I don't know how tariffs work. This this is you know, I I will

(50:31):
know that Trump on a lot of these tariffs has since backed
off or adjusted or recalibrated.They didn't stick around.
So liberation will have to wait for another day, I suppose.
Yes. Also, something that happens in
April, 4 Chan, the anonymous image board that has been like a

(50:56):
core sewer of the Internet. Very important place online.
Yeah, of course. It's like, as Crow says, you
could argue. That you could argue that Trump
would have never taken power without 4 Chan.
You could argue, yeah. Yeah, I mean certainly other
factors, but it was like the the2016 campaign had 4 Chan.

(51:17):
Every online disinfo campaign orinfluence campaign seemed to
start on that stupid disgusting forum.
Yeah. So it went dark for a week.
There were some writers that kind of rushed out to declare 4
Chan was dead or would never be the same.
I remember I was getting hit up by reporters around this time of

(51:38):
like, well, what's going to happen?
And like, well, 4 Chan does not hold the same cultural spot it
used to in terms of right wing politics.
I think I'm actually going to write a piece about that
probably later this year, early next year, just about like what
that changes look like in terms of its relationship to the MAGA

(51:59):
movement. But I, I did publish a piece
earlier this year just looking at the volume of posts on 4 Chan
and there's more stuff being posted on that image board, you
know, every day now then before it went dark.
So the people who declared 4 Chan was dead?

(52:19):
It's a little premature, right? Almost the start of a 4 Chan
renaissance and it's. Different.
It's a different site than it was in 2016, but that change
just happened gradually and then.
There, George Santos was sentenced at this time.
No, that's too bad. Well, May comes along and you
know the weather is warming up as it tends to happen.

(52:43):
And a rapper who we all know andlove.
Who used to go by the name KanyeWest released a new album?
Yeah, it was something that as awhite man, I cannot repeat, but
but the name of the album, I think is the name of the album
was Heil Hitler. Yeah.

(53:03):
And we talked about it on an episode, yes.
We did yes, it was a yes it, butbut the more the more
interesting part of it, which I think we isolated on a podcast
once was the the opening verse to it, which was like I'm.
Gonna see I'm on benzos, I'm whatever the.
Hell, he was rapping. They took my kids from me.
They took. My kids from me and I.
It's basically just like my lifeis horrible, yeah.

(53:27):
Man these people took my kids from me then they post my bank
account. I got so much anger with me got
no way to take it out then got stuck in a matrix.
When I post my nitrous and saying my cook.
I like when people fuck on my this shit and I post on my
Twitter they telling me you ain't don't say that how ***
can't see me in public. I'm driving I'll call me back
with all of the money you pay. I still can't get my kids back.

(53:51):
I still don't get to see my children.
You can see my Twitter, but theydon't see how I be feeling.
So I became a lassie. Yeah, bitch, I'm the villain.
The horrors in Gaza continue in May.
There's deliberate starvations, starvation of Palestinians on
the part of Israelis. Not good, obviously.

(54:13):
There's a massacre on Weather Street Market, which kills 33
Palestinians and wounds 90 others.
On May 13th, there was a bombingof another hospital in Gaza.
And yeah, and then it's. On the backdrop of all of this,
that a man who is actually from Chicago, not too far from here,

(54:35):
went to DC and shot and killed 2Israeli embassy staffers who
were at some kind of networking,conferencing type of thing.
This made a lot of headlines just for how shocking it was.
Yeah. You know what's interesting
about that? Because it was a deliberate act

(54:57):
of political assassination, terrorism, whatever you want to
call it, but it didn't make thatbig a wave in my opinion.
Like, you don't, you really don't hear people talk about it
much considering what it was, right?
You don't know. Usually people go up in a
political assassination like that, kill two people and then
it sort of disappear into the news to some degree.
But I think that that what it was really tied up in or

(55:20):
overshadowed by some of the horrors that were going on in
the Middle East. People almost didn't pay
attention to it or didn't seem to get as riled up about it as
they might have in previous years.
So. Some other stuff happens in May.
Chicago Pope, Pope Leo, and I should note the previous Pope
that. Francis, Pope.
Francis died shortly after meeting JD Vance.

(55:43):
Yes, yeah, which is which is what I would do.
I would just die if I met JD Vance.
Yeah. I, you know, for the sake of of
reporting and our newsworthiness, I have no
evidence that these things are related, but I'm just asking
questions if I sound. Haunted at all as I told you
before we did this podcast I hadJD advance appeared in my dream

(56:04):
last night looking like gaunt and like very sad so it's like I
like I'm carrying that around with me all the time so we.
Got a Chicago Pope? He's a fan of the Chicago White
Sox, so he's definitely familiarwith the plight of human
suffering. Hey, they won more recently than
the Mets, so I've been other. Things in May, the Trump

(56:25):
administration, there's some rumblings of this before May,
but this is when it really picksup.
They take a hard interest in refugees from South Africa.
I've done a lot of writing aboutthis years and years ago.
I mean, this, this almost felt like a throwback to me, you
know, 767 years ago. Oh, shit, I said 6-7.

(56:47):
Your kids are going to go nuts if they listen to this.
So basically there's like a verysmall group of far right, you
know, just nut cases in South Africa that ever since the end
of apartheid have been like thisgovernment is repressing white
people, specifically Afrikaners.And a lot of this has to do

(57:09):
with, forget the exact word, butbasically this farmland, these
lands that were stolen by forestduring apartheid from people of
color, black farmers, that sort of thing.
The government is going in and basically forcing the sale of it
and then making it public, that sort of thing.

(57:30):
And they are, you know, for years and years you'd go on
places like Stormfront or the Daily Storm or whatever.
This is like their big civil rights, Global civil rights,
yeah. They're like, look, this is the
spot and to be. Fair there, there have been some
S that white South African farmers who were like butchered
and killed. And sometimes there's like
they'll be, you know, those incidents that have been

(57:53):
extremely violent or whatever, they have been blown up to a
tremendous degree. And we see that that we see that
also in the United States whenever there is some act of
black on white violence, right? It can be disproportionately
huge online due to the fact thatit's so racially changed and
that they're the online white reactionary movement is it's

(58:20):
will so aggressively push it in people's faces to play the role
of victim. Yeah.
And during the first Trump administration, after watching a
segment on this on Tucker Carlson show when he was he was
on Fox News at the time he did direct was Mike Pompeo that
Secretary of State to look into it?
And I'm sure Mike Pompeo was like, yeah, sure, sure, man.

(58:43):
Yeah, we're on it. But Marco Rubio is totally down
to play ball. Well, Marco.
Rubio is down to do literally whatever.
He will. He will.
He will. He will lick mustard off of
Trump's shoes, dude. I What does he have on that guy?
But they flew in a plane full ofSouth Africans later on in the
year. We'll talk about more about this
later. But they have since restricted

(59:06):
the number of refugees that thiscountry will accept, and they're
prioritizing white South Africanspecifically.
So it'll keep coming up and showJoe Biden.
Yes, he announces cancer diagnosis.
Yeah. Prostate cancer, yeah.
I haven't heard much about him recently, Joe.
Biden Yeah, yeah, I I don't knowsince the.

(59:28):
Diagnosis is sort of he like, he's almost like he was never
here anyway. Well, Scott Adams around the
same time came forward about hiscancer diagnosis.
Who is he? Jared he.
Is the creator of the Dilbert cartoon and he lives in a
Dilbert shaped house I. Forgot about that.
Used to live used. To live there with his much

(59:48):
younger, much younger wife who Ithink has left him.
No, I don't know that's. That's too bad, but he he turned
MAGA or basically became a vocalMAGA personality.
In, you know, the 2016 election and continued as such and

(01:00:10):
embraced a lot of, like, really racist stuff, if I recall
correctly, in the middle of the Biden years.
Yeah. Yeah, and, you know, he kind of
rose onto the scene. We'll have to do a who the hell
is on him because that because like that's a guy.
If you're scrolling, you see hima lot and a lot of people just
don't understand how he got he's.
He's beloved by the sort of JackPozobic Mike Cernovich.

(01:00:33):
That that that genre of guy likethey they love Scott well.
His whole genre of commentary for the longest time was, you
know, I, I would summarize it asthe like, Trump's playing 4D
chess kind of thing, you know? Yeah.
Yeah, he was that. Basically trying to give like,
well, he said. You used to say he used to say
Trump is like a high tea individual.

(01:00:54):
Do you remember that? There used to be like he's got a
lot like Trump is a high testosterone and you know his
this opponent is low testosterone and he used to do
sort of, you know, brain scienceon on bullshit.
Well. Getting into June, that's my
birth month. I finally turned 12 years old.
Congratulations. And yeah, it's a big, big day.

(01:01:15):
And next year, I'll be a teenager for real.
Before you say this, I just wantto say something here because I
think it's important to like, like span out a little bit.
Sure. This is kind of the month where
I view. So we, we talked a little bit
earlier about January, February,how dark it was.
Felt like we were under a, a, a cloud all the time and it was
very scary and we didn't know what we were going to do and

(01:01:37):
blah, blah, blah. And things were really, I don't
know, just it just felt like there were no options to push
back against Baga. I'm going to pick June as the
month where that changes a little bit.
It's not like this. The year starts to suck less
because it still sucks ass. OK, the weather's warm.

(01:01:58):
That's nice. But not, you know, look at it
right, You start the month here.Trump has this really dumb
fringe military parade. Oh.
Yeah, yeah. And.
That's the moment for me in which you just get an inkling of
daylight. Yeah, that's fair.
Yeah, because that parade was just pathetic.

(01:02:19):
Yeah. It was.
It was one of the stupidest. And wasn't it sponsored?
By like a cryptocurrency company, it was.
It was, There were no, The attendance was abysmal.
You had a bunch of soldiers dressed up in like, you know,
throwback uniforms, right? Like they'll be like, this is
like, you know, the War of 1812 unity or whatever and all this
blah, blah, blah. And Trump was sitting there half

(01:02:41):
asleep looking miserable. And you remember we, when we,
when we covered it on our pod, we emphasized, I think played
the sound of like the creaky, these creaky tanks that were
rolling by while nobody applauded to do anything.
It was like. Like.

(01:03:05):
I said people are starting to goon offense.
There's a lot of anti Trump protests are are popping off.
They're big, they're people are people are paying attention to
them. And in the middle of that, Trump
does the first thing that I recall in which he just put too
much dip on his fucking chip. He they decide they're going to

(01:03:25):
go into Los Angeles and like, occupy Los Angeles.
Yeah. So what had happened going into
that was there were ICE raids inLos Angeles, people in the city
mobilize some huge numbers towards some acts of, you know,
vandalism at some protests, someclashes with police.
I mean, anything that happens during that sort of thing, they

(01:03:47):
blocked roads off that sort of thing.
And yeah, the administration's answer is we're going to send
troops into LA. Yeah.
And. The other, you know, like troops
kind of just like sleeping in hallways and things like that
because because it was such a poorly executed operation, they
didn't know where to put anybody.
And that push back that you are seeing at Tesla dealerships that

(01:04:11):
you're seeing like at roadsides,that you're seeing all across
the United States of America, you're what that was starts to
go face to face with ICE, with the military, etcetera.
The optics look to be quite bad for the Trump administration.
You have people you, you know, there's, I remember 1 video of

(01:04:33):
a, of a kid getting like showered with sort of rubber
bullets or whatever and he's just gives a finger and walks
off with his skateboard. It was fucking people thought it
was fucking bad ass and they thought it was bad ass to oppose
the Trump administration. And I think this is this.
This is where they really look weak for the first time.
Yeah, yeah, they're getting pushed back.
The city doesn't want them there.

(01:04:53):
Governor doesn't want them there.
And you know, towards the end ofit, it seems like most of what
they're doing is just rolling around filming propaganda videos
to post on X. Yeah.
And then in the middle of that vibe, Kilbar Abreo Garcia, who
was such a key, you know, symbolof those early days of

(01:05:13):
overreach, winds up back in the United States.
He's out as a cop, right? That case is still in limbo, I
believe, keeps going back and forth.
But the fact that he was back inthe US was a sign again of
weakness so. Israel attacks Iran in June.
That ends up being a pretty big deal because Iran has a pretty

(01:05:36):
big military and dude. I I remember everybody being
like, this is World War Three, we're all going to die,
etcetera. Yeah.
Yeah, it's like it's it's. Like we can laugh about it now.
It did actually at the time seemlike World War Three could
actually be, you know, could actually explode or something
like that. I don't know.
It didn't happen. Just because it didn't happen
doesn't mean it's wasn't really scary.

(01:05:58):
And there weren't reasons to think it was scary in the US is
involvement of in it continues to be a serious, serious problem
for the Trump administration, who has been accused of being
beholden to Israel by its own people.
Yeah. RFK Junior The side piece of

(01:06:20):
Olivia Olivia Nuzzi 1. Of her side pieces, one of her.
Side pieces replacing the hole in her heart that Mark Sanford
left. Well, so he's at Health and
Human Services. He's really starting to change
things up, especially with this Make America healthy Again

(01:06:40):
council there. There's all kinds of ways that
he has chunked up that place. But something he does in June is
he removes all 17 members of theAdvisory Committee on
Immunization Practices, which isthe CDC's vaccine advisory
panel. Yeah, bad, bad.
I don't think there's anything to say.

(01:07:01):
There's there's nationwide protests against the Trump
administration that kind of overlaps with the Iran stuff.
Like I said, they they're starting to June.
I'm telling you, dude, June is the month it starts to really
change. Well.
Something else changes, which isthat I get notified by the
nonprofit I was working at that due to quote UN quote budget

(01:07:24):
constraints. I'll leave that there, but but
it's in quotes. I'll just say that I'm not going
to get into it. But I, I was told that basically
I had to go looking for another job.
And I wish I could say the exit was amicable and professional
and kind, but it wasn't. I had to fight them just to get
them to pay out my paid time offbalance.

(01:07:47):
And it was a mess, man. It was a mess.
It was a really disappointing end to my time at that
organization, but I don't know. I wish it the best.
I hope they figure shit out. But anyway, I'm on the job
market starting in June, so. Jared's on the job market and
what else is happening the Florida Panthers beat the Oilers

(01:08:07):
of the Stanley Cup. I don't fucking know.
I I stopped paying attention to as soon as the Islanders are out
of it you and. Koch Patel.
Yeah. Me and Koch Patel, Oklahoma City
wins the NBA Finals. Sorry to be a snob, but like, I
don't care. The Knicks went on such a great
run everybody and it was so cool.

(01:08:28):
Yeah, Tim, Timothy Shamalayam and Ding Dong was was calling
himself ball of tradies. And the Knicks came back against
the Celtics. They had like 2 miraculous wins
in that, you know, in that series, that was all I really
cared about. It was basketball.
So also in June, Trump and Elon start fighting in a big way.

(01:08:53):
And a lot of this centers on thebig, beautiful bill, which was,
you know, the budget that they were trying to pass.
Oh. I remember because I was in I
was actually in Idaho reporting a story that it's not going to
come out until early next year. But for a thing from Mother
Jones, the at the time I remember didn't it didn't Didn't

(01:09:16):
Elon say the Trump is in the Emstein files?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they're going back and forth
because I remember. I was like texting with you and
with Hannah and with like, everybody was like, Oh my God,
Oh my God, Oh my God, the girls are fighting.
Yeah, the the girls were fighting and it was over this
federal budget, which after spending months and giving a

(01:09:37):
green light for Elon Musk and the Doge boys, you know, quite
literally boys in a lot of cases, boys with racist Twitter
histories. You know, just absolutely
gutting the federal government, laying so many people off,
shuttering US aid and and letting whatever was left of its

(01:09:59):
skeleton get absorbed into the State Department, doing all of
this in the name of reducing costs.
One thing we didn't mention withthe USAA thing, it's like how
many millions of people are expected to die as a result of
those cuts. We didn't get it.
We don't even have time to get into some of the horrors that
have been done. But anyway, continue, yeah?
So after, after going on this big mission to cut costs or

(01:10:23):
whatever, Elon makes some statements of like, well, this
budget's ridiculous because it actually is going to completely
offset any amount of money we could have theoretically saved.
And we're just ballooning the budget.
We're spending more than ever acting as.
If either one of them are remotely competent and like have
a have an idea of what's going on, yes, yeah.
One of one of the quotes he gaveto the news outlet was like, I

(01:10:45):
think a a bill can be big or it can be beautiful, but it can't
be both. So then this goes back and
forth. Trump takes issue with it
because at this point, Elon Muskis still like the most prominent
person in American culture. That's like basically Trump, you
know, and threatens to cut SpaceX and and Tesla government

(01:11:08):
handouts, which if you know anything about those businesses,
the US government is responsiblefor a large amount of bank
rolling and and carbon credits and stuff these companies rely
on. Then the conversation turns to
the Epstein files, and Elon drops this little bit of like,
oh, well, you want to know why the Epstein files aren't out?

(01:11:29):
It's because Trump's name, by the way, at the.
Time there were a lot of, you know, pro Trump people that just
like oh, Elon's out of pocket he's just saying stuff that's
not true. He's being unfair to to to
daddy. But I you know, this is one of a
rare instance of Elon Musk telling the truth about
something and being pretty forthright.
I think he probably knew what hewas saying when he said it, but.

(01:11:50):
Also, what does it say that he continued working for him?
No. Actually, what it says is very
clear to me and what this whole incident says is that these
people are all malignant narcissists.
They're malignant narcissists and none of them like each other
at all. There's not a single one of them
you can point to. No Pete Hegseth, no Christine.

(01:12:11):
They're all malignant narcissists.
And that's those are the people who are in power right now, and
they hate each other as much as we hate them on.
A On a bleak Note, 2 Minnesota lawmakers are shot and killed by
a gunman impersonating a police officer.
That was a state Rep Melissa Hortman and her husband, and

(01:12:33):
then State Senator John Hoffman and his wife.
I misspoke. Melissa and her husband died.
John and his wife were injured. Another story.
By the way, that really would have been a showstopper a couple
years ago that kind of came and went to some degree.

(01:12:53):
I mean, just like hunting down politicians and killing them.
You'd think that would be a muchbigger story than it was.
Yeah, I mean, given everything we saw after Charlie Kirk was
assassinated. Oh, no, don't give away anything
right now. Like, stop that, Jared.
Our audience thinks Charlie Kirkis still alive.
Sorry, don't. Do that.
Well, you know something else happened by the way at the end

(01:13:16):
here. Speaking of change coming in
June, Zoran Mamdani very end wins his primary against Andrew
Cuomo. Yeah, and people lose their
mind, but not. As much as they lose their minds
later, so we will hold some of that because Mamdani comes up in

(01:13:38):
the news again. So we're in July now.
USAID is officially shuttered. At this point, the Trump
administration is backing off its promises to release more
Epstein files, and South Park isback.
Oh yeah, so. It's important to mention this
out South Park being back here and and like I've added this to

(01:13:58):
the document and and whatever South Park has been around for
as long as I can remember. I can't, you know, I can barely
remember a world before South Park existed.
But it has a lot of cachet with a lot of people who are not that
politically engaged, who enjoy making fun of whatever the

(01:14:19):
dominant thing is in our culture.
And recently they had this character that was like PC
principal who is sort of like super woke and be like, bro,
come on bro, you got to do this right, bro.
I don't know what the hell he's fucking said, you know, well,
whatever. But he turns into essentially
power Christian or some shit like that principle and he

(01:14:42):
becomes a MAGA character. And like all of a sudden the
dominant ideology is the MAGA ideology that they're attacking
and the Trump people, etcetera, etcetera.
And a lot of these people who would have voted, like young men
who vote for Trump or would havevoted for Trump are sitting
there being asked to, and in some case doing so, laughing at

(01:15:03):
Trump and MAGA. And it's a big deal.
It's a really big deal because it has the capacity to change
opinion. Yeah, and, and South Park is
also not a show that is very politically correct.
It's not exactly like Seth Meyers or Stephen Colbert Lib
stuff. This is a little raunchy, a

(01:15:24):
little rough, and they. Literally the the the plot point
was that Trump is having is having gay sex with Satan.
That is like the main plot of the season 27 thing.
President, we're all dying to know something.
Your wife, Melania has been staying in New York and away
from the White House. That's right.
Well, what Fox News really wantsto know is are you fucking

(01:15:47):
Satan? No, I'm not fucking Satan.
We're just sort of hanging out. Oh, come on, President Trump,
with everything you've been doing, pretty much the whole
country thinks you're fucking Satan.
Now there's. That Coldplay concert fucking
shit happened, You remember that?
Oh. Yeah, it was like some executive
and yeah, they get caught on camera at a Coldplay concert,

(01:16:10):
which is, I think, you know, probably the most embarrassing
way. If only for the fact it was at a
Coldplay concert. Yeah.
Also, what kind of concert has aKiss Cam I?
Don't want to lose any audience members here, but I fucking hate
Coldplay. I'm sorry.
So if you want just DM me and I'll apologize to you
individually. I just fucking hate that bad.

(01:16:32):
I just hate the minute I was I was in I I think it was a
College of that yellow song cameout.
I was like this sucks like 2 notes in I was like not doing it
sorry everybody I fucking hate them I.
Like early Coldplay, but then they had this album like Milo
Zyloto, it was supposed to be like a rock opera, and after
that it was just. Can't do it.

(01:16:52):
Can't do it, folks. Not going to do it completely.
Lost the plot. Anyway, yeah, well, that's what
you get at a Coldplay concert and the same month to Israeli
human rights groups. Prominent Israeli human rights
groups declared what Israel was doing to be a genocide in Gaza.
Now we are running out of ability to push back on the

(01:17:14):
genocide label. Yeah.
And this is already after envoysfor the United Nations,
international human rights organizations are describing
Israel as an apartheid state, you know, civil rights abuses,
likely war crimes. Yeah, it's not.
It's, you know, the the public attitude.

(01:17:36):
And this has happened over the last couple years, which I never
thought I would see in my lifetime.
It just seems like a bipartisan consensus of, like, I live in
the United States. This is the Pledge of
Allegiance. And also, like, generally, we
support Israel because of reasons.
And every time you ask about it,someone tells you it's too
complicated. But it's just like, especially

(01:17:58):
with younger generations, that they're just not.
Yeah. Not about and and so many anti
Zionist Jews as well who have been speaking up about this
literally from, you know, October 7th onwards.
Yeah. And something we've covered on
the show a lot this year is thatalso open the gate to just a lot
of really nasty anti-Semitism, right?

(01:18:18):
Yeah, of. Course.
There is a attack on a ICE facility in Texas this month by
a smattering of, I don't even know what you call them
anarchist anti fascist types. The Trump administration is
currently in court trying to prosecute some people they claim
were involved in this attack using their fancy new Antifa

(01:18:42):
domestic terror group label, which is, I don't want to say
legally meaningless, but there'sno mechanism here.
We're. Going to find out how legitimate
it is, yeah. Also in Texas, there's some
major flooding in the Hill Country that is just really
grizzly, Terrible. Trump administration get some

(01:19:04):
criticism. The state of Texas get some
criticism for its response to that.
One big, beautiful bill passes. Yeah.
So Musk loses. And alligator Alcatraz, man, oh
God. This is one of my least favorite
things of the year because it just, it's so stupid on one hand
and so grotesque on the other, right?

(01:19:26):
It's this. It's a perfect MAGA thing.
It's both fascist, dehumanizing,horrible, and then corny and
insane and ridiculous at the same time, which is the way
American fascism appears to havemutated.
I was like the that's just like,what it what, what it is.
Ultimately, it's this facility that is supposedly surrounded by

(01:19:49):
alligators and other swamp creatures, which migrants who
are in prison cannot escape for that reason.
These are people who in almost every case have no criminal
record and are just regular people, yeah.
The whole branding is like, lookhow horrible this place is going
to be and they. Sell much of it if you want to

(01:20:09):
prove, prove that you are a complete shit head.
Oh my God. I.
Got this. I got this one.
I got this one I've. Seen these SO?
Yeah, la Boo boos. So there was no place to really
put the la Boo Boo shit like butI don't know too much about it.
But for here's what I've heard. There's like some sort of K pop

(01:20:30):
group called black thing. I was horrified yesterday to
learn at the play counts on KK pop videos and like I just I was
like, it was just it was like I didn't understand the world.
It was like, so it's like 65 trillion view.
I was like, holy shit, people like this stuff.
But there's like somebody in some black, pink or whatever

(01:20:51):
fucking K pop stupid. I don't know what the fuck it
is. It's stupid because I don't know
it. OK if it's great, if K pop is
great, also message me and I will educate me please.
I guess. But like one of them would like
put La Boo boos on her outfit orsome shit.
And then that became a trend andthen La Boo boos went crazy in
2025. People kept buying la Boo boos

(01:21:12):
at oh wait, I don't even say what they are.
They're like these little fucking like Muppets, like with
like they look like goblins, buthappy and they're soft and they
got a dumb face and the people Idon't know, it's it's like, I
don't know, but people like people.
Buy like designer clothes for them.

(01:21:34):
I, I think on the back of them there's like a, a carabiner clip
or something because whatever I see them around town, people
have them like clip to their belt loops and stuff.
It's, I don't know, it's very strange.
It's very. Strange, but I'm saying I'm
going to declare this like Midsummer to be peak of Lubu
craze. There could be a second wave of
this stuff. I tried to look up online and it

(01:21:57):
seemed like has the Lubu craze peak.
There were a couple articles in the summer, so I I just put it
here just to reference it because we can't really go
through 2025 without talking about these little dolls.
I. Don't get it?
Justin Bieber came out with two albums at the same time.
I don't know. I didn't listen to them.
It's like swag 1, swag 2. I don't know swag.
One swag 2. They came out, that's all I

(01:22:17):
know. 2 Justin Bieber albums came out.
OK, so we're in August now famine is declared in Gaza, the
Gaza. News.
Just it's like I'm just, I need to shower.
I just feel depressed every timethis comes up on the list.
But yeah. Well, that's, I mean, that's
what makes it so hard to watch is it just keeps getting worse
and worse. And it's so sad, dude.

(01:22:37):
And then you wonder like where the world is.
Nobody is stepping in to stop this.
But, you know, arguably the country that could do the most
to stop it is US, yes. And we're.
And we're, and I mean, just fucking look at this
administrate, look at any we are.
Facilitating the genocide we areencouraging and facilitating and
giving. Them gift cards to buy the

(01:22:58):
weapons to do it. But I mean, genocide is, you
know, what happened for as long as you know.
We know and continues to happen right.
So this is like it just it sucksto be living through this and
and feeling it. We've got.
Some more Epstein stuff. Jeff EPP, the man who never
dies. As Trump said it, something

(01:23:19):
interesting starts happening around this time, which is that
there is kind of an attempt, from what I've been able to tell
at my new job. I guess it's I guess it's around
that here that I start working with open measures, which I
really like working there. Awesome the.
Job gripes I mentioned earlier ended up for the best, but

(01:23:41):
there's like almost this attemptto see if they can launder the
reputation of Galaine Maxwell, right?
Ghislaine, Maxwell, Galaine. Galaine.
Galaine, Galaine. I read the news, I don't listen
to it, even though I host a podcast.
That's what I get. It doesn't really seem to stick.
But then the Trump administration sends attorneys

(01:24:04):
to go meet with her. They move her to a lesser secure
prison where reportedly she's very happy to have some more
liberty and freedoms in the prison.
It's still unclear to me exactlywhat they thought they got out
of that or what they did get outof it or what what that exactly
was meant to do. I thought, you know, a lot of

(01:24:25):
people seem to think, OK, well, they're going to like, give her
an easier time if she goes out in public and says Trump was
totally innocent, whatever. But we haven't even really seen
that. So no.
But she's she's she's made some statements that appear to
suggest that he, that he was nothing but a perfect gentleman
or whatever. So it it it's she's, she's

(01:24:45):
obviously a reliable source. Yeah.
Yeah, I, I don't know how I'd react if one of the, you know,
most notorious, I guess I could say if she got convicted, you
know, traffickers, accomplices to trafficking.
If somebody like that was like Jared, what a nice guy, I'd be
like, no, I'm not. I'm an asshole.

(01:25:07):
Mehdi Hassan, I think it was really actually at the end of
July maybe did a kind of round table debate that went viral and
Jubilee. Yeah.
And we we covered that maybe came on our podcast to speak.
It was a very important cultural, political, cultural
moment because he would the people who are asking him

(01:25:30):
questions at this event turned out to be, in some cases, stone
cold Nazis. It was a window into how extreme
far right the young Conservatives had become.
And when he did this debate, it generated like week's worth of

(01:25:50):
kind of meta commentary. These conversations that, you
know, as we said when we talked to Mehdi, like you and I have
heard and been part of for, you know, the last decade of like
questions about platforming, when's platforming good, when's
platforming bad. Did did Mehdi actually help
these people or validate these people in a way that they

(01:26:11):
shouldn't have been? And these are important
questions, but I think in the wake of with the light starts
coming through the clouds in June, like you said, people are
getting less scared generally, Ithink more willing to kind of
stand up against it. And my theory that I came up

(01:26:31):
with about 10 seconds ago is that that may have generated so
much conversation, One, because Mehdi's just great at arguing
and debating final clips of Bound, You know, he's a.
He's a great speaker on his feet, but.
Also, it's like people are getting the appetite up to push
back against this somehow. And the conversation about like,

(01:26:54):
what's effective, what's worthwhile, what's worth the
risk? What's not worth the risk, I
think is kind of coming up in people's minds again, you know,
it's like, is it risky to go to a protest?
Is it worth that risk? Is it risky to stand in front of
a ICE vehicle to block it from going down the road?
Is that worth the risk? Like, and I, I think maybe there

(01:27:18):
was just kind of like a timelines converge kind of thing
and it made Mehdi's appearance doing that like round table to
bait thing really thumped for some reason.
Yeah. Well, some of the clips from it
were crazy. So I was going down to DCA bit
and starting around August. And the big thing that was

(01:27:43):
happening at that time, if you recall, is that the Trump
administration forged an occupation of the Capitol.
A. Ton of National Guard officers
agent. Whatever.
Whatever Members National. Guardsmen.

(01:28:03):
National Guardsmen went to DC and kind of just roamed around
while ice did its thing. There's all these photos on the
National Mall of like DEI guys kidded up just like wandering
around the tourist areas. You know, I just.
Want to say one thing about that?
The whole thing is now it seems a little bit more mellow and

(01:28:24):
they've really scaled it back. There are a few National
Guardsmen now. Last time I was in DC, I walked
up to somebody and I said Antifawent that way and pointed and
they all rolled their eyes at me.
I just had to do it. But the, you know, I mean, so
now it doesn't seem as scary, but at the moment it is
happening. You haven't got to remember,
look at the look at the year up until August, right?

(01:28:47):
And all this sort of implications of a, of a surging
fascist regime. It's really seemed like they
were going to start taking over cities all over the country and
locking things down. And there was every reason to
believe that that was going to happen.
And it's possible that it would have were not for the tremendous
backlash they faced. Culturally.

(01:29:08):
People were disgusted by it. It became a news story across
every major non Fox network and in every paper across the
country. Yeah.
It it was just a complete loser for them.
And yeah, like around this time,like you said, their poll
numbers are dropping like concrete is tied to them.

(01:29:30):
And Tony Soprano just threw themin the river.
Yes, people who've been listening will know I'm watching
The Sopranos for the first time.So.
But like I'm. Jealous, I want to watch it for
the first time. But yeah, so, so their public
approval is falling off a Cliff.They're losing in court.
They're losing on big issues, things they really staked a lot

(01:29:52):
of shit on, like the guard, you know, Alberto Garcia, they're
losing on that, you know, arresting these student
activists. They're losing an opinion on
that. The culture is turning against
them. And the people are wondering,
well, if they feel like they're backed in a corner, what's this
rabid animal going to do? Are they going to try to just

(01:30:13):
vice grip power? So I think that the overall
theme here, before I mentioned Taylor Swift got married or got
engaged, whatever the fuck is this fascist overreach that we
were experiencing continues on as you get on the summer.
But the feeling that it is completely dominant is wearing

(01:30:35):
down. It's no longer as strong as it
was early on in the year. Taylor Swift, I don't know any
about this plant, has wedding plans to tell Travis, Kelsey,
whatever. Probably related to the
occupation of DC or. Probably, maybe yes.
And then Travis Kelsey is a lid,right?
He's like a Lib I think. I don't know, I believe.

(01:30:58):
He is. I think he well, I think he's
vaxxed. I think he does vaxxed.
Oh, he's Gigavax. OK, that's probably.
Why the Chiefs aren't doing good.
That's the very part. There you go.
So Trump met with Putin in Alaska again.
I don't really follow the the Ukraine Russia stuff as well
this year, but I remember this, Yeah.

(01:31:19):
Yes, at several points throughout the year, Trump, you
know, the administration has basically ran out and claimed
like we have. We are getting very close to
peace in the Russia Ukraine war.Yeah.
That's what he wants to do. And then?
Russia will like drone strike you.
Know he wants a Nobel Peace Prize.

(01:31:39):
He'll drone strike a family somewhere and then Trump will go
on true social and be like, hey,knock it off, yes, come on, man,
we talked about this, yes. Then a judge orders a closure of
Alligator Alcatraz on environmental concerns.
Appeals court says it can stay open while they argue in court.
Yeah. This, this is really

(01:32:00):
interesting. So Alligator Alcatraz is still
open because like you said, Mikein appeals court basically
reversed an order that they haveto close it while, you know,
they're they're working stuff out in court.
They were sued by civil rights groups and environmental groups
who said that the site wasn't given like an environmental

(01:32:22):
review before they opened it, which is a very like weird
technical thing, but also has some pretty clear laws around
it. So kind of savvy.
But will it hold? We'll see.
I mean, when the government was shut down, those cases just kind
of floated out in the ether. Imagine in like the months to

(01:32:45):
come, we'll figure out if they actually have to close it all
the way or not, right? But again, like I said, these
big things, these big, you know,ugly, fucking horrific things
that the MAGA movement's pushingfor and staking its claim to,
you know, right wing commentators lined up to fucking
defend this shit. They lined up to defend meeting

(01:33:05):
with Putin. They lined up to defend all this
stuff, the tariffs, the Epstein files, everything.
And it's just all falling through the cracks.
Or, you know, when the rubber starts to hit the road, it's
just fucking falling apart. Because like it or not, they
have to live in a society, right?
Well, September rolls around andkids are coming back to school.

(01:33:28):
Time for a new vibe. Vibe change happens in this in
September. Another vibe change.
I would say yeah. This one's personal to me
because the Trump administrationannounces Operation Midway Lit.
They send the feds here, right? Earlier in the year, they
deployed troops to LA. They've got National Guardsmen

(01:33:50):
in DC, and now ICE declares it'sgoing to go gangbusters here.
And they send in all kinds of federal agents and then try to
do these massive sweeps, some ofwhich have been just absolutely
horrific. Yeah.
But I, I have to give my city some credit.
The people here have have reallypushed back on it and giving

(01:34:12):
them a pretty fucking hard time doing it.
And they don't like it. This.
Is really not popular. It is is is an important thing
to note. I, I I have a known note here
that Sora 2 is released at this time, which is the AI video app.
Yeah. The importance of this is
largely that it ushers in an even bigger deluge of AI slop

(01:34:40):
into social media. Yeah, just just slop.
Slop, Yeah. It's, you know, these generative
AI tools are getting more accessible to people and also a
little slicker. I won't say good but like you
know, you still get the AI generated images where people

(01:35:00):
like have 6 fingers and stuff itlooks.
Fun, to be fair, I don't have it.
It looks like fun to play with or something like that.
But the, you know, the what it does to the culture, to me is
far worse than than just the fun.
The Trump's popularity is kind of waning a little bit by this
point. It's starting to go down.

(01:35:23):
He also starts to look really sick at a couple of pictures.
There's like a bunch of stuff, like his hand is messed up.
I think if you recall, there waslike something on his hand when
he was like, yeah, cankles or whatever, like the ribs.
Premium episode, yeah. Yeah, so people were wondering
whether Trump was going to die, and that's right.
We released our first premium episode on on September 4th.

(01:35:44):
Then some people win the US OpenTennis, I don't know, I'm not
going to get into that. And then on September 10th, and
this is a big 1C, Kirk is givinga speech out in Utah.
Start of a new tour for Charlie Kirk.
For people don't know what Charlie Kirk does.
He goes to he, he goes to college campuses and sort of

(01:36:07):
debates people usually debates liberals and creates these kind
of viral Tik Toks and things like that.
And he is up there talking and all of a sudden a bullet zaps
him in the throat and blood starts to gush out.
And we all or many of us see it pretty much in real time through

(01:36:32):
a video that goes on to social media.
It's extremely graphic. It's a snuff film, essentially,
because very shortly thereafter,Kirk is declared.
Dead. It was gruesome, but what comes
after that ends up being really important for the rest of the
year. I I just remember we had in

(01:36:53):
many. Ways you know we.
Had just started, we're like, all right, cool, we're going to
do you know, premium episodes, big change for us on the podcast
and then all of a sudden this huge thing that overlaps with so
many of the things we cover. Because he's like, he, he was
one of the biggest personalitieson the right.
I mean, he's in that, you know, if you had to do a top ten, he
would probably be in the top ten.

(01:37:13):
That's on a list that would include Trump.
Yeah, yeah. And.
And and, you know, Kirk was not a, you know, remarkable figure
in terms of the things that he said necessary.
It's not like he stood out for being particularly eloquent or
anything like that. It's his organizing prowess and

(01:37:33):
his ability to move young peopleand move young people to Trump
that was so admired. But culturally, why it mattered
more than almost anything else is that as soon as people saw
that he died and he soon as he was murdered, people started to
mock him and mock his death online and in in large numbers.
I, I would say in, in numbers that actually shocked me at the

(01:37:55):
time. You know, I'm, I'm pretty inured
to people mocking violence or this.
I couldn't believe how fast and how loudly his death was mocked.
Yeah, yeah. It was really charring to see
and you saw it with like crowds that you don't normally see that
from everybody. And the reason why I think it

(01:38:16):
matters so much and why it's such an important story in 2025
and arguably the most for the material that we cover is is
because all of the MAGA personalities, all of these
influencers, everybody else saw what would happen if they were
killed, said that people fuckinghate them.
They really fucking hate them, like Matt Walsh and these

(01:38:37):
people. And they were really shocked,
Jared, They were, I've never seen these.
They were the remember, beginning of this year.
I mean, if you think back to earlier in this podcast where
they were and the way they were kind of sort of dunking on the
world and acting like they they were, you know, could not be
harmed by criticism and just allthat.
All of a sudden, right, you see June, there's a loosening up.

(01:39:00):
People are criticizing Trump more openly.
There's protests against him. And then all of a sudden this
the the suspect, his name is Tyler Robinson, allegedly shoots
Charlie Kirk in the throat. And all of these people, Matt
Walsh, this, that and the other thing, they are shook.
They are scared out of their minds and they are.
They are actually saying. This.

(01:39:22):
Look at this. This is what they will say if
I'm killed. They're saying that actually
their own words. So it's not just me projecting
it. Yeah, that's a significant
thing. And.
Then another significant thing happens, which is that, well, I
guess two things. One is that Republican lawmakers
from local to federal go out andtry to make Charlie Kirk a

(01:39:46):
martyr for their 'cause it's very clear the public hates them
at this point. And after Charlie Kirk is
killed, as you noted, they get avery close look at just how true
that's starting to become. So they, you know, kind of use
his memory, something you've pointed out several times is

(01:40:09):
like. They're not playing quotes, you
know they don't. Have any quotes to Charlie Kirk?
Because he's just not a very deep thinker.
They just have. To describe, you know, some idea
of him right. And then what that also leads to
is, you know, the Stephen Miller's of the world, you know,
they get like blood in their eyes.
You know they they are like gungho.

(01:40:31):
Well, they have to try to stop the the.
They have to try to stop the mockery.
They want to just stop the enjoyment of, you know, that
people are getting from the ideaof MAGA getting hurt like that.
So. Something that MAGA influencers
do is they start, you know, basically identifying people who
are mocking Charlie Kirk's deathor in some cases even just

(01:40:52):
making kind of benign statementslike he was a piece of shit,
good riddance, which you could call it distasteful, but he's a
public figure. I'm kind of not inclined to care
about random people saying stuffabout public figures, but they
were like trying to get them fired from jobs, doxing them,
harassing them, running down on their lives, and then they

(01:41:15):
succeed. By the way, there's like there's
like hundreds of people, you know, hundreds of maybe 1000
people fired across the country and.
Then on the government's part, they before they even have a
suspect, before it's clear that they even have a lead, in this
case, Trump, Stephen Miller, I mean, the administration comes
out and says that Charlie Kilke was killed by a radical leftist.

(01:41:40):
Right. Possibly Antifa, right?
Well, yes, the shooter's bulletshad these markings that came
from a video game that, you know, had some stuff that was
vaguely anti fascist you could read in certain ways, but
actually came from a video game.Then there was the whole
business of that, that the suspect's partner was
transitioning to be female. So that was the thing.

(01:42:03):
And they added all this, this anti trans panic, which which we
haven't really talked about. And then 2025, it is an ongoing
story and ongoing facet of MAG of course, is scapegoating trans
people. And it just, it just blew up
from there. Yeah.
I'd be scapegoating trans peopleis one of the first things this
administration did That was likea day one thing, right?
And they've, you know, it just keeps going, but then, you know,

(01:42:26):
Trump goes on, declares Antifa, domestic terrorist organization.
I actually forgot about that because it's so toothless.
He's it's the second time he's done it.
For people who don't remember that from the when we covered it
earlier. This this is something they did
from anti Trump protests that went on during the summer of
2020. Trump also on Twitter declared

(01:42:47):
Antifa domestic terrorist organization.
But they've not been able to actually achieve anything from
that, which is something we maybe talk about in the year
end. Rap, Yeah.
Yeah, there's not like a a mechanism to enforce on that,
which is a good, which is a goodthing because after the Capitol
riot, there was like talk on Capitol Hill of like, we need to
be able to designate domestic groups as terrorist

(01:43:09):
organizations. And thankfully, a whole host of
civil rights groups stepped in and we're like, no, you don't.
It was. Scary at the time though, Jared,
because people like you and I, if you recall, and, and some of
our friends, we were all concerned about like what could,
could we get arrested? We didn't know how big the sweep
would actually be. But the reality is the laws
don't allow for you to arrest random people under the

(01:43:32):
suggestions that they're Antifa.So this ended up being a huge
butt fumble for the MAGA movement.
We can get into that in a second.
Afterwards there was a shooting outside an ice facility I.
Think this might have been? Yeah, no, this was after.
You're right. And it was after and a very

(01:43:54):
fishy turn of events. Cash Patel posts a photo of one
of the bullets and it's what's written on it.
In what looks like marker. It says anti ice.
Yeah. And I don't know what has
happened to that since. We never heard about it again.
It's just so weird and I'll justput it this way, I have a lot of

(01:44:15):
questions about whatever that was.
So there's also Jared this like kind of this year's long
normalization of Jack pozobic. We've covered quite a bit on
this there. I just want to make a note that
Jack winds up on Fox News in theaftermath of Kirk's
assassination, which was. A place that for the longest

(01:44:36):
time he was persona non grata because he's a pizza Gator and
has all this fucked up shit in his background.
But. He's the He's in many ways the
most visible face of TPUSA in the absence of Charlie Kirk, of
course. Erica Kirk.
We've covered quite a bit here. But yeah, I mean, now I've seen
Jack, I think at least every couple weeks wind up on Fox

(01:44:58):
News. So just something to track that
he continues to be normalized despite his history of, oh, I
don't know, posting shit about Pizzagate, posting Russian
influence campaigns, posting, you know, neo Nazi memes,
whatever else. Yeah, Jack Pozobic.

(01:45:20):
At the White House, Trump hangs up a photo of an auto pen on
the. I guess there's like, a walkway
that has photos of all the presidents.
Very classy, very funny, Mr. President.
Yeah. Yeah.
So stupid. Yeah.
Let's keep going. Bad Bunny is announced as the
Super Bowl halftime performer, so.

(01:45:42):
Early that's that's bad. He he speaks Spanish, Jared.
Yeah, he speaks Spanish and theyflip.
Out and we did a whole episode about this but they're they they
keep trying to plan an alternative Super Bowl thing for
2026 where there'll be you know Creed or some other MAGA
friendly act will be in opposition to bad Benny we'll

(01:46:03):
see who they can actually get yeah they.
Went really hard and like fundraised money Turning Point
USA did to have an alternate Super Bowl halftime show, but I
haven't heard anything about that lately.
I don't know, maybe it'll be. I just.
I'm always amazed at how it willbe.
Cringe. That's what it will be.
Whatever it was that they bring forward, they're going to have

(01:46:24):
to do something and we will cover it on posting through it.
It's. Going to be some like stupid
like they're they're going to get like the AI country singer
or or AI SpongeBob singing the Charlie Kirk song.
Remember this? One, I do remember that they
should do that. Then there was Trump reaches an
agreement with China to keep TikTok in the US.
That has implications because the the, you know, Marc

(01:46:45):
Andreessen is involved, I believe.
And that could possibly implicate, like, what your kids
see on TikTok, if TikTok remainsrelevant.
Not great. They rename the Department of
Defense to the Department of War, which seems stupid and
performative. I mean, at this point, I think
what we're seeing here is like, at this point, the Trump

(01:47:08):
administration is like down bad,knows people hate it.
So they're just kind of like, you know, throwing red meat out
to the base. What started?
In June is accelerating is in myopinion things are starting to
get hot in for them they're. They're trying to like get like
some own the libs headlines going, yes.
The Jimmy Kimmel thing is a is an another major MAGA misstep

(01:47:30):
here where they, you know, I'm not sure exactly what happened,
but he's off the air for a whileafter the pressure they exerted
and everybody gets mad, including some right wing
figures and he's back. He's.
Back but that upsets a lot of people again they they are
really butt fumbling this you know we.
Find out that Tom Holman allegedly took a big, you know,

(01:47:53):
$50,000 in a canvas in a cava. Bag, Cava bag.
That's like a Mediterranean basscasual place.
OK, It's pretty good, man. Yeah, I used to, like, go in
there all the time. All right.
That's fine the no kings protestnow here we go.
This is what I'm talking about this there's a lot of people end
up at this no kings protest and this is again more indication

(01:48:16):
that magazine and it stepped in some do do so to speak after 30
years you put this here after 30years AOL shuts down his dial up
Internet service. I guess so I was.
Surprised it I've been. Dialing up, that's how we do
posting through it. I didn't what are we going to
do? And then one at 1 battle after
another came out. No time for a critique here, but

(01:48:40):
it's a big phenomenon. People are beaming it and other
things. I thought it was.
OK, but I think something you said in a group chat we're in is
like it it doesn't it doesn't feel like breaks the whole
premise is there's like this dystopian fascistic type of
government thing and it. Just feels like today, yeah.
There's also one major issue I have that I can't, you know, I,

(01:49:05):
I, I can't process about that film, which is like, there's a
long chase scene at the end along a highway in which there
are apparently only three cars and they're all driven by
characters of the movie that I mean, look, you know, this is
some, some really kinetic filmmaking in that part.
But I was like, wait, what highway is this?
And. It goes on for so long, yeah.

(01:49:26):
There's like no other cars. There's nobody was like, hey,
I'm just, I'm just trying to go to the rest stop anyway.
But I enjoyed it. I, I, I was entertained.
It was an entertaining film, allright.
October. October Trump approvals tanking
Diddy ends trial with conventionOh.
Yeah, yeah. Sean Diddy.
Yeah, we. Can speed up for some of this
because it's all recent for people.

(01:49:47):
People like the Trump administration is blowing up
boats with people in it. Some of them are just regular
fishermen, apparently. I don't even know what to say
about that. The blowing up boats thing, it's
like my brain can't process it. It's so fucking evil.
It's like, yeah, imagine you're just like on a boat doing
something. And then like, they're just
like, yeah, we'll just drone strike you because you're

(01:50:07):
you're, you're a Latino person. If they are trafficking drugs,
which is what they're claiming about these people, you know,
and they don't have to prove it because they're dead, you know?
Yeah, dude, there's no conviction, no trial.
But if they were, wouldn't you want to capture them and like,
get them to flip? Isn't that the whole, like drug
trafficking game game in law enforcement is?

(01:50:28):
You just, like, get people to flip until you get to the top?
Yeah, I know there's. The federal shutdown, You just
lived through that. The ADLFBI relationship craters.
Yeah, which? I put in there just because this
is a huge thing. You know, we talked about like,
what's the ADL going to do afterthis?
Because I think, you know, there's a whole host of like

(01:50:49):
nonprofits we criticize along similar lines with the ADL has
really been kind of like at the forefront.
And just because it is so huge and so prominent and
influential, its turn is particularly notable, right?
If you think of like the the fight against hate thing, you've
got the SPLC and the ADL. Those are the two big boys in
town in a big thing that the ADLdoes that SPLC didn't do or got

(01:51:16):
out of the business of doing is fundraising, building bipartisan
support and all of that through its relationship to law
enforcement, training federal law enforcement, local, state,
whatever, correct. And despite all of their, you
know, bending of the knee, groveling, boot licking,

(01:51:37):
whatever you want to call it, I don't have a whole lot of nice
words for it. What does it get them in the
end? A whole lot of nothing.
Of course, one of their like most critical relationships that
they depend on for fundraising gets flushed.
And why? Because people on X the
Everything app looked at their glossary of extremism and kept

(01:51:58):
screenshotting like the one thatsaid Christian nationalism or
like this Jewish organization hates Christians very thinly
veiled anti-Semitic deem there. But like it it goes viral on X
because of course it does. And that's all you need to do to
influence some people in this administration.

(01:52:19):
So I. Mean Jonathan Greenblatt learned
what so many have learned beforehim, which is that you lap up
Trump's balls. It does not mean he will save
you. Right and all these people will
lick Trump's ass and suck his cock all day long.
Excuse my vulgarity. And he will throw you under the
bus and run you over with his car as soon as it's expedient.

(01:52:44):
So other things that happened inOctober, yeah, this isn't, this
is all more recent. So we'll kind of no.
I want to, I want to, I want to say this one.
We'll, we'll. Fly through the I want to.
Say this one The Chair Company first episode.
Now that is a show I can endorseentirely.
Rarely has has my anxiety been brought to life on screen in

(01:53:04):
quite the same way. As a share company.
Highly recommend that show. The first episode, Jared of the
Will Stancil show was aired in October.
Oh my God. Folks, just go listen to that
episode. I don't want to talk about it
is. It's it's it's it's an AI
generated cartoon cartoon created by a white supremacist

(01:53:25):
lady and it is so stupid and awful.
But the piggies on X cannot stoplapping it up.
And for some. Reason Six weeks late, The
Atlantic showed up and wrote a piece about it like it was on
the way out. And yes.
It was on the way. I don't want to talk about the
Atlantic right now, so. Other things that happened, Big

(01:53:48):
stories are coming out about group chats with young
Republicans, young Republican figures, including Trump
administration officials and leaders of Young Republicans
chapters, which are quite influential, a lot of them
working in, you know, state and federal offices and stuff of

(01:54:10):
them just saying horrifically racist shit, correct.
Like like stomach churning, almost like a parody of itself,
like a parody of a racist. It would.
It would be like how Andrew Anglin on the Daily Stormer
would like, make fun of himself,is what they're saying in this
chat. Yeah.
And it's, and, and just the important peg there for our

(01:54:32):
listeners is that this is what the young Republican has become,
right? It did become a lot of this.
There's, there's, they're not a lot of young Republicans who are
chatting in a different way in private.
Yeah, we've got Kenneth Moron. The guy who?
Wore the Nazi outfit and Halloween and then got into a

(01:54:53):
fight and now he's running to raise money for himself.
He sucks I feel like. Getting into a fight is almost
underselling it. He beat the shit out of some
woman. Oh, that's.
Right. Oh my God.
Yeah, that's right. OK, I'm sorry, guys.
And then? Tried to raise money.
Yes, Yeah, OK, Some of these are, some of these are a memory
game for me where it's sort of like, Oh yeah, that's what
happened just. Disgusting.
Yes. The head of Binance was, pardon

(01:55:15):
the crypto, the the crypto firm Barry Weiss something.
Funny about that is when Trump was asked about it, he was like,
I don't even know who that is. Oh, that's.
Right. Yeah, yeah.
Again, it's like they're they'relike calling Joe Biden president
auto pen or whatever, but this dude's like he's.
Literally saying he doesn't knowhe's.
Saying. Barry Weiss took over CBS News.

(01:55:38):
Trump started re reworking the White House with bulldozers
those. Amazing trucks, man.
The nick Fuentes generational run period to have started there
were a bunch of people randomly decided to start interviewing
nick Fuentes and make him out toseem like he's the Michael
Jackson of his time or somethingI.
Just with the rumors that have gone around around about Nick,

(01:56:01):
that's. Not that's not so far.
Off. They might end up panning out.
There's a new Taylor Swift albumI didn't listen to.
Trump limited the number of refugees allowed and prioritized
white S Africans. This is my favorite one that I
added here. Trump said he's not getting into
heaven. It's the first right thing he's
ever said. I mean, you know, I'm being a

(01:56:23):
little cute. I don't think there's anything
going to get me in heaven. OK, I've really I think, I think
I'm not Maybe heaven bound. I may be in heaven right now as
we fly in Air Force One. I'm not sure right I'm going to
be able to make. November, which is ending.
The Dodgers won the World Seriesover the Blue Jays and seven

(01:56:43):
games. It was a very good World Series,
although the Dodgers are instantcancer.
That gooning article in Harper'scame out and I I.
Still haven't read it. I just.
It's just. Like all you, it's just all you
need to. It's just why, like, you're
weird liberal aunt is going to ask you about porno sexuals next
time you see her. So Mark Meadows was pardoned.

(01:57:06):
Rudy Giuliani was pardoned. The shutdown ended after 43
days, a record. Democrats get nothing in return.
Everybody wants to throw Chuck Schumer into the river, but.
It's wasn't all bad for Democrats.
There's a lot of huge Election Day.
Simultaneous. No, it's fact.
This happened and then they ended the shutdown.

(01:57:26):
That's right. Yeah.
Because they're. Because they're so ridiculous.
OK. But yeah, Mom, Donnie won big
elections in New Jersey, big elections in Virginia all turn
up for the Democrats and MAGA does, which is terribly across
the board, which will factor into the way we describe the end
of the year. Thoughts.

(01:57:47):
Nancy Pelosi Queen Nancy says she is retiring a fella.
In Mississippi threw coins at Dave Portnoy and yelled
anti-Semitic stuff at him. We covered this on one of our
premium episodes recently, but it's all part of this big
anti-Semitic split in MAGA that has really emerged to become

(01:58:08):
bigger as MAGA has come under tremendous pressure culturally.
And it's sort of like a divided movement right now with a lot of
anti Semites kind of rising to prominence in part noted, you
know, in part because of Elon Musk's ex, which is amplifying
them all the time. I.
Have a feeling we're going to betalking about that a lot more

(01:58:31):
next year, too. Under RFK Junior's instruction,
Olivia Nuzzi gets on her. Oh wait, this is under RFK
Junior's instruction. Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention dramatically revises the language on its Vaccines and
autism page. The long standing statement
Vaccines do not cause autism is removed and replaced with

(01:58:51):
language suggesting that this claim is not evidence based.
I should also note I think it was November.
It might have been we may have missed it in October.
But RFK Junior also puts out theclaim alongside Trump that
Tylenol taking Tylenol or acetaminophen as generic name

(01:59:12):
could cause autism if taken while pregnant.
Which is kind of a big deal because acetaminophen is
actually has been understood fordecades as one of the only pain
relievers pregnant people can take safely while pregnant.
So this is as much like kooky, you know, anti vax health nut

(01:59:35):
conspiracy stuff as it is just like a a giant middle finger to
to pregnant people. Yeah, it's.
Insane. I have here Nuzzi Mania, which
is referring to Elizabeth OliviaNuzzi.
You should go back to our premium episodes to get a lot
more of that and probably preview episodes to come.
We're going to finish covering this in very important story
till the end. But basically an excerpt from

(01:59:56):
her book came out and holy cow, it is some kind of excerpt.
And the the extra details that we're learning is also that RFK
Junior's Harvest was entering. Her and and there's an alleged
affair she had with Mark Sanfordand like there's a question of

(02:00:18):
why Vanity Fair would would linkup with such a person in the 1st
place we're going to find out ifthey take action against her
going forward I also. Just want to say I I messaged
Olivia on X because we were likemutual follows from I guess
years and years ago. I I don't know, I invited her.

(02:00:38):
Oh my. God.
If any of our listeners know Olivia you should tell her to
come on the show. I would actually love to talk to
her about this stuff and just see what she has to say because
some of the shit especially likewhat her ex fiance Brian Lizza
is putting out is. I don't know how I could go
through that episode without vomiting, given some of the

(02:01:00):
things that she has allegedly done in, in terms of journalism.
Marjorie Taylor Green resigned and had this split with Trump.
Yeah. Well, she's resigning in
January. But yeah, she announced
resignation on the last one we covered and you know, and talked
with Heidi about some of her efforts to rebrand.

(02:01:21):
I maintain I think she is running for either the Senate or
the Governor's mansion in Georgia, which I could.
I could kind of see the governor's mansion making more
sense in in context of all of this, Elon.
Musk's X started to announce to people where a user signed up

(02:01:42):
for their accounts and this has been a huge shock to the system
as many gullible idiots found out that their favorite mega
bullshit accounts are actually located in places like, I don't
know, Albania or like you know, wherever Uzbekistan.

(02:02:03):
Yeah, yeah, it's it's a rude awakening for them to know that
they are, you know, it. It just makes them very
self-conscious of the fact that they're just gobbling up culture
war click bait that is so dumb and predictable that somebody
thousands of miles away can emulate it perfectly and just

(02:02:24):
make what in the US wouldn't seem like a lot of money, but in
a lot of these countries would actually provide a pretty decent
living. This has been the case for a
long time and has probably been the case on X for a long time,
but I don't know. It's I I have questions over
like how reliable this will be going forward.
You, you, you. Mentioned that like on premium

(02:02:46):
it is important to to to note that with through VPM or through
purchased accounts it's possiblethat people will be able to
skirt around this going forward and then appear like they just
came from America yeah I I. Mean, I think you can only
reveal the man behind the curtain, Wizard of Oz style like
once really in unless the site is going to commit to just like

(02:03:06):
constantly getting everybody to verify their devices and stuff,
which would just be a huge I. Want to talk about it on our
next premium episode, Jared? But but our boy Ian Miles Chong
is down bad and starting to postthings like did like you know,
So what you want me to post froma dying country?
Like whatever you know, he's he's never had to reveal who he

(02:03:28):
actually really is before and he's having a hard time and and
bag of people are in every replyyelling at him.
The last thing I have here I think is very important for
pretty much all of our listeners, actually.
Yeah, this. This might be the most important
thing on the list, the. Legendary musician Ice Spice has
released a song for the new SpongeBob movie called Big Guy.

(02:04:00):
Stop playing Big guy, big guy, big guy, big guy, big guy pants
OK. SpongeBob big guy pants OK.
Big guy, big guy, big guy, big guy, SpongeBob, big guy pants
OK. SpongeBob big guy pants OK?
Actually, you know, I'm just notgoing to say anything.
I think the song speaks for itself.

(02:04:21):
So it's December now. This will come out on December
1st. And what have we learned?
I mean, the manga movement started this year kind of
convincing everybody that they were the new cultural.
Yeah, based. On the election results, yeah.
And people were bought in, right?
I mean, corporations change their policies.

(02:04:42):
Activist groups started to hide.A lot of them are still kind of
hiding scared about what the IRSmight do to them or what, you
know, some stupid. Because if you're like a
nonprofit, like like the one that I worked at earlier this
year, all it would take is like,you know, pissing off a
congressperson and them putting you through like a million
dollars, $2,000,000 worth of legal bills to defend yourself

(02:05:05):
against nonsense for your place to be gone.
That's it. Lights out.
I mean, look at what Media Matters has gone through after
Elon Musk sued them. He has no grounds.
They were fine. Like it's, it's totally
frivolous and they've been successful on all the legal
fronts, but the just the cost ofdefending themselves, it has
been so outrageous that even despite this, they've had a

(02:05:27):
layoff staff and that sort of thing.
Just insane, right? But, you know, that kind of vibe
really almost feels like it's done at 180 now.
I think the the Trump administration, the MAGA
movement as a whole is a lot more timid and kind of scared
right now. I mean, they're still doing all

(02:05:47):
kinds of depraved shit, and they're going to continue doing
that. That's what their agenda is.
But they legitimately seem like defensive.
Yeah. I agree.
Here's the thing, leftists have had a really difficult time
moving America to them. And I really struggled with this
for as long as I've been alive. But one thing the average

(02:06:10):
American independent, whatever has ingrained in their mind is
this idea of freedom, right? Like America's land of the free,
home of the brave bullshit, right?
And I feel like this regime, when it took, when it, when,
when it won, when they, when they start to take power, they
were perceived to be the face offreedom.

(02:06:30):
You had Trump in Butler, PA, theblood coming down his ear.
And he raised his first and he'slike, fight, fight, fight or
whatever. Yeah.
And it's like, oh, it's the American spirit.
Like we do whatever we want. And we also say whatever we
want, right. We always say whatever the fuck
we want. You can't stop us.
So with this woke shit, we'll say whatever we want.

(02:06:51):
We're going to say if we want tosay something offensive, we're
going to say it, etcetera. Well, now that they're in power,
this fascism thing is not as exciting to the average American
as it is to the core MAGA person, right?
You know what I mean? Like the core Trump guy who's
like, yes, I want to put camerasin people's bedrooms and make

(02:07:12):
sure they're not, you know, having kind of weird sex.
I want to control people at thatlevel.
It's not going well for they don't want occupations in
cities. And the immigrant anti immigrant
thing looks like they like the people may have liked the idea
of, OK, let's, let's get this illegal immigrant stuff, right.
And we use the word undocumented, but let's get this

(02:07:34):
under control, this illegal immigration problem.
But when they see it in practiceand they see like people, the
take the same people who sell them bread in the morning, who,
who are there as part of their lives, right?
And you see them being taken away in pain, their families
ripped apart. It's not appealing to both

(02:07:55):
people, right? And it and it's, I think the
critical point for it like, likeon that point is they're seeing
people have their lives ripped apart.
And the government in many casesisn't even trying to claim that
these are supposedly the dangerous criminal gang members
that all of this was supposed tobe about, that this was going to

(02:08:16):
reduce crime and reduce whatever.
Yes, this is just racial profiling.
And they're loading in some cases people up on planes,
sending them to countries they've never fucking been to.
And it's it's just like. And it.
Was what do you call it? There was also a defendant.
There was. Also a perfect storm as related
to Biden, of course, who was declining.

(02:08:39):
And then there's the whole coverup of, of Biden's health or
alleged cover up of his health. And that the whole debacle
around trying to get Harris in at the last minute and stuff
that this created a perfect storm in which people were
briefly willing to forget how fucking horrible 2020 was and
other other times during Trump'sfirst first term.

(02:09:01):
And people are remembering now. And this I mentioned the words a
malignant narcissist as part of this administration to have the
kid at The Who is at the back ofthe class being like making fun
of the teacher. And he's really funny and
everybody likes that. That's cool.
Like he's like, he's like, ha, ha, like fat butt, like whatever

(02:09:22):
from the back of the class. OK, Now that kid is has to lead
the class. Yeah.
And people don't like him as much.
And you can only do that for so long before it's just annoying.
And they they have like, no new material, right?
Like, like the big thing over the week of Thanksgiving that

(02:09:43):
like is the new hell yeah, woke is dead.
What everything is that Trump used the R word to describe Tim
Walz, right? Which is pathetic.
Yeah, It's pathetic. It's pathetic.
So. Going into 2026, yeah.
What do we what do we think we're going to be talking about?
I would be completely shocked ifTrump or MAGA were able to

(02:10:07):
repair its image or move up in popularity during 2026.
I think that is unlikely. I could see a rebound if there's
an economic upturn, but we are currently looking at a situation
in which there people spending is is way down and buoyed
completely by the the Super rich.

(02:10:30):
I think the economy could be headed for a bad place in 2026.
And it's a real question of whether they will go to drastic
measures around voting. And they didn't in 2025 and they
got their asses handed to them. And in 2026, we have a big
midterm and we will see if they do things like say, oh, there's
voting irregularities, let's station a bunch of National

(02:10:52):
Guards, been around polling places or whatever else they
might do to try to alter the outcome of the election.
That is the biggest thing I'll be watching.
And I think it's right now the the sort of push comes to shove
has to do with how much people are disgusted by MAGA and what
they're willing to do in order to control people.

(02:11:13):
Yeah, I mean, just building on that, you know, the Marjorie
Taylor Green thing, heartbreaking with Trump, I
mean, obviously that's an outlier, but if after Democrats
had these big wins, including people like who was it, Jay
Jones who had those text messages or whatever?
Yeah, I know, but. Nobody seemed to care that he
was like fantasizing about killing drunk members of the

(02:11:36):
Trump administration or whateverit was or Republicans was his
Republican colleagues, I. Mean we're just, we're laughing
because that would be like a career ender.
Normally, but people it's so. Absurd, but people, it seems.
Like the public, the voting public just hates this shit,
Yeah. People saw that and said I still
hate the Republicans more and we.
Also see with Trump like emulating Mumdani and whatever
Kabad does it praising Mumdani or whatever he's desperate for

(02:11:59):
to be liked again but. If people around him or in the
Republican Party look at what's happening and they think the
MAGA brand is dead, they think it's over, this is a losing, you
know, horse to bet on. I'll be curious to see what the
response to that is because I think we're going to end up

(02:12:19):
seeing it play out in a million and one different ways.
There will be, you know, the people who try to reform MAGA
from the inside people, you know, the Stephen Miller's, the
JD Vance's try to like kind of rebrand, kind of refocus, that
sort of thing. There will be defectors, people
like Marjorie Taylor Green that just broke off and said we got
to do something different. This will play out a million in

(02:12:41):
one ways, like you said. It could be, you know, people
who think the answer is that theadministration should go for
another power grab, maybe aroundelections.
You know, it, it could play out a lot of different ways.
And I'll be curious to see whichway it goes.
Yeah. The big, the big things to
watch, I think going into next year are the split and MAGA

(02:13:04):
pushback against the Trump administration from the left and
from liberals and the voting andhow all that plays out.
What a weird fucking year man dude.
Fucking yeah. It was like it was a bad year.
I'm going to just say that like,I just want to say this.
I I want 2026 to be like, I hope, I hope we're sitting here

(02:13:25):
even in Chicago. Maybe I'll have you in New York,
but I hope we're sitting here hanging out and talking about a
much better year. Well, you've.
Made it this far, so I'll clear you in on something fun that's
coming. You'll probably hear about it
this week, but a few episodes ago we mentioned that those

(02:13:46):
white T-shirts with black tacks at Turning Point USA has been
selling since Charlie Kirk was killed at say Freedom.
We made a joke about like, you know, more like femdom.
What if What if those shirts said femdom?
Yes, it was. Awful.
It was off of Erica Kirk's leather pads.
So probably this week, if if notearly next week, we're debuting

(02:14:08):
these shirts. We have had I've I've been
talking to AT shirt manufacturerthat's in the Midwest here.
We're going to be opening pre-orders for these shirts.
It's going to be like you're going to have like 2 weeks to
get them and 100% of the profit we make from this shirt we're
going to donate to some kind of,you know, women's charity.

(02:14:32):
We're still talking to a couple of them and figuring out where
that money is gonna be the most impactful because we want it to.
We want it to really help. Not like we're not.
Doing it to make money, althoughI do want one of the shirts for
myself. Yeah, I.
Mean I'm gonna be getting a shirt or two but yeah, I don't
want the money to buy like pamphlets at A at a donor

(02:14:54):
conference or like the extra shrimp appetizer at at the board
of directors meeting. You know, I would, I would like
the money to go to something that like really can help people
doing good work. So that'll be live.
I'm sure we'll be posting all about it.
I think the shirts look pretty good.
They're pretty funny, but keep an eye out for that and the way

(02:15:15):
we're going to do the pre-order.If everything works out, they
should be able to get here in time for the holidays.
So if you're looking for that last minute gift for somebody
whose brain is just absolute garbage mashed potatoes, that
could be it, yes. Well, bye everybody.
We are Charlie Kirk. We.
Are Charlie Kirk and we I'm Red Hat.
Mega Hat. We are.

(02:15:38):
Charlie. Kirk we carry the flame.
We'll fight for the gospel without his name.
We are Charlie Kirk, his courageour own.

(02:15:58):
Together, unbroken, we'll make heaven known.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

Dateline NBC

Are You A Charlotte?

Stuff You Should Know

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}058: What the Hell was 2025?

Episode Transcript

Popular Podcasts

.css-r6mb8g{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:1;overflow:hidden;}Dateline NBC

Are You A Charlotte?

Stuff You Should Know

All Episodes

058: What the Hell was 2025?

Dateline NBC