May 6, 2026 • 34 mins
In this episode, Michael discusses the Spirit Airlines crowdfunding campaign and its implications for community ownership. The conversation touches on the airline industry's consolidation and the potential for public ownership, as well as the challenges of running a commercial airline. The host also delves into the story of Hunter Peterson, a 22-year-old who launched the Spirit Airlines crowdfunding campaign, and the broader question of whether the people can actually own an airline. The discussion explores the complexities of community ownership and the limitations of crowdfunding as a business model.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi guys, good morning. I just wanted to report in
with my sit rep enjoying a little late breakfast some
eggs and sausage and black coffee and watching the snowfall.
Nothing much else is going on, so hope you guys
(00:21):
have a good day.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Poor cat, Feed the cat, Come on, feed the cat.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
He likes eggs and bacon or sausage.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Obviously, I think at this point the poor cat would
eat anything. We should call the SBCA, because clearly the
cat's being abused, not getting enough food. Speaking of food,
before I move on to I want to do something
really odd this hour, which everybody's going, yeah, it's new.
Yesterday we had the vegan tacos, and last night I'm
(00:57):
reading through stuff and I come across during the Daily
Caller apparently the global warming hoax is still alive well
and the Netherlands. In Amsterdam, specifically public advertising for meat
and the fossil fuels that you allow us to stay.
Speaker 4 (01:15):
Warm what's snowing out like it is right now has
been banned.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
In the name of propitiating I guess the left wing
mother gods. The Daily Caller writes this, The ban results
from efforts by ankey Becker Amsterdam Group leader for the
Party for the Animals. According to the BBC, Green Left
is there a Green right Green Left, another Dutch political party,
(01:42):
also supported the legislation. According to CBS, the most militantly
insane nutjobs are now calling the shots in Europe, specifically
in Amsterdam. Fish product, air, travel, cruises, all those things
are being affected. Nobody We're going to get the cruises
if I can get cruises today too. Elsewhere in Holland,
(02:03):
the Hague, another Dutch city, became the first city worldwide
to ban all advertisements or advertisements as we like to say,
for oil and gas as well as aviation and cruise ships,
encouraged by a call for such bans by the United
Nations Secretary General.
Speaker 4 (02:20):
And O'Neil getteris according to The.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Guardian, whenever you're gonna pull out of the Union. The
Dutch city of Harlem became the first to ban all
meat advertisements from spaces available to the public. According to
the Guardian, so after banning advertising fails to secondly perfect
the weather, these nut jobs will and that we move
on to banning meat and fuel themselves. The Church of
(02:46):
the climate activists are never going to be satisfied. Until
their religion their ideologies is pushed out onto all of
us and will be freezing in the cold with snows
and main Colorado. I think the Dutch of the future
are probably gonna end up living on substandard diets like
the in Tacos as they shiver in the dark. The leather, however,
(03:07):
will a lot as usual totally unchanged. Guy, I just
I couldn't resist. Now, let's let's talk about an airline.
This is hilarious. Let's buy Spirit Airlines. You don't live
(03:30):
in bankrupt right, it's shut down. In fact, it's so
bankrupt that the airline could not afford to auction off
their planes.
Speaker 4 (03:41):
So the lease holders, the creditors are.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Just having to go find the planes themselves, and you know,
I guess pick them up and I don't know, shipping
down to Arizona and park them in that parking lot
down in Arizona somewhere. But anyway, go back to those
four words, Let's buy Spirit Airlines one TikTok account and
now one hundred and fifty six thousand strangers think that
(04:05):
they can do well. Wall Street or the Trump administration
and Jet Blue could not do.
Speaker 4 (04:14):
So.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
Spirit ceased operations at three o'clock in the morning on
Sunday or Saturday, May second, the quiet hour, you know
when bad news gets buried. Thirty four years of service,
they finally ran out of altitude completely. Its collapse came
after a cascade of failure's two bankrupts, two rounds of bankruptcy, furloughs,
failed mergers, crippling debt, and most recently, a failed five
(04:36):
hundred million dollar federal bail at attempt. That's Trump administration
ultimately decided, well, we really can't do this. Thank goodness.
The Airlines on CEO Dave Davis told CNBC with notable kenner,
we just ran out of runway. No pen intended. When
Spirit shut down, it left about seventeen thousand employees jobless
and millions of passengers stranded mid itinerary literally mid itinerary
(05:00):
in some cases, scramming for alternatives. By Saturday evening, the
same day the Spirit went dark, a twenty two year
old voice actor named Hunter Peterson had already posted his
response on TikTok.
Speaker 4 (05:18):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
I guess Peterson to some is some kind of known
individual and social media for having once phoned Spirit Airlines
for twenty four consecutive hours as a stunt that he
could post on TikTok. His pitch was pretty simple, disarmingly simple.
We could buy Spirit Airlines, he said on TikTok. Then
(05:42):
he launched the website Let's buy Spirit dot com.
Speaker 4 (05:46):
Took him about an hour to do that.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
It crashed because of the traffic going to that website.
He dubbed his movement Spirit two point zero and has
an pretty ambitious goal until you hear the real numbers.
He wants to try to raise one point seventy five
one in three quarters billion dollars in community pledges. To
(06:11):
enter this pledge, it's just forty five dollars a person.
By last night, he claimed one hundred and thirty two
million dollars in non binding pledges from more than one
hundred and fifty six thousand people. Now, I do want
to emphasize the key phrase non binding. Not one single dollar,
(06:32):
not a dollar has actually changed hands. This is a
declaration of intent, a digital enthusiasm, not capital. Peterson's pitch
draws heavily as I kept digging into this. From the
model of the Green Bay Packers, He's arguing that the
airline could be community owned. One vote permember proportional profit distribution.
(06:55):
The people's carrier, then that sounds wonderful, sounds pretty Marxist
to me. But the people's carrier, it wouldn't be a
trophy for some hedge fund somewhere. Is there an ulterior motive?
Because the surface story and the deeper stories had dug
into this are pretty different. On the surface, this looks
(07:15):
like it's earnest populism, and Peterson himself says it started
as a joke that went out of control in the
best way possible. But let's think about this logically for
just a minute. First, Peterson has explicitly stated that he's
positioning himself as the potential new CEO Spirit Airlines. So
here's a twenty two year old nincompoop on TikTok, no
(07:40):
aviation experience, no management background, no capital, who is actually
out there. Says a lot which I'm going to get
to eventually, but says a lot to us, to us
about our own society. He's building a massive, verifiable audience
of aviation consumers, he's collecting their contact information, He's generating enormous,
(08:01):
enormous viral media coverage. Now, whether or not Spirit two
point zero succeeds, doesn't make any difference what's he doing.
His personal brand has been permanently elevated. Now, I'm not
saying it's not a conspiracy, not even saying that that's just.
Speaker 4 (08:20):
In our new society.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
That's modern content creation meeting a real world crisis. That's
the first point I would make. The second point I
make is this Fortune magazine makes a pretty critical observation
that Peterson is fighting a nonexistent villain because he wants
to keep this out of the hands of private equity.
You know, the hedge funds. Well, private equity is not
(08:44):
in fact circling the skeletal remains the Spirit's records anywhere.
They're not being predators as they have been with oh,
I don't know, maybe some radio station companies, to maybe
name a few. The reason is pretty brutal and simple.
Nobody wants Spirit Airlines enough to pay what the creditors need.
(09:07):
Frontier Airlines tried twice, they walked away, and the bankruptcy
court itself confirmed this week the Spirit doesn't have enough
cash to host an organized auction of its own equipment
the aircraft. As I said, the lenders are just actually
going out and repossessing the planes themselves.
Speaker 4 (09:23):
There is no villain.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
The villain was the business model itself. The villain happens
to be the airline industry itself. That's the second point.
I make the third point, and this is where I
think it gets pretty interesting Peterson's pitch.
Speaker 4 (09:36):
I don't care how flawed it is in the details.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
It is tapping into something that I think is pretty
real about our anxiety about the economy. This isn't really
about spirit airlines, is it No. I think it's about consolidation.
The four largest legacy airlines now control about eighty percent
of domestic capacity. Economists have documented something that is literally
(10:00):
called the economics the spirit effect. The Department of Transportation
has documented something called that spirit effect, and they for
years have been saying that the mere presence, just the
presence of an ultra low cost carrier on a given route,
drives all the competing fairs on that route down by
(10:23):
double digit percentages, ten percent percent even more. Without spirit,
Without the spirit presence, without the spirit effect, oh everybody
pays more.
Speaker 4 (10:36):
Full stop.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Peterson, I think may instinctively understand that he's just gotten
the wrong enemy. But what does this say about us
as a society. So here's where maybe you're not, but
I am. So that's why I'm doing it. I think
this is a real clear Warshack test for America in
twenty twenty six. I want you to think about what
(10:57):
it reveals in a time when a significant portion of
population genuinely believes that collective action conducted through social media
can substitute for institutional competence, regulatory complexity can take the
place of a capital market. It's the same impulse that
(11:20):
drove that stupid games Thought short squeeze back in twenty
twenty one. The same impulse that feeds these go fundme
campaigns for medical bills that frankly ought to be covered
by insurance. It's the same impulse that's these elected y'all
who outsiders at every level of government. Americans are exhausted
(11:42):
by a system they feel no ownership over, and now
they're desperately reaching for any lever, no matter how insane
it is, that gives.
Speaker 4 (11:53):
Them a sense of control, a sense of agency.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Now, the Green Bay Packers comparison, I think is emotionally resonant,
but I think it's legally and structurally bankrupt. Fortune points
out the packers community ownership model was grandfathered in before
the NFL band it in nineteen sixty, and today a
share of packers stock converts. You don't have an inequity,
(12:18):
no payout, you can't trade it. It's a sentimental document,
it's not a financial instrument. The win Co Foods comparison,
also invoked by Peterson, is an employee stock ownership plan
in ethos, that's where the company off the employees makes
the contributions. Neither model translates out to five hundred and
fifty six thousand strangers pledging forty five dollars on the
Internet toward a defunct airline. It doesn't have any planes,
(12:41):
has no operating certificate, it has no cash. So the
probability of Spirit two point zero succeeding pretty low. Right, Well,
there are several reasons the math doesn't work. When Jet
Blue is going to try to buy Spirit Airlines, they
value the airline at three point eight billion dollars three
(13:02):
or four years ago. Now that's before UH Senator Pocahontas
and the regulators of the Department Transportation killed that deal.
The current pledge target one point seven five billion dollars.
That's less than half that valuation. And that's before you
account for the ongoing operating costs, fuel, crew contracts, maintenance,
(13:22):
if a certification requirements, if you're going to reconstitute the carrier,
you got to do all those things. The math doesn't
work yet people are throwing forty five dollars at this.
Speaker 4 (13:33):
I don't know, dragon.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
I could take forty five dollars and we could have two,
you know, supersized meals at McDonald's.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
No four vegan tacos.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Four, we get four vegan tacos. Well, not quite, weren't
they like two fifty apiece.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
Oh the street tacos? The other well a little.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
Okay, all right, And the planes are gone and they're
being repossessed by the lenders already. So by the time
you even get to the one point seven billion dollars,
if it was real, and it's not, if you could
kind of assemble that capital, you don't have an aircraft
actually buy. You don't have a gate, you don't have
a slot at an airport, you don't have an operating infrastructure,
(14:14):
and then the regulations that you have to deal with
is a wall that you're going to run into and
it's going to flatten your face. Launching a commercial airline,
you got to have FAA approval, an air Operator's Certificate,
DOT economic authority, and ongoing compliance. That takes years and
hundreds of millions of dollars and a crowdfunded startup with
(14:39):
no aviation management team. And people are still throwing money
at it. And remember, not one dollar has moved. One
hundred and fifty six thousand non binding pledges are not
the same as one hundred and fifty six thousand investors.
If you convert Internet enthusiasm into legally commit a capital
(15:00):
at scale from strangers that has never been done anywhere
near that magnitude, that I could find the spirit two
point zero. That story itself, I think is genuinely fascinating,
precisely because it is both admirable and delusional at exactly
(15:22):
the same time. Now, the admirable part is the instinct
people I think since that consolidation in the airline industry
is going to hurt them, that the loss of an
ultra low cost, you know, low competition carrier is going
to raise prices for working Americans, and it will. And
if the answer to corporate concentration should involve broader public
ownership and accountability, I think those instincts are probably real instincts.
(15:47):
The delusional part is the mechanism, and the delusional part
are the people that fall for it. Now they don't know,
they don't really have skin in the game yet, but
they saw on TikTok. I'm thinking dragon and I if
we can just find the right thing to go viral
and just ask for forty five dollars, But we want
(16:11):
real money. We want to see a cashier's check, we
want to see a Venmo transfer, we want to see something.
What if it never comes to fruition. Now, if there's
no fraud involved and we're just legitimately wanting to try this, huh.
But that's the delusional part. Well, spirit two point zero
(16:34):
really is stripped, you know, of the of the yellow
planes and the TikTok virality. I think we might be
witnessing a protest. A protest movement is kind of dressed
up as a pseudo business plan, and I think in
America in twenty twenty six, that might just be actually
on brand. And I find that frightening. One hundred Peterson
(16:58):
might be twenty two years old. He doesn't have any
aviation experience, but I think he understood something that the
legacy media that the cabal missed. In the first forty
eight hours after Spirit shut down. People aren't mourning Spirit Airlines.
They're mourning affordable access to air travel. And I think
that probably is a grief worth taking seriously. Even if
(17:21):
his proposal has about as much chance of success as spirits,
you know, planes being repossessed back by the passenger, it
ain't gonna happen. Then there there's the entire, the broader question.
I guess I describe it that way. Could the people,
you know, we always talk about the people, could they
(17:43):
actually own an airline? I think a romantic answer might be, yeah,
he probably could, But the legal, the financial, and the
operational answers almost certainly know. And I think the history
of every airline that has tried something like that is
a graveyard that we have, a cemetery that we ought
to go visit. Community ownership is getting pushed everywhere in
(18:05):
our society, and it kind of scares me. Now, not
all community ownership is bad. Credit unions work, they work fine,
that's a community ownership. Look at ARII, do you have
an RII dividend? I think I've got an UNUSEDRII dividend.
You got an RII account dragon any body glove anything
recently at RII, it's that's that's you know, that's a
(18:25):
community ownership. And the Green Bay Packers kind of works,
but not really. But airlines are categorically different from any
of those. Enterprise Running commercial airlines is not a passive investment.
It's a continuous capital devouring, highly regulated, operationally intense enterprise.
And the margin for air is measured in minutes, and
(18:47):
the margin for that for a financial error, it's probably
about zero. Spirit Airlines, for all of its faults, never flew.
But all I know is what I've heard about. It
carried forty four million passenger a year. Is I said
employe because an ow UN employee seventeen thousand people. That
is a machine with thousands of moving parts, aircraft maintenance cycles,
(19:08):
if a worthiness, air directives, pilot certification requirements, fuel contracts,
gate leasa's crew scheduling, labor agreements, and you have to
synchronize all of that every single day or guess what
people are gonna die.
Speaker 4 (19:22):
The idea that a diffuse group.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
Of one hundred and fifty six thousand small pledges with
no common governance, no structure can make time since theive
operational decisions together. That's not a business model, but that's
where America is in twenty twenty six.
Speaker 4 (19:38):
Somehow we think that we can do that.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
I think you have a better chance of just doing
this and that is recognizing that, oh, your chance to
win one thousand dollars that's coming up in the next
five minutes thanks to South State Bank.
Speaker 4 (19:50):
This is making forward south State bank dot com.
Speaker 5 (19:53):
Yeah, reporting with my sit rep for the day up
here in the wind River Country. I had a little
bit of snow last night, nice bright, sunny, clear sky.
Today the wind River Mountains to the south and the
Alt Grete Mountains to the north it covered with fresh
snow and it's gonna be a good day, and I
(20:15):
hope you have a good day.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
Two questions for you, mister producer again, was the background
audio real too? How many different farm animals did you
count in that audio?
Speaker 6 (20:30):
If you're asking if I inserted in the audio, I
did not, so I would say real. I heard the rooster,
and I think there were some chickens, I.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Thought, and I thought there was something else. I'm not sure,
but I thought there was a third one, two and
all I can think about was the wind River Range,
and he's up there in wind River Country, and I'm thinking,
if it's if it snowed and now it's clear up there,
it's gorgeous right now, I.
Speaker 4 (20:53):
Bet absolutely gorgeous.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
Jealous, Well, I kind of am.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
I have to bet I kind of am. There is
a And of course I said earlier in the program
that when we finally get to you know, when this
finally moves out, which I guess I have to, I
have to say that katiev R has been very, very
good in terms of their forecasting, very good. They frasing
(21:18):
those guys. They deserve whatever awards they say they've won
because they said that we would get more and then
it would clear out. And so I'm hoping by this
afternoon when I'm out running the meetings, that we can
see the snowcaped peaks. It'll be a gorgeous ding. Do
you have any trees broken, lambs broken in your neighborhood? Uh?
Speaker 6 (21:37):
No, but some were sagging very heavily in my neighbor's yards.
Speaker 4 (21:43):
You or the tree?
Speaker 2 (21:44):
Yes, Okay, all right, I just heard the word sagging,
and you know, I have kind of a convulsive reaction, kind.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
Of Yes, the joys of losing one hundred and fifty pounds.
Speaker 4 (21:56):
It's great, you know, can't talk about that for just
a second.
Speaker 3 (21:59):
Oh, go right ahead.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
There was you know, sometimes when you're just scrolling through Facebook,
I don't know why some things appear and some things don't.
But there was an example of someone who much worse
than you.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
Uh huh.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
I think he was supposed to four four fifty and
he was now he was trying to get I think
to one eighty or something. I think, yeah, And so
he had a he had taken a video of himself
not naked. I think he had some underwear on. I'm
fascinated by that. The surgical process that you've told me
(22:37):
about that you'd have to do to correct it, that
would be incredibly painful. Yeah, because that skin is that
skin is a is an organ.
Speaker 4 (22:45):
Yep. That organ is holding everything together.
Speaker 6 (22:47):
And then they cut it all away and stitch it azed.
It's the bits and pieces.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
But it's almost like when you if you've ever skinned
an animal, I mean you know that skin is attached
to the so and you've got to a hump.
Speaker 4 (23:01):
You take you a really.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Sharp knife from you start peeling that at what I
guess the doctors do the same thing.
Speaker 4 (23:06):
Yep.
Speaker 6 (23:07):
Oh yeah, you're pretty much minimum minimum down for two weeks.
Speaker 4 (23:14):
Oh yeah, you're right. I think that's the bare minium.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
Yeah yeah, yeah, so and.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
I can't even imagine trying to move. I mean, you
think about it, what it will say, am my super
little thumb. It's just now getting where it's flexible. And
that's been two weeks or maybe more, I don't remember,
but it's just no getting now. Imagine that all your
entire body.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
Yeah, it's it's eventually a goal.
Speaker 6 (23:35):
Uh, you know, maybe a few years down the down
the road, but you know, yeah, have you checked on.
Speaker 4 (23:40):
The insurance with the insurance covered?
Speaker 6 (23:42):
Typically not, because it is considered a cosmetic thing serious
unless you can convince them that the pause for a
fact here and make sure that people the skin folds
and flaps, if they start rubbing and start causing brashes
and everything, then they will kind of consider that.
Speaker 3 (24:01):
But it's few and far between.
Speaker 6 (24:03):
You.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
Well, we would do a gofund me, since I made
fun of gofund me earlier. We would do go fund
me for you. And I've already gotten just talking about
Spirit Airlines. Girl, Dad's already venmowed me forty five cents
spirit two point zero.
Speaker 4 (24:15):
Let's go.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
We can do this, girl, Dad, he's got I'm just
saying I don't feel now. I know he's not. I mean,
he's active duty, but I and he probably does carry
a weapon at times, and he's probably trained to kill.
He's probably you know, a trained killer. But being a
JAG officer, I know he's sitting behind a desk and
(24:36):
he's It just doesn't give me a feeling of security,
doesn't give me a feeling that he's actually protecting our
constitutional rights.
Speaker 4 (24:43):
One. He's just he's listening to us, which scares me.
Speaker 3 (24:48):
If that proves insanity right there.
Speaker 4 (24:49):
That's that's absolute proof of insanity.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
And tells me that maybe the discharge is not gonna
be as easy as he thinks it's gonna be. Maybe
it's not gonna be honorable because kind of like the
guy with the tattoo, they've got a record and.
Speaker 4 (25:02):
They're gonna say, oh, you want to reenlist.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
Oh we understand you sent Michael Brown forty five cents
on numerous different occasions, different amounts of money, and that
you have religiously listened to that program. We can't let
you reenlist. That's when I feel that the country is safer.
Is there anyway when YOUVENMO somebody to retract it. No,
I'm not gonna send it back. I'm just curious whether
(25:26):
he can try to retract it.
Speaker 4 (25:27):
Oh he can.
Speaker 3 (25:28):
Oh, I don't know about that.
Speaker 4 (25:30):
Yeah. I haven't got any notice of any retraction yet.
Speaker 3 (25:34):
I would like to think so, But maybe not.
Speaker 4 (25:38):
I hope not. I hope not.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
There is a particular kind of political act that kind
of masquerades as courage while functioning as absolute betrayal.
Speaker 4 (25:50):
It looks like whistle blowing.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
It gets treated as whistle blowing, at least in certain
newsrooms and certain congressional offices. But I think it's something
else entirely. It is the deliberate weaponization of a classified
document chosen specifically the document itself has chosen specifically because
the document alone is misleading, and then you deploy that
(26:15):
document against this country and its commander in chief. The
leak of a preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency battle damage assessment
from Operation Midnight Hammer, that's the first time we sent
the B twos over the bomb everything, I think is
the clearest most recent example of exactly that kind of betrayal.
(26:38):
And I'm using the word betrayal specifically because I think
that's exactly what it is. It demands prosecution of both
the leaker and the reporter who published it. Now, I'm
gonna start with what maybe I'll be obvious, but somehow
it keeps getting muddled. A member of Congrus who genuinely
(26:59):
believes that the American people need to know that a
classified fact has a lawful path to tell them. If
you're a member of Congress and you want to make
sure that we know something and it's classified, there is
a lawful way for you to do that. You can
walk onto the floor of the chamber of the United
(27:19):
States Senate or the floor of the United States House.
You can stand at the well of either one of those,
and you can speak the speech or debate. Clause of
the United States Constitution protects that act absolutely, not sort
of not kind of not under certain circumstances. Absolutely, so
you could place the document in the Congressional record. Now,
(27:41):
I'm not saying it's not going to be political blowback,
and I'm not saying, but I'm saying in terms of
if you think you're going to be you're going to
be prosecuted for revealing some classified document. You're not because
you're as a member of Congress, you are entitled to
walk under the floor and say whatever you want to read,
whatever you want to on the floor. You can't go
out into the hallway, you can't go to a press room,
(28:04):
you can't go stand on the steps. But inside the
chambers you are protected, and the case law on that
is settled. There is not one reason none to whisper
to a reporter at midnight when you can speak from
the floor at noon with the lights on. So when somebody,
(28:25):
when a congressman, chooses to whisper instead, I think that
choice is the tell It is the evidence of intent.
It tells us the leaker did not want a public
debate on the merits. He wanted the cover of anonymity.
He wanted a sympathetic byeline. He wanted deniability. That is
not the friend of journalism. That is journalism's user. Now
(28:49):
what was actually leaked and might does it matter?
Speaker 7 (28:53):
Michael and Dragon. I will match Girl Dad's donation if
you promise to stop describing skin fold and I'll double
it if you promise to not use the word discharge
in the same conversation ever.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Again, Okay, the venmos at Michael D. Brown for I
can collect, I can collect a buck today, I'm almost
two thirds of the way to buy my afternoon diet
coke at Matcdonald's. Is this is this violation ay sort
(29:30):
of ethics rule by cleaning for forty five cents from
listeners so I can go buy a diet coke?
Speaker 4 (29:37):
Yeah? Who cares so?
Speaker 2 (29:40):
Because you're well, the only thing that worries me about
is that's like double what I make during a program.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
That's true.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
Yeah, so you know it's like profiting off the program here,
you know, getting at a buck fifty nine to play
for the diet coke.
Speaker 4 (29:55):
So what was leaked and why does it matter?
Speaker 2 (29:59):
After after we struck Iran's nuclear facilities at ferdo the
tons and what's the other name Isfahan Operation Midnight Hammer,
the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, produced a preliminary battle
damage assessment preliminary. So, having seen these kind of documents before,
(30:22):
it had the standard caveats right on the face. It
was marked preliminary. It was marked as I've seen intel
reports like this. It's marked low confidence and this is critical.
The analysts who prepared it disclosed in the body of
the report itself that the inputs on which the intel
and the assessment was made were from intercepted Iranian internal
(30:47):
communications taken in the days after the strikes. Now just
think about what that means. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps
does not send internal messages for our benefit. They communicate
internally for the benefit of the regime and the immediate
(31:09):
aftermath of a humiliating American military strike, those communications served
one purpose propaganda. They told their own leadership the IRGC did.
They told their own leadership that the damage hall is
just modest. They were lying upward, as bureaucrats in authoritarian
(31:30):
regimes always do. They wanted to soften the blow. They
wanted to protect their own positions. So that preliminary Defense
Intelligence Agency assessment it was in most part a faithful
summary of the Iranian battlefield misinformation, disinformation propaganda, and it
(31:53):
gets even worse. Subsequent assessments told a completely different story.
Satellite imagery showed structural collapse and surface signatures consistent that
were consistent with deep penetration of those hardened facilities that
we were going after. The Israeli intelligence from Aside, which
had been tracking the rams mixular program for years contradicted
(32:15):
the internal Iranian narrative, and in fact, the IAEA's own
commentary undercut the picture of a glancing American blow. Follow
On assessments done by the United States concluded that the
enrichment halls at Fordeaux and the Tans had been penetrated
by those bunker buster bombs, the largest non nuclear bombs
(32:37):
in our arsenal, and that critical systems were rendered inaccessible, unusable,
and that whatever subterranean structures technically survived no longer functioned
as a working enrichment complex. So the honest summary available
within days was that the strikes had indeed achieved their
(32:58):
operational objective. So now I want you to ask a
simple question, what did the leaker know and when? He
had access to the preminary report, But he also had access,
by virtue of the exact same clearances to all of
the follow on materials. He saw the analyst caveats, he
(33:20):
saw the satellite imagery, he saw the Israel liaison product,
and out of that entire body of intel, he chose
to hand exactly one document to a reporter, the document
that made Trump look foolish. The document made our military
looking competent, the document that handed the Iranian regime a
foreign press echo of its own internal lies in order
(33:44):
to maintain their regime posture. He never leaked the follow
on Defense Intelligence Agency conclusion he curated, and the curation
had a very deliberate direction. Is what separates malice from conscience?
And what what about the reporter
Hi guys, good morning. I just wanted to report in
with my sit rep enjoying a little late breakfast some
eggs and sausage and black coffee and watching the snowfall.
Nothing much else is going on, so hope you guys
(00:21):
have a good day.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Poor cat, Feed the cat, Come on, feed the cat.
Speaker 3 (00:30):
He likes eggs and bacon or sausage.
Speaker 2 (00:33):
Obviously, I think at this point the poor cat would
eat anything. We should call the SBCA, because clearly the
cat's being abused, not getting enough food. Speaking of food,
before I move on to I want to do something
really odd this hour, which everybody's going, yeah, it's new.
Yesterday we had the vegan tacos, and last night I'm
(00:57):
reading through stuff and I come across during the Daily
Caller apparently the global warming hoax is still alive well
and the Netherlands. In Amsterdam, specifically public advertising for meat
and the fossil fuels that you allow us to stay.
Speaker 4 (01:15):
Warm what's snowing out like it is right now has
been banned.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
In the name of propitiating I guess the left wing
mother gods. The Daily Caller writes this, The ban results
from efforts by ankey Becker Amsterdam Group leader for the
Party for the Animals. According to the BBC, Green Left
is there a Green right Green Left, another Dutch political party,
(01:42):
also supported the legislation. According to CBS, the most militantly
insane nutjobs are now calling the shots in Europe, specifically
in Amsterdam. Fish product, air, travel, cruises, all those things
are being affected. Nobody We're going to get the cruises
if I can get cruises today too. Elsewhere in Holland,
(02:03):
the Hague, another Dutch city, became the first city worldwide
to ban all advertisements or advertisements as we like to say,
for oil and gas as well as aviation and cruise ships,
encouraged by a call for such bans by the United
Nations Secretary General.
Speaker 4 (02:20):
And O'Neil getteris according to The.
Speaker 2 (02:22):
Guardian, whenever you're gonna pull out of the Union. The
Dutch city of Harlem became the first to ban all
meat advertisements from spaces available to the public. According to
the Guardian, so after banning advertising fails to secondly perfect
the weather, these nut jobs will and that we move
on to banning meat and fuel themselves. The Church of
(02:46):
the climate activists are never going to be satisfied. Until
their religion their ideologies is pushed out onto all of
us and will be freezing in the cold with snows
and main Colorado. I think the Dutch of the future
are probably gonna end up living on substandard diets like
the in Tacos as they shiver in the dark. The leather, however,
(03:07):
will a lot as usual totally unchanged. Guy, I just
I couldn't resist. Now, let's let's talk about an airline.
This is hilarious. Let's buy Spirit Airlines. You don't live
(03:30):
in bankrupt right, it's shut down. In fact, it's so
bankrupt that the airline could not afford to auction off
their planes.
Speaker 4 (03:41):
So the lease holders, the creditors are.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
Just having to go find the planes themselves, and you know,
I guess pick them up and I don't know, shipping
down to Arizona and park them in that parking lot
down in Arizona somewhere. But anyway, go back to those
four words, Let's buy Spirit Airlines one TikTok account and
now one hundred and fifty six thousand strangers think that
(04:05):
they can do well. Wall Street or the Trump administration
and Jet Blue could not do.
Speaker 4 (04:14):
So.
Speaker 2 (04:14):
Spirit ceased operations at three o'clock in the morning on
Sunday or Saturday, May second, the quiet hour, you know
when bad news gets buried. Thirty four years of service,
they finally ran out of altitude completely. Its collapse came
after a cascade of failure's two bankrupts, two rounds of bankruptcy, furloughs,
failed mergers, crippling debt, and most recently, a failed five
(04:36):
hundred million dollar federal bail at attempt. That's Trump administration
ultimately decided, well, we really can't do this. Thank goodness.
The Airlines on CEO Dave Davis told CNBC with notable kenner,
we just ran out of runway. No pen intended. When
Spirit shut down, it left about seventeen thousand employees jobless
and millions of passengers stranded mid itinerary literally mid itinerary
(05:00):
in some cases, scramming for alternatives. By Saturday evening, the
same day the Spirit went dark, a twenty two year
old voice actor named Hunter Peterson had already posted his
response on TikTok.
Speaker 4 (05:18):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (05:19):
I guess Peterson to some is some kind of known
individual and social media for having once phoned Spirit Airlines
for twenty four consecutive hours as a stunt that he
could post on TikTok. His pitch was pretty simple, disarmingly simple.
We could buy Spirit Airlines, he said on TikTok. Then
(05:42):
he launched the website Let's buy Spirit dot com.
Speaker 4 (05:46):
Took him about an hour to do that.
Speaker 2 (05:48):
It crashed because of the traffic going to that website.
He dubbed his movement Spirit two point zero and has
an pretty ambitious goal until you hear the real numbers.
He wants to try to raise one point seventy five
one in three quarters billion dollars in community pledges. To
(06:11):
enter this pledge, it's just forty five dollars a person.
By last night, he claimed one hundred and thirty two
million dollars in non binding pledges from more than one
hundred and fifty six thousand people. Now, I do want
to emphasize the key phrase non binding. Not one single dollar,
(06:32):
not a dollar has actually changed hands. This is a
declaration of intent, a digital enthusiasm, not capital. Peterson's pitch
draws heavily as I kept digging into this. From the
model of the Green Bay Packers, He's arguing that the
airline could be community owned. One vote permember proportional profit distribution.
(06:55):
The people's carrier, then that sounds wonderful, sounds pretty Marxist
to me. But the people's carrier, it wouldn't be a
trophy for some hedge fund somewhere. Is there an ulterior motive?
Because the surface story and the deeper stories had dug
into this are pretty different. On the surface, this looks
(07:15):
like it's earnest populism, and Peterson himself says it started
as a joke that went out of control in the
best way possible. But let's think about this logically for
just a minute. First, Peterson has explicitly stated that he's
positioning himself as the potential new CEO Spirit Airlines. So
here's a twenty two year old nincompoop on TikTok, no
(07:40):
aviation experience, no management background, no capital, who is actually
out there. Says a lot which I'm going to get
to eventually, but says a lot to us, to us
about our own society. He's building a massive, verifiable audience
of aviation consumers, he's collecting their contact information, He's generating enormous,
(08:01):
enormous viral media coverage. Now, whether or not Spirit two
point zero succeeds, doesn't make any difference what's he doing.
His personal brand has been permanently elevated. Now, I'm not
saying it's not a conspiracy, not even saying that that's just.
Speaker 4 (08:20):
In our new society.
Speaker 2 (08:22):
That's modern content creation meeting a real world crisis. That's
the first point I would make. The second point I
make is this Fortune magazine makes a pretty critical observation
that Peterson is fighting a nonexistent villain because he wants
to keep this out of the hands of private equity.
You know, the hedge funds. Well, private equity is not
(08:44):
in fact circling the skeletal remains the Spirit's records anywhere.
They're not being predators as they have been with oh,
I don't know, maybe some radio station companies, to maybe
name a few. The reason is pretty brutal and simple.
Nobody wants Spirit Airlines enough to pay what the creditors need.
(09:07):
Frontier Airlines tried twice, they walked away, and the bankruptcy
court itself confirmed this week the Spirit doesn't have enough
cash to host an organized auction of its own equipment
the aircraft. As I said, the lenders are just actually
going out and repossessing the planes themselves.
Speaker 4 (09:23):
There is no villain.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
The villain was the business model itself. The villain happens
to be the airline industry itself. That's the second point.
I make the third point, and this is where I
think it gets pretty interesting Peterson's pitch.
Speaker 4 (09:36):
I don't care how flawed it is in the details.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
It is tapping into something that I think is pretty
real about our anxiety about the economy. This isn't really
about spirit airlines, is it No. I think it's about consolidation.
The four largest legacy airlines now control about eighty percent
of domestic capacity. Economists have documented something that is literally
(10:00):
called the economics the spirit effect. The Department of Transportation
has documented something called that spirit effect, and they for
years have been saying that the mere presence, just the
presence of an ultra low cost carrier on a given route,
drives all the competing fairs on that route down by
(10:23):
double digit percentages, ten percent percent even more. Without spirit,
Without the spirit presence, without the spirit effect, oh everybody
pays more.
Speaker 4 (10:36):
Full stop.
Speaker 2 (10:37):
Peterson, I think may instinctively understand that he's just gotten
the wrong enemy. But what does this say about us
as a society. So here's where maybe you're not, but
I am. So that's why I'm doing it. I think
this is a real clear Warshack test for America in
twenty twenty six. I want you to think about what
(10:57):
it reveals in a time when a significant portion of
population genuinely believes that collective action conducted through social media
can substitute for institutional competence, regulatory complexity can take the
place of a capital market. It's the same impulse that
(11:20):
drove that stupid games Thought short squeeze back in twenty
twenty one. The same impulse that feeds these go fundme
campaigns for medical bills that frankly ought to be covered
by insurance. It's the same impulse that's these elected y'all
who outsiders at every level of government. Americans are exhausted
(11:42):
by a system they feel no ownership over, and now
they're desperately reaching for any lever, no matter how insane
it is, that gives.
Speaker 4 (11:53):
Them a sense of control, a sense of agency.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Now, the Green Bay Packers comparison, I think is emotionally resonant,
but I think it's legally and structurally bankrupt. Fortune points
out the packers community ownership model was grandfathered in before
the NFL band it in nineteen sixty, and today a
share of packers stock converts. You don't have an inequity,
(12:18):
no payout, you can't trade it. It's a sentimental document,
it's not a financial instrument. The win Co Foods comparison,
also invoked by Peterson, is an employee stock ownership plan
in ethos, that's where the company off the employees makes
the contributions. Neither model translates out to five hundred and
fifty six thousand strangers pledging forty five dollars on the
Internet toward a defunct airline. It doesn't have any planes,
(12:41):
has no operating certificate, it has no cash. So the
probability of Spirit two point zero succeeding pretty low. Right, Well,
there are several reasons the math doesn't work. When Jet
Blue is going to try to buy Spirit Airlines, they
value the airline at three point eight billion dollars three
(13:02):
or four years ago. Now that's before UH Senator Pocahontas
and the regulators of the Department Transportation killed that deal.
The current pledge target one point seven five billion dollars.
That's less than half that valuation. And that's before you
account for the ongoing operating costs, fuel, crew contracts, maintenance,
(13:22):
if a certification requirements, if you're going to reconstitute the carrier,
you got to do all those things. The math doesn't
work yet people are throwing forty five dollars at this.
Speaker 4 (13:33):
I don't know, dragon.
Speaker 2 (13:34):
I could take forty five dollars and we could have two,
you know, supersized meals at McDonald's.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
No four vegan tacos.
Speaker 2 (13:42):
Four, we get four vegan tacos. Well, not quite, weren't
they like two fifty apiece.
Speaker 3 (13:47):
Oh the street tacos? The other well a little.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
Okay, all right, And the planes are gone and they're
being repossessed by the lenders already. So by the time
you even get to the one point seven billion dollars,
if it was real, and it's not, if you could
kind of assemble that capital, you don't have an aircraft
actually buy. You don't have a gate, you don't have
a slot at an airport, you don't have an operating infrastructure,
(14:14):
and then the regulations that you have to deal with
is a wall that you're going to run into and
it's going to flatten your face. Launching a commercial airline,
you got to have FAA approval, an air Operator's Certificate,
DOT economic authority, and ongoing compliance. That takes years and
hundreds of millions of dollars and a crowdfunded startup with
(14:39):
no aviation management team. And people are still throwing money
at it. And remember, not one dollar has moved. One
hundred and fifty six thousand non binding pledges are not
the same as one hundred and fifty six thousand investors.
If you convert Internet enthusiasm into legally commit a capital
(15:00):
at scale from strangers that has never been done anywhere
near that magnitude, that I could find the spirit two
point zero. That story itself, I think is genuinely fascinating,
precisely because it is both admirable and delusional at exactly
(15:22):
the same time. Now, the admirable part is the instinct
people I think since that consolidation in the airline industry
is going to hurt them, that the loss of an
ultra low cost, you know, low competition carrier is going
to raise prices for working Americans, and it will. And
if the answer to corporate concentration should involve broader public
ownership and accountability, I think those instincts are probably real instincts.
(15:47):
The delusional part is the mechanism, and the delusional part
are the people that fall for it. Now they don't know,
they don't really have skin in the game yet, but
they saw on TikTok. I'm thinking dragon and I if
we can just find the right thing to go viral
and just ask for forty five dollars, But we want
(16:11):
real money. We want to see a cashier's check, we
want to see a Venmo transfer, we want to see something.
What if it never comes to fruition. Now, if there's
no fraud involved and we're just legitimately wanting to try this, huh.
But that's the delusional part. Well, spirit two point zero
(16:34):
really is stripped, you know, of the of the yellow
planes and the TikTok virality. I think we might be
witnessing a protest. A protest movement is kind of dressed
up as a pseudo business plan, and I think in
America in twenty twenty six, that might just be actually
on brand. And I find that frightening. One hundred Peterson
(16:58):
might be twenty two years old. He doesn't have any
aviation experience, but I think he understood something that the
legacy media that the cabal missed. In the first forty
eight hours after Spirit shut down. People aren't mourning Spirit Airlines.
They're mourning affordable access to air travel. And I think
that probably is a grief worth taking seriously. Even if
(17:21):
his proposal has about as much chance of success as spirits,
you know, planes being repossessed back by the passenger, it
ain't gonna happen. Then there there's the entire, the broader question.
I guess I describe it that way. Could the people,
you know, we always talk about the people, could they
(17:43):
actually own an airline? I think a romantic answer might be, yeah,
he probably could, But the legal, the financial, and the
operational answers almost certainly know. And I think the history
of every airline that has tried something like that is
a graveyard that we have, a cemetery that we ought
to go visit. Community ownership is getting pushed everywhere in
(18:05):
our society, and it kind of scares me. Now, not
all community ownership is bad. Credit unions work, they work fine,
that's a community ownership. Look at ARII, do you have
an RII dividend? I think I've got an UNUSEDRII dividend.
You got an RII account dragon any body glove anything
recently at RII, it's that's that's you know, that's a
(18:25):
community ownership. And the Green Bay Packers kind of works,
but not really. But airlines are categorically different from any
of those. Enterprise Running commercial airlines is not a passive investment.
It's a continuous capital devouring, highly regulated, operationally intense enterprise.
And the margin for air is measured in minutes, and
(18:47):
the margin for that for a financial error, it's probably
about zero. Spirit Airlines, for all of its faults, never flew.
But all I know is what I've heard about. It
carried forty four million passenger a year. Is I said
employe because an ow UN employee seventeen thousand people. That
is a machine with thousands of moving parts, aircraft maintenance cycles,
(19:08):
if a worthiness, air directives, pilot certification requirements, fuel contracts,
gate leasa's crew scheduling, labor agreements, and you have to
synchronize all of that every single day or guess what
people are gonna die.
Speaker 4 (19:22):
The idea that a diffuse group.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
Of one hundred and fifty six thousand small pledges with
no common governance, no structure can make time since theive
operational decisions together. That's not a business model, but that's
where America is in twenty twenty six.
Speaker 4 (19:38):
Somehow we think that we can do that.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
I think you have a better chance of just doing
this and that is recognizing that, oh, your chance to
win one thousand dollars that's coming up in the next
five minutes thanks to South State Bank.
Speaker 4 (19:50):
This is making forward south State bank dot com.
Speaker 5 (19:53):
Yeah, reporting with my sit rep for the day up
here in the wind River Country. I had a little
bit of snow last night, nice bright, sunny, clear sky.
Today the wind River Mountains to the south and the
Alt Grete Mountains to the north it covered with fresh
snow and it's gonna be a good day, and I
(20:15):
hope you have a good day.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
Two questions for you, mister producer again, was the background
audio real too? How many different farm animals did you
count in that audio?
Speaker 6 (20:30):
If you're asking if I inserted in the audio, I
did not, so I would say real. I heard the rooster,
and I think there were some chickens, I.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
Thought, and I thought there was something else. I'm not sure,
but I thought there was a third one, two and
all I can think about was the wind River Range,
and he's up there in wind River Country, and I'm thinking,
if it's if it snowed and now it's clear up there,
it's gorgeous right now, I.
Speaker 4 (20:53):
Bet absolutely gorgeous.
Speaker 3 (20:55):
Jealous, Well, I kind of am.
Speaker 2 (20:58):
I have to bet I kind of am. There is
a And of course I said earlier in the program
that when we finally get to you know, when this
finally moves out, which I guess I have to, I
have to say that katiev R has been very, very
good in terms of their forecasting, very good. They frasing
(21:18):
those guys. They deserve whatever awards they say they've won
because they said that we would get more and then
it would clear out. And so I'm hoping by this
afternoon when I'm out running the meetings, that we can
see the snowcaped peaks. It'll be a gorgeous ding. Do
you have any trees broken, lambs broken in your neighborhood? Uh?
Speaker 6 (21:37):
No, but some were sagging very heavily in my neighbor's yards.
Speaker 4 (21:43):
You or the tree?
Speaker 2 (21:44):
Yes, Okay, all right, I just heard the word sagging,
and you know, I have kind of a convulsive reaction, kind.
Speaker 3 (21:53):
Of Yes, the joys of losing one hundred and fifty pounds.
Speaker 4 (21:56):
It's great, you know, can't talk about that for just
a second.
Speaker 3 (21:59):
Oh, go right ahead.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
There was you know, sometimes when you're just scrolling through Facebook,
I don't know why some things appear and some things don't.
But there was an example of someone who much worse
than you.
Speaker 3 (22:13):
Uh huh.
Speaker 2 (22:14):
I think he was supposed to four four fifty and
he was now he was trying to get I think
to one eighty or something. I think, yeah, And so
he had a he had taken a video of himself
not naked. I think he had some underwear on. I'm
fascinated by that. The surgical process that you've told me
(22:37):
about that you'd have to do to correct it, that
would be incredibly painful. Yeah, because that skin is that
skin is a is an organ.
Speaker 4 (22:45):
Yep. That organ is holding everything together.
Speaker 6 (22:47):
And then they cut it all away and stitch it azed.
It's the bits and pieces.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
But it's almost like when you if you've ever skinned
an animal, I mean you know that skin is attached
to the so and you've got to a hump.
Speaker 4 (23:01):
You take you a really.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Sharp knife from you start peeling that at what I
guess the doctors do the same thing.
Speaker 4 (23:06):
Yep.
Speaker 6 (23:07):
Oh yeah, you're pretty much minimum minimum down for two weeks.
Speaker 4 (23:14):
Oh yeah, you're right. I think that's the bare minium.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
Yeah yeah, yeah, so and.
Speaker 2 (23:18):
I can't even imagine trying to move. I mean, you
think about it, what it will say, am my super
little thumb. It's just now getting where it's flexible. And
that's been two weeks or maybe more, I don't remember,
but it's just no getting now. Imagine that all your
entire body.
Speaker 3 (23:33):
Yeah, it's it's eventually a goal.
Speaker 6 (23:35):
Uh, you know, maybe a few years down the down
the road, but you know, yeah, have you checked on.
Speaker 4 (23:40):
The insurance with the insurance covered?
Speaker 6 (23:42):
Typically not, because it is considered a cosmetic thing serious
unless you can convince them that the pause for a
fact here and make sure that people the skin folds
and flaps, if they start rubbing and start causing brashes
and everything, then they will kind of consider that.
Speaker 3 (24:01):
But it's few and far between.
Speaker 6 (24:03):
You.
Speaker 2 (24:03):
Well, we would do a gofund me, since I made
fun of gofund me earlier. We would do go fund
me for you. And I've already gotten just talking about
Spirit Airlines. Girl, Dad's already venmowed me forty five cents
spirit two point zero.
Speaker 4 (24:15):
Let's go.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
We can do this, girl, Dad, he's got I'm just
saying I don't feel now. I know he's not. I mean,
he's active duty, but I and he probably does carry
a weapon at times, and he's probably trained to kill.
He's probably you know, a trained killer. But being a
JAG officer, I know he's sitting behind a desk and
(24:36):
he's It just doesn't give me a feeling of security,
doesn't give me a feeling that he's actually protecting our
constitutional rights.
Speaker 4 (24:43):
One. He's just he's listening to us, which scares me.
Speaker 3 (24:48):
If that proves insanity right there.
Speaker 4 (24:49):
That's that's absolute proof of insanity.
Speaker 2 (24:52):
And tells me that maybe the discharge is not gonna
be as easy as he thinks it's gonna be. Maybe
it's not gonna be honorable because kind of like the
guy with the tattoo, they've got a record and.
Speaker 4 (25:02):
They're gonna say, oh, you want to reenlist.
Speaker 2 (25:04):
Oh we understand you sent Michael Brown forty five cents
on numerous different occasions, different amounts of money, and that
you have religiously listened to that program. We can't let
you reenlist. That's when I feel that the country is safer.
Is there anyway when YOUVENMO somebody to retract it. No,
I'm not gonna send it back. I'm just curious whether
(25:26):
he can try to retract it.
Speaker 4 (25:27):
Oh he can.
Speaker 3 (25:28):
Oh, I don't know about that.
Speaker 4 (25:30):
Yeah. I haven't got any notice of any retraction yet.
Speaker 3 (25:34):
I would like to think so, But maybe not.
Speaker 4 (25:38):
I hope not. I hope not.
Speaker 2 (25:40):
There is a particular kind of political act that kind
of masquerades as courage while functioning as absolute betrayal.
Speaker 4 (25:50):
It looks like whistle blowing.
Speaker 2 (25:52):
It gets treated as whistle blowing, at least in certain
newsrooms and certain congressional offices. But I think it's something
else entirely. It is the deliberate weaponization of a classified
document chosen specifically the document itself has chosen specifically because
the document alone is misleading, and then you deploy that
(26:15):
document against this country and its commander in chief. The
leak of a preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency battle damage assessment
from Operation Midnight Hammer, that's the first time we sent
the B twos over the bomb everything, I think is
the clearest most recent example of exactly that kind of betrayal.
(26:38):
And I'm using the word betrayal specifically because I think
that's exactly what it is. It demands prosecution of both
the leaker and the reporter who published it. Now, I'm
gonna start with what maybe I'll be obvious, but somehow
it keeps getting muddled. A member of Congrus who genuinely
(26:59):
believes that the American people need to know that a
classified fact has a lawful path to tell them. If
you're a member of Congress and you want to make
sure that we know something and it's classified, there is
a lawful way for you to do that. You can
walk onto the floor of the chamber of the United
(27:19):
States Senate or the floor of the United States House.
You can stand at the well of either one of those,
and you can speak the speech or debate. Clause of
the United States Constitution protects that act absolutely, not sort
of not kind of not under certain circumstances. Absolutely, so
you could place the document in the Congressional record. Now,
(27:41):
I'm not saying it's not going to be political blowback,
and I'm not saying, but I'm saying in terms of
if you think you're going to be you're going to
be prosecuted for revealing some classified document. You're not because
you're as a member of Congress, you are entitled to
walk under the floor and say whatever you want to read,
whatever you want to on the floor. You can't go
out into the hallway, you can't go to a press room,
(28:04):
you can't go stand on the steps. But inside the
chambers you are protected, and the case law on that
is settled. There is not one reason none to whisper
to a reporter at midnight when you can speak from
the floor at noon with the lights on. So when somebody,
(28:25):
when a congressman, chooses to whisper instead, I think that
choice is the tell It is the evidence of intent.
It tells us the leaker did not want a public
debate on the merits. He wanted the cover of anonymity.
He wanted a sympathetic byeline. He wanted deniability. That is
not the friend of journalism. That is journalism's user. Now
(28:49):
what was actually leaked and might does it matter?
Speaker 7 (28:53):
Michael and Dragon. I will match Girl Dad's donation if
you promise to stop describing skin fold and I'll double
it if you promise to not use the word discharge
in the same conversation ever.
Speaker 2 (29:07):
Again, Okay, the venmos at Michael D. Brown for I
can collect, I can collect a buck today, I'm almost
two thirds of the way to buy my afternoon diet
coke at Matcdonald's. Is this is this violation ay sort
(29:30):
of ethics rule by cleaning for forty five cents from
listeners so I can go buy a diet coke?
Speaker 4 (29:37):
Yeah? Who cares so?
Speaker 2 (29:40):
Because you're well, the only thing that worries me about
is that's like double what I make during a program.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
That's true.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
Yeah, so you know it's like profiting off the program here,
you know, getting at a buck fifty nine to play
for the diet coke.
Speaker 4 (29:55):
So what was leaked and why does it matter?
Speaker 2 (29:59):
After after we struck Iran's nuclear facilities at ferdo the
tons and what's the other name Isfahan Operation Midnight Hammer,
the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, produced a preliminary battle
damage assessment preliminary. So, having seen these kind of documents before,
(30:22):
it had the standard caveats right on the face. It
was marked preliminary. It was marked as I've seen intel
reports like this. It's marked low confidence and this is critical.
The analysts who prepared it disclosed in the body of
the report itself that the inputs on which the intel
and the assessment was made were from intercepted Iranian internal
(30:47):
communications taken in the days after the strikes. Now just
think about what that means. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps
does not send internal messages for our benefit. They communicate
internally for the benefit of the regime and the immediate
(31:09):
aftermath of a humiliating American military strike, those communications served
one purpose propaganda. They told their own leadership the IRGC did.
They told their own leadership that the damage hall is
just modest. They were lying upward, as bureaucrats in authoritarian
(31:30):
regimes always do. They wanted to soften the blow. They
wanted to protect their own positions. So that preliminary Defense
Intelligence Agency assessment it was in most part a faithful
summary of the Iranian battlefield misinformation, disinformation propaganda, and it
(31:53):
gets even worse. Subsequent assessments told a completely different story.
Satellite imagery showed structural collapse and surface signatures consistent that
were consistent with deep penetration of those hardened facilities that
we were going after. The Israeli intelligence from Aside, which
had been tracking the rams mixular program for years contradicted
(32:15):
the internal Iranian narrative, and in fact, the IAEA's own
commentary undercut the picture of a glancing American blow. Follow
On assessments done by the United States concluded that the
enrichment halls at Fordeaux and the Tans had been penetrated
by those bunker buster bombs, the largest non nuclear bombs
(32:37):
in our arsenal, and that critical systems were rendered inaccessible, unusable,
and that whatever subterranean structures technically survived no longer functioned
as a working enrichment complex. So the honest summary available
within days was that the strikes had indeed achieved their
(32:58):
operational objective. So now I want you to ask a
simple question, what did the leaker know and when? He
had access to the preminary report, But he also had access,
by virtue of the exact same clearances to all of
the follow on materials. He saw the analyst caveats, he
(33:20):
saw the satellite imagery, he saw the Israel liaison product,
and out of that entire body of intel, he chose
to hand exactly one document to a reporter, the document
that made Trump look foolish. The document made our military
looking competent, the document that handed the Iranian regime a
foreign press echo of its own internal lies in order
(33:44):
to maintain their regime posture. He never leaked the follow
on Defense Intelligence Agency conclusion he curated, and the curation
had a very deliberate direction. Is what separates malice from conscience?
And what what about the reporter
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