Badlands Media

Jon Herold and Burning Bright compare notes on being under the weather before getting into the week's main event: Xi Jinping's upcoming visit and what it means in the context of Herold's older theory called Overton's Goalpost, the idea that Trump, Putin, and Xi are converging in ways the mainstream media can't quite make sense of. They break down the split media coverage, half framing it as Trump getting outplayed, half framing it as Trump dominating the negotiations, and argue neither narrative captures what's actually happening. There's also midterm talk and what Herold calls the ongoing struggle...

Shipwreck opens with a sponsored chat with Gabe from Good Bru, digging into gut health, prebiotic fiber, and how a simple supplement has helped her own wellness journey and 40 pound weight loss. Once the interview wraps, she pivots hard into the fallout from a video she posted this week announcing she will not be voting in the midterms or presidential elections going forward, only locally. It sparked a massive backlash from across the political spectrum, and she spends the rest of the show defending her position point by point, from rigged election concerns to broken campaign promises to why...

Kwast and Chris Ponder pick up the framework built since "Ghost in the Garden," expanding it into what they're calling the Sol Information System, a way of organizing information around the sun and planets, complete with each planet assigned its own function, communication, commerce, and more. Chris compares it to mining Bitcoin, the more you contribute, the more value you build, while Kwast frames the whole project as an ongoing arms race for truth, referencing stealth technology's fading advantage as proof that no edge lasts forever. Expect planetary symbolism, a genuinely wild comparison between America's four page Constitution and...

Jon Herold spends most of hump day addressing what he sees as a recurring pattern of election season "struggle sessions," where some in the Q community accuse Badlands hosts, and shipwreck in particular, of being traitors for questioning whether voting fixes a system they believe is fraudulent. He reads his own viral morning post in full, walks through a pointed rebuttal from a critic line by line, and argues that demanding ideological conformity around voting contradicts the Founding Fathers' actual example of declaring a corrupt system illegitimate rather than working within it. He also announces a new upcoming Badlands...

CannCon and Ashe open Ash Wednesday with a Senator Chris Murphy clip arguing that regulating the Internet and fixing loneliness is the way to inoculate voters against Donald Trump, which the hosts find both revealing and a little rich given what Badlands events do every year. That leads into a candid exchange about whether elections are really the mechanism of consent. The bulk of the show works through yesterday's UN General Assembly, from the Greenland and Denmark Arctic security agreement and two new military bases to pointed remarks on Iran, the Western hemisphere, and a globalist push around AI...

JB White is riding high off a Gators win over Auburn and a whirlwind trip to the Badlands Media GART 13 event in Las Vegas, despite a rough travel day getting home. He recaps a heated panel discussion from the conference, shares a personal health update on major progress reversing his diabetes numbers, and dives back into his ongoing commentary on a closely watched Massachusetts criminal trial and the jury dynamics around it. On the geopolitical side, he breaks down Zelensky's recent meeting with President Trump at the UN, continues making his case for why America's alliance with Japan matters...

Alpha Warrior and Josh Reid are back together after a busy week apart, and they have a lot to unpack. They start with a string of odd weekend occurrences, from air traffic control outages to unusual reports in the skies, before shifting into a big discussion about Trump TV and why the guys think that move was far more significant than most people realize. They also break down the United Nations talks, hints of an Iran deal on the horizon, and new export restriction moves tied to domestic oil and gas. There is a segment digging into John Brennan...

Fresh off a Vegas GART weekend (complete with Velcro suits and a balloon-room hip injury), CannCon and Ashe in America settle in for a news roundup after one of the great Game-of-Thrones-style beard-oil ad wars you'll ever hear. They dig into the government's own non-citizen voter figures, the 24,000 flagged by the Census Bureau versus millions still unanalyzed, and why neither host fully trusts the numbers coming from either direction. That leads into the absurdity of being told the census and voter rolls "can't be compared" when the data fields are basically the same, and why that excuse props up...

Two very different stories share the spotlight here. First, Trump hosts the second Shield of the Americas summit, welcoming Peru as a new member and pushing allied nations to formally designate cartels as terrorist organizations, with genuinely striking numbers on fentanyl seizures down 97% by sea and $4 billion stripped from cartels. Leaders from Ecuador and Colombia weigh in on Venezuela, democracy, and regional security, and Trump touts a 21 trillion dollar investment record along with Iran's crumbling navy and air force. Then the scene shifts entirely to a DOJ press conference out of Utah, where officials announce charges against a postal...

Jon Herold digs into Trump's UN General Assembly speech, playing multiple clips including his declaration that he "gives no credence" to the midterms when it comes to Iran policy, which Jon reads as Trump deliberately putting distance between himself and a Republican Party he doesn't fully trust. He also breaks down Trump's push to rename "artificial intelligence" to "superintelligence," his comments defending fake news bans as a national security matter, and a new Pentagon Homeland Defense Board Jon connects to his ongoing theory about the military eventually countering a weaponized intelligence community domestically. Other topics include over 200 arrests in...

CannCon and Zak Paine are back from Gart in Vegas and open with a major update on the election fraud crackdown, where more than two hundred arrests and indictments have now been secured and officials say that number could double before the midterms. They dig into Michigan, playing clips from the Macomb County clerk and Sheriff Leaf on why local clerks cannot verify citizenship and what his referral to federal investigators could mean. From there they cover an appeals court siding with the Trump backed Missouri map, Fox contributors pushing back on the President banning several outlets, and newly...

Jon Herold and Zak Paine catch up on some weekend man on the street chaos before easing into a genuinely unnerving story about "tall whites," a supposed group of ethereal, blonde, Scandinavian looking beings who show up unannounced on private property, communicate without moving their mouths, and vanish just as fast. It's the kind of firsthand account that even Jon and Zak, self described skeptics, admit gets under your skin a little. From there the show ties it all together with a wilder claim making the rounds again, that the CIA has quietly been using consumer DNA...

Jon Herold, fresh off the Badlands Vegas conference, shares highlights from the "man on the street" interviews before diving into the escalating fight between the Trump White House and mainstream media over CNN, MSNBC, and Politico being banned from the press pool. He digs into the resulting lawsuits and Fox News' own internal debate about whether it deserves press access, argues the entire press pool system is compromised regardless of outlet, and replays an old personal video where he publicly requested a one on one interview with Trump. Other topics include a cryptic "something's coming" teaser video from the...

Jonathan Drake takes listeners on a wild nine phase journey tracing how 1840s usury laws quietly evolved into the modern financial surveillance apparatus, arguing we are already living in something eerily close to a social credit system, just built slower and dressed up as consumer protection. From the Russell Sage Foundation's suspiciously self interested crusade against loan sharks, to the Federal Reserve, income tax, Social Security, and the Patriot Act, Jon connects a two century dot to dot showing how each reform designed to help the working man actually deepened centralized control. Along the way expect a sharp read...

A rare crossover: Jon Herold, Chris Paul, and Burning Bright are all together live at Gart for this one, and the energy shows. They kick off with Trump's latest true social posts about a potential third term before getting into a genuinely strange story about AI supposedly nudging the country toward conflict with China, and the very convenient timing of the outlet that broke it getting banned from the White House the same day. The hosts pick apart just how many layers of fakeness might be stacked on top of each other here, joking about "fake intelligence"...

Chris Paul and Burning Bright revisit this Terry Gilliam adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's gonzo classic, and it turns out this one is a genuine dividing line between the two hosts. Expect an honest reckoning with a movie that's aged into something stranger and more uncomfortable than either remembered, plus real talk about psychedelics, why fear is often what actually sends a trip sideways, and a thoughtful detour into whether humans are naturally ordered or chaotic beings. The conversation gets surprisingly reflective on drug culture, personal experience, and where the line sits between genuine insight and just disordering your...

Frankie Val leans into the damp, mosquito bitten edge of the season with a full cryptid and haunted places special. Before the guest, he wades through the week's grimmer headlines and his running theory that the Internet now incubates characters and legends that start manifesting in real life, from the postpartum murder mom to that Cat in the Hat figure the show keeps tracking. Then the main event: New England Legends host and Ghost Adventures contributor Jeff Belanger, author of "The World's Most Haunted Places." They tour spots from Pennhurst State School to the RMS Queen Mary...

Trump welcomes hunters, fishers, and outdoorsmen to the newly renovated Rose Garden to sign two executive orders that sound almost too niche to matter, until you hear the numbers. One opens up millions more acres of federal land for hunting and fishing on top of 92 million acres already unlocked, while protecting traditional lead ammunition. The other tosses out a widely mocked 10 mile per hour boating speed limit and kills a push to mandate electric only boats, complete with a genuinely wild tangent about electrocution versus sharks. Bass Pro Shops' Johnny Morris, NRA's Doug Hamlin, NASCAR legend Richard Childress, and...

CannCon and Ashe in America finish out Chapter 14 of The Creature from Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin, picking up with what the book calls the Transfusion Mechanism. This week covers how American taxpayers ended up quietly subsidizing Soviet Russia and its satellites long after Lend Lease officially ended, through below market trade deals, guaranteed loans, and bailouts routed through agencies like the IMF and World Bank. The hosts trace how that same pattern continued into the 1990s, with a long list of major American corporations and their CFR connected executives rushing into former Soviet territory once Yeltsin opened...

Trump lands in North Carolina to make one very clear pitch: pretend I'm on the ballot, because Michael Whatley basically is. The rally leans hard into crime, walking through the brutal murder of Ukrainian refugee Irina Zaretska and Governor Roy Cooper's early release of 3,500 inmates, before comparing it to the infamous Willie Horton ad that sank Dukakis decades ago. From there it's a full sweep of economic bragging rights, record stock market highs, a proposed $5,000 "Trump dividend," no tax on tips and Social Security, plus a candid Iran update covering their sunken navy and a Strait of Hormuz blockade...