Well, today is another Liberation Day, the liberation of America's warriors in name, in deed, and in authorities.

You kill people and break things for a living.

You are not politically correct and don't necessarily belong always in polite society.

President Trump has your back, and so do.

I.

A few things off the top.

This has been such a huge year for the show and I mean we have worked hard.

Mike and I are just like what episode is this?

Which one are we doing?

You know, between the main feed in the premium those, who the hell is biographies?

Those take a ton of work.

It's been huge, but so has the response.

Just want to say thanks to everyone who's signed up for the Patreon and even those who don't.

Just thanks for being here.

Thanks for showing up every week.

It's been awesome.

But.

As we.

Look to the year ahead.

We have posted on our Patreon page a link to a survey form.

It's a little cheesy, but but we're interested, you know, what have we been doing?

Well, what could we do that you would like?

Who are some guests?

You'd love to hear some things you'd like us to cover.

So go to our Patreon page, whether you're signed up or not, you can find the link and let us know how we're doing.

The next piece of housekeeping before we bring in Swin and talk about the Pentagon is the long rumoured the femdom shirts.

The parody T-shirts are happening.

Just a reminder this is a came from a joke I made while looking at Erica Kirk's leather pants.

Jared Basically she was wearing the Charlie Kirk Freedom shirt and the leather pants and I said same shirt but it says femdom.

You'll be able to get your own Femdom shirt.

The way we're doing this is it's going to be a limited front and you've got two weeks from today until December 22nd to put in your pre-order for these shirts.

They are going to be US manufactured, printed with union labor and all of the proceeds.

Every dollar that we make from these T-shirts, we're going to donate to a charity that helps women experiencing homelessness.

I just like the idea of somebody going to like the Atlanta Braves game in in the femdom shirt and having somebody look at it and see it and be like, Oh yeah, Charlie Kirk, great.

I like that.

Then I'm looking to be like wait a second.

Because there is a small chance The Turning Point USA goes ballistic on us for doing these shirts, we're going to hold back the name of the exact organization that's receiving these funds.

We don't want them caught in the crossfire, especially around the holidays, but when all is said and done, we'll report back on exactly how much money was raised and where it went.

Of course, if you're a lady and you're wearing it on your Tinder date or whatever, you're making a very profound statement.

I think it's a good way.

It's a good way to weed yourself out from particular like TPSA supporters that might be, you know, in your replies.

We need to figure out a way to get one to Erica Kirk.

Like if she wears it, will people notice?

I think they will, Jared.

All right, that's all the housekeeping.

Let's get right into it.

Joining the podcast now we have Swin Soopsang, who is a senior political correspondent at Zeteo.

You may have read his work in Rolling Stone and The Daily Beast before that.

And if you ever listened to the podcast Fever Dreams, you'll recognize his voice.

He's a Co host of that show with Will Summer and Kelly Weil.

So in What's up, Dude?

I'm popping a tear on my left eyelid right now because you mentioned fever dreams.

RIP.

I'll I'll never.

Forgive you.

He's the real deal journalist, I will say.

Far too kind.

Way more than I deserve.

If if you have a media ethics and methods class to teach your podcast audience at some point I could dish to them on why being unavowed out and open leftist snarling vulgar leftist things on the Internet can actually help you get a lot of confidential sources in Trump world and in elite Republican circles.

But again, that is a different story for a.

Different.

I'm interested in that story.

Today we're having you on to talk about the ten kinds of fucked up that has been going on at the Pentagon over the last couple of months.

Because, man, it sure is something.

So since January, the Pentagon's been under the control of Pete Hagseth.

He's a military veteran, but he's better known as a Fox News on Air personality.

Jared and one thing he threw an axe and it like hit like one of the one of the people to the side in like some bit on fox and friends.

I just want to he almost.

Killed the guy on TV?

Yeah, almost.

Killed the guy with an axe, so.

Yeah, we like the exaggerating a little, but not by that far.

Like it, if you watch a video of it, you're like, this guy's now the Secretary of Defense, excuse me, secretary of War.

And it looks bad.

And we're not even getting into like the top 1000 worst things he's done or said in his career.

Well, he almost didn't get in at the Pentagon.

Due to allegations of sexual misconduct, financial mismanagement, and, among other things, excessive drinking.

JD Vance had to go in and break a 5050 tie vote in the Senate to confirm him.

He's clearly in way over his head.

Since getting in, he's been purging senior military leaders who, you know, one might think could help him run this Pentagon.

And he's doing that for reasons that sort of remain unclear.

There's a lot of speculation.

On September 5th, they renamed the Department of Defense to the Department of War.

Why?

Because it's based in Epic or something like that.

That name change could cost up to $2 billion in sacred taxpayer money, for what it's worth.

Worth it.

Also important to Pete Hegseth for some reason is making sure that there are military bases named for Confederate generals.

Pete Hegseth was in the news earlier this year for hauling a bunch of top military generals out to a meeting in Virginia to lecture them about culture war bullshit and tell them to resign if they didn't like.

Issuing new policies that will overhaul the IGEO and MEO processes.

I call it the no more walking on egg shells policy.

We are liberating commanders and NCO's.

We are liberating you.

We are overhauling an Inspector General process, the IG, that has been weaponized, putting complainers, ideologues and poor performers in the driver's seat.

There's a lot more.

We don't have time to go over everything, but the screws are starting to tighten on Hexa as of late and there's even been some debate over whether war crimes have occurred.

We'll talk about that in a minute.

But first, Swin, I want us to talk about the new press corps at the Pentagon.

What did they do?

Earlier this year, they decided to institute a policy of basically, I I may be trivializing this a tiny bit, but it was essentially, you cannot report things that Sean Parnell, Pete Hegseth, and the rest of the cabal at Donald Trump's Pentagon don't want you to report, including if it's classified information or top secret information.

You can't do that.

This is a reporting process where you guys are just going to basically reprint our print press releases.

I'm only lightly paraphrasing what what the direct was like, as you can probably guess, like any journalist who is sitting in that Pentagon press pool for all these years worth even like a inches worth of their weight in salt said no, fuck off.

I'm not signing this agreement.

That is not what we're going to do to so we can be blessed with being able to sit in your precious air conditioned room and ask some Pentagon officials who step up to the mic questions.

So even new sources that your audience may suspect might sign on to a Trump propaganda document like that.

Several of them or at least some of them declined to do so.

Like I think the Fox News of the World were like, we need to maintain a patina of respectability on this front.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

We can't sign that.

So in response to this and other things, the Secretary of War Crimes or whatever the fuck his title is now Pete Hagseth and his merry band of wannabe war criminals there decided to say, OK, you're not signing the thing.

Get lost.

So then they flooded the Pentagon press pool with just a a a parade of, of, of just like dorks and loons.

Yeah, I was looking over some of the reporting that's been out of who has been confirmed or who has said they've received credentials to replace legacy news outlets and they include the My Pillow guy.

Wait, the My Pillow guy for his company?

He has like a mini Armada of quote, UN quote reporters now.

Where there's Lindell TVI think it's.

Yes.

There we go.

Yeah, a real TV station, Yes.

Your Pillow News is giving giving you scoops about the military, apparently.

Also on a name I found Raheem Kasam, close associate of Bannon World.

Laura Loomer.

Live site News which is an anti abortion blog.

RedState a Salem Media property.

I should say Loomer makes Raheem Kasam look like Walter Cronkite.

Almost, yes, yes, or, or or at least like Tom Brokaw or something like that.

But yeah, Laura Loomer, I'm sure your audience knows is close to Donald Trump.

They're actually pals like these senior administration officials of the president take her policy advice from time to time.

She always felt like she was cheated to have a job in Trump's West Wing, at least for this part of his second term.

Like, I don't none of us are looking at Laura Luma's cell phone right now.

But if you did, you would see text messages from Donald Trump back right around the time of the 2024 presidential election saying giving her pseudo job offers if he got a second term.

And she is a self declared proud bigot when it comes to Muslims, Islam and other things.

So that kind of gives you the gist of like the caliber of journalist that he's being proliferated there.

Yeah, you've got The Gateway Pundit.

You've got the Post Millennial Slash Human Events, Jack Pasovic, Libya, Minsat Crew Front Lines, which is the media arm of Turning Point USA and Tim Poole for some reason.

Tim has been melting down because people don't think he's a real journalist over this.

And they and, and you know what?

It is this cabal, the media industry, the cultists who demand.

So they had their first big showing in the Pentagon last week, and man, it was something, as you just mentioned, Swin, Matt Gaetz showed up for one American News.

So supposed to be the sitting US Attorney General right now, but we, we can just, oh, whatever, nothing happened.

He just isn't.

James O'Keefe, his outlet was there.

Laura Loomer showed up.

Jim Hoft was there from The Gateway Pundit.

RC Maxwell, who's a real fucking character.

Very minor figure, but a Cam Higbee, some dipshit from Infowars, And predictably, all they did was glaze the Pentagon.

We had some scorching scoops, like Santa Claus has showed up at the Pentagon.

People, you know, trying to post looking hard questions along the lines of like, is the Pentagon going to sue the Washington Post?

My question is, does is does the Department of War plan on pursuing any sort of legal action against the Washington Post and what consequences will there be for lying to the American people?

Because, of course, the implication there was that Pete Hegseth.

And Admiral Bradley are war criminals and that that was the implication.

And that's what a lot of people on social media were saying after the fact.

So could you speak to that?

Yeah, it it is frankly disgusting that the Washington.

Swid I I just want to get your take on this as somebody who has covered the first Trump administration.

You even wrote a book about it.

Co wrote a book about it.

What what's your take on this?

I mean, the first administration was certainly hostile to the press, but this certainly seems like an escalation.

Right.

They're escalating in all kinds of ways, including ways that are much darker and more destructive.

And behind the scenes in this, we can get in to that layer before all of this cause cosmetic WWE inspired like just trying to fuck with us and others publicly just for their own amusement.

To answer your question, I used to be based in Washington, DC.

I'm now based in the great Cincinnati metropolitan area here in the great state of Ohio.

But when I was based in Washington, DC, I was a White House reporter for The Daily Beast.

And during the first four years of President Trump, I would go to the White House from time to time, including for mandatory pool duty for the White House press pool.

So I'd be, you know, I'd be in that briefing room and I quite frankly immediately found that there was an inverse relationship between the amount of time I physically spent at the White House versus the quality of my reporting on any on that given day.

Can you tell us a little more about that?

There are.

A lot of people, some of them have to do it whether they want to or not because they work in the business of show TV where you kind of have to have a camera and you have to have a body there dispatching from the White House or other important government Oregon.

You have to be there physically delivering your the news to the audience.

But for me personally, the kind of stuff that I do, I always found that my reporting, my original reporting, whatever investigations or scoops or whatever that I was working on on that day.

You might guess that barely any of that comes from sitting in the White House briefing room.

Like, no, you're, you're trying to get documents or in depth granular accounts from sources with direct knowledge privately.

You know, you're not going to be doing it while trying to knock on somebody's door on their office in the White House in The West Wing, or while you're peppering a White House or administration official who's up at the lectern who's just giving you like canned talking points.

Like the less time as a White House reporter I spent physically at the White House, like meeting people off site or somewhere else or making a billion phone calls a day, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

That is where I did the work that I was proudest of what I was covering the first Trump administration.

And I can say the same about my my cruise coverage of Term 2.

Now my boring take and I'm sure so many others have had this for the Pentagon press pool during the Hagseth era.

Getting purged and run out of town is not all of my brain, but a good chunk about brain thought to myself, good.

All of you go out there, get scoops.

Like fuck, fucking do your job and don't just sit in that air conditioned room waiting for Sean Parnell or whoever to come out and lie to you and just say whatever they want to say and what that they they typed on a note card like five hours ago.

Who gives a shit?

If the administration wants to continue to beef up their rabid propaganda apparatus and just flood the zone with all these freaks and sickos, who are they are going to pretend on the actual media?

I don't necessarily like that, but at some point, like they're going to do what they want to do.

Like the what the the White House during Trump's first year back in power did sort of a power grab with the White House Correspondents Association with regards to, I think selections the White House print pool or press pool, the daily rotation or whatever the fuck.

And at some point they're just going to do for these four years of Trump 2 point O what they want to do.

And a lot of reporters, including in legacy media and their bosses, are going to have to decide, do we try to jockey and try to play the rules as we wanted them to be and as they have been for decades or whatever?

Or are we going to adjust to this new reality of what they're going to give us?

The middle finger, what's good for the goose is good for the gander.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, do you think this could actually work right?

Because the rules they asked them to agree to are are are basically you're not allowed to report information that hasn't been approved for release.

You're not allowed to solicit military for officials for information.

Basically, you're not allowed to.

Be a report.

You're not allowed to be able to.

Yeah, your your job is to regurgitate press releases and stuff, right?

But all of these outlets, with the exception of One American News, which doesn't necessarily have a reputation for getting hard hitting journalism, all left, right.

And I, I don't think they, I, I don't think they can, they can't stop them from reporting, right?

No, no, of course, I, I think, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong because I'm not a member of the Pentagon press pool in the DC area.

But I think what you're talking about is they had to sign something for as a condition to stay in that air conditioned room.

And people, including, if I recall correctly, fucking Newsmax, the pro Trump, pro Republican Party Newsmax were like, yeah, we're not going to sign this thing.

Like we have a responsibility as flimsy as that responsibility.

Maybe with the our dear friends over at Newsmax, they either thought they had a responsibility to the truth and reporting and the privileges and rights I should say that the First Amendment offers us, or they thought to themselves, OK, well we we can't look completely stupid.

Even if some of these organizations like Fox News or Newsmax or whoever are a validly pro Trump or pro GOP, like they they most of them do require like at least a sliver of plausible deniability.

I, I think it's important to isolate that and just let it sit for a second that this administration is forcing Newsmax to soul search about what it's, it can ethically do Newsmax.

I mean, that's just that that's kind of wild considering it is it it, it does have the reputation of being, you know, just a junk news network for reactionaries.

Yeah, it's gotten to a point where they've just pumped the Pentagon press pool with a bloodlusting pro Trump propagandist who are there to tell the Pentagon how awesome Pete Hegseth Botox makes his cheeks look.

Your listeners can Google that Pete Hegseth Botox.

That is not something I'm just saying facetiously.

And how awesome the policy of the murder spree that the administration has going on in the Caribbean Sea right now is.

It's it's it's very childish.

I think it is abundantly silly.

But at the end of the day, while it is emblematic of the authoritarian blitz that this gang running the federal government is on right now, at the end of the day, it's lower on my chart of things that I'm getting apoplectic about.

Because this at least offers the Washington Post of the New York Times, of the Associated Presses of the World or whoever to say, OK, the guys who we had based there depend on, let's get them on, you know, some real fucking work right now.

And then, you know, the conversation will shift when all those get people get charged under the Espionage Act.

But that's hopefully a different conversation for a different day.

I mentioned war crimes earlier, chatter about war crimes, that it seems to be a term on the tips of tongues in Washington lately, centering on Pete Hagseth's decision to extrajudiciously kill people in boats in the Caribbean that he says are narcotics traffickers.

It is horrifying, and people in Washington seem to be getting pretty freaked out that he just keeps doing it and keeps doing it.

It's a little bit out of our depth.

So I'm glad that you're with us today to to fill us in.

But for people who haven't been following it really closely, you know, the Pentagon bombing these bows, can you catch us up on sort of how this started and how things have escalated over the last couple months?

When you start trying to unpack it, including the legal intricacies of the supposed justifications that lawyers in the administration have gone about to, to say that this is OK and quote, UN quote, legal over recent months, your brain starts to bleed a little bit out of your ears because it is so Orwellian, so dystopian, what they've been trying to do, including with this bombing campaign in the sea.

Now they will argue this is about narco terrorism, including narco terrorists who are coming out of and in league with the government in Caracas, in Venezuela.

That's their stated justification.

And that's what I guess they have in still classified legal paperwork in the bowels of the Justice Department, the Pentagon, the White House.

But what's important for your audience to realize is, and I'm sure this will not stun them, is that that is the administration just openly lying and spinning to you.

They have been doing these bombings specifically as part of their broader campaign by the Donald Trump's, the Stephen Miller's, and the Marco Rubio's of the world to try to destabilize the Maduro regime in Venezuela so that they can do a regime change operation or even a potential war on Venezuelan soil.

Donald Trump has been talking for months about potentially moving the bombing campaign onto actual Venezuelan soil.

Right now, are you?

Sure, because I was told, I was told that Trump was the peace president.

That's what I was told by all the the kind of all right activists in 2016, and then it was reiterated again when he was running in in 2024.

Well, the way I like to think of that, including when people try to bring up Trump's rhetoric for the past decade that he wants to end these endless wars and that he's supposedly anti neo con is the difference between someone like Donald Trump and Dick Cheney or George W Bush.

Post 911 is that, and I am cribbing this some from multiple Republican sources I've spoken to over the years, including ones working on Team Trump, some of whom, whether you like them or not, aren't thrilled about some of this shit.

I would refer to him as a lazy and incompetent war monger when you're trying to think of Donald Trump's policies when some people try to paint him as anti war or at least not as warlike as your average neo con circa 2000.

Two my response is he's a war monger just like the other war mongers are except he is lazy and incompetent.

So so often when he does things like bombing Iran, something Dick Cheney and George Bush didn't do, he tries to limit it to A1 and done thing tried to declare a victory and to be like OK let's make peace and hug now because he doesn't have the commitment to follow through with it.

I mean it's not a saving grace.

I'm insulting him right now, but would you rather have the non lazy warmonger or lazy warmonger?

I mean, whatever, but for the sake of just talking about his worldview here, lazy warmonger.

And again, I'm stealing that quote and reappropriating it, but I think that's a perfect way to describe what he's doing, including with regards to Venezuela right now.

So these boats in the Caribbean are being targeted with these military strikes.

Can you tell us more about what these strikes actually look like 'cause there's been a few of them, right?

Do you know how many there have been?

There have been dozens and dozens of deaths.

There have been.

Really.

Dozens of.

Yes, there had been a lot of deaths.

This is a serial killing spree.

It's essentially, and I would not be the first to point out that when Donald Trump, JD Vance or any of their propagandists go out there to tell the American people we are killing the narco terrorists, Joe Biden didn't.

And you're a squash or you're a Lib or you're a pussy if you're not on board with our bombing spree.

They do not know who are on these boats.

They claim that these are the worst of the worst narco terrorists.

They're basically Osama bin Laden dangling like a cocaine baggie in front of American children.

That's what they want you to think of with this shit.

But there is absolutely no reason to take the administration's word for it.

Yeah, given how much they lie about people they bomb or assail, including American citizens or people in American soil, people who their thugs literally shoot when they're Americans or U.S.

citizens.

So given the rapidity and the rapacious sets that they lie and spin and get caught lying time and time again about that stuff with regards to Trump's militarized ICE and BP crackdowns across the country, there is absolutely no reason to take their word about it about who are on these boats.

We just have no idea who their massacre.

Are right now and even if there are there were some it it first of all, I want to point out that it's conceivable that there are no drug dealers on any of the boats they've attacked.

That's completely possible.

But even if there were some, these are not high level.

I mean, you're not blasting Pablo Escobar or whatever, right?

You don't, yes and you don't just get to slaughter people who are accused of things like this is and this is being discussed through the prism of what they are doing are possible or crimes, which I guess textbook definition.

Yeah, agreed.

Especially because this is Trump's and hagsess Pentagon doing it.

But it feels so Orwellian and fucking strange to me to talk about it in that way.

When there is no war going on, There is no war going on.

It is a war crime in a time of no war.

Hence, a more accurate designation for what the Trump administration doing right now in the Caribbean Sea and elsewhere is just murder.

It's just murder.

And it's not liberal Pod Save America style hysteria or hyperbole to say stuff like that.

There are Republicans on Capitol Hill who are starting to come around do that.

How badly do you have to fuck up to the point that at least some senior Republican lawmakers in Capitol Hill are coming out saying we demand answers, we demand investigations, particularly with regards to this double tap strike that was reported in the Washington Post where I'm not sure if they're these Republicans are saying yet, like you can't do that.

But at the very least, they want more aggressive oversight over the Trump administration.

All the Democrats are basically saying that.

But several senior Republican lawmakers in official Washington have come around to again and again publicly joining them in that chorus.

And I repeat, how badly do you have to fuck up with making your crimes so obvious that that is starting to happen?

And this is only year one of Trump's second term.

Well, Swint, speaking to your sources and in the process of your reporting, have you gotten a sense of what has changed because these boat strikes have been going on for a while, you know, did did all of them just like wake up from an app at the same time or?

If Donald Trump's poll numbers weren't weaving in and out of the 37 to 39% US approval rating, I think maybe we'd have a different story.

But currently we have the reality we have.

You are correct in alluding there to be very correct idea that before this stuff happened in recent days with the Republican lawmaker suddenly saying, oh, wait a minute, we should maybe fucking look into this.

All of this, all of these months of bombings have been almost certainly very, very illegal like so.

So I, I do agree with some people when they say we're missing the forest first, the trees a little bit when we focus on this one reported double tap strike, because if you think that's murder, then all of it is murder.

I I I do agree with that generally.

Right, the the very premise of it.

But I guess I've seen some experts, you know, distinguishing on TV that maybe because the president ordered it.

And in the past there had been attacks like, you know, ordered by Obama or Clinton that that didn't receive congressional approval.

And then this would be in the same realm as that.

I don't know.

I mean, that's what that that's what they're claiming.

I mean, to me it seems like you're just blowing up boats full of full of people who are not white and you know, you're expecting us to swallow that as normal.

Right.

And the thing that was different about the reporting on this double tap strike, whereas the first one of this now significantly long running spree of bombings is that we had known for a while, I believe for weeks now, if you were following reporting at the Intercept that multiple strikes were ordered.

And obviously that would, whether intentionally or not, have the effect of killing survivors who were maybe clinging to the boat.

The Washington Post revealed in recent days that according to their sources with direct knowledge of the matter, that Pete Hagseth himself ordered the chain of command to leave no safe quarter to make sure that everybody was killed, kill them all, and that if there were survivors clinging to the boat, it didn't matter.

Order follow up strikes to get rid of them.

That is where it escalated more to the point that a lot of lawmakers who weren't really publicly paying attention to this shit earlier started saying, OK, if this is accurate and if this is what actually happened, there needs to be restraints on this because what was just described was so fundamentally just a war crime and murder in this ongoing campaign that it freaked people out.

And we had some reporting at Ceteo recently that in the aftermath of this revelation from The Washington Post, the administration has sort of tried to push back on it.

But I think it was a little bit instructive when you saw that Pete Hagseth's initial public response to the Washington Post reporting was not a denial.

He didn't deny it.

He was gleeful.

About it, yeah, he posted Franklin the turtle with a bazooka, right?

Like.

Yeah, and even before that, when he did a really huffy statement about it, if you read it carefully, he does not deny that he gave the order.

Only more recently have he and Donald Trump started to step back a little bit from the edge of bear hugging this operation.

And we have reporting at zeteo.com that one of the things that followed immediately before the administration's upper echelon started walking back their celebratory Glee a little bit was that lawyers in different agencies and different departments in Trump's second administration started telling senior administration officials and their colleagues that, just so you know, if what has been reported in the Washington Post is correct, that is blatantly and flagrantly illegal.

This crossed the line even for a lot of the lawyers who are still populating and then still have not been purged from Trump's second administration.

Even they were like, this does not look good.

This is not something you want to go on TV and brag about like, you got to figure this out.

This is a quote, UN quote problem as some of them were telling their colleagues.

And lo and behold, right after that, the President of the United States and the so-called Secretary of War started saying, oh, you wait, no, it wasn't me.

It was this guy.

It was this guy.

It was this guy who ordered the double taps, right?

I we support him, he's great, we love him, but it wasn't me.

I'm, I'm, I'm struggling to figure out how we can get the majority of American people in this country to realize how grotesque this particular boat thing is.

Jared and I were talking about this before we came on.

There was a line that used to float around white nationalist talking points, whatever.

And it used to be that we would, we would get a president in there who would go to war with the cartels by just, you know, doing drone strikes on places and, and whatever else.

I remember Kris Kobach was considered too extreme when he ran talking about using the military as part of his thing to to blow up, you know, things in Mexico or whatever.

So this is sort of been around for a while on the racist right in particular.

And you have this guy Hegseth, who has, you know, is in the business of trying to bring back the Confederate named things, get rid of Martin Luther King Day events and comes in and he does this thing to me.

I feel like that story isn't out there enough that just this is like a really it's not only horrific from a humanitarian perspective and like seems to be highly illegal in in multiple ways, but it's also just like a a virulently racist thing where just the idea is that they come from Venezuela, their fair game for assassination.

I'm guessing that you guys did see or hear Megyn Kelly recently.

Trump ally and podcaster Megyn Kelly, former Fox News host, going out there on her stupid little show, which sadly I'm sure does pretty well with the listenership to say that she's happy about what Trump and Pete Hagseth are doing and that she doesn't just want these people blown up.

She wants like limbs blown off them to bleed out slowly in the water for them to suffer and basically be tortured to death.

She seems like she's gotten like she's gotten more extreme in the last couple of years.

By the way, this is one of many examples.

I would argue there's a good chance she has always been like this, including when she was trying to moderate herself.

So she would have fancy multi, multi $1,000,000 gig at NBC.

But it's, it's funny to think about that era.

We should talk about that more on another date.

So I, I, I think the tea leaves were there that she's always been to like this to some degree, but she has entered a phase now, well, now that she's just podcasting and that she's not on the Evening News or cable news or whatever anymore, that she's just letting the MAGA freak flag fly in a sadistic manner.

And it is very illuminating to see how much she is bloodthirsty about these operations to a cartoonish degree, believing that the point of the US military or American law enforcement or the federal government or whoever is to torture to death people who you want to see either abroad or at home, torture to death like.

And I would like to believe that that is an isolated thing among the manga sphere and the Republican elite.

But it's not.

And we know it's not because of how gleefully the federal government under Trump's two point O is conducting not just these operations, but so much else like it's it's institutionalized A giggling bloodlust.

And to your point earlier about how people should communicate to the American people, so it sinks in how not just blatantly illegal, but how grotesque.

This is the way I keep thinking about it, not even necessarily as a political reporter or as a guy who covers politics and injects it directly into his like arteries day in and day out, but as just like a citizen, as a registered voter, as as hopefully a seemingly regular enough person living in the United States of America.

I constantly think to myself that they are doing this in our name, funded by our tax dollars, constantly.

This atrocious Mer spree of people who we don't even know who they are, they're laughing about on TV while simultaneously trying to steal health care, food, neighbors, killers of your community and everything else from millions upon millions and millions of Americans and just laughing about it constantly on live streams or on TV or on social media.

So that's what I think about when you when people try to say like, oh, normal people aren't going to care about this.

I mean, in a vacuum, I don't know, maybe not.

It was kind of hard to get normal quote, UN quote normal people to care about the Awlaki drone killing.

But in the sense of that this is what they're prioritizing after years of saying we're not like the neocons.

We're we're all about ending wars, not starting them while they are trying to steal so much, trying to mug so many people.

Maybe what you're saying is that the more people feel that hurt economically, which has been, which is gradually built up over the course of the last year, they're more likely to associate the horrors of this with with that?

Right, Right.

To me, it's both as a reporter and as just an average Joe or Jane.

It's the same story.

It's the same Trumpian game show host personality called Fishistic Project.

You can't separate any of these elements from each other.

Yeah, Going back to the point you made, Mike, when I'm looking at this, what I keep thinking about is like you said, sort of this alt right when we were calling at the alt right sort of portrayal of immigration as invasion, right?

It's like great replacement light.

Like one of the first things Trump did when he got in office was he declared a handful of cartels as foreign terrorist organizations.

And to me, like even though Heg Seth is the face of this and obviously the buck stops with Trump I.

I just keep thinking about Stephen Miller and like these themes that they campaigned on basically that and I want to get your take on this, but it seems like they may be over indexed on how much they managed to convince people that immigration is an invasion akin to some kind of military operation they have to push back on.

And now that they're acting on those beliefs and murdering people for it, I'm almost struggling to come up with words for just how repulsive it is.

Oh, totally.

It's it's sick.

It's depraved.

Back when I was at Rolling Stone magazine, I wrote something in the heat of the 2024 presidential election saying that look what Trump and his goons are running on is that if they retake power, they are going to use the federal government to turn it into the blood orgy scene from the movie Event Horizon.

If only every single cannibal space demon from that scene were played by the villain from the Adam Sandler movie.

Happy Gilmore I Stand.

By Bob Silverman, Tear reference.

I stand by that and then some, because I honestly believe to my core, to the NTH degree, that I actually undersold to readers how bad it would get during 2025 if Trump were restored to the throne in every conceivable metric.

There are so many things where I just look at it, analyze it, report on it, and think to myself, this is not just worse, but markedly worse than I thought it was going to be.

Just before he was re elected in November 2024.

And I had the shittiest expectations for how this administration, if it were given the ability to exist again, would turn out.

And the Venezuela stuff is a perfect example of those many, many instances, largely because as bad as I thought it would get if you were re elected, I did not have.

Oh, we're actually going to very likely do an actual war on Venezuelan soil and start bombing Venezuela's soil, not just the coast off of it, but Venezuelan soil.

That we're going to use our tax dollars and our time and effort to do regime change there in a big, big way.

Not just funding and supporting things covertly via the CIA to try to destabilize the place, but actually kinetic big boy explosive bombs and planes warfare on Venezuela.

I would not have put that on my Trump second term fascism bingo card in December 2024.

Maybe that's because I'm naive or stupid.

Did you guys have it on yours?

No, but I think when you put somebody like Pete Hagseth in charge of of the military, or at least he and Trump in charge of the military, anything is on the table.

Because I, I, I think probably when I woke up to the possibly something like this happening.

And it's and that doesn't make it any less horrific to actually see it happening is when again, he started to do that stuff with a changing in the names of the bases to the Confederate things.

And you know, all those other like white nationalist coded choices that he made when he first got the gig, because when I say if you somebody like this who's who's capable of that, you know, you don't want them in charge of military power, it's really scary.

No, totally.

And look like there's so much horrifying, historically shambolic shit that's going on with this administration and the first year of the four years isn't even up yet, so it can get exhausting to try to catalog it.

But one thing I keep coming back to is when you look at the historic history making tippy top of corrupt presidential actors in perhaps all, not just modern American history, but all of American history, Donald Trump and his pals both in and out of government seem to have very quickly in a matter of several months eclipsed them all.

Like it's not just me who says that.

It's like if you ask good government ethicists and people who actually are paid to study this stuff intensely and catalog it and look at things in the vast scheme of American history, not just vibes or what you think is going on right now.

So many of them will say that even just the crypto stuff, like the Trump meme coin stuff alone automatically makes Donald Trump the most corrupt president in all of American history.

And that's not even counting all the other stuff with his pals, with his pardons, with his family, business empire.

Like there's so much else.

I'm only flicking at the tip of the iceberg right now.

The levels of corruption that we have being a ring LED by the supposed leader of the free world right now is so intense and so brazen, so out in the open and so open and shut textbook obvious corruption that it is madding.

It is sickening.

And it gets to the point where I constantly think to myself, boy, when I was in high school or college, I first started reading about the Marcos family in the Philippines.

I would think to myself, geez, how did the Filipino people ever let this happen?

Guy?

I have not thought that for a while as I start to get more cynical and less naive about American politics, but boy, do I not fucking think anything like that now.

Like Amy, the idea that there's any shred of American exceptionalism left when you think of like corrupt tin pot dictators in other country.

And it's like, oh boy, at least that things might not be perfect here, but at least that doesn't happen here.

It all happened here and it makes like the fucking Marcoses of the world and recent global history look almost like small time criminals.

Well, Swid, before we let you get out of here, I, I just want to ask you about one more thing that's been coming up on our show a bit, which is that, you know, as you've noted earlier, Trump's poll numbers are in the toilet.

Democrats have been sweeping.

You know, they swept a bunch of elections in November.

They put up a hell of a fight.

I believe it was in Tennessee last week or the week before, depending when this comes out.

You you have people like Marjorie Taylor Crean defecting.

I mean, all of this is kind of like an aside.

There's a story here, a story there, but now on top of the pile, you've got Republican leaders in Congress looking at these boat strikes and wondering, oh, geez, is our name going to be on this?

And, you know, I'm just thinking if next year, if Democrats are able to sweep elections again, make Trump a, a lame duck president.

I, I mean, where do things go from here?

I, I have a hard time imagining the toothpaste going back in the tube on the Republican Party.

But have you thought about this?

I mean what's on your mind in terms of what a like post Trump MAGA movement might look like?

I'm I'm positive this is all extremely detrimental to my mental health, that I consider the questions that you were just asking rather profusely, both on my professional time and in my spare time.

And I would like to wind it back a little bit before I talk about the MAGA movement itself.

Because the advent of Trump's second presidency has really gotten me to think over and over and over again how silly it was for me to spend years diagnosing that the United States was an empire in decline.

But then also psyching myself into thinking, particularly during the mid Obama era, that we could do empire in decline without doing aggressively empire in decline type things that all declining empires do.

And obviously sending the the racist game show host, demented as he is, back to the White House twice and to unleash everything, including what is currently going on is certainly very empire and decline hours.

There's like no way to get around it.

When you look at everything in his domestic agenda and and foreign policy.

It it's it's great for the Roman Empire that TikTok didn't exist during their era.

I'm sure it would be at least a little bit less humiliating for them than it is for us now if that had been the case, if that had been live streamed.

So I think about that a lot in terms of the Democrats will be back in power at some point fairly soon in our lifetimes, or whether that's on Capitol Hill or the White House.

I don't know exactly what the 2026 of the 2028 elections are going to look like.

But at some point soon, the Democrats will control the justice appointment again.

They may even have a trifecta in official Washington in terms of control of the federal government.

But I've long thought that for the left or center left, the story of the coming years and decade is going to be 1 of picking up the pieces of what's left.

Not necessarily completely undoing the horrifying degree of damage that is going to be done and is being done just because it's so hard to crib something you said earlier, Jared, it's so hard to put the toothpaste back in the in the fucking thing.

And they have spray the entire room full of toothpaste.

Yeah, I mean, just just when the just to point out this boats thing in the in the context, if they get away with this, right, it's precedent for who knows what, It's actually, it's like really, really scary.

Now, you could always point out any kind of wise critic of American foreign policy.

We'll we'll just quickly say what about this, what about that?

And they'll be right about it.

But there's something about, there's something about the cynicism of just of looking at the past and saying like, hey, what if we took all that and made it worse?

And that's what I feel like is what's what.

They're always point out what somebody did in the past, but then they do this, this the version of the same thing on steroids.

Oh, yeah.

And look, all despotisms and particularly the horrifying idealities of the mid and early 20th century, they're all built on other regimes and other practices and other forms of law enforcement or imprisoning or whatever that came before them.

Like when people point out like, oh, what about Obama's drone warfare?

What about this?

What about that?

It's like, yes, I no, no, no, I understand that.

And you can check the tape.

I think all three of us were probably hyper.

Well, yeah, I certainly was hyper critical the stuff while I was covering it, while I was just a fucking nobody, like basically a teenager or whatever while that was going on.

But the idea that what is going on right now, not just with the murderer incorporated in the Caribbean, but everything else foreign, domestic that Trump and the Republican Party are doing right now, the idea that it's not markedly historically worse and different is facile.

And it is important for people like the three of us to analyze it in the context of, well, what are the conditions now, what all the things that brought us to this moment that is fundamentally different than using that very necessary smart form of analysis to excuse what is currently going on for the Democrats.

My fear as an average citizen is that when it's their time to command things like the Justice Department and the Oval Office and other fancy little trinkets like that, is that they will do some sort of souped up a version of Obama's saying in 2009, we can't look back at the crimes or alleged crimes of the past.

We have to move forward.

That sounds good, I think to your median independent voter, maybe.

But it is terrifying to me that it is highly probable that we are going to enter the next phase of the American saga without an aggressive form of looking back at the alleged crimes or very obvious crimes that have been happening in broad daylight while Trump and the other individuals are just laughing about it, just rubbing it in all of our hundreds of millions of faces.

So they've just, they've just totally gotten away with it so far.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And I, I hope I'm wrong.

I really hope I'm wrong.

I'm hoping that some of your listeners bookmark this and then in four or five years they can rub it in my face.

Ha ha, ha.

Actions do have consequences.

You were being too nihilistic about it.

I really hope that, that I'm, I, I get so very savagely owned at this point.

I just don't have much 'cause I don't think for for optimism on that point.

But when it comes to the other side of the aisle, how I am feeling about the future based on my reporting and experiences over the past decade about the post Trump MAGA movement and Republican Party, whatever that looks like whenever he's no longer a candidate or whatever he does in go into retirement or whatever.

I do think that as deleterious a effect that Trumpism has had on not just the party but the country, that Trumpism will be with us for a long time even when Donald Trump is no longer around.

Even if there are changes or tweaks here and there.

In the same way that the long, long shadow of Reaganism in a big way loomed so large in American life, and you can argue in many, in several key ways, still does loom rather large, but in the gratuitous, hyper gratuitous way that it did that lasted for a long time.

That was the defining thing about the Republican Party for ages until, say, a guy named Donald John Trump came along.

And now it's just all Trumpism.

Yeah, well, even the Trump campaign, I mean, Make America grip great again, is, you know, ripped off of Reaganism, right?

So it's yes.

Yes, and Trump's whole thing in 2015 and on about how he is campaigning for the quote UN quote silent majority is a RIP off of people like Richard Nixon.

I'm, I'm not one of these guys who's like, oh boy, if only we could return to the old days of the Republican Party.

I really do think that despite the tweaks with certain things and so-called virtues, if you are someone who does not draw a straight line from at least Richard Nixon and Barry Goldwater to the moment we're living in now, I don't know what to tell.

I don't know what to tell you if you view the history of the moderate Republican Party as radically different from what we're seeing now.

So I think Trumpism, even without Trump, will be with us in one form or another for a long time.

I think that is going to be disastrous in certain ways for the nation part because no matter how unpopular he or they get, we have a two party system.

They're going to be after they're out of power, they're going to be back in power not too long after that.

And I don't think the Larry Hogan in Maryland of 2015 is going to be seizing power anytime soon.

Having said that, in the shorter term, I think the Republican Party, and again, I'm willing to be, I'd hope to be proven wrong on this, but it does kind of feel, especially with his incredibly fucking low approval rating right now, with all the reigns of terrors that he's blasting out all over the nation and all over the world, it is having effect.

Your average person, your median voter, and even swing voters are looking at this.

And even if they're not as passionately anti ideologically as you or I are, they don't like it.

They are not fans of this, especially when they see inflation continuing to be what it is, the cost of living continuing to be what it is.

They are not fans.

You have roughly 40% of Americans or fewer still clinging to the idea of being on board with it.

But that's a disastrously shitty number for any president, even a second term president.

And the honchos in the Republican Party have caught on.

And they're really, really not happy about it because they know they're going to have to try to win elections when Donald Trump is at the top of the ticket.

Again, that's another thing to talk about and another set of reporting that we can maybe dive into on another day.

But I do think that the chances are rather high as things currently stand if they don't dramatically improve for Donald Trump and his party, that they are going to have their version of what happened when another beloved by the base two term president in the Democratic Party, what is suddenly off the field and was no longer the top of the ticketer candidate anymore.

I mean, obviously Barack Obama was and he is much, much, much, much, much more popular with the American people than Donald Trump.

I'm not trying to compare them at all in that respect.

But when Obama was done it did leave this vacuum that we are still feeling to this day in the Democratic Party where it seems rudderless and maybe a leader pops up a here or there but it doesn't have the same once in a lifetime charismatic force of nature, ultra party and political culture defining figure with a built in vast hyper energetic personality occult that an Obama or a Trump has.

And when that evaporated from the Democratic Party, we saw what happened.

We're living with the consequences right now once Obama was suddenly done.

And I think the chances are high that when Donald Trump is off the field, that the JD Vances of the world and the other leaders of the Republican Party are going to experience a similar vacuum where they start to really, really figuratively asphyxiate on the idea that it is not possible for Trumpism and the Trumpist Republican Party to succeed without Donald Trump being at the top of the ticket.

Right.

Well, that feels like a good place to wrap it up.

Today I've been joined by Swin Soupsang.

You can check out his work at Ceteo.

We'll put a link to his stuff in the description.

Swin, thanks for joining, posting through it this week.

Thank you for the group therapy, it was very refreshing for me.

I'm a big fan of your work, I'm glad we had you on.

People who listen to our premium episodes know that at the end of every premium episode, this is this is not a premium episode, but the every premium episode, Jared, we give an album recommendation and we kind of trade off.

So every it's fortnightly, every every two weeks.

I have one you, then you go and then Bah Bah Bah Bah Bah back and forth and.

These the albums we recommend span all, all types of years and I think that'll probably be continuing to expand in the year ahead.

As we go deeper into our into our archive.

We figured, let's actually talk about our favorite albums of the year at the end of this conversation.

So we would do you want to you want to start us off?

What were your?

What were your?

What were your favs?

Yeah, some of my favorites that came out this year, the record Never Enough by Turnstile.

They had put out a really just fantastic record a few years ago and they came back with this.

Another one was Straight Line Was A Lie by The Bets.

Again, another really fun follow up album to a record I really enjoyed called Expert in a Dying Field Moisturizer by Wet Leg.

This band had a huge breakout year.

Really fun record.

I need to check some of these out.

I don't.

I don't like I didn't even.

You're telling me now for the first time.

The Golden Heart Protector by Margaret Glaspie who is one of my favorite singer songwriters.

This is a record of covers but really done true to form in her style.

I enjoyed it a lot and the last one I'll leave people with that stuck with me this year came out fairly recently.

It's a record from the band Mama called Welcome to My Blue Sky.

I really have been enjoying that one over the last week.

Is it It's recent?

Yeah, it's, it's recent.

OK.

Oh yeah.

All right.

Well, I got it.

Well, I, I just preface by saying I like more than albums that came out this year.

I had a really good year going to shows and I doubt that 2026 will be as good because it was, it was uniquely good.

And not only that, I just foresee not being like schedules and a lot of stuff going on.

I just don't see me being able to go out as much as I as I did.

But I, I, I saw craft work in March.

I saw Napalm Death in the Melvins in May.

I saw Underworld in May.

I saw the rapper Mike who we'll get into in in late May and I saw Wu Tang in in July with my son.

That was a trip.

And then in October I saw Stereolab, Hotline TNT, which we'll also get into and awe Tekker, which was in total darkness.

I think we talked about it at one show, but it was just, it was just, I don't even know what I was.

I don't even know what happened.

I found religion and in November I saw the the the campy cult cult group my life with the Thrill kill cult to wrap it up.

So my favorite albums Jared this year I'm going to do it like two different ones that were like compete for #1 and like I'll just do some also rants that were good.

I like I know he's very controversial.

I like the John Mouse album later than you think, particularly like the the first song on that is just awesome.

But I really like the whole album and I love the stereo lab, the new stereo lab album, instant holograms on metal film.

Thought it was awesome.

OK, I'm just going to be pretentious here.

What is it called?

Tranquilizer.

The new one O tricks point never loop leap album.

I thought it was pretty good like this.

It's not for everybody.

You got to be like, you got to be some on on some real hipster bullshit for this.

But actually it's it's really grown on me and I like stuff I can work too.

And that was that's, that's one of them.

So my favorite albums this year, I guess #2 if we're counting down is Raspberry Moon by Hotline TNT, which is just like, I don't know many bands that like play shit hard and but also have melody that are around anymore like quite like Hotline TNT does it.

What a what a great bandit Mom Donnie was out hanging out with them at the show.

And yeah, it was just, they were, they were just so they're so sincere.

They're off Spotify you so you can't really get them on Spotify, but I listen to him on CD and and you can get it probably.

I think they're on YouTube Music if you got that and my favorite albums getting plenty of you know, it's cricketly acclaimed.

Lots of the crickets love it.

So it's not like a shocker, but it's showbiz by the rapper Mike, which I just want to describe.

When I saw Mike at Irving Plaza, it was so weird because it's like, I think of him as being sort of this kind of like ambient rapper where it's just like, I don't know how to describe it.

Whereas one song kind of flows into the other and it can be like sort of background music.

And he's almost, you know, almost a spirit of a contemporary tribe called Quest, but in a, in a sort of Internet poisoned like clip, clip, clip, the way the the songs go along.

And I, I thought just the most mellow thing.

And then I got there.

It was completely sold out.

And there's all these teens who are with backpacks and salt, like just moshing to all these songs and like just whiling out like every single track.

And Mike is such a like he has no like there's there's no mask on this guy.

He's just a dude with glasses from Brooklyn.

And he comes out and he's just and keeps saying please, please, please, please put your hands together for for like, whatever, just naming his friends and stuff.

I mean, I can really identify with this.

I feel like I do this on posting through it anyway with my friends.

So yeah, it was that.

And then afterwards, he had a few shots of vodka and he decided to play a bunch of Chief Keef songs, and people moshed to that too.

And I just was a totally surreal experiment, like experience.

I just, I've never been to a rap show like that before.

It was just like, it was just like hanging out in somebody's backyard.

Anyway, I love showbiz.

It's a beautiful album and everybody should give it a try.

Yeah, I'm starting to get old enough now where if I show up to a concert and I see a bunch of teenagers, I get a little scared for like, what?

I moved to the back of the crowd and put my earplugs in and just vibe.

But at the same time, I would like, I like to, you know, I just, I like to see that energy.

I like to see that, you know, I like to, I like to see them out of the house and not on their phones.

You know what I mean?

I got AI got a son who's 12.

So like I like whenever he's put his his phone down to do something.

That's great.

All right.

Well, let's wrap it up here.

We'll see you guys next week.

Bye everybody.

Thank you.