Badlands Media

Jon Herold breaks down a newly declassified 2020 NSA memo showing a deputy director delayed a foreign election targeting report for over a year out of fear it would brand the agency as "deep state," then replays what he calls his favorite Trump clip on the weaponized intelligence community to tie it all together. He questions why these releases seem to route exclusively through journalist John Sol...

CannCon flies solo again on the now permanent Tuesday format and opens with a genuinely wild polling scandal, where a brand new firm openly admits to running what it calls a social experiment after getting caught pushing wildly inflated numbers for a socialist candidate that ended up losing by half a point. He connects that to Rasmussen quietly getting booted from a major polling aggregator despit...

Jon Herold and Zak Paine kick things off with fresh Fang Fang document drops, digging into some genuinely eyebrow raising details about a certain congressman's staff interviews and just how much got quietly swept under the rug when that whole scandal wrapped up. Then the guys settle in for the night's main event, a decades old theory claiming horror novelist Stephen King was secretly behind one of...

Ashe in America welcomes former Miss Colorado, Senate and House candidate Deborah Flora for a wide ranging conversation on what it actually means to be "post partisan" in a state where most voters are unaffiliated. The two dig into Colorado's caucus system, why it can both empower grassroots candidates and shut them out, and whether the two party structure still reflects how people actually vote....

Fresh off last week's fallout, Matthew Ehret dives straight into the deep end of internet conspiracy lore: the Khazarian empire. If you've ever heard someone blame the world's problems on "Khazarian mafia" bloodlines, this episode traces that idea back to its unlikely source, including a certain shape shifting lizard theorist from the late 90s, and asks how much of the popular Khazarian narrative...

Football season has arrived, and the crew wastes no time debating whose game day schedule reigns supreme (East Coast breakfast kickoffs versus West Coast five-beers-deep mornings) before diving into a coffee-warmer appreciation segment that somehow doubles as a good-brew sponsor read. The meat of this episode is ESPN's three-year future power rankings, and the guys tear into them team by team. Exp...

Ashe, Christy, and Jackie kick off with a genuinely fascinating history lesson on the origin of pass the buck, tracing it from a 19th century poker table all the way to Harry Truman's Oval Office desk sign. It is one of those rabbit holes you did not know you needed. Then the tone shifts as Ashe and a guest dig into the fresh reporting on Eric Swalwell and his relationship with alleged Chinese int...

Jon Herold digs deep into newly declassified FBI files on suspected Chinese operative Christine Fang, nicknamed "Rusty Thumbs" by investigators, and her years long relationship with Congressman Eric Swalwell, walking through the FBI's failed attempt to recruit her as a source before pivoting to a campaign corruption investigation that ultimately closed without charges. He builds out a detailed the...

CannCon and Zak Paine kick off Monday with a Kushner and Grinnell clip on longevity and priorities after leaving the White House, plus a quick check in on the surprise hurricane that battered Hawaii over the weekend. The real headline is a resurfaced Terry Moran interview where the ABC correspondent admits network brass killed his own investigation into the COVID lab leak theory back in 2021, a st...

Alpha Warrior and Josh Reid pour the coffee (with a little something extra) and dig into the drip of declassification they say has been building since June 30. Josh walks the thread from Tulsi Gabbard's Ukraine biolab and Wuhan disclosures through the Fauci gain of function texts, then into Trump's address on hundreds of millions of voter records stolen by China across 18 states. The heart of it i...

Part two of the Burning Bright and Ghost saga. Last week gave us the final boss, so naturally this week brings the final convergence, a title Burning Bright cheerfully admits his past self chose despite using "convergence" in roughly half his episodes. This one is meant to be bicameral: two proxy states, two bosses, one game board. The promise for tonight, delivered with maximum deadpan, is to dis...

Jonathan Drake shifts gears into chapter three of Spooner's Science of Justice, trading the tight logical if then structure for a narrative history lesson on how despotic government actually got started. Spoiler, it was not a noble experiment gone wrong. Spooner traces a direct line from ancient bands of robbers plundering agrarian farmers, to slaveholders realizing chains were bad optics, to the...

Jon Herold and Chris Paul open with a media narrative they're not buying: reports of low morale aboard a deployed carrier near the Strait of Hormuz, which they frame as a coordinated pressure campaign to get Trump to back off his Iran messaging. From there they roll straight into Trump's own Hormuz clip and some Monroe Doctrine talk. The middle stretch bounces through a Fauci clip, JD Vance commen...

Cam Cooksey opens episode 63 (recorded August 15th, and a happy birthday to Jackie's dad, Javier) as the first show on Badlands that Saturday, mapping out a relaxed night of Truth Social posts, funny X finds, and the long overdue return of American of the Week. The heart of the show is his "triangulating truth" theme. Cam walks through Trump announcing missionary Kevin Rideout's rescue from West A...

The crew can't quite believe how much oxygen a paid Charlie Kirk assassination debate sucked up online this week, and spends a solid chunk of time roasting the whole "we'll figure out who killed him by watching two influencers argue" premise. From there it's on to a pop quiz built from the week's Badlands headlines, covering a contested Attorney General confirmation vote, an FBI investigation that...

Newly clean-shaven host Matt Trump (yes, he shaved the beard) delivers part four of his summer abroad walking tour, back in London as the self-described Rick Steves of Badlands. After brief detours on odd Wisconsin election results and AI watermarking, he cues up the 1953 Ivanhoe trailer and walks you upstream along the Thames, past Blackfriars, to the round Temple Church at the heart of the medie...

Jordan and Nate break down a genuinely massive news week starting with Trump's executive order slashing the recommended childhood vaccine schedule and splitting up the MMR shot, plus the predictably unhinged media freakout that followed. From there they dig into HHS's new "Wolves in White Coats" report, which refers hospitals accused of profiting off pediatric gender medicine to the DOJ, and cover...

Jon Herold spends Friday explaining why he refuses to watch the much hyped Candace Owens versus Andrew Wilson debate, arguing that a debate can never settle a controlled opposition dynamic and that whoever "wins" has nothing to do with who is actually right. He responds to some chat pushback on his stance, then shifts into a genuinely quiet news day covering an appeals court dismissing an Alien En...

Ashe in America and Ghost dive into Season 5, Episode 2 of The Chosen, "House of Cards," and they do not undersell it, calling it one of the best episodes of the entire series so far. This is the one everyone has been waiting for, the moment Jesus makes his stand in his father's house, and the hosts break down why the scene lands with so much weight. Expect a close read of the temple confrontation...

Chris Paul and Burning Bright dust off this 90s political comedy about two rival ex presidents forced to team up against a corrupt sitting president, and yes, they clock exactly how hokey it is right out of the gate. There's a running bit about how often James Rebhorn keeps showing up in their movie picks lately, some genuine affection for the cast even when the material is on the nose, and a soli...

CannCon and Chris Paul go deeper into the SPLC indictment, walking through the eye popping funding numbers behind the organization's growth over the past decade and the specific ways prosecutors say donor money was funneled to informants inside extremist groups. They connect it to a broader pattern of unaccountable NGO grant money and speculate on how far the fallout could spread. From there they...

CannCon and Alpha Warrior open with a bit of family life, some Rumble platform gripes, and a hearty debate on why the infantry misses the chaos more than they will admit. Then it is straight into the news. Suppressors are now free of the old NFA Form 4 paperwork after a court win, and the guys walk through what that actually means for gun owners while roasting a viral demonstration video for its q...

A Windows update wiped Frankie Val's intro, outro, and sound clips, so ep 62 runs raw and improvised, which suits a night this scattered. Frankie opens with an emergency room story about his mom, then dives into the news oddities: a man dressed as the Grim Reaper taunting patients from a Welsh hospital roof, a rare European solar eclipse, and, yes, the very real World Cup of window cleaning (a Cal...

CannCon and Ashe in America leave the world of pure banking history behind for a moment and step into Chapter 11 of The Creature from Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin, opening a new section the book calls The New Alchemy. The theme this week is grim but fascinating: how the same fiat money mechanism used to fund banks has also quietly funded wars, and how the profits of war have historically flo...

Jon Herold leans on the chat for a lighter Thursday, opening with Karoline Leavitt's announced departure as White House Press Secretary and a fun debate over whether the role should even exist in the Trump era. He digs into a Washington Post report tying a covert CIA program to mysterious strikes on Ecuadorian fishing boats near the Galapagos, plus a separate leak questioning the CIA's confidence...