Badlands Media

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...

CannCon and Alpha Warrior dig deep into a genuinely stunning federal case against the Southern Poverty Law Center, walking through allegations of a secretive internal unit literally named after the CIA that ran informants, funneled donor money to people inside hate groups, and even broke into a target's headquarters to copy documents before sneaking them back. They connect the dots to a broader RI...

Todd Blanche steps up as the 88th Attorney General and gives the kind of speech that's part victory lap, part love letter to the DOJ, tracing his own path from a college intern in the building all the way to the top job. He walks the room through his career, from paralegal to prosecutor to Deputy AG, before laying out a promise to lead with integrity, back federal law enforcement without apology,...

Jon Herold and Burning Bright open with sponsor banter (yes, there's now a joke Chinese knockoff Badlands promo code in play) before diving into a fresh John Solomon clip and a batch of newly declassified files. The throughline for the night is clear: the intelligence community, not any one political figure, is squarely in the crosshairs of these disclosures. Herold breaks out one of his all time...

Bigfoot week continues. Shipwreck welcomes Adrian from Rise Attire, who traded streetwear design for building Sasquatch Nations, an original video game rooted in real cryptid encounter stories. They swap theories on whether Sasquatch, the Giant of Kandahar, and dogman are all separate species or branches of the same mystery, dig into the Sasquatch Genome Project's unexplained DNA results, and prev...

Chris Ponder and G Money join Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Steven L. Kwast to push the "tools for truth" framework into new territory, tying it directly to Bitcoin. G Money makes the case that Bitcoin isn't just a monetary system but a thermodynamically grounded protocol that makes lying nearly impossible once information is written to the chain, while Chris riffs on constellations, constitutions, and why some...

Jon Herold digs deep into newly declassified documents revealing that the FBI's "Round river" operation buried corruption reporting from 14 confidential human sources on Joe Biden while formally labeling officials like Bill Barr and Mike Pompeo as Russian disinformation conduits. He ties this fresh evidence back to Hunter Biden's laptop emails and the Blue Star Strategies contract timeline to argu...

Eleven defendants, over a thousand sham marriages, and tens of millions of dollars, DOJ pulls back the curtain on what officials call one of the largest marriage fraud prosecutions in U.S. history. The Attorney General walks through a decade long scheme pairing Chinese nationals with paid American citizens in fake weddings, complete with staged photos, prenups, and a whole cottage industry of recr...

CannCon and Ashe bring on voting systems expert Clay Parikh for an urgent breakdown of a wild overnight development in Wisconsin, where five out of nine election USB drives reportedly downloaded audit logs instead of actual vote totals, delaying results and prompting officials to call it simple human error. Clay walks through the technical documentation and explains why that explanation does not h...