The Smoke Pit

The Smoke Pit with 50501 Veterans · Wednesday, October 14, 2026 · Pillar I: Veterans Care, Rights, and Dignity Host: Tim Boivin, writers room lead, 50501 Veterans Substack Guest: Maj. (Ret.) Richard Ojeda, Democratic nominee, North Carolina's 9th congressional district Panel: Steph Money, Keith Davies, Bryan C. Winter THE SHORT ANSWER The VA has shed roughly 30,000 positions under this administrat...

Recorded live Saturday, October 3, 2026. Thirty-one days out from the midterms. Iran sent a seven-day plan through Qatar to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. The president rejected it in public, then told aides he expects to start bombing again after the votes are counted. Katie, Carl and Bryan take that apart: whether it is a ploy to clear the news cycle, why Iran may be content to wait, and what a wa...

At the UN this week, the President called it a choice: a deal with Iran, or "annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly." Congress never authorized this war. The House has voted three times to end it. The Senate has not moved. We start at the February 28 strike on the elementary school in Minab. 123 children killed. A school tagged as a military site off old intelligence. CENTCOM's civilian...

The Smoke Pit with 50501 Veterans · Wednesday, September 23, 2026 · Pillar II: Democracy, Peace, and Constitutional Duty Host: Carl Able Guest: Alex Rikleen, former Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts Panel: Bryan C. Winter, Steph Money, Brit Robinson THE SHORT ANSWER Starting a campaign is easy. A website, a treasurer, an FEC filing. Getting anyone to pay attention is the hard p...

Host: Carl Able, Gunnery Sergeant, USMC (Ret.) Panel: John Moses, Bryan C. Winter Three times in 2026 the House of Representatives voted to end the war in Iran. The third one passed on September 15 at 10:32 PM, 220 to 204. Not one of those votes can end anything, and every member who voted yes knows it. This episode takes apart three levers Congress and the courts pulled in one week, and asks whic...

We swore to defend it. Tonight we argue about fixing it. Seventy-seven percent of Americans say the system needs major change. Twenty-seven percent think it can actually happen. On the eve of Constitution Day, Carl Able, Katie Chorbak, John Moses, and Tim Boivin put three amendment ideas on the table and fight about them. One, a bigger House and a different ballot. Washington asked for one represe...

Godfrey Wade came to Georgia from Jamaica in 1975. He was 15. He held a green card for 50 years, served in the U.S. Army in Germany, raised six children, and has three grandchildren. In September 2025 a traffic stop in Rockdale County ended with him in ICE custody on a removal order from 2014, tied to a hearing notice that went to an address he had not lived at. He spent five months in detention a...

Thursday the Speaker sent the House home. Two weeks of work cancelled. The House has taken 295 recorded votes this year, against 362 last year, which was already the fewest this century. Same week, the Secretary of Homeland Security said federal agents could be at polling places if there is "a threat," a poll found most Americans under 30 view socialism favorably, and the President, asked about a...

American elections are infrastructure. Like any infrastructure, they have an attack surface, a set of failure points, and people whose job it is to defend them. This week the Smoke Pit runs a threat assessment on the whole system, from the voter roll to the certification, and asks the question veterans are trained to ask about anything worth protecting: where is it weak, and who is standing watch....

The panel works the week across all three pillars. Veterans' Care, Rights, and Dignity. Democracy, Peace, and Constitutional Duty. No Veteran Left Behind. What broke, what got buried, what deserves a second look, and what the coverage got wrong. Got something you want the panel to take on? Submit your question before the show at 50501vets.com/ask Live on YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, and 50501vets.co...

Brit Robinson is running for Congress in Florida's 4th District (FL-04). She joins The Smoke Pit to talk policy: where she stands on veterans' care, the war powers question around Iran, and the money driving congressional campaigns. The conversation covers VA funding and staffing shortages, continuity of care and the community care debate, mental health treatment and veteran suicide, access to exp...

Veterans and military families are joining forces for a mass march in Philadelphia on July 4th, and on this episode of The Smoke Pit, the organizers tell you exactly why. Katie Chorbak (50501 Veterans), Hanna Lafko (Common Defense), Billie Winner-Davis (Military Family Speak Out), Steph Money (50501 Veterans Policy Director), and Carl Able (50501 Veterans Media Director) break down what is driving...

Ceretta Smith has been planning this run since 2015. That was the year she walked into her congressman's office in Washington, D.C., leading a union delegation on veterans' and federal worker issues, and got a polite thanks-for-coming and was shown the door. She looked at her delegation and said, "One day I'm coming for that seat." Eleven years later, she's on the ballot in Georgia's 12th Congress...

IN THIS EPISODE The Saturday crew dives into a week that felt ripped straight from a dystopian screenplay. Katie, Carl, and Bryan cover the $250 Trump bill, the collapsing White House fair, the UFC fight on the people's lawn, Peter Thiel's move to Argentina, the billionaire class and its relationship to democracy, end-stage capitalism, worker co-ops as a structural alternative, and what it means w...

What happens to veterans who get deported from the United States? On this episode of The Smoke Pit, host Katie Chorbak sits down with Dee James, an Army veteran and deported veterans advocate who served six and a half years as a legal permanent resident and nearly became a deported veteran herself, to answer that question directly. The U.S. government does not track how many veterans it deports. N...

On Memorial Day 2026, the Smoke Pit paused the news cycle to do something simpler: remember. Our members shared the names of those they served with who never came home. Army veteran Katie Chorbak traced the history of Black Americans who fought in every American war while being denied the rights those wars were supposedly defending. Army veteran Max Stubbs asked what it actually means to honor a s...

In this episode, we're not talking about maps. We're talking about power: who has it, who's being engineered out of it, and what veterans are doing about it. From Bloody Sunday and the Voting Rights Act to the Supreme Court's gutting of Section 2 in Louisiana v. Calais , the playbook for silencing Black and Brown voters has never gone away. It just got redrawn. We break down the full history with...

The White House just released a new counterterrorism strategy that labels left-wing extremism, including anti-fascist ideology, anarchism, and transgender ideology, alongside narco-terrorists and Islamist movements as major domestic terrorism threats. This week's panel breaks down what it means, why veterans should be paying attention, and who's really being targeted. On the panel: Tom Sidle — Co-...

Veterans are trained to follow lawful orders — but they're also taught that just following orders is never a complete moral defense. So where does obedience end and complicity begin? This week on The Smoke Pit, Katie brings together a panel of veterans and military family members to dig into one of the most uncomfortable tensions in American civic life: when is breaking the law not only justified,...

Military sexual trauma (MST) affects hundreds of thousands of service members—yet it remains one of the most underreported, under-prosecuted, and systemically buried issues in the U.S. armed forces. In this episode, host Katie Chorbak, president of 5051 Vets and MST survivor, brings together a panel of advocates, attorneys, and veterans to pull back the curtain on decades of silence, institutional...

When does presidential behavior cross the line into incapacity? In this episode of The Smoke Pit , we break down one of the most uncomfortable questions in American politics: how do you determine if a president is no longer fit to lead? Using real-world examples, military leadership perspectives, and constitutional analysis, we examine: The difference between personality, poor judgment, and true i...

Money drives modern politics. But at what cost? In this episode of The Smoke Pit , veterans from across the political spectrum sit down with Mayhem , co-founder of Money Out of Politics , to break down how campaign financing has reshaped American democracy. From the historical roots of political funding to the post– Citizens United explosion of dark money and Super PACs, the panel explores a core...

Veterans from across the political spectrum break down what’s really happening in the escalating Iran conflict—and why the lack of information should concern every American. In this episode of The Smoke Pit , the panel reacts to reports of a U.S. F-15 being shot down, additional aircraft losses including an F-35 and AWACS, and growing questions about whether the United States still maintains air s...

Veterans from across the political spectrum come together in The Smoke Pit to break down the latest U.S. troop movements, rising tensions with Iran, and the real risk of another forever war. This unfiltered conversation dives into what “boots on the ground” actually means from those who have lived it, not just debated it. The panel explores strategic realities like the deployment of the 82nd Airbo...

Do constitutional rights apply to everyone in the United States, or only to citizens? In this episode of The Smoke Pit , veterans debate due process, ICE enforcement, and what their oath to the Constitution actually demands in today’s political climate. This episode brings together veterans with different perspectives for a direct, unscripted conversation about immigration policy, civil liberties,...