Brave The New World

Haaretz reports that UAE President Mohammed bin Zayed called Netanyahu ten days before October 7 and spent 45 minutes warning him that Hamas was planning a major attack. Egypt's spy chief reportedly warned him too. Netanyahu never briefed the head of the Shin Bet or the head of the IDF. This week he's suing the newspaper. Matt and CJ walk through the warning, the money Netanyahu kept flowing to Ha...

Lindsay Clancy strangled her three children in their Duxbury home and admits it. After seven weeks of trial, eleven jurors wanted a hospital, one said guilty, and Judge Sullivan declared a mistrial. Outside the courthouse, hundreds of supporters showed up in pink with shirts reading Believe, She Needed Help, and Peace for Lindsay. Influencers bragged about a million views. Protesters blamed the dr...

Greg Bovino went on Tucker Carlson and claimed 107 million illegal aliens are living in the United States. That's roughly one in four people in the country. Nobody pushed back. Matt and CJ take the claim seriously enough to test it: where could a number like that come from, why would the man selling it want it high, and here's the harder question—if you believed it, what would you be willing to do...

Axios and CNN say the US is sneaking 15 to 20 tankers a night through the Strait of Hormuz. Brent crude hit $93 the same day. Both things can't be true, and the price is the one that doesn't lie. Matt and CJ work through the Hormuz numbers, why a ship count is the wrong metric, and how Trump is using the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to hold down the futures price while the salt caverns storing it a...

Forty trillion in debt. A $1.5 trillion budget request for a military that can't win a war. Fauci pleading the Fifth over a hundred times while holding a pardon that covers eleven years. CJ Killmer and I started with a simple question and spent an hour finding out how bad the answer is: is there still a political solution to any of this? CJ's answer, as a historian: in theory yes, in practice unde...

AI Will Free You or Own You. You Decide Which. And the people spending the most money on it can't tell you which. Kevin O'Leary went on Tucker Carlson to defend his $100 billion AI data center. Asked what regular people get out of it, he said "nobody knows." Asked why build it, he said beat China. That answer, from that man, reveals more about where AI is headed than any demo or benchmark. The sam...

Lindsey Graham is dead at 71, the Iran war is back on, and Conservative Inc. spent the week claiming courtroom evidence that two journalists in the room say doesn't exist. Matt and CJ walk through all three stories: what the state actually showed at Tyler Robinson's preliminary hearing versus what Benny Johnson claimed, the strange timing and aftermath of Graham's sudden death, and how the US brok...

The preliminary hearing in Tyler Robinson's case wrapped this week, with a judge weighing whether there's enough to send the Charlie Kirk assassination to trial. Matt and CJ use the moment to ask a simpler question than most of the coverage does: does the official story actually hold together? Their starting point is how narratives work. A true account tends to be simple, because reality carries m...

The Charlie Kirk assassination has one official narrative, and it comes from federal law enforcement and Turning Point USA. Matt spent a week digging into it and came away less convinced, not more. This episode is really about how narratives work. A true story is easy to believe because the pieces fit reality. A false one is a chain of "maybe" links that gets shakier the more you line it up, until...

The state took an anti-government, secessionist document and turned its anniversary into a celebration of itself. On America's 250th 4th of July, Matt and historian CJ Killmer start there — then trace that same inversion through the news. The Iran war that never actually ended: the shaky MOU, the $300 billion rebuild check, and Trump's pivot from threatening to level Iran's infrastructure to offer...

Is Trump's Iran Peace Deal Real This Time? Why is Trump Allowed To End The War Now? Trump says he never wanted regime change in Iran. He said the opposite, repeatedly, on day one of the war. Matt and CJ start with the gaslighting and end up somewhere bigger: if Trump only attacked Iran because he was captured, why can he suddenly defy Netanyahu and the whole Israel-first machine without fear? Matt...

Matt Carano and CJ Killmer bring you the latest in news and politics. This week, Trump's own officials leaked a call to Axios where he called Netanyahu "crazy" and "ungrateful." Hours later, Israel ran its worst bombing campaign in southern Lebanon in weeks. The feud made headlines. The policy didn't move an inch. Matt and CJ Killmer break down why the blowup was theater, why the Iran war is the m...

The media keeps insisting an Iran deal is imminent. Read the terms and it's obvious no one in Tehran would sign — not after being surprise-attacked twice mid-negotiation, including the killing of their own leader. Matt and CJ start there and end up somewhere bigger: what a declining empire does when it stops believing in limits. From Trump threatening to "blow up" Oman over the Strait of Hormuz, t...

The Israel lobby just spent $32 million to remove Thomas Massie from Congress. AIPAC bragged about it on X within hours. A sitting Defense Secretary flew to Kentucky to campaign against him — federal law be damned. And here's the kicker: the three most expensive House primaries in US history were all decided by the same foreign lobby, all against members who criticized Israel. Matt and CJ work thr...

CJ Killmer of the Dangerous History Podcast is back after a brutal few months, and we walk through where the United States actually stands two and a half months into the war with Iran. The blockade is theater. Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz. Every justification the administration has given has shifted, and every objective they set is unreachable. Trump is in Beijing this week asking Xi for hel...

Iran sent its response to the United States this weekend. Trump posted "TOTALLY UNACCEPTABLE" on Truth Social. He knows what the deal is going to look like. So does anyone willing to look at the receipts. The Strait of Hormuz belongs to Iran. The blockade is theater. The polling at home is the worst any wartime president has ever seen. Gas is climbing toward five dollars and the midterms are six m...

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has flown to Jerusalem multiple times to sign Florida laws on foreign soil. He's not the only one. Thirty-eight US states have adopted the IHRA framework — a definition of antisemitism whose own author, Kenneth Stern, has been telling Congress for years is being weaponized to silence political speech about a foreign government. This episode walks through what's actual...

The Southern Poverty Law Center was just indicted by a federal grand jury for fraud, money laundering, and paying the people it told its donors it was fighting. A Klan-affiliated informant got over a million dollars. The Unite the Right coordinator got $270,000. The money moved through shell companies with names like "Fox Photography" and "Rare Books Warehouse." And in the fiscal year after Charlo...

Iran announced today that the Strait of Hormuz is "completely open" for commercial traffic. Iran announced it. Not the US Navy or Trump. Iran opened the strait the same way they closed it — by deciding to, tied to the ceasefire in Lebanon. That's the whole story. Iran controls the Strait of Hormuz. They always did. Their coastline runs the length of it. They hold seven of eight islands. The shippi...

Tuesday night, the US and Iran agreed to a ceasefire. Pakistan brokered it. Both sides confirmed. Markets surged. Oil dropped 13%. Families in Beirut packed their bags to go home. Twelve hours later, Israel launched 50 jets into Lebanon. 100 targets. 160 munitions. 203 dead. The largest strike of the entire war — after the ceasefire. Netanyahu said Lebanon wasn't included. Trump backed him over hi...

President Trump addressed the nation on the Iran war Wednesday night. The White House promised "an important update." What he delivered was 19 minutes of talking points that contradict his own intelligence chief, his own counterterrorism director, his own words from the night he started the war, and his own Reuters interview published the same day. In this episode, I take the speech apart line by...

While every camera in the country points at Iran, the US is quietly waging war across the Western Hemisphere. And the Pentagon just told Congress it's "just the beginning." In this episode I walk through: — Operation Southern Spear: 46 boat strikes, 159 dead, no evidence, no trials. The UN calls them extrajudicial killings. A former ICC prosecutor calls them crimes against humanity. — Operation To...

Almost 3 weeks in. The objectives have changed six times. No allies are sending ships. The Arab states are furious. Iran says they never asked for a ceasefire. And the president said on camera, that maybe we shouldn't be there at all. In this episode, I walk through: — The six shifting justifications for the war — What Iran is actually saying vs. what Trump claims — Why no country will send warshi...

Two people in the Trump administration had access to the same intelligence on Iran. Both built careers opposing exactly this kind of war. Joe Kent resigned and said it plainly: "Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel." Tulsi Gabbard broke three weeks of silence with a statement that never once said she agreed with the threa...

The US is spending $900 million a day on the Iran war. Tariffs are triggering stagflation. The dollar is losing its grip on global reserves. China is weaponizing rare earths. Foreign creditors are dumping US Treasuries and buying gold. And the WEF just released their Global Risks 2026 report warning of "geoeconomic confrontation" as the top trigger for a material global crisis. There's a word for...