Badlands Media

Fresh off a Vegas GART weekend (complete with Velcro suits and a balloon-room hip injury), CannCon and Ashe in America settle in for a news roundup after one of the great Game-of-Thrones-style beard-oil ad wars you'll ever hear. They dig into the government's own non-citizen voter figures, the 24,000 flagged by the Census Bureau versus millions still unanalyzed, and why neither host fully trusts t...

Two very different stories share the spotlight here. First, Trump hosts the second Shield of the Americas summit, welcoming Peru as a new member and pushing allied nations to formally designate cartels as terrorist organizations, with genuinely striking numbers on fentanyl seizures down 97% by sea and $4 billion stripped from cartels. Leaders from Ecuador and Colombia weigh in on Venezuela, democr...

Jon Herold digs into Trump's UN General Assembly speech, playing multiple clips including his declaration that he "gives no credence" to the midterms when it comes to Iran policy, which Jon reads as Trump deliberately putting distance between himself and a Republican Party he doesn't fully trust. He also breaks down Trump's push to rename "artificial intelligence" to "superintelligence," his comme...

CannCon and Zak Paine are back from Gart in Vegas and open with a major update on the election fraud crackdown, where more than two hundred arrests and indictments have now been secured and officials say that number could double before the midterms. They dig into Michigan, playing clips from the Macomb County clerk and Sheriff Leaf on why local clerks cannot verify citizenship and what his referra...

Jon Herold and Zak Paine catch up on some weekend man on the street chaos before easing into a genuinely unnerving story about "tall whites," a supposed group of ethereal, blonde, Scandinavian looking beings who show up unannounced on private property, communicate without moving their mouths, and vanish just as fast. It's the kind of firsthand account that even Jon and Zak, self described skeptics...

Jon Herold, fresh off the Badlands Vegas conference, shares highlights from the "man on the street" interviews before diving into the escalating fight between the Trump White House and mainstream media over CNN, MSNBC, and Politico being banned from the press pool. He digs into the resulting lawsuits and Fox News' own internal debate about whether it deserves press access, argues the entire press...

Jonathan Drake takes listeners on a wild nine phase journey tracing how 1840s usury laws quietly evolved into the modern financial surveillance apparatus, arguing we are already living in something eerily close to a social credit system, just built slower and dressed up as consumer protection. From the Russell Sage Foundation's suspiciously self interested crusade against loan sharks, to the Feder...

A rare crossover: Jon Herold, Chris Paul, and Burning Bright are all together live at Gart for this one, and the energy shows. They kick off with Trump's latest true social posts about a potential third term before getting into a genuinely strange story about AI supposedly nudging the country toward conflict with China, and the very convenient timing of the outlet that broke it getting banned from...

Chris Paul and Burning Bright revisit this Terry Gilliam adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's gonzo classic, and it turns out this one is a genuine dividing line between the two hosts. Expect an honest reckoning with a movie that's aged into something stranger and more uncomfortable than either remembered, plus real talk about psychedelics, why fear is often what actually sends a trip sideways, and...

Frankie Val leans into the damp, mosquito bitten edge of the season with a full cryptid and haunted places special. Before the guest, he wades through the week's grimmer headlines and his running theory that the Internet now incubates characters and legends that start manifesting in real life, from the postpartum murder mom to that Cat in the Hat figure the show keeps tracking. Then the main event...

Trump welcomes hunters, fishers, and outdoorsmen to the newly renovated Rose Garden to sign two executive orders that sound almost too niche to matter, until you hear the numbers. One opens up millions more acres of federal land for hunting and fishing on top of 92 million acres already unlocked, while protecting traditional lead ammunition. The other tosses out a widely mocked 10 mile per hour bo...

CannCon and Ashe in America finish out Chapter 14 of The Creature from Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin, picking up with what the book calls the Transfusion Mechanism. This week covers how American taxpayers ended up quietly subsidizing Soviet Russia and its satellites long after Lend Lease officially ended, through below market trade deals, guaranteed loans, and bailouts routed through agencies...

Trump lands in North Carolina to make one very clear pitch: pretend I'm on the ballot, because Michael Whatley basically is. The rally leans hard into crime, walking through the brutal murder of Ukrainian refugee Irina Zaretska and Governor Roy Cooper's early release of 3,500 inmates, before comparing it to the infamous Willie Horton ad that sank Dukakis decades ago. From there it's a full sweep o...

Jon Herold and Burning Bright pre record from the road this week and dive straight into a wild theory: that the AI safety story dominating headlines right now is timed suspiciously close to the midterms and might be less about safety and more about election interference. They play a clip of Todd Blanche calling the AI panic a hoax and posts from Trump comparing it to treason. Burning Bright lays o...

Kwast and Chris Ponder mark Constitution Day with a deep dive into America's founding document, tracing its full timeline and showing how it stacks up against basically every other legal document in human history, including, in a genuinely fun aside, Claude's own 82 page constitution compared to America's tidy four pages. Chris breaks down his method for structuring any document, the Constitution,...

CannCon and Ashe record a special late night edition ahead of travel to Nevada, opening with the Supreme Court's mail in ballot decision and the blistering Alito and Thomas dissent that raises real questions about who actually gets to set election rules. Ashe is still fired up from a Why We Vote episode recorded moments earlier. The bulk of the show works through a series of Kash Patel clips from...

Josh Reid flies solo again this week and does not waste any time, diving straight into what he calls a coordinated AI doom narrative playing out across media, tech, and celebrity circles all at once. He walks through a supposed AI hack that may not be what it seemed, explains the concept of regulatory capture and why it matters for the future of open source AI, and connects a handful of recent hea...

No in-studio guest tonight, just CannCon and Ashe in America playing prosecutor as they roll the tape on David Becker's members-only town hall, the one Ashe tried to record and got 49 minutes of silence for her trouble, now recovered from the group's own YouTube. They pick apart his victory-lap framing that the DOJ is a perfect zero for 23 in voter-data cases, his turnout sleight of hand, and a ca...

Shipwreck is fully checked out on voting this year, and she lays out exactly why, from gas prices to the same recycled promises no matter who wins. She digs into the online energy vampire theory, reacts to the Sydney Sweeney sports betting ad backlash and the double standard she sees in who gets outraged about what, and works through a wild Matrix inspired take on why everyone suddenly needs more...

Jon Herold digs into the Supreme Court's decision leaving a lower court block on the USPS mail ballot integrity rule in place for the midterms, reading through Alito's sharp dissent and Kavanaugh's concurrence to argue election officials and courts, not Trump, caused the timing crunch that killed it. He builds a theory connecting the AI industry's sudden safety slowdown push to the midterms, diggi...

CannCon and Zak Paine christen the new Tuesday slot with the Supreme Court finally ending the Schrodinger executive order saga, declining to revive the President's mail in ballot requirements with ballots already going out. From there they cover John Brennan getting subpoenaed to testify in a federal conspiracy case, complete with a six year Q delta that lands the same morning, plus James Comer de...

Ashe in America brings back Deborah Flora, joined this time by her husband Jonathan Flora, to talk about their newly released 9/11 remembrance film. Deborah serves as executive producer, and Jonathan wrote and directed the project, which Ashe caught at a private screening the night before recording. Rather than retreading conspiracy angles, the film focuses on something Ashe felt strongly about, t...

Jon Herold and Zak Paine open with breaking news out of the Supreme Court, breaking down a ruling that blocks new USPS mail ballot rules from taking effect before the 2026 midterms, and what that means for election integrity heading into the fall. The back half of the show shifts into much darker territory as the guys examine an anonymous online post alleging decades of abuse inside a prominent Ho...

Ghost jumps on for a surprise live show and finds a lot to unpack. He opens with Trump's off the cuff comments on Irish unification during his Ireland trip, which somehow snowballs into Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland signing a joint pact toward independence from the UK, something Ghost frames as a genuine win for local sovereignty rather than the doom certain corners of the internet are sell...

The battle of the sexes returns for round three, and this time it's a full crossover between Y-Chromes and Alphas Make Sandwiches. Ash, Christy, and Jackie face off against Brian and Cam (poor Alpha forfeits by absence) in an AI-generated, Jeopardy-style trivia gauntlet that starts civil with sports, music, and movies, then gets gleefully lopsided once the categories turn to Glow Up, Herstory, Man...