Badlands Media

Chris Paul and Burning Bright revisit this 2008 Shia LaBeouf thriller, and both agree the movie itself is far from great even as its central concept lands eerily well from 2026. Expect a genuine appreciation for the film's prediction of an all powerful centralized AI system that manipulates the world through digitized objects, some pointed complaints about the shaky cam action filmmaking era it ca...

The pageantry continues into the evening as Trump hosts President Xi and Madame Peng for a formal state dinner, complete with history lessons, a genuine gift exchange, and an unscheduled detour to show off the new White House ballroom construction, described by Trump as something 150 years of presidents have wanted built. His toast traces two centuries of U.S. China relations, from the first Chine...

Frankie Val goes solo for a self described grab bag night, just him and what he calls the molten core of his audience. He opens on Rumble landing WWE Main Event and turns it into a lament for what social media used to be, back when authenticity and consistency beat paying to boost a post into an algorithm that no longer serves the creators who built real bonds. From there it wanders happily. A vir...

CannCon and Ashe in America step back into early American history with Chapter 15 of The Creature from Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin, titled The Lost Treasure Map. This week covers the colonies' painful experience with fiat paper money, the resolve of the Founding Fathers to keep the new nation off of unbacked currency, and how that resolve shaped the drafting of the Constitution itself. The...

Jon Herold opens with the lighter news of China sending two pandas to the Atlanta Zoo before digging into a federal judge's overnight ruling that Trump's White House press ban on CNN, MSNBC, and Politico was likely unconstitutional, questioning whether a judge should be able to override a president's national security determination at all. He also does a live deep dive into CISA's newly released 2...

CannCon and Alpha Warrior open with Alpha settling into a brand new studio and a bit of nostalgia about how far both hosts have come from laptops and YETI mics. The news starts with a Trump appointed federal judge temporarily blocking the White House press credential ban, and the hosts take real issue with the constitutional reasoning behind it. That pairs with an Iowa judge tossing the President'...

President Xi Jinping becomes the first Chinese leader ever to make a second formal state visit to America, and the White House pulls out all the stops for it, national anthems, full honor guard, and a genuinely warm arrival ceremony. Trump reflects on his years long friendship with Xi, the new Board of Trade created during his Beijing visit, and a shared World War II history that gave the Marines...

Jon Herold and Burning Bright compare notes on being under the weather before getting into the week's main event: Xi Jinping's upcoming visit and what it means in the context of Herold's older theory called Overton's Goalpost, the idea that Trump, Putin, and Xi are converging in ways the mainstream media can't quite make sense of. They break down the split media coverage, half framing it as Trump...

Shipwreck opens with a sponsored chat with Gabe from Good Bru, digging into gut health, prebiotic fiber, and how a simple supplement has helped her own wellness journey and 40 pound weight loss. Once the interview wraps, she pivots hard into the fallout from a video she posted this week announcing she will not be voting in the midterms or presidential elections going forward, only locally. It spar...

Kwast and Chris Ponder pick up the framework built since "Ghost in the Garden," expanding it into what they're calling the Sol Information System, a way of organizing information around the sun and planets, complete with each planet assigned its own function, communication, commerce, and more. Chris compares it to mining Bitcoin, the more you contribute, the more value you build, while Kwast frame...

Jon Herold spends most of hump day addressing what he sees as a recurring pattern of election season "struggle sessions," where some in the Q community accuse Badlands hosts, and shipwreck in particular, of being traitors for questioning whether voting fixes a system they believe is fraudulent. He reads his own viral morning post in full, walks through a pointed rebuttal from a critic line by line...

CannCon and Ashe open Ash Wednesday with a Senator Chris Murphy clip arguing that regulating the Internet and fixing loneliness is the way to inoculate voters against Donald Trump, which the hosts find both revealing and a little rich given what Badlands events do every year. That leads into a candid exchange about whether elections are really the mechanism of consent. The bulk of the show works t...

JB White is riding high off a Gators win over Auburn and a whirlwind trip to the Badlands Media GART 13 event in Las Vegas, despite a rough travel day getting home. He recaps a heated panel discussion from the conference, shares a personal health update on major progress reversing his diabetes numbers, and dives back into his ongoing commentary on a closely watched Massachusetts criminal trial and...

Alpha Warrior and Josh Reid are back together after a busy week apart, and they have a lot to unpack. They start with a string of odd weekend occurrences, from air traffic control outages to unusual reports in the skies, before shifting into a big discussion about Trump TV and why the guys think that move was far more significant than most people realize. They also break down the United Nations ta...

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...