Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds. We're almost back from vacation, but we have some new material too. Author Brad Meltzer stops by to talk about his new book. But first we have the Lincoln Projects own Rick Wilson, and he is here to discuss Trump's insane takeover of Venezuela.
Rick Wilson, Molly John Fast or what is it good for?
Well, it's good for little Marco to have the viceroy Ship of Caracas and to apparently pay off one of Marco's largest donors who's in this apparently in this deal to own all the oil fields out there. So what what shocks you about this?
It should be nothing, Okay, So let's talk about this. Saturday morning, right after New Year's Gene's a sleepy morning. We wake up to find that Donald Trump has kidnapped the president. And it's a kidnapping, right, because even though I mean it's basically a kidnapping, you tend not to be okay to kidnap foreign leaders and their wives and take them.
You know, we do it so rarely, and it happens so rarely in the world.
That we've done it before, though.
Yeah we have. But Noriego was a Although they pretend it's the same deal, Noriego was actually a different deal because there was a treaty obligation in Panama. A long story.
Short, right, Panama's different.
Here's something we know at this point in the game. Snatching a foreign leader should not surprise anybody. We can do it. We have the greatest military in the universe, and we are able to do magical things like that.
That.
However, if the story of Venezuela is a ladder, that's the first rung on the ladder. That's the easy one. Now, since Trump is basically said, we're doing this for the oil, how does people how do people think this is going to go? We left the Majiu regime in charge. It's still being run by the same people. The police, secret police are still there, military is still there, the Chavismo
brute squads are still there. Nothing has changed. We basically told the people of Venezuela, hey, we took the big guy, but everything else is the same, except now we own your oil fields, that we're running your country. It's gonna go great. We're gonna be greeted as liberators.
So one of the things that The New York Times had a really excellent article about how they had wargamed it out and every scenario ended with fucking disaster and discuss.
Yep, no one should be surprised that a country that's been in the grip of this chavismo, bolevarian revolutionary, commie kleptocracy for a long long time, so I probably got close to twenty years now. Nobody should be surprised when they wake up in the morning and don't say, Wow, you know what I'm really looking forward to is American
democracy and pluralism. You know, anybody who thinks that this is going to be some sort of of magical transformative moment when we do not have any intention or capacity to change what's happening there is on crack. This is madness and.
Buty a scenario.
You notice the one question they won't answer, The question is are there going to be American boots on the ground. You notice Marco was asked to yes, Trump said yes, But the rest of them are like ahamad ahmanahamana.
Right.
Okay, So let's say we decided we're going to put American contractors into the oil fields to rebuild the oil fields.
What you're going to have to do, Just so folks.
Know, in the world, in the entire global oil and gas industry, there are only two countries that really have the engineering speck and the ability. It's the Americans and the Brits. So we're gonna be sending Americans down there. At what happens when they start getting kidnapped or shot at, or disappeared, or sabotage starts happening. What happens then, Woh, we have to escalate, We have to put more boots on the ground. We have been to this fucking rodeo.
I say this as a neocon. We have been to this rodeo and learned painful, painful, painful lessons not to do it this way right. But if you compare the ad hockery and the slab dasherie of our entrance into Afghanistan and Iraq, this is an order of magnitude more sloppy. This is like shit written on the back of an enhoop somewhere in mar Lago, compared to a encyclopedic scent of plans for a peaceful transition to democracy in Iraq.
I got so excited that you said this that I dropped my pen and let the record show I have drop my pen. So what you're saying here, which and you are someone who has spent some time in Iraq, so and you know those people, and what you're saying here.
Iraq Venezuela is the Iraq of Vietnam's okay.
Right, it's not going to go It's not going to go well. And why is it not going to go well? Because I think it's important. So one of the things that I wanted to go back to, and I think that there's.
Not been enough time spent on this, okay, is.
That in nineteen ninety one, there was an action that caused the First Golf War. And I don't think that anyone is remembering. It may not have really caused it, but it was the excuse for it.
Oh no, it caused it. I mean it caused it Kuwait. Yeah, the Iraqi Army, the Republican National Republican Guards stormed into Kuwait. It is explicable that our allies in the Gulf and around the globe all said, holy crap, this isn't good. Right, that was a legitimate.
Moment and then Europe remember, go on, go on.
No, we built a global coalition and nations. Tony Blair jumped in and said this will not stand. Now. Donald Trump's initial excuse for blowing up all these Venezuelan fishing boats is oh, the fentanyl, the fentanyl, the fenterl Right. You notice the indictment of Maduro doesn't mention fentanyl.
No.
You know why because even this clownish administration recognizes that the freaking fentanyl comes from Mexico.
And also China.
Right, yeah, well the precursors come from China and it smuggled in from Mexico. There is nothing going on here other than as what Donald Trump mentioned twenty one times in the Malogo press conference, the oil, the oil.
I want to go back to to go for two point zero because that also was preceded.
By nine to eleven. Yeah, so talk us through that.
So we had I feel like it's so important that they were actual, they were reasoned or there was some yeah.
Okay, I mean not to spend too many hours on this. We had very bad wrong intelligence. Right, many people were inclined to believe because the intense trauma and paranoia.
After nine to eleven after nine to eleven, we.
Had bad intelligence, particularly from one source named Curveball, who turned out to be a fabulous and a lying liar who lies, and Curveball said Iraq has weapons of mass destruction. There was an inclination inside the government to believe that intelligence, even against intelligence that was contradictory to it. That led to the conflation of Iraq and al Qaeda. We invaded Iraq.
Of course, we were successful in the initial invasion. But as I said to somebody yesterday or today who said, man, you know, I hate Trump, but my neo con heart was beating today, I'm like, dude, this is two thousand and three. Remember how we felt in two thousand and six when this shit had well and truly hit the fucking fan.
We didn't get out for another decade.
Well, you know what, region, this is the problem of going in and doing regime change when you don't offer something based on values. Okay, and we're doing that in Venezuela. We're not saying we're going to help Venezuela improve the lives of its people, are bringing democracy or liberty or prosperity. We're saying, fuck you, you get to keep the Maduro regime without Maduro, you get to drill for oil and give
us the money. Well, rerun your country. Anyone who wakes up and says, oh, murk first a log I don't want to do nation milder, No, no, that, and thinks this is the this is the way, this is the path. This is your neo isolationism playing out. Trump Fell Forward Again Award, Edition nine seventy two.
For these people, it.
Strikes me that there are not a lot of ways out now. Okay, so we're seeing Trump a lot of saber rattling now talking about Greenland, and certainly there's anxiety that that will be his next step. But I can't imagine that he gets out and just go pivots to something else.
But maybe he does.
But tak Us, well, I look this weekend. This weekend I was in a long text chat with a bunch of my Miami friends.
Who are Venezuelan, some of them a right.
Cubans Venezuelans, and some of them, I would I would say that a lot of them were passionately maga initially and now are like hands in the air like okay, whatever, he's crazy. Now They're like, well, maybe he'll take out
Cuba next, and maybe he'll take out Columbia next. We do not have a national capacity to deal with the basket cases of those three economies by any stretch of the imagination, But yet that seems to be what is the desired outcome here is We're going to go and we're going to do a sweeping regime change.
Through all of latinum out Latin America.
Yeah, you know what, God bless them for ambition. But this is dumb.
So let's just talk the political implications of this, because obviously this is it feels like a shit sandwich already, But what are the political implications? So you have January first, a lot of more health insurance premiums went way way up. Trump ran on affordability. Inflation is still a real and serious problem. We have a trade war with China. We
have all of this underlying trade stuff. The real tariff numbers we discovered really good reporting the New York Times are lower than what Trump World has said about.
You're not setting for trillion dollars and we're not going to all get a you mean we're not going to all get a tariff a tariff check after we get our doze checks.
Right, exactly. The doge so Doze was a scam. Tariffs are not as bad as Trump is advertising.
Them to be.
What do you think, like, what is the political I mean, he's hurtling towards the mid terms. They've spent billions of dollars of ice. The deficit as big as it's ever going to be. Like do you think I mean, did they overplay their hand?
Yeah, bio by a lot. Here here's the thing, the economic fantasy that has been empowered by getting rid of the bureau labor statistics. They're just making numbers up. This is all this is all five casting. You know, you had the president of Bank of America that they say, you know, an independent FED is necessary, independent data. We need it. They're not going to tell fewer lies going forward about the economy. But people, we are in a
very bad job situation in the economy. This health insurance crisis is about to smack Trump's voters in the face with a with a you know, baseball bat. None of this is going to go None of the economic stuff is going to go smoothly, and that's when that's when you end up with mistakes in other domains causing greater political impact. For the President's party two thousand and six. The Republican has got blown the fuck out, not only because the war was unpopular, but because the economy was bad.
So Trump is setting up the Republican Party for a historic wipeout in twenty twenty four, twenty twenty six.
Excuse me, it's funny because I think so much about like George Conway, you send new congressional candidate, my congressional candidate in New York twelve or New York two or whatever I live in, said that the only way that Trump like that, Trump will in fact eventually destroy the Republican Party.
And that wasn't true in twenty twenty.
No, it wasn't true in twenty twenty because there was still a little bit of pre COVID, there was still quite a bit of economic optimism in the country, where that is now no longer present in the country at all at all. And there was a sense, I think of that that image Trump had that was so deeply embedded in America's psyche, that he was a good business dealer, a good negotiator, a good businessman. All that crap that
nobody now buy is that at all. So I think we've ended up in a situation where where the Republican Party has gotten more obedient to Trump, more locked into Trump, and they have fewer options for escaping him. They don't there's not really a good pathway now where they can wake up in the morning and go you no, no,
that I don't know that guy. They're stuck right right on the on the on the Venezuela question, Molly, you know you had Mike Lee initially like this is unconstitutional, and three hours later he's like, yes, master, I love what you did in Venezuela. All of them are sucking up on this thing like mad men.
It ends up being there.
There are very few members of the Republican Party who have sort of said note to Trump, and I think they are worth highlighting at this moment. Marjorie Taylor Green and Thomas Massey continues to be a pretty loud voice. You've got justin a mash. But the people a rampon, right, But the people that have really you know, Tom Cotton has never not loved a war. Mike Lee is like a pretend libertarian.
He's a pretend pocket constitution guy, right, you know, during during during the Tea Party, air of those guys, I always carry the Constitution because that's all I care about.
Okay, But here's a question and for you, and I think this is an important tension that I'd like you to talk through.
In our last couple of minutes.
It feels like Donald Trump is getting increasingly crazy and that he will not stop until some branch of our government stops him.
Correct.
So what does that look like?
I mean, how far does Donald Trump go before the Supreme Court is like, no.
I am waiting with no sense of patience or anticipation for the Supreme Court to find some courage and integrity. Every time I have counted on anything from them, it has turned out to be a crashing disappointment. They don't have the guts to say no to the guy.
So if that happens, and if the Supreme Court at some point they make a calculation, either the Supreme Court does or the Congress does, that says something to the effect of we well, also, like he's polling at twenty percent, he's polling at there's a number where everyone stops doing what he wants.
I don't think it's twenty percent. I think it's twenty six, twenty seven percent. We've already seen the beginning the MAGA crackup in the low thirties. In the mid thirties, let's say we've already seen that starting to fracture. Once it's in that twenty degree range, a twenty five degree range, twenty seven degree range, let's call it. At that point,
obeying Trump is a political death sentence. We're not there yet, and all the incentive structures inside the MAGA media universe, the MAGA, the MAGA networks like Fox and Newsmax and CBS are increasingly.
Was snuck it in, I'd snuck it in.
They're increasingly going to have to play that tension. Do we want Trump to attack us and and be angry with us for telling the truth, or do we want to try to, you know, pacify him and not cover the people betraying him? Now Trump, Trump's political team, they
make book on everybody. They're always monitoring every Republican. At some point, these guys in the in the twenty six or twenty eight seats that are going to be in play, they're going to have to make a moment after their primaries, most likely where they say no, sir, and Trump has a hissy fit and they try to convert on that and say I'm an independent Republican.
Yeah, you go me.
I don't think it helps them in the end, Molly, I think it still drags them. I think he's still dragging them under the under the water. I don't knowk there's any world in which where they get away clean.
It is wild and you would not want to be any of these people right now. Who is it worse to be? One last question, who do you think is worse off at this moment? John Thune or Mike Johnson? Oh, Mike Johnson, because he's just going to get fired.
He's going to get fired. Look, let's just say hypothetically the Republicans somehow cling to power.
It's not going to happen in that house.
There's not going to happen in the house. But the haters, even in his own party, Mike Johnson's hated. Yeah, he's got a majority, but they look at him as he is out. Yeah. MTG is out tomorrow. Yeah r I p MTG. Who. By the way, I don't know if you saw her this morning or that Sunday morning where she she sounded like a rational human again, Oh.
It's crazy, it's crazy.
Look, I'd rather have her in charge of the Republican Party right now and in her current iteration of Mike Johnson. But that ain't never going to happen. She's she's now, she's now, she's now an apostate. And once you're out, you're out.
Rick Wilson, Mother John Fast Will you come back?
You know I will.
Brad Meltzer is the author of the books The Book of Fate, The President, Shadow, and his latest The Viper.
Welcome to Fast Politic.
Brad.
Good to be back.
So let's talk about this book.
Yes, The Viper. I'm going to give you the quick version of it. It's a thriller. Basically, a guy walks into a funeral home carrying a blue suit. And that's what you do when you're sick and you have no family. You pick out what you're going to wear in your coffin. And funeral homes are filled with them. They have like closets full of them.
They lot of them.
Days.
I saw when I was researching and I watched this mortician do and I said, explain it to me, and he said to me, it all happened in real life, but I used it as a book. Is if you go into a bank and you open up a new bank account paperwork, it's filed and the government can eventually track it. You go to the ups store, you open up a peo box, paperwork, it's filed. They could be tracked. There's like cookie jars now that have like Wi Fi and can tell you who in your family the last
chocolate chip. But if you go to your local funeral home with the suit you're going to be buried in, and then you sew into the inside of that suit and a little secret compartment and you hide something in that suit and hand it to your local mortician, you have an untraceable hiding spot. And in the book, the guy drops off the suit, his local mortician says, thanks for holding this for me, goes back to his hotel. Someone's waiting with a gun and says, where it is,
I don't know what you're talking about. They shoot him dead, and sure enough, in that funeral home is a secret item that I will not ruin what it is. But I just ruined chapter one of the Viper because you won't believe what's inside it. So the Viper begins. That's literally the prologue of the Viper, and it goes from there.
The last time you Ron, we were talking about these kids books that you were writing political kids books.
Explain to me how you make all this work?
Yeah, how do you like murder people and then go to children's books to entertain people? Yes, listen, we're both parents, right like we both go from that in our moments where we're talking about like what's going wrong in America, what's going wrong with history, what's going wrong with how we document things, and then we have to go and put on that whole other outfit of parenthood. And that's
all I'm doing. I'm like in the viper. I'm trying to show you the world of everything from witness protection to what's wrong with the culture right now, to what's going on in our military right now. And in the same breath, I'm going to race and do I am Princess Diana our next kids book, because I'm like, my God, the country doesn't have empathy, So both of them are just different delivery devices for me to try and bring empathy back. That's what I think books do. And if
your kids read, I know this, Molly. I can't change the minds of adults. But for nearly a decade now, I've been arming an army of young kids with lessons of kindness and empathy. And I'll take that fight any day. This one, I'm in the viper. I'm just doing it with my thrillers.
Let's talk about that more in a technology world. Do you think that reading creates the empathy that is needed?
I mean, I wish I could just say because it makes me feel good, but it's scientific fact. Okay, So today cruelty and venom and harshly judging those we disagree with. It's becomes sport in our culture. But cruelty and venomore and signs of strength, there are signs of weakness and petty and security. Right What takes strength is showing kindness
and showing empathy. If you look at the social science for it, the science says that fictional books have more impact on people's lives when you ask them than real people. And the reason why, whether it's like you like Dumbledore, Atticus Finch, the reason it has such an impact, or Superman or anyone else is because your favorite stories, you don't like them because you like the plot. You don't
even like them because you like the character. The reason you love your favorite book is because that story in somehow, some way says something about you, whether it's your dream, whether it's who you want to be, whether it's what you wish you had within you. And that's how empathy works, right, empathy right now and the culture look around like we get overwhelmed every day. We scroll and we look and we shut down. And you can't shut down, like we
need you right now. If you shut down, we're in trouble. But here's the other thing about empathy is empathy is malleable. And if you look at the social science on that, you can see that if you want to have more empathy, the secret is you just have to want to have more empathy. It's like your freshman year at college. The reason you make so many friends is because you decide I'm open to making lots of friends and it happens.
And that's how empathy is. So reading is just one of the greatest delivery devices of putting you in the eyes of someone else and you get to look through their eyes.
So yeah, I will bank on that any day.
I wonder if you could talk to us about what you think the big problems right now that sort of historical delivery systems are facing, Like I feel like I spend so much time thinking about news and how local news, how hard it is to keep that going. But I wonder if you could talk to us about like the other ways in which you feel that people are having trouble keeping up with history.
Yeah.
So, you know, in the Viper, one of the places I deal with is Dover Air Force Base. It houses the government's most secret funeral home for fallen soldiers and spies. It's where, you know, it's a solemn place. It's where all of our fallen soldiers go. It's where the astronauts go when the Space Shuttle blew up. It's where the Pentagon victims went on nine to eleven. All of our
double oh seven spies they go there too. It's a place that's filled with secrets, and I love secrets, but it's also a place that's deeeped in tradition and history. And today we have a president who's literally plowing over those traditions. The White House, the East Wing being torn down is like the you know, the single greatest metaphor. You know, it's going to be the cover of someone's book.
But I think, to answer your question, the greatest problem we're having right now is when it comes to history, you can go and say no, no, here's what the real history says, or you can say here's the way when you can fight back in the ways we usually fight back. But the real problem now is you can't legislate empathy. You can't force someone to protect history. And to me, that's the problem we're facing right now is
what's being torn down isn't just the East Wing. It's our norms, it's our empathy, it's our decency that is to meet the greatest problem we have. But the good news is, I think people on both sides of the aisle are tiring of it.
It's just exhausting to all of us at this point.
The best example of it is what we've seen with Trump's horrible, horrible tweet about what happened with Michelle and rob Ryiner. It strikes me that the breakdown of empathy has been pretty dark, and people are seeing that because he just, you know, this tweet he did, which ultimately, as Trump tweets go, I actually thought it's distasteful, but you know, there's a whole plethora of distasteful tweets, but it does strike me that that one, for whatever reason, crossed some people's red lines.
I think the reason it hits so hard. And again we've seen a lot of like sloppy late night tweets that go out, but that one. Every person listening to us talk right now has someone who they wish could be with them today. Everyone has been through a loss.
We may not be through.
You know, hopefully you know whether if you're issue is whether it's immigration, or whether it's ice, or whether it's what like, some people have a personal tie to it, some people don't. It means nothing. Some people are always going to vote with their pocketbook, right. Some people are never going to be upset until it affects them at home. But burying your loved one, watching someone die just tragically,
everyone knows what that's like. And everyone knows that even the worst person in your family still gets a nice word at their funeral. Right We may like under our breath and what our close friends be like, yeah, that person was you know this or that the other thing, but you got to show some respect and whether it was Charlie Kirk, whether it was Rob Bran, you show
some respect to the dead. That is not just an American value, that's like a human built in thing that you can't argue with that show respect to someone who was murdered, so respect to a family that's suffering. And I think that's why it just struck so hard. But I think I actually think and as you as we've now seen in those weeks after, is that you know
that stuff matters. I know we're all going to at the end of the you know, when it the midterms, everyone's still going to vote on where prices on eggs are. And it's always the economy stupid, I know all that, But you cannot have this race to the bottom of empathy and this race to the bottom of decency and say let's not have an impact.
It just is.
I think the numbers you're seeing in politics right now are a reflection of those. It's not just about the eggs this time. It's about something where people are like, I don't want to teach my kids that lesson. And that's what the White House is to me. The White House at the end of the day, the bully pulpit
is not what it used to be. The bullet pulpit has changed, and I think the bully pulpit for all of us has become something of like, what do we stand for, and it's not about your politics always, you know, obviously, it's about you know, there are certain issues that are vital, but it's just about like turn it on the TV and wishing your kid didn't see it, and that hits people.
It's certainly true. It's such a tough thing to watch and to be a part of. And so I wonder if we could talk about, like, I feel like America is kind of caught up in a conspiracy. They're a loop right now, you've written about this. I wonder if you could talk about what you see there and how you see a way to.
Get out of it.
Yeah, you know the thing about conspiracies, and listen, I make my living doing them. The Vipers, you know a book that has you know, this this lie at the at the center of it that people are trying to figure out is it true? Is it not? That that'll forever be the quest we're always on. But I think that you know, we all have the Library of Alexandria in our phones. Every day, we walk around with it. But the hardest thing to find right now is still
the truth for so many people. Right it's just you were still looking for it, And I think when you when you really break down why conspiracies take hold. His conspiracies are just our fears being realized. That's all they are. It's just your your actual fears being manifest. So as a perfect example, like people always say, you know who
killed JFK. And if you look in the nineteen sixties, if you want to know who killed JFK, right when he was killed, it was we thought it was the Communists, We thought it was the Cubans, it was you know, the height of the Cold War. That's there are great enemies. That's who killed JFK. But if if you look in the seventies, as Watergate happens, we started not trusting our government anymore.
So who killed JFK?
Then well it was LBJ who did it was an inside job, the CIA did it was you know, our own government had to have had a hand in this. And if you look in the eighties, as the Godfather movies peak, who killed JFK? It was the mob. So decade by decade, if you want to who killed JFK, it's just whoever America is most afraid of at that moment in time. I think the problem with conspiracies now is I don't even think the word conspiracy applies anymore.
That's just become our news. We just everyone. You know, conspiracies were the original thing that everyone did their own research on.
Right.
You would have a group of people that would come together at some meeting place and say, here's all my UFO evidence, and here's my research, and here's my JFK evidence, and here's my research, and here's who killed Lincoln.
It wasn't John molks Booth. Here's my evidence.
And we've now turned into a culture that has applied that conspiracy theory modus opera hunda to our own lives. We've let that replace science. Everyone's got their own research on every topic, and that, to me is that's what the growth of conspiracy has done. Is it's turned everyone into a sudden expert, and that is where we get into that dangerous subject. The only good news is is that historians matter. I take my job, you know, I sit on the board of the National Archives the Foundation.
I take that seriously.
Luckily, there are places like that that are still there to remind people there are actual facts, there are actual things that can't be argued. I don't care what your Internet search says, but there are actual things that in the end you cannot argue, and as long as that fight continues, ho'py fighting it.
Our conspiracy theory is real or not? I think like sometimes obviously people were much stupider than we were before because people don't read anything, and we all have our phones and we're getting misinformation or disinformation. But some conspiracies are real, Like probably JFK was not killed by one person.
As that example.
Right, I can tell you I still believe that Lee Harvey Oswald took that shot. But I also I'm like, why is Lee Harvey Oswald in Russia at the height of the Cold War marine and nobody knows about it? Nobody's looking into that. Who's backing this guy? When Lee Harvey Oswald was killed, we lost the person who could tell us that, which was Oswald himself. Right, what is Jack Ruby doing that It gets into a police station with a gun and shoots the only person who can
finger everybody else who is involved. There are good questions that are still not answered even with all the files open, because the people who are there are gone. But you're right, there are things that are out there. Everyone always wants to say the government lies, the government's doing this. The government's doing that. The government, as anyone knows who's lived in DC, can barely handle a snow day. Okay, So the idea that they can make these grand plans and
that they're running it in some odd way. The reason I always like kind of cock a skeptical eyebrow at that is that I don't think the government is some giant, massive organism. I think the government is made of people, and people lie. That's who I believe lies. People will do selfish, stupid things. They'll do things because whether it's money or power or sex. So you know, the original advices that people want to point out, People do that
all the time. I can tell you that I once got a phone call from the family of John Wilkes Booth, who famously shot Abraham Lincoln. They called me up through their lawyer and they're like, listen, there's a ninety year old woman who was told she's on her deathbed right now, and when she was young, twelve years old or something, her family told her, Hey, listen, we have a family secret. We're related to John Wilkes Booth, who killed Abraham Lincoln.
He was supposedly shot in a barn a few days later. And the truth is, and the family secret is they got the wrong guy. He actually escaped, he went on the run, and you can't ever tell anyone. And this ninety year old woman called me up her lawyer to tell me and show me all the proof she had from her family, because this conspiracy was real, and we looked at it, we dove into we tore everything apart,
went through it. She had the will of John Wilkes Booth that she showed me, but the will was never signed, which was the only way any will back then was. And John Wilkes Booth's name was his fake name was John B.
Wilkes.
That's the worst fake idea I've ever heard in history. If your name is John Wilkes Booth, right. But I do believe that she believed that story when she was little, and I do believe there are questions to be asked if you want some funds, And I go look up the autopsy of John Wilkes Booth after he's gone. America needed someone caught for Lincoln's death. The autopsy is a giant mess full of bs, and it covered up one
man's ability to say we got the guy. So is there a real conspiracy, is there not like those things are gone, like there's no way to prove them. So again, I feel like I'm giving you the long winded answer, but I think there are good questions to ask. But it doesn't mean everything is a conspiracy. It doesn't mean everything that happens in the government is. You know, they're all trying to get you and steal your car right now and make sure that you're you know, your kids
eating bag candy on Halloween. So I believe like healthy skepticism is a great thing. You need that, but you can't turn everything into a conspiracy.
Wild Brad, thank you.
You're like, what kind of crazy ass calls are you getting? Is what you're thinking right now?
I was like, why do people call Brad and not May no moment?
Rick Wilson, moy drunk fast?
It is that time for the moment of fuckery? Do you have a moment of rockery?
My moment of fuckery is a tiny colony of Denmark located in our Arctic regions, which Donald Trump would like to transform into another American dependency, and that is Greenland.
My favorite part.
I'm going to read you the statement from the premiere of Greenland. Let me state this calmly and clearly from the onset. There is neither reason for panic nor for kinson. The image shared by Katie Miller depicting Greenland wrapped in the American flag changes nothing whatsoever. Katie Miller, area podcaster and right right that said the image is disrespectful, Like you know how bad it is for the president of Greenland to get on Twitter and it's not good, Like this is an international incident.
Yeah, it is an international incident. It is an absurd situation. And I really believe as Trump has distanced himself from NATO, no one ever thought NATO's Article five would have to apply to America attacking a NATO ally. But I think we are going to increasingly see them do things like this. I think they may well use military force against Greenland. It will shatter our greatest alliance in the world. It's
a foregone conclusion. The Arkansas National Guard could take on the one hundred or so defense forces in Greenland and take control of it. But it is a madness, and it had been by the way, it emerged from a fucking Russian propaganda thing. As I recently read.
Russia has turned out to have done really well with our politicians who are very stupid. The one last other thing I wanted to add is that just as like a ps for our moment of fuck Gray, is Donald Trump sharing a lie that Tim Walls somehow was involved in something that caused the murder of Melissa Hollman.
Yeah, it was repulsive even for Trump.
And the reality is that this is because there was this right wing influencer who exposed this fraud. Even though it had been exposed and actually prosecuted in twenty twenty.
Two and eleven people had gone to jail.
It wasn't a Somali who ran the fraud. It was a suburban Karen. It was a white woman from the suburb right.
And they have rediscovered the you know, and they were all of these MAGA influencers. Why hasn't anyone covered it? The New York Times had written seventeen stories about it, CBS everyone had covered it, and it was just they hadn't read this stories. But this guy, Nick Shurley had somehow gotten the story to their attention.
And he's increasingly being exposed as kind of a of a grifty little character in this whole film.
I'm shocked.
None of these people, grifty little mofo.
Yes, but our moment of fuckery really goes on and on. And Rick Wilson, you'll come back.
I hope it never ends.
That's it for.
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