Welcome to the party, pal. The Michael Duke Show. I have two gums. One for each of you. Firearms Friday. As Thomas Jefferson stated, it is the right and duty of the people to be at all times armed. Say hello to my little friend! I say that the Second Amendment is, in order of importance, the First Amendment. The right to keep and bear arms is the one right that allows rights to exist at all.
The right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Not be infringed. Firearms from my cold, dead hands. Friday. Firearms Friday. That's right, your chance to sound off on issues of a 2A nature right here on the Michael Duke Show, broadcasting live across the state of Alaska on this, your favorite radio station and or FM translator.
And live around the world on the internet at michaeldukeshow.com. Facebook, YouTube, Rumble, you name it. We're trying to take over the world from our little corner of Alaska here. Good morning, my friends. Welcome to it. Again, it is that day of days where we get to talk about our favorite subject. And we've got one of our favorite guests on. I look back at my text messages.
Well, you know, I've been busy, right, with the station acquisition and setting things up and putting it on and doing all this stuff and moving the whole family and doing all that. I've been busy, and I didn't realize it had been. We hadn't talked to JD since I think October or something. It's been kind of crazy. So I wanted to reach out to JD to Chile, who is one of my favorite authors over at Reason Magazine.
Because he's written a great piece talking about the potential future of the ATF. Because... The FBI director, Cash Patel, is now two-hatting it. He's the interim director of the ATF. And that's raised some good questions. And J.D.'s got a great article that he wrote about eight, nine days ago.
about this we touched on it a couple days after it came out but i really wanted to get it straight from the horse's mouth so to speak so jd2 chili is waiting in the wings we've got some other headlines and stuff that we're going to talk about in the second hour of today's show and of course as always on friday we try and lighten it up. And we're going to be visiting with Willie Waffle in the final segment of the show. Yes, that's his real name.
I mean, his parents must have hated him. Willie Waffle, he's our entertainment critic. We're going to talk about the streams and entertainment news and just kind of lighten it up before the end of the show. So that's where we're going. But before we get too far along here, let's just jump into it because JD2Chili, as always, prompt.
You look up prompt in the dictionary and there's a picture of him right next to it. JD Tuccioli has been with us hanging out for a few minutes in the green room. Good morning, my friend. How are you? How's life been? You've been pretty busy yourself.
There's a lot going on. I mean, we've had the holidays. I mean, we got family, got the whole bit, but it's been good. It's been good. I hope it's been good for you too. Wow. You know, it's funny because usually JD and I, I try to talk to him every six, eight weeks. so and then i look back and
Yeah, it's been a hot minute, my friend. I haven't kept you in the loop because, you know. Anyway, so, yeah, I moved my family 300 miles, bought four radio stations, set them all up, did all that. And the time is just flying.
by uh it's just it's crazy but uh i guess isn't that that what do they call that uh you know when you're young everything seems to take forever you know that summer that three months of summer seems like it lasts forever and now two years is like that you know right as you get older so i guess it's all about perception you know as you as you go through um jd let's uh let's get started in talking about this because this is fascinating one of the big problems for gun owners
Over the last decade has been the ATF. I mean, they have been it's an agency that's been. And weaponized in many ways. But I mean, even before that, you know, we talked with people like Len Savage and everything else who have been, you know, that was 10, 12 years ago, I was talking with people like Len Savage who had been.
persecuted and prosecuted by the ATF. He won those cases, but that was when the ATF defined a string as a machine gun, you know, and some other crazy stuff that they did. But it just got worse over the last few years. with this announcement from the president and this appointment of Kash Patel, not only as FBI director, but now as the interim director of the ATF.
It's got some people cheering. You point out some possible problems, but let's talk about this whole breakdown here. So start me off at the beginning. Yeah, I mean, this is kind of unprecedented. Take the director of the FBI. He was confirmed in that position, Kash Patel, and make him the acting director of the ATF. But it makes sense in some in some real ways. And it's been proposed in the. past. The big issue, as you mentioned,
We have this federal policy called the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which is where it kind of wears three hats. It's a law enforcement agency, it's a regulatory agency, and it's a tax agency. And they're all rolled together into one horrible, horrible combination. The thing about federal agencies is if you give them a purpose, they've got to justify their existence in ever bigger requests for budgets and for power.
and so they're always finding something and if it's an enforcement agency they're always finding violations so they can you know parade bad guys in front of the cameras bad guys by their definition and then justify a bigger budget request next year and that's the atf and then you throw in an ideological element. I mean, we kind of dodged a bullet when Chipman didn't get approved as the ATF director into Biden, but Dettelbeck wasn't a whole lot better. You still have an agency that's...
become increasingly hostile to private gun ownership, to private firearms retailing, and to the gun industry that it regulates over the years. And so the ATF is a big problem. And it's also... more than a little incompetence mean operation fast and furious um and it doesn't play well with others including its sister agencies so the atf has problems to to address right right there I mean, and you're right. I mean, Fast and Furious is the most...
It's the most egregious example. One of my friends is David Codrea, who is one of the journalists that broke that story. It was called the gunwalker scandal to begin with because they were walking guns across the border. Then you discovered that they called it. The government's actual code name was Fast and Furious. That's just one of the most egregious examples where they walked hundreds and hundreds and thousands of guns across the borders to cartels.
ostensibly to track them, trace them and be able to capture the cartel members in a foreign country. And what they ended up doing was basically just getting all these guns across the border. And then on top of it. throwing the gun dealers that were on the border that they had strong arm into working with them, throwing them under the bus in the eye of the public and chastising them publicly and doing everything else. It's.
It's really astonishing. I mean, we could spend a whole two-hour show doing nothing but highlighting the foibles. The most recent one, well, I mean, we've got that sailor where they took a replica machine gun. And they sent it to the gun branch at the ATF. And they spent hours and hours and hundreds of man hours and who knows how much money converting it to get it to be able to fire one single shot.
And now they're prosecuting the guy for owning and distributing machine guns, even though it was a replica machine gun that they modified. in a machine shop and got it. You know, I mean, it's that kind of, they killed the director of the airport down there in Little Rock, Arkansas.
who was selling guns at a gun show. The guy was the director of the whole airport, pillar of the community, and they knock on his door and kill him in a raid. There's so many bad things that's happened with ATF. And like you said, here's an agency that... They're an enforcement agency. And so to notch marks on their belt, they have to prove violations. And it's a lot easier to prove.
paperwork violations or minor violations than it is to find actual bad guys who are doing bad things. And so that's what they end up doing. It's exactly what they end up doing. I mean, and if they don't generate, if they don't demonstrate that there's a need for them, they're always afraid that they'll be defunded, that they'll lose positions, that they'll lose status. So there's a real sense here that...
it would make sense to take a law enforcement agency and fold it into kind of the more general purpose FBI. And so while nothing has been said, I mean, we should be clear, the Trump administration hasn't said yet. that they're going to fold the ATF into the FBI, and they can't do that without Congress. Putting the same person in charge and then letting him kind of reallocate personnel and loan them out and give them different tasking can do at least some of that.
or move in that direction. And that may be what we're seeing with Kash Patel, made acting director of ATF, even as he's already the confirmed director of the FBI. And there's precedent. This is not the first time someone came up with this idea. The Clinton administration wanted to do this when they had their national performance review, which was headed up by then Vice President Al Gore. They pointed out in the performance reviews report.
I can think at that time there was 140 federal law enforcement agencies, I mean, of varying size and different roles or what have you. And they didn't cooperate especially well. They often fought over turf. and FBI often don't get And their proposal was that the big three, DEA, ATF, and FBI, ought to essentially be folded together. First, DEA into FBI. That's the Drug Enforcement Administration. And then the law enforcement functions of ATF should go to FBI.
and the regulatory and tax functions should go to the IRS. And then you'd kind of stick them together into one big law enforcement agency. So this is not the first time someone's thought of doing this and putting Cash Patel in charge of both FBI and ATF may be a step in the direction. that another president had already thought of right now the the initially the atf which was uh it was under initially under the department of revenue
And it has since moved under the Department of Justice. So this seems to make sense in that regard. And I know there's been a lot of hand wringing. The Democrats came out with an there was an 80. 80 different Congress people signed this letter saying that this is wrong and you can't do this. But again.
There's nothing preventing it. Now, there are some dangers here, and you've talked about this in your article, and that is of creating a supersized megalithic agency that has the functions of all these things. which may be great under Patel, but we're always worried about the next guy, right? That's always the next guy or gal that ends up there. That could be a danger.
That's exactly right. I mean, the thing is, what you're hoping when you fold the ATF into the FBI, what we're hoping as self-defense rights advocates, is that you get the ATF not so monomaniacally focused on manufacturing gun law violators. Because if they can't find enough gun law violators, they'll move over to drugs or they'll move over to counterfeit, they'll move over to something else, whatever it might be.
uh except that the fbi also has civil liberties problems and the danger is that if you fold one agency that's got uh regard for civil liberties at a low level into another one that also has low regard for civil liberties you end up with a superchar agency that really doesn't like civil liberties. And the FBI's problem is that it's got decades of kind of working as a political police agency, spying on dissidents.
manufacturing terrorists and quasi terrorists. We can look at that ridiculous attempt to kidnap the governor of Michigan a few years ago, where it turned out that a significant number of the participants were FBI informants and one was an active duty FBI.
agent i mean the whole thing was pretty much staged by the fbi and yeah they didn't justify their own budget they didn't even know that there were different you know oh hey i'm reporting on this guy not realizing he's an fbi informant and this guy you know pretty soon it's a circle jerk where they're all pointing you know Oh, oh, wait, we did all this whole thing ourselves. We created this. And that's not necessarily unusual, unfortunately.
It's not unusual. This happens a lot. The FBI often engages with stings. It's subject to the same kind of institutional pressures as the ATF or any other government agency. So unless you address the problems the FBI already has, and I quoted John Kiriakou, who's a former CIA agent and was also a whistleblower, who said that the FBI just has a history of manufacturing terrorists because that's been its thing for about 20 years now.
terrorists. So if it can't find them, it creates them. And so if you add the ATF to that, now you've got a much bigger, better funded agency that still doesn't regard civil liberties very well. And that's a big concern because you always just end up with a bigger problem rather than two smaller problems. And that's not an improvement on anybody's watch.
Plus, and we got to acknowledge this too, Kash Patel, while he's considered to be an ally of self-defense rights, of gun rights, he spoke to gun owners of America, is kind of more of a political creature and he's got a bit of a thin... skin, and he's threatened to go after his political enemies in the past. He published a book that contained what people refer to as an enemies list. It's more of kind of a grievance list, people who he thought had politically wronged him. Right.
So there's a danger that he could take the FBI and then a supercharged FBI and misuse it to his own political ends. And he wouldn't be the first person to use the FBI for that. Like I said, it's been used as a political police since the date was founded. Right, right. The church committee back in the 1970s found egregious abuses where they were going after dissidents and manufacturing criminals.
Kash Patel hopefully won't go down that path, and the FBI hopefully won't just add its grievances and its flaws to the ATFs in a merged agency. JD Tuccioli is our guest, contributing editor for Reason Magazine. He has a... a newsletter feature. If you go to any story that JD's got him at Reason Magazine, you'll find a link in there to sign up for what they call the Rattler, which is his weekly newsletter. And it is.
It's excellent. It's it's excellent. And you should go check it out right now and sign up to get those dumped right into your email box every week. JD to Chile is our guest. The Michael Duke show continues. We've got more coming up. Don't go anywhere. We're going to continue our discussion with JD. And we're going to have some fun today. I've been looking forward to this. And we will continue. Don't go anywhere. The Michael Duke Show.
Common Sense, Liberty-based. Free Thinking Radio. Happy Firearms Friday. Back with more right after this. Running on 100% pure beard power. Oh, also some coffee. We dip our beard in coffee. Ha, nice beard. The Michael Duke Show. Okay, JD2Chile is our guest, Reason Magazine. Again, special thanks to JD for coming in. It was at last moment. I thought I had sent him a text message earlier this week, and then when I looked, I realized I hadn't actually mashed the send button.
And so I reached out to him yesterday and he he came up, you know how it is. I'm like, I'm typing it. And then somebody walks in on me and I'm like, yeah, OK. And then I forget what I was doing because I'm old, apparently. JD, it's good to talk with you, my friend. Everything's been going well. I know before you said you've been busy. Anything new happening since, gosh, October? What's been going on?
Well, let's see. I mean, relevant to our discussion today is my family's family vacation this year is going to be a week at GunSite, you know, the GunSite training facility in Holden, Arizona. So we're going to spend a week there getting more dangerous. And it's going to be nice, you know. some time with our son and be back home from college.
and uh you know we rented a house for the for the festivities and we'll just have a good time oh that's gonna be great that'll be great yeah i love that i uh the last time i did anything like that was in 2010 2011 i went down to uh, I went down to Front Sight in Pahrump when it was still Front Sight and took a combat rifle course down there. That was an amazing—first of all, I weighed about 90 pounds more than I do right now, and it was the desert in—
Nevada, you know, 97 degrees. That was not the fun part. But anyway, everything else was very, very cool. So it was definitely an exciting time. I look forward to being able to do more of that stuff. JD, I noticed something on your bio that changed. Maybe I just missed it before, but tell me about High Desert Barbecue. I just noticed that. Yeah, that's my novel. It came out about 14 years ago. I wrote that. It's a comic adventure novel. It takes place in the high desert of northern Arizona.
And it's about environmentalists out of control, you know, federal regulators, EPA types, you know, looking to justify their existence and teaming up with the environmentalists and a kind of a... scurvy crew of would-be heroes, or unintentional heroes, more like, who oppose their plotting while they trek through the desert. So if anyone's looking for it, it is available both for the Kindle and the Nook.
well as in paperback from Amazon. I had fun writing it. And then it sold. I mean, both the readers who read it tell me they enjoyed it. And so I've not followed it up with another novel because it was a lot of work. But if anyone likes it.
Maybe I can be persuaded to do a sequel. Yeah, no, that sounds like fun. I mean, you know, I was just thinking about, I found when I was moving, I found my copy of the book, Unintended Consequences. I don't know if you've ever read that. Yeah, I have. John Ross. John Ross, you know, this big...
thick book and I was like, you know, cause I was getting rid of a lot of my books and I was like, well, I'm not getting rid of this one because this one, I don't think it's in print anymore. And it's, you know, it's such a good book. So that reminds me of Unintended Consequences or maybe Matt Bracken's Enemies, Foreign and Domestic. Both of those books involve agency overreach and kind of a false flag thing inside the narrative. So I'm going to have to see if I can track down a copy of that.
and give it a read. That sounds like some fun stuff. Yeah, it's amazing to watch what's going on right now, JD. Like I said, we could spend an entire show. just detailing the missteps of ATF. And you pointed out that the FBI is no choir of angels, right? I mean, this is what kills me. The FBI has always been lauded as... Kind of the preeminent agency.
In the world. Right. I mean, the police agency that has the most, you know, it's the most valorous. It's the most, you know, Elliot Ness and the untouchables and all this kind of stuff. There's a gazillion shows on TV talking about how great it is.
And there are great people that work there. Don't get me wrong. And I'm sure that the original mission of the FBI was great. But it, too, has this history. I mean, going back to J. Edgar and others, having an enemies list and doing this kind of stuff. We should stop deifying. a lot of these agencies because they're made up of people and people are not always great.
That's exactly right. Law enforcement agencies may be necessary, but you don't want to give them unconstrained respect and power. That doesn't make sense. It's dangerous. Yeah, no, it's it's crazy stuff. All right. JD to Chile, our guest. We're going to continue here. Reason magazine contributing editor. You can find him at reason dot com. Let's get back to it. Here we go.
What the hell is an assault weapon? You know, if we could just figure out how to get all of the murder guns and the attack guns and not keep selling those to people and just sell protection guns, I think that would be great insult. Does this mean that if we hurt your feelings, you'd consider The Michael Dukes Show assault radio? Okay, we can live with that. Here's Michael Dukes.
Another guy that has nothing but protection guns. I don't know. I'm sure JD checked all the tags on his. There was no murder or attack guns at all. They were all protection guns. Right, JD? They're all kind and gentle. I went through them carefully. I didn't want any murder guns in there. I know it's tough and you got to check them close to make sure that they don't have, you know, you got to check them, check the tag. Is this a murder? No, not a murder gun. Okay. I can, I'm okay to buy this.
JD Too Chili, Reason Magazine, our guest. So, JD, I guess the bigger question here is, and we've kind of gone over the article and the ups and the downs and everything else, but I guess the biggest question for many of us who've been watching... the shenanigans of uh of the atf over the years i mean and and their hat just keeps expanding right because it was a bureau of first it was the the bureau of revenue department of revenue and then it was the bureau of of uh alcohol
and that was during the time of prohibition that's when they really got their chops and then it was tobacco and then firearms and now it's explosive so they got like they're wearing all these different hats But I think the biggest question that many of us ask after looking at years of abuse and kind of the manufacturing of charges and kind of these stupid paperwork, the question is. Is this an agency that's really needed? I think that's the bigger question.
I would say no. I don't think the ATF serves a valid purpose. I mean, do you need, is it useful to have investigators who have skill in, you know, law enforcement investigators who have skill in firearms and explosives? when you're investigating crimes? Yes, it is. Do you need an entire agency full of them who also have regulatory and tax collection duties? No, that sounds like a hot mess to me.
So I don't think the ATF serves a valid purpose. That expertise can be transferred to a couple of agents over in different law enforcement agencies, put them in the FBI. and let them investigate the use of explosives and incendiaries, and that'd be fine. But should the ATF exist at all? No, I don't think it should exist at all. Why should we have an entire law enforcement agency dedicated to regulatory violations?
and misuse of firearms when we have too many laws on the books regarding firearms that we ought to be sweeping away. Too many regulations on the books regarding firearms that we ought to be sweeping away when the licensing and permitting requirements that they enforce. ought not exist and when the taxes they collect ought not be collected so um the atf ought not exist because it's going to find so long as it has this mandate it's going to find the violators
that it's going to arrest and it's going to parade across TV in front of TV cameras so it can ask for more money next year. We know this because this is what it's always done. This is what all federal agencies all government agencies do they justify their existence by finding people who
violate whatever it is that is the remit and then, you know, punishing them and then saying, see, we need more so we can catch more people like that. That case in Little Rock, Arkansas, we talked about it earlier with the head of the airport there. ended up being killed by ATF agents crashing in through his front door. I mean, he was being investigated because he sold guns from his hobby just as a private party. And the ATF decided, nah, he'd crossed the line to commercial sales.
Okay, that's a paperwork violation based on a subjective read of how many guns you ought to be buying and selling before you suddenly become a retailer. You know what? That line ought not exist. It ought not be regulated. But if it's going to be regulated... a polite letter or phone call saying we think you might be overdoing it, step down the sails would be the appropriate response if we accept the existence of those regulations. I don't.
But that still could be handled by a nice letter. Right. They crashed in his front door and started a gunfight. He ended up dead. That's not appropriate. Right. You don't you don't just you know, and that's the thing. This no knock warrant, this whole thing. He had no idea that was coming. They bust into.
his house at six o'clock in the morning or 5 45 in the morning at some day. And I look, I don't care if somebody busts into my house at O dark 30, I don't care if they're screaming police or not, because there's been plenty of examples of home invaders. screaming police on their way in through the doorway. You just don't do that, especially on something that is essentially, as you pointed out,
A simple paperwork. It's an administrative violation. You know, he didn't get a registered letter that said, hey, we think you're doing the wrong thing. He didn't get any of that. They just kicked his door down. Luckily, I guess they didn't shoot his dog, but they shot him. which was another problem there. We were talking during the break about a novel called Unintended Consequences by John Ross, which is a classic novel.
And in that, one of the things that I really appreciated about that book was that he goes back into the history of the creation of the ATF. And the ATF was initially founded. Under the Department of Revenue, during Prohibition, they were looking for bootleggers. That's where the alcohol part of ATF came from. And the problem was is that when Prohibition ended, you had this agency that was stood up with all these employees.
with all these enforcement officers, and they weren't going to have anything that they could do. Now, luckily, the Congress had just passed the National Firearms Act in 1934. And so it gave them a whole new mission. And so that's where the US v. Miller and all these other cases came out, because all of a sudden your shotgun that was 25 and a half inches instead of 26 was a violation. And they started going after. gun owners. And like you said, I don't necessarily think that this...
that the expansion, that the behavior of a governmental agency to expand its budget, to expand its power, in and of itself, that's not necessarily evil. It's just the nature of the beast. But when you are manufacturing things to try and justify... your existence, that's when it slips over the line into wrongdoing. And we've seen so many examples of that.
You have to call into question is whether or not this agency should actually exist. And, of course, on the premise that the Second Amendment shall not be infringed, you have to start calling into question all of these laws to begin with. That's exactly right. I mean, if there aren't government agencies, law enforcement agencies need lawbreakers in order to justify their existence. And so if there aren't enough lawbreakers.
They'll manufacture the lawbreakers. That means they put people's lives at risk. They put their freedom at risk. They kill people. They destroy families. They bankrupt businesses. And the ATF has done all of these things. And in fact, all law enforcement agencies have. It's an inherent danger of the beast, which is one of the reasons why we ought to be skeptical of law enforcement agencies, just as with any element of government, because it wields vast, dangerous power.
And with the ATF focused on firearms and having a regulatory function as well as a tax function, it's got a lot of different tools it can use to destroy people. They can go after them for violating law, can go after them for violating regulations, not having a permit, crossing a paperwork line, or can go after them for missing a tax payment. And that's a lot of ways to destroy lives. So the ATF has engaged in an awful lot of that.
as well as engaging in a lot of incompetent, immoral behavior. We talked about Operation Fast and Furious. The investigation for that, the aftermath, found that it had very poorly coordinated with other federal agencies with which there was overlapping responsibility for that project and to question the competency and the decision-making of the overall ATF apparatus as well as the Phoenix office of the ATF. I mean, it was a hot mess.
So you had incompetence mixed in there too. I would say some malice also, I mean, especially as it gets ideological, because firearms are a fraught thing. You create an agency to regulate firearms, loaded up with people who are ideologically opposed.
to the use of firearms. And of course, you're going to end up with something that's weaponized and dangerous. Right. Well, and I remember seeing an interview on Fast and Furious specifically. They had coerced gun dealers who were along the border to participate in this operation. They had gun dealers that they said, people are going to come in.
They're going to be straw purchasers. You're going to recognize many of them as straw purchasers, but we want you to go ahead and sell them the firearms anyway, because don't trust us. Trust us. We're going to track these across the border. We're going to follow it up. We're going to catch these guys. We're going to do all this.
And it went on for such a long time. At one point, I saw an interview with one of the gun store owners who said, we begged the ATF to stop this because we had seen these guys come in again and again. And we were very concerned. And the ATF said, oh, no problem. And it wasn't four or five months later that these same ATF agents in front of the cameras were saying these evil gun dealers were exacerbating the situation. And they were doing this at the behest of the regulatory agency.
who had power over them, who they could have said, well, no, we don't want to do that. But I mean, do you tell that to your lord and master who could take your business away overnight? So you're kind of strong arm into doing it. And then you are held up. as the reason it all happened i mean it is to see the whole thing break down it is astonishing
It's disgusting. I mean, so in this case, they were using the regulatory clout to coerce people into participating in a firearms law violation. So they pushed them through, you know, they pushed their... push them through the regulatory hoops threatening their status as retailers because they're there have to be licensed by the atf in order to function that way and then push and then blame them for breaking laws that they coerce them into breaking the atf does this a lot and by the way
Their genius plan for tracking those guns was to use these GPS trackers that they planted in the shipments of guns that had batteries that were good for about three, four days. And then, of course, the guns were purchased. They were stored someplace for a couple of days. The batteries died, and only then did they go across the border.
So there was never really any realistic plan for tracking the guns past the expiration of batteries at a life of days. That was it. So of course it lost track of these guns. But they've done this stuff before. They were setting up mentally disabled teens and young men.
in the Midwest years ago to engage in firearm stings. They even got them to put gang tats on their faces, tell them that they were helping the government out and catching bad guys. And then at the end of the stings, they arrested their own patsies. participate in that. They can add another body to their arrest count. I mean, it's really disgusting the way this agency has behaved. And that's on top of the fact that it shouldn't exist at all. The basic behavior behind all this is inhumane.
immoral and of course it shouldn't be it shouldn't be exercised in this area even if it wasn't in a human anymore You and I are in agreement on this. What do you think the possibility is? Because, again, we're seeing more and more of this come to light. And you could write a novel just on the problems with the ATF itself over the course of its tenure. But what do you think the reality is?
Does it get folded in to DOJ and under the FBI? I know that there's been a couple bills to abolish the ATF, but do you think that that's ever going to happen? What is the best outcome you think we can expect in the country? you know, in this administration, I guess. Realistically, Congress has been dysfunctional and almost unable to pass major changes and reforms to government now for years. And so as much as I hope that we see major reform
It's the ADF, but also beyond that, you know, under things like Doge and big cuts. The fact is Congress is almost incapable of making hard decisions. They'll every now and then expand government to a new area because. You can promise people new goodies. It's easy to kind of get them to go along. But taking goodies away, taking the agency away, making big changes to the existing status quo.
is more fraught. It takes a higher level of courage, even if it's absolutely necessary. And so my fear is that Congress will not do anything in terms of major reforms, including. getting rid of the atf or folding it into the fbi and that the best we can hope for is that cash patel is more sympathetic to gun owners during the during the course of his term in office and simply reigns in the atf for the next few years we might just have a breather
this administration until the next Democrat gets into office or the next president overall is hostile to firearms ownership and put somebody in there who doesn't like gun owners. And then we're back to the old way things are. J.D. Tuccioli is our guest, Reason Magazine. We're going to continue here with him in just a moment. We're going to talk about the overall fight for firearms in general, but also a new player.
that may be coming from the wings um that i there's been some speculation with patel holding the holding the chair for the moment but we'll see what J.D. thinks of that, and more when we return, The Michael Duke Show. Common sense, liberty-based, free-thinking radio. Back with more, right after this. If you missed the show, you can listen to it on your time with Duke's On Demand. Oh, and it's free. Like America used to be.
Streaming live every weekday morning on Facebook Live and MichaelDukesShow.com. Okay, we are in the break right now. i think sorry hold on these guys are they're working on one of my machines locally here and i just want to make sure we're okay all right um JD to Chile is our guest. Reason Magazine. JD, it's it's been kind of crazy. What are some of the other stuff that you've been working on? Because I know.
And we've been talking about this. You wrote here recently, you and I talked about things that were going on in Alaska. And you wrote about the Jones Act and some other stuff. Have you seen any other movement on some of that stuff? Because we're talking about right now we're facing this shortage of gas here in Alaska.
even though we've got 17 trillion cubic feet of gas up on the north slope of Alaska that we can't get. And I see now there's been kind of a renewed push and a discussion. Have you been keeping track of this since you wrote about it here in the fall? What are you seeing? Yeah, I mean, the problem is you've got a mix of people in this new administration. You've got some free marketeers in there who want to get rid of the Jones Act, but you also have some real economic nationalists.
um who are big fans of the jones act they've actually called people calling for the repeal of the jones act traitors uh so there's a there's different factions in the current administration fighting over that there's also a push to uh to continue
to get back to building that new pipeline down from the gas fields in the north to where Alaskans live. But that would take years, even if they get around to doing that. So the big hope is the Jones Act, and there's a lot of infighting over that. So I'm not holding out a lot of hope.
right now with such a slim Republican majority in the House of Representatives and multiple factions in the Republican Party, I think that getting rid of that law is going to be of an uphill battle as it's been since the thing was passed. I think we spoke this week with one of our state senators, Rob Myers, who's putting forward a resolution to ask the Congress to write a specific exemption for the Jones Act, a short term waiver.
That would allow to speak only to LNG tankers, that they would allow foreign flagged LNG tankers to ship gas from Alaska to Alaska. But only for the specific time that it takes for some American shipbuilder to actually build an LNG. Because there's not a single American-built LNG tanker in the world. Never has been. And so...
He's asking for it very specifically. And this this has got precedent. I mean, this has happened dozens of times. They've written exemptions and waivers for short periods of times across the country, even if it was for natural disasters or for other reasons.
It has happened. And this would actually be a good thing for many other parts of the country. They can't ship gas from the Gulf Coast of the United States to the East Coast if the pipelines are not working or if the production's full or whatever, or they can't connect. There's a pipeline that doesn't connect to another pipeline. And so they're importing gas like he was talking about Boston.
a couple of years ago imported a tanker load of gas from Russia. An icebreaker went all the way across the top and came down and delivered gas to Boston because they couldn't get gas from their own fields. I mean, it just seems so counterintuitive.
sometimes the way this thing works. Yeah, I mean, the Northeast is weirdly devoid of enough pipelines to fuel... that the high concentration of population you have there but the jones act has always slammed alaska it's slammed hawaii it's slammed puerto rico and it also hits other parts of the united states i mean defending the jones act when no one will build ships that would
with the Jones Act has never made any sense. I guess the Office of Shipbuilding that President Trump announced the other day is supposed to be an attempt to address that. But if you lay a keel down now, you're still not going to see the ship for quite some time to come. Yeah. need multiple ships. So that's not, I mean, you can try to jumpstart an industry in the US all you want. It's got to make economic sense.
And in the meantime, until it does, letting foreign flagships pick up the slack would be the way to go. And if you can't do it nationally, as you mentioned. Cut out, carve out some exceptions so you can at least give some relief to Alaska and other parts of the country. Well, and Rob made an interesting point because I had not looked into the actual history of the Jones Act, but the Jones that it's named for was a congressman from Washington.
state and the problem that the the jones act was initially aimed at alaska Because they were shipping stuff to Alaska and he didn't want his shipping cronies in Washington state to lose out on those lucrative contracts to ship to Alaska. All the shipbuilding stuff seems to be just an add on from the shipbuilding states. That's how he got them into.
the whole fray, but this was really aimed at Alaska from the very beginning. And that is, I mean, that is the most horrendous thing that I've discovered about the Jones Act over the years. But we've got to find a way to... to to to fix this like i said because it's not just alaska it's affecting many any of the of the port of the port states uh on both the east and the west coast this would be a big help when we made 40 of the world shipping
That would have made sense. Now we're down to what? Less than 5% of all ships are made in the U.S.? I mean, it just doesn't make any sense anymore. Those constituencies, once they're baked in and once they're made, it's hard to break them, right? That's what it comes down to. Well, I hope you keep an eye on this because this is...
This is some great stuff. JD to Chile is our guest reason magazine. We are continuing on here. One final segment with him. Please like, and share the show. If you would like and follow. Subscribe, ring the bell, do all the stuff, Rumble, YouTube, Facebook. But you can share it from anywhere. And we'd love to have more people get exposed to JD and everything. JD exposing himself to what? No, it's all good. Go check it out. What the hell is an assault weapon? What isn't?
If I assault you with a penguin, doesn't that make it an assault weapon? Does this mean that if we hurt your feelings, you'd consider The Michael Dukes Show assault radio? Okay, we can live with that. Here's Michael Dukes. Yeah, those are salt penguins. Man, those things are vicious, especially the emperor version. Those are like the evil black rifles of penguins. Four foot tall, those things will kill you.
Welcome back to the program. It is The Michael Duke Show. It's Firearms Friday. J.D. Tuccioli, contributing editor for Reason Magazine, continues with us. We've been talking about the folding in of the ATF under the FBI that we may be in the early stages of something like that because Kash Patel has been named the interim head of the ATF as well as the director of the FBI. But there's been a lot of chatter going on here, J.D., in the talk news world.
Of course, the biggest thing of note is that Dan Bongino, former Secret Service agent and New York police officer and all around, you know. Great guy. Bongino is an amazing, amazing talk radio host and everything else. He has given up his show and he's going to work for the for the FBI.
The word on the street is I talked to a couple of people behind the scenes at the at the syndication network was that he'd turned down this offer three times. But Trump would just not take no for an answer. And there's been some speculation that Kash Patel.
Is the interim director of the ATF only long enough to wait for Dan Bongino to get in there and that potentially he could be tapped because he's going to be a deputy director. He could be tapped to oversee that agency. And he has some thoughts on the ATF if you've ever.
listen to Dan Bongino. What are your thoughts on that? Do you think that that would be a good thing, a bad thing? Do you think it's a possibility? What's your take on it? It would be a good thing in terms of reigning in the ATS. It would make it less likely if you have a standalone.
person responsible for it that they're going to fold the atf into the fbi but uh bongino is tough uh tougher i would say than patel is i don't think he's going to be steamrolled by the existing bureaucracy of the atf so if you get him in there I would think that the culture and nature of the ATF would change pretty dramatically, and it wouldn't take a lot of resistance from the existing staff.
Those who in particular are hostile to gun rights. It would be an interesting thing to see if it happens. It really would be. And I think, again, it would help. They would bring it under the umbrella of the DOJ without. necessarily folding it in directly if it was like a separate division, right? I mean, and as one single deputy director is the head of it, with that being their sole purview and purpose, the law enforcement aspect of it, I think that would be...
And again, Bongino has some thoughts on the ATF that are not necessarily charitable the way the ATF has been operating the last 50 years. So, I mean, I think it would be a good thing. And I guess I would reserve my judgment for future years. But for now. like you said during this administration, maybe we would see some relief.
Well, yeah, I mean, if he backs off on the interpretations of rules, and this is where one of the areas, the ATF does a lot of damage, but one of the areas where the ATF does an enormous amount of damage is in the interpretations of rules. And we've seen that. We've talked before about the 80% rule, 80% receivers. Are they firearms or are they blocks of aluminum and polymer?
Biden administration won the ATF to reinterpret the rule to make them into firearms. Well, obviously, I would say Bongino is going to come down on a different side. with the support I would assume of the White House, of a more pro-gun interpretation of a lot of the rules that the ATF oversees. And this, of course, is an overall problem with the administrative state, is that interpretations of rules, interpretations...
of laws have absolutely have so much power that they can threaten people's lives and freedom. But with a Bongino in charge of the ATF, I would assume that the interpretations would be much friendlier to self-defense rights. Well, and that's been a big problem. I mean, this reinterpretation of the law, when the when the federal agency that regulates the industry issues.
three four five different confirmations that a product is legal and then decides 10 or 12 years later oh you know we decided it's not legal I mean, first of all, that's not constitutional. Second of all, it lacks just a certain amount of fairness. You've had people build their whole lives about manufacturing or distributing or selling a product or consumers buying a product. And now all of a sudden.
They're either out of business or they're potentially felons for a simple determination that they decided to change their mind. And that's not how laws are supposed to be. No, it's not. And I've appreciated a number of the very tough. court cases that you know judges ruling that the atfs and reinterpretations make no sense and that they ought not be doing this they they really don't have the the authority to basically call a lump of metal um you know a block of you know a paperweight
a firearm. But beyond that any federal agency ought to have its rules that's interpreted in such another way that it's essentially legislat powered by the agency. And it's a dereliction of duty by Congress to assign them laws that could be interpreted that way, that could be interpreted at all. If Congress can't pass laws that are clear in the way they're written, it ought not be passing laws at all.
Right. And until until it gets back to the business of actually legislating as legislatures, not just doing film in the blank legislation, we're going to have out of control federal agencies. But that's been the problem with Congress over the last 50 years. They've abdicated their responsibility.
They create framework laws that have a basic idea, and then they turn it over to the bureaucracies to then fill in, like you said, fill in the blanks. And then the bureaucracies are essentially writing laws that they themselves are enforcing and giving themselves. all the ability and the power. And like you said, it's been refreshing to see some of these courts say,
You're an administrative agency. You do not have legislative powers, which is essentially what you're trying to assume here is legislative powers. This is on Congress. And eventually Congress is going to have to. Step up or I mean, I guess it'll all come apart, but there's two choices there. But Congress is going to have to step up. We got about five minutes here and I wanted to ask the big question because I think a lot of us feel like in the battle.
for gun rights in the country. We've taken some big W's. We've gotten some big wins over the last few years. I mean, Bruin obviously is the pinnacle. of what's happened. A lot of stuff in the last couple of years have been pivotal because of the Bruin decision. You had Heller and McDonald and all the other cases underneath that. Now Snopes maybe will be another part of that underpinning. But we are winning. But this is just winning the battle, not the war, right?
Yeah, I mean, the real war is in the culture, and I think we're winning the culture war, too. I mean, a big part of that, a big sea change came when you saw people who are not traditional gun owners over the last few years, especially kind of post-pandemic. the summer of love in 2020 and such. When you saw more African-Americans, more women, more people identified as politically on the left buying firearms to protect themselves and their loved ones.
When you have more Americans who are gun owners, you have more American support for gun ownership. So it's a good thing when you have it extend beyond its old cultural niche and become more normalized for larger segments of the population. More minorities, more urban dwellers, more women, more what have you. That's a good thing. And that's a cultural win for gun owners because that entrenches it.
Once you own something, you don't want to see the government infringing on your ability to own it and use it. So I would say take the cultural win. And I would say looking forward that the chances of major infringements coming out of the government of firearms rights, of self-defense rights anytime soon. By that, I mean years is unlikely. I think that we've moved beyond the point where they had a window of opportunity to do that. We've passed the point where that's easy or even likely at all.
There's you're still seeing pushback. I mean, they're talking about now. I think it was Maryland where they've got now they're trying to ban handguns, any handgun that can be readily convertible with a switch or something to full auto. But again.
They've already I mean, that was part of the McDonald decision was that you can't ban whole categories of guns because it infringes. So you're going to see these states try and take stances on this. Somebody else, one of the other states, I think it was Hawaii, just expanded there. definition of sensitive spaces and so all of these are going to have to go through the courts but i think with bruin
Again, I kind of likened it to a battlefield. We've moved forward across the battlefield, and Bruin is the bunker that we're now fighting out of. So we've advanced. But we can't grow weary in well-doing. We can't give up and say, oh, we've won and now we can coast. We've got to keep pushing this forward. Oh, absolutely. I mean, some states are going to be bastions of authoritarian laws on guns, New York, California, Hawaii.
Maryland has been weirdly bad. That's because the state west of the coast is actually very pro-gun and much different than the coastal area, but the coastal area dominates the politics there in Maryland. And that's true in a bunch of states. New York, it's all run by New York City and the surrounding commuter suburbs. But those states are kind of on their own. On the federal level, the threatening legislation, I think we're past the real danger period where that's likely to be.
that's likely to occur. Mostly we're going to see decent legislative, I'm sorry, judicial decisions coming out of the Supreme Court. I expect Thomas and Alito to probably be replaced, you know, be replaced by new justices, you know, nominated by Trump during the course of Trump's term. They're both getting older up there. And I think they both know the political reality. So Supreme Court is probably safe. And for most of the country, I think acceptance of.
gun rights is expanding, not contracting. And as you said, we're winning the culture war. And you can see this in the elections as the Democrats continue to try and cling to an anti-gun message. They're continually shot down. If they make that a cornerstone of anything, they're continually shot down. And that has to do with a culture war. Like you said, more minorities, more people who are identifying as moderates or progressives, you know, women, blacks, Latinos, LGBT.
Q crowd, the whole thing. I mean, they are all embracing this because I think in part because of the summer of love. And that's, that's, that's, I'm glad to hear that you're, you and I are on the same sheet of music. JD to Chile reason magazine, our guest folks, we're out of time for this hour. Katie, as always, so good to talk to you. Thanks for being part of it. Thanks for having me on. All right, hold the line for a second. Folks, we're out of time.
All right. We're in the break, JD. Final thoughts. Anything else? What else are you working on? Anything we need to be paying attention to? We should be subscribing to The Rattler. Everybody should subscribe to The Rattler. I'm writing a lot about Doge and things that can be cut to make government smaller and less expensive.
of today is about reform efforts for medicare a lot of people don't realize that the uh trust funds for social security and medicare don't actually exist they're just claims on fewer future taxes that means they're liabilities and they effectively double the national debt uh which is huge i mean see right the 36 trillion national debt we talk about is actually double that once you're folding those entitlement uh obligations so
We need, I mean, it can't just be Doge, it has to be Congress, but we need Medicare reform to guarantee that people do have better quality health care and that it's affordable and sustainable into the future. Wait, wait. Those are just IOU slips in there? There's no real money? Just IOUs. Just IOUs. On future. That's the thing. That's what kills me. On future.
tax revenues which they're already screaming about at this point and uh the the the caterwauling over doge is so crazy because they all are like well we're all for efficiency but Wait a second. Why is there a butt in there? If we've been expending billions of dollars on, you know, on, on. trans operas in Peru or something like that, millions and millions. How can you say that that forwards the American people's interest? I don't I don't even understand it. It's so baffling to me.
It really makes you think me thinks they doth protest too much. Maybe somebody getting paid. You know what I mean? Oh, absolutely. I mean, I've got a close friend who's, I'm not going to mention his name because I want him to stay a friend, but he worked for the FDA until recently after the buyout offer was made.
And he put in his retirement papers and he was fuming to me about Doge and the buyout offer. But in the same conversation, he told me that two thirds of the people in his office are utterly useless, just collecting paychecks and taking up space. So, I mean, if he's going to concede that two people, you know, two thirds of the.
people in his department at the FDA are useless, then there's a real need for Doge. I mean, we got to make the government more efficient and a lot cheaper and smaller. Thank you. And I would take away a lot of its responsibilities, unless it has to do. the less trouble it can cause the rest of us. Absolutely. Well, I mean, and that's the thing. The other option is unpalatable.
Because the other option is for the train to just plunge off the cliff. You cannot continue to spend a trillion dollars more than you take in every year and expect that it's going to work out okay. Right? No. that money that money is is I mean, right now, it doesn't exist. I mean, we've committed, our federal government has committed to spending an ever-growing amount of money with a growing gap between revenues and expenditures up until it all collapses.
The best guess I've seen is from the Penn Wharton budget model at the University of Pennsylvania that we have no more than 20 years before we're either the federal government's defaulting on the debt. or devaluing the dollar to pay off basically in funny money. And that's assuming the markets don't clue in before the 20 years, and of course they will.
yeah you got let's say we got 10 to 15 years tops that's it yeah and and i think the the that that alternative is not palatable sure cutting into bureaucracy I've often said, you know, it's better to get sick from the cure than to die from the disease. And that's where we are right now. I'd rather take the chemo than die from the cancer because at this point.
That's exactly what's coming. If it does come and the dollar crashes, it stops being the world reserve currency. Like you said, they reissue bluebacks instead of greenbacks or something at a 10 to 1 margin or whatever. Catastrophic is the word that I would use, catastrophic. And if we don't get a handle on it, it's going to hurt us and our children.
That's exactly true. And that's so I have high hopes for Doge, even as I think Congress won't act on some of this is unlikely to act on the things that need to be done, but they need to be done. And Doge is the best opportunity I've seen in decades for actually cutting the size and the cost of government. And I'm really hoping that it works and accomplishes something good, because if it doesn't, I don't know what else we do.
Yeah. Well, and luckily, there's a lot of administrative power in what they're doing because a lot of this is administrative and does not require the authorization. I mean, some big changes require Congress to participate, but a lot of this can be done from the administrative side. So we'll keep an eye out and just keep writing, my friend. You're doing some great work, and I really appreciate you and what you do, and I appreciate you coming on board. We'll talk again soon.
It's been my pleasure. See you next time. All right. Thanks, JD. Appreciate it. JD to Chile reason magazine, man. Love talking to that guy. Okay. Um, why is that? Weird. OK, we are getting ready to jump back in here to our two. We've got some headlines. I suppose I should start the phones because I didn't do that earlier because I was too excited about talking with JD. So let's get that locked and ready and loaded.
But, yeah, I really appreciate J.D. He's it's been a long time since we've talked. It's time's just going so fast. I mean, how did we get to the March already? I just got started the other day. How did we get started? How will we make it all the way to March? All right. Well, this is going to blow my volume here, so I'm going to shut up for a second. And here we go. Phones are locked.
So phones are open. If you guys want to call in this morning, now is the time to do it. We'll get all that stuff done. Again, please like and share the show. Let's get more people involved. Let's do all the fun stuff, and we'll get started with Hour 2 right now. The Michael Duke Show, Coffin Sets Radio. Welcome to the party, pal. The Michael Duke Show.
As Thomas Jefferson stated, it is the right and duty of the people to be at all times armed. Say hello to my little friend! I say that the Second Amendment is in order of importance, the First Amendment. The right to keep and bear arms is the one right that allows rights to exist at all. The Michael Dick show. The right to keep and bear arms shall not. Be infringed. Not be infringed. Firearms. From my cold, dead hand.
Firearms Friday, your chance to sound off on issues of a two-way nature right here on the Michael Duke Show, broadcasting live across the state of Alaska. On this, your favorite radio station and or FM translator and live around the world on the Internet at MichaelDukeShow.com. Hello, my friends. I appreciate you coming in and joining us on this beautiful Friday.
We just finished up with JD to Chile from Reason Magazine. Great interview with JD talking about the latest move by the Trump White House. uh to uh what looks to be the opening moves of folding the atf into the fbi or at least putting it under the purview of the fbi at some point and i'm this is some good stuff and jd has got
A lot of good insight into that. And if you missed it, you can go back and listen to it on the podcast, which is available wherever you find podcasts. Or you can watch the replay on Facebook or YouTube or Rumble. So go out there and check it out. Some good stuff there from JD Tucheli from Reason Magazine. JD's also been writing a lot about Doge recently and pointing out some of the things and some of the places that you can find.
The efficiencies and everything else, he's got some good writing up there. And if you want to get JD in your mailbox, in your inbox every week. Just go over to any of his articles and sign up for The Rattler, which is his weekly newsletter, and drops it right into your mailbox every week. So go over there and check it out at Reason. In this hour, we've got some headlines to cover, some headlines from around the country. And we're going to talk, continuing to talk about the ATF.
which has been, was the topic of hour one. We'll talk about some of the more egregious things that are happening here locally. Excuse me, I guess not locally, but recently. That's what the word, what I was looking for. Things that were happening recently. We'll also take your phone calls. The phone lines are open this morning. One of the whole premises of Firearms Friday is that we want to talk with you. We want to demystify the firearm and to.
explain if you have questions if you're not you know this show is not necessarily for those who are pro-gun although many of you love to listen to it the show really is aimed at people who are gun curious not uh you know not pro-gun not anti-gun but somewhere in the middle who are like man i could take it or leave it but i do have questions and that's why we're here so the phone lines are open at 319-527
319-527-3864. 319-527-3864. I know it's not an Alaska number, but I couldn't get an Alaska number for the system that I'm using. So I'm sorry. That's just, that's how it works. Drop us a line if you'd like to talk today. Any question is any firearms related question or gun related topic is fair game. Love to hear what you have to say here this morning and feel free to.
Feel free to ring us up and let's let's let's get talking to it, shall we? So some of the stories and Willie Waffle will be at the end of the show today. I forgot to mention that Willie Waffle for the entertainment review. And for our weekend movie review, we're going to talk with Willie here in just a little bit. So with J.D., we were just talking about some of the outrageous. behavior over the last 50 years for the ATF. Some of the things that they have done that just is mind-blowing.
some of the stings and operations. We talked about Operation Fast and Furious, which is probably one of the most egregious examples. As far as scope, not necessarily as far as impact, but as far as scope, where they allowed...
thousands of guns to cross the border into the hands of cartels, ostensibly to track those down and catch the cartels in action. But of course, We know that that was ultimately an absolute failure and actually created in part kind of an international incident between Mexico and the United States because the State Department knew what was going on. And they were running guns across the border into Mexico, and they were planning on going into Mexico to get that.
Anyway, that's a whole thing. But some of the more recent actions by the ATF are still calling into question. We talked about the administrator of the Little Rock, Arkansas airport. who again a pillar of the community had a hobby of buying and trading guns was a collector and had been selling guns as a private citizen at gun shows and in other places
And the ATF decided he sold one too many guns and he should really be a commercial dealer and not a private seller. And instead of issuing a letter. Instead of sending a certified letter or sending an agent during business hours to talk to him or anything else, they executed a no-knock warrant on his house at 0 dark 30 in the morning and instigated a shootout with him.
killing him in his own home. And this is just another example of some of the craziness that's been going on. Now, one that you may not have heard about. is a man by the name of Patrick Tate Adamiak. Patrick Tate Adamiak is a former sailor, former U.S. Navy sailor. Bought a replica Sten submachine gun at a local gun show. It's a toy. It's non-firing. It's a replica. He paid $75. It's sold online.
to this day and uh he hung it up on the wall you know it was made of zinc alloy wasn't made of the proper steel uh it was uh it was basically Just again, a replica, non-firing replica. The ATF decided that for some reason they wanted to make a point with a Damiac. And so they took the Sten toy, became the most tested and most written about gun of all the legal firearms parts seized by the ATF during the raid on a Damiac's place of residence. This fake Sten.
which they then took into the firearms branch, the Firearms Bureau there, their workshop, and they proceeded to work the hell out of it. They basically did everything they can and made it into a gun that fired a single round. OK, it has no. Here's some of the firearms experts' testimony about this that just kind of blows your mind.
Exhibit 28 is a non-firing replica of a Sten Mark II machine gun manufactured by Denix in Spain. The exhibit is 31 inches long, and overall, it has the physical appearance of a Sten machine gun and simulates a Sten machine gun's action. revealed the receiver in the magazine well of the exhibit is comprised of a homogenous casting of zinc alloy. The simulated barrel is a hollow tube with no chamber and thin walls.
The barrel assembly of the exhibit is simply press-fitted into the receiver. The bolt does not contain a firing pin or an extractor. I field-strip the exhibit to its major components. It appears unmodified from its original configuration. But then they went on to continue and try and make it to the point to where the damn thing actually fired a single round.
I don't know how many hours or modifications would have to go into something like that when it has no chamber, has no firing pin, has no nothing. How are they? I mean, I wouldn't want to be standing around that thing when they did it. And this is how they railroaded this sailor into a charge of illegal possession of machine guns.
And this is from last year. This is from last year. So this is before the Little Rock incident. But this is the kind of stuff that's been going on. And this, quite honestly, folks, is one of the reasons why... people have a major distrust in government because of actions like this. This is like the, what was the, what was the guy's name? Ober, Obermeyer?
I can't remember the gentleman's name. He had an old, it was a $500 AR that I can't remember. Yeah, I think he just bought this. It was a cheap AR. He loaned it to a friend. And during the during, well, his friend was at the range shooting it. The gun had a malfunction. And it and it bump fired a bunch of rounds. Right. It got something got stuck or whatever. And it bump fired a bunch of rounds.
And which slam fire slam fire, which happens, you know, if you got something's out of spec or it gets super dirty or whatever, it can happen. It's uncontrollable. It's not something you want because you pull the trigger and it just keeps firing until the mag's empty. And the range, you know, got somebody got the police got involved. ATF got involved. Next thing you know, even though the gun was not manufactured as a machine gun, even though that they did.
They took the gun and then they prosecuted the owner who had loaned it to somebody else. They prosecuted him for owning a machine gun. And again, this was just an agree. It was obviously not something that was intentional. But they ruined this guy's life. They put him in jail. They did all this. This is a consistent theme in what we're seeing.
Now, with that being said, they won't investigate real crime. I mean, while you may know the names of some of the people that have been railroaded by the ATF. Lee Williams over at the Gun Rider looked into this and he saw, you know, he talked about a lot of the different things while they were busy railroading this sailor into thing. They couldn't actually be bothered to look into an actual crime involving the theft of a firearm. Because Lee Williams writes about Paul Szabo.
who purchased a gun shop called the Shooters Emporium in 2020. It was located just outside of Minneapolis. And after he purchased the gun store, he got some bad vibes from an employee who he later terminated. Doing an in-house audit revealed that his suspicions were correct, that there was an American Ruger American Rimfire rifle worth about $350 that was missing, and all the evidence pointed to the former employee.
They tried to get it back from him. He basically told them he gave him the finger. And so Zabo called the police. He also reported he submitted a report to the ATF. Six months later. This same employee, former employee, was arrested for state crimes of theft and forgery, theft use when property stolen as a firearm, and with intent to defraud and make written, make or utter written statements, forgery.
as well now three years later zabot still waiting for a trial that has never come up the suspect was now hired by a competing gun shop Where he's been very busy. Apparently he still had login information. He hacked into the. into Zabo's social media accounts for his gun stores. He hacked their special order accounts. He said, we started losing customers to the other dealer who denied he'd ever worked there.
The next thing that happened is the prosecuting attorney sent him an email and he said, I had me look at the document. It was a 4473, which is the form you have to fill out when you buy a gun from an FFL. For the rifle that had been stolen from Zabo. Filled out, completed, signed, and stamped by another local FFL. Ugh. It had a different name that signed the 4473 for the rifle, which had been sitting in the police department's lockup. So the gun had been, I mean, this is, this is insane.
The ATF, he said he's still livid that the case remains in state court rather than federal court. Why isn't the ATF prosecuting that? They talk about straw purchases. They talk about felons applying to buy a gun. I mean, because this is how dumb they are. We'll go to a gun dealer and we'll fill out the 4473 and another part that said, have you ever been convicted of a felony? They say yes. What? Why aren't they? Why aren't they prosecuting those?
Right. Why aren't they prosecuting any that they this is the kind of stuff that would be easy slam dunks. But, you know, it's even easier finding somebody who didn't. You know, spell out the name of a county. Instead, they put initials. Or somebody who puts Y instead of yes or N instead of no. Minor paperwork violations. It's easier to go after those people you control, namely the FFLs.
where you have direct control over everything that they do. The ATF, I mean, major reforms have to happen at a minimum. The abolishment of the ATF would probably serve a... better purpose in my opinion but what'll that get you that and a nickel will buy you nothing maybe five bucks will buy you a cup of coffee but there you go
All right, I see Fred's on the line. We're going to continue here in just a minute. We'll be back with Fred from Rhode Island on the phones at 319-527-3864. The Michael Duke Show. Common Sense. Liberty-based. Free Thinking Radio. If you missed the show, you can listen to it on your time with Duke's On Demand. Oh, and it's free. Like America used to be. Streaming live every weekday morning on Facebook Live and MichaelDukesShow.com. Okay, I hope we're in the break right now.
We're continuing with you. And I see that Fred's on the line. Fred, hold the line. We'll be right to you here, bud, when we come back throughout the day. What about the kid on YouTube that had the credit card that could theoretically be cut into pieces to create a full-auto device for an AR? The device was found not to even work, yet he's... rotting in jail, I think is what she's trying to say. Yeah, I mean, that's exactly it. Although I will say, why would you poke a hornet's nest?
Because I thought about this. What it was, was that it was a business card made of metal. It was the size of a business card. And it had on it, it had his business name or whatever. And on the back of it, it had a... template stenciled out where if you cut it and folded it into an ar specifically it would become an ar auto sear right that's what the that's what the theory was but as the as armed in ak here on youtube points out it didn't really work
But why would you poke the bear, right? Why would you poke the bear? I mean, you know, but I agree. I mean, that was just dumb. I'm threatened. I'm going through here. We need to hear from Fred. Yeah, no, I'm with you. Time drags on when you're retired, says Kim.
Well, I look forward to retirement then, Kim. I'd like things to slow down just a little bit. I mean, I would like things. I mean, literally, I just started these radio stations last week, but that was two months ago. That's what it feels like. just crazy, crazy stuff. Um, um, any, see, uh, cause it can be fun. Okay.
All right. Why poke the bear? Because it can be fun, says Frank. Yeah, we know that that's your modus operandi, Frank. We got that. We understand. We understand, my friend. That's how it works for sure. Okay. Sounds like the agency made a franking gun. Well, that's what this is the same agency that declared that a piece of string was a machine gun. I'm not kidding.
Literally, that was the determination because they strapped a gun down to a bench and they tied a string to the trigger and they ran it through a bunch of loops and then they were able to get it to bump fire and they classified a string as a... You can't make this stuff up. This is what's going on. And the fact that they had to work so hard to get this gun to even fire is astonishing. It really is. It really, really is crazy. And they've done this for years.
You know, they've done this for years where they keep trying to take and make something out of something that it's not. I don't know. If you hear these stories about the ATF. If you listen to these stories and you go back and you look at the history and this article, I guess I should post this in the chat room. I'll post this. This is the article that J.D. wrote talking about the folding up of the FBI. But he's got links right in the middle of the article.
If you if you go about halfway down the article, it says the ATF's history of incompetence and abuse. And there is links. There's six, seven links in there about. all some of these different egregious stories, you know, the fast and furious, the story where he talked about mentally disabled people, where they, the FBI lured them into a sting and said, you're helping your government. And then.
convicted them as patsies how they've lost guns how the atf has lost machine guns gun parts how they've killed people over paperwork violations and how they unilaterally decide to reinterpret the laws If you're not outraged by some of the things that are happening here, you may need a checkup from the neck up. That's all I'm saying. Because there is some crazy stuff going on out there. And this is just, I mean, again, you could fill an entire book.
with the botched and, you know, unscrupulous things that have been done. And he said, it's not just the ETF, it's many agencies, but this one is near and dear to my heart. It's a tough one, tough one. All right, we're going to continue here, jumping back into it, the Michael Duke Show. Common Sense, Liberty-based, free thinking radio. Like, share, subscribe, ring the bell. Let's do this thing. Here we go.
What the hell is an assault weapon? Does that mean that if we hurt your feelings, you should consider the Michael Dukes show Assault Radio? Okay, we can accept that. Here's Michael Dukes. Kind of a d**k, but somewhat funny. All right. Welcome back to the program. One final firearm segment here before we jump into it with Willie Waffle, who will be joining us for the weekend entertainment review.
Phone lines are open at 319-527-3864. 319-527-3864. We're going to jump into it. Fred from Rhode Island. I see him. I see you, Fred. He's on the line. Let's go see what he has to say this morning. Good morning, Fred. What's going on, my friend? Good morning, Michael. I just heard one of the best quotes I've seen in a while. just the other day from Albert Einstein from some time ago. And Albert Einstein's quote is, you know, the most powerful forces in the world are three things.
Stupidity, fear, and greed. I think that kind of pretty much sums up a lot of what we're dealing with in this day and age between the progressives and the wokes and the globalists and everybody else. that Doge hopefully is going to do a real deep dive and get into a whole bunch of rabbit holes as to what's been going on, who's been influencing who.
who's been tickling, who's scratching, who's back, and where has all the money gone, and whose pockets has been dropped into. And I think that's definitely going to be a real eye-opener. And I think they definitely should be adequate prosecution to any and all of those involved with that particular activity. And, you know, I think they should all be prosecuted. I don't think anybody should be.
It should be let free. If it's against the law to rob a bank, it should be definitely against the law to rob the taxpayer. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. No, I agree. Well, you know, the other thing, as far as the ATF goes, you know, the ATF used it once upon a time. The ATF was a halfway decent agency. I mean, they did their job. If you broke the law, if you earnestly broke the law.
You know, then it came down on you. But they were, remember Benson from years ago? A guy by the name of Benson, he was the director of the ATF. I don't recall. I think he was on a couple of interviews. He's a real honest, down-to-earth guy. And ever since then, they've kind of gone to hell in a handbasket that agency has. And it's a shame because they've been, like so many other departments of the government and agencies of the government, they've been weaponized.
And, you know, they've just been taken over by, you know, from the executive branch or the influencers from Congress and the Senate. who've gone in there and just manipulated them for their own nefarious purposes. Right, right. Once again, they managed to get away with it. They operated in the shadows, and you had to be out of the shadows into the light. and be exposed. And they should be dealt with. We told business the other day with Trump's...
You're seeing that right now. You're seeing that right now when they're saying that Patel, even though he's director of the FBI, now they're saying, well, he shouldn't be the ATF director because he doesn't have the proper. Law enforcement experience specifically for this type and yada, yada. Yet they were all about Stephen Dettelbach. They were all about the guy from the Giffords anti-gun group, Chipman. When Chipman was up there, that guy had no.
No law enforcement experience. I mean, they were all about putting those guys up. So this is really it's about ideology and politics. It has nothing to do with actual enforcing the law or keeping people safe or anything else that they ostensibly are saying. Just wrote on to a letter to the president to say you shouldn't have Cash Patel run the ETF because he doesn't have the. I mean, come on. These are the same people that were cheering for Chipman and Dettelbach and all these guys.
If anything, Kash Patel has probably more experience in that field than any of the previous, especially that last idiot that was in there before. He did absolutely nothing. He couldn't even define what an assault weapon was, and yet he wants to sit there and he's all on board for getting rid of it. The whole thing is based on ignorance of the public. A lot of this, it's unfortunate, but not too many people are aware or in tune with what a firearm is.
And the operation of it, the whole gist of it, not everybody's involved with it. But they're easily led astray with a lot of BS, a lot of non-facts. the shoulder thing that goes up from Senator McCarthy and you know that along those lines and they buy it as gospel right fortunately they're being lied to you know the Pied Piper you know the Pied Piper sent an arrest over the cliff
And, you know, it's really being manipulated and played for fools. And if they believe it, then they are fools. But they're fools in the fact that they don't take the time. You just take it, you know, just take a carte blanche on whatever they're told. Right. It's being gospel. Right, right. That's the problem. That's the biggest thing we face in this day and age in the 2NA community. Yeah. They're being lied to, and they believe it is gospel.
And those are the people who are going to sit there and say yay or nay when it comes time for the vote. And a lot of these people in Congress... They don't have a clue what the hell they're talking about. Well, again, they don't know what's going on, and you're 100% right. And that's the reason behind Firearms Friday is hopefully to try and demystify, to educate people, and to do all that other stuff, Fred. Hey, I appreciate the call, Fred.
Hey, did I hear you on Tom Gresham's gun talk this last weekend? Were you on? Did you call in? You most certainly did. Okay. I've been listening to him for years, and I finally got on. I was listening to Tom Gresham because I carry it on my stations here, and I was sitting.
here, listening, working on something, all of a sudden I'm like, that sounds like Fred. Anyway, it's good to hear you, Fred. Thanks for calling in and joining us today. We really appreciate it. Appreciate you being part of it today. Have a good week. Yeah, you too. I appreciate it. Interesting. I just got a text. I just got a message from a listener and.
He says, it's rather ironic, Aaron says, a Brady campaign radio ad during Firearms Friday on the Michael Duke show. What the heck? Well, I don't know. The local station must be playing. I don't have any Brady campaign ads in my, hmm, interesting. But I guess if I was going to do something, and I guess I would put it in the show that was...
I was mostly against. I guess that'd be the place to put it. I don't know. All right. I think this is Tom. Let's check to see who it is. Good morning. Who's this? Where are you calling from? Good morning, Michael. It's Tom from Ksilof. How are you today? Good morning, Tom. What's on your mind, my friend? Well, let me tell you a quick story here. In 1978, I was 18. You can do the math there if you'd like.
i bought a 1976 ar-15 colt a1 style and i still own the gun today and when i bought it i paid 425 for it that was like a whole paycheck for a month. That's real money, yeah. Yeah, and it's actually my daughter's favorite gun that she loves to shoot. But anyways, when I bought it, It was completely stock and we'd be out playing in the desert, shooting rabbits, things we probably weren't supposed to do.
And every now and then, you couldn't make it do it. You just wanted to do it. It'd rip off three to five rounds all at once. And if it was pointing at a rabbit, it wasn't pretty. So I did some research on it. And there's a notch in the top of the stock AR-15 hammer that causes a problem. And I was told by people, well, just put an M16 hammer and trigger in there and there'd be no problem. I said, well, where do you get that?
So I went to the Cow Palace Gun Show back in 1978 and bought the $5 book that broke down an M16 and looked at all the different parts because back then you couldn't just go buy that part. And then I went over to another deal. Rumbled through his trays and stuff, and I found the M16 hammer, the M16 trigger, and I put him in the gun, and I've never had a problem. Thousands of rounds through that gun now, and it's never fired full automatic again.
No, I mean, it happens. There's just, you know, it's a lot of mechanical stuff. Part in there that caused the problem. Yeah. Well, and again, there's so many problems, so many reasons that that could be caused, whether it's fouling and being dirty, whether it's a mechanical failure. And that's the thing. It does happen occasionally. It doesn't mean that it was intentional. That was the worst part.
They tried to duplicate that, and they actually, again, took the gun into the firearms branch and did all kinds of stuff. It's crazy. You're right. It is a mechanical problem, Tom, that could have been fixed, but nobody really wanted to look at it. Instead, what they wanted was they wanted another notch on their belt and to convict somebody.
Tom, it's good to hear from you. Thank you for calling in. I'm sorry I'm up against the break. I got more coming up. Willie Waffles dead ahead. The Michael Duke Show. Common Sense, Liberty-based. Free thinking radio. Streaming live every weekly morning on Facebook Live and MichaelDukesShow.com. Okay. We're in the break. We're in the break doing our thing here. We're making sure that it's all good. Okay. It's all good. All right. Yeah.
This is slam fire. Okay, let me go back up here. Oh, yeah, it's daylight savings time this weekend. That ought to be interesting. That ought to be interesting. Armed in a case that I had a captain on a ship in southeast that had the same problem with his Colt AR. I mean, it happens. It does happen. And it's not it's not something that you want to happen by any means.
But it's, you know, it definitely does happen. And that's when you want to take it all apart and figure out exactly what you need to do. And like Tom said, maybe it just needs some parts replaced. Miguel says, everyone have a great weekend. Don't forget to move your clocks ahead this weekend when it's time. Let's get the ATF cleaned up with Dan. Ah, man, I hope that that's what's going on.
I hope that that is what's going on, is that Bongino is going to go in to the ATF. That would be amazing. That would be an amazing thing. Uh, yeah. Don't forget to set your clocks ahead and change the batteries, all the batteries. Don't forget to change all the batteries at this point. Uh, for sure. Um,
Anthony says, it's like the old saying, never attribute malice to something stupidity can be can be placed on first. Yes, that's the thing. How much of this? But, you know, here's the thing. I think a lot of this has to do with, again, many of these. Folks that are working for these various agencies, whatever three-letter agency you want to talk about, it's the ends justifies the means, right? I don't think it's necessarily malicious per se.
but it is i've got to justify what i'm doing so let me find whatever violation i can whatever minor infraction that i can and it's much easier when you have a controlled environment it's easier you know when you're going after ffls who are literally under your thumb it's much easier to find those guys and do something to those guys than it is to try and track down some random anonymous criminal out there doing something bad. And if you need to.
you know, make your name and you need to justify to your superiors what you're doing and to show the closure rate of your cases and everything else, then you look for the easy route. And that's how we ended up where we're at today. And that's just a shame because they take an oath to uphold the Constitution. But that seems to get pushed to the background when they're worried about justifying their positions or their jobs or their departments or whoever it is.
Because they're supposed to first and foremost be upholding the Constitution and protecting citizens' rights. Instead, they start looking at the citizens as...
part of the group of problem out there. I mean, there's a subset of the citizens that are obviously criminals, but you can't look at the body as a whole and say, and this has been part of the problem when we've seen, we've talked about the militarization of the police where, you know, The police are getting all this military gear and Humvees and tanks and trucks and flashbangs and full auto suppressed weapons and all this other kind of stuff that they are getting.
And you wonder, well, would they, do they want to use them? Yes, they want. I mean, boys and their toys. Of course you give me a full auto, whatever. I want to go shoot it and try it out. Of course they want to go do that. I remember back in the late 90s, there was a early 2000s. It was after 9-11. So it had been early 2000s. There was a trade magazine or it was a magazine aimed at military personnel.
And essentially said, you know, getting ready to get out, getting ready to retire, you know, love kicking doors, come kick some doors with us. And it was an ad for one of the SWAT departments on the E on the West Coast in California. I can't remember which department. I think it was San Diego.
But basically we're going to be kicking doors. That's what we're like. We were doing in Iraq, like Afghanistan. This is what we were doing. You're going to take that mentality, that battlefield mentality, and you're going to bring it home. You know, and that's when they started viewing, you know, the citizens as civilians. Right. Oh, those are us versus them. Civilians versus law enforcement. Civilians versus we're citizens.
We're citizens. That's what it's supposed to be. It's kind of crazy, you know. Tracer says having a blatantly malicious agent can having a run in with a blatantly malicious agent can change one's perspective big time. Yes, absolutely. That's all it takes. One run in. I mean, one running can ruin your life. It's not just a change in perspective. It can ruin, it can absolutely ruin your life. All right, I'm getting my phone set up here. Willie's calling in, locking him in here on the deal.
You guys ready? Let's do this thing. A little bit of weekend pick me up. Let's talk about some. Let's talk about. I want to talk about Daredevil. Let's talk about some fun stuff here. All right. There's a can of worm, Citizen, says Fat Ray. All right, let's get back to it. Here we go. The Michael Duke Show, Common Sense, Liberty-based, free-thinking radio. Again, like, share, subscribe, ring the bell, do all that stuff. Only 25 of you have liked it.
All right. I'm just in the studio dancing with myself. I'm dancing with myself. Hello. Welcome back. It's Friday. Can you tell? I'm ready for the weekend to be over. Willie Waffle, wafflemovies.com, joins us this morning for... Wood ticks, lunatics, and politics. No, it's all entertainment all the time. Hello, my friend. How are you? I'm doing great.
You just reminded me of one of my favorite songs. I know. Billy Idol rocks, man. He does. Billy Idol. I don't know if you've ever seen it. If you ever get a chance and get a chance to listen to it, Billy Idol did almost like an acoustic concert with his guitar player once.
And it was one of the best things I've ever seen in my entire life. I think it's still out there. I think you can still get it on CD or something. It was really good. All right, Billy Idol Acoustic. I'll have to look that up for later today. Yeah. I got some work to do, and I need to. I need some jam and stuff. So we'll get to it. All right. Well, let's not a lot on the entertainment front this week. It was really kind of a quiet week, but we've got some movies and some streams and stuff. So.
I guess, since there's nothing else to talk about in the entertainment world, we'll talk about the Oscars. But we're going to talk about the Oscars, and then we're going to talk about the Oscar. fail i mean like hardcore fail so hit me so hit me with the oscars themselves and then we'll talk about the badness there
Well, who do you believe when it comes to the ratings, my friends? So this was kind of interesting. So Nielsen puts out like next day, like Nielsen ratings. They call them their fast nationals. After the Oscars had aired on Sunday night, Onora, by the way, won Best Picture. they announced that they actually had a drop in the audience, that the audience was down 7% compared to 2024, which brought it down to like 18.1 million. Wow. But alas, my friends.
There's always some other additional counting that can be done. And a day later, on Tuesday, Nielsen said, you know, we didn't include all the streaming viewers. Ed, when you include them, why the Oscars were up 1% to 19.7 million viewers this year. The highest total in five years. And... They said the reason the numbers were so big, so much bigger, once they included the streaming, is because it increased the young viewers. The young viewers 18 to 49 were up 19% compared to last year.
Okay, well. That'll be a one-time thing. I mean, I don't know, man. I just, you know, I've never, and I know we talk about this all the time, but I've just never been into the award shows. I mean, ever. Even when I was younger and it was the only thing on TV, I was like, I'll go do something else.
I don't know why. Yeah. But, you know, and of course, in this day and age with Instagram and everything else, people are being deluged with stars and celebrities and everything else. So I'm really surprised. It wouldn't have surprised me if those numbers of the 7% down.
would have held true. It really wouldn't. No, it wouldn't surprise me either. And when I saw it, I said, well, that makes sense. One of the other numbers that I saw late last week... was that 48% of people who go to the movies said they didn't see any one of the movies that were nominated for Best Picture. Not one of the 10, okay? And that tells you where you are right there. You know, we have seen time and time again.
The Oscars always gets its best numbers when there's a movie that a lot of people have seen was nominated. Now, in this case, I'll make the argument. that that movie was Wicked this year. And that's why the younger viewing was so much higher because Wicked was extremely popular. It was extremely popular among younger viewers. So I think that did help.
I think Conan O'Brien was fine as a host. I don't know if Conan O'Brien brings you in any additional eyeballs. I think that's hard to say it's because of him. It was a decent show. It wasn't the greatest. It wasn't the worst. And again, some surprises. I mean, I thought Timothee Chalamet was probably going to come away with something, you know, but I mean, were there any big surprises? I think the biggest surprise.
was Best Actress, that after Demi Moore had won literally every Best Actress award leading up to the Oscars, like all the precursors, on Oscar night... It was young Mikey Madison for a Nora who wins best actress. Right. It was the shock of shocks. I mean, I, I, I honestly thought it was, I thought it was going to be the other way around. I thought that Demi Moore was going to win for best actress and the surprise was.
to be best actor. I was like you. I thought Timothee Chalamet was going to pull it off because he had just won the Screen Actors Guild Award. But overall, it ended up going to Adrian Brody in his like six or seven minute. long boring speech why is that man even a lot of stage ever again i know i start i watched about 30 seconds of it and i'm like okay dude i'm snoring already let's move on you're an actor nobody cares about your philosophical leanings on
I don't know, whatever it was. Anyway, that wasn't the biggest news on Oscar night. The biggest news was that Hulu was streaming the Oscars, and the House of Mouse apparently can't handle its sauce. It was a train wreck. I think it's nice to say that Hulu attempted to stream the Oscars. See, this was a big deal.
So traditionally, if you wanted to stream the Oscars, you would watch the Oscars on some service that carried... an abc station you know like you know like youtube you pay for a local affiliate or hulu even has a service where you can watch your local affiliates and see them live this was the first time
that the stream was going to be available solely to a Hulu subscriber if you were a Hulu subscriber. And I'm one of them. And I thought, well, let me try it out. Well, let me tell you, it was a big disaster. First, it didn't work for something like 34,000 viewers who were trying to watch the Oscars. And it kind of glitched in the beginning. And what happened was.
All those other people couldn't get it. Now, I did get the show. Most of the show. See, that was the second part of the problem. So after it took Hulu like over two hours. to actually fix the stream so that it was available to all the subscribers the show which had been scheduled to end at 10 30 which by the way never ends at the time when it's scheduled to end right right
Hulu shut the stream down. Hulu shut the stream down with two more awards to go and put up a nice little message about your live event is over. Thank you for watching. And I'm like, it's not over.
so there wasn't a live human being on the thing some guy set the time he read the script and said i was supposed to be over 10 30 let me just shut it down at 10 30 and write it into the deal yeah it was it was almost like it was pre-programmed like they didn't even want to pay somebody to sit there watch it to make sure hey don't turn this off until they give away the awards nope they just they just automated it and and then the thing shut down like with two awards to go so hulu
is the biggest loser of the week. This is a black eye that they are not going to be able to live down. This is right up there with Netflix having all the streaming problems with the Mike Tyson, Jake Paul. Right, right, right. But at least Netflix redeemed themselves. I don't know if Hulu will. You are the weakest link. Goodbye. Exactly. You're out the door.
All right, well, let's move over to the movies. We've got four different things. Queen of the Ring in theaters, Mickey 17 in theaters, In the Lost Lands in theaters, and then the Daredevil reboot. on Disney, Born Again. Now, the Daredevil series was pretty groundbreaking. It was like the first Marvel series that was outside of the cinematic universe.
It was great. We won't talk about Iron Fist, but we will talk about Daredevil. Daredevil was amazing. So I'm looking forward to that. But you guide me. You give it to me in order here, my friend. You know, we've opened the door to talk about Daredevil. Let's go for it. And so, yeah, this is a reboot. And, you know, I don't even want to call it a reboot. I want to call it a sequel. Right. It's a continuation. It's a continuation. It is literally picking up.
Where we left off with the original series. And in some ways that's hard. Because I didn't watch all the series. I wasn't enamored with Daredevil. Nothing against Daredevil. I just wasn't into the series. And so when this is continuing. And we've only seen the first two episodes. So throughout the first two episodes, you can tell.
There are certain callbacks to relationships or characters, and you could tell that's supposed to be important. So, like, I'm on my phone looking it up like, why was that important? Who's that guy? You know, and it helps kind of fill in the blanks. But in general, it's a good. intense series. And what you've got is Daredevil. Well, Daredevil had a horrible tragedy that we see at the beginning of the first episode and kind of walked away from being Daredevil for a while.
He's getting pulled back in because his old nemesis, the kingpin, Vincent D'Onofrio, well... He's just become mayor of New York City. And I think all of us know he's got an agenda. Yeah, it's good to be king. It's good to be king. Yeah, no, this is a great series. I mean, I really enjoyed it. I'm going to have to go back and watch. last season.
to get caught up and get the full scope of it but yeah no i'll put it on the list but again they're only dropping one episode at a time again so screw them it'll be it's like i'm not watching reacher for another five weeks because that's when the last episode drops um Okay, so negative one to four waffles so far on the two episodes you've seen of Daredevil. What do you say?
You know, I'm at Three Waffles because I think they've done a good job not only making a good action series, but they have a nice mystery that's tying it all together as, you know, as Matt Murdock, who is Daredevil's, you know, Daredevil's persona. He is a lawyer and he is representing a good Samaritan who's been accused of killing a police officer. And this is going to tie the whole series together and it's going to bring out.
what kingpin's real uh motivation is for becoming mayor and everything else and that's cool they've planted enough seeds to make me want to come back on tuesdays maybe not every tuesday maybe i'll be like you i'll wait a couple weeks then watch like three episodes All right, well, let's move on here. We got about three and a half, four minutes. What's next? You know, let's get it out of the way. Uh-oh. In the Lost Lands. Uh-oh.
Yeah, you know, and, oh, believe me, they're pushing. Now, I don't know if you've heard, it's based on a short story by George R.R. Martin. They are leaning their hat right on that stick, man. Milking it. It is a short story by George R.R. Martin. It turns out it's a really cruddy story. And it turns out to be a really cruddy, boring movie. I'm telling you.
You know, if there was ever a movie that really should have been a video game, this is it. Okay, so it's Mila Jovovich, very good actress, good action star, and Dave Bautista. Another good action star, a nice developing actor after his career as a professional wrestler. Well, they're a witch and a hunter, and they have to travel to a dangerous land to find an artifact for the queen.
that will make her shapeshifter so she can be with her werewolf boyfriend. And you think you've got problems, mister. Yeah, really, really. Yeah. And so, you know, it's the journey, right? It's the Odyssey that they're going on as they go through all these strange lands and they have these battles and they're forging forward. And so, you know, that's the video game.
That would be a great video game. But here, there's no real great drama. There's no real great storytelling. The dialogue stinks. I mean, oh, dear God, the dialogue stinks. i'm at one waffle oh just because the action scenes at least are cool enough to keep me watching all right so she wants to get to be a shapeshifter she wants to turn into a real bit uh all right so um let's go back over to the other two mickey 17 and the queen of the ring
Yeah, and these are also pretty good movies. I'll hit Mickey 17 first. So this is Robert Pattinson's movie. You know, he is directed by Bong Joon-ho, who was the Oscar winning director for The Parasite. And this was like his big movie that's been tied up for a few years. And it hasn't seen the light of day yet.
And it's not because it's a bad movie. I think it's a good, goofy sci-fi movie with some humor that kind of, I think, runs out of steam towards the end as the plot kind of starts to jump around too much. So it's set in 2058. Robert Pattinson is this guy who doesn't have much going on in his life, decides to join this expedition to this ice planet that we're trying to colonize. And the catch is, well...
He's kind of expendable. So if he ever dies, which is every single day, there is a printing machine on their ship that will print him a new body. and they just download his memories into his new body so that he kind of keeps going day after day. Now, in some ways, okay, so now we have all the goofy scenes of all the way he dies, okay? And that can be kind of funny, and that can be a little bit crazy. But eventually...
this movie is going to have to get serious. And in one way it's serious in that, you know, it's an examination of capitalism and, and what do we do with workers and how just disposable workers can be. Then there's the very, very not subtle Mark Ruffalo. How do I put this nicely? Politician.
wears a red hat a lot oh gosh okay kind of has a tan yeah that that's the kind of stuff that loses me i'm at like two and a half waffles i thought it was average i thought it was all right finally queen of the ring we only have 40 seconds here so give me a quick waffle meter and we'll pick it up. Yep.
I'll go with Three Waffles. It's the story of professional wrestler Mildred Burke, Millie Burke, who revolutionized female wrestling throughout the Depression and after World War II and into the 50s and beyond. And it's a movie that gets better and better.
as the story gets more complicated and you see the different troubles and bad relationships that happen throughout the movie. I'm at three waffles. I thought it was pretty solid. All right. We'll have to take a look at it. Thank you, Willie. We will see you guys on Monday. Be kind, love one another. live well we'll see you then have a great weekend I mean, really, let me go back to Mickey 17 real quick, because the premise sounded interesting, right? But man, Mark Ruffalo and the whole...
Well, you know, statement on capitalism and everything. I mean, come on, guys. Really? You've got a movie that's exploiting capitalism to dump on capitalism at the same time? I mean, did Mark? You are the most capitalistic enterprise ever.
Did Mark Ruffalo give away all of his salary for this movie so he could play this character? I mean, I just, you know. No, he did not. No, he did not. No, he did not. So shut up. Just shut up. But it sounds like an interesting premise. I mean, I think it'd be fun.
to watch just for that part of it queen of the ring though that was the one that kind of intrigued me on this whole thing because i'd never heard of millie burke um we talked about it you mentioned something about this a few weeks ago and i went and did a wikipedia look and i was like wow this is
crazy this this this was some crazy stuff oh oh shockingly crazy And people who are professional wrestling fans will probably more readily recognize one of the other characters in the movie Mae Young, who is also one of the trailblazing female wrestlers of professional wrestling.
wrestling and and so yeah you know it's a movie that starts off kind you know kind of cliche you know she's a small town girl who has big dreams and wants to do more with her life than work at the diner and she gets an opportunity She loves professional wrestling. And she gets trained by this guy who, you know, then ends up, of course, marrying her. And they're touring and they're growing their wrestling stable. And they're picking up other women along the way. And they're starting to become.
popular, but then it all falls apart, man. I think that's the part that gets interesting. Once we get kind of... through that establishing a few scenes where she's learning how to wrestle. We learned that she wants to do it. As they're kind of facing a lot of the challenges, as you can imagine.
Female wrestling is not exactly widely accepted in the 1940s and 1950s. There are states where they're not allowed to do it. And you see how she's being taken advantage of by her husband, who's the promoter, and how she wants to fight back. And, you know, and other promoters, the way they treat some of the wrestlers. I mean, it really does get interesting in that respect. And watching that character grow and watching all those relationships become so complicated.
is what really sells the movie and I think really wins you over. All right. Well, good stuff, man. I can't wait to find out more about it or see it myself once it hits the streams. What are we doing next week? Next week, there's a lot of stuff next week. We've got Novocaine. We've got Black Bag. Maybe even the Netflix movie Electric State. I've got to see if they'll let me see it because it comes out on Friday, but sometimes they'll let me see it early.
So we'll find out. All right. We'll see. We'll see what happens. All right. Willie Waffle, waffleboobies.com. Thank you, my friend. I appreciate you. As always, have a good weekend. Hey, you too. I'll talk to you this week. All right, folks, we're out of time for reels now. I got to go. Thanks for being part of it today. We'll see you on Monday. Have a great weekend. And now we are slimy lizard internet people. It's the Michael Duke Show.