Badlands Media

The Daily Herold: 5/14/26 - CIA Psyop Debunked, Trump-Xi Outcomes & $1.5T DOD Budget

Jon Herold comes in Thursday a little bruised from the Wild's overtime collapse and ready to sort out what actually happened with yesterday's viral story. Half of the infowar space spent Wednesday sharing breaking news that the CIA raided Tulsi Gabbard's office and seized JFK and MK Ultra files. Jon traces the story back to its actual source in the CIA whistleblower testimony, explains how the word "raid" got invented along the way, and names the people who fell for it hard including General Flynn, Jesse Watters, and Anna Paulina Luna, who then tried to walk it back without admitting she used the story for clicks. The real news from the whistleblower is that Fauci allegedly pressured the CIA to flip its lab leak assessment between August 12 and August 17, 2021, which Jon points out is genuinely significant and already being buried under the clickbait. The Trump-Xi summit produced real results: China commits to not arming Iran, agrees the Strait of Hormuz must stay open, and commits to 200 Boeing jets and major energy purchases. The DOD wants $1.5 trillion next year and is calling it an investment, which Jon finds personally offensive as a matter of vocabulary. The DOJ is also suing the DC Bar to protect Jeff Clark from politically weaponized attorney discipline.

The Choice (S3E8): Sustenance - Season Finale, Part 2

Ghost and Ashe in America close out season three by walking through the Decapolis arc all the way to Simon stepping out of the boat. The hosts unpack why Andrew and Philip's parable of the great banquet sparked a literal street brawl, why Judas is the only apostle in the room who instantly grasps everyone's offense (because his ego is still fully intact), and what it means that Jesus heals a deaf-mute Greek before he's even had a chance to introduce himself.
The conversation widens into Socrates dying for "corrupting the youth" the same way Jesus would, the Nabateans of Petra, the Haskalah and why Orthodox versus secular Jews are headed for a civil war in present-day Israel, and what the chosen people actually got chosen for (hint: Deuteronomy 28, and it isn't a status upgrade). Then it lands on the feeding of the five thousand and Simon's brutally honest, cynical kind of faith. He believes Jesus can do it. He's just afraid Jesus will choose them.
It ends where every storyline this season has been pointing. Keep your eyes on me. The mercies are new because we need them new.

Badlands Daily: 5/14/26 - CIA Spied on Trump's Own Investigators, Cartel Ops Exposed

CannCon and Alpha Warrior bring the Thursday energy with a show that is almost entirely CIA. Senate Homeland Security Committee holds an open hearing with CIA whistleblower James Erdman, and not a single Democrat shows up. Erdman confirms that Fauci personally injected himself into the intelligence community's COVID origin review, that CIA analysts concluded lab leak was the most likely explanation as of August 12, 2021, and that the conclusion reversed five days later for reasons the CIA refuses to document. The single most alarming admission from the hearing: the CIA illegally monitored the computers and phone calls of ODNI's DIG investigators while they were executing work explicitly authorized by President Trump, and fired a contractor the day after he met with DIG. Alpha and CannCon lay out why the public hearing is preparation for a Fauci indictment and why the auto pen pardon is the central legal battlefield ahead. Anna Paulina Luna reports the CIA removed 40 boxes of JFK and MKULTRA files from ODNI while the DIG was being wound down. CNN drops an exclusive that the CIA has been conducting targeted assassinations of Sinaloa cartel operatives inside Mexico using car bombs, and CannCon and Alpha question whether the CIA is clearing the field for a competing cartel.

Devolution Power Hour Ep. 457: Trump in Beijing, CIA Hoax, and the War on Naming Things

Jon Herold and Burning Bright open with live footage from Trump's bilateral summit with Xi Jinping in Beijing. Burning Bright unpacks his multipolar margin call theory: the entire US/China trade war was a coordinated squeeze on the global billionaire class, and the summit is Trump and Xi standing at the head of the table telling those 30 top CEOs exactly who controls the future of their companies. From there the show pivots to The Atlantic's rebuttal of Trump's National Counterterrorism Strategy, which the guys frame as the media confirming exactly what the strategy says about them, that they are instruments of fifth-generation psychological warfare. Seb Gorka's clip calling for the mapping and identification of Americans for their speech draws sharp criticism, including his dual citizenship and what that should disqualify him from holding. The fake CIA raid on Tulsi Gabbard's ODNI office gets a thorough debunking alongside a breakdown of Anna Paulina Luna's pattern of attaching herself to viral MAGA narratives. Trump's Iran quote gets a fair but honest assessment, and Robert Kagan's neocon warning article is read as an unintentional confirmation of Burning Bright's disentanglement thesis. The show closes on Operation Epic Fury potentially being renamed Sledgehammer to dodge the War Powers Act

The Shipwreck Show Ep. 54: Operation Fishbowl and the Great Awakening

Tonight on The Shipwreck Show, we go deep into some of the strangest theories, stories, and moments shaping the modern conversation around reality itself.We’re talking:Operation Fishbowl and the theories surrounding it,Claims of people living in “two timelines” side by side,The viral roast of Kevin Hart,The mysterious “Lazarus” story and questions about life, death, and resurrectionThe so-called “Great Shift” of 2021
And more. Tonight’s episode isn’t about telling you what to believe. It’s about asking why so many people feel like reality itself is changing.

Space Revolution Ep. 18: Technology in History Doesn't Repeat Itself, but it Sure Does Rhyme - Pt 2

Cohost Matt Trump finally makes it on the mic after last week's traffic detour, and the wait was worth it. He brings a giant lens: humanity over millennia, with Johan Huizenga's The Autumn of the Middle Ages as the anchor. Lt Gen (Ret.) Steven L. Kwast riffs alongside him.
The framing is unforgettable. Matt calls our current moment the return of the future. In the 1960s, with Apollo and Star Trek, humanity was thinking in millennia. Then we pulled in the sails. Under Trump and Musk, we are unfurling them again. The deep-dive walks through the Portuguese caravel breakthrough that opened the New World, why it took a century of violence and printing presses and reformations before things matured, and why our space era follows the same pattern at vastly higher speed.
Along the way: why globalism became a Pandora's box, why nations and families are the structures we cannot skip past, why Ming dynasty politics destroyed their own 600 year naval head start, and why young engineers raised on the internet are turning hundred year timelines into hundred day ones. Build with the right moral compass, then full speed ahead.

The Daily Herold: 5/13/26 - FBI Probes Wisconsin 2020, Arctic Frost Memos & Iran Renamed

Jon Herold comes in Wednesday with a full show and a story that has him reaching for the electoral college map. The FBI has opened a preliminary investigation into Wisconsin's 2020 election, and Jon walks through the math live: flip Georgia, flip Wisconsin, flip one more state, and the "not enough fraud to change the outcome" argument collapses entirely. The Arctic Frost memos reveal that Biden's FBI secretly preserved all Trump prosecution evidence until 2030, explicitly leaving the door open to revive charges the moment a Democrat takes the White House again. Trump is in Beijing with a delegation of A-list CEOs for the Xi summit, and Jon breaks down why Bill O'Reilly's source claiming a Taiwan-for-Iran deal is in play actually makes strategic sense regardless of whether you like Bill O'Reilly. Inflation is getting worse with the producer price index up 6% over the past year, Operation Epic Fury just got renamed Operation Sledgehammer, and Jon explains why that name change is a War Powers Resolution technicality designed to reset the congressional authorization clock. He also plays his own tax accountability compilation clip and explains why asking your elected representatives to justify taxation is not a radical act.

Badlands Daily: 5/13/26 - Dead Voters in Brooklyn, Warsh Confirmed, McConnell Being Handled

CannCon and Ashe bring Ash Wednesday with a show that ranges from the absurd to the consequential. Missouri's Supreme Court upholds redrawn congressional maps that effectively eliminate the only Democrat seat, and Mississippi sets a special session to redraw Bennie Thompson's district. Ashe and CannCon use the redistricting wave to make the deeper argument: the real problem is not who draws the districts but the 1929 cap at 435 representatives that makes political manipulation structurally inevitable. A Brooklyn Democrat assembly candidate has 90% of her 5,258 nominating signatures thrown out, including two from voters who have been dead for over a decade. Dr. Andrew Paquette's Why We Vote appearance the night before revealed 1.5 million cloned voter registrations in New York alone in 2020, and CannCon and Ashe show that US registered voter turnout hit 94.1% in 2020, higher than countries with compulsory voting. Kevin Warsh clears his Senate hurdle 51-45. Kash Patel eviscerates Senator Van Hollen live in committee. An undercover video catches a White House budget official calling Trump a madman. Trump calls out Mitch McConnell's Democratic-aligned handler Robert Karim by name.

RattlerGator Report: 5/13/26 - Trump's China Pressure Summit, Iran's 13-Point Collapse, and Petro Bitcoin

JB White records this one at night for the first time ever, and somehow delivers one of his more loaded episodes. He walks through two sharp posts on Trump's China visit: Rob Cunningham's framing of the industry CEO delegation as a negotiation over the global financial operating system, and AJ Inapi's systematic breakdown of every pillar of Chinese global leverage that the Trump administration has already dismantled. JB then reads Mark Dubowitz's staggering 13-point summary of what has been done to Iran since the conflict began: nuclear program in ruins, missile production near zero, regime decapitated, proxy network shattered, economy in freefall. He also covers Tennessee Democrats stripped of committee assignments after setting fires in the statehouse, Gene Robinson's blunt truth about Democratic plantation politics and black independent thought, and teases the full Bitcoin Wizard Petro Bitcoin walkthrough for Friday.

DEFCON ZERQ Ep. 043: Massie's Cow Money, Brennan's Threat & The Comey Cooperation Test

Alpha Warrior and Josh Reid open with the Thomas Massie scandal that broke today, an alleged relationship with Anessa West, a South Africa trip with corroborating photos, and a hush money offer from something called a cow money fund. Pair that with Marjorie Taylor Greene quietly relocating to a five million dollar house in Costa Rica, which conveniently does not extradite to The United States, and the dynamic of the so called America first dissenters starts to make a lot more sense.
From there they widen the scope. UAE and Saudi Arabia are now bombing Iran while Trump backs off kinetically and the federal gas tax disappears. Trump heads to China with seventeen CEOs and the NVIDIA chief, John Brennan goes on television to brag that a legion of deep state operatives still resists from inside the DOJ and CIA, and James O'Keefe drops video of Susie Wiles allegedly running the White House around Trump.
Plus the State Department's admission that the UN ran a migration pipeline through the Darien Gap, Tulsi Gabbard's task force on a hundred twenty four biolabs in fifty six countries, the Wisconsin FBI investigation, SCOTUS outlawing gerrymandering, and Alpha's six to nine month test for whether Comey is cooperating.