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Make Funny, Make Money

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Ted Rall

In media, does satire generate profits? Or do profits permit satire? Causation is elusive. But there is a correlation between how much money a media organization generates and how much funny it publishes or puts on air.

When print newspapers were dominant and highly profitable, satire was a significant part of their content. Based at The Washington Post through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, Art Buchwald’s syndicated column appeared in more than 500 newspapers worldwide. His droll takes on Beltway politics and everyday absurdities reached millions of Americans and was extremely influential. Mike Royko of The Chicago Daily News and Sun-Times blended populist snark about institutional corruption and sarcastic ethnic humor in hundreds of newspapers, inspiring a generation of journalists. Other influential widely-syndicated columnists included those who blended gossip, news and jokes like Herb “Baghdad by the Bay” Caen of The San Francisco Chronicle, satirist of suburban life Erma Bombeck of The Dayton Journal Herald (which I delivered to my neighbors) and, in the 1990s, Dave “I am not making this up” Barry of The Miami Herald.

By the late 2000s, when I worked as Editor of Acquisitions at the United Press Syndicate, editors’ appetite for humor had vanished. Barry, I said ruefully, would never have had a career had he been younger. Indeed, he never returned to the Herald after he took a sabbatical in 2005.

At this point, print media circulation had been declining steadily for years. As legacy outlets looked for people and topics to cut, humor was one of the first targets. Editorial cartoonists, who had numbered in the hundreds, have been eviscerated.

Until half a century ago, big-city newspapers devoted a lot of space to comics. Sunday comics sections often ran 8-to-16 pages. Strips like Blondie and Doonesbury were widely syndicated, with Peanuts appearing in over 2,600 newspapers at its peak. Today, a Sunday section might include 10-to-15 strips.

The alternative newsweeklies where my career began—papers like SF Weekly, Boston Weekly Dig and The Village Voice—added more humor writers and cartoonists as they expanded in the 1980s. At their peak, in the late 1990s, a paper like the New York Press might run as many as a dozen edgy Gen X strips like my Search and Destroy and Ruben Bolling’s Tom the Dancing Bug. You could tell how well a paper was doing by how many comics it published. When the Internet—specifically, Craigslist—decimated the weeklies’ ad model, satire disappeared first. Alt weeklies have all but vanished.

Editorial decision-making being roughly as transparent as the White House, it’s impossible to say with certainty why satire got a harder swing of the budget-cutter’s ax when times turned hard. Comic strips and humor columns are popular with readers. But many editors have told me that they see these features as non-essential compared to hard news and opinion. Others said that humor generated too many complaints. Newspapers are trying to brand themselves as “serious journalism” to differentiate themselves from entertainment-focused digital media.

Perhaps because the websites of legacy newspapers are as funny-free as their print predecessors, newspaper profits have continued to decline as they’ve moved online.

The book publishing industry, still dominated by print editions, is profitable but threatened by rising operational expenses, including printing and distribution challenges. Returns of unsold books, a long-standing industry issue, make for razor-thin margins. And book publishers aren’t hot on humor. Only a few percent of trade books fall in the niche humor category. And forget edgy topical humor. When I tried to sell my prose Trump parody book Dinner at Mar-a-Lago, publishers liked the writing. But they were as afraid of angry MAGA readers as the president of Harvard.

Just when we need satire more than ever, we get hardly any.

Where there’s expansion and increasing profits—whether it’s cause or effect—you will find humor.

Comedy shows are a cornerstone of the exploding medium of video streaming, where platforms are investing heavily in original material like Netflix’s Squid Game, HBO Max’s Abbott Elementary, Amazon Prime’s The Studio and Hulu’s Common Side Effects. Leading the industry, Netflix released nearly 40 stand-up specials in 2024. The Daily Show, Last Week Tonight and South Park are still going strong. Comedy animations like Bluey and Family Guy top the Nielsen ratings.

A useful test for a correlation between satirical content and financial health is legacy broadcast television. They’re still making billions—but fewer billions. Continuing a years-long trend, total TV station revenue is anticipated to drop more than 9% this year.

The shrinking of legacy network TV profits has created a complicated picture. Networks like ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox run more weekly hours of satire than they did in their heyday of the 1970s and 1980s. But they’re far less prominent. Though Saturday Night Live ran and still runs in the late night, comedies like All in the Family, The Jeffersons, Maude, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour and The Carol Burnett Show ran in prime time. Satire reached massive audiences in an era with only three major networks. Seth Meyers and Jimmy Kimmel can’t come close in their time slots. And if you believe CBS, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is no longer financially viable—it reportedly generated $60 million in revenue but lost $40 million annually due to high costs, including large writing teams, celebrity guests and elaborate sets.

Optimism abounds in the rapidly-expanding $30 billion-a-year podcast industry, and comedy is the cornerstone of the sector. Shows like The Joe Rogan Experience, SmartLess, and My Favorite Murder (which blends true crime with humor) consistently rank among the most popular programs.

Do more profitable media companies run more satire because they can afford it? Or is comedy profitable?

Yes and yes.

Satire is risky because it often pisses off advertisers and viewers. Editors and producers fear that more than cancer. Things seemed to be going well at my interview for the cartoonist job at the Asbury Park Press when the executive editor turned to me with that here’s-the-clutch-question expression. “Will I ever look out there,” he said, gesturing out his office window to the parking lot below, “and see people protesting one of your cartoons?” I replied something about not being able to guarantee that such a thing would never happen. That, they decided, was a risk they couldn’t afford to take.

Profitable organizations can weather a post-backlash downturn. But satirical content is cost-effective compared to content like drama, sports and hard news. And it attracts the younger, engaged audiences sought by advertisers. Had the Press taken a chance with me and other hell-raising types, it might have a brighter future today.

(Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of “Never Mind the Democrats. Here’s WHAT’S LEFT.” Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com. He is co-host of the podcast “DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou.”)

TMI Show Ep 188: “Gaza: Now It’s U.S./Israel Against the World”

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Ted Rall

LIVE 10 AM Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

After nearly two years of brutal genocide by Israel against the beleaguered population of the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip, the world is at a turning point: support for Israel has never been lower, and it’s only going to get worse. “The TMI Show with hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan,” drops truth bombs on the world’s hottest issue that the mainstream media is terrified of!

France’s bombshell decision to recognize Palestine as a state, announced by President Emmanuel Macron, is a major game changer certain to prompt other big countries to do so and demand an end to Israel’s ethnic cleansing. In the boldest move of his presidency, Macron formally declared France’s commitment to a “just and durable peace” in the Middle East, making it the first G7 nation—and permanent member of the Security Council—to take this step. The announcement, set for the UN General Assembly in September, highlights famine among Gaza doctors and journalists, images of staving and dying babies, and has infuriated the Trump administration as it runs interference for Netanyahu’s far-right extremist government.

Plus:

  • President Trump’s new executive order attacks “endemic vagrancy” by redirecting funds to forcibly rehouse the homeless, including addicts and the mentally ill, in treatment centers that don’t exist. The controversial plan prioritizes involuntary commitment and “assisted outpatient treatment.” It’s a right-wing move to whitewash gangster capitalism and address public safety at the expense of individual rights.
  • Thailand and Cambodia are teetering on war after deadly border clashes killed 12 Thais, with F-16s and artillery escalating tensions. The century-old dispute has flared since a May skirmish. Thai politics are also reeling after PM Shinawatra’s ousting over a leaked call.
  • The China-EU summit exposed trade frictions, with Ursula von der Leyen slamming China’s subsidized electric vehicles. President Xi Jinping deflected, urging closer ties amid U.S. tariff threats. It’s a high-stakes economic showdown.
  • A test of the four-day workweek trial resulted in happier, less burned-out workers with no pay cuts. Over 90% of companies kept the 32-hour schedule. Could this reshape the global workplace?

Transcript: TMI Show with Ted Rall and Robby West – Hulk Hogan RIP

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Ted Rall

Generated by AI, so errors will occur.

On a Rumble Premium edition of The TMI Show, hosted by Ted Rall with guest host Robby West, the duo mourns the passing of wrestling legend Hulk Hogan, dedicating the episode to his legacy and legal impact. They discuss Hogan’s rise to fame, his scripted WWE rivalry with Andre the Giant, and the rebranding from WWF to WWE, which boosted its entertainment appeal. The conversation turns to Hogan’s infamous lawsuit against Gawker for posting a private sex tape, resulting in a $115 million judgment (later settled for $31 million) with help from Peter Thiel, highlighting privacy versus press freedom debates. They also touch on personal media defamation experiences, cultural shifts, and the Epstein files controversy, exploring a potential populist left-right alliance over issues like Gaza and transparency.
Ted Rall: Hey, everyone. Thanks for tuning in. You are watching a Rumble Premium edition of The TMI Show, which normally airs Monday through Friday at 10 AM Eastern Time and features me, Ted Rall. I am the T in TMI. Manila Chan is the M. But today, you only have the T, not the M. You have an R. You have guest host Robby West. He is the producer of the show. Thank you very much for joining me to do this. And just as we got ready to go on the air, we received the news that legendary wrestler Hulk Hogan had passed away. So we thought we would dedicate this segment and the entire show to Hulk Hogan, his legacy, and discuss his life in detail. Additionally, I am particularly interested in the legal ramifications because he established some highly significant libel and defamation laws. Let’s dive into the discussion. Robby, do you watch wrestling?

Robby West: I did watch wrestling when I was a kid back in the eighties. Growing up, I followed Hulk Hogan, Andre the Giant, and Randy Savage; you could see all of them energetically performing, shouting, and hitting each other with chairs during their matches.

Ted Rall: So Donald Trump? Yes, he was part of that scene. Pretty much.

Robby West: Yes, because he was present at those events. I wasn’t a big wrestling fan myself, but when you grow up with cable TV in the rural South, you tend to watch whatever is broadcast. For instance, WKRG Channel 15 down in the Florida Panhandle always aired wrestling, which was as popular there as NASCAR events. So it was one of those two dominant forms of entertainment. That experience served as my introduction to Hulk Hogan. I recall that he had a notable rivalry with Andre the Giant, which stands out in memory.

Ted Rall: That rivalry was, of course, entirely scripted, as is typical with WWE. It’s interesting to note that they used to be called the WWF, but they had to change their name because they were sued by the World Wildlife Fund, which shared the same acronym. The WWF, meaning the panda conservation group, had priority since they were established first. As a result, the wrestling organization rebranded from WWF to WWE. In a strange way, this redefinition helped position them more clearly as an entertainment entity. The term World Wrestling Federation might suggest a legitimate sport organization, whereas World Wrestling Entertainment explicitly clarifies its nature as staged performance. I initially thought that this change might cause many fans to stop watching. But surprisingly, they grew even bigger than before as a result, and I believe people fully embraced this shift. Essentially, any pretense that it was anything other than scripted entertainment was eliminated. I think audiences preferred this transparency, enjoying it without the fiction of it being a genuine sport. I must admit, I don’t watch wrestling myself. However, one aspect I’ve never fully understood is the concept of awards in this context. I’m not sure if calling it fake is the right term, since the action happens, real injuries occur, and the physical effort is authentic, but I don’t grasp the awards system. For example, you win a championship belt for winning a match, yet the match was pre-scripted. There’s no scenario where the outcome wasn’t predetermined. So how can you truly be said to win anything? I understand that outcomes in other sports can be fixed too. But there’s a distinction between two athletes competing, where judges might make an erroneous call leading to the wrong person winning, which is one issue. In contrast, when the entire event is rehearsed and planned in advance, it feels different. For instance, it’s like saying Robby and I are going to wrestle, and then you are designated to receive the title. That doesn’t make sense to me.

Robby West: Well, it’s somewhat similar to elections in the EU or Ukraine. The winner is often predetermined unless an extraordinary event occurs; the voters, or the people in those states, have little real influence. Yes, that’s exactly like the situation with a candidate in Romania who kept getting elected despite being the wrong choice, prompting the European Union to essentially suspend the elections. It’s comparable to France as well. For example, Le Pen was almost certainly going to win. And then, back when I was a kid—no, more precisely, when I was in elementary school—we nearly had a riot because there was a heated argument among the kids. The debate was whether wrestling was fake or not. Of course, one group insisted it was absolutely real, while the other group argued it was obviously staged. So we went to the playground, and it turned into a chaotic brawl. It was wild, and the contention was intense. When I was growing up, wrestling, football, and church were the major activities in the Deep South.

 

Ted Rall: Oh, I’m sure that’s true. Yes, and it’s funny to reflect on this. I never watch any sports now, but I can definitely see the appeal of wrestling. I think it’s worth considering how this works as a form of entertainment, like any other medium. So, how do you think someone like Hulk Hogan achieved such fame? I’ve never seen him wrestle in my life, yet I knew everything about him. I knew who he was and why he was famous. Even though I never watched, I was aware of Andre the Giant because of the Obey stickers. Those stickers were everywhere. How does a personality transcend wrestling to become a mass pop culture figure, even for people who have never stepped inside a wrestling arena?

Alright, let’s shift our focus. I want to highlight that his real name was Terry Bollea. He apparently died of a heart attack at the age of 72. This serves as a reminder that such health events can happen to anyone. You mentioned that he died a millionaire. One reason he died with significant wealth, though I’m unsure how much he saved from his wrestling career, depends on his earnings and how well he was paid, and he had a financial manager to handle his assets. Alternatively, in some cases, managers might steal the money. In other instances, they do an excellent job. If someone has a vice, like a cocaine habit, that money can disappear quickly, or it might be lost on poor investments or taken advantage of by friends. I keep thinking of the band Blondie. They famously snorted $10 million worth of profits in a single year in 1980, and they and their entourage ended up with nothing for a while. So things can get pretty chaotic at that level of fame.

He was the plaintiff in a notorious lawsuit. What happened was that at one point, he had a friend, Bubba the Love Sponge, another Florida personality with a podcast, with whom he did radio. They were hanging out together. I’m not sure if the following incident occurred on more than one occasion; I have the impression it might have. But Bubba suggested to Hulk Hogan, or Terry, hey, would you like to have sex with my wife? I don’t know if alcohol or marijuana had been consumed, but the point is that he did. Terry was present during this event. Some people describe it as a threesome. Others say Terry just watched and derived pleasure from it. Either way, what is known is that surreptitiously, Mr. Sponge videotaped Hulk Hogan having sex with his wife, not Hulk Hogan’s wife. I’m uncertain if Hulk Hogan was married at the time; I got the impression he was single. But anyway, this is a rather sordid story.

Bubba the Love Sponge’s video, I don’t know if he had a falling out with Hulk Hogan or not, but I’m unsure if it was leaked, stolen, or sold. You might remember the website Gawker, which was a news site very prevalent around ten to twenty years ago, run by an English individual. Gawker obtained the video and posted it. Obviously, it served as clickbait for them. Hulk Hogan sued in the state of Florida for defamation. And you know, as you know, as I know personally, it is very, very difficult to sue for defamation in American courts against a media company. Media companies have created numerous legal obstacles and have influenced judges’ temperaments, making them generally predisposed against defendants and in favor of plaintiffs in defamation claims against organizations like newspapers, websites, magazines, TV stations, and radio stations.

This trial was really sensationalistic, and a lot of people thought that Hulk Hogan would not move forward because of the Streisand effect. The Streisand effect is named after the singer Barbra Streisand, who sued paparazzi for taking photos of her secret beachfront enclave. Basically, nobody really saw the photos that appeared in the magazine. But after she sued, everybody went to look at the photos and discovered where she lived. So the Streisand effect means that by complaining about a wrongdoing, you might end up drawing more attention to it. I was worried about that when I sued the LA Times. Not everybody saw the scurrilous smears they published about me. And by suing them, I risked bringing further attention to something that many readers might never have heard of otherwise. So that’s like—

Robby West: I have a quick question. If he did it, and he obviously did, then if a news organization published a video, what crime do they commit? I mean, it wasn’t a lie that something actually happened. So explain this to me. I don’t understand it.

Ted Rall: Let me see if I can find a good summary of the lawsuit. Yeah, the claims included invasion of privacy. For example, in someone else’s house, there’s an invasion of privacy when he’s there having sex with his wife. There is an expectation of privacy when you are having sex behind closed doors, even if someone else is watching, because he didn’t consent to being videotaped.

Robby West: So it was a hidden camera then. Yes, it was a hidden camera. He didn’t know he was being videotaped. Gotcha. Okay, that I don’t fully understand. So it’s an ambush.

Ted Rall: This was in February 2006. The woman’s name was Heather Clem. He said that, and anyway, he also sued for infringement of personality rights. When you are a celebrity in particular, you are deemed to have personality rights; I think at this point, both of us could probably be considered to have them, though not quite on the same level as Hulk Hogan. And Hulk Hogan wouldn’t have the same level of personality rights as, say, Obama. But basically, it is scaled based on your level of celebrity. You have the right to control your public persona and image within reason. For instance, if you go shopping, the paparazzi can take your picture because you’re in public. But a photo of you naked and having sex with someone who is not your wife is particularly damaging to your brand. He also sued for intentional infliction of emotional distress, which most lawyers will tell you is a legitimate claim, but judges and juries tend to view it as a throwaway argument. Like, “oh, too bad for you, you were sad.” But you probably would be sad if you were Hulk Hogan and woke up one morning to find your group sex tape had appeared on the internet. Not just on the internet, not even on a porn site, but on a legitimate news organization.

So anyway, Gawker’s attorneys argued that he had originally sued for copyright infringement, but that was withdrawn. During the trial, Gawker argued that Hulk Hogan had made his own sex life a public matter. However, on cross-examination, when Hulk Hogan’s lawyer asked whether a depiction of his genitalia had any news value, editor AJ Daulerio said “no.” Then Hulk Hogan stated that comments he made in interviews were done in his professional wrestling character, which is not his real personality. So this was an exposure of his real personality that diluted his brand as an entertainer. Nick Denton was the CEO of Gawker at the time, and he tried to appeal, but ultimately, a Florida jury in 2016 ordered them to pay Hulk Hogan $115 million, including $60 million for emotional distress. The jury also awarded him an additional $25 million for punitive damages. So the reactions to this case depended on what you think is more important: your right to privacy or a news organization’s right to publish material it obtains.

News organizations, as robust as the New York Times, argued this poses a threat to freedom of the press because they simply received and published it. Probably this case would not have gone Hulk’s way if he hadn’t sued in Florida. But he was very popular there, the jury liked him, and the Floridians had a dim view of what was done to him. For example, they might think, hey, someone offers to let you sleep with his wife, and then secretly tapes it to give to Gawker. So it was a really interesting case. Anyway, it’s kind of crazy that when Gawker’s editors, including publisher Nick Denton, testified, they were really snotty about the whole thing. They brought their New York attitude to it, acting like this was ridiculous, that Hulk Hogan was just a wrestler, and that he brought it on himself. They didn’t care that he was upset.

Robby West: It completely misread the population. Yes, that might have worked in New York, maybe. Yeah, it probably would have worked there because nobody cares, even though people like wrestling here. But I think privacy rights are not considered that important. Back in the nineteen eighties, we had community access cable, and there was pornography on it in New York City. Someone sued under obscenity law and took it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Community access cable standards are based on community values, and the Supreme Court officially ruled that New York City doesn’t have community values. Therefore, the porn stayed. And so now, I would venture to say that even if you live on the Upper East Side, you probably wouldn’t be too happy about having something like what happened to Hulk Hogan occur to you. You know, it’s easy to laugh when it’s not you.

Also, part of the controversy I should mention is there was a political aspect to this. You’re going to love this. So you know who Peter Thiel is. He is a very famous right-wing billionaire tech figure, co-founder of PayPal, and former board member of Facebook. Anyway, he was hanging out with his Australian buddy, Aaron D’Souza, and they were discussing how this might be their opportunity to destroy Gawker. Gawker was liberal-leaning, and more to the point, Gawker had outed Peter Thiel as gay. Peter Thiel was really angry about that and held a grudge, saying this is nobody’s business but his own. So he was waiting for a chance to get even. He decided to finance Hulk Hogan’s case because there’s no way Hulk Hogan, even as a successful wrestler, had the money to outlast a big media organization like Gawker. So they decided to give him millions, $10 million, to fund this lawsuit.

Anyway, this dragged on. In May, Hogan sued Gawker again because they leaked sealed court documents in which he used racial slurs. The transcripts were then published by the National Enquirer. The WWE fired him for being racist. Gawker claimed they didn’t know anything about it, and the case didn’t go anywhere. Long story short, Gawker ultimately failed. They said they couldn’t afford to pay the $140.1 million judgment or the $50 million bonds needed to appeal. So they filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, put themselves up for sale. Gawker was a large group that included Deadspin, Gizmodo, Jezebel, and Lifehacker. The Spanish company Univision ended up buying them. After the sale, they negotiated, and in the end, Hulk Hogan received $31 million.

Robby West: Isn’t Peter Thiel also one of our favorite werewolf, J.D. Vance’s big financial backers? Yes, that is correct. Because one thing—and I don’t know what it is about attorneys from New York or just people from out of state in general—back in the early two thousands, when Jeb Bush first ran for governor of Florida and got soundly defeated, he was running against Lawton Chiles, if I recall correctly, back in the nineties. They were doing a debate, and Lawton Chiles, who sounded a lot like me with that Florida cracker accent, was on stage. I remember watching this debate, and Jeb looked over at Lawton Chiles and said Florida no longer has room for old southern politics. And Ted, you could have heard a pin drop; it went completely silent. My dad looked at me and said, “that stupid Yankee has lost.” And it sounds like that’s kind of what happened here with these attorneys who came down for Gawker. They just viewed the electorate as backward and unsophisticated, which, to be fair, might be true. But if that’s who you’re drawing your jury pool from, it’s probably not a good idea to insult them and pretend it’s raining.

Ted Rall: Totally. Yes, that’s exactly right. And I mean, look, honestly, I was extremely concerned. As you know, I understand what it’s like to be defamed by a media organization. And I’ve worked throughout media my entire life. I started out at a small community newspaper. I’ve worked at big city dailies and national magazines. I’ve been on radio stations, big and small. I’ve been on television and worked for ABC News. You name it, I’ve done it. I’ve been an editor, a writer, a cartoonist, an illustrator, and a copy editor. I’ve seen it all. And I gotta tell you, I could not, for the life of me, understand what Nick Denton was thinking when he posted that video. It had zero news value whatsoever.

Robby West: It might have had news value, let’s say for argument’s sake, if it involved a different person, like Jimmy Swaggart or a TV evangelist. That would make sense.

Ted Rall: Exactly. Or let’s say J.D. Vance, whom you mentioned. Right? Like, anyone who’s a public figure with a conflicting image. So I remember a friend of the show, Scott Stantis, my best friend, and I arguing about Larry Craig, the Idaho senator who was caught soliciting men in the Saint Paul Airport bathroom. He claimed he had a “wide stance” because he was reaching into the stall, playing footsie with the person next to him. That’s how he got caught. Apparently, there’s a well-known gay meeting spot in that airport bathroom. Who would have known? Anyway, the point is, he asked why Craig got in so much trouble. I said, because he was an anti-gay married senator from Idaho who constantly criticized gay people. That’s why. And like, well, how come? I said, it’s like in England, it’s always a Tory MP you find in a scandalous situation, like hanging from the ceiling with a ball gag and a spatula involved. It’s never a Labour MP.

So the point is, of course, that’s right. And like Hulk Hogan, his brand was never I only have sex with my wife.

Robby West: His brand was wild man wrestler. No, his brand was an alpha male, I’ll beat your face in jock. That completely disrupted his brand. Now who would have thought? Yes, his friend. Yes, 100%. His friend should have been completely ashamed. It’s like, no, I guess, Ted, it would be like me, coming out as the right-winger here on “The TMI Show,” if it came out that I was secretly supporting Kamala Harris for president the entire time. Just something off-brand. Or, you know, being a Christian, if I found out I was having an affair with my neighbor while my wife and kids were home.

Ted Rall: Or, let’s say for me, if you found out I’m having a torrid affair with Ann Coulter, or I’m moving to that whites-only community in Arkansas we talked about this morning, and I’ve applied to join there. That goes against brand. Right?

Robby West: So it’s like, hey, they need cartoonists. And that is newsworthy. Well, it’s news, so I don’t think it’d be off-brand. Here’s what I’m thinking about this, Ted. I could 100% say I’m already disqualified. Had you, however, you can go in because you have a couple of things going for you. One, you probably don’t have to worry about someone playing the polar bear game with you on the subway. So you know, I got some black dude just rabbit-punching you. In this whites-only community, they need someone to handle their newspaper. They’ve got to have commentary and cartoons.

Ted Rall: I can prove, by the way, I’ve been working on my genealogy. I can prove that my lineage goes back at least four hundred years in France and Germany as Christian. So they’d be okay with me.

Robby West: Yes, we’re into politics. Yes, I’d be able to trace my genealogy back to about the late nine hundreds so far reliably.

Ted Rall: Oh, that’s amazing.

Robby West: And like, true story, I don’t know if the name rings a bell, but Captain David Morgan—he is my direct ancestor. He’s like my grandfather. So badass. Oh, 100%. So whenever it says that my ancestors literally came and conquered this continent, I’m not saying that. No, I know.

Ted Rall: I believe you, and that’s true. There’s a lot more of you in the South who can say that than in the North.

Robby West: Well, because it’s just so old. It’s old. It’s big.

Ted Rall: Yes, it’s also where some of the earliest settlements were, and then people didn’t really move much once they stayed. They got to the South, like in Georgia, and tended to stay or not go too far. But people arrived in New York and tended to disperse. So, getting back to Terry Bollea, it was crazy to me at the time how many of my friends in the media rolled their eyes and thought he had no case, that he shouldn’t have complained, that he had nothing to bitch about. Literally, I’m sorry, in this case, the only person—it’s not breaking news that a guy has sex. Right? And it’s just not. And this was between the only three people involved. You know, it was between him, the wife, and Bubba the Love Sponge, who liked to watch and film it and ought not to have filmed it.

Robby West: Did the wife know it was being filmed?

Ted Rall: I don’t know. That’s a really good question. She was involved, but I thought it was really disgusting what they did to him. And I think that if I’d been on that jury, because I followed that case very closely, I would have ruled in his favor and hit Gawker hard. I’m really happy about what happened to them. They were a disgusting publication with terrible news judgment, willing to ruin people’s lives for nothing, just for fun. They thought, let’s just mock this dumb wrestler. What’s he gonna do? But it goes back to the Peter Thiel thing. Like, oh, they outed him as gay. Okay, I don’t like Peter Thiel’s politics at all. But is it really anyone’s business, my business, your business, who he sleeps with? It’s really not. And it’s like, why are you outing people? This is his personal life. Well, he’s a rich guy, and he’s famous. So what? Leave him alone. And so I don’t blame him. Also, this part really drove me crazy. A lot of my friends were mad because Peter Thiel gave all this money to Hulk Hogan, without which he never could have prevailed. It’s like, well, listen to yourselves. You’re admitting that an ordinary guy, even one as well-off as Hulk Hogan presumably was, doesn’t stand a chance against a media organization when he sues for libel. Only with the equalizing influence of a billionaire can he maybe prevail. So I don’t see that as a grave injustice to Gawker or any other future defendant. I view it like Sarah Palin needs an infusion of cash to take on the New York Times. They treated her unfairly, and it was wrong. And I don’t care if you’re on the right or the left. I want to see defamation plaintiffs prevail. If I had that cash infusion, I would have prevailed against the LA Times. As it is, I gave them a great run for their money, and they couldn’t believe how hard I was to defeat. But it took five years. The thing is, if I’d had a Peter Thiel, it would have happened, and I would have taken the money. People might say, ew, that’s disgusting. Who cares? It’s like, those guys have filthy money. Why can’t I have filthy money?

Robby West: That’s one of the things I wanted to ask Achilles about on yesterday’s show. They’re talking about the LA Times going into an IPO. Personally, I hope the LA Times dies a miserable death, especially because of what they did to you specifically.

Ted Rall: Thank you. Well, it’s true. And I’m not the only one. When an organization behaves like that, you can be sure it’s not an isolated incident; they’ve done it to many, many other people. I got to know some of the others they mistreated. For example, there was a guy, a sports writer named T.J. Simers, who was in his sixties. The LA Times paid him a lot of money, but they decided they didn’t want to pay him that much anymore. Instead of talking to him like a human being and saying the newspaper business is struggling, we need a new arrangement—he had a contract—they just fabricated excuses and fired him. So he sued for age discrimination and won. When they did discovery, and I know this for a fact, the LA Times’ internal communications came out. And perhaps the most revealing one, especially for a jury in a city that is 50% Latino, was when they were discussing internally the young Latino sportswriter they got to work for one-sixth of his salary. The editors said, okay, so before we get rid of the old guy, is your Hispanic replacement ready? That’s charming. Yes, that’s just who they were. And the LA Times workers, there was no solidarity whatsoever. I think about the first paper I ever worked for. My editor got fired because she refused to fire me over a cartoon the paper had approved. I was 16 years old at the little Vandalia Chronicle in Ohio. When this happened to me at the LA Times, internally, they were all upset. Everyone thought it was bad news, but they were terrified. Not one person who worked at the LA Times ever tweeted to say what happened was wrong, and they knew it was wrong. So there was no solidarity; their union didn’t back me up because they were scared and sucking up to management. Forget them.

Robby West: Really, what’s the point of having a union if it just collaborates with the boss to screw the workers, like talking about Hulk Hogan sleeping with someone else’s wife? What’s the point of paying union dues?

Ted Rall: Yes, you’re 100% right. In Japan, they have a different system with official unions that have a seat on the board of directors. It’s a much more cooperative culture, and it works a little better. But here, a union should be oppositional. That doesn’t mean they have to be mean or rude or deliberately sabotage management, but they should oppose, be militant, and push for their workers’ interests only. And it is definitely in the workers’ interest that the company stay in business and remain profitable. So there’s a balance; you don’t want to go too far. But no, I agree. The LA Times union was not really a union. They were constantly posting things like, we’re so grateful to our management for supporting us in this difficult time. I’m like, what is wrong with you people? Anyway, in terms of the LA Times, they got away with it. And in a sense, I held them to account by making it hard for them. I think they would think twice before doing something like that to someone else again.

Robby West: Well, I sure hope so. And the thing is, more to the point, I know we’re drifting a bit from Hulk Hogan here, but it’s a premium episode. Who cares? I think it just shows how our culture, for lack of a better word, has imploded. Because last night when I was at church, I was talking to another churchgoer, and he asked, Robby, why do you think Biden didn’t release the Epstein files and that Trump is involved? I said, because it’s bigger than Trump. I explained that whoever is in these Epstein files will include people from both parties, people in business, finance, and industry. This is bigger than one person; it encompasses the entire upper echelon of the American leadership establishment. That’s the problem. Forget any foreign funding that might have come through foreign influences or intelligence agencies. I said Trump is lying. He’s doing this to protect the powerful, and he’s destroying his entire coalition to do it. In a big way, it’s like what the LA Times did to you. They circled the wagons. Management knew they were wrong, but they chose to side with the establishment and screw the little guy.It didn’t matter if they were right or wrong.

Ted Rall: And to put a finer point on it, once they committed to that action, there was no going back. Like, because now, when you’re talking about a defendant like the LA Times, they committed to a series of lies they had to keep doubling and tripling down on to cover up their cover-ups. Similarly, Trump knows what’s in those files. AG Pam Bondi has told him. He may have looked at them himself, though I doubt it since he’s not a big reader. But Pam Bondi has fully informed him of the contents. He knows he’s in there. I don’t think for a minute this is about Trump personally committing sex crimes. It doesn’t fit what we know about his personality.

Robby West: No, he likes middle-aged Eastern European models, not someone like Dolph Lundgren. And corn-fed women. Yes, there’s that. Now this is so much bigger. And talking about brand, I was discussing the Hulk Hogan brand, how people always knew who he was. Dan Bongino, I don’t think he realizes—well, maybe he does—but he completely destroyed his brand. When he’s done with the FBI, there’s no going back to Rumble anymore. His show is finished because he went against brand, unlike Hulk Hogan. You know, if you’re a wrestler, a big alpha male, no one’s surprised you’re with women. If he was with a man, people would be shocked. Yes, very much so. Dan Bongino came in, before his appointment, saying the Epstein files are out there, we need the truth, and so on. And now he’s saying, oh, there’s nothing there, it was a suicide. Everyone knows he’s lying. He was putting on a show as a truth-teller who worked for the Secret Service, willing to sacrifice everything for justice, truth, and exposing corruption.

Ted Rall And then a month in, you know Bongino is the only possible source of the leak that AG Bondi told Trump he was in the files, which came out a day or two ago. We know that comes from him. The base must know that. Bongino’s fans must know that. Does that buy him any currency?

Robby West: It will with the Trumpers. So it would have bought more currency if he’d called a press conference, released it, and exposed Trump. That’s what would save Dan Bongino. Just do a press conference, drop the truth bomb, commit political suicide, and set Washington DC on fire. He’d be a hero on the left and right, lionized. Instead, he’s like Hulk Hogan’s friend who betrayed him. That’s Dan Bongino. He is the jerk.

Ted Rall: So yes, that’s what happened here. Obviously, Bongino goes to work for the administration. Yes, he’s been told he’s number two after Pam, with a lot of power, but number two isn’t number one, and even number one isn’t number one because that’s Trump. So number one is Trump, then there’s Kash Patel, then Pam, then him. So he’s really at least fourth in the pecking order. I’ve always said you can’t really affect real change from the inside, only personal change.

Robby West: Unless you’re willing to set yourself on fire on a pyre. If you’re willing to self-immolate. Like, for example, I would like to—or what you’re really doing is declaring to the people, listen, my fate is in your hands. Now if you like, I sided with you, the people, against my former bosses, the government. Now I’m on your side. If you see fit to buy my book, support my podcast, and donate to my legal defense fund, then I’ll be okay. Because I’ve never been in this position, Ted. I never will be. I would like to think I have enough spine that if I were in Dan Bongino’s place with all this going on, I would have the guts to go on national TV and tell the truth. So, here’s what’s happening. When this is done, I guarantee you I’ll be charged under the Espionage Act and go to prison. Basically, do a John Kiriakou. I would like to think I have that kind of courage. I think I do. I don’t know, I’ve never been tested. I would like to think I’m that much of a disagreeable person to burn everything down, using myself as the match. It’s rough. Yes, it is. Because that’s the only thing that can change us. Because change really happens when people are willing to say, damn the consequences, this is wrong, what’s going on is wrong, this has to change, and then you’re willing to either literally or figuratively set yourself on fire to be the change that makes it happen. I’m not advocating going out and self-immolating at Walmart. But what I am saying is that if you’re in a position of power and know the system is completely corrupt, and you promised to clean it, you have a choice. Are you going to gain more power, side with the bosses, or sacrifice everything on principle? And nobody else can do it. We had a press conference because you can’t suppress that. No, you can’t.

Ted Rall: Yes. So what do you think is going to happen here? In the end, you and I both know Trump is going to fire Dan Bongino. You know he’s going to throw him to the wolves. And I guess the other question, there are a bunch of things here. Let’s handicap what will happen with the Epstein files. Speaker Johnson seems to believe that by kicking the can down the road to Labor Day, adjourning Congress early, he can suppress this whole controversy, keep it under wraps, and that people will forget about it. Something else will come up in the headlines to overshadow this, and people will forget, as they have about so many things regarding Trump and others in the past. There’s reason to think that might be true. My instinct says not this time.

Robby West: Not this time. And do you know why? Because the Republican Party is going against its brand. We just talked about that, but take the scenario from Idaho with the anti-gay senator who turns out to be involved with young boys. I mean, I felt sick thinking about it. The Republican Party champions itself as the party of family values, traditional Americana, and protecting children and the unborn. The Democrats never promised to do any of those things. The Republican Party does. So then you have a president who ran on that promise—Trump—talking about the media all the time. Yes, QAnon, all that stuff, Pizzagate. He talked about QAnon. Yes, he owns it. So Trump ran on transparency and draining the swamp. How do you drain the swamp? By going in, cutting down trees, draining the water, and slaying the alligators. That was his brand. He promised transparency. The alligators—no, you don’t. And so this guy at church I was talking to yesterday said, could you please tell me any time when Biden, running for president, promised to release the Epstein files? He said, well, he didn’t. Okay, but Trump did. Not only did Trump promise it, Kash Patel did. Dan Bongino did so on TV all the time. The entire world knew Trump knew Epstein. We always knew they hung out together. There were all those photos. There’s nothing new about those photos. So, curious, what did MAGA World think when Trump said he’d blow all this out of the water, but they also know Trump had an association with Epstein? What did they think the truth was about that association?

Robby West: I think most people are willing to overlook that because rich people hang out with rich people. They just do. It’s a very small circle of friends. Yes, Trump was a donor before he was a politician. So what do you do? You network, you go to all the parties. He invited Bill and Hillary Clinton to his wedding. Everyone knew.

Ted Rall: And Epstein was a neighbor down there in South Beach, Florida, living just two miles away from Epstein.

Robby West: Yes, so as far as that, no one cares. The issue is that Trump promised to be transparent and to drain the swamp, not only to drain the swamp but to make America great again by dismantling the deep state. Yes, and his whole thing about the 2020 election isn’t calling out of brand. Trump always talked about how he was a winner. Well, when he lost, he suddenly became the biggest loser and claimed it was stolen. So it’s like, you can’t be both. You lost, take your lumps, but he never could accept defeat. Then he ran again, saying we’re going to expose everything, we’re going to reveal the corruption. And then he starts telling blatant lies, and you see the control coming from the top. And one day, it’s like someone flipped a switch. You have Charlie Kirk and Cat Turd on Twitter and all these other people talking about how the Epstein files must be released. And then suddenly, oh, Epstein’s a non-story anymore after Trump complained. People are smart enough to realize this. And Ted, I think here’s the opportunity your side of the aisle has now. We have on the right a small group of people in Washington, DC, who are standing up, who are fighting. They’re probably going to face primaries. I guarantee you they are. Marjorie Taylor Greene is going to face a primary. Thomas Massie is going to face a primary. Rand Paul is going to face a primary. It’s up to your people on the left now, for at least some who come in through primaries or are elected, to say, I’m going to put principle over politics. I’m not going to stand with the party. I’m going to stand with these MAGA types on the right and collaborate, because the margin is so small, you don’t need a big majority. All you have to do is obstruct a must-pass bill, like one for automobile states.

Ted Rall: Marjorie Taylor Greene is from Georgia. I don’t know if Georgia is one of those states where Democrats can vote in a Republican primary. I don’t know the answer to that. So in that situation, you’d want to see some strategic voting. Although I gotta say, you and I both believe in a left-right alliance of convenience among populists. But I don’t think the Democratic Party or even the progressive wing of the Democratic Party sees it yet. Some people do. I see it. David Sirota sees it. Cenk Uygur sees it. Others see it. But that’s kind of the intellectual vanguard of the mainstream left in America, and they usually don’t listen to us.

Robby West: I disagree. They end up taking over everything. I disagree, and I think it’s going to be one issue. And this might surprise you, Ted, about how this alliance can come about. It’s because of the genocide happening in Gaza. People are noticing that. Like, AOC actually says she’s opposed to the genocide, but she’s going to keep sending money to Israel for their defensive use to kill Gazans. People see that. So if you start getting people on the left who are sick and tired of this Israel-first mentality, where American tax dollars are used not only to commit a genocide but then you start asking questions. It’s like, Epstein. Epstein. What kind of name is that? Oh, it’s a Jewish name. Oh, it’s a Jewish state. It’s the Jewish state committing a genocide. Then people will start asking questions, which you’re not supposed to do because Ben Shapiro says that makes you a Nazi if you ask questions. Well, who else is he calling a Nazi? Tucker Carlson for asking questions. So then you start getting this conversation going back and forth. We don’t have to agree on everything, but what we can agree on is no one should agree on everything. No, I agree. So we can agree on maybe we should defund Israel. Maybe we should cut them off. Yes, and the way I look at it is if they want to kill Palestinians, they can do it without my money. I agree. And I think that’s going to be the bridge, Ted. Really, honestly, I could be wrong, but I think that’s the way people are willing to start coming together, like the way Mamdani did. I don’t agree with that man on anything. But if I lived in New York, I would have voted for him because when he said, no, I’m not going to Israel, I’m staying here, whether he realizes it or not, that is an America-first position. Of course, take care of your home first by definition. Yes, that’s what we’re asking for.

Ted Rall: Yes, America First is not inherently a right-wing thing. No, not at all. But we’re told it is. Yes, I know. It’s like, I gotta say I never really understood the rabid internationalism on, I think it’s fair to say, the neoliberal Democrats like the Hillary and Bill Clintons of the world, who are aligned with a lot of corporatists. You can sort of see why they like it that way. Their money goes all over the place and lives in the Caymans, Luxembourg, and Switzerland. So they’re citizens of the world. I don’t think those people really care that much what happens to one country more than another.

Robby West: No, they’re globalists. They’re not Americans. They float around. Yes, they’re globalists. By definition, if you believe the entire idea of a nation state is obsolete, then why would you identify as an American? It’s like what we talked about earlier on this morning’s show. What is an American? You know, I think we could do a whole other hour on that. Oh, easily.

Ted Rall: The idea of the nation state, which is relatively new, really only 200 years old in its modern configuration. But it’s like if you’re going to get rid of a system or want to get rid of a system, you better have some idea how you want to replace it. I’m looking at you, George W. Bush, overthrowing Saddam. The globalists don’t. I can see in some airy way how and why we should have one world government. Like, we can address the great inequalities of wealth between the North and the global South. But the point is, I don’t see logistically how you’d be able to hold a whole world government together at this stage. I don’t think our communications technology is good enough. And when you’re in a world with thousands of languages and cultures, I don’t know how you could ever have a global system, sort of like in the lexicon of Star Trek. Everybody formed one world government once we went into interstellar space so we could have one government to represent us to the rest of the galaxy. We can’t do that yet.

Robby West: No, that’s going to be a really hard sell. That’s going to be a hard sell in Pakistan. I know if you go into a short lecture on them about gay rights and feminism. I mean, let’s be honest.

Ted Rall: Or it’ll be a hard sell in Greenwich Village when the Pakistanis are trying to sell Sharia law. So either way, most cultures don’t get along with each other. People have a hard time here in the U.S., and we all speak the same language supposedly. Yes, that’s just the whole problem. And it’s weird because Hulk Hogan was kind of a throwback to Americana. Now, you’re talking about a big, strong, individual, larger-than-life figure with a brand. That was his brand. And then, about a year and a half ago, this guy—something that really impressed me—was he converted to Christianity, and he and his new wife were baptized. When he was asked about it, he said that all his life he realized it was nothing, and that the strongest he’s ever been is now by surrendering to Jesus. And as a Christian, that resonates. It’s like, hey, truly, welcome, brother. That’s huge. I just think that as the country becomes more diverse culturally and ethnically, as the culture gets more diluted, as Christianity retreats, I don’t see another Hulk Hogan. I don’t see another symbol people can look at and say, that’s the guy, without any negative judgment one way or the other. It’s like, that’s Hulk Hogan. I don’t see the next Hulk Hogan. I don’t know if you’re ever going to have another Hulk Hogan.

Ted Rall: Well, I think that’s a really good place to leave it. And I don’t know that I’m going to argue with you on that. I think that’s exactly right. You’ve been watching a Rumble Premium edition of The TMI Show with me, Ted Rall, and Manila Chan. She’ll be joining some other episodes in the future. Filling in for Manila is producer Robby West. Robby, as always, it’s a real pleasure to do this with you. If you’re watching, please like, follow, and share the show. If you’re watching one of the clips, please check out the full show and subscribe. We’re very close to that magic 1,000 subscribers threshold. We need to start earning some money. And if you’re on Rumble, come over because you’re going to see a lot of spicy content here on Rumble that you won’t see on YouTube. We’re here Monday through Friday at 10 AM Eastern Time, 7 AM on the West Coast. So check us out, and take care.

Transcript: DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou – “Why is Iran Burning?”

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Ted Rall

Transcript generated with AI. So there may be errors.

Ted Rall and John Kiriakou discuss critical issues on the Wednesday, July 24, 2025 episode of Deprogram.

Watch/listen here.

Kiriakou shares Congressman Thomas Massie’s efforts to release Jeffrey Epstein files via a discharge petition, facing resistance from House Speaker Mike Johnson, who altered rules to curb subpoenas. They speculate on Trump’s involvement in the Epstein case, doubting direct culpability but suspecting he’s protecting someone close. In Gaza, they condemn ongoing violence as genocide, citing starvation and IDF tactics. They address Kilmar Albrego Garcia’s wrongful deportation and unfair labeling by officials. In Ukraine, Zelensky’s unpopularity and potential CIA-backed coup are highlighted. They also touch on Iranian arson fires, possibly Israeli-orchestrated, and Greek protests against Israeli tourists. The show’s name changes to Deprogram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou for clarity.

Ted Rall: Hey, everyone. Thanks for joining us. You’re watching Deprogram with me, Ted Rall, and John Kiriakou. Lots to talk about. John and I are having quite a day, but, hey, so is the country. John, you were just on the phone with a guy who’s been in the news lately. Maybe you want to tell us about it.

John Kiriakou: I was asked at the last minute to appear on a show called Redacted on the Unified Television Network, not realizing that I was going to be asked to appear alongside Congressman Thomas Massie. So I got on, and as soon as I got on, Massie got on, and he was absolutely fascinating. The whole thing was about Jeffrey Epstein. I’ve been trying to talk a lot about Jeffrey Epstein because these political developments surrounding the Epstein situation are complicated. He made them more complicated with what he said. He used to be on the Rules Committee. The Rules Committee is the single most important committee on Capitol Hill because the members of the Rules Committee decide what bills go to the floor for a vote and what bills are just killed. Because he’s an independent thinker, he was removed from the Rules Committee and is no longer a member. But he says he’s a smart guy.

My time on the Rules Committee taught me how to write a discharge petition. A discharge petition is a very rarely used parliamentary trick in the House of Representatives. I remember it being used once when I was in college in 1986. What a discharge petition is, is this: Let’s say there is a bill to make Ted Rall Day. Okay? And most—well, that would be unopposed. You’d think.

Most people want a Ted Rall Day. Right? But there’s this one asshole on the Rules Committee who says, you know what? I don’t like Ted Rall. He made fun of me in a cartoon one time, and I’m not going to allow this thing to go to the floor for a vote. So Congressman Kiriakou then writes up what’s called the discharge petition. A discharge petition, if it gets a majority, that’s 218 votes, forces the bill out of the Rules Committee, whether they like it or not, to the floor for a vote. Until 1933, you needed 25% of members of Congress to vote yes on the discharge. They changed the rules in 1933, so now you need 218 votes to force a bill to the floor. Thomas Massie just now said that he has a bill to force the administration to release every scrap of paper that exists related to Jeffrey Epstein to the public, including videos, hard drives, black books, files, emails, and everything they have. And Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, said, oh, no. No. We can’t do that. That’s going to embarrass the administration. And the president has already said that there are no files. We can’t contradict the president. So Massie went to Hakeem Jeffries, and Hakeem Jeffries says, you know what? I can guarantee you every single Democrat in the House of Representatives. Meaning that Massie has to come up with five Republicans. He’s one. That’s four more. Marjorie Taylor Greene said yes. That makes three more. So he’s in talks with the Freedom Caucus. That could be as many as six more, which would give him enough to discharge the bill from the Rules Committee.

Ted Rall: So what did Mike Johnson tell him today?

John Kiriakou: Mike Johnson said, if you persist with this, I’m going to change the rules, which haven’t changed since 1933. And I’m going to make it so that you need two-thirds of the members of the House of Representatives, not 50% plus one. He can do anything he wants because he’s the Speaker of the House. Another thing Massie said, which was so interesting to me, is that he wants to subpoena people in the Jeffrey Epstein orbit. When I was a senior staff member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, I had subpoena power. It’s not something you want to do every day. It pisses people off to receive a subpoena. But if you have somebody that just refuses to testify, you have to issue the subpoena and force them to come and testify before your committee. So Massie issued a whole bunch of subpoenas for all these different people to come before the House and testify as to their role in facilitating Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes or in not helping to end Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes. So what happened? Mike Johnson changed the rules. And so now the only people who can issue subpoenas in the House of Representatives are Mike Johnson’s attorneys. No member of Congress can issue a subpoena as of today. Only Mike Johnson’s attorneys. So the fix is in, man. We were saying the day before yesterday when Johnson announced that he didn’t want any votes on Epstein, so he’s just going to shut down the House of Representatives until September so that there won’t be any votes. Now you can’t even issue a subpoena, let alone have a vote. One other thing Massie said that was very interesting: despite this announcement that the House will shut down, it actually won’t shut down because Johnson doesn’t trust Trump to not make recess appointments. They’re all the same party. They’re all Republicans. It’s shocking to me. So Johnson came to an agreement this week, and folks, this is not reported in the media. This is breaking news from Thomas Massie’s mouth. Johnson came to an agreement with John Thune, the Majority Leader in the Senate, that every eight days, they will gavel the House and the Senate into session and then immediately gavel it out of session. The whole process takes five seconds. So this is like the guy in the bottom of the hatch on Lost who has to keep pushing the button. That’s exactly what it is. So that way, they’re in recess, but they’re really not in recess. That way, they can’t vote on Epstein, but Trump can’t make any federal appointments. Shocking.

Ted Rall: Well, just in case you were bored, John, this has broken in the New York Times while you were talking to Thomas. AG Pam Bondi informed Trump in the spring that his name appeared in the Epstein files, according to three people with knowledge of the exchange. The disclosure came as part of a broader briefing on the case by the FBI and prosecutors. It was made by Bondi during a meeting that also included the Deputy AG, Todd Blanch, and covered a variety of topics. She meets regularly with Trump, officials said. They informed Trump that his name, as well as those of other high-profile figures, came up during their reexamination of the Epstein files that had not previously been made public. Trump has already appeared in documents related to the investigation. Steve Chung wouldn’t answer any questions about this briefing and basically reminded everyone that this was supposedly fake news. This has all previously been reported by the Wall Street Journal. But this is a bona fide scandal, John.

John Kiriakou: It is. It is. Wow. Well, I mean, it’s like what we thought it was. The only answers here were that it had to be either the president himself who was somehow implicated to some extent. I have to admit that doesn’t really pass the smell test that the president is a pedophile. No. I don’t believe that. There’s no evidence of that. Of course, anything’s possible, but I just don’t think so. Most things are usually the way they seem. Although every now and then, you’re like, what? So this could be one of those times. But it’s got to be someone close to him. It’s got to be someone he cares about. Interference for.

It has to be. And I’ll tell you what, it has to be Dan Bongino that leaked this to the New York Times. For sure. There is no other possibility.

Ted Rall: So Elon Musk told the truth, which then makes me think, how in the world did Elon Musk know that Donald Trump was in the Epstein files when Musk should not have had access to law enforcement information? That’s a good question. Although, apparently, Doge and Musk had their noses in all sorts of holes that they weren’t supposed to be.

So, I thought we were going to be just talking about sending Congress home early and what a bad look that was. Massie was quoted in this morning’s media, probably from stuff he said yesterday to reporters, saying that MAGA World isn’t going to forget about this just because six weeks go by. This really does remind me of Watergate summer when things dragged out. It was no air conditioning in that Senate hearing. Everyone’s hot and sweaty. It was boring. And this low-level functionary named Paul Butterfield comes in and says, and then the tape recorder in the Oval Office. And people are like, what? There’s a tape recorder in the Oval Office? Reporters go scrambling out the door. I remember that. And I always thought that if Nixon hadn’t dragged his ass on this whole thing, we would have never gotten to that point. The more Trump does this, the more it’s staying in the news. I know he’s hoping there’s going to be an asteroid hit or Jesus is going to finally come back and say hi or something’s going to happen that’s going to wipe this off the headlines, but I don’t see it.

John Kiriakou: No. I don’t either. And I’ll tell you what, Massie said some other things that made me want to yelp out loud. He said that this discharge petition, he wrote it, but it’s co-sponsored by Ro Khanna. He said that he and Ro Khanna have a lot of respect for each other. They work together on a lot of legislation, and they are of one mind on this issue. Frankly, I was enjoying listening to him. I’ve been to a couple of baseball games with Thomas Massie. He is a lovely man. You don’t have to agree with everything he says. He’s very constitutionalist, but that’s cool. He is such a patriot. He said a couple of things that were fascinating. The lesser one first: he said that there is a kind of phony 501(c)(3) nonprofit that all of a sudden started broadcasting TV commercials against him in his district. It took his staff all of fifteen minutes to trace the registration of this 501(c)(3) back to the White House. Just like that. It’s like, no. You can’t do that. You’re not supposed to do that. But this organization, called something like the Make America Great Again Patriots, has already spent $1,800,000. So he’s in serious trouble. He’s being primaried in Kentucky. I went back on Friday and looked at the polls. There’s not a whole lot of polling in these individual congressional races so far. But his constituents love him, and they want him to stand up like this. The more interesting thing he said was in response to the last question of the panel. The host said, so Congressman Massie, you find yourself at odds with the administration a lot, like, all the time. And he laughed and said, yes. And remember, I was the only Republican who voted against Mike Johnson for Speaker. So everybody’s mad at Massie. He’s the Barbara Lee of the right. Or maybe Rand Paul. But Rand Paul is kind of a phony, though. Massie is a true believer. He’s really doing it. So she says, is there any chance that you might consider running for president under Elon Musk’s new America Party? Maybe you and Ro Khanna could do something together. Unity ticket. He says, never say never. That’s always the right answer. And I was like, oh my god. Any other politician would say, I’m a Republican. I’m a lifelong Republican. I stand with the Republican Party. I’m going to work to change the Republican Party from within. That’s not what he said. He said, never say never. My mouth dropped open. It’s an honest answer.

Ted Rall: Deanna Montoya is asking, so neither of us, we’ve said this already, think that it’s likely that Trump could have sexually assaulted a young girl. Let me tell you why I don’t think that’s true. Thousands of pages of biographies of Donald Trump. I wrote a biography of Donald Trump. I don’t recommend that you buy it. It’s really not one of my best books. I have better books if you want to buy one of my books. But I learned a lot about him. He’s led such a public life that it’s really hard to believe that if he had these predilections or if he was really particularly interested in unusual sex, we wouldn’t have heard about it by now. It just doesn’t seem likely. Think about Matt Gaetz; he was only a congressman, and everything came out. Larry Craig, Mr. Wide Stance at the St. Paul Airport, just a senator from Idaho, and we found out everything. So with Donald Trump, who’s the most public person in the United States and has been for decades, I think we would just know. We know he likes to sleep with porn stars now and then and other random women besides his wife, or sometimes the random woman becomes his wife. But that’s not really unusual for dudes in general and for dudes at that level. They have their wives and families and love them, and they also have sex on the side sometimes, but they do it with adults. That’s my take. I’m not saying I have a crystal ball here. If I did, I’d be buying more stocks.

John Kiriakou: I agree with you. I think if he had done something like that, it would have come out by now, even just as a rumor. We also have the statement from Stormy Daniels that he was 100% vanilla, that there was nothing special or out of the ordinary. He was the missionary man, totally ordinary. And he made that comment when he was still friendly with Epstein. He said, Jeff’s a good guy. He’s a fun guy. He loves women just like I do. He loves them young, but he loves women. I think there was a lot behind that statement.

Ted Rall: Here’s the thing too. We do live in a world where perhaps it would be nice if you knew about sexual assault and pedophilia, you might step up and try to stop it or even report it to the authorities, but I suppose that’s too much to hope for in this case.

John Kiriakou: So now we have this speculation game. I’m not going to throw out names here, but we’re all going to be wondering, who is Trump covering for? Is it one person? Are there multiple? There has to be. Because otherwise, this doesn’t make any sense. If he had nothing to hide, he would have ordered the release of the information. He campaigned on ordering the release of the information. He released most of the JFK documents. He released the MLK documents. He’s in the process of releasing the RFK documents. But then all of a sudden, like magic, there are no Epstein documents. There were no files until there were files, and then there’s no files again. I love Speaker Johnson’s comment that only the best files, the proper files, the reliable files should be released.

Ted Rall: And who’s going to get to decide that? Is it going to be you, John, or is it going to be me, Ted? I don’t think so. It’s going to be them, and the truth will out. This is going to come out. Sometimes it takes years, decades even, but the truth always comes out. Always.

John Kiriakou: I remember six weeks before my release from prison, I called my wife. I was allowed to call her every other day for fifteen minutes. So I said, how was your day? She said it was great. And I said, really? It was great? Why was it so great? And she said, because the Senate torture report came out today, and it proved that everything you said was true. So I had to wait from 2007 to December 2014, but my truth came out. This Epstein truth is going to come out, especially when you have people on the inside of the system who hate that it hasn’t come out yet. Bongino’s furious to the point where he’s talking about quitting. Kash Patel is in a real situation right now where his reputation’s on the line, and Donald Trump’s only going to be president for three and a half more years. And then what does Patel do? You have to be on the side of righteousness here. Otherwise, you’re going to ruin yourself.

Ted Rall: Shall we switch over to Gaza? Things in Gaza. It’s hard to know where to start. I could start with Bret Stephens’ rancid column in today’s New York Times, where, again, he’s turning cartwheels to redefine what’s going on there as a non-genocide. In a way, it doesn’t really matter what it’s called, but it is a genocide. He quotes the UN definition of genocide and carefully analyzes it, ignoring the whole “in whole or in part” part of that phrase. You don’t need to kill every Jew like the Nazis wanted to for it to be genocide. They were trying to get most of them to leave, actually. And they herded them into ghettos. The point is, if you go after a significant part of a population and your purpose is to kill them or just get them to leave, that’s still genocide. Even if you don’t kill anyone, you can still be committing cultural genocide by driving a population out of their homeland. But what blew me away is the starvation reports are escalating now to the point where the doctors, who are exhausted beyond belief treating the endless flow of casualties into what’s left of these hospitals in Gaza, are now themselves succumbing to starvation and are literally fainting and passing out while they’re operating on people. That’s because they don’t have enough food or water. Were you the one telling me yesterday or the day before about these games that the IDF play?

Ted Rall: Yep. Absolutely sick. The doctors report that the IDF, literally, for fun, the snipers will be like, today is shoulder day. Let’s shoot everyone in the shoulder. Today is knee day. Let’s shoot everyone in the knee. And then everybody comes in with the same identical injury—abdominal wound, buttock, head wound, all on the same day. It was on the BBC, reaffirmed in the New York Times. The Israelis are taking the piss. They’re having fun.

John Kiriakou: They are. You’ve read the genocide statutes. I’ve read the genocide statutes. I don’t care what people’s political positions are. This meets all of the legal definitions of genocide. It is a genocide. Period.

Ted Rall: There’s no question. It’s sort of like how people with borderline personality disorder will justify anything they do because you triggered them. If you hadn’t said this or done that or remembered to take out the trash, I wouldn’t have burned the house down. Israel is basically a borderline country. They’re saying, well, look at what happened on October 7. Therefore, everything that follows by definition is not our fault. That’s completely absurd and ridiculous. That’s a mental illness.

The only good news, I suppose, is that belatedly, not just two years late but decades late, the world is starting to see it, and people aren’t afraid of Israel anymore. People are willing to speak up. I don’t know that AIPAC is going to keep its power even with all the money they have.

John Kiriakou: I was disappointed in these recent votes in the House of Representatives over military aid to Israel. A friend of mine in Code Pink posted something on Facebook from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez explaining why she voted against a bill that would’ve allocated $500,000,000 for Iron Dome. It’s okay to allocate money for guns to shoot the Palestinians, but your objection is that the money was going to be spent for the Iron Dome. That’s so typical of the Democratic Party, and both parties, these pro-Israel lefties. The ideology just doesn’t make any sense to me.

Ted Rall: Part of it stems from this ridiculous idea that governments and companies have where they’ll say, the money is in a separate pot. So the Iron Dome defense money is in this pot, and the genocide money is in another pot. That’s just fiction because money is fungible by definition. If you pay my cable bill, it’s easier for me to pay my phone bill. It’s like SS guards at a death camp killing people, and we say, we don’t want to finance that because that’s bad. But we don’t want them to fall off the watchtower, so we’ll pay for a little bumper to shore things up. We don’t want them to get shot by the resistance, so we’ll buy them some body armor. If you provide defense for a belligerent, you are assisting that belligerent. Legally, you become a belligerent. Bruce Fein explained this to me. For example, the government of Belarus allowed Russian troops to invade Ukraine through Belarus. That makes Belarus a belligerent, and so it would be subject to war crimes charges after the war. It won’t be, but that’s just an example.

With the doctors falling down, it’s just going to get worse and worse. Another thing that was funny about that stupid column in the Times today was he said, if they were really committing genocide, it would be hundreds of thousands, not tens of thousands. First of all, it is hundreds of thousands. They just haven’t found the bodies, but it’s arithmetic. There were 2,300,000 Palestinians there before October 6, 2023. We’re down to about two million now. 2.3 minus 2 is 300,000.

John Kiriakou: You’re right about the bodies. Most of Gaza has been leveled. It’s rubble. You can see it in the overhead photography. Nobody has any idea how many tens of thousands of bodies are underneath those buildings. Hundreds of thousands of bodies. The bodies aren’t counted by the Gaza Health Ministry unless they’re recovered and identified. So you have to know, like, that’s John Smith, his birth date is such and such, his occupation was whatever. You’ve been to wars, I’ve been to wars. It takes a long time to find out. When a body—I’m speaking to you inside a nine-story building right now. If someone dropped a bomb on this building, there’s probably fifty, sixty people here now. I think it would take weeks even for the NYPD to find everyone.

They just found a body in Pacific Palisades yesterday, in the LA Times. They’re going through these houses that turned to ash. They just got around to this one block, and sure enough, there was a burned body in the ruins yesterday. This was months ago. I guess we’ll just keep an eye on this story, obviously. It’s an ongoing catastrophe.

Ted Rall: So let’s talk about Kilmar Albrego Garcia. I’m glad to see this. His lawyers are aggressive. This is, of course, the guy who, by all accounts, is a green card holder deported to El Salvador. There was a specific court order preventing that from happening, which ICE and the Trump administration either willfully or accidentally ignored, deported him anyway. Then they found out, and they made all sorts of ridiculous maneuvers to try to prevent that. When they did bring him back, they came up with some charges that may or may not be valid to say that he’d been involved in smuggling illegal immigrants and possibly working for MS-13, which, apparently, the truth is that he left El Salvador originally because he was afraid of MS-13. The Salvadoran authorities even said he doesn’t fit the profile, nothing they believe. They don’t believe he’s a member. He doesn’t have the right tattoos. Nothing fits. He’s kind of just a mild-mannered dude who may not have been the best husband. Anyway, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem went on Twitter to call him a monster. Now his lawyers are in court, and they’re asking the judge to issue an order telling the Trump administration to stifle it so that they stop prejudicing Kilmar’s ability to get a fair trial in an American court of law. This is long overdue. I don’t even understand why district attorneys go on the air and give a press conference and say, we just indicted this real son of a bitch for committing horrible crimes. At most, they should just say, we’ve arrested this person. These are the charges. We’ll keep you posted. They editorialize. They queer the jury. They queer the judges. When it’s the cabinet secretary using the power of the US government to say that you’re a monster, how the hell are you supposed to get a fair trial?

John Kiriakou: Even in the Bureau of Prisons, if you are a member of a gang, the last two digits of your prisoner ID number are going to be -47. You see these guys in the Crips, in the Bloods, and MS-13, and they all have -47. I was sitting with one guy one day, and I noticed his badge said -47. I said, how are you a -47? He’s just a typical white guy. He said, they accuse me of being in the mafia. I said, the mafia? You’re not even from a town that has the mafia. And he’s like, I know. And when I complained, they just said, so sue me. But if you have a badge that ends in -47, you can’t go to a minimum-security camp. You’re not allowed to have compassionate release. You can’t do anything. You’re stuck in prison. But they don’t have to actually show anybody any proof that you’re in a gang. Once they say you’re in a gang, that’s it. It’s done. You’re in the gang whether you like it or not. And that’s what Kristi Noem is doing in this case. You just keep repeating the lie over and over, and now all of a sudden, he’s MS-13, whether it’s true or not.

Ted Rall: He’s got great lawyers. The tricky part here is that the Trump administration, as usual, is playing it cute, trying to have everything two or three or four ways at the same time. They want to prosecute him, but they said, well, we won’t prosecute him. We might not prosecute him. In which case, we’ll send him back to El Salvador or maybe South Sudan. Then they’re like, well, but maybe we will prosecute him, but as soon as we convict him, we’ll send him to South Sudan or Libya or El Salvador. Or maybe we won’t prosecute him at all. It reminds me of the shell game guys in Times Square back in the eighties: watch the hand, watch the ball, and you can never watch the ball. When the state declares you an enemy, the amount of chicanery and bullshit they will subject you to is just incomprehensible for someone who hasn’t been through it. It’s not well reported. You find all these things out when you show up, and there you are in the jaws of the state.

There’s no let-up here. These people are relentless. The Kristi Noems of the world and these Justice Department prosecutors, oh my god. They’re just relentless. There’s no getting away. I’m very curious as to how this is going to play out. It’s a fucking embarrassment. I don’t know if they think their base likes this. Do you think their base does like it?

John Kiriakou: I think elements of the base probably do, but the thing is that they’re going to vote for you anyway. They’re going to support you anyway. So why keep pandering to them like this? Either lead or allow them to tell you on what issues they want you to lead. To me, that’s not leadership.

Ted Rall: It’s definitely leadership. It’s just leadership down the shitter. How about Ukraine? America’s favorite democratic leader, who leads the most streamlined democracy in the world that doesn’t have any opposition party and is very not corrupt in any way, shape, or form. We don’t have to have any elections because that just gets in the way of democracy. Anyway, there’s a scandal now in Ukraine, and the bloom is off the rose. I suppose it’s taken a lot longer than I would have expected it to. Zelensky was wildly unpopular before the war, and that was all suppressed, and maybe there was genuine rallying around the flag in Ukraine. You would expect that. But now, the opposition is getting brave. It’s not easy to oppose the state in Ukraine. You may end up under house arrest or worse. It’s a time of war, and they have martial law. They can literally just shoot you at a demonstration if they don’t like you. There have been large mass demonstrations opposing the regime because Zelensky basically put the kibosh on an anti-corruption campaign that was wildly popular and that people were really hoping to see happen. It reminds me a little bit of the kind of stuff that we’ve been seeing with the Epstein files here. It’s just like, yeah, we’re not going to do that.

John Kiriakou: As long as—doesn’t really seem to have a good narrative here. I was asked by a reporter this morning if I thought it was possible that we may be seeing the early stages of a coup, even maybe a CIA-backed coup. I said, if this were a year ago, I would say no. But today, I would say, sure. This could be the start of a CIA coup. It’s not 1963 where the CIA puts a bullet into the back of the head of South Vietnam’s president, but it could be the kind of coup where the US ambassador and the station chief go to see Zelensky and say, alright, it’s time for you to go. Pack your shit, get on the plane, and go to London. Could it be a kidnapping thing like we did to Jean-Bertrand Aristide from Haiti to the Central African Republic? Sure. Just like that. Something’s afoot in Ukraine, and it’s not good if you are a supporter of the Ukrainian government or of US policy. I don’t know what that means.

Ted Rall: You’re the one trained in code, John.

John Kiriakou: I never did well with code. I preferred the disappearing ink. That was much easier for me. Seriously, they do use it. You write a letter in regular ink, and then in between the lines, you write your secret letter in the disappearing ink. You send the letter, they put it into the solution—I forget what it was, maybe hydrogen peroxide. The ink disappears, and the hidden ink comes up. It’s kinda cool. Not at all complicated. It’s like stuff you can see at the Spy Museum in DC. A fun visit.

Ted Rall: Houdini is asking if there’s a Russia-Ukraine ceasefire. The pressure is on Zelensky. He’s agreed to get serious, and they’re talking in the next couple of days. The US isn’t invited, but Ukraine and Russia are going to talk.

John Kiriakou: It’s my understanding that Zelensky actually owns real estate because he stole so much money as president of Ukraine. He would likely go to London. J Rock makes a good point here too: I thought the CIA already did his coup. So this is the double coup. They didn’t like the first coup, so they may try a different coup.

Ted Rall: It’s not the first time in CIA history that there was buyer’s remorse on the front of the agency. The coup and the counter-coup. If it doesn’t go well, you just do it again. No big deal.

For people who are wondering what we’re talking about, of course, we’re talking about the 2014 coup. Some people would say it’s not, but it really does fit all the requirements for a coup. Do you think that Russia and Ukraine are able to make any progress? The fighting seems to be—there’s really just not a lot of movement. What movement has been taking place has been to the benefit of Russia, but the facts on the ground haven’t really altered a hell of a lot.

John Kiriakou: This is the prime fighting season. The weather’s good. The spring rains are over, so your tanks don’t get bogged down in mud. This is where the two sides are supposed to be fighting the most so they can dig in in time for winter, and it’s just not happening.

John Kiriakou: Both sides are tired. Both sides are running short on supplies, especially fuel. Who wants this more? The Ukrainians or the Russians? I don’t know.

Ted Rall: I think you and I probably would have agreed that Russia didn’t really want this war. I’ve never seen many belligerents wait eight years to attack. That shows a certain degree of patience unless we have the big procrastinator. But now, if I were Putin, I would feel like I was in a good place to negotiate. Why not say, okay, let’s talk, let’s do this? Russia hasn’t changed their demands at all. I think they’re all achievable, perhaps, except for some random stuff like denazification, which is impossible for the Ukrainians to do and also impossible to define. Demilitarization also has to be a throwaway because that’s ridiculous. But in terms of the territorial concessions, that should not be that hard for Ukraine. I’ve always said to my friends who are pro-Ukrainian, in a way, this war fixed a problem that should never have existed in the first place. These borders were poorly drawn after 1991. If you’re Ukraine, do you want a hostile, restive population of ethnic Russians in Crimea that you basically have to suppress?

John Kiriakou: People in Crimea and in the Donbass are ethnic Russians. They speak Russian at home. Their faith is tied to the Russian Orthodox Church, not the Ukrainian Orthodox Church. They aren’t Catholics in those areas. The Catholics are in the West. So what would Ukraine really be losing? They wouldn’t really be losing anything. And if part of the deal is this fast track to membership in the European Union, what’s the downside? I don’t see the downside. Just sign the deal. Let it go.

Ted Rall: Somebody made a comment about the corruption. There are so many ways to do it. You could have a foreign company serve as a cutout. You could have the money diverted directly into your Swiss bank account. When I served overseas, we saw it nine ways from Sunday. It’s not at all hard.

John Kiriakou: Switzerland’s not as good as it used to be. The Swiss will rat you out now. Now it’s more like the Isle of Man, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Guernsey, the Cook Islands. And old-fashioned cash. We know that skids of $100 bills left Afghanistan by plane. If you travel on a diplomatic passport, they don’t search you. You can bring vast amounts of whatever—drugs, money, anything you want in your diplomatic pouch.

I got arrested once with the diplomatic pouch. I was going to Yemen to see some friends of mine in the spring of 1991. I was kind of tired from the war and wanted to go to that vacation spot that is Yemen to decompress for a little while. Friends of mine invited me. I want one of those big pointy hats that the women wear. I collect weird hats.

Those are awesome. I actually bought little ones for my boys. They were young at the time. So I was traveling from Riyadh through Jeddah to Sana, and one of the State Department communications officers asked me if I would take a diplomatic pouch with me. It had some radios in it and some mail. Just mail. So I said, sure, I’ll take the pouch. When I arrived in Yemen, they insisted on X-raying it. I said, no, this is a diplomatic pouch. I’m a diplomat. I have my diplomatic credentials. I had the paperwork with the wax seal on it and all this stuff. And they were like, fuck that. One of them pulled out his jambiya, that curved dagger they carry. He hacked the lead seal off the pouch. I kept saying, I protest. You can’t do this. I’m 26 years old. What am I going to say? I didn’t speak Arabic yet. I had taken six weeks of Arabic familiarization. So they open up the pouch, he reaches in, pulls out this radio, an old-fashioned CB radio, and says, jasus, one of the few Arabic words I understood at the time. It means spy. And then they were on me. So they put me in this cell in the airport, and I was with a Filipino nurse and a couple of Indian guys that had hashish on them. I was in there for about four hours, and finally, the American ambassador came and said, wow, you really threw a wrench into my day. I said, I’m sorry. They should have never opened that pouch. He said, nah, forget it. Let’s just go. So we got in the car, and that was my first experience in a jail cell. It’s always funny when people just don’t follow the rules, and that happens a lot.

Ted Rall: I read the Greek papers this morning, and they were talking a lot about this new wave of refugees. Is that what you’re talking about, Nick?

John Kiriakou: I just figured since you’re Greek, you know all things Greek. Somebody asked me a question today about why Greeks hate the royal family so much. I’d love to answer that question.

Ted Rall: Israeli tourists blocked by locals from disembarking. Spicy. I like it. I’m going to check that out right now. Top story: Greece crowned champion of women’s water polo after victory over Hungary. Greek police have dismissed reports in the Israeli media alleging that a mob carried out a knife attack against a group of Israeli tourists on the island of Rhodes. That’s my ancestral island. Interesting. I’m going to text my cousin and ask him what’s going on there with Israelis.

Question from Adam Feider: When are we going to cover China? There’s a really interesting piece in the Washington Post today about deflation. China’s been in a deflationary environment for eight consecutive quarters, over two years, because of excessive competition. So the authorities are stepping in, and they’re going to start to regulate this so that there are fewer companies in the same sector. I guess the right-wingers would say they’re picking winners in the free markets. Doesn’t seem like a bad idea to me. If you have excessive competition and prices are getting so low that in the aggregate, sectors are wildly profitable, but no individual company can stay afloat, you’ve got a problem.

Ted Rall: Thanks for the suggestion, Adam. We’ll do it soon. I can’t promise it’ll be Friday, but it might be. Pretty crazy. Prince Philip was Greek. Prince Philip was the son of a very minor Greek princess. The Greek royal family, they’re not ethnically Greek. They’re half British and half Danish. That’s why we hated them so much. They were imposed on us by Queen Victoria. Philip was born on the island of Corfu, Kerkyra in Greek, and his mother suffered from severe mental illness. She ended up resigning from her royal duties and became a Greek Orthodox nun and moved to a convent where she spent the rest of her life. Prince Philip left Greece as a child and never returned to Greece ever. It was because he hated Greece and didn’t like the Greeks, and they hated him. There was no love lost between them. He was an asshole.

John Kiriakou: Charles is different. Charles goes to Greece every year or two, and he always goes to Mount Athos, which is called the Holy Mountain. He’s not Greek Orthodox, being the head of the Church of England, but he’s as close to Greek Orthodox as a British royal is going to be. They like Charles. They hated their own royal family, and we threw them out on a rail in 1967, told them never to come back. The first Greek king was King Otto the First. He was Bavarian, German. The guy was king for thirty-two years and never learned to speak Greek.

Ted Rall: That’s how those royals are. There’s a category of dudes whose job is they parachute in to run a cereal company even if they don’t eat cereal. Then they’re off to run a software company. After that, maybe they manage a ball team. These royals are the same way. Poor Marie Antoinette never could have said, let them eat cake, nor would she have because she was actually a kindhearted person. But she never could have said it in court and been quoted because she didn’t speak French. She was Austrian. She only spoke German.

John Kiriakou: We had a king of Greece who was taking a tour of some neighborhood in Thessaloniki, and he was bitten in the leg by a monkey. He pretended it didn’t hurt, and it was no big deal. It got infected, sepsis set in, and he died three weeks later. His brother became king, and his brother didn’t want to be king. He didn’t know what the hell he was doing. He’s like, we should invade Turkey and overthrow Atatürk. He led this army into Turkey, which is now called the catastrophe of 1921.

Ted Rall: Film adventures around that time, like when the Marines invaded post-revolutionary Russia. Disastrous, stupid, forgotten.

John Kiriakou: I don’t know what Houdini is talking about with Pine Gap. I’ll look it up. Pine Gap is a highly secretive jointly operated Australian-US intelligence facility located near Alice Springs. It’s a ground control station for signals intelligence satellites and a key relay station for satellite communications. The base plays a crucial role in global surveillance, particularly for missile launches and battlefield intelligence. We never called it Pine Gap. We always called it Alice Springs. But that was from Grok, and that’s even more than I knew about Pine Gap.

Ted Rall: Personal question for you here. How do you rate the Turkish intelligence?

John Kiriakou: Good in some ways and not good in others. Good in that they are on the Kurds like white on rice. And I don’t mean just their own Kurds. I mean Syria, Iran, Iraq, and all the Kurds. They’re not so good on Greece. Greek intelligence is better against the Turks than Turkish intelligence is against the Greeks. Greek intelligence officers are much more likely to speak Turkish and pass for Turks than Turkish intelligence officers are at speaking Greek. Did I work with them? Yes, I worked with them years ago.

Ted Rall: Not going back to prison. We’ll need two pardons for you.

John Kiriakou: The cruise ship incident on Sidos. I was in Sidos last summer. It’s an amazing place. Protest against Gaza war prevents Israeli visitors from touring Greek island, from the Associated Press this morning. Greek island residents stop Israeli cruise ship from docking. Travel advisory for Greece by Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs as ship is blocked in Sidos. If you’re not a scientist, you have nothing to worry about.

Ted Rall: We would be remiss not to talk about Iran. There’s this really weird situation going on in Iran now where there are arson fires all over the place. My first thought goes to a country that starts with I and ends with L and sounds like Israel. This is a problem in Greece every summer.

John Kiriakou: The Turks come and light fires, and we have these catastrophic forest fires, wildfires. They’ll send operatives into the islands and just light the forest on fire in the middle of the night. You know that the Israelis are watching the same media weather reports that everybody else is watching, that it’s 120 degrees Fahrenheit in Iran, and it’s a tinderbox because it’s so hot and dry. Of course, the Israelis are out there setting wildfires.

Ted Rall: There are no Israeli tourists in Iran, but they have lots of operatives. We know that the Iranians are infested with turncoats who are collecting money from the Israelis. A lot of Afghan refugees have taken Israeli money. Iran deserves some gratitude for the fact that they’ve taken in more refugees than any other country on the planet. They’ve always been very open that way. They allude to it in that movie Three Kings. It’s done without comment, but it’s a very sly, politically accurate thing. I’ve crossed that border from Afghanistan to Iran, and you can tell what a border feels like. Afghans like Iran. The cultural ties go back thousands of years.

So we have these arson fires. It’s psychological warfare. Why doesn’t the Mukhabarat get to the bottom of it and find out what’s going on and stop all this?

John Kiriakou: They are incompetent, underfunded, and focused on domestic political rivals, not counterintelligence. How you can have thousands of people essentially acting as sleeper agents in your country in a time of war is a mystery to me. There was an Israeli announcement yesterday saying that they were able to identify a thousand Israeli citizens passing information to Iran, and most of them were Iranian Jews living in Israel. I think it is ideological in that respect. They’re so upset about what’s going on in Gaza. They catch a lot of discriminatory bullshit on a day-to-day basis from the security forces.

Ted Rall: Are we sufficiently deprogrammed?

John Kiriakou: Do you want to tell our friends here that we’re very slightly changing our name?

Ted Rall: Right now, we had a—I don’t know if you guys have noticed this, but when you go to search for us on YouTube, there’s another thing called The Deprogram that comes up, and it’s in the UK. It’s a different show entirely, and sometimes it’s hard to find us. It’s very frustrating. So I did what we all do in this day and age when we’re trying to solve impenetrable problems. I asked AI what to do. AI said that we should do what we’re doing, which is we have officially changed the name to Deprogram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou. I graciously suggested that John’s name go first, also alphabetical order. But John pointed out that because of the spelling issue, nobody can spell my name. So that’s why my name is first.

Ted Rall: Thank you, Houdini. I would have been happy to have you go first. My pleasure. Please, please, please, please like, follow, and share the show. It really makes a difference to us. We are trying to make some money here. If we get the search terms right, I think it’s going to make a difference, but we count on you guys the most. We’re here again Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 5 PM. We’re going to probably step it up to five days very soon, maybe in a week or two. But right now, it’s Monday, Wednesday, Friday, so we’ll see you Friday at five Eastern in the afternoon. Thank you so much for your support. Really appreciate you, and take care. Bye-bye.

 

DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou: “Iran Is Burning”

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Ted Rall

LIVE 5:00 pm Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

On the “DeProgram show” with political cartoonist Ted Rall and CIA whistleblower John Kiriakou, we’re dissecting urgent global crises with unflinching clarity. We confront the escalating starvation crisis in Gaza, where over 100 aid groups, including Save the Children, blame Israel’s blockade for mass hunger. Gaza’s health ministry reporting 43 deaths from malnutrition in just days. We probe the horrific state of Gaza’s doctors, who are too malnourished to remain standing, much less treat patients effectively. The Guardian reports medical staff fainting from hunger, with 21 children dying in three days due to starvation, as hospitals buckle under the crisis.

In the U.S., we examine the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, where lawyers demand the Trump administration and Kristi Noem cease inflammatory rhetoric labeling him a “monster,” raising free speech concerns after a judge barred his ICE detention.

In Ukraine, we analyze President Zelensky’s response to domestic protests over entrenched corruption, as public unrest grows amid wartime struggles, with Zelensky proposing renewed talks with Russia to end the conflict.

We also tackle congressional calls for more Jeffrey Epstein files, amid Trump’s past ties to the financier, fueling debates over transparency and accountability as Congress goes home early to dodge the heat.

Finally, Iran. Why are fires breaking out all over?

TMI Show Ep 186: “Are Lower Prices Bad?”

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Ted Rall

LIVE 10 AM Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

China’s cutthroat business world is making prices cheaper for consumers. But deflation could cause a depression. That’s the economic paradox we’re talking about on the “TMI Show with Ted Rall and Manila Chan”!

China’s “involution” crisis: fierce competition and overcapacity are strangling industries. A hot new technology or product sparks a frenzy of copycats, with hundreds of Chinese manufacturers then flooding the market. They slash prices, ramp up production, and battle for survival, often with razor-thin margins or outright losses. Local governments fuel the chaos, backing hometown champs with cash and clout, pushing industries like steel, solar, and electric vehicles into a brutal race to the bottom.

Take BYD, China’s EV giant, which slashed prices on nearly two dozen models in May, only to get a slap on the wrist from a government-linked auto group for sparking “price wars.” Xi Jinping is on the case, vowing to curb this “disorderly competition” and outdated capacity. With Trump’s tariffs slamming exports and a slowing economy piling on unsold goods, China’s facing a deflationary spiral—its GDP deflator has tanked for eight straight quarters.

The People’s Daily warns that price wars could drive out quality players. Can China tame this self-defeating cycle, or is it too late? Could something like that happen here?

Plus: “Black Sabbath” member Ozzy Osbourne’s legacy celebrated after his passing at 76.

House Speaker Mike Johnson sends Congress home early to duck releasing the Epstein files.

Cannabis and psychedelics show promise for eating disorders.

Somerville’s cat mayor race heats up.

Keywords:

TMI Show Ep 185: “Los Angeles Times, R.I.P.”

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Ted Rall

LIVE 10 AM Eastern time, Streaming Anytime:

Things get personal on today’s “The TMI Show” with hosts Ted Rall and Manila Chan, diving into what looks like the beginning of the final death rattle at the Los Angeles Times—the paper Ted sued all the way to the Supreme Court for five years!

Billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, a biotech billionaire being sued for sleazy machinations that killed breast cancer victims, paid half a billion for the Times back in 2018, promising he’d run and fund the paper as a public trust for 100 years or more. The paper’s union, suckered by Pat’s promises, cooperated with him as he moved the paper to the suburbs, put his young daughter in charge and bizarrely tried to turn it into a TV cooking channel.

Now he’s dropped a bombshell on “The Daily Show,” announcing that he plans to take the 143-year-old paper public within a year, oddly inspired by the Green Bay Packers’ fan-ownership model. He says he wants to “democratize” the Times, letting readers own a piece of the action. But why now? Because no one wants to buy it.

The paper is hemorrhaging cash—losing $30-50 million annually—with over 20% of its newsroom slashed, including 115 layoffs this year. High-profile editor exits and controversies, like the censored Kamala Harris endorsement, have tanked newsroom morale and trust. Soon-Shiong even rolled out an AI “bias meter” to win back readers, but financial woes and editorial turmoil continue under his mercurial, uninformed rule.

Going public could pump in cash—or it could fail like the WeWork IPO. With debt, staff unrest, and digital hurdles looming, this looks less like a bold gambit than the dying gasp of a once-proud institution? Ted and Manila unpack this high-stakes pivot at the nation’s fourth-biggest daily paper and what it means for journalism’s future.

Plus:

  • Etan Patz’s murder conviction overturned, facing retrial or release.
  • Malcolm-Jamal Warner’s tragic drowning at the same beach that killed Ted’s friend in Costa Rica, at 54.
  • Trump pulls U.S. out of UNESCO again, claiming that criticism of Israel’s genocide is anti-Semitic.
  • New $250 U.S. “visa integrity fee” required for all US travelers. Will tourism tank?

 

Transcript: DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou: Donald Trump, Bully-in-Chief

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Ted Rall

The following is a transcript of an episode of DeProgram with Ted Rall and John Kiriakou for Monday, July 21, 2025. Transcript was done via AI, so beware of possible errors.

Ted Rall: Hey there. Thanks for joining us here on DeProgram, where we deprogram you from corporate news propaganda. Coming to you on the left side of your screen, I’m an editorial cartoonist, Ted Rall. On the right side of the screen, but not politically, is John Kiriakou, CIA whistleblower. Thanks for joining us. We’re here now on our regular schedule, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, 5 PM Eastern Time, 2 PM on the West Coast, and we love you in all other 22 time zones as well. I guess there are more than that. There are those half-time zones. Those are very strange. I don’t even understand the reason. Well, we could do it. If only there was a device that could answer that question for us.

So, let’s get into it. Lots to talk about today, as always. John suggested, and we definitely have to talk about, the role of Donald Trump as bully-in-chief. I think that’s self-explanatory, but we’ll get into the details and exactly what that’s all about. Several of my cartoonist friends called me about a story out of The Intercept saying that ICE is now setting up domestic surveillance against critics like yours truly and John, who say anything bad about ICE on social media. So we’ll talk about that chilling effect here. As ICE is prepared to become the biggest police agency in the United States now with its massive expansion, we’ll talk about the human cost of the Trump deportations, including this terrible case of an 82-year-old Chilean torture victim under Pinochet who is at death’s door in Guatemala. Sorry, not Guantanamo. He was actually reported dead. ICE thought he was dead, but he’s hanging on, thank God. We’ll talk about that. Pat Tillman—some people who are familiar with my cartooning career will remember that I did a very controversial cartoon about him. His brother appears to be having some major problems, and he’s under arrest for apparently intentionally driving into the front of a post office in San Jose, California. And on the Israel-Gaza front, I guess you could call this good news: 23 countries just signed a joint statement, including Canada, urging an immediate cessation of hostilities and criticizing Israel for its behavior there. So, John, let’s get into it with Donald Trump. There’s the Gulf of America stuff, which I have to admit, let’s start with that. A lot of stuff that Trump does comes out of the fevered rants of right-wing media over the years, as you expected. I watch Fox every single day, and I have for years. I’ve never seen anyone talk about renaming the Gulf of Mexico before Donald Trump brought it up during his second term. He never brought it up during his first term. Never. Suddenly. So where is this coming from?

John Kiriakou: I think it came from his decision to rename Mount McKinley, Mount McKinley. I think he figured, “Hey, why should I stop here? I’m going to change the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.” And, you know, the people on the MAGA right just love, love, loved it. It’s such a stupid thing, but it’s easily changed back. But then we saw the way he began bullying universities to the point where Harvard’s not allowed to accept international students. Columbia is losing its federal funding. Yale had to back down and get on its knees in front of him. That bothered me very much. But then today, he issued a new demand that the Washington Commanders, Washington’s football team, must change its name back to the Washington Redskins, or he will nix the deal that the team has negotiated with the city of Washington, D.C., for a new stadium. This is a big deal in Washington because both the Washington Redskins and the Washington Senators used to play at what became RFK Stadium. RFK Stadium is a terrible stadium. It’s been abandoned now for years. They’re in the process right now of knocking it down. The Redskins moved to Lanham, Maryland. They’ve been there for twenty-five years, whatever it is. They, under pressure, dropped the name Redskins several years ago and couldn’t pick a name. So they were known for two seasons as the Washington Football Team, which was also stupid. And then they decided to become the Washington Commanders several years ago. Well, they’re tired of playing in Lanham, Maryland. The stadium there now is old and in disrepair, and they decided that they wanted to go back to Washington because the new stadium that’s being built on the RFK Stadium site is right on the metro. It has its own metro station, so everybody can get there. It’s going to have tons of parking for thousands and thousands of cars, and Lanham’s not like that. You have to drive to Lanham, Maryland. It’s the only way to get there and the only way to get to a game. So he’s thrown this wrench into the deal now. RFK has been torn down. It can’t be renovated. They wouldn’t have renovated it anyway. But now unless they change their name back to Redskins, he’s going to kill that stadium deal, and the Commanders are stuck. Not just the Commanders are stuck. Residents of Washington, D.C., are stuck because they’re not going to see any of the revenue benefits that were expected to come from the team. So now, I mean, the only reason it seems to me that he’s doing this is just because of cruelty. He’s just mean. He’s trying to bully. And I think it just distracts from the important issues.

Ted Rall: I’m glad, John, that you reminded us of what happened with Mount McKinley, which had been renamed to Mount Denali. That’s the Native American preferred name. It’s also an SUV. So it went from McKinley to Denali. I guess, traditionally, it may have been called Denali before. It was named Mount McKinley, obviously. It’s been there a long time. And so, in the case of the Alaskan mountain, you know, let’s get rid of the Native American name because that will piss off the Native Americans. In the case of the Washington Commanders, let’s restore the Native American name because it’s a Native American name they don’t like. And I can’t help but think about that incident in the first term when he had Native American tribe representatives pose for a photo under the portrait of Andrew Jackson, a genocidal maniac who, aside from shooting the husbands of women he was having sex with, also liked to kill Native Americans.

John Kiriakou: Good point. He did.

Ted Rall: I mean, Columbia is also about to sign a $20 billion deal with the Trump administration to try to get some of their research funds back, which Trump has been wielding as well.

John Kiriakou: If they would just address the rampant antisemitism that’s taking place.

Ted Rall: I think it’ll be easier to find the Loch Ness Monster than the rampant antisemitism.

John Kiriakou: I think so too. I mean, he did. I don’t understand what he hopes to gain. He’s a lame duck. He can’t run for president again. I think this is just to be mean. And you know what? Speaking of lame ducks, I’m sorry I should have brought this up before the show, but we should probably talk about this new Trump-announced policy to convince the Texas state legislature to do an off-cycle congressional redistricting to squeeze three, four, or five more Democrats out of their congressional districts so that the Republicans can hang on to the House of Representatives in perpetuity.

Ted Rall: Is that allowed? I mean, because it normally happens after the census every ten years.

John Kiriakou: This has never been done before, Ted. It’s never been done before. And so Hakeem Jeffries then announced this morning that he is filing lawsuits to ask judicial permission to redraw the congressional districts in California, New York, New Jersey, and one other state—oh, Minnesota—to squeeze Republicans out of their districts to offset Texas if Trump wins. Incredible. They’re just like crime families, the two parties. That’s all.

Ted Rall: Well, I mean, in fairness to the Democrats—not something I do normally because I hate them—but, you know, it is true that in this particular respect, they’re between a rock and a hard place. Because if they go tit for tat, they’re playing Trump’s game, and they legitimize it. It’s kind of like having an abusive spouse. If they hit you all the time and you hit them back, well, then you’re just two people who hit each other. But on the other hand, if you don’t do anything, then you’re a wuss, and you’re getting rolled, and your partisans hate you. In this respect, I don’t know what Democrats should do.

John Kiriakou: I agree, man. I don’t know. The whole thing states. It really, this goes back to the 1990s. We can hate on James Carville all we want, and he’s deserving of our hate sometimes. But he can be charming as hell. He got into a knockdown, drag-out fight with Hillary Clinton in the mid-1990s because he wanted to pour millions of dollars into state legislative races to win seats in state houses and state senates because they’re the ones that redraw these maps every ten years. And she told him that was a waste of money, that the money the DNC had should go to U.S. House and U.S. Senate races, and anything left over should go to the presidential campaign. And the Clintons walked away from the state races. And look what happened. Republicans control, like, 70-something percent of them now. There’s no farm team. When was the last time that you ever heard of a state senator or state representative being spoken about on the national stage? It was Barack Obama in 2004, when state senator Barack Obama gave a speech at the Democratic National Convention.

Ted Rall: I was there. I remember it well. You’re right about that. And, yeah, I remember, of course, I’m so old. In the late ’80s, when I worked for a Japanese bank, I met Governor Bill Clinton, and my boss turns to me and says, “That guy’s going to be president.” And I was like, “Who? Him?” Shows my political instincts. Don’t have me pick candidates. Wow. So, I just wonder how this is going to play out legally. I mean, redistricting is kind of like, they do what they want much of the time? The states set their own rules. They change them all the time. They’re going to get away with this.

John Kiriakou: I think they’re going to get away with it. Trump has so stacked the courts.

Ted Rall: Well, let’s talk a little bit about the psychology of political bullying. There’s always been political bullying, and I could name example after example. But here, it’s really naked. It’s brazen, and it just seems to be the way Trump always worked as a developer. He just comes down like a ton of bricks: “Don’t mess with me. I do whatever I want. It’s not personal. I’ll just destroy your life to get what I want. You’re in my way. Don’t be in my way.” And nothing much really stands in his way. I mean, is it just as simple as, this works, so I do it?

John Kiriakou: I think it actually is. I think Donald Trump is like a lot of CIA officers that I’ve met over the years, senior ones, where they just push the envelope of legality as far as they can until they’re slapped down. There was a great piece in the Washington Post today saying that in 70% of the federal cases that Trump has lost so far, the administration has just ignored the judge’s decision. So they’re in contempt. But how do you hold a president in contempt? You can’t do it. What are you going to do? You’re going to lock up the White House lawyers until the president does what you tell him to do? That’s not going to happen ever.

Ted Rall: Because the guys who wrote the Constitution were a bunch of English upper-class gentlemen. The idea that someone would behave indecently, totally ignoring the rules, was just not something that would cross their minds. It never occurred to them.

John Kiriakou: I’m not optimistic. Michael Gardner says the judiciary is our best hope. I agree, but even that does not make me sleep better at night.

Ted Rall: No. I think this is a major crisis. And the part that I keep coming back to is, you know, this man was only elected six months ago. We’re one-eighth of the way out of the woods.

John Kiriakou: One thing that I find kind of fun too, and this is a minor point, but it bugs the hell out of me, is I hate having to defend Barack Obama. But when Obama named whatever it was—a drug czar, a border czar, some czar—I remember Fox News going to some Republican rally and asking people, “What do you think about this?” And they’re like, “We don’t have no czars in the U.S. That’s a communist idea, having czars.” And I was like, “Man, you morons.” Reagan is the one who started the czars with his drug czar. It was a Reagan administration policy, and the people are too stupid, shortsighted to remember that. Number one. Number two, Obama took an incredible amount of criticism for the number of executive orders that he signed. And I remember Republicans just screaming that he’s ruling by executive order. It’s just executive fiat. It’s illegal. It’s anti-democratic. Donald Trump has signed more executive orders at this point in his term than any president in American history, and the MAGA Republicans are loving it. The sum total. So now we’ve gotten ourselves into a political position where, when the Democrats win the presidency again, they’re going to have to sign hundreds of executive orders to undo the executive orders that were signed under Donald Trump. Just keep happening like this every time, cycle after cycle, and it’s going to be the Gulf of Mexico, and then it’s going to be the Gulf of America again, and then the Gulf of Mexico again. And we just make ourselves look like boobs.

Ted Rall: That’s right. And it’s a system that doesn’t work. And while we’re doing this, we’re not addressing our real problems. John, one of the things that’s really changed too is we’ve seen fairly unified government before. There have been other times when one party held the trifecta, all three branches. That’s the case now. But what I’ve never seen or read about, as far as I can tell, is where one branch of Congress, particularly the House of Representatives, completely becomes a rubber stamp, enabling party, gives up its prerogatives entirely, completely relinquishes oversight or wanting to be consulted. It used to be that in Washington, power was everything. Don’t step on my toes. Yes, we’re both from the same party. I like you, President Kiriakou. But as Speaker of the House, I’ve got to insist that you check in with me. And now it’s like, “Yes, sir, Mr. President. I’ll do, and I don’t even hear from you. You never call. You never write.” It’s really that part is truly frightening. For students of Nazism, the Enabling Act, when the Reichstag just passed one law that finally said anything that Adolf Hitler proposes is automatically passed. They still met and everything, but it was kind of like under the Roman Empire where the Senate still met, but the emperor had decided everything. It was a dictatorship. That’s where we’re at. Even Republican senators don’t seem to be pushing back real hard.

John Kiriakou: No. If you think they’re welcoming it, look at Lindsey Graham. Could Lindsey Graham be any more of a lap dog than he is? I’m not even sure it’s possible. And 2324 makes a good point. The Democrats are no better. The Democrats are in a state of utter chaos right now. They can’t even decide if they want to endorse Mamdani for mayor of New York. He’s their nominee. Well, they don’t want to. They don’t like the cut of his democratic socialist jib.

Ted Rall: That’s right. But they’re going to, and now the thing is, it’s a bad look. They will as they get closer, but by then, it’s too late. The time to show unity is in advance. Probably better not to do it at all. By the way, shout out to 2324. Thank you very much for the $9.99 donation. We really, really do appreciate it. Well, let’s answer his question. What does happen next with the Democrats? I would have expected by this point, we’d start to see some initial cohesion, but I don’t see it.

John Kiriakou: No. There’s no cohesion at all. I think what’s going to happen, though, they are such a corporatist party at their core that they’re going to go right back into that DLC, middle-of-the-road, tack to the left in the primaries, tack to the right in the general corporate party that they’ve been since Bill Clinton was nominated in 1992. When they went to, what was it? Annapolis or Y River, I think it was at Y. They went to their Democratic off-site in 1992, and they invited the Democratic Leadership Council to present on what became the centrist third way.

Ted Rall: That was the centrist third way that no longer exists. But, basically, it doesn’t need to because they run the whole DNC.

John Kiriakou: The whole party moved to the right. I don’t think it’s going to change. We’re not going to see a Bernie Sanders-like person ever again, particularly as a Democrat.

Ted Rall: No. Mamdani is the only game in town now. We’ll see what happens there. But, I mean, the mayor of New York doesn’t usually go on to anything national of any import. We’re not calling you President Giuliani. But, you know, he could have. I mean, just surprising, but for a variety of reasons, I think it just doesn’t carry over. You know, Carville has an op-ed in today’s New York Times where he talks a little about that. His prediction is that the day after the 2026 midterms, there will be a leader, a front-runner, apparent for the presidency who will effectively become the leader of the Democratic Party, and nothing will really coalesce until there’s that leader.

John Kiriakou: I think he’s living in a fantasy land.

Ted Rall: I think he may be right, but I just don’t know that there is such a leader who can do this. There are eight Democrats out of the desert.

John Kiriakou: There are eight Democrats that have already either set up exploratory committees or traveled to Iowa or New Hampshire for fundraisers.

Ted Rall: Yep. We know the list. I mean, it’s not too early to start shaking the trees for money. Gavin Newsom, Andy Beshear, governor of Kentucky, Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania. Josh Shapiro will not be the nominee. The progressives will just not allow it.

John Kiriakou: You know what, though? On principle, I could or would never vote for someone who has served in a foreign army. I honestly have no idea where his loyalties lie. And if it’s to the IDF, not a chance.

Ted Rall: Yeah. The IDF is a criminal organization. Totally agree.

John Kiriakou: Travis has a very down-in-the-weeds question for me about Phil Mudd. So I knew Phil Mudd very, very well at the CIA. Believe it or not, he used to be a nice guy, a decent guy. He’s a direct descendant of Dr. Mudd, who set John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg after he murdered Abraham Lincoln. And he’s a distant cousin of Roger Mudd, the famed journalist. But Phil, in order to promote his own career, went all in with the torture program. So Phil and I were pals until 2001. And then, without even having exchanged a word, we became enemies to the point where he testified against me in the grand jury. Not that he knew anything about my case. He just wanted to say on the record that I was an asshole. That was it. So I always enjoyed watching Phil fail. He was initially appointed deputy undersecretary of Homeland Security for intelligence under Obama. And I called a couple of friends of mine at the agency who were quiet supporters of mine, and one who was on the Obama transition team, and they yanked his nomination. And he’s not done anything of import since then, except he coauthored a book that was a defense of the torture program, which just made me so happy that his name now will be associated in perpetuity with the torture program. He so deserves it.

And, Reid, I’m sorry. I never had anything to do personally with Leon Panetta, but I published an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times from prison, handwritten on a legal pad, which they gladly ran, saying that Leon Panetta should be in the bunk next to me because he committed espionage. He gave classified briefings over a classified mock-up of the bin Laden compound to Kathryn Bigelow, a Hollywood director, and Mark Boal, a Hollywood writer, for Zero Dark Thirty. And then invited them to the attaboy speech after bin Laden was killed, forgot that they had been invited, and then outed the names of all the SEAL Team Six officers who were responsible for the bin Laden killing, and then said, “Oops. Sorry.” That’s all classified. And then they redacted not just the six names. They redacted 27 lines of his comments because they found out that a whole bunch of other stuff that he said was also classified. And remember, the judge in my case said that the definition of espionage is providing national defense information to any person not entitled to receive it. What he did was the definition of espionage. Insane. Jessica Chastain played—I don’t know. Should I say her name? She played the red-headed devil. I won’t say her name. I’ll probably get in trouble again. And Billy Waugh. Billy died a couple of years ago during COVID, not of COVID. He was well into his nineties, but I did not keep in touch with him after I left the agency. Every once in a while, I would run into a mutual friend. I’d say, “Tell Billy I said hi,” and then Billy would say, “Tell John I said hi.” But that was the end of it. I liked Billy a lot, but Billy kept some dangerous company.

Ted Rall: Shall we talk about ICE? And I also, before I should interject about this case of Luis Leon that, you know, you read a case and some cases make your blood boil. This guy, 82 years old, came to the United States in 1986 under Ronald Reagan. He’d been tortured by the Pinochet regime of Chile, notorious. He got political asylum under a right-wing Republican administration, rightly so. He’s lived here peaceably all these years. He loses his wallet. In his wallet was his green card. So he goes online: “What do I do?” You go to ICE, and you file a form, and we’ll give you a new one. He makes an appointment, shows up, is cuffed immediately, dragged off, and disappeared into the system, into the network of domestic immigration gulags.

John Kiriakou: His family called every morgue, every police station, every hospital.

Ted Rall: Yep. Can’t find him. He’s got a green card. He’s basically a U.S. citizen who can’t vote. That’s what a green card holder is. And the guy’s 82 years old and suffering from all sorts of medical conditions. Well, finally, weeks pass. The family is completely losing their mind. By the way, his wife doesn’t know where he is. And then ICE calls and says, “Yeah, by the way, he died. You can pick up his body in Guatemala.” And to add to the excitement, because never a dull moment, it turns out, “Oh, not dead yet, but he might.” He’s desperately ill in a hospital in Guatemala, and he may or may not make it back. This is ludicrous.

John Kiriakou: That’s kidnapping. It’s kidnapping and torture is what it is. The guy came in.

Ted Rall: It was, yeah. They just swept him up. They don’t even allege that he committed a crime. Like, you did something that justifies us yanking your green card, which, by the way, they don’t have that authority to do anyway. They’re not even making the case. They literally have no basis. Just whoosh. He just did it. This can happen to anybody. It happened to that U.S. army vet. The Intercept has this piece that basically says that ICE is making an enemies list. They’ve hired private contractors to monitor social media feeds to keep track of their critics. Their explanation for this is that ICE officers are supposedly in a lot of danger. They really hate it. And what if something were to happen to one? They’d want to be able to know that maybe it was someone who posted on X, something that was bad that would help them investigate this possible theoretical future threat to these dudes. Of course, obviously, they are hated and reviled, not because they’re enforcing the law, but because of the way they’re behaving, the kinds of things that they’re doing.

I had two cartoonists call me today and say that they’re concerned that they’ve said negative things about ICE in their cartoons and in their social media feeds, and their cartoons appear on social media. And they’re wondering if they need to start thinking about leaving the United States. This is the intention here, clearly, to establish a chilling effect on criticism, because if that were not the case, they wouldn’t announce it. If it was something they just wanted to do for their personal safety, they’d just do it. But why announce it? The announcement is to let you know, “We see you. We’re making a list, and we’re checking it twice, and you’re going to be on that list.” And when we’re done deporting all the foreigners, well, we’re not going to just close shop and say, “Wow, we deported all the illegals. Throw us a party. You’re welcome.” They’re going to expand, and they’re going to turn—they’ve already been expelling green card holders. Just last week, there was this raid on a California cannabis farm where they arrested and tried to deport a U.S. citizen born in the U.S. who is also a U.S. Army vet, 23 years old, who was working at this legal cannabis farm. The dude almost died in custody. He was so badly physically maltreated. And, of course, he’s suing. There are all sorts of allegations of medical abuse in ICE custody. And now there’s this surveillance project, which, you know, is terrifying. It feels a lot like fascism.

John Kiriakou: I think that is fascism. I happen to be in New York. Sorry, I didn’t tell you in advance, but I’ve been swamped. I’m in Queens to finish the photography for my next book, and I went to the grave today of Roy Cohn. And, you know, what a charmer. It’s not really a grave. He’s in a family mausoleum, the Marcus family. And all it says is “Roy Cohn, birth year and death year, lawyer and patriot.” Well, he’s not a lawyer. He is one of the darkest, most hated and hateful figures in modern American history. Jesus. And he would fit in so well in government today. He represented Donald Trump.

Ted Rall: I mean, early on. Roy Cohn and they were buddies. There’s that movie, which I haven’t seen, The Apprentice, about their early relationship and the things that Trump supposedly picked up from Roy Cohn. He was, of course, the scoundrel of the Army-McCarthy hearings.

John Kiriakou: Absolutely. Let me say real quickly, we have a whole bunch of questions. Thank you, Soudan. My book, Remains of the Day, the definitive guide to Washington, D.C.’s historic cemeteries, is supposed to be out next week. It won’t be, and I don’t know why, but it’s ready to come out. The book after that is called Whispers in the Dirt, the definitive guide to New York City’s mafia graves. That’s why I’m unshaven. I’ve been out since eight this morning. I went to five different cemeteries here.

Ted Rall: Oh my god. Forever.

John Kiriakou: Ted, I’m going from one grave to the other. I put it into Waze, and it’s like, “Continue straight for two miles.” In the same cemetery. There are 350,000 people buried in this cemetery.

Ted Rall: They’re a major feature on the map of New York City.

John Kiriakou: It’s crazy. So, anyway, Cohn was also an attorney for a lot of high-level organized crime figures, and I wanted to put him in there too. That’s why I was out. But Cohn made me think, frankly, of Stephen Miller. You guys are mentioning Stephen Miller here. Just between us, I heard last week that one reason I haven’t been pardoned is that I have a Stephen Miller problem. So I’m going to try to work that out so Stephen Miller doesn’t hate who he thinks is John Kiriakou.

Ted Rall: Maybe you shouldn’t say anything bad about him here.

John Kiriakou: Yeah. Right. You get a pass from me on this. Saint John’s Cemetery in Queens has Lucky Luciano, Vito Genovese who’s next to Tommy Lucchese, who’s a hundred feet from Lucky Luciano. And then in the mausoleum is John Gotti, and he’s next to Roy DeMeo, and he’s next to a guy that he shot six times in the head. It’s just nuts.

Ted Rall: I believe it. So do we want to talk any more about ICE, or what do you think?

John Kiriakou: Before you get into it, just as an aside about ICE, I get this hyperlocal newsletter every day at four. It’s called Arlington Now, and it’s for Arlington, Virginia. And they had an article today that there’s this serious feud between the Arlington County Sheriff’s Department and ICE. And my first thought was, “Good. Good for the sheriff’s department.” I voted for this man for sheriff. I don’t even remember his name. Not the woman. She retired. I voted for this Hispanic guy because he was just a low-level sheriff, and he was going to go in and bomb-throw and tear the whole place down. So I click on the article to see what the fight is about. And it says the sheriff’s department is refusing to cooperate with ICE. And so ICE said that they’re going to try to take over the sheriff’s department. I’m like, “Okay. That’s cool.” And then it said the reason why this fight is taking place is that ICE has twice put a hold on this convicted pedophile. And rather than hold him until an ICE officer can get there to deport him to wherever it is in Latin America he’s supposed to be deported to, they just keep letting him go, and he keeps molesting other children. It’s like, “No. That’s not cool.” Stand up to ICE, but not in support of a pedophile. What the heck are you thinking?

Ted Rall: Well, also, I’m not sure, like, I want foreign kids to be molested either. Prosecute him. Hold on to him. Nail him. I mean, nail him here. This is one of those cases where it’s like, yeah, we can keep him here. I don’t know that I necessarily trust returning him, unless it’s to a country that we can believe. So what do you think? I mean, is there going to be political pushback here either in the Democratic Party, in the media, or on the street?

John Kiriakou: There has to be. I’m still kind of chuckling about that woman who voted for Trump in Indiana. She and her husband had that successful steakhouse, apparently the most successful steakhouse in Indianapolis. He came here from Mexico thirty-five years ago, never got legalized, but got married, had kids, has a profitable, successful business, a pillar of the community, and they grabbed him and sent him back to Mexico. And she was crying on the news saying that she voted for Trump because he said he was only going to throw out the bad hombres. And then there was a woman last week. I laughed so hard. I don’t mean to laugh, but she said that she voted for Trump because she wanted to own the libs. But now with the big beautiful bill, she’s going to lose her Medicaid. And what’s she going to do? She can’t afford medical insurance. What, all I wanted to do was own the libs. Like, you moron. There are consequences to our votes.

Ted Rall: This is not really saying that this is a consequence thing, but I’ve always been obsessed with always having my paperwork, particularly both of my passports, up to date. Friends who have nebulous legal status here, because a lot of people have come in and overstayed visas or gotten green cards but never become citizens, I’ve always told them, “You never know in this country how the political winds will shift. You can just ask the Japanese Americans in 1941. It’s always good. If you’re not sure, get yourself regularized. Get as much legal documentation as you can.” Right now, obviously, it’s not going to happen. But when a Democrat comes back in, get that done if you want to stay because you just never know what’s going to happen.

John Kiriakou: You never know. That’s absolutely true. And the situation domestically has become so crazy, stuff that we’ve never seen before. You know, masked ICE kidnappers roaming the streets.

Ted Rall: I’m still waiting for the violence. This is a country full of weapons. It’s like 12 guns for every man, woman, and child. Someone’s going to shoot these ICE guys. And the ICE guys, honestly, it’s not really illegal to resist being kidnapped. If you don’t know who the people are, anybody could dress like that, cruise around in an unmarked car, all masked up, and try to grab with their little fake police outfits. No badge. No ID.

John Kiriakou: You go on YouTube and type in “fake cop,” and you’ll have video after video of people getting pulled over. And it turns out the person being pulled over is a real cop, being pulled over by a fake cop, and then clarity ensues. I love those.

Ted Rall: That’s awesome. I used to tell my ex-wife, we lived in a rural area, and I would tell her, “If you’re in the rural area and you see the red and blue lights behind you, just keep driving until you get to a gas station, someplace that’s well lit. Don’t just pull over on the side of some country road. And if they get mad, they get mad. Whatever. But, you know, anyone with $20 can buy those things and put them on the roof of their car.”

John Kiriakou: Galls.com.

Ted Rall: And I don’t think cops should be driving around in unmarked cars anyway. You don’t need them. Drive around in a police cruiser like a normal person. It’s going to happen. I’m really curious when it happens, how people will respond to that. I don’t know whether they’re going to laugh and be like, “ICE had it coming,” or they’ll be like, “That’s so terrible. They were just enforcing the law.” Or will it just be completely siloed, based on what party affiliation you have?

John Kiriakou: One fun thing I saw in the LA Times the other day is that tow truck drivers are now towing ICE’s cars. So these ICE guys just park anywhere they damn well please, and they get out to raid a restaurant or whatever, and tow trucks are towing their cars away.

Ted Rall: That’s awesome. Is it intentional?

John Kiriakou: Oh, yeah.

Ted Rall: Oh, that’s so great. Keep doing it, guys. Team tow truck all the way. Jay French is asking, “How did Obama manage to deport so many people without making much noise?” Good question. I don’t know the answer to that question. My understanding is that, first of all, he trolled prisons more. So you don’t see that. He was going for undocumented people at prisons, and nobody cares when they’re really bad hombres. And, also, he went to workplaces like Tyson Chicken in Arkansas. Those are in rural areas. So he got away with a lot, man. The violent coordinated Homeland Security raids of the encampments, all on the same morning.

John Kiriakou: Oh, yeah. The Tuesday morning kill list was an Obama invention.

Ted Rall: Yeah. And my personal favorite Obama quote is his term for watching drone killings when someone’s head explodes. He coined it. He called them “squirters.” No, ma’am, we love Barack Obama. He’s the best. He was great. We love him.

John Kiriakou: Wow.

Ted Rall: I think we can probably move on to this bizarre story out of San Jose, California, where, so, Pat Tillman—I have a personal connection here. So Pat Tillman was an Arizona Cardinals player. I thought he was a quarterback, but he was a big deal at the Arizona Cardinals. And in the days after 9/11, he volunteered to serve in Iraq. And then he was ultimately transferred to Afghanistan. He died in Afghanistan. Now, a lot of this, basically, the way this was originally presented in the media at his memorial service, which was led by Senator John McCain of Arizona, and it was nationally televised, it was a big thing. It was kind of like he was our noble patriot hero who gave up a million-dollar career to go and serve his country and fight the terrorists in Afghanistan. That’s how this whole thing was marketed. He was basically marketed like he was a right-wing conservative who saw 9/11 and got pissed and went to Afghanistan. Well, that’s not really what happened. What really happened was that he went to Iraq first. Why did he go to Iraq? Because his brother had previously enlisted, and he thought, “Oh my god, I’m so pissed about this.” He was opposed to the Iraq War. He said it was completely illegal, but he got the idea, maybe from a recruiter, that he could be assigned to the same unit as his brother, with whom he was very close, and could watch his back in combat, and they could be brothers side by side in the same unit. Army recruiters are basically the best part. They told him that. He believed them. He promised their mom, “I’ll take care of Kevin. I’ll go.” And then he went to Iraq, and then they were, of course, assigned to different units. And then he went to Afghanistan, where, ironically, they were in units that served in the same area, but they were never in the same unit. And then we were told that the horrible Al Qaeda terrorists shot Tillman. Actually, that turned out not to be true. That was friendly fire that killed him. So he was killed by his comrades accidentally.

And then when his body was brought back, there was this giant patriotism-off, presenting Pat Tillman as, you know, he gave up his football career to help serve God, country, and George W. Bush. So enter Ted Rall, political cartoonist. None of this information that he’d served in Iraq, that he was a left-winger, that he had gone and met with Noam Chomsky in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that he was violently opposed to the Bush administration, to interventionism, to militarism, and that he was just there to help his brother—none of that’s reported. Nobody knows any of that. I think he’s a right-wing idiot who basically fell for Bush’s lies and bullshit about Iraq and Afghanistan and went there and got used and died like a moron. So I did a cartoon about it. And, basically, it was one of my spate of really controversial cartoons during that time period, and that was one of them. And so the cartoon came out, and all hell broke loose. Anyway, that’s some background.

I got to know—I’m at a cartooning convention in Sacramento, and I get a call from Mary Tillman, the mom. And she’s really cool, and she’s just like, “You know, I was really mad at you and furious at you. But after I calmed down, I decided I wanted to hear from you what you were thinking and what your thoughts were.” And I just told her, “Look, I did a cartoon on the story as it was reported at the time, which turned out to be all lies. If I’d had that information, I wouldn’t have done that cartoon at all. He’s not an idiot. He was a wonderful, smart, compassionate, thoughtful, progressive young man who got killed in the stupidest way you can die in a war, killed by your own men and through no fault of his own. And it’s a fucking tragedy and a nightmare.” And we talked about it, and we got to know each other. I would say we’re friends, and we’ve talked since then. So in today’s news, one of the other brothers of this family, obviously deeply touched by tragedy, drove his car intentionally into the front of a post office in the San Francisco Bay Area. It caught fire, and he’s under arrest. Apparently, he’d been suffering from mental issues for quite some time, and the family is dealing with this. And, you know, it’s just like a reminder that this happened a long time ago. Even I still feel really bad. I don’t feel guilty because you have to have done something wrong to feel guilty, and I didn’t do anything wrong as a political cartoonist, but I feel bad. If I could go back in time, I wouldn’t draw that cartoon at all. I might have drawn a cartoon criticizing Bush and John McCain for being scurrilous dogs, but I didn’t. The whole thing now, this is happening too. What a shit show. And it just shows how long the aftermath of this kind of trauma lasts. Pat Tillman, oh yeah, I know who that is, but it’s been twenty-one years since his death. And it’s still kind of killing them.

John Kiriakou: He was a safety and defensive back. I will tell you something that I have never said publicly before. My grandmother on my mom’s side had four brothers, and all four of them served in the Second World War. And when I was a little kid, my grandmother was not close to her brothers. There was one in particular, Uncle Bill, who lived in the same town. We would see him at family events, the Greek festival, or a dance, or a baptism, or whatever. And my mom always told me not to ever ask Uncle Bill about the war. When I was a little kid, that didn’t really mean anything. But by the time I was 12 or 13, I was very interested in the war because a lot of my friends’ dads had served, or if your dad didn’t, then your grandfather did. So I never approached Uncle Bill. Well, when I finally became an adult, my mom told me a story. This was the reason why she told me I really should stay away from Uncle Bill. Uncle Bill was one of the American soldiers who liberated Dachau Concentration Camp outside of Munich in the closing days of the Second World War. And he never was able to get over what he saw there—piles and piles of bodies and half-burned bodies in the crematoria and people looking like skeletons. Now we call it PTSD. They didn’t have a name for it back then. He gets back from the war and sort of bounces around from job to job. Fast forward to 1953. The war’s been over for eight years. Uncle Bill has had no therapy or mental health care whatsoever. There was nothing like that back then. He somehow gets it into his head in 1953 that Richard Nixon, who had just been elected vice president, promised him a job at the post office in Steubenville, Ohio, where he lived. So Monday morning, Uncle Bill puts on his best suit. He goes down to the post office, and they said, “What are you here for?” He said, “I’m here to start work.” They said, “We don’t know anything about that. You’re not supposed to work here.” And Uncle Bill said, “That damn Nixon, I’m going to make him pay for humiliating me.” Six months later, who happens to come to the civic center to give a speech but Vice President Richard Nixon. And Uncle Bill tried to get into the venue with a .45. And he was arrested and charged with conspiracy to shoot Richard Nixon, and he served five years in prison. What my mom used to say, “There, but for the grace of God, our name could have been Oswald.” Even after all this, he never got any mental health care. And now here we are in 2025. I’ll tell you how Uncle Bill died. He got hit by a train. Like, how can you not see that the train is coming right at you? And my mom said, “Well, I think that was the whole point.” No Walkmans back then.

Ted Rall: I almost got hit by a train. I was listening to that.

John Kiriakou: Got killed by a train. My mom’s best friend’s son got killed by a train. Uncle Bill got killed by a train. Where you and I grew up, Ted, a lot of the crossings don’t have the bars that come down. It’s just, you stop and look both ways and hope there’s not a train coming. So here we are in 2025. Seventy-two years have passed since Uncle Bill was arrested, and we still don’t have adequate mental health care for people who come back from combat.

Ted Rall: I think of that famous incident with General Patton, who slapped a shell-shocked, traumatized soldier and got into a lot of trouble for it because it was reported. He didn’t recover. His command assignments, he never recovered after slapping that soldier. And rightly so, I think. But that was the point of view. And things haven’t really changed. In this case, this is like the brother of the victim, and it’s just horrible. He’s collateral damage. We should probably leave that and check in on Israel. So, basically, 23 countries signed a declaration, mostly European countries, but also Canada. Major countries are demanding an immediate end to hostilities. And, of course, every single day, a dozen or more Palestinians report to a food distribution site in Gaza and are massacred by IDF forces. Every single day. They’re so desperate that they figure, even though it’s incredibly dangerous, “Well, we’re going to die of starvation anyway.” At this point, there’s still all the semantic arguments: Is this genocide or not? If both it is, but people who say it isn’t, my favorite counterarguments are, “Well, they haven’t killed them all.” I’m like, “Well, Hitler didn’t kill them all either.” And also, they’ve issued warnings and tell them to evacuate to other places. Nazi Germany did that too. That’s not really a defense. How much longer is this going to go on before someone who matters makes it stop?

John Kiriakou: Nobody is saying anything. I was looking at the BBC today too, and the BBC was saying that, yes, the Israeli IDF killed another 61 people who were standing in line for food. But there are also children who were reported to have starved to death today, including a four-year-old girl who hadn’t eaten in weeks. She was lucky that she was at least able to get water for a couple of weeks. So, yeah, the only European country that’s really said anything so far is Ireland. Everybody else is just pretending that this isn’t happening.

Ted Rall: I’m hoping France acts quickly because that would be a game-changer. France has tremendous power from its legacy as the dominant diplomatic power. French prestige is massive. So I’m hoping Emmanuel Macron does something to validate his far-left administration, which is wildly unpopular in France. This morning on BBC Radio, I was pleasantly surprised that they interviewed a physician-slash-reporter who’d been on the ground there in a hospital in Gaza for months. And he said in very clear language, “There’s no question that this is an attempt to exterminate the entire population of Gaza and to do complete ethnic cleansing.” He said something, John, that was extremely disturbing. He said that, for the IDF lately, for months, they play games with the injuries. And the BBC asked, “So what do you mean by that?” And he said, “Well, in one day, everyone will come in with a head wound. The next day, everyone comes in with a left leg wound. The day after that, everyone comes in with an abdominal wound.” And she said, “That’s a very serious allegation.” And he’s like, “It’s a fact. It’s documented. I have photos.” And so it’s like, “You think it’s a coincidence?” No. The idea they’re doing this for fun. They’re shooting civilians for fun. And to send a message to troll in this incredibly sinister way. I’m almost 62 years old. I’ve never heard of such a thing. I’ve studied war. I’ve just never heard of such depravity.

John Kiriakou: I don’t even have words. I’m just speechless. These are crimes against humanity, war crimes. They need to be prosecuted just as we had prosecutions at Nuremberg.

Ted Rall: Let’s get real. If Israel was not a U.S. ally and this was going on and the president of the United States got word this horrible situation is happening over in this country, there would be tremendous pressure. We have to lead an international invasion force. We would either do it ourselves or we’d go to the UN and say, “We’re going in as an international community. This is a Rwandan-style genocide. We’re putting a stop to it right here and now.” Am I wrong?

John Kiriakou: No. It is a Rwandan-style genocide. I was outraged when I heard that Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons were not allowed to speak, but they were also not allowed to walk. They had to go from point A to point B on their hands and knees for months at a time, and they’re just destroying their legs, being forced to do so. It’s just sick the way the Israelis are treating people. Criminal.

Ted Rall: I went with an open mind the first time I went to Israel. And when I saw the checkpoints and the way that people are treated, you can’t possibly think it’s anything but apartheid.

John Kiriakou: It just is. I think I told you my mom, back in 2008, my dad had been dead a few years, and she was lonely and bored, and she wanted to take a trip. So she called me and said, “Hey, I think I’m going to take a trip to Ireland with NPR. They’ve been advertising this group.” And I was like, “Mom, it’s February. Why do you want to go to Ireland in February? It’s going to be freezing and just pouring down rain the whole time.” And I said, “My church is planning a trip to Israel. You should go to Israel. You know everybody.” So she and my sister went to Israel for the first time. My mom never paid attention to current events or the news or anything. She would always say, “Oh, I’ve been busy raising three kids. I didn’t have time for the news.” So she comes home and says to me, “Did you have any idea how they treat the Palestinians out there?” And I was like, “Of course, I did.” And she didn’t. And for months afterwards, she would talk about how their driver, who was a Palestinian Greek Orthodox guy, was humiliated at every checkpoint, not allowed in certain hotels, not allowed across certain dividing lines. They would have to get out of their little van and walk the rest of the way just because he was Palestinian. And I said, “Yeah. And multiply that times the millions of Palestinians who live in Israel. It’s criminal.”

Ted Rall: Question Everything just posted that. I guess this is probably a quote from a story. I hope. “Heads day, legs day, testicles day, heart day. The IDF sniper’s sport includes certain targets for certain days.”

John Kiriakou: I saw the spitting. They spit on a bunch of Greek Orthodox people going into a church.

Ted Rall: They just destroyed Pope Francis’s favorite church, a very historic one, hundreds of years old, bombed it. I mean, come on. They knew where it was.

John Kiriakou: But, Ted, they did say they would investigate. They would carry out an investigation.

Ted Rall: They’re so good at that. I’m still waiting to hear, you know, they have so many investigations that they owe. We’re probably going to see those Epstein files before we see the results of those Israeli investigations. Guaranteed. They’re sons of bitches. What can I say? Alright. So, let’s see. Should we put this up? Abby Martin mentioned on Rogan that most of the IDF is kids from Jersey and the Philly suburbs. Ironically, many of the kids from Philly and Jersey over there are also Palestinian. So it’s basically like Jersey-on-Jersey violence. Seriously.

John Kiriakou: Time was when they could just settle it on the football field.

Ted Rall: That would have been better.

John Kiriakou: Awful.

Ted Rall: Well, John, I think I ended up on a depressing note here, but we gotta do that. So thanks, everyone, for joining us. Please like, follow, and share the show. We really appreciate the tremendous support you guys are giving us. Just keep it coming. Love you guys. We are here Monday, Wednesday, Friday, which means we will be back Wednesday, 5 PM here on YouTube and Rumble live. Obviously, not everyone’s available then. So if you’re watching us in streaming, we appreciate you as well. We also have an audio version of this. So for you guys, we’ve seen the numbers tick up recently. For people who are just listening, thank you so much for doing that, and thanks for enjoying the show. Thank you, I’m Ted Rall,. That’s John Kiriakou. Have a great night, and see you Wednesday.

John Kiriakou: Bye-bye.

 

 

Transcript: The TMI Show – “The Great Population Collapse”

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Ted Rall

The following is a transcript of a bonus Rumble Premium episode for Monday, July 21, 2025, of The TMI Show with Ted Rall and Robby West filling for Manila Chan. Transcription provided by AI so there may be errors.

Ted Rall: Hey there. Thanks for joining us. You’re watching a Rumble Premium edition of The TMI Show with Ted Rall and Manila Chan. I’m Ted Rall, the “T” in TMI. Today, it should be the TRI show because that’s Robby West, our producer. If you watch the show, you’re already very familiar with Robby. Robby’s filling in for Manila for this premium edition. Right before this, I sent an interesting story from Bloomberg over to Robby. I know that he, like me, is interested in demographics and population flows. One of the topics on The TMI Show that generates the most controversy is the issue of immigration, particularly into and out of the United States. One of the justifications often given by proponents of increased immigration to the United States is that we have a declining fertility rate. The average female has 0.7 children, which is not enough to replace the population that naturally dies off. Basically, a female should give birth to at least 1.1 children to maintain the population. If the fertility rate goes higher than that, as in a country like Bangladesh, which has a much higher fertility rate, the population should increase.

People who support migration, legal or illegal, often say, “Listen, the country’s population will collapse.” Since we rely so much on consumer spending for our economy, we need to allow immigrants to come into the United States to fill that gap because we don’t produce enough babies. Bloomberg has this really interesting projection, reviewing a book by economists Dean Spears and Michael Geruso called After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People. In this book, they use existing data to project something that Thomas Malthus probably never thought would happen: global population, after increasing exponentially for centuries, especially in the twentieth century, will start to shrink and continue to shrink, potentially disappearing entirely. According to this projection, this will happen relatively quickly.

According to the UN, the global population will peak at just over 10 billion. We’re at about 8.2 billion now, and it should peak at about 10.3 billion in the year 2085, then start to drop precipitously. In the 2100s, also known as the 22nd century, the population will begin to ebb. By the year 2130, it will be at 9.4 billion, down from 10.3 billion at its peak. By 2160, it will be down to 8.2 billion. You might think, “Okay, that’s not a huge collapse.” But by 2200, we’re at 6.5 billion. To put that into perspective, that’s where we were in 2005. By the year 2250, we’re at 4.7 billion. That’s comparable to where we were in 1980. By the year 2300, I don’t think anyone watching here, even you Gen Zers, will be around for that. The population of the Earth will have declined by two-thirds to 3.3 billion people. To put that into perspective, the last time we saw a global population at that level was 1965. Fertility decline will create all sorts of pressure on our current economic models. I don’t say economic system because you could develop a different model that might work better with a declining population. With our current model, based on expansion, you need an improvement in GDP in the United States by at least 2 to 3% annually. Otherwise, you start to plunge into recession or even depression. You can get some improvements in GDP from improved productivity, but you can’t rely solely on that because productivity and technology don’t increase linearly. Progress happens in leaps and bounds. What do you do in between major disruptive innovations like the invention of the internet, the automobile, or internal combustion? These authors do not believe that solutions like a guaranteed universal basic income, as proposed by Andrew Yang or Elon Musk’s universal high income, will work. They say you can’t really force people to have more children than they want. Sure, you can. Alright, let’s start with that. Let’s dive into natalism, which has never been a significant part of mainstream American politics but is now seeing its moment in the sun, as much of the MAGA world has embraced it. Robby, bring us into that.

Robby West: If you want to fix this problem, it’s the easiest problem in the world to fix. You ban birth control. Seriously, that’s how you fix the problem. This is a problem of our own making. If you want to dive into population collapse, let’s first define what it is. The population is imploding in East Asia, like South Korea and Japan. They had fewer births than deaths last year for the first time, as did Western Europe and North America. What do all those countries have in common? Birth control, promoting the idea of living your best life, marrying your job instead of a spouse, and not having kids. That’s what it all boils down to.

Ted Rall: There are other factors too, right? People are getting married later, often because they feel they can’t afford to get married when they’re younger. It’s harder to get started, buy a home, or afford a car. When they do get married, couples have fewer children for the same reasons.

Robby West: I completely agree. Those are problems we can fix. This isn’t some biological factor.

Ted Rall: Let’s back up to this idea, though. Setting aside the ethics, I’m not sure if it would practically work. When the world’s population was a small fraction of what it is today, they didn’t have birth control. They were pulling out, as they call it in the Bible.

Robby West: Well, yes, but they also didn’t have antibiotics. Pandemics like the Black Death, which today a shot of penicillin could fix, wiped out half the population.

Ted Rall: Human beings know how to avoid having children without chemical birth control.

Robby West: That’s true, but this is the first time since the 1960s that it’s been industrialized on this scale. Both things can be true at the same time. It’s a societal issue. Governments don’t want people getting married and having kids younger.

Robby West: younger because if a parent, typically the woman, stays home raising kids, you can’t tax her for that. How are you going to fund your wars or social programs? You need both people working. So how do you address this problem? You import the third world to replace your domestic population, creating ready-made tax cattle until you don’t. The Romans tried this. Why isn’t anyone speaking Latin anymore? Because it doesn’t work. It’s suicidal on a global scale. If you look at Sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia, like Bangladesh, they aren’t having a birth rate problem. They’re producing babies. There’s a reason for this. This is a problem happening in the industrialized West.

Ted Rall: Traditionally, countries like Bangladesh or Pakistan, which Bangladesh was once part of, are very agricultural. Each baby becomes a potential worker in the fields, helping subsistence farmers. Agrarian societies tend to have higher populations than urban societies.

Robby West: That’s my point. Also, with the advent of AI optimization, you don’t need as many people to do these jobs because most of them won’t exist anymore. At the grocery store, self-checkout is a thing. I saw something yesterday about movie theaters in some countries where robots, not employees, dispense popcorn. Those jobs are going away. Thirty years from now, will truck drivers or taxi drivers still exist? With self-driving cars, all those jobs disappear. Do you need as many people doing those jobs? The answer is no.

Ted Rall: You’re a student of history like I am, Robby. Disruptive technologies have always been viewed as job killers. Capitalists overstate the case that they’re also job creators. There’s no doubt that these technologies free people up to start new lines of business that nikt thought of before. The automobile was insanely disruptive, eliminating the horse industry, which was massive—shoeing, maintenance, storage, sales. Years ago, I was walking through Times Square in New York, one of the busiest urban places in the world, and a demolished building revealed an old ad from the 1800s painted on the side for horse shoeing and storage. I learned that Times Square, before the New York Times opened its offices there, was a hub for the horse industry in New York City, where people took their horses to be groomed or stabled. That was a whole industry, gone because of the automobile. But the car also created demand for road building, auto maintenance, and so on. With AI and disruptive technologies like self-driving cars, you’ll need workers to handle those systems, like the equivalent of air traffic control for highways and roads.

Robby West: It will all be AI. The technology already exists. For my own podcast, I looked into how China, once a major agrarian civilization, now has more people moving to cities. Who’s farming to feed 1.5 billion people? Robots, using GPS maps on the fields. The reason so many former Chinese peasants are in cities now is because those jobs no longer exist.

Ted Rall: Quite frankly, being a peasant in rural China isn’t much fun.

Robby West: It’s not. So to your point, it frees up more time for you to do something else, but also the civilization doesn’t collapse because they’ve got machines doing the work. It’s part of the problem.

Ted Rall: Those machines have to be programmed and maintained. For example, AI might handle ground traffic control or air traffic control for cars, but someone has to program it and maintain it.

Robby West: I agree. And you know who that someone is? It’s AI more and more. There are factories and repair shops in China where robots repair other robots. No human touches them. That’s for the future.

Ted Rall: But that requires the construction of a lot of energy infrastructure because AI is very energy-intensive. People need to run those plants. More people need to mine the coal. I’m saying we don’t know. Overall, it’s probably a job killer, almost certainly. But how it plays out exactly, we don’t really know.

Robby West: I completely agree. But as far as population collapse goes, it’s only happening in developed, high-IQ societies where, for whatever reason, people have decided—and we know the reason—economic pressures. Our governments have decided—

Ted Rall: National interest. Say high educational attainment because those are not the same thing.

Robby West: Potentially. If you look at the average IQ of, say, South Korea or Japan, it’s higher than, say, Kenya. That’s not a racist thing to say; it’s a statement of fact. So you have to ask yourself why less sophisticated civilizations—so as not to offend people—have more babies. They’re peasants, and they produce a ton of babies. Then what do you do with the babies? You export them to Europe and the West.

Ted Rall: That’s what’s been happening.

Robby West: Exactly. And then you have an increase in crime. When these jobs are automated away, as the French are finding out now, what do you do with all these unassimilated people who don’t want to be part of your culture? The Germans had a pretty good answer for what to do with people you no longer want or need. I’d rather not have that happen again.

Ted Rall: No, we don’t need a final solution, to put it bluntly. So let’s talk about the implications here. With our current economic models, this is a bad thing. But does it have to be? We’re looking at a future where, by 2300, there will be only about a third to a quarter as many people on Earth as there are today. To many ecologists and environmentalists, this sounds like a good thing—less strain on the climate, less pollution, less garbage, and an easier impact on the Earth with a lower population. Not long ago, we had these population levels, and nobody thought it was a catastrophe. Now, suddenly, it’s considered bad. Is it inherently a bad thing under the existing capitalist system? And would socialism address these problems by having a state-run economy that could plan ahead for these changes?

Robby West: I think a couple of things will happen. We have no idea what data these people are drawing on to make this forecast. The biggest population collapse I can think of in history happened with the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The population collapsed. When Belisarius tried to liberate Rome, he had an army of only 5,000 men because that’s all he could get. There simply weren’t enough people.

Ted Rall: There had been plagues at that time.

Robby West: Yes, the plague came after that. My point is that the social order collapses. People lived in squalor, so it’s not surprising.

Ted Rall: People lived in squalor. It’s not surprising.

Robby West: I completely agree. My question is, assuming we have a financial collapse—and I think we’re heading toward one—and you import 100 million people with nothing for them to do, resources become scarce. What do people tend to do? They go tribal and start going medieval on each other. That probably plays into it too. From a global standpoint, I’m trying to make sense of this.

Ted Rall: The other big population collapse we’ve discussed is the bubonic plague, which came in waves. People might not realize that it devastated not just Europe but Asia and Africa. The Silk Road, Central Asia, and the Middle East were the center of the world during the Middle Ages. Europe was a backwater. All the learning, politics, and economic and military expansion were happening in places like modern-day Uzbekistan.

Robby West: Yes, and in Iran, Baghdad was the literary capital until the Mongols turned it into rubble because, with horse archers, reading isn’t important. My point is, if the US economy implodes and resources become scarce, what happens?

Ted Rall: You’re talking about a global issue, though.

Robby West: For sure. The United States is one of the leading food exporters on the planet. If those exports stop, what happens to overpopulated places in Southern Africa with no food? The population collapse might help address that problem. I’m wondering if the authors of this paper are considering these scenarios. What triggers it? I didn’t have time to do a deep study before we went live, but from what I scanned, they weren’t putting much causation into their forecast—just projecting numbers. Using my busy brain, I’m wondering how they get there. Either you have war, economic collapse and war, or a total global societal collapse like Rome or the Black Death. That’s how you get there. If you talk to a typical MAGA person like me—though I’m not a Republican—the quick solution is to ban birth control and start making babies. But that doesn’t address the societal or governmental problems preventing Western or East Asian families from having babies to begin with.

Ted Rall: The argument in the book by Spears and Geruso is that the population will fall, it will be harmful in many ways, and it will come too late to save us from climate change. We don’t have a clue what to do about it. Is this like when you’re a kid and learn the sun will go red giant, boil the oceans, and scorch the Earth in five billion years, but you don’t care because it’s so far off? Is it like that?

Robby West: Or, from my Christian view, God will take care of it well before that happens. Either way, we won’t be here. Hopefully, Elon Musk is onto something, and his progeny can colonize another planet. You’d need a new solar system, though.

Ted Rall: Colonizing Mars won’t help. The universe is so vast that physics makes travel difficult.

Robby West: That’s also part of the population change problem. In highly educated, high-IQ societies, if you’re aborting your babies, you could be killing the scientist who unlocks future solutions.

Ted Rall: That’s an interesting point. The authors say more people mean more ideas and bigger markets, allowing governments and companies to spend more on R&D. A shrinking world means fewer people, fewer ideas, and more problems, like less research for rare diseases. I see the argument—it’s like the case for cities. Historically, cities with millions of people are hubs of technological and educational innovation, more so than small rural communities. They foster a culture of cross-fertilization of different cultures, which you may not favor since you support reduced immigration. When different kinds of people meet, innovation happens.

Robby West: At least for now, until we fix our own house. If your house is on fire, it’s not a good idea to help your neighbor paint their walls. Take care of your place first.

Ted Rall: We can agree the house feels like it’s on fire, but we don’t agree on the cause. I think it’s capitalism.

Robby West: I’ve read your book. Both political parties benefit from it. It drives down wages, and Democrats get a new voter base without arguing for ideas, which is expensive and tiresome. They just import the third world and say, “I’ll protect you from Orange Hitler who wants to deport you and your family. Vote for me.” Republicans agree, play the game, and drive down wages. Everybody wins until society implodes. What happens then?

Ted Rall: You can tell a society’s or political system’s base values when opposing forces like Democrats and Republicans agree on certain assumptions. Those assumptions are what the system is based on. A crisis arises when the system’s values clash with the people’s values. I think most Americans—Democrats, Republicans, Independents, lefties, righties—agree the most important thing is to ensure as many Americans as possible live as well as possible.

Robby West: A hundred percent. The parties are a death cult. We’re talking about a global population decline—death on a mass scale, no babies to replace those dying from disease, war, or accidents. I submit this is by design because we’re governed by people who get off on death. It gives them a sense of power. Look at Ukraine—over a million dead, 7 million left, never to return. In Gaza, American taxpayers are funding a genocide, with at least 100,000 killed, over half under 18. In our country, it’s “live your best life, don’t get married, use birth control, screw as many people as you want, free of consequences.” Then you’re 40, want a family, but have no eggs left. A healthy society would value life, have a growth rate, and people would be happy having babies.

Ted Rall: Historically, happy societies have more babies. The baby boom ended nine months after the Kennedy assassination. Americans became miserable after Kennedy died, even though the economy was still good and Vietnam wasn’t yet a problem. They just decided to become miserable.

Robby West: Feminism played a big part in that. The counterculture said you can be a strong, independent, career-minded woman, master of your own ship. The problem is, women have a cutoff date for having kids, unlike men. That’s not my problem or yours—it’s biology.

Ted Rall: It’s a little fuzzier with IVF and egg storage. Some Silicon Valley companies offer egg storage as a benefit so women can work 20 hours a day without making that decision.

Robby West: Think about how soulless that job must be to make you do that. You’re married to a thankless company that dissuades you from taking time off, let alone getting married or having kids. It’s a death cult, killing the West.

Ted Rall: I took a feminism class at Columbia with Barbara Tishler, who wrote books on feminism. In 1991, she highlighted the negative ramifications society hadn’t contended with. Capitalism benefited when women entered the workforce in huge numbers, increasing labor supply and causing wages to fall off a cliff. That’s why wages froze in the 1960s and dropped in real terms after 1970, and we’ve never recovered. It’s not that women shouldn’t work, but it’s had consequences, like the boy problem.

Robby West: It also led to the immigration problem. Without enough kids, you don’t have workers, so you import the third world. It’s insane.

Ted Rall: I know rich people who don’t raise their own kids because they work long hours. They hire upscale nannies, who then hire lower-wage nannies or relatives to raise their own kids. It’s messed up.

Robby West: It is. The way to fix it is to kill feminism—drive a stake through its heart.

Ted Rall: What does a post-feminist society look like?

Robby West: You go back to the last 5,000 years of human history. You marry a man, have a ton of babies, honor and love your wife, provide for her and your kids. That’s how you get the baby boom back. After World War II, during the baby boom, America was largely a Christian nation with Christian values. Was it perfect?

Ted Rall: There’s a lot to what you say. Studies show sexless marriages are a cliché. People say, “If your wife isn’t putting out, take out the trash or help with the kids.” But studies show traditional setups, where the mother bears most child-rearing responsibilities, lead to more sex.

Robby West: Women have mammary glands—that’s how God designed it. If you’ve got the milk jugs, you take care of the babies. That’s established.

Ted Rall: What about the complaints that gave rise to feminism? Women’s intellectual and economic contributions were often dismissed, to society’s detriment. I wouldn’t want a society where Marie Curie couldn’t work or Simone de Beauvoir couldn’t write.

Robby West: It’s not perfect. But the society we have now, the one being critiqued, is worse. We’re talking about mass die-off and destruction of nations. The traditional system is better.

Ted Rall: But we’re pulling on a string, and things are unraveling. That structure doesn’t work with the nuclear family. I went on a genealogy tour in France, looking at church records from 1630. Every card listed the mother and father’s occupations—the mother had none, and the father was always a farmer, passing the farm to his son for centuries. Everything stayed the same until World War I, when the car and railroads disrupted everything. People left villages for factories, never to return. My great-grandfather died at 30 in the trenches, leaving his family in poverty. In 1848, the community would have rallied, but the proto-nuclear family model left them destitute. That would happen today unless we restore multigenerational families.

Robby West: You need a UBI. More and more jobs are going away. In 100 years, you won’t have talking heads like us—it’ll be AI avatars. It’s already happening on YouTube. Your truck’s motor dies, you pay a mechanic. In an automated society, your self-driving truck goes to a self-repair facility with robot-made parts, no human hands involved. The entire economic model will change. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations ushered in the modern financial era, but we’re heading toward a paradigm shift where current rules don’t apply. What does GDP mean if only 10% of the population works?

Ted Rall: The worker participation rate in the US is about 64%. One in three Americans isn’t involved, subsisting on disability payments. Yet the economy is doing great—they don’t need us.

Robby West: They don’t. That’s why I think those in DC don’t care about our opinions—they don’t need us. Why is Trump protecting the pedophile cabal in DC? They don’t need us.

Ted Rall: That’s why I found Bernie Sanders’ small-donor model promising. He was getting $29 per person from working-class people. Tulsi Gabbard was similar until the DNC changed the rules.

Robby West: The rules keep changing until it’s unsustainable. That’s where we are. People don’t understand. I could be wrong—I’m just a hick from nowhere, no degree, but I think a lot. We’re heading to a world where existing models don’t matter. GDP doesn’t matter if people don’t matter.

Ted Rall: We’re entering a period of tremendous changes, and the system seems unable or unwilling to address them intelligently. History shows societies that fail to respond collapse or, if lucky, face a revolution like the French one.

Robby West: The Chinese call this the mandate of heaven. When a dynasty becomes so decadent the people overthrow it, it loses legitimacy.

Ted Rall: That’s what popular legitimacy is—a rough Western equivalent. When a society fails to adjust, like Rome with overexpansion or the Soviet Union with external capitalism, collapse is inevitable.

Robby West: If you were in ancient Italy, you’d see the writing on the wall but could only keep your family alive. Here in Western Montana, I hear people from rural areas. New York City, once a great city, now feels like an oversized slum. Why? You can’t build a new subway system like Moscow’s or even repair what you have.

Ted Rall: It would be too expensive. The system wasn’t designed for today’s flash flooding.

Robby West: If this happened in Singapore, could they fix it? Yes. Which city has more mass immigration? New York. If you prioritize building and maintaining your society instead of exploiting the native population until they leave, there’s a problem. The fall of Rome was caused by the Third Punic War, importing half a million slaves and destroying the Republic’s foundation.

Ted Rall: Hadrian and Diocletian staved off Rome’s fall with reforms. Do you think the US and the West have a Hadrian in us?

Robby West: No. As a Christian, I believe we’re cursed by God for embracing things He hates, like the wholesale slaughter of innocents. Even if there’s no God, aborting your future workforce is a bad idea.

Ted Rall: If abortion and birth control were unavailable, young people would be more careful to avoid pregnancy. Does reproductive freedom make people feel they can have sex without worrying, or does it lead to a mindset of avoiding kids altogether?

Robby West: If I had my way, we’d have a baby boom because women would get pregnant. That’s a fact of life. If you don’t want to get pregnant, don’t have sex or use old methods. To prevent a population bust, remove what’s killing future generations. It depends on what’s most important to your society. I want to be a grandfather, to torture my grandkids with ice down their shirts. That’s human.

Ted Rall: Sure, for me too.

Robby West: The current system celebrates sterilizing kids for trans rights or killing them for convenience. That’s anti-human, satanic.

Ted Rall: Would banning abortion and birth control lead to a lower birth rate if people are more careful?

Robby West: No, people will keep having sex and will have to be more responsible. Women bear the higher risk.

Ted Rall: In the UK, early DNA testing in the 1950s and 60s showed half the fathers weren’t the biological dads. The tests were accurate—English women were unfaithful, likely more careful when cheating. If the goal is more babies, does it matter who the father is?

Robby West: That’s my point. The study addresses a global population decrease, and I’m giving the solution.

Ted Rall: But my lefty female friends are horrified by natalism. They feel it turns women into chattel, existing only to bear kids without agency, like The Handmaid’s Tale.

Robby West: Mother Nature did that. You have a womb, uterus, ovaries, vagina—that’s not my fault. Blame God or nature.

Ted Rall: But we have better living through technology.

Robby West: If you’re a radical feminist and don’t want kids, don’t have sex. Problem solved. Demographics is destiny. My argument will win because the death cult will die out.

Ted Rall: Alright, Robby, we’ll leave it there. Thank you for filling in for Nella and for a great conversation.

Robby West: It was interesting. Can you point out any holes in my argument? Where am I wrong?

Ted Rall: There’s an ethical concern about men manipulating women into doing their bidding.

Robby West: And?

Ted Rall: With that, before you get into more trouble with the feminists watching, this has been a Rumble Premium edition of The TMI Show. We air Monday through Friday, 10 AM Eastern Time, on Rumble and YouTube, but we also stream many times, so don’t feel obligated to watch us live. If you do watch live, you can send questions and comments, and we respond throughout the show. We really appreciate you and your donations. Please like, follow, and share the show. Tell your friends about us. Take care, and thanks for listening.

DMZ America Podcast Ep 211 for Sunday, July 20, 2025: Transcript

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Ted Rall

Generated with AI. There will be errors.

Ted Rall: Happy Sunday. I hope you are having a great weekend. You are watching the DMZ America podcast. I am editorial cartoonist Ted Rall, coming to you from the left.

Scott Stantis: I am editorial cartoonist Scott Stantis, coming to you from the right. We are here right now, right here in America. Our president has remarkably fat ankles.

Ted Rall: Do you know where your god is? I suppose that if you attended mass this morning, you do know where your god is. Perhaps you are still there. If you are one of those Protestants with your lengthy services, that is the worst thing about the Reformation. Today, we are going to discuss the Biden gate issue. Yes, it has evolved into an autopen controversy. We will address Russiagate next. Then we will talk about Stephen Colbert. Is it truly about money, or is it genuinely about politics? We are going to explore the budget cuts to NPR and PBS public broadcasting. That constitutes a full agenda. If you are watching on YouTube, or also if you are on Rumble, please feel free to contribute questions and comments, and we will attempt to respond to you. We can certainly display them on the screen on YouTube, and we can try to read them from Rumble. If you have a question that you want Scott, myself, or both of us to address, please feel free to ask. So, alright, let us begin with the autopen topic.

Scott Stantis: Oh my goodness, Ted, what a story. Ted, please go ahead.

Ted Rall: Well, basically, there is currently a partisan investigation underway, but there would not be any investigation at all if the Democrats were still in power. That is simply the nature of these matters. The party in power punishes the party that was previously in power for their past crimes. Since we do not have a divided government, that is what is occurring now. Anthony Bernal, deputy chief of staff under Biden, and Annie Tomasini, who were both part of what Jake Tapper’s book and other administration insiders called the Politburo under Biden, which is essentially a cabal of five to seven individuals—

Scott Stantis: White. They did not use the word in a positive sense.

Ted Rall: That is correct. These individuals surrounded the president, protected him, and covered for him. To some extent, they were running the United States of America on his behalf. Anyway, they all appeared before the House Oversight Committee, where they were questioned about Biden’s physical and mental health. Rather than answer any questions, the doctor, who is Biden’s physician and not considered a highly regarded doctor, first pleaded doctor-patient confidentiality. That is reasonably fair on its face, except that the former president could have chosen to allow the release of this information about himself. However, he decided not to do so. Then he also invoked the fifth amendment. Scott, the fifth amendment of the U.S. Constitution protects us from self-incrimination. If a police officer pulls you over and asks, “Hey, did you rob that bank?” you do not have to answer. The only exception is in an FBI federal investigation, where you could—

Scott Stantis: The fifth amendment. I am fairly certain you can plead the fifth there too, but you must explicitly state, “I plead the fifth.”

Ted Rall: Okay, I suppose so. Yes, you cannot just refuse to answer vaguely. With a police officer, you could refuse to answer and simply say, “Get lost.” But okay, let us proceed. There is no law against what these individuals are accused of doing. Right? I mean, these people were running interference, protecting the president, and concealing the fact that he was mentally ill, declining, demented—however you choose to describe it—and physically incapable.

Scott Stantis: All of the above.

Ted Rall: All of the above, which you and I have discussed since he was running for president in the primaries, both here on the podcast and elsewhere in our cartoons. We will not revisit the fact that we were repeatedly ridiculed, lambasted, marginalized, and otherwise treated poorly over this. We have forgiven all of you. If you hear a flamethrower, Joan, it is not mine. So yes, the point is that in your rearview mirror, flamethrowers in the mirror may be closer than they appear. So, I mean, there is no law, right? Do you think there is one? What are they afraid of? Are they merely contemptuous of the process, or do they genuinely believe they are in legal jeopardy?

Scott Stantis: You know, Ted, I must be honest. Perhaps on the next podcast, we should invite our friend Ricardo Aparicio, who is a lawyer. Although he is not technically an institutional lawyer, he is deeply interested in that field and has recently been admitted to the Supreme Court Bar. He is probably better equipped to handle the legal intricacies of this matter. Was there an existing law that they broke by committing what amounts to a coup d’etat? Did you see or hear about this? By the way, he did not say it in front of a camera, which is telling. Joe Biden, the former president of the United States—or so they tell him—did you hear his comment? He said, “I authorized all the signatures.” There are, like, what? How many of them? Thousands of—

Ted Rall: Them? There are 27,000.

Scott Stantis: Yes, that is nonsense. You have to call nonsense when it is nonsense, and that is the White House—

Ted Rall: Counsel’s office has ordered the National Archives to produce 27,000 documents signed by Biden, many of them by autopen. Previous presidents from both parties have used the autopen. Normally, correct me if I am wrong, Scott, but my understanding is that the typical use of this device is when the president is away from the White House or in a location where a document arrives and cannot be handled immediately. In many cases, a document can obviously be sent by email or fax to wherever the president is. However, in some instances, it cannot, or there is an urgent need to act quickly.

Scott Stantis: Or to a small extent. Let us say it is an orb, Ted, to be energetic. It could be a proclamation declaring, for example, National Asphalt Day. He does not need to sign it. He does not need to sign it. It is not important enough.

Ted Rall: It is not important enough. That is correct. So, basically, yes, good point. However, these documents are signed by a machine. If you do not know what an autopen is, it is essentially a device used back in the old days, before email, when you sent a letter to the White House and received a response from the president that was autopen-signed. For instance, the president and the first lady might write, “Thank you for your letter and your support. You are awesome, Joe Biden.” He obviously used this when he was in Delaware, calling to say, “Yes, go ahead and sign that for me.” However, it appears to have been used extensively—or I should say, it was used extensively. The numbers come from the House.

Scott Stantis: Well, well over 90% of all the documents were—

Ted Rall: Signed, including bills, policy statements, and executive orders.

Scott Stantis: Pardons. However, the most disturbing aspect is the pardons because there were a large number of them, and he did not sign many of them himself.

Ted Rall: Even by his own admission, he knew there was a category of people he approved for pardoning, but this is not a broad category. For example, when Jimmy Carter first became president in 1977, one of his initial acts was to pardon the Vietnam draft dodgers who had fled to Canada and other places. He issued a proclamation stating that they were all pardoned. If you avoided the Vietnam War, there was no problem. It was clearly defined, and there was no confusion about who was covered. That is not quite the case here. Basically, it reminds me of the Herb Block Foundation, a cartooning institution funded by the late cartoonist Herb Block. Herb was not very specific about defining the terms for the foundation’s end, which was funded with about $50 million. He simply said to do things that support cartooning, which he would have liked. That is subject to considerable interpretation. Similarly, Joe Biden was somewhat vague, saying to pardon people he would have wanted to see pardoned. That grants significant latitude regarding important matters that he delegated to his aides. Now, there is a question of whether these people should have been pardoned. Additionally, there is a constitutional question about whether these autopen-related, autopen-signed documents are valid. I have been researching this topic.

Scott Stantis: Oh, and what do you think? What is your conclusion?

Ted Rall: It appears that they are valid. It is not that they should not be; it does not make sense otherwise. Lawmakers do not always anticipate every scenario. If they had, we would not need to enact new laws.

Scott Stantis: You know—

Ted Rall: I think about the man in Germany who placed an advertisement on the internet saying, “Come to my house, and I will kill and eat you.” Even under German law, that action was not illegal at the time. Consequently, they had to pass a law. Oh, people do that? Okay, we will address it. Apparently, no one considered this possibility because it traces back to monarchy, where the king, the sovereign, signs a document, thereby giving it the power of law. Americans have inherited that system. Thus, when the president, governor, mayor, or other official signs a document, it becomes enforceable. The autopen was introduced and deemed enforceable by policymakers. The issue is that if it is executed with the will of the sovereign—in this case, the president—it is acceptable, I suppose. However, no one ever envisioned a situation like this, reminiscent of “Weekend at Bernie’s,” where the president is not fully competent. Then, aides like Ted and Scott might declare a national cartoonists’ day and plan to erect a giant statue of my cat, Clovis, on the Washington Mall.

Scott Stantis: That would be cool, but I understand.

Ted Rall: Just because. I mean, it seems that no one anticipated this could happen to anyone, but it appears to be what has occurred over the last four years.

Scott Stantis: Yes, clearly, that is what happened. You and I were complaining, protesting, and drawing about this very issue, asserting that it was a coup d’etat. This is the very definition of a coup d’etat, and they certainly carried it out. Now, documentation is emerging that Joe Biden did not know what he was signing, or that documents were signed on his behalf. They claim he always approved all the signings. However, the man did not even know that underwear goes under pants on some days—you could tell. So, do not tell me he was aware of every signature on every document. Granted, you and I both understand that this job involves sending letters back to schools or classes in Ohio, saying, “Hey, thank you for writing. I hope you continue to be interested in civics. Love, President Biden,” and it is signed. The children are thrilled, everyone is excited, but it is not his actual signature. I think it would be interesting. I wanted to backtrack on two points you mentioned. First and foremost, the hearings: you and I both called for them, but we also knew they would quickly devolve into the nonsense they have already become, which is highly partisan. It would have been wonderful if someone on the Republican side had said, “Can we act like adults for once and try?” Because this is too important to behave like fools. Well, no. So, the other thing—

Ted Rall: Is this administration doing that in any respect?

Scott Stantis: No, absolutely not. Not the administration, but this is Congress.

Ted Rall: It is the same thing now.

Scott Stantis: You are correct; it also involves the Justice Department. However, as you noted, have any laws been broken? Potentially, Biden invited someone over to kill and eat them. This feels somewhat similar.

Ted Rall: I mean, this should be illegal.

Scott Stantis: Oh, absolutely.

Ted Rall: Absolutely. It should be very illegal.

Scott Stantis: Well, you raised an important point. I intended to connect the dots you laid out, Ted. One aspect you mentioned at the start is that many of his aides, including his doctor—I am unsure—are involved. Is Jill part of the group pleading the fifth?

Ted Rall: She has not been implicated yet. I do not know if she has been subpoenaed or if she will be.

Scott Stantis: The fact is that they are pleading the fifth, and even liberal commentators are saying that it looks very bad when you consider that they claimed Joe Biden was fine, with good days and a few bad ones, but mostly good—which we all know is complete nonsense. If he cannot have a good day during a presidential debate, then he does not have any good days. That simply does not happen. However, pleading the fifth creates terrible optics. To your point, Ted, it also suggests that there may have been laws broken, and the attorneys for these individuals likely believe that some laws could lead to prosecution. Therefore, they plead the fifth to avoid false testimony, which is a prudent move. I just want to ride our bandwagon one last time. I am sure the listeners—both of them—of this podcast are tired of us boasting about being right, but we were correct about this. We were even more accurate than we initially thought, Ted.

Ted Rall: Yes, no, look. We smelled a rat. Little did we know how large it was, and it actually had many cousins. That was a big family. You know, rats do not travel alone. It is—

Scott Stantis: Go ahead. I apologize.

Ted Rall: It is bad. That is correct. So, basically, it seems that here—I am going to quote from the Washington Post. An anonymous Biden ally is how the person is described. They are explaining the Democratic stance. This Department of Justice is not normal. These times are not normal. Because of that, people will take different approaches. Some might speak to the committee. Others may invoke their fifth amendment rights. However, this does not change the fact that this investigation is not about oversight; it is about political retribution. So, they say the individuals pleading the fifth are concerned that they might walk into a trap, potentially leading to prosecution for something else. As we pointed out, there is nothing illegal, even if they are completely guilty of what we suspect. It ought to be, but it does not appear to be. I mean, it is not really a criminal issue. Right? It is a political issue.

Scott Stantis: It is now. Yes.

Ted Rall: But they installed a president knowing he was not fully competent, then kept him in office for four years as he deteriorated further, and even attempted to reelect him for another four years. That is what this is about. Really, you should not need a law to recognize that this is wrong. Right?

Scott Stantis: Well, concepts of right and wrong seem old-fashioned. You are such an old-fashioned person, Ted. I know. But also, I mean, okay, I am going to shift to another instance where we were correct, regarding Russiagate. You would think, as a conservative, I would be thrilled about this. In fact, full disclosure, I created several cartoons that supported the Russiagate probe and narrative. However, after conducting research and reading about it, I realized it was complete and utter nonsense. The Columbia Journalism Review, a highly respected journal chronicling journalism, published a lengthy article detailing how the New York Times knew the Russiagate story was nonsense yet continued to publish stories about it, and they still do. It is simply that we work with people—there are editorial cartoonists who still believe this story is absolutely true, and they consider us fools for thinking otherwise. Granted, we do not hate Donald Trump the way these cartoonists do, with a blind rage that I cannot fully explain. I do not like him. I dislike Donald Trump for numerous reasons. We could dedicate an entire podcast to that.

Ted Rall: Me too. Most of them do not involve policy.

Scott Stantis: Not all of them. I would say most. I think temperamentally, he is unsuitable for the job.

Ted Rall: Atrocious. Yes.

Scott Stantis: Yes. However, for me, the policies are more atrocious because he is not a conservative. That is a topic for another podcast. But regarding Russiagate now—have you read the story that has been emerging, the leaks coming out today? Are you sitting down, Ted?

Ted Rall: I am sitting down. You can see you already knew that.

Scott Stantis: I am not sure. I mean, okay, because I am looking right at you. Yes, I am not sure. Now, how do you refer to him? Is it Saint President Obama or President Saint Obama? I am trying to recall how your Democratic friends phrase it. Because the mainstream—

Ted Rall: Maybe Pope Obama. Pope—

Scott Stantis: Popeama. Pope, because the people who, you know, the mainstream—and yes, it sounds like heroin because it is—mainstream Democrats who adore Obama, well, it is turning out that the lawyerly, constitutionally expert former president helped push the Russiagate narrative. He was deeply involved and instructed his supporters to continue promoting what they all knew was nonsense. I mean, Jesus H. Christ, I cannot, for a moment, comprehend the audacity required, and it reveals their cynicism. You know, these people who love us like their own children, Ted, although they send our jobs overseas and do everything they can to harm us, they claim to love us. Ultimately, they knew the mainstream media would keep reporting a story they knew was false, and their followers would continue to believe it.

Ted Rall: I have many well-educated friends, better educated than either of us, who are quite—

Scott Stantis: A low bar for me.

Ted Rall: And for me. It is having a degree. Not anymore, I do not. Do not forget.

Scott Stantis: Oh, right. Your college is no longer accredited. I went—

Ted Rall: To Columbia University Beauty School. So that is correct. I am a high school graduate for now until they revoke that. You know that is coming next. Then I will eventually say, “Well, I am a proud graduate of Dwight L. Dwight L. Barnes Junior High School.”

Scott Stantis: Yes, until they take that away. Yes, and then it is the elementary school, which is Toller Elementary.

Ted Rall: First, they came for the bachelor’s degrees, then they—

Scott Stantis: I said nothing.

Ted Rall: So, then they came for the certificates. Anyway, yes, no. So, I think we need to recap what is happening here, right? Go ahead. Basically, Russiagate was the assertion that the Russian Federation, under President Vladimir Putin, influenced the American presidential election in 2016 in various ways, primarily by hacking into voting systems, but also by running ads on social media in favor of Trump against Hillary Clinton. That is the essence of it. Additionally, they allegedly tried to hack into the DNC servers and leaked all the DNC documents to WikiLeaks, which then posted them, creating a rift within the Democratic Party as Bernie Sanders’ supporters discovered the deceitful actions the DNC took to undermine Bernie Sanders. As it turns out, we now know that the CIA, at the time, when they assess their level of confidence—stating whether they have high confidence, no confidence, low confidence, or moderate confidence—reported no confidence in the Steele dossier. This dossier claimed, among other things, that Trump had a penchant for watching prostitutes urinate on a bed in front of him in Moscow. That was not true. That did not happen. Christopher Steele, who compiled the Steele dossier, stated that he had no confidence in the accuracy of this information. He was asked to conduct opposition research and gather every possible accusation against Donald Trump. Thus, he compiled them. This is not intelligence; it is merely a collection of potentially true or false negative claims about Donald Trump. Anyway, it turns out—what did the Russians actually do? There is no question that by the election, Putin preferred Trump to win, simply because he was terrified of Hillary Clinton. He believed, and it was the Kremlin’s assessment, that she was psychotic and intended to start World War III. There is an article in Foreign Policy magazine from 2016—not a left-wing publication—where they interviewed top Kremlin generals, and they said, “We are just scared of her. She speaks impulsively. We do not think she wants a working relationship with us. We think she wants to attack us.” So, Putin had his opinion. The question is, did he take action? There is no evidence whatsoever that he did.

Scott Stantis: Well, did they not spend $100,000 on—

Ted Rall: Yes, but okay. A company called the Internet Research Agency, a private entity that, as far as we know, had no connection whatsoever to the Russian government, right? They label it a Russian company, which is true. There are many—tens of thousands—of Russian companies not affiliated with the government. This was one of them. It is a clickbait farm. They published on Facebook a total of between $100,000 and $200,000 worth of ads in 2016, intended to generate clicks. Over 90% of them were unrelated to politics, such as cat videos or other trivial content. The tiny percentage that were political actually included more pro-Hillary ads than Trump ads. It was a minimal effort, like dipping a toe into the water. We are talking about a fraction of $100,000 in a $7 billion campaign. It had no impact. The intelligence community assessed that this minor activity had zero effect on the American presidential, state, or local elections. That is the truth and has always been the truth. However, Hillary and then Biden promoted this narrative for years, claiming Trump was a stooge of the Russian Federation. This drove the already somewhat unstable Donald Trump even more insane, as he tried to disprove a negative. He spent considerable time on this, becoming increasingly vengeful. Part of what we are witnessing now—I am not saying it is right, but it is understandable—is him seeking retribution against those who did this. It is still ongoing. Then we had a letter from 51 former intelligence officials who stated that it is their best judgment that this has all the hallmarks. Remember, this involved the Hunter Biden laptop. They said, “Hunter Biden—

Scott Stantis: Does the laptop exist? Remember that?

Ted Rall: Does not exist and has all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation. It was all fabricated by the FSB, the successor to the KGB, to make Trump look good and Biden look bad. That laptop contained thousands of files. It was 100% legitimate. We all know the Hunter Biden laptop was real. Everything on it was real. All the gross photos we saw were real. This has been an ongoing issue. Now the CIA has revisited this. They are not—really, the CIA is not a wholly owned subsidiary of the Trump administration. It is the deepest part of the deep state. They concluded, “No, there was never anything here.” I do not think it will make any difference. I do not think it will change any minds whatsoever.

Scott Stantis: The one thing that will change is that if this information about Obama is true—if he was one of the people behind the scenes pushing this narrative—it diminishes his image, I think, even further. In my opinion, he is already destined to be remembered as one of the best presidents. Do you not love hearing that? That is not true. He will go down as a fairly mediocre president. Obamacare was a significant achievement, but—

Ted Rall: That is it.

Scott Stantis: That is pretty much it. And I mean—

Ted Rall: Seriously, what else is there?

Scott Stantis: He kept us involved in two utterly foolish wars. He continued to sacrifice human lives because he did not want to be perceived as weak. Yes, but if he was involved in this in any way—if there is any smoking gun—I mean, let us face it. We are looking at media outlets reporting this, whether or not it is true. You and I both know this story could collapse very quickly. However, if it turns out to be true, his historical standing will decline even further. It will not improve; he will go from mediocre to terrible.

Ted Rall: Well, Obama is quite the character, is he not? Yes, he is somewhat like Madison.

Scott Stantis: He sank the Madison Monroe.

Ted Rall: He sank—he sank the knife into Joe Biden at the end, which, by the way, is commendable, but it should have happened long ago. And he—

Scott Stantis: Also, he sank the knife in 2016, Ted, when he chose Hillary over Joe Biden. Joe Biden had served as vice president—

Ted Rall: And that drove Joe Biden crazy.

Scott Stantis: Well, and why would it not? You are the vice president of the United States, and suddenly they say, “Joe, can you sit this one out?”

Ted Rall: Yes, let the ladies have their turn.

Scott Stantis: Yes, you know, Hillary, because you know what happens to people who cross Hillary.

Ted Rall: That is a good—

Scott Stantis: It would be a damn shame if you ended up on a park bench.

Ted Rall: With your brains blown out.

Scott Stantis: Yes, so okay. We have got—that is nonsense. We have got the conclusion of pleading the fifth for the Biden investigation. Again, I sincerely wish that a sober statesman—remember the Watergate hearings?—would emerge. The Republicans never complained about the hearings being unfair, even though they dragged on for a long time. They delved deeply into the information. They allowed witnesses to speak. They did not berate them. They did not mock them. They did not call them joyless. Those of us who—

Ted Rall: It was very civilized, actually.

Scott Stantis: Ted, what is the word I am looking for to describe guys like you and me who, during that summer of not love, would rush home to watch the hearings? Yes, that is it: dorks. So, we would rush home. I did. I know you did too. We hurried home to watch these hearings almost every day. They were very dry, and they were very serious. That is the key word here: serious. There are no serious people around anymore. Speaking of unserious people, I am eager to know—because you and I have not spoken since the news broke of Colbert being canceled by CBS—

Ted Rall: Right.

Scott Stantis: Now, CBS wants to provide a quick background. Colbert’s show is number one in its time slot. However, that does not seem to matter to broadcasters. A dear friend of ours, Ted Noser—she is one of my very good friends, Patty Vasquez—had an evening program on WGN Radio, the legendary radio station in Chicago, and it aired from 11 p.m. until 2 a.m. It was by far the number one show in that time slot. Ted, it was the only number one show they had. But if you asked management there—you know where this is heading—if you asked management there, well, when they were criticizing her for various reasons, you would say, “You know what? She is the number one show in her time slot.” They would respond, “Oh, well, that is because of that time slot.” And just going—

Ted Rall: Not that time slot. No.

Scott Stantis: Well, it does not matter. What are you talking about?

Ted Rall: Who cares? She is still—

Scott Stantis: On your only number one show you have.

Ted Rall: The only one. Yes, it is like when they fire the editorial cartoonist who is the only person to bring a newspaper a Pulitzer Prize, and they fire him anyway. When I was fired from KFI Radio, I had the top rating in my time slot, and they let me go. They fired me because they said that talk radio is inherently conservative, and liberals could not succeed. I argued, “But my time slot included conservatives, and I outperformed them.” Then they replaced me with a conservative, Marcia Clark, the O.J. prosecutor, who was as effective a radio host as she was a prosecutor. She performed much worse than I did. I think she had about one-sixth of my ratings. It was a steep decline. To their credit, they brought me back for a short while and admitted they were wrong, which was somewhat amusing. But, yes, that could happen. I investigated this. Their excuse at CBS, which is owned by Paramount—

Scott Stantis: They want to be owned by Paramount. There is a merger, right? The merger is pending.

Ted Rall: It is pending. The Trump administration must approve it. Trump obviously does not care for Stephen Colbert. So, the speculation here is that Paramount, which recently paid $16 million to Trump to settle a defamation lawsuit over a “60 Minutes” segment they almost certainly would have won if they had persisted, decided to surrender and essentially throw the case, much like the Chicago White Sox in 1919.

Scott Stantis: Yes, 1919. Wow. Oh my goodness, Ted, you have a sports metaphor coming.

Ted Rall: Thank you. Thank you. And—

Scott Stantis: Give that man a man card.

Ted Rall: So, anyway, they rolled over and gave him $16 million, which they did not need to do, because they want that merger to be approved by the FTC. That is what this is all about. Now, they might be considering further efforts to appease the FTC, similar to how Columbia University and other institutions, including major law firms like Paul Weiss, are aligning with Trump. They might think, “Okay, we will just get rid of Colbert at Trump’s request.” That is the speculation. On the other hand, late-night television is expensive. So—

Scott Stantis: That is strange because why?

Ted Rall: Well, apparently, first of all, it is a significant operation. I looked into this. A show like Colbert’s operates out of a large theater on Broadway. It employs over 200 people full-time. They have substantial costs. They must pay many salaries. They cover guest expenses. They build elaborate sets. All of this is expensive. Of course, a person like Colbert earns a substantial income.

Scott Stantis: So, he makes between $15 million and $20 million a year.

Ted Rall: Apparently, the show costs $60 million a year to produce but only generates $40 million in revenue. However, it has the highest ratings. So, basically, you could argue it is a loss leader. It may be that late-night television is no longer a viable format. I do not know.

Scott Stantis: That is what the decision-makers at CBS are claiming. You can kind of—

Ted Rall: They are eliminating the show entirely. It will not be Colbert. It is as if “The Late Show” is disappearing.

Scott Stantis: I think “The Late Show with Rall and Stantis” would be a success, and we would accept a fraction of what Colbert was paid—100% more. He takes a plane back to Chicago every night from New York City.

Ted Rall: Colbert? Okay, every night. That might explain some things. Have you heard about this new book on Condé Nast? Like, how they were—oh, I sent it to you.

Scott Stantis: Yes, please go ahead and tell our listeners.

Ted Rall: Well, basically, during their heyday, Condé Nast owned titles like Vanity Fair and Vogue. They lived an extravagantly depraved high life. If you watch The Devil Wears Prada, which is loosely based on Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, you get a slight taste of it, but that is nothing. They describe instances like the editor of Vanity Fair refusing to carry his briefcase from his chauffeur-driven car to the building lobby or back at the end of the day. They all flew first class constantly. Everything was utterly extravagant. They only ate—

Scott Stantis: Legendary lunches. Lunches with a bill that could reach $10,000. I am not kidding—or sadly, it is true.

Ted Rall: Yes, in the nineties. So, shockingly, they ran into financial trouble. Who could have predicted that? Anyway, that is somewhat like what Colbert is doing. He flies home to Chicago. I did not know he lived there. He did not either; he is a New Yorker.

Scott Stantis: Well, before his troubles, Bill Cosby would return to wherever he was performing. I saw him, as I mentioned, before his troubles, performing in Las Vegas. He flew back to Massachusetts every night.

Ted Rall: Wow, that is like Trump. Trump always wanted to be at Trump Tower until he faced legal issues in New York that made him consider the possibility of spending time in a cell at Rikers. So, he decided Mar-a-Lago was where he preferred to spend more time, and occasionally he visits the Bedminster Golf Club in New Jersey. But we—

Scott Stantis: I mean, Ted and I have no inside information on this. We have none, but we have observed media for decades. So, I can tell you this. I believe what happened to Stephen Colbert at CBS is likely a 50-50 combination. His show was extremely expensive, and late-night advertising, like all advertising for terrestrial television, is declining rapidly. People prefer to watch YouTube and stream—

Ted Rall: Yes, television profits for broadcast are down over 9% from last year, according to my research. And you—

Scott Stantis: You have to realize that this decline compounds year after year. So, Tim, do the math, folks. Combine that with the fact that the Trump administration must have disliked Colbert because “The Colbert Show” was essentially a liberal talking point. It drove me crazy, Ted, because I remember Johnny Carson. Again, I am an old man, but Carson’s political humor always mocked the person. You could never tell what Carson’s political stance was. He never attended fundraisers. He never declared himself a Republican or a Democrat.

Ted Rall: He was interviewed about that. You can see a clip floating around on social media now. He was asked, “What about your politics? Why do you never discuss politics on your show?” He replied, “I will never do that. I think it is bad entertainment.”

Scott Stantis: Well, my point is, why? Why would you risk that? Why would you alienate 50% of your audience? It made no sense to me. So, I—

Ted Rall: I do not think it makes sense either.

Scott Stantis: So, Colbert did do that. Every show included some content, literally a speech. And I think I—

Ted Rall: Do not really know what Letterman’s politics were.

Scott Stantis: No, well, yes, I do not know if he ever participated in political events. He did engage in some political activities, but they were mostly related to comedy and actors’ and comedians’ rights. I think the Colbert situation is a mix. CBS wants to consummate their merger; they want to unite with Paramount. Paramount desperately wants them. That is half of it, and it will need approval from the Trump Justice Department, particularly from the sharp-minded individual that is Bondi. Add to that the fact that hosting that show is extremely expensive. However, it seems to me that if Stephen Colbert truly cared about the working men and women of this world, he could take a 50% pay cut, and they could pay the staff a decent wage.

Ted Rall: Well, that would be—

Scott Stantis: And the show could continue.

Ted Rall: Well, right. You know, that is what Keanu Reeves does. Right? He does this discreetly, but in feature films, his rate is between $10 million and $20 million. However, he does not need or want that much money. So, he redistributes it somewhat evenly, giving more to the lowest-paid cast members, like key grips and others whose roles I do not understand. Basically, he lines their pockets. He only takes a small fraction, like $500,000, of what he is owed.

Scott Stantis: Wow, he just does not want it. It would unnecessarily complicate his life. He believes it is the right thing to do. And—

Scott Stantis: Yes, but he is a rarity. I mean, I think I told you this story. I was speaking with a friend’s child who interned at a large concert promoter’s company. He said they allowed him to sit in on a conference call negotiating a Bruce Springsteen concert. Bruce Springsteen was complaining that he needed an additional $200,000, even though he was already being paid a seven-figure sum to perform.

Ted Rall: Uh-huh.

Scott Stantis: He was already guaranteed seven figures. This was not his agent, Ted. This was Bruce Springsteen himself saying, “Bruce needs money.”

Ted Rall: Well, Bruce is a greedy individual. The problem here is that it contradicts his brand. If it were Kid Rock, who, granted, lacks the talent of Bruce Springsteen’s pinky finger but is a right-winger, going for the money would be fine. But the working-class man from Asbury Park, New Jersey, presents a bad image. Stephen Colbert, I think, made his reputation with The Colbert Report.

Scott Stantis: He—

Ted Rall: Did, where he mocked being a pompous, right-wing figure. I think he missed the joke. He believed the effect was to satirize the right. I think the effect was to satirize partisanship and always holding the same opinion regardless of the situation. To me, the satire applies almost equally to someone like Rachel Maddow, who consistently pushes the same talking points. So, when he moved to “The Late Show” and became the very type of hack he mocked on The Colbert Report, he lost me, and I assume he lost others too.

Scott Stantis: Yes, that is an excellent point. He lost 50%. There is—imagine me doing air quotes here, always effective on a podcast—a conservative late-night comedy show, and it is not by far the number one show in that slot.

Ted Rall: Yes, it is Gutfeld on Fox. Yes, and I must say, I find him to be a funny man. I watch the Fox show The Five at 5 p.m. Eastern time on Fox almost every day, and he is one of the highlights. However, I do not think his show is very good. No, I do not think humor works well when it is partisan.

Scott Stantis: No, it has to involve rolling your eyes and shrugging at everyone. It must target everybody, which is—

Ted Rall: By the way, if you consider the great humor from the heyday of television comedy, like Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, Hee Haw, The Carol Burnett Show, and then in films like Kentucky Fried Movie or with George Carlin, they mocked liberals and conservatives equally—

Scott Stantis: Mercilessly. Mercilessness is the key point. Another topic, speaking of a lack of humor, public broadcasting has just been gutted. Ted and I discussed this earlier today, or yesterday, actually. I mentioned that I have been advocating for defunding public broadcasting since I began cartooning in the late seventies. However, it is not for the reason you might think. I happen to enjoy a lot of public broadcasting, though not as much as I used to because of budget cuts and because I do not think they perform the job they once did. Nevertheless, I want their budgets to be cut and removed from the federal budget entirely because they have always been a target of Republican talking points. It seemed like an easy punching bag to me. If you truly believe that NPR and PBS should survive, let them survive on their own. It is interesting, Ted, where you are in New York City; the New York NPR station, as well as public broadcasting, receives about 2% or less of its budget from the federal government. So, you can eliminate 2%. You and I could both live with 2% less. We were not liking—

Ted Rall: It. It is no big deal.

Scott Stantis: Yes, but here in Alabama, for instance, the NPR station is losing 10% of its funding. That is a significant hit. Frankly, may I go off on a tangent and discuss things I have never spoken about publicly? Well, I do not care what you say today; I am doing it anyway. You will find this interesting.

Ted Rall: When have I ever stopped you? Who could stop you?

Scott Stantis: It is true. Who could? I am a force of nature. The NPR station here has very little, if any, public programming—local programming, rather. When I moved back here, my wife and I owned a house. My son is here. My grandson is here. That is why we moved back after my decade in Chicago. I approached the radio station and said, “Listen, I have an idea for a locally generated show. I will find people to underwrite it; you do not have to spend a single cent—back when they were still making cents. You just need to provide me with a place to do it and a studio with a producer.” They said no. To think—

Ted Rall: Say—

Scott Stantis: Free programming. What is that? No, they simply said, “No, we do not think that fits into our programming.” I responded, “You do not have any programming. How can it not fit into something that does not exist?” I was also considering creating a roundtable, like a weekly political show to discuss Alabama politics, all of it being—

Ted Rall: A very good idea.

Scott Stantis: Again, I know I could find people to underwrite it and make it worthwhile for me. They said no.

Ted Rall: Do you think it is because you are conservative?

Scott Stantis: Yes, because I have a record in the community from my work drawing for the Birmingham News for thirteen years, and I have a deep history of my politics, which I thought were fairly moderate, given where I lived. I mean, I targeted Republicans as much as I did Democrats. I approached WBHM because they had an opening—remember I mentioned this once, Ted? You may not recall. They had an opening for the morning news desk. You know, it would involve following NPR news with a three-minute slot for local news, where you might say, “Today, the Gulf of America has flooded halfway up the state of Alabama.” I knew I could do that. So, I approached the news director and asked, “I saw the job posting. Can you tell me more about it?” He literally said, “It is not for you.” I am just saying, here is someone with a fairly decent track record in journalism, Ted. I think we can acknowledge that about my career. Coming to public radio in central Alabama would probably be a good story for them, but they were not interested. Okay, but that is my rant. I am done.

Ted Rall: I am sorry. I think that is disgusting, and I do not believe a liberal would have been treated the same. I must be objective about that. That is Birmingham, right? I mean, if a Republican cannot get a fair shake in Birmingham, Alabama—literally the most conservative state in the union, well, perhaps Mississippi—

Scott Stantis: Yes, we are pretty much neck and neck. We are going to have Governor Tommy Tuberville, for heaven’s sake. I mean, come on. So, WBHM, the NPR station here in Birmingham, Alabama, is losing 10% of its funding. This hurts where these cuts are potentially—I would venture to use the word dangerous. There is a rural station. The most glaring and significant example is in central Alaska. It is the only broadcast entity in the entire region. So, if there is, let us say, an attack of ice monsters from the north, no one will know. But in all seriousness, when there is a serious event—like bears—yes, the bears will—oh my goodness—they are organized.

Ted Rall: Well, actually, bears are terrifying. So, yes.

Scott Stantis: Oh, polar bears, particularly, are—

Ted Rall: Yes, it is not like they are crazy. If you endanger their cubs, no. The males, the females, the cubs—they are hungry for you as a person, and they will eat you. It is not like a shark saying, “Oh, my mistake.” No, it is like, “No, you are food. You are good.”

Scott Stantis: A big piece of meat to polar bears, and it is the only thing they eat, by the way. They do not eat berries. So, that is 100%. That station I mentioned in central Alaska is 100% funded by the federal government. There are other stations in—

Ted Rall: The Plains states, right, where there are tornadoes. There are already major local news deserts in those states because, basically, when you count the radio stars, they literally have automated stations. You drive by and see an old-fashioned 1940s radio station, like “This is KAKAW, the voice of Piscataway or whatever.” It is in the middle of nowhere, with no one there. It is surrounded by a fence. It is all automated; someone checks it once a week to ensure the power is on, but no one is present.

Scott Stantis: And no rats have eaten through the power lines?

Ted Rall: Not yet. Exactly. Then a tornado comes through. There is no one there who knows about it and can report it on the air. NPR stations, in many cases, are the only game in town.

Scott Stantis: Yes, so this is why this is important and why I care. You know, and the other thing is—so are you—

Ted Rall: Are you? Let us get you on the record. Cuts, yay or nay?

Scott Stantis: I would say yay, but I would also be very interested in understanding the economics of public broadcasting because the umbrella company that owns or runs Sesame Street—the Children’s Television Workshop—brings in hundreds of millions of dollars in ancillary sales. When you see a child carrying an Elmo doll or a Big Bird lunchbox, all that money went somewhere. Where did it go, folks? Ted and I also noted—Ted, could you tell the listeners—you were on an NPR show in New York, The Midday Host. If you do not already know, if you cannot guess, they did not make a lot of money. They were not the morning show hosts, like the “Ted and Scott Morning Zoo,” who made a million each. Sometimes the afternoon drive-time host earned $900,000. But the NPR midday person—Ted Rall was on their show. Ted Rall, what was his name, and how much did he make?

Ted Rall: Brian Lehrer makes over $600,000 a year. Goodness. The thing is, I do not fault anyone for earning as much as they can, and he is a truly excellent host. However, honestly, Scott, you and I are as good as he is, and we do the same job for much less. It is like they are begging for donor money. That is the issue here. It is similar to when I was in Afghanistan and tried to check into a five-star hotel, which was booked by Doctors Without Borders. I thought, not without reservations, right? I met some of these people, and they said, “We are doing God’s work, helping people in a war zone.” I said, “God bless you, but you are using donor money. Cannot you stay at a three-star hotel? It is lovely, with air conditioning, Wi-Fi, good food, and comfort.” I am not saying they must live in squalor. I am not saying Brian should earn $20,000 a year. But come on, he makes more than the President of the United States. That is outrageous. It is funded by taxpayers and listeners. That is wrong.

Scott Stantis: To your point, Ted, this reflects my small-c conservative stance, and I am not wishy-washy. I wanted the funding to disappear, but they should have reviewed and said, “Okay, stations in places like Alaska, the Dakotas, Montana, and Wyoming—if they had said, ‘These will receive some funding until they can find another source,’ give it, say, two years. That is plenty of time to search and determine who else can support this. Can the state of Alaska fund the NPR station in central Alaska?” The same applies to the other regions I mentioned. That is what I would have done, but cutting the funding makes perfect sense. And—

Ted Rall: Although, I am just—but, Scott, all big countries have state media.

Scott Stantis: I know, and they are terrible. And I do not—oh—

Ted Rall: Really? Does the BBC suck?

Scott Stantis: Well, do you think it does? Do you think it—

Ted Rall: Do you think the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation sucks? Do you think the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation sucks? I do not.

Scott Stantis: Well, I would ask, is it biased? I mean, do you think—

Ted Rall: Yes, bias. Because human beings are running it. So, yes, it is definitely biased.

Scott Stantis: So, I think there is a definite bias in something state-run that defends the state.

Ted Rall: Right.

Scott Stantis: That is what I meant by state.

Ted Rall: Country, but I will—if you are going to be part—I mean, if we think we are involved in part of an international propaganda effort, I would rather be involved in a propaganda war than a hot war. They call this soft power, right? If Russia has RT and Sputnik, and England has the BBC, which—

Scott Stantis: Should be allowed on our channels, by the way.

Ted Rall: China has—what is it, CNCBTN? I forget the acronym, but they have their own English-language services. Shouldn’t the U.S. also have state media?

Scott Stantis: Well, this does not prevent it from existing. It just means American taxpayers do not have to pay for it, and it does not become a target.

Ted Rall: State media.

Scott Stantis: I am going to return to my original point, which is that this has been a target for Republicans for as long as I have been cartooning, so remove the target. That is all I am saying.

Ted Rall: Oh, I certainly think that, like you said, on the national level, I never understood why NPR stations allowed themselves to be a target for, you know, 1 or 2% of their budget. I would say, if someone tried to dictate what I draw, saying, “Ted, we are paying 2% of your salary,” I would—

Scott Stantis: Be—

Ted Rall: Like, “Forget it.” But I agree with that. However, I think we have a problem regarding rural access. Rural areas are very underserved. They do not have high-speed internet. They do not have—

Scott Stantis: Well, they are becoming news deserts. Their newspapers are folding.

Ted Rall: So, it is a great time to be a corrupt local politician in rural Oklahoma, you know?

Scott Stantis: Maybe we should consider moving to Oklahoma.

Ted Rall: That could be a job for us. Hey, corrupt politician, I could—we have studied corruption. We could do that.

Scott Stantis: Yes, we can do it. I do not know if there is any doubt we can do it.

Ted Rall: I mean, some of the least intelligent people who have ever lived do it.

Scott Stantis: Oh my goodness, they are idiots. One of my funniest conversations with my former boss at the Chicago Tribune occurred when I had just moved to Chicago. They had just indicted a local official—I think it was St. Clair County, but it could be another county here in Alabama. They were accused of stealing— are you sitting down, Ted?—$2,500 a month. They were convicted and went to jail. When I moved to Chicago, they caught a man—I forget his role, something like being in charge of sand or dirt in Cook County. He had embezzled $12 million, and they were not sure they would prosecute him. So, I asked my boss—

Ted Rall: You always want to steal money from private corporations. In many cases, they will not pursue you.

Scott Stantis: Is that right?

Ted Rall: Well, yes. Like, when I worked at the Japanese bank, the Industrial Bank of Japan Trust Company, from 1986 to 1990, there was a very quiet, very nice man who sat right behind my desk, about four feet away. One day, he was not at work. We wondered what happened to him. Within a few days, we learned that $10 million was missing from—

Scott Stantis: Oh my.

Ted Rall: The accounts. This was in 1988 or 1989, so it was real money, not like today when it buys an egg. So, he—

Scott Stantis: Had, like, three cups of Starbucks coffee.

Ted Rall: Maybe. Anyway, with our Zimbabwean dollars—

Scott Stantis: Without extra pumps. Yes.

Ted Rall: Yes, exactly. So, anyway, to make a long story short, the FBI came because he had written himself a check, cashed it, and disappeared. He had a wife and kids but did not involve them in the scam. So, the FBI interviewed us all about what we knew, which was truthfully nothing. I asked my boss what happened. He said, “They are going to let it go.” He added that the FBI said, “We can put this guy’s face on the front page of every paper in the world,” but the company in Tokyo said, “Let it go.” Because then the question becomes, “Can IBJ be trusted to keep your money safe if they are incompetent?” So, it is better to absorb the loss.

Scott Stantis: So, how much did you abscond with? I am just curious.

Ted Rall: I wish.

Scott Stantis: See, Ted? You disappoint me.

Ted Rall: Yes, I know. I am talented, but not in that way.

Scott Stantis: It sounds like me. So, anyway, with my story, I asked my boss, “What the hell is going on here? $10 million?” I mean, a person in Alabama was convicted for $2,500. He said, “Scott, up here, we are professionals. Welcome to the NBA.”

Ted Rall: I was like, and—

Scott Stantis: He was not wrong. He absolutely was not wrong.

Ted Rall: Yes, it is really funny. Back in the nineties, when I worked for alternative weeklies, I remember talking to some investigative reporters who would literally argue about which of their municipalities had the most corrupt politicians. It was like, “No, no, we have the best corrupt people.”

Scott Stantis: Oh, I used to have running gag arguments with my friend Marshall Ramsey, the editorial cartoonist in Jackson, Mississippi. We had a silly governor bingo game to see whose idiot—because he had one, I had one—would raise the level of idiocy. We—

Ted Rall: Let us have a—

Scott Stantis: Raise the level of idiocy. You draw an editorial moron. It was neck and neck.

Ted Rall: It is so challenging. Alright, well, I think we are complete here. Thank you, everyone, for tuning in. We have good viewership today. They are quiet, but they are out there. I see the numbers. Many people are watching and listening. That is wonderful. I guess most people are watching, according to the New York Times.

Scott Stantis: Oh my—

Ted Rall: Goodness. Podcasts today—like, three out of four people watch and do not listen.

Scott Stantis: Did you—but, Ted, in this—or they—

Ted Rall: Watch, or they watch but are really listening.

Scott Stantis: Ted, four—yes, that is like terrestrial radio used to be. You turned it on in the background. If you heard, “Mark, Ted Rall,” you would go—

Ted Rall: “Send asshole Ted Rall.”

Scott Stantis: Yes, but Ted sent an article stating that these podcasts, broadcast over YouTube and Rumble, are extremely popular. What stunned me most, Ted, is—we will end this on a note—we last about an hour.

Ted Rall: Yes.

Scott Stantis: These things are four and five hours long. Ted, I do not want to do anything I enjoy for five hours. No offense.

Ted Rall: Greed. Yes, if you and I can think of some. Yes, I do not want to make love for five hours. I do not want to drink for five hours. I do not want to watch TV for five hours. I do not want to pet my cat for five hours. Those are my favorite things. I do not want to talk to you for five hours. I do not want to do anything.

Scott Stantis: Yes, no. Like I said, no offense. I love you. I am not going to the beach—

Ted Rall: For five hours. Really?

Scott Stantis: That I could do. I suppose I could do that. Lying there, it gets—

Ted Rall: It gets hot, man.

Scott Stantis: Yes, it gets sandy. Yes, and the pelicans. Oh my goodness, the pelicans.

Ted Rall: Like, stop. And with that, alright, now it is time for our “Scott Seeing” segment of the show. Thank you, everyone, for tuning in. I am Ted Rall. That is Scott Stantis. Check us out at our respective places. You will see them scroll by. I am at rall.com. He is at gocomics.com/scottstantis, and off we go.

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