Left Face
Join Adam Gillard and Dick Wilkinson while they talk politics and community engagement in Pikes Peak region.
Left Face
Shutdown Stakes For Veterans
A warm lunch table with veterans turns into a hard truth session about the third week of a government shutdown—and who bears the cost when politics stalls. We unpack what missed first-of-the-month payments mean for retirees and VA disability recipients, why many military families face a double hit from “non-essential” base jobs, and how a late surge of back pay could mask deeper harm in the holiday economy. Along the way, we point to real lifelines—Food to Power, Care and Share, and Mount Carmel—for food access, counseling, and community that helps people breathe when the numbers don’t add up.
From the streets, a “No Kings” protest brings the question of power into focus. Forget the noise; look at the clearest signal of all: the idea of putting a sitting leader’s face on currency. Democracies honor after service; monarchs mint themselves. That simple test anchors a wider conversation about dynastic ambitions, family entanglement in core state functions, and the normalization of permanence that corrodes the rule of law.
Then we head south, where small boats in international waters are being blown up at a steady clip. If you can track a vessel well enough to strike it, you can interdict it lawfully—that’s the standard the laws of armed conflict demand. An admiral at Southern Command resigns rather than carry orders he deems unlawful, even as rank downgrades compress experience and reward compliance. Meanwhile, the press is boxed into choreographed access while propagandists flood the zone, drowning out facts with noise. We connect these threads with a veteran’s practicality: help your neighbor, use the resources within reach, and keep your eye on what the law requires, not what the loudest voice demands.
If this conversation helps you navigate a hard month—or see the stakes more clearly—share it with a friend, subscribe, and leave a review. What’s the one action you’re taking this week to support someone in your community?
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Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of Left Face. This is the Pikes Peak Region podcast, where we talk about political topics through a veteran's point of view. I am your co-host, Dick Wilkinson, and I'm joined this morning with my co-host, as always, Adam Gillard.
SPEAKER_01:Good morning, Dick. How are you doing?
SPEAKER_00:I'm doing great.
SPEAKER_01:Um being here. That was such a solid episode.
SPEAKER_00:It was a sad I'm great in this room right now. Outside of this room, not things aren't as great, but I'm happy to be here. In the next hour is gonna be a good hour. That's better. And we have the veterans lunch today, right? Is there one today? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So um I know people don't hear this. It's not like we're live on the radio. No. There's the veterans lunch today, and then another one, what, two weeks? Uh yeah, second and fourth.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Sorry to just random. Uh yeah, second and fourth. And so, like we've been getting, you know, pretty good speakers there. Uh today we'll have uh a lady from Tesla. She she does uh um domestic abuse help for or f helps people in in those domestic abuse situations. Uh so just kind of getting those resources out to the community so that folks know what's out there, you know, especially you know, kind of a quick lead into our topics today, but you know, more community resources, and that's kind of what we've been focusing on at these lunches and and getting some political candidates in there too. Um but yeah, yeah, just doing a whole game of things and trying to be as productive as we can at those meetings.
SPEAKER_00:Uh I thank you for kind of putting a little more uh effort or emphasis into getting some guest speakers to attend more often, right? I feel like that definitely um it can draw people in that have never come to a veterans lunch before because they want to hear that person and then they get to meet other people, they don't realize how much of a community there is here, right? So for me, having that uh a little another header on the advertisement of like, hey, come and hear this person, um, that definitely increases the outreach. So yeah, uh regardless of the quality of yeah, it makes the programming a little bit, you know, it doesn't have to be programming, right? It's a veteran's lunch. We can it can be let's just get together and commiserate, it can be let's tell war stories, right? Yeah, you know, it can be let's hear about what's happening in the future, yeah, right.
SPEAKER_01:It can be whatever it needs to be. Yeah, and for the you know, first 30 minutes and then for after after the speaker speaks, you know, we're we're all kind of gabbing it up, but it is funny during the day there's usually a QA session with the speaker, and there's always one vet that just takes it over and just wants us like just tell a story. It it is it it's because it and it relates and they're good stories, so like you like you learn a lot about just you the folks in your community for sure.
SPEAKER_00:That's it. And I mean, I'm kind of uh I'm like some of those folks. I don't always lead, I definitely don't lead with my war stories, and I don't lead very much with like what I ever did in the military, even when I'm in a group of other veterans, like it's just I want to talk to them about other stuff, yeah. Right? I want to I want to be in a group of friends, but we don't have to sit around and talk about army shit, you know, right? Yeah, we already did that for a lot of people.
SPEAKER_01:It gets old, yeah. It got old while I was in, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So I'm happy to just be in the in the camaraderie without having to talk about you know military stuff, right? And you get to hear that from those folks. So it's always I appreciate you getting some more speakers out, and uh haven't been in a little while, but I I need to attend one. But yes, speaking of food and lunch, we'll jump straight into our first topic. Yeah, um the government shutdown, we're in week three. We talked about it a little bit on the last episode. It was it was a couple weeks ago, so it was still pretty new, but even then, there was really no um framework for progress, I guess, back then, and both sides were pretty dug in, like basically on day two of the outage or the shutdown. Like everybody's just been entrenched and there's not really been any uh go back and forth, right?
SPEAKER_01:So no, and I think uh they're already closed down, or the House speakers already said there won't be any votes next week on anything.
SPEAKER_00:And I was saying the Senate has been staying around on the weekends, right? Yeah, has been keeping them in session over the weekends, and he finally dropped that. He was like, You guys can go home, like we're not gonna vote on that.
SPEAKER_01:They're they're still doing things too. They just approved some judges and things like that. So they're still stacking the courts with themselves. Sure. Uh so they got time for that. Uh or the government can stay open for that. But uh, but yeah, that the fact that they don't want any open up the house because they would have to swear in an extra member and it would force a vote on the Epstein files. So he doesn't even want to come to the table and talk about uh saving health care for tens of millions of people. You know, they're they're they're just they're digging their heels in it and they're willing to let it all burn down just to protect people from finding out the truth.
SPEAKER_00:They are, and uh they I mean the the statement from the Republican side was very clear. I mean, I don't know, you know, if it was if people just thought they weren't serious or what, but the few days leading up to the shutdown, both the House and this and the Senate, the Republican leadership all said, listen, you want to negotiate anything, you've got until the government shuts down. And then after that, we're just not gonna talk to you, right? And they were not lying, they were serious, and so the Democrats said, Yeah, we'll shut it down, and now they won't talk to them, right?
SPEAKER_01:But but you know, as this is shut down, they're not talking to Democrats, they are talking to you know sellers of personal jets for Christine Ole. They bought two personal private jets for her. Sure. They've funded Argentina, you know, they're making them great again. Well, that's critical, uh, that's what they said. They're dying down there.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely critical.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, they're dying down there. Yeah, you know, giving them 40 billion dollars, buying their beaver, importing their beef to undercut our ranchers. Uh so that they have all this time to and and Trump went after the ranchers said they were being selfish and like didn't understand his vision of everything.
SPEAKER_00:You know, it's like so and he's he's 230 million compensation to himself from the DOJ into his personal pocket. Yeah, and he says, Oh, don't worry, I'll give it to charity. Right. And then I love that somebody says, Yeah, he's had more than one charity over the past 30 years and they always get shut down for corruption, right?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, he's not allowed to have his own charity yet, or like his whole family is just having their own charity. Yeah. While he's building a White House or destroying the White House to build a ballroom that's supposed to be clad in gold, yeah, but he doesn't have money to, you know, for our farmers to fund the government, to provide health care for all these folks. You know, because the 10 million folks that are going to be losing their health care if the budget passed as the the House Republicans wanted it, there's money for that. Like you can't tell me there's not money for that when all this other shit is going on. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Like, and I I mean, I'm willing to admit, and and we always get you get here's oversimplification of government spending is there's some logical, you know, that big poster of logical fallacies, and you know, you got straw man and red herring and all the whatever, you know. People that like to argue really love that poster. Yeah. Um, one of them is when you take two things that are unrelated and then try and draw a comparison to them and go, like, well, this doesn't make sense. If you did that, then you can't do this because this doesn't make sense. Like a correlation cause. Yeah, the correlation, but you know, it's more of like, hey, uh, if you're gonna give um some country in South America a hundred billion dollars, then and but we have veterans that sleep on the streets, right? Oh, okay. And you go, okay, you understand those things aren't related at all, right?
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:But then the argument is we gotta take care of those veterans before we take care of those South Americans.
SPEAKER_01:And they move it over, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And it's like, no, hold on now. You know what I'm saying? Like the government has one uh almost unlimited amount of bureaucratic names for different agencies, and they all have almost an unlimited amount of funding lines. And so there's no such thing as apples to apples with government money. There's just no, it's just not, it doesn't exist, right? Even from two like programs, yeah, you cannot compare the spending from one to the other and say, like, oh, defund that to uh increase funding on this. No, no, that works at like city council level. That does not work at the federal government level. Once you get even up at the state level, you almost cannot manage money that way. Yeah, yeah. Federal government doesn't do that at all, right? So I hate that.
SPEAKER_01:But uh having like Navy Army pay issues, like if we went out on a Navy mission and having them try to pay us, like it's all DOD. Yeah, but it was a pain in the ass. We would have to move, we would have to move money around so many different ways, but like we're all in uniform on the same boat. Yeah, it's gonna be money.
SPEAKER_00:Where's that money coming from? Yeah, somebody's gonna pay for that reserve deployment, right? Yeah, yeah. And it gets yeah, crazy red money, blue money, green money. Yeah, like what are you talking about, right? Like, all under one program, yeah. So um, I agree with the statement that absolutely we can prioritize spending, and let's just say there's some tone deafness from the administration to start tearing down the ballroom to make a gold-cladded party room for the president. Yeah, and there's a loss of optics when you bring up the idea that you're gonna force the government to corruptly give you 200 million dollars. Maybe wait till next year to talk about that. You'll still be the president next year. You can still get that money before you leave office if you ever leave office, right? You still got time. So just chill for like a couple weeks, man. No chill. Don't talk about your own money when there are people right now that have not gotten paid in a month and that are not gonna get paid at the beginning of the month, and that are running out of food right now. Don't talk about your money, don't talk about money at all.
SPEAKER_01:I I can't remember if this was last election or if when he wasn't president, but he uh did a uh an event to donate to vets and like no money ended up going to vets. Oh, yeah. Do you remember that one? It was a televised big adventure, like you know, who knows you know, Trump for Vets type thing. Yeah, and like no money went to vets. Yeah, just a constant grip from those guys.
SPEAKER_00:Some uh promoter, you know, like event promoter got paid almost all of that money to like go rent the stadium somewhere.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah, but but there's gonna be no slowing down the these griffs. Like he's he's talking to watches now that are falling apart on people. Like he's gonna grab as much money as he can while that's the second and third time around watches.
SPEAKER_00:He's done that a couple times, right?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, he's made like four billion off of crypto this year. Yeah, just and that's also just having one part of steam on it and then drop it.
SPEAKER_00:He just pardoned a guy that was in prison on a crypto scam, and he was like, Oh, you know, it wasn't a scam. He just uh, you know, it's a tricky business. Yeah, he's an untricked. It didn't quite go his way. Yeah. And that guy, of course, helped start the Trump meme coin, right? Like his company or his associates or the reason that the the junior Trumps are doing all the crypto stuff, uh guys, that dude. And so, all right, so the government shut down. Let's talk about the the real impact here. I think that we are already was today, the 23rd. I think we're too late in the month for the first of the month paychecks that would go out to veterans. And we'll just focus on that. I know there are a lot of programs that kick out of checks on the first of the month. Yeah, but let's talk about our peers here. We got retirees and we got disabled VA disabled folks. Those are the two kind of funding lines that come in for a lot of the people here in our community, right? That are um they're not active duty anymore. Active duty folks got one paycheck covered by Mystery Money. Um, what that how the next one's gonna get covered, yeah. We're not quite there in the news cycle yet, but by Monday they're gonna have to start talking about it, right? That will be the headline, not the fact that, you know, okay, we're you know, and all all respect due to that million people that are on active duty, one to two million people, they think that they better get paid, right? Yeah, there's 50 million people in America that depend on one of those two income streams, military retirement or VA like disability, right? Out of 350 million people in America, 50 million of them have some ties to that income stream. And I don't think that those checks are gonna show up on the first. And so Adam and I are are also affected by that. And so I'm anticipating, you know, getting it skipping a month of income. They'll they will make it up, you know. But that ride, that ride between here and there is, you know, there's not gonna be a check on the first of the month.
SPEAKER_01:Right. Yeah, and you made the point where if if there's not one on the first, there's not gonna be one in in the month until the first of the next month. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, they're not gonna push out and no, they won't do an in-between interim thing. If they open back up, they wouldn't do that. So we're gonna leave that in. Let's just leave everybody the phone rang. We're not gonna edit it out. They're not gonna call in children. So uh yeah, yeah, wrong time, caller. Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:There are some unhinged folks out there.
SPEAKER_00:How did they know? So, yeah, the the issue there is with these once-a-month paychecks for retirees and disability paychecks, those only come out on the first. And so if you missed that window, I don't think that they would do a catch up. It would just be, hey, we'll just give you a double paycheck at the beginning of December. And so everybody needs to be prepared for, and if you hadn't already, always have that contingency in your mind of you know, the government is a stalwart billpayer, right? And get those checks out on time. Nah, not this time. Nope. So there's gonna be some folks that are gonna need some help. So you wrote some things down on the board here that are suggestions, and I think timing-wise, that they're gonna people are gonna hear this episode right about the time that they probably need to start thinking about these resources.
SPEAKER_01:So yeah, uh, in our town, you know, we have a pretty good uh infrastructure for for some good nonprofits. Uh, food to power is one that it it has, you know, they they're at our events and they usually try to do things. Um, care and share has a good food bank. Uh, Mount Carmel is a veteran-specific one, so you can go there and probably get other resources too.
SPEAKER_00:That's what I would say while you're there. If you're in a situation where you, if it for any reason you're getting some anxiety over this, missing this next paycheck, just go to Mount Carmel and just say that. And they can help you not just with the financial piece, but the the mental health piece. The you can get access to counseling and just be like, I'm freaking out. Yeah. You know, they can help you with all of that.
SPEAKER_01:So yeah, I mean, they they have things that are just just to hang out and do drum circles and and you know, guitar circles, things like that. So they have a lot of things like that. Exercise classes that are free.
SPEAKER_00:There's a whole gym that like is free to most people that are, especially disabled veterans. There's a gym program where they have like veteran workout classes where everybody that's there is a veteran, right? So that Mal Carmel can hook you up with that stuff.
SPEAKER_01:So yeah. Yeah, yeah, they're uh great resource. We definitely need to are a lot of people are gonna be leaning on them because we've seen you know pictures of you know active duty and uh you know reserves or not reserves, but but federal f federal folks standing in food lines right now, you you know, because they they're not getting paid.
SPEAKER_00:Um yeah, we gotta remember too the double tap for a lot of our military families on active duty, their spouses are also federal employees, right? And so they work on base in those uh I can't remember what the name of it is, but the the funding that's the it's the non-essential funds. I can't remember the name of it, but there's there's all these positions on base that are paid for by this military non-essential funds, right? Okay, and um the those are the like the first ones. Yeah, like at the whisper of a shutdown, you're like, go home.
SPEAKER_01:You know, if your job title includes non-essential, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I mean it's it's just the whole there's the whole funding program. That's how like the family readiness group gets paid for on base, like a lot of the other health and welfare morale welfare type things happen on base off of that type of money. Okay, that's annually released and that's now programmed for ops, right? Yeah, MWR. Yeah, yeah, it's that there's a whole category of that spending that the military does. I can't remember the name of it, but anyways, that that's like a lot of military specialists choose to work, yeah. They're they're they're on that type of income. Yeah, and so the double tap is there that, like, hey, they missed the paycheck, the service member missed the paycheck, like everybody missed the paycheck, more maybe more than one at this point, right? Depending on the pay cycles, right? Yeah, that's scary. Yeah, that's uh scary, man. Yeah, I can I was freaking, you know, I freaked out about that kind of stuff because everybody in the military's paycheck to paycheck, everybody, yeah, like below 05. You know, even junior officers, people think I know enlisted people think officers are balling out of control, and in your world they are, but in the whole world world, they're not, right? You know, right?
SPEAKER_01:So I remember in 2011 or 2013, I can't remember which shutdown it was. Um active duty still got paid, but since I was a reservist, I didn't have orders in time for that that the yearly rollover. So there was a month, uh a month and a half, I think, where I just didn't get a paycheck and had to you know show up for work every day. So jerks. But uh but but like my mortgage company didn't care. But like I still got the nasty letters, so you know, I still tried to call them be like, hey, you know, it's just it's a government thing, you know, and they're like, okay, here's the letter you got on Friday.
SPEAKER_00:The Air Force didn't sign your lease, brother. Yeah, yeah, they don't care. So the Air Force doesn't own this house, you do.
SPEAKER_01:Right, yeah, yeah. So that there's like you said, everybody not everybody, but a huge chunk is living paycheck to paycheck. And if this goes into the holidays, it's gonna be a nightmare scenario.
SPEAKER_00:There you go. That's my crystal ball. Is the economy, even Democrats, even Democrats understand that if you break the Christmas purchasing cycle in America, you have broken America. Like you may cause irrecoverable damage if you mess with Q4 retail. Period. This is the lifeblood of America. You think it's soybeans and oil, yeah. Christmas presents, all right?
SPEAKER_01:That's what's driving the whole thing.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, it is, and so I really, really think this is gonna ride all the way till the week before Thanksgiving, and then that Black Friday scary is Black Friday. If people don't get, then here's the weird, I'm gonna say something that's really disgusting. You're gonna drop two, three, four paychecks in people's hands the week before Black Friday.
SPEAKER_01:Oh, so they're just gonna get stupid with their money.
SPEAKER_00:They're gonna get stupid with their money. Yeah, yeah. We're gonna have the biggest blowout Q4 Christmas holiday ever because you're gonna give everybody three months worth of pay or two months' worth of pay all on one day, yeah, right before the holidays. Right. Amazon's gonna be like, you'll be able to hear the money getting sucked into Amazon's bank account. You know what I'm saying? So, and then you know, everybody forgets how terrible the shutdown was, and there's no side to blame, and nothing matters, nothing happens. Yeah, just go right back to it. Basically, nothing happened. Consume, consume, consume, consume, consume, consume. So I think the timeline is everybody freaks out and sees the economy, would you know, just really take a massive, um uncontrollable hit if this rides through Thanksgiving. Right. So I think the week before Thanksgiving is when the Dems show up would just turn their pockets inside out and say, where do I sign?
SPEAKER_01:And I still hope they don't. Like they they can't sacrifice 10 million people's insurance for a system that's this broken.
SPEAKER_00:I feel like it's a it's a it's a foregone conclusion at this point. For me, I'm not a political, I'm not elected right now, but sitting out here, I feel like it's a foregone conclusion.
SPEAKER_01:So I I think there's a big enough push right now in middle America because of you know zero soybeans going to China in September. Uh that's a huge deal. There's other plants that only get used by China in America. Uh sorghum, sorghum, I think it's called type of wheat. Yeah. So like there's those things. These folks are just going bankrupt left and right.
SPEAKER_00:Fields going to fallow, they just chop it and leave it. Exactly. Because it can't, nobody's going to buy it. So they don't even properly harvest it. They just chop it down and let it lay on the ground.
SPEAKER_01:So, you know, that coupled with uh the insults that the Trump administration has thrown at middle America for not understanding his vision. Yeah. I think there's going to be a big enough push to get them to actually do something. And hopefully, you know, these folks aren't just you know making TikTok videos about it. Hopefully they're reaching out to their government officials and actually leveraging them and not just falling in line because you know the king says so. Um hopefully they're they're pushing their own elected representatives, they're not just making TikToks for the billionaires. But who knows?
SPEAKER_00:We didn't put it on the board, but this is our chance that I think we'll squeeze it in between these topics. Um, no king's protest. Why didn't we write that down? Okay, that happened. It happened, yeah. Yeah, um let's let's squeeze that in here. Um, so you got to attend. I had good intentions to attend, but I didn't make it. Uh, I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was 12,000 people in Colorado Springs. That's on the lower conservative side. There were some up to 15,000. I saw, you know, the spread in between there, yeah, as far as the population that attended.
SPEAKER_01:So yeah, that's a lot. I I would put us over 15,000. Yeah. Because the the pictures that I saw, and like, you know, we kind of try to uh it and one thing is like we provide those numbers, and I don't think anybody ever fact checks us.
SPEAKER_00:So Fox is where I'm telling you, the local Fox 21 is where I got that number from.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, because they ask us for it.
SPEAKER_00:That's crazy. So you know what I'm saying? Like you'd think they'd cut it in half just right off the top, right? They'd be like, oh yeah, 5,000 people showed up.
SPEAKER_01:Local Fox has been actually really incredible for us. Yeah, they'll come out and talk uh with the organizers and things like that. And it's been they're actually uh they'll send a camera owned by um Murdoch, right?
SPEAKER_00:There are Fox outlets that are not they're independent like other agencies, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, but but they'll they'll set up a camera.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, they'll set up a camera and like actually report on it and not just kind of show up at the end and be like, hey, nobody's here. Yeah. Um but but I think there's over 15,000 because uh you know, when I was there and you know, looking at the pictures, the pictures show usually the park. Going down the park and going up the roads, it was still packed. And like once we started marching and and trying to, you know, there was one medical incidence we're trying to get an ambulance in, so we had to move cars, and it was you know kind of chaotic in in some of the spots, trying to get people, you know, 15,000 people to move out in single file. Yeah. Uh so but overall, the energy and the excitement that people had was all positive and peaceful, and just that they were just there to let their voices be heard. There was one uh so maybe two or three trucks were driving around kind of antagonizing or something like that. Yeah. And uh there was one vet that gave me the pro-Tifa instead of Antifa.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Those pro-tifa trucks. That's a new term.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, just to call the the far right movement and they want to call it pro-TIFA. Yeah, I know that doesn't phonetically quite work out, but I really like it.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. If you're fine a Trump 2024 flag or 2028 flag, you are pro-tifa. Oh yeah, pro-pro-Tifa. Um so this vet though, he was on the sidewalk and he he was wearing uh a tech sergeant pen, so I knew he was a vet. But one of the pro-tifa trucks there was just he was letting them have it, just screaming at him, just like, you're protecting pedophiles, look me in the eye. And he was just for a hundred yards just screaming at this guy and just like it was it was probably the most enjoyable part of my life. Yeah, but he was also like very like whenever he would like get too close to the truck, I'd be like, Hey, get back on the sidewalk, and he'd step back on the sidewalk. You know, he just he just used his first amendment right, and yeah, you know, didn't engage with that guy or didn't block him from traveling, just walked him down the street. Yeah, it was an arm party, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Like this is our party, not political party, but you're you're at their own frat house, brother. There's asshole frat houses down the street, you know.
SPEAKER_01:There was like four kids that drove down from Woodland Park and tried to like antagonize folks too, and like it's just like if that's what you gotta do, and you're like, we're here to you know be with like-minded folks and just kind of like build each other and build community. Yeah, if you if you want to show up just to try to tear people down, you are grossly outnumbered. Yeah, like go away.
SPEAKER_00:So for me, um, the the the term king and the argument around, you know, is Donald Trump acting like a king or not based on policy, anybody can get lost in the sauce in some of those arguments, right? And that's where the right, you know, made fun of the protesters over the weekend because they were like, oh, the right, you know, the right was just they said, Well, what are they protesting? Donald Trump ended seven wars. Is that what a king does? You know, uh, Donald Trump did this, Donald Trump did that, you know. And I heard some, you know, 25-year-old woman just on Fox News just going off about how great he was. And I'm just it was just my brain was like, right, I couldn't get it, right? But um, here's a behavior that again, if someone started to list off all of that stuff, I'm not even gonna get wrapped up on policy things that are kinglike, right? Here's something that I don't the treasury is for real going to mint and issue one dollar coins with the sitting president's face on it. Yeah, that is a kingly action. If your face is on the coin, that is so that everyone knows that you're the emperor, right? That you rule the laser, right? Yeah, and that is not how we do it in America, right? We we wait for you to die before we put your face on the coin or the money, right? And it's just whether what it is, you know, like and sometimes it happens really fast because you were really an American hero. Yeah, and so just a year or two after you're dead, like they're printing something with your face on it. Right. That's the right order of events, right? You you get you get you help America, you die, and then we honor you, right? Yeah, uh the dying part is the step in getting your face on the money, yeah. Kings don't wait to die, kings reprint the money, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:They want the glory, they want to glory that right now, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:And so that if right there, if I'm sitting there talking to that young lady from Fox News, and I'll say, What other sitting democratically elected leader is on currency on earth? Yeah, answer that question. None, zero, you know what I'm saying? So that's a kingly action straight up, you know. Like, and I'm not like I'm not the most fervent king hater. I don't want to have a king, but like if I had to find, you know, in me, I was like, I'm gonna boil it down outside of policy things where you can't you can argue the benefit of a policy and whether or not the president should be allowed to do whatever they want to do, right? A group of judges agreed that that must be okay. I'm not smarter than the Supreme Court. I know that. But I don't have to be smart to see a coin with the sitting president's face on it and know that that's not how we do business. You know what I'm saying? It's not an intellect or an outcome kind of thing, it's a face value, literally pun intended. What's the face value of this coin? It's a kingdom. That's the face value of it. I don't want to argue about policy. I don't want to argue about whether he raped anybody or not. I don't care about any of that stuff. Let's just talk about the coin. And can you tell me that is not a king-like action? I'd love to hear what somebody that thinks that we were all being stupid on Saturday. I'd love to hear what they think about that.
SPEAKER_03:Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:That question will never get posed to anybody who really should answer it, right? Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Well, well, because it's hard to get to that when there's all those other things.
SPEAKER_00:You can't swim through the noise to get to this point.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's buried. Yeah. But I mean, the stuff that you're swimming through is valid. Like if he traffics children, we should know.
SPEAKER_00:Yes. Or at all. That like one of his best homies was doing that. Right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Even if like you found out and said, Oh, I'm not cool with that and walked away, still know. Like that needs to be elevated, buddy. Yeah. Right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Um, the idea of there, I don't know of any other one other kingly type thing that I haven't seen other presidents do, or you know, I don't know historically about this, but it's one thing to involve your family in what we'll say, tertiary duties of the office, right? Because they do have your name and your clout, and they can help with charity and with uh moving the needle on social topics, right? There's a lot of things where that can be impactful. But the real core functions of government, your family's usually not involved in that, right? Right, yeah. That's not been the case here, right? It's like, hey, I'm setting up a bloodline level of control that's not going to end with me. It's been my name is gonna perpetuate through this process, not just me. Yeah, and that requires other people with my name to be involved. Oh, he's that's very kingly. Oh, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, his videos of like uh running for election. Uh he put a video out of like Trump 2028, 32, 36, 40. Yeah, like on and on.
SPEAKER_00:Like a never-ending Trump Putin runs for office every four years, right? He's won six times in a row or whatever. Yeah, so just a rain.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, so he's yeah, he he's planning a rain, and people are you know talking about uh, you know, it's it's there, you know, in front of your face, if you know where to look, it's it's blatant.
SPEAKER_00:It's not a dog whistle anymore, it's a regular coach whistle now.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. He's running extra people. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, he's got a masked army that doesn't report to anybody, you know, uh a secretary of war that is looking to turn those forces on American people. Uh a homeland security that is wants to cross that boundary between military and law enforcement as well. Yeah, and uh ICE themselves have gotten guided missiles in the budget requests and things like that. Uh yeah, there's because we're gonna shoot Mexico?
SPEAKER_00:I mean, like, is that the yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:So is that what it is? Their their budget requests had guided missiles in it. And again, the government shut down and we're building these things angle.
SPEAKER_00:And they don't want to give them a lot of domestic law enforcement agents that need missiles.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and and their and their argument is always because they we want to give illegals health care. Yeah. They they've they've never received it in the past. You you know, they're like they get very little resources from the government, and so this fake straw man argument that they always have is just bullshit and it gets swallowed up.
SPEAKER_00:I guess if you want to run the other way with it, not only are we not gonna give them health care, we're gonna shoot them with sands, you know?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. And we're going to take your healthcare too.
SPEAKER_00:We're going to start blasting Home Depots, right? So I started blasting.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. Fire for effect. Yeah. Yeah. So that's a good transition to our, I think, our last topic on the board here, which is the Southern Command, the tack, the boats blowing up, and the military news, if everybody's not aware, of what's come out of that whole story. Yeah. Um, so you you I feel like you've tracked maybe the events around the boats a little bit closer than I have.
SPEAKER_01:So I mean, there's not much we know about the boats. There's seven boats, one uh just last night or yesterday in the Pacific now. So we've expanded this war on random boats that we don't know. Like I'm sure they have intel, I'm sure it's good intel.
SPEAKER_00:Uh the one had a semi-submersible, and that was the one that had some survivors off of it last week, boat number five or number six. Um it was hauling a semi-submersible. So it was that's drugs, right? They they tow, they have a submarine that they tow with a surface boat, and it it just doesn't go very far into the water, so that it looks like there's only one boat. And if that boat was to be like viewed, like optically viewed, it just looks like it's not loaded with anything. So we have pounds of cocaine in the water right behind it.
SPEAKER_01:But we also have the intel to stop them and capture that. If you if we can track them with a missile, we can track them with a intercept and we can take lawful intercept, provide.
SPEAKER_00:There's international laws around so you can't.
SPEAKER_01:There's extra juice of uh punishment here at the death penalty, to just killing people randomly. I can't believe there's not more of an outcry in the international community. You know, let like clear, like clearly we don't have our shit together here. Yeah, like we need the international community to have outrage and say, like, this cannot go on. You cannot just shoot people because you have intel that they're carrying drugs, people, whatever it is. You interdict, you know, interdict them, whatever the word is, grab them, you know, contain them, do a real investigation. Right, either hand them off to the international courts or some court system. Yeah, like that's civilized humanity here. And we are not behaving like that.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, we we would arrest, we would go out of our way to arrest pirates that had stolen boats, right? And like we know that the them, the boat, everything about it is uh an uh uh instrument of criminality. If there was ever somebody that we could have just lit up, it would be like Ethiopian pirates, right? Like we didn't even do that, you know what I'm saying? We would follow them around for days to interdict them and like arrest them and then take them to court in New York, right? Like we would arrest them in the Indian Ocean and take them to New York so that we can have a trial and show people that this is a crime and make it make a spectacle out of it. Yeah, that's how it's done. Now we're just blowing folks out of the water with with with a baseball card, is what we call it in the Intel side of the house, right? You know, a four a quad chart that has like bad guy, this is why, this is why we can kill him, this is when we can kill him. We're just basically running a baseball card, which when you're in a war zone and you've got rules of engagement, yeah, then you then that's how you get stuff done.
SPEAKER_03:Right.
SPEAKER_00:When you're blowing things up in international waters from places that you are not at war with, that's a different story. Yeah, right.
SPEAKER_01:That's a war crime.
SPEAKER_00:Right. And so um, if we you know, whether we want to say that is you know, I'm not saying left face is ready to make that declaration. Let's we have to vote on that offline, right? Because maybe it's all valid. I don't know. But somebody else did already make their statement on this admiral that's in charge of the southern command, and so that's a the combatant command that covers all the waters around South America and basically um from about three-quarters of the way of Mexico down is like Southern Command. Like Mexico's in northern command, but once you get right down to the southern tip of Mexico and like Guatemala or whatever, yeah, then it switches to Southern Command. And so that can be a that's an open seat, that's a not service specific uh combatant command, could come from any, you know, Navy, Air Force, Army, whatever, right? And so he's the combatant commander over all forces for the Southern Command, ground and sea and air. But he's a Navy Admiral, and so the prosecution of these ships falls much more in line with what his professional expertise is, right? He knows how to conduct war uh on the high seas when we are and are not at in a conflict with somebody, right? When you're patrolling, you know, the Asian Pacific area, anybody around there could take a shot at you. You can't shoot back, you know what I'm saying? Like there's rules of engagement, right? And so once we started blowing these boats up, these drug runner boats, um, it didn't take long. You know, we're doing it at a pretty good clip. Um, the president told Congress that we're at war, but Congress isn't even in session, so there's nothing, nothing happening there. And so the commander, uh, three or four star Navy Admiral resigned because of the orders to blow up these ships. There hasn't been much more, no public statement from that person yet. They're not authorized to have a public statement yet, I'm sure. Um, the administration is going to badmouth and throw this person under the bus for sure. Absolutely. They've already started to hint at that, right? Hexeth for sure, like I don't agree with this dude's position. What we're doing is legal and lawful, and and you know, kill them all and let the let the sharks sort them out, I guess. So and the commander there says, no, this is not legal, and I'm not gonna have my name associated with this anymore. I've got 30 years of honorable service, and following these orders is dishonorable. I'm out. Yeah, I I want I want to applaud that person for taking that stand and to to some degree of personal sacrifice, yeah, saying, I'm not gonna be associated with this because I really believe it's illegal. Yeah, right. And I have the opportunity to get to get out, right? To get out of this.
SPEAKER_01:That's a terrible way to end the career like that. 30 years and it and to be chained like that. Yeah. You know, that's yeah, that's terrible.
SPEAKER_00:I mean, but wouldn't you rather go out on your morals than a year or two of questionable, authorized, you know, killings that are happening on your watch?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I mean, like so since September 2nd, the first one, uh, this is the seventh one. Yeah. So it's been like six weeks. So they're getting about one done a week here. So yeah, I mean, how long can you have that within your consciousness?
SPEAKER_00:Right. You know, the first one is maybe uh a bad day, and I need to go talk to the chaplain, and I'm not sure what's going on here, right? And the second one is, oh no, this is happening, right? And then by the third one, you're like, how fast can I drop my papers? Like, I have to go. Yeah, and I wish I could take everybody with me. You know, like I don't want anybody to be doing this, you know.
SPEAKER_01:That's what's gonna like really intrigues me is the person behind them. Like, how close were they? How you know aligned are they? Like, who are they gonna get to fill that role and just rubber stamp those operations and really kicking into overdrive? So instead of one a week now, we're doing all a day, yeah. Like they're they can find people like that. Yeah, agree.
SPEAKER_00:And we are seeing um this this is also convenient in you know, we're gonna get a little bit of inside baseball on the military side of things. Heggseth has been pushing, and I'm I'm actually just in a vacuum, I'm okay with this. Decrease the rank, increase the responsibility. So instead of having a three-star in charge of something, make a one-star in charge of that thing, and then that's it. We just reset the clock. We don't need the three and the two and the one star. The one star's got it. Yeah, they got it. Don't neuter the one star, give them the authority and get rid of the two-star and the three-star position altogether. They don't need to be there, you know, like in a in some of these frameworks, right? Depends on the mission and how it's all built out, right? But there are there are stacks of stars where there don't need to be. Yeah, and so you're gonna you're gonna start seeing downgrading. A star is gonna get dropped every time somebody uh resigns or or retires, even if it's just the end of that tour, the person that replaces them is gonna come in with one less star, right? That's happening in a lot of places already. Um, and I saw just this this last weekend that congratulations to somebody that is a three star. The lieutenant general was leaving and a one star replaced him. That one star may be promotable to two stars, yeah, but they're definitely not a two promotable to three, right? Right. Um, so the you know, that's already happening in a in a lot of different places, right? And so I see this as a as one of, you know, it's another one of those four uh attrition, right? Right, force shaping by attrition, right?
SPEAKER_01:You know, but but you're really watering down the professionalism because like moving uh you know the one star to a three-star, yes, okay. But then everybody below them is also getting bumped up and moved up, but they're not ready for it. And I can't tell you how many folks that you would you know see make oh six and not be ready to leave. Yeah, yeah, you know, so so that they're gonna but here's the here's the flip side, but they're just gonna be yes men.
SPEAKER_00:Well, the flip side of that is there's friggin' five thousand oh six authorizations on the books, and there should only be three thousand. So two, I'm just saying, there's that like there doesn't need to be five thousand oh sixes, right? Those people weren't ready for promotion, but there was a vacuum. The the service is going to promote, right? If they've got 3,000 billets that they need to promote 05s into those 06 positions, they're gonna do it. Yeah, so don't make those people stay 05s and let them retire there. You see what I'm saying? Like it's there's nothing wrong with saying, hey, pump the brakes on me. You're not gonna get that bird, it's just not gonna happen, you know. It doesn't matter how good of a service member you are, it's just not there, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, and and that's happening, right? You know, so well now the side effect of that is you get to replace people, like I we said in previous episodes, when you get rid of the person who has morals, you get to replace them with a person who does maybe has a different set of morals. I don't want to say there's people out there in the military that are willing to betray their oath, but there are absolutely people in the military that can view something like shooting a boat full of, you know, what are you willing to believe they're drug criminals based off someone else's word? Or do you really need the proof? Right. That's where that moral line gets drawn, and that one, oh, you know, one officer would say, Oh no, I need triple layered proof. And the other officers officer would say, That guy's in charge, not me. Let's go blow him up. Right. You see what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_01:But this is also the problem with firing all of your lawyers that would protect commanders from these illegal decisions. Sure.
SPEAKER_00:So now these folks are going into without proper Well, and you can't whistleblow on people under Hexeth's administration either, right? Yeah. So it doesn't matter if you don't like the you know, the illegal commands that are coming down. So what? Yeah, everybody knows they're illegal and they just keep coming. So yeah. Because you can't whistleblow, right? Like, so there's, you know. Yeah, he can only signal leak. Yeah. And uh I saw there was um even more problems on the press side of the house. Thousand uh, I think there was no, it wasn't thousands. I don't know, there's like more than half of the press course, so it was a hundred-something press turned in their credentials for the Pentagon. They said, Well, not, we're just not gonna play this game. They're they told them they all have to be in one spot, and basically anybody, nobody's authorized to talk to them, they just have to stand in a rectangle out in the hallway, and nobody that walks by is gonna say anything to them. And then if someone did talk to them, basically they have to leave that rectangle and walk down the hall to the press office and show them what they're gonna print. And people were like, No, I just don't even need to be here.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, like Fox News, like every like air quote legitimate news source said no. Left. Yeah, that they they bounced. And so just this morning I was reading about how the uh you know press secretary, deputy press secretary, whatever, just released the official new right-wing press corps that that it's just you know, it's the folks that you know um Patriot Towns, yeah, uh the Des Moines Register.
SPEAKER_00:You know, this is like random little local papers are getting credentials for the White House because nobody else would go there.
SPEAKER_01:So the Epic Times, you know that one? Yeah, uh website. Yeah, so that's got a lot of stuff on it. They actually fired some journalists who wouldn't go along because they signed up and they got their press credentials, so they'll be on there. Yeah, but they fired their employees that didn't want to be in there. Right, right. The journalists that had a little bit of integrity. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They fired them, got rid of them. So again, it's just gonna be people that are standing there just to gobble up whatever's being fed at.
SPEAKER_00:I feel you know, at that point, you're you're not um you're just part of the press, you're part of the public affairs office at that point. The propaganda machine. You know what I'm saying? You're not you're not part of your own press organization, you're just part of the public affairs office. And the more branded outlets that we can get to print this, the more valid the public affairs message is.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and then they they reference reference each other. Yeah, you know, so it's a cyclical thing. Yeah, yeah, and they're just it's a propaganda machine.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, right. And so that means that you know, the people who would be chasing down this story about this admiral and trying to really understand what's going on on that and whether or not he's facing any legal consequences, or if he denied a command and like that's what led to his resignation. Uh, if he talked to Heg Seth before he did any of this, and it's like, hey, this is illegal. Nobody knows.
SPEAKER_01:You know, all of them are standing in a little square, just waiting for that guy to not walk by.
SPEAKER_00:You know, so we need to know more about his his thought process and what's happened in Southern Command and why, you know, who's gonna replace him, all that. Like there, you know, the public should know more because the president is saying we're sending, we're doing old school South America um government rigging again, right? We're back in it. We got CIA in Venezuela, we're blowing up boats, we got troops on the ground, we got troops on boats, funding Argentina, like you know what I'm saying? Like we're tipping scales and doing shady stuff down there, and nobody is watching, nobody is paying attention, they're not allowed to. Yeah, yeah, that's insane, right? Like, this is how the old Bay of Pig stuff happened, right? That's how the old Cuba missile crisis, like all that stuff was related to the government doing shady stuff, nobody knowing what was going on, even one side of the government not knowing what the other side of the government was doing, so that plans were conflicting with each other because nobody trusts anybody, right? To talk and go, I don't want them to know what's going on. They might stop us from being able to execute our plan.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, or take credit for it, or take credit for it, right?
SPEAKER_00:Or we may die down there because something happens and we don't ever come back, you know. Like when you're doing that secret operative stuff, do you have to worry about that, right? You know, so you don't trust even other Americans, right? And like then you end up with botched everything that happened back in the 60s, you know, like all that stuff could happen all over again. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01:We're barreling towards that.
SPEAKER_00:Right. That's what I'm saying. So it's insane. Yeah, and we don't have a press score to to keep track of it.
SPEAKER_01:So yeah, the the uh I don't want to say the failure of like journalists uh to like properly like record things.
SPEAKER_03:They would get it.
SPEAKER_01:I mean, just so inundated with bullshit from everywhere now, sure. You know, like even the the good true stories and journalists and the people that put the work out there, it gets buried under BS so quickly. But you you know, so it's just tough.
SPEAKER_00:They flood it's called flooding the zone. Yep, exactly. Right? Yeah, they flood the zone, right? Never never stop talking about stuff that doesn't matter. Some of the stuff that does matter makes makes breaks the sound barrier. Right, it only gets up there for a second, and then it's just right back over with all the other fart noise stuff that you're talking about. The signal-to-noise ratio. Yeah, they want to keep that that floor, the noise floor, as high as possible. Yeah, so you cannot transmit through that noise floor, right? They're just blasting it, you know, like good luck. Nobody can hear you, you know, because we're making all the noise, right? And like the the oh, we'll wrap up with this the AI cartoon of Donald Trump flying the jet and you know, dropping dookie on people, right? Real people that was a real person that he dropped in. Yeah, it was it. Okay, I I only saw a little, I didn't even watch the whole stupid clip, right? I didn't know. I saw a little piece of it. I saw what it was, right? You know, and I was just like, this is the that's it, that's the noise, right? The signal to noise ratio. There you go. You're witnessing the noise, right? The president himself is gonna sit down and tweet AI videos, and then we're gonna spend time talking about why the president has the bandwidth to look at truth and X all day long and retweet stuff, yeah, instead of all the illegal commands, instead of the forkless going into the White House, instead of the ice trucks, instead of right, you see what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_01:Oh, yeah, like yeah, that is our society. All right, another positive note to have it. Hey, we'd love to wrap it up just like that, right?
SPEAKER_00:If you did if you dodge the dookie bombs out of the AI vehicle this weekend, good for you. And uh, I guess we'll see you all next week. Thanks for listening, everybody. Take care.
