Here is a transcript, edited for clarity:
Good morning. As you’re watching this, it’s Friday morning, March 20th. As I’m recording, it is Thursday afternoon, March 19th, 6.30 PM. The sun is still out because we do something to our clocks.
It’s been a strange week in a lot of ways. And I wanted to talk about the idea of what reality is and how hard it is now to come to grips with what the truth is.
And this is obviously by design. We know from learning about fascism for the last 10 years that the thing that the dictator tries to do is destroy the ability to know what’s real and what’s not. That’s ultimately what the goal is. Because once reality is destroyed, people surrender and give up.
In the days of AI and deepfakes and all this kind of technology, it’s easier than ever to blur real and fake. Couple that with the fact that five insanely wealthy oligarchs own pretty much all of the media, and it’s a recipe for disaster.
Joe Kent until last week was the director of the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center. He’s a Republican. He was born in 1980. He ran for office unsuccessfully in Washington State, and he’s a combat veteran. He has a pretty impressive resume. He’s been working in this field for a long time. So he definitely has the bona fides to do the job—unlike pretty much anyone else in the Trump administration. And he resigned because he disapproves of this war with Iran; doesn’t like how it’s going; doesn’t like how it started; doesn’t like anything about it. He put out a statement on social media and then he did what Republicans do in such perilous times: He went on Tucker Carlson and gave a lengthy interview—which was interesting to watch.
And a lot of the things he said made a lot of sense. But I feel the need to deconstruct it, pull it back a little bit. Joe Kent is historically a libertarian. He’s basically a Ron Paul guy. That’s his background. So he comes at the conservative stuff from that path. And he has some questionable associations with with rightwing figures, but that’s not the topic for today. In the past, he is a guy who was vociferously opposed to sending aid to Ukraine. He thought that the Russians were going to win. He thought it was prolonging the suffering of the Ukrainian people to give them aid and, in his view, give them some sort of false hope that they might win and defeat the horrible people that were invading their country—which if it happened in the United States, and Canada was invading Washington State where Kent lived, my guess is that he wouldn’t feel the same way. But that’s neither here nor there.
So he’s been pushing that narrative. That doesn’t mean necessarily that he’s, like, a Russian stooge or whatever, but he’s definitely putting things out in the ether that the Kremlin would not disapprove of.
He was a frequent guest on Tucker’s show for years before this. And until recently, he was operating as Tulsi Gabbard’s chief of staff—Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence. And God knows where her allegiances are. It’s been well documented by Hillary Clinton and a lot of other people that, you know, she’s basically a shill for the Kremlin. And if you look at what she’s done and what she’s said, I think, especially since taking this job, you know, that bears out. She’s done a lot of questionable things that have, in my view, disrupted the safety and national security of the country.
So you’ve got a guy that’s working for her, in some sort of command position.
Now, one of the problems is that Tulsi and Joe did not get an audience with Trump before the decision was made to bomb Iran. Apparently it was a small group of people that were in his ear—and the intelligence community were not among those people. The intelligence community, according to Joe Kent and I think common sense, found no credible evidence that there was any sort of nuclear threat with Iran. That, according to Joe Kent, was what they would have told Trump, had he asked, which he did not.
So that’s who you have on here—this guy. And he’s smart. Tucker is smart, too. It’s worth listening to, to hear them talk, because they have ideas that are interesting.
Now you have Tucker, who’s been cast off from Fox News where he was for a long time. He’s a guy who went to Moscow and platformed Putin, under the guise of journalism.
It’s not journalism. It’s just not. It seems like it’s journalism, but platforming a guy who’s just spewing lies, and not calling him out on his lies, is not journalism. It’s just platforming. Especially when it’s not a live broadcast. You know, he recorded it. He could have edited it. He could have inserted things. He did not. I don’t know why. Maybe he was told not to do it. Maybe he was terrified. I don’t blame him. I remember looking back at what I wrote at the time—I was afraid for Tucker, watching him in Moscow and watching Putin’s reactions to things Tucker was saying anyway. So you’ve got that.
He’s the Polymarket favorite for Republican candidate for president in 2028—for what that’s worth. Polymarket is the kind of legal betting site where you can basically bet on future events. And it’s become a thing where people go look at it, because they allow insider trading, so when some weird blip happens, that’s a predictive thing. It’s very strange. I don’t understand it. But Polymarket seems to think Tucker Carlson is going to be the candidate for president.
Carlson is a big Hungary guy, you know, a big Orbán guy, Victor Orbán. He’s been to Hungary many times, he’s definitely on his side. There was that CPAC Hungary thing that he was, I think, involved with. Victor Orbán, according to testimony in a trial by another lieutenant of Mogilevich, was a bagman from Mogilevich—delivering money from the Russian mob to bribe politicians. So, you know, he’s a mobster basically. And so Tucker’s all rah-rah for this guy.
So I’m watching this and I’m like, “OK.” I’m listening to what they’re saying. A lot of what they’re saying makes sense. I mean, Kent gets his digs in on Biden and Obama, like they do. But most of what he’s saying makes perfect sense.
He’s saying there is no nuclear capability. They don’t want nuclear capability. The Iranians are smart. If they wanted to do it, they would do it. They’d figure it out. Obviously, they’re smart. We can tell in the last two weeks what’s happening. The capability is there; there’s no will. He says there’s a fatwa from the clerics that they’re not allowed to build a nuclear weapon. That seems like it’s true to me. All of it.
And there was no credible threat. The only credible threat came from what Israeli intelligence was allegedly telling Trump. So that goes back to Bibi and Israel. And a lot of what Joe Kent and Tucker both were hinting at was that there are powerful lobbying forces working on behalf of Israel to basically try to turn public opinion to suit their needs and to influence the people in power.
And as Kent pointed out, often the strategic objectives of the United States and the strategic objectives of Israel are one and the same, but not always—and certainly not in this case. He said, Joe Kent, that there’s a lot of Israelis in Washington who will kind of come up to you and say, “Well, our intelligence says this, you guys don’t have it yet, but the nuclear thing is very close,” and these things are floated and they’re believed.
And he named Mark Levin, who’s a big Bibi ally here in the United States, who publishes columns and promotes the talking points, according to Joe Kent. So there was a push by the powerful Israeli lobby. Again, I’m using his words. This is what he’s saying. While it didn’t make the decision—like, Bibi didn’t call Trump and demand he do this; it was a push to get him to do it and he agreed with it. At the end of the day the decision to go to war is made by the president—even if the president is a mobbed-up Kremlin asset who can barely string two sentences together. That’s what we voted for.
One more thing that I thought was interesting about Kent is that at the same time as he was attacking the the lobbyists in the United States—I think they were talking about AIPAC, but they didn’t say the words; they’re very careful not to say the words, but I’m pretty sure that’s who they meant—he sort of hinted that the Gaza thing maybe wasn’t as bad as all that. He seemed to indicate, to my listening, that a lot of what we know about Gaza was actually just propaganda, spewed by Hamas or whatever. And I think that’s ridiculous. I think it’s pretty clear that Bibi blew up a lot of stuff and killed a lot of people.
So I’m watching this, like I said, and all of these ideas are swirling around in my head. And I don’t know that I fully trust either one of these people. I don’t know if they have an ulterior motive to be doing the interview. I don’t know what they’re trying to do. I don’t know if Kent resigned in order to give Trump some sort of “out” down the line. I don’t know if this was itself some sort of counterintelligence op. I don’t know what is going on, but my brain is churning and churning and churning, trying to figure this all out, when it shouldn’t be like that.
It should just be, Trump did something really stupid, and this guy resigned in disgust and in protest. I think that actually is true. But I still can’t get over what the motive is. Why is he talking about this now? Why this guy? You’ve been with Trump this whole time. And yes, Iran is a catastrophic blunder. On the other hand, isn’t it better to stay in your job and make it so that we don’t get attacked? And maybe that’s part of it, too. I don’t know.
(Note: Kent is reportedly under investigation by Kash Patel’s FBI for revealing classified information, further muddying the picture. Is that legit? Or a way of giving Kent more credibility with the resistance? I guess we have to wait and see if Meidas Touch gives him a podcast.)
Again, these are all these possibilities that are swirling around in my mind. And you have to understand also, there’s been this sort of—I guess we can call it a conspiracy theory for the last two weeks about whether or not Bibi Netanyahu is dead or alive. There was a big attack on a command center by Iran like two weeks ago and Bibi hasn’t really been seen in public since then— although there have been videos of him that were made public, but people on the internet have gone in and pointed out that a lot of these videos are generated by AI.
So is it really Netanyahu? Is it AI? Is he dead? Is he alive? I actually—I made a song parody and I made a little video myself, just because I wasn’t sure if this story would even keep until today, today meaning Friday. And I think Donnie—Chunk—is gonna do something a lot funnier tonight. Anyway, I made this. I think it shows you all the ridiculous stuff that’s happening. So let’s listen to this…
[plays music video]
All right, so I made that. You know, and again, you see there at the end—AI can do a lot of things. Deep fakes are good now. And a lot of people aren’t qualified to, you know, know what’s real, what’s not, what’s AI, what isn’t AI.
The thing that’s disturbing is that if it’s AI, and Bibi hasn’t been around in two weeks, the United States government’s now complicit in it. Because Mike Huckabee was in one of those videos confirming that he’s alive. Which you would like to think would be true—that the U.S. ambassador would not be lying to Americans about something as important as, our ally in this stupid war is dead.
But again, this speaks to the moment right now. It speaks to where we are right now. It’s very, very hard to tell what’s real and what’s fake. I mean, I’ve been writing about Epstein for years now, right? Years. And when he died, there was immediately a lot of conspiracy theory, so-called, about how he died. He wouldn’t have committed suicide. We think he was murdered. We think this. Maybe he faked his death. And I just dismissed all of that out of hand. I was like, “I don’t care. That’s not really that important in the grand scheme of things. It’s much more important to follow the money and figure out what his real role is,” and all that kind of stuff.
And now all this new information is coming out, and it’s like, maybe the coroner was wrong. Maybe all this shit is lies. Maybe somebody went in there and murdered him— or maybe they did swap the body out. I don’t know, you know? Maybe Epstein and Netanyahu are together right now in Uruguay or something. I don’t know. I don’t know.
Netanyahu missed pretty much all of his major defense meetings for the last two weeks, by the way, which is very very strange. That was the main kind of data point for him being dead, or infirm, or in hiding, or whatever.
It’s a lot of weird things. If you’re interested in it, you can go look it up. To be clear: I’m not reporting on it happening. I’m not reporting on it being true. I’m telling you about this whole thing that’s brewing online because, I don’t know, it’s so weird. And that specific thing speaks to how hard this moment is, you know, to know what’s real and what’s not real.
And it doesn’t help that we have a reality TV president. It doesn’t help that we have a reality TV president who’s an idiot and an asshole—just being mean to people and disrespectful all the time. None of this stuff helps. I always thought that when he chose his Twitter handle and he put @ realdonaldjtrump, that seemed like, I don’t know, a sign that everything was fake. You know what I mean?
So who knows? I don’t know who’s alive, who’s dead. I don’t know. LB and I have a long running joke about how this is all a simulation. Maybe it’s all a simulation. I don’t know. You know, that would explain the glitching in the AI video for Netanyahu today (meaning Thursday). He released another video, which people online immediately insisted is AI, where he talked about how Jesus Christ was no match for Genghis Khan. I guess he was quoting?
But the point is that everything is so messed up—it’s so crazy, it’s so bonkers—that I don’t know definitively…like, I don’t believe it fully, I’m not totally convinced…a percentage of my brain thinks that there’s something there—that the prime minister of an allied nation in the time of war faked his death. Or rather faked his life, I suppose.
That’s where we are right now. And it’s a crazy, crazy time. And I don’t know what to do about it. Maybe LB will be able to enlighten me tonight on The Five 8, which I hope you watch. We have a great guest tonight. I don’t know; maybe the solution, as it often is, is just alcohol.
Anyway, I think the weather might be improving. It was a little bit warm and it got cold again, but I don’t know—maybe it’ll be a nice weekend. I hope so. You know, we’re getting closer to the No Kings marches. We’re getting closer to the midterms.
We’re also getting closer to April Fool’s Day. So maybe that’s when the aliens come down and tell us it was all a joke all along. Or, you know, the generic ending: It was all a dream.
Until next time, we shall prevail.
