They used WHAT to hide the President? | Ep. 10

Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills. But it turns out, that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for a 12-month plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms. Hank joined BJ's Wholesale Club the day he became a father of 30. I coach football. Now, Coach Hank saves up to 25% off grocery store prices. 30 pounds of pasta, three cases of protein bars, 75 sports drinks. And that's just pregame. He knows teamwork. And BJ's knows savings. This is your home, Coach. Home of the save. Join for just $20 at bjs.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon. Limited time offer. New members only. BJ's home of the save. Hello from Athens, Greece, where it is now 4.36 p.m. I am in an area of Athens that I just love. It's called Psydi. When I was living here between 1998 and 2000, Psydi was almost a no-go area. It was largely abandoned. Abandoned warehouses mostly, light industrial. But then around 2000, artists began moving in and opening small galleries or small workshops. And then once the artists came, the cafes and the restaurants came, and then the young people came, and now it is the place to be for nightlife and restaurants and clubs. And you are a stone's throw from the beautiful historic Parthenon, which you can see behind me. The Acropolis, which is the hill that it sits on. Right in the heart of everything. Well, folks, as we speak, the YouTube channel is about to hit 250,000 subscribers. When we started, I had high hopes for this channel. I really did. But I had no idea that we would hit this number so quickly. It's ridiculous. I cannot thank you enough for commenting, for subscribing, for telling your friends. We're improving every week. I'm really proud of this show. But we're improving thanks to the notes that you guys leave. And I can't wait to keep bringing you the show because we are just getting started, to tell you the truth. And I don't want to spill the beans, but we have some big plans for next year when we're going to be, I think, big enough, hefty enough that we can start bringing on some A-list guests to answer some tough questions. And since we're in Athens, I thought that we'd talk about a side of this city that most tourists never hear about, and that is terrorism, assassinations, terrorist groups, anarchism, spy wars, and a relationship between American and Greek intelligence that has at times been just an absolute mess. I'll tell you some of those stories later on in the show. But first, we have some genuinely 007-style intrigue involving the current president of the United States, Donald Trump. Remember this strange story from a few weeks ago? President Trump was leaving the NATO summit in Turkey, headed for the UK, when suddenly he announced that he wasn't going to fly on his shiny new Qadri-gifted Air Force One 747. Well, instead, Trump said that he was switching back to the old Air Force One. He said, for old time's sake. Nobody believed that. But we didn't have the story until now, because this was happening in the middle of a war with Iran. Everybody just assumed there was some sort of a threat. And just to be on the safe side, the switch was made. There were already reports that the president's new Qadri jet didn't yet have all of the defensive communications capabilities of the old Air Force One. When reporters raised those questions, the White House just went ballistic. White House communications director Stephen Chung attacked reporter Carol Lennig, saying this, quote, Carol Lennig is a liar, and this article is complete fake news. She has no idea what she's talking about, unquote. That's not very nice. Well, it turns out that the truth was considerably crazier than what was being reported at the time. And now we have video of the transfer. According to new reporting from The Washington Post, U.S. officials were worried about what they called a credible Iranian threat against Trump or against his aircraft. So they didn't just switch Trump's plane. They used an airport catering truck to secretly shuffle Trump onto a smaller plane after he boarded Air Force One in view of the television cameras. We're going to break this down. Let's look at this video. But it turns out that's very illegal. Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12-month plan required. Initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. See terms. Tammy regularly hauls stuff to her kids at college. That's why she shops at BJ's Wholesale Club, saving up to 25% off grocery store prices. Beef jerky, microwave meals, laundry pods, even they can't screw up. Have you met my kids? And with BJ's gas, she gets there for less. They call me the road warrior. This is your home, road warrior mom. Home of the save. Join for just $20 at BJ's.com slash mesquite and save $10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon. Limited time offer. New members only. It sounds like a scene from a movie. President Donald Trump was secretly moved off of Air Force One in an airport catering truck and transported to a different plane without the world knowing. The Washington Post broke the story Monday night, reporting that the ruse happened after the NATO summit in Turkey. Photos released Tuesday from the press pool traveling with the president that day show three U.S. government planes on the tarmac in Ankara, Turkey. The new Air Force One that Qatar gifted to the president, a legacy Air Force One that has flown presidents for decades, and a smaller jet in the back that apparently took center stage. The Post reports that in Ankara, Trump boarded the old Air Force One jumbo jet in view of television cameras. He was secretly shuttled minutes later to a smaller plane, an Air Force C-32A, via an airport catering truck. The New York Times later reported that after Mr. Trump arrived in Britain, he was secretly moved back to the older version of Air Force One. He then disembarked in view of reporters and walked across the tarmac to the plane donated by Qatar, which he flew to Washington. Security officials reportedly thought the secret plane change was necessary because of a potential threat against the president by Iran. The traveling press pool was not told about the deception, meaning they incorrectly thought the president was on the old Air Force One with them. In this particular case, it sure looks like the press, White House staffers, the military members on board the plane were potentially sitting ducks in a case like this. After the president boarded the Qatari Air Force One in Britain later that night, he was asked about concerns over Iranian threats. I'm number one on their list before you, but if I go, you go. It's not the first time a president was covertly transported, though it's unusual that the traveling press pool was not clued in. Well, in the year 2000, President Clinton was traveling between India and Pakistan, and they actually put him on an unmarked plane to go between those two countries. This incident is putting renewed focus on security concerns surrounding the new Air Force One gifted by Qatar. Had that plane been fully secured, this deception might not have been necessary. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Reporting at the White House, Taylor Poplarz, Spectrum News. Yeah, boy, oh boy, there's a lot to unpack there. So Trump eventually did move back to Air Force One. It's not clear how he moved from the C-32A to the old Air Force One after landing, but he then got back aboard Air Force One to take questions from journalists for 15 minutes, not acknowledging that that change took place. Now, before we go on to another clip, I want to say that one of the things that Trump did with that kind of smart-alecky comment, was he confirmed, was he confirmed that the reporters that were on the plane were sitting ducks. He got off the plane and went on to the other plane to save himself. He didn't give a shit about the reporters who were all on the plane thinking that Trump was at the front of it and just not taking questions. Reporters in Washington are talking about this a lot today, and universally, they're angry. They're angry because the president didn't show any concern for their lives or their safety. Now, another issue here is: Was this really legitimate intelligence? What we've learned, and we learned this from the Turks, we're going to get to this in a minute, is that the intelligence came from the Israelis. Well, of course it came from the Israelis. But remember, other credible intelligence that the Israelis gave us were immediately after we started bombing Iran, they said that there were iranian terrorist cells in every major city across the united states okay so where where are the arrests we have not seen one single arrest of a an iranian terrorist anywhere in the united states did they just make it up i mean you might recall they're eating the dogs they're eating the cats that was made up so were these terrorist cells all across america never existed so did the israelis tell the white house that there was a credible threat against the president's life just to make trump feel indebted to them for saving him i don't know i'm speculating this is the report from the turks turkey suspects israel fabricated trump air force one assassination plot to derail u.s iran deal well you know one of the interesting things is that literally nobody is reporting that the cia had developed the same information or that nsa had developed the same information or mi6 or gchq or the australians or the french or the saudis or the emiratis nobody else was able to develop this information only the israelis so we're supposed to believe that either they got very very lucky or they are so good that they beat the pants off of every other intelligence service in the world and they single-handedly serve to protect the president united states i'll let you decide well another issue that we have here is the plane footage i thought you would get a kick out of seeing something like this jb can you run this uh this clip so here's the president going on the new air force one and he just disappears inside it just like he normally would now what you see down there is a catering truck there's an elevator on the other side of air force one where the catering truck can drive up to the elevator load the food onto it it goes up into the actual body of the plane and everybody gets their meals for the trip and their drinks and coffee and what have you but in this case the president was hiding inside the catering truck and then the catering truck took him to the smaller jet in between the new air force one and the old air force one loaded him onto the smaller jet the media gets on the the new air force one which is apparently the one that was under threat from the iranians and uh and then everybody flew to the uk well once they get to the uk trump gets off the smaller jet secretly gets back on air force one flies to andrews air force base and everybody lives happily ever after and we're only learning this now so the bottom line is we're just going to have to take the israeli's word for it because we're never going to know if there really was a uh a threat against the president or not what if the way money works is about to change not someday not hypothetically but right now china and the united states are both making moves that suggest we could be heading towards something the world hasn't seen in more than 50 years a return to gold backed money or something very close to it china is shutting down paper gold trading at four of its biggest banks all on the same day and they're building a new system that settles on physical gold instead on our side the government is sitting on more than 8 000 tons of gold still valued at 42 dollars an ounce on the books legislation to fix that has already been introduced in congress if both superpowers start anchoring their currencies to gold what happens to the price and more importantly what happens to every dollar in your retirement that isn't backed by anything at all that's the question that a free report from american alternative assets answers it's called the day money changes forever and if you have an ira or a 401k you need to read it right now get your free copy at johnlovesgold.com that's johnlovesgold.com or call 1-888-G-O-L-D-053 this whole incident got me wondering about other historic escapes and there were a couple that i knew about in 1861 this is one of my favorite ones this was a legitimate plot in 1861 detectives uncovered the pinkertons by the way pinkerton detectives uncovered a plot to assassinate president-elect abraham lincoln as his train was passing through baltimore he was on his way to washington to take the oath of office this was march of 1861 so get this in baltimore he received two percent of the vote baltimore even though maryland maryland was a southern state but it did not it did not secede from the union it did not join the confederacy it just wanted to stay out of it but maryland marylanders hated abraham lincoln he got two percent of the vote in baltimore telegraph wires were cut and the future president slipped through baltimore overnight wearing a soft felt hat and a shawl detective kate warna repeated reportedly posed as as lincoln's sister while lincoln hid behind in a sleeping car he made it safely to washington he took the oath of office and then got roasted by the press for sneaking into town universally the media in 1861 called abraham lincoln a coward because he wouldn't you know face his assassins like a man can you imagine two hundred years before that king charles ii in 1651 famously climbed and hid inside an oak tree after losing the battle of worcester he successfully hid there for a day and then he went on the run for six weeks so as not to be caught and probably executed fidel castro survived decades of assassination attempts some that sound like like rejected austin power scenes seriously poison pills exploding seashells exploding cigars a contaminated skin diving suit ridiculous and then there's the closest historical comparison to what trump just did and amazingly we only learned about this yesterday bill clinton pulled a similar plane plane switch maneuver in 2000 during a secret trip to pakistan but there was one big difference the white house told journalists what was happening while it was happening white house reporter for usa today susan page revealed that she was briefed by white house security officials about the threat on the president which put her own life in danger as far as why she revealed the story now she said quote i haven't spoken about this episode before but because of the off the record ground rules of that discussion and since more than a quarter century has passed and since the roost became evident as soon as president clinton disembarked in pakistan i think it's okay for me to relay it now unquote well this brings us to the part of trump's operation that has the white house press corps furious i mentioned it a moment ago because while trump was secretly being driven across the airport in a catering truck the journalists traveling with him were left just sitting on the decoy plane they weren't told that trump had escaped in the catering truck they weren't told that there was another aircraft taking off they weren't even told hey listen uh we're having some engine trouble or comms trouble you might want to just take a united airlines flight back or whatever the white house could have done that they weren't even told that they might be participating in a presidential security operation the only clue that something unusual was happening the secret service suddenly ordered everybody on the plane to close their window shades you can see in this photo the window shades were closed on air force one reporters had no idea why the white house poll reporter just said it was an order they were ordered to close the shades he said quote at one point a photographer seated behind me opened his shade and was quickly instructed to close it again we asked a wrangler why and they only said it was a request from the secret service unquote well listen to what the president said after he snuck back on board air force one and then spoke with reporters any credible threat by iran against i haven't read all the time i'm number one on their list before you but if i go you go right so perhaps perhaps someday you want to change professions i'll tell you that is that is cold-hearted mean-spirited and as i said it's the talk of washington today among the press corps and there's one additional wrinkle to this story you might be wondering about the details of this alleged plot to kill the president this is something i mentioned a few minutes ago and how credible or incredible and how credible the information was. The aircraft switch happened in Turkey during the NATO summit after intelligence on the assassination attempt came from Israel. And Turkish officials suspect the Israeli intelligence report was just a ruse to undermine negotiations with Tehran, as reported in the Middle East Eye. The story says, quote, during his meeting with President, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Trump repeatedly said that the war with Iran had ended and expressed hope about the negotiations, a source who attended the meeting told Middle East Eye. Turkish officials now say they believe the Israeli intelligence report was probably a ruse by Netanyahu's government to portray itself as protecting Trump, derail negotiations with Iran, and undermine Trump's apparently close relationship with Erdogan, unquote. I think that's probably true. You know, if I were to rate this escape on a scale of one to 10, it's got to be a 10. It worked. Nobody had any idea. It only came out later when somebody finally started talking. I do not believe that there was a credible threat on the president's life. The Israelis do things like this to us all the time. It's a manipulation tactic. And let me tell you a little bit about this guttery 747. Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for 12 month plan required. See terms. This is your home road warrior mom, home of the save. Join for just $20 at BJ's.com slash mesquite and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon. Limited time offer new members only. I've mentioned in past podcasts that I've mentioned in past podcasts that I have friends in five of the six Persian Gulf royal families, and I stay in close touch with most of them. When the Qataris decided to gift this 747, it came in reaction to President Trump asking them, will you give me a free Boeing 747? They were offended, according to this royal family member. But Arab culture is such that you can't deny a request for hospitality, right? Now, most people ask for a glass of water or a cup of tea, not a 747. But the Qataris couldn't say no to the request. But they were so offended that the president would come right out and ask for a free 747, that when they finally turned it over to the U.S. government, they made an announcement that it was a gift from the people of Qatar to the people of the United States, that it was not a gift to Donald Trump. Well, the president one-upped them a couple of weeks ago by announcing that when he completes his term, he's taking the 747 and parking it at what will be the Donald Trump presidential library. And it'll be on display there. So he will be the only president to write in it. And let me tell you my own story. In November 1999, Bill Clinton came here to Athens. When a president comes to a country that you are assigned to, it doesn't matter if you are CIA or State Department or Commerce Department or Agriculture Department. They don't care who you work for. Everybody has to pitch in and help. Ambassador Nicholas Burns, whom I have always disliked and disrespected, on this one occasion did the right thing. He put all the jobs that needed to be done into a hat. And we all took turns picking our job out of a hat. I hit the lottery. And the job that I picked out of the hat was to be the note taker in President Clinton's meeting with the Greek prime minister, defense minister, and foreign minister. I've told that story many times. But here's a side to that story I've never told. When the meeting was done, President Clinton went to the basement from the top floor to the basement of the Intercontinental Hotel, about two miles that way. And he gave a raucous speech, wildly popular speech to the Greek American Business Women's Association. From that speech, he then went to Athens airport, the old airport at Elinikon, and flew back to Washington. I went back to the embassy, and we had something called a hot wash, which is an after action report. And that's when everybody gets together and you talk about absolutely every detail of the visit, what went right, what went wrong, what lessons learned. And the ambassador says to everybody, when he calls us all together, do you want to hear something crazy? He said, just as the plane is taking off, the telephone inside Air Force One rang. And it was a random bomb threat. Someone here in Greece got the top secret phone number for the Air Force One telephone. Not to say Bill Clinton answered the phone. He didn't answer the phone. Some low level aid answered the phone. But it was a bomb threat to blow up Air Force One. So did the Israelis lie? Probably. But you have to take every shred of information like this seriously, just in case it's legit. 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For those of you who watch the show regularly or who know me personally, I love Greece almost more than any other place on earth. I've been coming here since I was 20 years old, right? 19 or 20, whatever. And I just love the place. I hope that someday I can buy a little apartment right here in this neighborhood and spend a few months a year maybe writing books on a balcony overlooking the beautiful Parthenon. I served here with the CIA from 1998 to 2000. It was the most dangerous tour I ever had in my career. And I served in Pakistan. I served in Afghanistan. I served in Iraq. And I never feared for my safety like I feared for it right here in Greece. When I was serving in Greece, the US government spent more money on security than it spent anywhere else on the planet, including Beirut, which was exploding at the time. And that is because of two groups. Neither group exists any longer. One, the more lethal of the two, was called Revolutionary Organization 17 November. The other one was called Popular Revolutionary Struggle. 17 November carried out 27 assassinations between December 23rd, 1975, and April of 2000. The last assassination was of my next door neighbor, Brigadier General Stephen Saunders. He was the British defense attache. I've told this story many times. But a couple of months after Stephen was assassinated, 17 November mailed a manifesto to a left wing newspaper. This is something they usually did. They would either drop a manifesto at the site of the hit, or leave it in a garbage can, call a leftist newspaper and tell them where to find it, or mail it to the newspaper. And usually they did it within a day or two of the hit. In the case of Stephen's assassin, nation, they waited months. They waited until August of 2000. And they said in this manifesto, we saw the big spy, but he was driving an armored car and we knew he was armed. So we elected to carry out the revolutionary sentence on the war criminal Saunders. Now, Steve was not a war criminal. He had served in the British Army in Northern Ireland and in Yugoslavia, but he was a paper pusher. He was not a war criminal. But they had intended to kill me that day. And he was a softer target. He lived about 20 minutes after they shot him. They blew his right hand completely off at the wrist. They shot him in the chest with the same.45 that they used to carry out most of their assassinations. It was called the Welch.45 because it was used to kill CIA Station Chief Richard Welch on December 23rd, 1975. They also killed two U.S. defense attaches and a hapless, low-level African-American Air Force tech sergeant who was doing his laundry in the basement laundry room of his apartment building. They self-destructed in early 2000. One of the 17 November bombers was carrying a bomb in a brown paper bag in Piraeus, the port city of Athens. He was going to use it to blow up the car of a wealthy Greek ship owner. Instead, the bomb went off in his hands, blew his hands completely off, blew his right eye out, and he was bleeding to death. A policeman across the street heard the explosion. He ran over, tried to stanch the flow of the blood, and the bomber confessed that he was 17 November's bomber and that his two brothers were among the assassins. And he named all the members of the organization, and he gave the policeman the address of the safe house where all the weapons and the explosives were killed. And then he lived. The cop actually saved his life. So the Greek counterterrorism police used that information to break the group within a day. The primary assassin, Dimitris Kufondinas, who was known as the Black Hand because everything he touched died, briefly escaped. He was found, of all places, on a nudist beach on one of the Greek islands and finally captured there. Most of the members of 17 November have been released from prison. The primary assassins, five of them, are still in prison. The founder of the group was released from prison on parole a month ago for good behavior. And there was such an uproar and an outcry that the Supreme Court reversed his release and he went back to prison. Greece is no longer dangerous like that. In fact, there's very little crime here of any kind. And I hate to even say this, but much of the crime comes from undocumented migrants and refugees who are, you know, stealing to eat to survive. That's a whole different issue we can talk about at some future time. There are still terrorist incidents, but they're not necessarily carried out by terrorist groups so much as anarchist groups that just literally want to throw a grenade into the middle of the room and see what happens. Those of us who lived in Greece in the 90s or in 2000 used to say that Athens was a wannabe Rome. That Athens was Rome 20 or 30 years earlier. Dirty, run down, not advanced. Now Rome wishes it was Athens. That's how great it is. Greece doesn't have those kinds of problems anymore. And that is a very, very good thing. I'll add one more little detail to my story. And I say this in my first book. One of the things that I'll never forgive myself for. I was shocked when I saw that manifesto that day. Shocked. Because not only was I particularly good at surveillance and surveillance detection. I actually became a surveillance and surveillance detection instructor at the CIA. And I wrote a book called the CIA Insider's Guide to Surveillance and Surveillance Detection. And for years, for years, I've talked about how in the world they found me and I never noticed that. The conclusion we came to was that Stephen was a media whore. He never saw a camera that he didn't want to jump right in front of and give a big toothy, you know, interview. And then they noticed my license plate and noticed that it was an American embassy license plate. And when they looked at my car, they saw it was armored and they made the correct assumption that I was a CIA officer. That's the conclusion. Well, a month after Stephen's assassination, my mom and dad came to visit me here in Greece. I was married at the time and I had two little boys. They were, let me think, they were seven and four at the time. They're grown men now, of course. And I was standing in front of the house one day with my mom and the boys. And I said, Mom, let me take a picture of you and the boys. And my mom crouched down and put her arms around the boys and all three of them are smiling. Months passed. Now, this was the days when you had to get film developed, right? You had to take it to Kodachrome or whatever, the little hut that was in the parking lot of the grocery store. It was months before I got those pictures developed. And in the picture of my mom hugging the boys, there's a man sitting in a red Toyota and he's just staring at the camera. He's looking right at the camera. And I never noticed him. And guess who he turned out to be? Stephen Saunders' assassin. I got very lucky that day. I still think about Stephen. Well, folks, yesterday was actually a really important day for American elections, primary elections, big, big DSA races, Democratic Socialists of America. DSA and pro-Palestine candidate Peggy Flanagan pulled off a major win in the Minnesota U.S. Senate race. This is the Democratic primary. In Wisconsin's governor's race, there was a huge loss for the DSA candidate, State Representative Francesca Hong. The main story in that race is that the polling was absolutely terrible. Listen, over the last 10 years, polling has been notoriously bad anyway. And it's because it's almost impossible to poll people now accurately because nobody has landlines anymore. You know, you can't say, well, I need 40 percent, you know, white, middle class people and they live in these areas. Everybody uses cell phones or the Internet. So each poll ahead of Election Day had Francesca Hong up by at least 20 points. We have a really cool graphic here. Look at this. State Navigate. She was up by 22. Public policy polling and PPP is good. Up by 18. Marquette University, also good. Up by 25. State Navigate, up by 29. Here's another PPP from a couple of days earlier. Up by 20. And the results she lost by half of 1 percent. Now, I will add too that Wisconsin is the most purple of the purple states. It can go Democratic. It can go Republican. It can go down to the wire. And we don't know who won the state for days in a presidential race. They've got a Democratic senator. They've got a Republican senator. They have a Democratic governor right now. The last governor was Republican. The congressional delegation is divided between Democrats and Republicans. You just never know. It's all about turnout. And when the polling is bad just by its nature, it's just impossible to poll in a purple state. Well, all of this comes after Abdel Sayed in Michigan pulled off that narrow win in the Democratic Senate race. So, so far, DSA-aligned candidates, especially those who have been endorsed by Bernie Sanders, are pulling off major upsets, mostly. The thing is, and this is what is the most interesting to me, are we seeing the Democrats' version of the Tea Party? We might be. I don't know how many of you remember the election of 2010. I remember the election of 2010 because I was working on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time. And the conventional wisdom we all believed was that the Republicans were going to win a ton of Senate seats. The Democrats were going to lose their majority and John was going to lose his job. Right? But the Tea Party, which has become the MAGA movement by and large, the Tea Party picked off a whole bunch of moderate Republican senators. And so in states where these moderate Republican senators were popular incumbents, the Democrats won. The Democrats won in Missouri that year. The Democrats won in Indiana that year. The Democrats won in Montana. And the Democrats won a race in Delaware, Joe Biden's old Senate seat, that they were predicted to lose. And so I'm wondering if we're seeing the same thing now among Democrats, where DSA-aligned candidates, pretty hard left by DNC standards, are picking off incumbents, only to then lose to moderate Republicans in the general election. We've got a clip of Francesca Hong that I think is really funny. J.B., do you mind running that clip? I know we've already talked about her, but it's kind of funny to me. Cook many great Thanksgiving dinners. And I'm not going to cancel Thanksgiving. How do you make the pivot to November, especially as voters are learning about you through those attack ads, about Thanksgiving comments, about the proximity to whiteness comment? How do you make the pivot to November's to voters who may not know much about you outside of that? Delivering on solutions, fully funding public schools, taxing the ultra-rich moratorium on data centers, universal child care, paid leave for all legislation that I've introduced and championed and will continue to fight for as governor. Okay. I'm for just about all those things. But what she was referring to in the beginning was she made statements in the past saying that she wanted to either cancel Thanksgiving or change the name of Thanksgiving. Almost nobody in America wants to do that. And so attack ads came out in this race against her saying she is so off the charts when it comes to personal ideology that she wants to cancel Thanksgiving. That's why she started off by saying, I have lots of great Thanksgivings. I'm not going to cancel Thanksgiving. Well, then why'd you say you're going to cancel Thanksgiving if you're not? What a stupid thing to say. Another thing, and one of our producers, JB, and I were talking about this before we started filming, was I'm sure many of you have seen this, what I consider to be an absolutely hilarious video on YouTube of the, it's like the 2020 or 2022 DSA convention in Los Angeles. If you, if you go into YouTube and type that in, it'll pop up. They couldn't get any work done because somebody saying you use the wrong pronouns or people, please stop the crosstalk. I have an auditory problem and I'm beginning to freak out. Come on. That's not America. Most Americans don't want candidates that are going to scream at us. About pronouns. I will not call anybody Z or Zer. Sorry, not going to happen. And I consider myself to be progressive. But anyway, this may be just a little bit too much for many Americans. And I'm wondering if that's what we saw in this Wisconsin race. There was another significant upset. On, uh, on Tuesday. And this is in Connecticut's first congressional district. Representative John Larson has been in Congress for 28 years and he lost to an upstart named Luke Bronin. Now you may, you may remember Congressman Larson from quite an unfortunate thing that happened. And you see here on this chart, he got clobbered 54.4 to 32.8. You've been in Congress for 28 years and you get less than 33%. There's something terribly wrong. But what I want to show you too here is look, there were fewer than 48,000 votes cast, fewer than 48,000 votes cast. You know, how many people are in that congressional district? 1.2 million people. Yeah. And 38,000 bothered to go to the polls and vote. So Democrats should be warned. And I say this every two years, because this seems to be the Democrats election theory. Vote for me because I'm not the other guy. What you have to stand for something. And if you don't stand for anything, people aren't going to go to the polls to vote for you. I think that's what we saw in this case. I wanted to show you this, this clip too, of Congressman Larson. It might ring a ring a bell. Worry, no one on the Republican side in the House and Senate who control both the House and Senate is going to speak up. And challenge us. Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. See terms. I coach football. 30 pounds of pasta. Three cases of protein bars. 75 sports drinks. He knows teamwork. Home of the save. Open soon. Limited time offer. New members only. But we need to protect Americans' privacy and their social security. For 40% of all Americans, social security is the basis for their retirement and their retirement savings. Let's stop it there, JB. The conventional wisdom at the time, of course, was that he was having a stroke. His office said at the time that, no, he was a little dehydrated. He hadn't slept very well the night before. But the thing is, when you're in your 70s or 80s or in some cases 90s, maybe it's time to step aside and let the younger generation come in and do their thing. Well, the voters of Connecticut's first district made that decision for him yesterday. There was also news on the Republican side. I don't know why I'm so interested in the South Carolina Senate race. My feelings about Lindsey Graham are well known. His sister Darlene was coronated in this situation only because she happened to be Lindsey Graham's sister. So now she's Senator Darlene Graham. And there are other Republicans, qualified Republicans, in South Carolina saying, not so fast. She's not qualified to be a United States senator. Well, the race was Tuesday. And she came in first. That's not saying much. There were a whole bunch of people running. And she only ended up with 32.7%. So now she's going to run against Ralph Norman in a runoff. The runoff will come. I don't remember the date, but it's coming soon. It's going to be like six weeks from now. I don't think she's a shoo-in. I don't think people respect her. And I think that most South Carolinians don't have any idea who the heck she is other than Lindsey Graham's sister. And I'll tell you what, Lindsey Graham just died, what, like the other day. And the Defense Department already named a military base after him called Joint Base Lindsey Graham. Nice, huh? So, listen, in politics so far, 10, 10 U.S. House members have lost their primaries. 10. That is the most since 1970. You remember that mantra from the famous film Network? I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore. That's what the American voters are saying. So until next time, actually, you know what? I'll tell you. Our next episode, I'm going to film from Cairo, Egypt. And I hope I have a good view to show you from there. Thanks for joining us. Please find my other podcast. It's called John Kiriakou's Dead Drop. It's on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. We're also on X, on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on Instagram, and pretty much everywhere else. Thanks again for helping us by liking, subscribing, commenting, making recommendations. It really means a lot to me. We'll see you next time.