← Truth in the Barrel
Truth in the Barrel
This Week Unfiltered | 07.17.25
00:56:23
This Week Unfiltered Amy is back from vacation and not a moment too soon! Amy and Denver cover everything from Donald Trump’s fabled tariff bumps to Russia/Ukraine and the entirely preventable disaster in Texas. Stick around for our whiskey minute...
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- [00:01]
Amy
Today we're taking an unfiltered look at Donald Trump's deal making abilities. He promised to close 200 trade deals by the 90th day of his presidency. Well, that was 88 days ago. So did he even get close to 200? Plus, the tariffs are causing inflation to rise yet again, while waste and incompetence run rampant through the government. Then, in a shocking twist, the Trump administration has decided to help Ukraine in its war against Russia. What's behind this sudden policy change? And the search for accountability in the aftermath of the tragic flood in Texas has begun. Why does a place known as Flash Flood Alley have no early warning system? Plus, is Fox News still the preferred news source on military bases? Newsmax and Trump media are forming an alliance now. And did you know that people actually run marathons at the North Pole? This is Truth in the Barrel, a different kind of Whiskey Rebellion.
- [01:15]
Denver
My gosh, it is good to see you, Amy. And before we get going, people better be subscribing to us right on their favorite podcast. You better be on YouTube hitting that little button. And you better be following us on all our social media channels, even true social. But my gosh, Amy, you got a line up today.
- [01:32]
Amy
Yeah. Welcome to Truth in the Barrel. We're back to our regular programming here.
- [01:37]
Denver
Well, you know, you were having so much fun in Hawaii for so long, right. And, you know, now you're tan and rested and. Right. You've lost 10 years, you know, on your age now because you're in Hawaii. Right. Just, you look like you're 25, I look like I'm a hundred. Right. So this is fantastic. It's a good compare and contrast. But, you know, talking about what's going on with this, these tariffs and all these trade deals is pretty incredible, Right. When you see this sort of the naked ridiculousness of it all, you know.
- [02:06]
Amy
Yeah. And you know, we finished our live show just a little bit ago, a couple days ago. If you haven't checked that out, you can go back and listen to it. It was the July 15th show on YouTube and you can listen to the audio version or in your podcast feed. And boy, that was fun because we talked about for a long time about what the Epstein fight is really all about. And I learned a ton that I just didn't know or really frankly didn't care about prior to now. But now we care.
- [02:42]
Denver
Yeah, now we care. Now we care. And you know, when people didn't know about it. But I think with what's happening, right, Amy, is once you watch the live show, you realize that there's so many things happening. And me and you had talked before the live show about, my goodness, we have tariffs, we have flash flooding. Right, Right. We have so many crazy things happening in this world that the Epstein thing has sort of overshadowed it. But there's very important things happening right now that we have to get to.
- [03:08]
Amy
Yeah. And we're going to talk about that today on, on Unfiltered here. But before we, we dive into these topics, we're excited to announce that our next live show will be Tuesday, July 29, 7:30 to 8:30pm Eastern Time. Not Hawaii time, Eastern time. We'd love for you all to join us. And don't forget that you can actually ask us questions during the live stream and we'll answer them. Right. And if you can't make it to the live show, but you still want to ask a question, you can send us an email at any time in truthiinthebarrelmail.com and we'll try to answer your emailed questions during the live show. So make sure that you check out the video, the audio replay and hear your hear the answers.
- [03:55]
Denver
Yeah, I mean, I'm going to push that email everywhere again because I think having those where people are like, oh, you know what, I just watched Damien Denver and I really wonder, right. You know, who was the AG in Florida during Epstein's? Oh, it was Pam Bondi.
- [04:11]
Amy
Oh, yeah.
- [04:12]
Denver
From 2011 to 2019. Oh, how weird. Right? And we didn't even get into that. So. No, this is going to be so cool. No, we didn't. And you know, I, but you know, we were talking so much about conspiracy theories and everything. I think that, I think we, we didn't, we, you know, it was so, it's so much material in the layers of it. But again, I'm so glad we're doing the show today. I am so happy about it.
- [04:33]
Amy
Well, let's get started. I wanted to talk first about where we're at with these 200 trade deals that were promised to us. Denver. 200 trade deals were supposed to happen in this 90 day period. So where are we at?
- [04:51]
Denver
Yeah, I mean, you know, it's funny, I was watching Navarro on the news. He goes, okay, this is what's so cool about this, right? He goes, yeah, we're doing these trade deals, but they're mostly unilateral. That, okay. That I don't, you know, it's almost, you know, I don't know if Fox News has gone to the point that it's just Sort of the ignorant talking over the ignorant or they're sort of like, right. Ships that are tilting, passing in the night. I don't know what it is, but when I, when he said that, that a lot of these are unilateral right now, that's not a trade deal, right. That's a sanction.
- [05:29]
Amy
Boy, that's a great deal. You could do all your deals unilaterally. That, that, that, that. Boy, you can get everything you want. Isn't that wonderful?
- [05:37]
Denver
No, you can. And I think that's the other thing too, is that they can crow about tariffs. So, for instance, I was talking to a friend of mine, he actually represents Hyundai Global and you know, on the law side, on the business relations side. And he called me and he goes, you know, he goes, it's, it's awful, right? He goes, the Koreans. So Hyundai Global is so big, right? They don't just do vehicles, they do everything, electronics, things like that. He said, it's so awful that's they're consumed every day about what the hell is going on. Like, how do they even react to tariffs that they're not quite sure are going to be executed within the timeframe or if those tariffs are going to change. And the tariffs are so restrictive anyway, they're so oppressive that they have to react to that too. So he said, deborah, we got like 55 charts of what could possibly happen, but it's impossible, right, to predict where that's going to go. So you have large international organizations in the billions and billions, close to trillions that are scrambling. And by the way, you know, and I hate to tell people this, Kia and Hyundai, they build cars in the U.S. oh, yeah, right. So now they're wondering, you know, how much more business can they afford to do in the US as far as the things that they're doing right now. So unilateral trade deal literally doesn't mean trade deal. That's all I'm saying.
- [07:01]
Amy
But let's be serious, though. So, you know, I wanted, because I was thinking about this myself, you know, we're getting close to this 90 day point and I'm thinking, and I was on vacation for a while, so I frankly didn't think about much at all during that time. But now that I'm back, I'm like, okay, so where, where are we? We had this Liberation Day, which was basically across the board tariffs on, you know, every country on the planet, except for Russia, by the way. We'll talk about that later. And I guess on August 1st, now there's going to be a 30% tariff on Europe, on the EU, Mexico tariffs. He's talking about having, you know, tariffs on Mexico starting on August 1st as well. He promised, I'm talking, he, DONALD Trump promised 200 deals by now. How many do we have? We have three, three quote deals. And I'm like fake quoting, you know, whatever this is. When you, when you hold up your.
- [08:02]
Denver
What is the deal? Right. Yeah, the three deals.
- [08:05]
Amy
Right, three deals. The three deals. One is with China, which is basically a deal that goes back to the status quo, which we had before the Trump presidency. So that's not much of a deal. And then you have a deal with the United Kingdom, which was so underwhelming that like the economists said, it was like a nothing burger. And then you have a deal with Vietnam, which doesn't mean much either. Meanwhile, we have price increases. So the consumer price index is still going up and up and up. Inflation now, which had been coming down since the middle of Biden's presidency, had been kind of trickling on down. Guess what? That's starting to come back up. And, and so the concern I have is that I don't know if people seem to care about this, but you know, this is, this is not good economic policy.
- [09:09]
Denver
You know, I always said stupidity is terminal. I don't know if you're doing ego based decisions, which I know we're going to get into more of that too with other things we're going to talk about, but it just seems like these are ego based international decisions that come from some font of a belief system that me and you can't really get our arms around, you know, conspiratorial or fantasy thinking or delusional thinking or the fact that this is his religion. One of the individuals who work in government relations so that they've been trying to get up into the Trump Organization or in the Trump administration to talk about. Hey, you know, why, why these specific arbitrary tariffs unilaterally imposed. This doesn't make sense even on countries where we have a surplus, I believe like Brazil. So. Right. And so they're, they're like, it's because it's his religion.
- [09:56]
Amy
Yeah.
- [09:56]
Denver
And what they're starting it, none of it makes. And they're like, so this is what he, this is the Hill that Trump is going to die on regardless of the policy is rational. And that's, I got that straight from the horse's mouth on, on lobbyists on the Hill in D.C. yeah.
- [10:09]
Amy
And it's, it's just, it's crazy. And meanwhile Meanwhile, Denver, we're. Our government is incinerating 500 tons of emergency food, enough food that could feed 1.5 million kids for a week. Why? Because of these cuts to the agencies, these sort of blanket. Getting rid of usaid, the DOGE efforts, which have just in my mind caused an enormous amount of incompetence in government. And this is a perfect example of causing waste. DOGE was supposed to like cut waste. This is, we were incinerating 500 tons of food for needy kids.
- [11:00]
Denver
It's almost like they've weaponized ignorance. I, I've never seen, I don't even know how you get your arms around, if you're a rational human being about incinerating 500 tons of food that's already been aggregated. Is that, you know, paid for, that's already there? That's, oh, let's just burn it.
- [11:23]
Amy
Remember when he came out and said, I'm going to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget and then a month later, after they started, he cut it, cut that back down to, well, I think I could probably get 1 trillion. Well, how much did they actually cut of waste, fraud and abuse from the federal government? There was a study in May done by the Manhattan Institute in early May that they could only account in verified budget savings, could only account for $2 billion. And that was mostly, you know, the stuff that Musk was saying was fraud, waste and abuse that they got rid of were already false contract cancellations, they were accounting errors. So they could only find $2 billion. That's not a whole lot. And so I just feel like there's this haphazard way that they have gone through and hurting our government. Slashing usaid, slashing things like pepfar, it's just, it's terribly, it's done terribly in my mind.
- [12:30]
Denver
Well, I don't know if the savings offset the big beautiful bills. 10 year projections of 3 to 5 trillion dollars added to the debt. Amy, I don't know if firing 1300 people from the State Department is going to offset, you know, just let's forget about the awfulness of that. And, and we can, that's another thing we could talk about down the road, but I don't think firing people is going to offset a $1 trillion DoD budget that went from just over 800 billion or money's used for ridiculous purposes or the fact that, you know, the, listen, everybody loves tax cuts, but you can't ignore the cbo, you know, score on this. And what's going to happen is that, you know, revenues are not going the amount of money that's going to be pouring out of the government and handouts and also to, you know, defense contractors and for the specific funding lines they've identified. It's just, that's just math. We don't even have to mean. You don't have to talk about this politically. It's just math. And they lied about the math and they lied about what they were going to do. But I don't think that's a surprise to anybody.
- [13:36]
Amy
Well, I'm just, I've always said, look, if you start firing people left and right in the federal government, you're, the government's going to be filled with people that, that either don't know how to spend the money correctly or we just get this more fraud, waste and abuse, you know, in the government. So.
- [13:56]
Denver
Yeah, well, you're also left with the people who didn't leave that might not have the proper support structures that might be untalented. Right. You're not keeping the best, you're firing willy nilly. It's arbitrary. There's not nuance in what you're doing. Everybody can talk about fraud, waste and abuse, but you have to look at it in a very targeted and scalpel like way. You don't want to use a blunt hammer based on conspiracy theory in order to reshape the government, you know, through something like Doge.
- [14:20]
Amy
Did you read about the, the young man who was hired on by Doge, who, who they interviewed him after he had done his work and he basically said, yeah, I went in there to, to look for fraud, waste and abuse. And I, I guess, you know what, the government actually is pretty efficient. We didn't find much.
- [14:37]
Denver
Yeah, you don't, Yeah, I did read about that. Yeah.
- [14:40]
Amy
25 year olds.
- [14:41]
Denver
Yeah, there's not much to find. I mean there is fraud in some places, but it's mostly incompetence based on tr training lag times, somebody fat fingers, something in wrong, the code needs to be switched or changed. There's sometimes there's backwards investigations where you have to look at why money went to a certain account layer that probably shouldn't have been. But when you look at it in a broad spectrum, we have 340 million people, right, Amy, that we're trying to, trying to navigate through and trying to negate through and, and trying to organize. So I, you know what? I think we do okay.
- [15:13]
Amy
I do too. I mean, if you look at, if you look at what our federal government spends per capita in comparison to other countries, it's actually not that bad, actually. We don't have this big government. We have a big country. Denver. We have a big country with a lot of land and a lot of people. And so you got a big government for that, I guess. All right.
- [15:38]
Denver
A lot of glue sniffers.
- [15:40]
Amy
Over the past week, Donald Trump has shifted his stance on the war in Ukraine, reversing his administration's halt on military aid. That's good. And releasing this new plan to sell weapons to NATO, to our NATO allies, who would then transfer the weapons to Ukraine. So, okay, what's up with this now?
- [16:07]
Denver
Well, you know, I'm about to go back there for a third time. I think right now we have the battle of the arrogant sociopaths and the emasculation game. So, you know, Trump had given Putin so much rope in Ukraine, right, To the point that, you know, he was joking around. I don't know if you saw this clip of him getting laughs. Joking around where I talked to Putin about maybe he should stop. And he told me he would. And then, you know, he bombed a nursery school. You know, it's just sort of ludicrous when you have people this ignorant, this arrogant, this narcissistic, with this much power, you know, talking about the, this back and forth. But I think what happened is Putin overplayed his hand. You know, Raptor. He said that he was going to rearm Ukraine and he was going to wait 50 days. Right. For the decision. Give him 50 days to do something. By the way, he was going to arm them through NATO. And it's just a convoluted process. There's no reason why we can't just fund Ukraine ourself and go through Poland. But I can go into that all day. It's just stupid. But that's him sort of deflecting off and making sure that it goes to NATO specifically. But here's the, here's the thing. Putin in Russia, I was looking at some of the reporting in Russia. They're saying that Putin overplayed his hand because he had pretty much a shill in Trump to do what he wanted to do, but he kept pushing the boundary. So if Trump thinks, right, this is what I call ego fueled foreign policy. If his he feel like his ego's hit, there's not, there's no long term strategic look at what you should do. It's an ad hoc decision based on ego. And if he feels like his little manhood is threatened, that is it. That is the whole basis of this decision making.
- [17:42]
Amy
Well, the constant flip flopping is just helping Putin And I'll get into that. But I do want to say that, look, this is good. We want weapons to go to Ukraine. Ukraine needs missiles for the F16 air intercept missiles, Hellfire missiles. They need artillery. They're going to get supposedly some Stinger missiles. Those are sort of shoulder launched surface to air missiles where they can shoot down Russian helicopters, Russian fighter jets that are flying low trying to bomb. They're going to get some precision rockets. This, this is all good news. And by the way, I need to remind people that these, these weapons are built and made here in the United States. So we're helping our own production, our own economy by, by doing this. All right, now, Trump threatening Putin, giving him 50 days now to come to peace again and threatening sanctions. Look, Denver, I'm a skeptic.
- [18:48]
Denver
What do you mean?
- [18:49]
Amy
Donald Trump has been flip flopping since day one. So let's review a little bit, okay? Donald Trump said that he would end the war in Ukraine on day one. He said that he alone could resolve the conflict. Okay? So then he gets into office. And then he gets into office and he gives Putin a 100 day deadline. And, and after that deadline, there would be, quote, serious consequences if Putin doesn't come to peace. Okay, well, that didn't happen. He extended that, Donald Trump extended that to six months. Okay. And then in the middle of this, if you remember, he says that he's going to back away. Donald Trump's going to back away and allow the fighting because he got so, you know, tired of this conflict. He then sets up peace talks for Istanbul in May. Guess who decides not to show up?
- [19:45]
Denver
Putin.
- [19:46]
Amy
Right, Interesting. Putin gives the big middle finger here, he doesn't even show up. And now here we are in July and Donald Trump is giving Putin another 50 days to come up with a piece here or there will be, quote, very severe tariffs. Okay. Mind you, there have been no new sanctions on Russia since Donald Trump has gotten back into the White House. Again, Donald Trump didn't even put Russia on the Liberation Day tariffs. In fact, unlike he put everybody else in the world on these tariffs, he didn't put Putin on them. He's actually eased restrictions on Russia. So call me a skeptic on this, but I just, it's, it's, to me, it's all talk. I'm glad they're gonna get the weapons, but I don't think, I just worry that it's not gonna be enough.
- [20:41]
Denver
I think when dealing with Trump and Russia and his flip flopping on arbitrary deadlines that seem to just come from his ego. I think you have every right to be a skep. I don't think Trump even knows what he's saying half the time, but when he does, it's specifically based on his ego. I think a lot of this came from Clark Kellogg. You know, General Kellogg, who's the envoy to Ukraine, Right. For the US Extended his stay in Ukraine. And I have a feeling, I think he had, if I'm trying to remember, friends or maybe family that was in Ukraine, people there that maybe his daughter. I'm trying to remember who it was exactly, was there. And so General Kellogg extends a state. Now, I'm not a big fan of General Kellogg. He's a sh. Literally a MAGA apologist. But he's also a big Ukraine supporter. I have a feeling that Kellogg got to Ukraine, I mean, got to Trump about Ukraine. And it's just this, I think once, once he talked, once he announced this 50 day going to supply weapons in this 50 day deadline for Putin to do something, which. You should be a skeptic. I'm as big a skeptic. I don't actually think that'll ever come to fruition. I'll even go that far. Amy. Yeah, but I do believe that Kellogg got in his ear and said, listen, we're still in NATO. You have a country that's not listening to you. And I think Kellogg appealed to his ego. He said Putin disrespected you. Because if you think about it, when, when Trump said he thought they were getting somewhere, that was the night that Putin actually had the largest drone strike in Kiev. What was it, 700, you know, combined glide bombs, missiles and FPV drones. Right. First person view, drones and shaheds. So it's pretty to me that I think it was an ego based decision because Kellogg came back from Ukraine or was in Ukraine and said that Putin was disrespecting him. I think you're very right to be a skeptic though, because if something were to happen or there's a lull at some point where Trump can claim victory even though there's no victory, and then Putin can say, well, he just starts the next week and he starts bombing again. I think that's what's gonna happen. Be a skeptic. I think you're right on all of this. But I think this is Kellogg to Trump in an ego fueled decision based on the fact he thought he's been emasculated by Putin. That's what I think.
- [22:55]
Amy
Well, and Meanwhile, most Americans, 50%, 50, 54% of Americans voters disapprove of Trump's handling in the war in Ukraine. So, I mean, Americans want to support Ukraine. And I also think it's interesting because I believe that Donald Trump isn't. He doesn't really care. He just wants a win. And so he's allowed, you know, Hegseth and his deputy policy guy to kind of do whatever they want. But then, you know, and that's why the Pentagon has halted shipment of aid to Ukraine three times and it's been overruled by the White House. I mean, obviously, as you, as you said, somebody got to Donald Trump. I mean, maybe General Kelly. Not General Kelly, General Kellogg, as you said, but clearly he's not on the same page with his Secretary of defense or his OSD policy guy.
- [23:56]
Denver
I don't know, maybe Hegseth is back to drinking. Who knows? I mean, I, you know, Hegseth is so incapable and of doing this job. I just don't even know. Amy, what do we even say anymore? I mean, when it comes to Hegseth and the Gabbards and everybody in the intelligence, the DoD community, nobody there has any notion of what to do long term because they're incapable of making those decisions, decisions based on their own ignorance and fantasy based decision making. And I think that's the issue that we have. Again, you have to appeal to Trump's ego. Has to be somebody who's not completely crazy. They just have to be on the crazy spectrum like Kellogg, and they have to go there and actually see it for themselves. Because I don't think Hegseth has been over to Ukraine, if I remember correctly, or Gabbard or any of them. So I think really this is an ego based decision that's very helpful for Ukraine. Is it actually going to happen? I'm a skeptic like you.
- [24:47]
Amy
Yeah. All right. Okay. Well, I want to move on to the Texas floods because this happened. It's just such a tragedy in our country. It happened a couple of weeks ago over July 4th. Over 130 people were killed, lots of children. And I've heard this quote that nobody could have seen this coming. And, you know, nobody wants to run and talk about public policy right after a tragedy. You know, we have victims after mass shootings. And, you know, people are criticized when they talk about, you know, gun violence as a, as a political issue. So we wanted to give it a little bit of time and we're a couple weeks out. But this idea that no one could have seen this coming is really infuriating and kind of a slap in the face to all Americans. The river there in Texas, the Guadalupe river, is prone to flooding. There have been reports of flooding all the way back into 1955. It was called Denver Flash Flood Alley. Now if there's anywhere in the United States that should have early warning systems, it should be the area called Flash Flood Alley. Right?
- [26:17]
Denver
So we have this flash flood and this awful loss of life. Awful, awful. And you're right, right. We're really reluctant to talk about policy right. After a disaster like that. People that are sane and have empathy are reluctant to do that. However, the fact that Flash Flood Alley had a flash flood probably makes sense, number one. Number two, the policy that comes out of this, Amy, is conspiracy theories about geoengineering and cloud seeding. And HARP from Marjorie Taylor Greene and the EPA administrator Lee Zeldin. We've been talking about fantasy delusion based decision making for a long time. What gets me about this is that you talk about an early warning system. You're exactly right. If it's called Flash Flood Alley and they have documented flash floods and they know what the 500 flood plane looks like. Right. That you have these once in a lifetime events, you got to be prepared for them. And instead we have this sort of willy nilly cuts across Noah, right? People arguing about whether they had the proper system in place for the forecasters themselves. That can be argued one way or the other. I would humbly submit that based on what you've seen from this administration, the cuts did have some effect on their ability to do early warning, either through TV or media or things like that, or even to do proper forecasting. Which Texas came out and went after the weather forecasters after all the cuts to weather forecast. I think what we're seeing right now is that if you're always relying on superstition and fantasy, deaths, right, come from the deep state of the globalists and crazy things like trumping is, you know, saved from the assassination, come from God even though other people died. That's the issue that we have right now. If you have superstitious fantasy based people, we're always going to have issues that become terminal. And you have deaths, government decision making. The cascading effect of bad government decision making is death. And so in so many ways, Medicaid cuts or healthcare cuts, cuts to Noah. Right. The unability, the inability to have real solutions for what happened in Flash Flood Alley. These things scare the hell out of me. And they're getting worse, they're not getting better after only six months into this, Amy, I'm Fearful that we haven't even seen the tip of the iceberg on what's about to happen with the decision making coming from our government.
- [28:55]
Amy
I just think we need to shine a light on good public services. These are the public services that the Trump administration is now trying to cut. And we're still trying to figure out why they couldn't get the FEMA money that was allocated to them to get these early warning systems.
- [29:16]
Denver
Wasn't that hundreds of millions of dollars, Amy?
- [29:19]
Amy
Billions. Billions. And so the cost, Denver, of implementing an early warning system for Kerr county is $1,000,000. These systems are not new technology. We're not talking about like, like new AI, like your business here, you know, we're talking about like old 30, 40 year old technology. It's not hard, but apparently the county tried to get early warning systems using the FEMA money, but it was blocked by state officials. And we're sort of trying to pull the string on why. This is why we need like a commission. You know, like we had a commission to look at the Iraq war or 9, 11 commission, or my gosh, Denver, we had what, seven hearings, seven reports on Benghazi where four people died in a war zone. So, yeah, I think we need a commission on this. But, but to go back to why the money was never spent by Texas or blocked by Texas officials to get these very basic early warning systems, I've been thinking a lot about that. And I think the first thing is one, politicians hate these agencies. Many politicians, not all of them, you know, Republican politicians, a lot of them hate fema. They hate noaa. They hate the National Weather Service. It's big government. Right? And that's why Trump is cutting NOAA by 26%. That's why Trump wants to eliminate FEMA altogether. That's why Ted Cruz, the Republican senator, has personally eliminated $150 million for NOAA climate research. All right, so that's one, politicians hate these agencies. The second reason I think is that, and we touched on it earlier, is that the federal government gives money to the states into communities, but a lot of times those communities don't have the personnel to either spend the money properly or to apply in the correct way for the grant money. And I think that that is a big part of that. And that goes back to something you were saying earlier about people in government getting good, solid people to work in government. And the third reason, and then I'll shut up, but the third reason I thought this is such an issue is something I read just the other night. Did you know that the position for the warning coordinator, meteorologist in this region, in the San Antonio, Austin Hill country region, that position, Denver, has been vacant. And why has it been vacant? Well, the previous coordinator took Doge's offer of early retirement. So here we are, we're like come full circle with Doge, you know, doing this haphazard bullshit. Let's get rid of everybody in the federal government who we don't like or don't understand what they do. The public servants take that offer because they see it coming. And the position that could have helped warn people is empty.
- [32:36]
Denver
Bad decisions make bad things. Is that what you're telling me, Amy? And incompetence and stupidity fantasy also create issues, right, for, for people all the way up to death. And again, I kept going back to stupidity is terminal. Even, you know, about a month ago, stupidity was terminal. For those people in Texas, the fact that they don't have the ability to have any type of policy recommendations right now to actually fix it. It also means that people in the future could be put in danger. But here's the toxicity of what's happening. And I know, I go back to this and I know there's. Amy, I have a tough time, right, talking to sane and rational people about how there's no sanity or rationality in the policy decisions that are being made right now. And if we go back to the Texas floods and I told you about geoengineering and weather manipulation and these deep seated conspiracy theories, you had this, this insight and, and I'm not. I know it was a very good insight. Better than so when you said that Republicans automatically back away from big government, right. Why they hate these agencies. I want to tell people why they hate the agencies. It's not just Republican dogma, which it is. It's also the fact that FEMA had death camps, that climate change isn't real, that it's a globalist pogrom to destroy American way of life is what climate change is they talk about back in the day. I don't know if you ever heard this conspiracy about UN Plan 21, where the United nations was going to take over the US Right? Take away land, make sure that we're following their stringent climate nazism is what they called it at the time. So this is what you have, right? You have this toxic mix of Republican dogma that was based sometimes on maybe we shouldn't have so much money going to the public sector. If we can somehow solve this in a private way, or it's unneeded or right, or it's just a handout. It's gone now to this other thing. They're against big government because they don't know the difference between fact and fiction, because they're ignorant, because they're glue sniffers in some way, because they've been raised this way, because supernatural forces should tell them what to do. You know, their, their policy should come from the Bible. That's the issue that we're having right now. And the reason I get so angry about this is because it's impossible to argue with people whose policy comes from a voice I can't hear because it's in their own frickin head. And that's the issue that we have right now. So when you have Ted Cruz taking away $150 million specifically for climate, or you have Doge taking away emergency coordinator specifically for something like this, it's because of dogma based on shite. And that's why I absolutely think that we haven't even seen the worst, not even the tip of what's going to happen over the next six months to 18 months.
- [35:35]
Amy
Well, two facts. One, in the past 10 years, extreme weather has killed nearly 700 people in Texas alone. And that state turned down $225 million in federal grant money that it was supposed to spend on protecting residents from disasters. That county, Kerr County, $1 million would have covered a siren warning. Would that have, would that have saved everyone's life? I don't know. Even if it saved one person, saved some, probably would have saved some. And even before let's save one person, it would have been worth it. Texas has not spent 500 million of the $820 million. That's 62% that it got for mitigation projects after Hurricane Harvey. So they did a deep dive into Hurricane Harvey. What could be better next time? Texas hasn't implemented that stuff. And so it's just like we need in my mind, a disaster review board, a flood commission, something where we have smart people in government that on a bipartisan way, nonpartisan way, special whatever, special group to look at this and say what do we need to do to mitigate this stuff? If these local communities can't get the federal money, why can they not get the federal government money? What do we need to do? And the other thing, last thing I'll say on this is I teach national security policy. And one of the first things that I do in every semester where I teach this is I start the class by asking my students what is national security? What does it mean? What does that term mean? If you think about our Department of Homeland Security, right now, they're spending all kinds of money on masked men going after farm workers. Is that making us safer? I mean, in my mind, the DHS should be looking at and running a disaster review board commission right now because 130some people just died in a preventable, in my mind, preventable thing.
- [37:57]
Denver
So DHS has that charter. You know, it started as the nppd and I wish I could remember, it was like the national protection plan for something, but it was for national infrastructure that I used to work to work with. JWAC military has something called the Joint Warfare Analysis center for Critical Infrastructure. Now it's cisa, right. You know, the Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency. Right. I mean, we have the NTSB for the ntsb, absolutely. For transportation. So there should be a tiger team. You're exactly right. For critical infrastructure. And how about this couple things. How about the tens of billions that were increasing DHS into this internal police force that looks just frighteningly like, right, A secret police force with the masks on and stuff is just ludicrous. Even a republic, real Republicans would just absolutely scream about this 20 years ago, you know, that like, oh my God, this is a deep state globalist, you know, incursion right now they completely support it because of conspiracy theories and lies about this invasion. You know, we talk about saving lives. If we have targeted enforcement of criminal, illegal immigrants. Awesome. I want to save lives. Wholesale removal actually can create an issue where lives are at risk, whether it's through, you know, food interdependencies that aren't actually realized and things like that. What I'm saying, with everything you're talking about with Guadalupe river, tens of billions of dollars. What if we just took, and I know this is crazy, one person. How about this? About 10% of the 70 or $100 billion more in DHS. So we take 5 billion of that and we go to these areas where there needs to be flood mit. They go to the areas like Flash Flood Alley. They go to the areas in each state where they have the largest incidence of flash flooding and they do mitigation plans, policy. But the issue that you have, Amy, the issue that you have is that our executive legislative right branch and our judicial branches are owned by the far right. Now you sort of have to believe there might be a climate change issue before you start mitigating. How do you even start if there's no baseline understanding of science or even like me and you agree on the science, Amy. But if you're talking to a local government that can't execute federal funds based on the fact if they do that, they won't get reelected into their local position because they're taking money from the federal government and they believe that God and weather manipulation is what caused the floods, not poor mitigation or planning. We're in deep trouble. And I'll end with this. I bet you dollars of donuts right now, I bet somebody a million dol that there's flood mitigation plans in Texas for the Guadalupe river that were ignored over the last 20 to 30 years. They weren't instituted. The money was there, but the expertise and the science based individuals that need to execute that plan did not exist in that area. That's the problem when superstition overrides rationality. And that's what we're dealing with right now.
- [40:56]
Amy
Yeah, well, it's a tragedy. We got to keep talking about it though, because we need to, we need to, to keep helping where we can. I'm not giving up on our country. We can do better. All right, that said, it's time for a whiskey minute because we've had a really good show so far, but we need some whiskey to get through to the end. All right, so I have brought today one of the very famous. This is Old Granddad.
- [41:25]
Denver
Now, I know you know about this.
- [41:27]
Amy
But people who are listening may not not know about this. It's Old Granddad High Rat High Rye Mash Bill Bonded Kentucky straight Bourbon whiskey. Okay, so one of the things I love about this, it's produced by the Jim Beam distillery. It was named after the distiller in the late 1800s was the grandson of a guide named Basil Hayden, who, you know, there was another, another whiskey named after him. But Basil Hayden Sr. Was this guy Raymond Hayden's grandfather and he called him Old Granddad. And this was his bat. This was his recipe. And it's spicy. It has a higher rye content. Denver, which normal rye content. You know, this is, is about 10% for bourbon.
- [42:20]
Denver
About. Yeah, between 10 and 15%. Yep. If they're doing a rye in, in the middle. Right. So you like.
- [42:28]
Amy
This one has 27%. It's affordable. So that's why it's, it's been such a favorite.
- [42:36]
Denver
Old Granddad is affordable.
- [42:37]
Amy
It's affordable. It's, you know, at the, at the low end of the, of the, the bourbons there. But it comes in three different proofs. 80 proof, 100 proof and 114. I'm drinking, I'm drinking 100.
- [42:52]
Denver
Good.
- [42:53]
Amy
But the story behind this, this is really cool. Harry Truman, this was his favorite bourbon in the White House. And his biographer, David McCullough, very famous author, wrote that the former President Harry Truman started his mornings, every morning at 5am with a shot of old Granddad bourbon that, in Truman's words, quote, got the engine running. He accompanied his morning whiskey fix with toast, eggs, bacon, and milk. So here we go.
- [43:29]
Denver
God. Cheers to Harry Truman. I'm actually drinking our rye whiskey. 70. 70% rye. So. And guess what? My. My wife is a grandma now. I can call it old grandma.
- [43:40]
Amy
Okay, very good, Very good. I love it. It's got a little bit of spice. Look, it's golden honey brown. It's. It's good stuff. All right, all right, quick shots. Here we go.
- [43:53]
Denver
Okay.
- [43:54]
Amy
Okay. So, as you know, my husband and I, we. We were able to take the family to Hawaii and we got a chance to stay on one of the bases there in one of the cabins at Kaneohe Bay, which is a Marine Corps base. And we're flipping around on the TV stations there, and we notice there is no cnn, there's no msnbc, there's all the Fox channels. There's Newsmax, and there's abc, cbs, and NBC. So they have legacy media. But I just thought that was really interesting and also kind of sad. So I did a little bit of research and I found that there was a lot of rumors of this type of thing happening. And so Snoops.com did a hey, is this for real or not? And they actually went to the Pentagon and asked the Pentagon, hey, are you, you know, what are you doing here? And the Pentagon responded, this was just a couple of months ago, that it says the, the rumor of the branches of the military which DoD oversees, it says while the, the Navy and the Air Force did not return a request to confirm or deny the claim, the Marines and Army both said that the two agencies do not direct or mandate viewership of any specific news channel. Individual commands aboard installations have the ability to purchase cable contracts on their own with their own budgets. So what does that mean? To me, that's basically a non answer that says that we don't do anything with the bases and we'd leave it up to them. And, and I just thought it was really sad. Like we're, we're really like pushing Fox News now, I guess, on certain bases.
- [45:48]
Denver
You know, what people do identifies what they are. And if you have a base commander or you have a local commander. Right. Whether it's a squadron in the Air Force. Right. And where it's a sortie generation flight or whatever they're making the decisions on what's being shown in there. Or they're not. Not. Or it's just an nco. Right. Or an officer. No I see. Or something. Right. Is you know, officer in charge is like hey, we like Fox. So really at that local level it's, you know they're. If they're putting on those channels Amy, that's what they're at. That's who they are. There's no, you know. Yeah. Stopes goes out there and does this. Right. The issue is, is that it's just. You're right, it's just a non answer. So if you have local commanders making those decisions or local NCOs. That's just where they're at right now. And I literally don't know how to fix that problem. Right. If you're not getting equal time and you're. You're radic. You're self radicalizing and just in that same fantasy loop that's what's happening. A lot of people are like Denver Fox doesn't propagandize. I mean we. Like you said and on the live show if I remember, you know, and maybe a show before that you said, you know, Fox has already been proven or liar. $787 million proves that based on the Dominion voting case, they're liars. And that's really where we're at right now is you have a radicalizing channel that has trouble with the truth that's being played PR primarily on military basis.
- [47:10]
Amy
Well in, in this last thing I'll say on this. The, the. The quote from the Pentagon saying. Or from the, the. The services saying that they do not mandate viewership of any specific news channel. Well no, but if you only have one news channel.
- [47:31]
Denver
Exactly. It's.
- [47:32]
Amy
Then that's all you're going to watch. Okay. It doesn't need to be mandated.
- [47:38]
Denver
I know.
- [47:38]
Amy
Seriously, it's like a. Oh God.
- [47:41]
Denver
It's like.
- [47:42]
Amy
Sorry.
- [47:42]
Denver
A dog licking its own butthole, man. Okay, go.
- [47:46]
Amy
So here's another one that, that we're gonna need a drink over here. Newsmax and Trump Media have merged. All right, so the crypto scheme wasn't enough. Now Donald Trump is going to have to make more money on his streaming. Streaming service. He's calling it truth plus us and it's like 100% pure propaganda for pro Trump content. It's a four part for profit partnership. And look, this might be illegal as. Because it's. But it's completely unethical. It's never been done before because we've never had such a freaking unethical president in, in the, in, in the history of, of mankind before.
- [48:27]
Denver
Can you imagine if there was Biden plus and he, you know, had a, you know, a great deal with Mother Jones. Right. And right. And they call right. People would lose their mind. And where's the press on this?
- [48:42]
Amy
I don't know.
- [48:43]
Denver
You know, Jake Tapper is still writing books about Biden's age. They're so awful, pathetic, access driven types of individuals who can't even get out of their own way. There's a Trump meme coin. There's Trump channels, there's Trump tv. He's doing deals on crypto like you've never seen before. He's a corrupt president and I dare anybody to come after me after that. I'll do a follow the money investigation on that and crush it. But nobody cares.
- [49:12]
Amy
He's absolutely corrupt. He's financially locked in with a propaganda platform that he frequently welcomes to the White House into the White House briefing room. And it's a. Now this merger is going to allow this far right propaganda to spread around the world. I mean I, it's, it's terrible.
- [49:33]
Denver
I bet Truth plus doesn't talk about Epstein.
- [49:37]
Amy
Probably not. That's not, that's not on their quick shots.
- [49:40]
Denver
No, not on their quick shots. Nope, not all Epstein. What if we had Obamacs?
- [49:45]
Amy
Oh, this is. This. I love there is there. Did you know there was a marathon on the North Pole? I mean that is incredible and kind of insane. So these marathon runners, they do a four day journey by a cruise ship. They go up there to the north pole. They're from 22 countries. They run 50 laps mapped out on floating sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. Because that's what the North Pole is, right? Denver. It's floating sea ice.
- [50:24]
Denver
Yeah, it's floating sea.
- [50:25]
Amy
They're battling sub zero temperatures. They are wearing life vests and they ran this marathon. I mean, pretty cool.
- [50:36]
Denver
I tell you what, I'd watch it. You know, I'd watch it literally because I want to see a polar bear attack. Like I, you know, it'd be really cool. Like I think they need to add, I think they actually need to ship polar bears on the route specifically. Like really make it real. Like you're just running in the North Pole on sea ice. Big deal.
- [50:55]
Amy
And they have, and they had like polar bear stations where like people watch out for polar bears. But you get, if you, if you do this thing, you get to be in this marathon Grand Slam Club, which is an exclusive group of runners that have completed marathon marathons in all seven continents and at the North Pole, so. So my question to you, Denver, is, have you ever run a marathon?
- [51:22]
Denver
I know it's hard to believe, but I haven't based on, you know, how I'm, you know, how I look. Right. I mean, you know, I'm almost model shape, you know, like for, you know, like Vogue magazine or, you know, Men's Health, so. But, yeah, I think. I know it's hard to believe, but I've never run a marathon. I would like to tell people, though, that I've watched marathons, and I've also, if you look at the combined miles in my life that I have run, probably around 26 miles.
- [51:52]
Amy
Well, you being in the Air Force, that doesn't surprise me. But I've actually run three marathons in my life, and now I have knee problems and back problems. But the first marathon I did was the Pensacola Marathon. I did it in my 20s during flight school, and it was a great first marathon because it was really flat. And then the second marathon I did was the Cincinnati Flying Pig marathon. I did that with my brother. And that was really cool because I did it with, you know, with my brother, with a family member. And then the third marathon I did was the San Diego Rock and Roll Marathon, which was my last one. Had a hard time finishing that one. I mean, by that point in my life, my. My knees were getting pretty bad, but. And I haven't run one since, But I absolutely loved it. I have so much respect for people that run marathons. And so that's really cool. Cheers to those who finished and completed Cheers marathon.
- [52:44]
Denver
Cheers to people who run from polar bears.
- [52:48]
Amy
All right, so we have two other cheers today before we close off.
- [52:53]
Denver
I love it.
- [52:53]
Amy
One is tell us about Rokana and this amendment.
- [53:00]
Denver
So I think cheers to Rokana. I mean, we're to a point right now that the Epstein thing has gotten so crazy. Went through rules, by the way, they're trying to listen. This is. God, I know. Congress. I should probably be very specific here. Ro Khanna, right, wanted an amendment on the floor, right to vote, to release all the Epstein files. It went to a procedure vote or a rules vote. Actually, it's called a previous question, which goes back and allows the minority to actually take control of the floor. For that specific vote. It went down to 11 to 210. So everybody, all the Republicans said, everybody, we always vote against a pq. A previous question. The thing is, this is so crazy. Because what they. The reason they had to go to a PQ is because they actually couldn't get it out of committee, which lost seven to five. Right. So did not to bring it to the floor. So very smart move to go to a PQ. Of course, the Republic loses 11 to 210 along party lines, which is really weird. Some people just didn't vote or, you know, some Democrats have died, unfortunately, so that's really what it is. But cheers to Rokhanna for trying to make sure that there's transparency in this and to break apart the conspiratorial thinking of the gop. Cheers.
- [54:07]
Amy
Keep it in the headlines. Cheers. All right, well, I have a Cheers, too. And a little bipartisan cheers, by the way, because that doesn't happen very often, but, you know, we're a bipartisan.
- [54:20]
Denver
Bipartisan to some degree. Right.
- [54:22]
Amy
So the House Armed Services Committee passed an amendment in the ndaa. That's the National Defense Authorization to Bar Secretary of Defense Pete Heath from using any funds to rename bases after Confederates. So. And in order for Hass to have passed that amendment, you needed two of their members, two Republican members to vote for the amendment, and two did Representative Don Bacon. Representative Don bacon, Air Force. Yeah. And Representative Derek Smith of Kansas voted for that. So I, I cheers to them, those two Republicans who, you know, actually are standing up to Confederates.
- [55:11]
Denver
Cheers to Don and Derek. And by the way, I know Don Bacon very well, as you know. Good friend.
- [55:17]
Amy
All right.
- [55:18]
Denver
All right. What a great show today, man, I tell you, you know, we covered a lot of ground here, Amy, especially, you know, from the live to today. I feel like we've covered like a hundred topics, whether directly or indirectly based on policy, conspiracy theories, crazy people, what can be done, how the. How our actual system of government works, executing and authorizing funds, how local governments turn down funds. It's just pretty amazing what we do on this show. And if people want to learn about the amazing things that are happening in our world today, they need to subscribe to YouTube because we're there. And they need to actually download their favorite podcast and they need to follow us on all our social media channels, because if going to be in this together, we need to be in this together. And they need to get here on Truth in the Barrel because we're sort of awesome.
- [56:07]
Amy
Awesome. I'll see you next week.
- [56:09]
Denver
See you next week, Rock and Rolla.
- [56:11]
Amy
All right.
- [56:15]
Denver
Delicious.
- [56:22]
C
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