Oren Cass Defines Conservatism and Ashley Rindsberg Exposes Wikipedia’s Propaganda War
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Welcome to another episode of Breaking Battlegrounds with your host Chuck Warren. I'm Sam Stone. Diving right in as always, our first guest of the day, Oren Kass, Chief Economist at American Compass and editor of a new book, The New Conservatives, available for pre-order, releasing on June 3rd. You can subscribe to his newsletter at understandingamerica.co and follow him on X at Oren underscore Kass.

Lawrence, I was listening to your interview with Tucker Carlson, and I wanted to ask you a question first. Define conservatism. But you made a very interesting point I was talking about with my colleagues in here. As you said, we often talk about policy. We go talk about the means, but we should talk about the end first, and then the means meet the end. So can you first describe what you view conservatism is now and discuss how policy needs to look more at the end first?

and then the means match what our end goals are. Yeah, I think that's a great place to start, because I think in a lot of ways, it's what we were just missing altogether in our politics in the last few decades. I think everybody just sort of decided, oh, well, we all know what we're here for. We're here to, you know, the term they love is the economic pie, right? We're here to grow the economic pie. The Democrats say this, Republicans say this. Maybe we'll fight a little bit about how best to do that. We'll fight about how much to redistribute it. But, you

But, you know, everybody likes pie. And so the bigger the pie, the better. And of course, what it meant was consumption, that we were here to raise material living standards and make sure everybody could have as much stuff as possible. And, you know, I always emphasize, like, I like stuff too, right? I'm not one of these let's go live in a log cabin kind of guys.

But I think particularly in the way that people started doing economics, we focused only on stuff. And we assumed that as long as people had stuff and as long as people had more stuff this year than last year, they would be happy. Things would be successful. Everything else could we cared about would flow from that.

And that's just not true. And it obviously didn't work. And so I think, you know, in a lot of ways, that kind of thinking represents a lack of conservatism. If conservatives can contribute anything to our public discussion, it should be a recognition that, you know, human flourishing and the good life is

is about a lot more than stuff and that people leading good lives require a lot more forms of support. Markets that are actually going to serve people well require constraints. And bringing that back into the conversation is, I think, exactly what you see conservatives doing now. It's interesting that...

You're talking about that growth in material consumption being the justification for the politics because that exactly mirrors the justification provided by the Soviet Union, provided by communist China for their rule in their countries. And it's sort of the exact opposite of the foundations of American exceptionalism.

Yeah, that's it's a great point. It's funny. I was actually doing an interview recently. It was it was with the research staff at a very large and prestigious investment bank. I'll leave it at that. And they actually tried to say, you know, we're talking about what the Trump administration is doing. And they were saying, you know, there was concern this might harm corporate profits.

And they actually tried to define, they said, isn't that what's always made America exceptional, that this was the best place to make a profit? Isn't that what American exceptionalism is? And I said, I've honestly never, it makes sense, I guess, that you're saying that, but I've never heard anyone believe that. American exceptionalism certainly is about the opportunity to make a profit. And the fact that we respect and celebrate people who are successful,

But American exceptionalism isn't about the stuff for its own sake. It's about actually having a political system and an economic system that respects human beings and what's important to them and what they value. And the great thing is that when you do that, when you get that right, the stuff comes, right? When you actually have a healthy economy, a healthy society, you're preparing people to lead productive lives.

That then leads to the success. And exactly your point, it's like the Soviet Union is exactly the opposite. If you erode everything else and just focus on making the stuff, everything falls apart. And in our own way, even though obviously we were not communist, we were doing it in a capitalist way, I think you've seen something similar in the US that it turns out you can have a lot of stuff and a lot of social and political decay at the same time. And that's what we're living through.

So you're a Harvard Law grad and you worked at Bain for people who don't know it's a huge consulting company internationally for 10 years. When you go in and talk like this to an investment bank, do they view you as an apostate now? Like what happened to you? Did you get some bad water in India when you worked there? I mean, what do they think?

It's a good question. I think there's certainly a way in which I'm considered an apostate or a heretic, you know, with respect to the business world, maybe also with respect to the political world. Of course, my first major policy job was working for Mitt Romney when he was running for president in 2012.

And what I always emphasize to folks is that I feel very fortunate to have come into the kind of work that I'm doing from just a very unorthodox path. Typically, if you want to do public policy,

Right. You like major in the thing for public policy and then you go and get an internship on the Hill and then on Capitol Hill. And then you go into all the summer fellowships where they like brainwash you into believing exactly what a Republican is supposed to believe or exactly what a Democrat is supposed to believe. And then you, you know, go out and do that. And I always wanted to do public policy, but I guess I somewhat failed.

happenstance approached it in this different way. I went and got some business experience first, which I loved. I always tell people I learned a tremendous amount having the opportunity to work at a place like Bain. But then when all my colleagues went off to business school, I went off to law school and wanted to understand how would you not just take everything you see in the economy and figure out how to exploit it for even more profit,

How would you take what you're seeing in the economy and actually think about the ways you would use law to have better things happening in the economy? And that's what I always thought politics and policy was for. And I then entered into this conservative movement where it was not very conservative, bluntly. I think it had become what I call this sort of form of market fundamentalism, the kind of blind faith in the market that

That's not conservative at all. It dominated the right of center for a few decades, but it wasn't working. And so I found myself clashing frequently with the folks who had come up through this system of, no, no, this is just what we think. This is what we're supposed to say.

And, you know, I think the good news is that that has expired or collapsed to some extent. And we're now in this very exciting period where people do get to think about things differently. People are returning to some of those conservative principles. And that's what the book is about. You know, the book is all of this work that I, but many others have been doing over the last five years,

to try to reestablish conservatism that would serve the needs of America in the 2020s. And I think it helps kind of make sense of all these things coming out of the Republican Party, all these things coming out of conservatives' mouths that are confusing people. They're like, where is this coming from? That's not what we thought a Republican was supposed to say. And the answer is, no, that's really good because people do need to change their thinking when the world changes. You don't live in a big city, correct? No.

Correct. So do you find – so you're talking about this investment bank and others.

I feel we live very much in this bubble world. You know, we see people. So, you know, obviously they want the past economic system. It's benefited them. It's helped them put their kids in schools. Nothing wrong with that. But do you feel you not living in a major city and living in a smaller community outside the New York, D.C., has helped you have a better outlook and more curious about how do we make everybody's lives better?

Good question. There are days when I like to think that that's true because it's a good story to tell the people that are like, well, why aren't you living in Washington, D.C., where you could show up for meetings more regularly? And, well, it's really important that I live outside D.C. It helps me do my work. I don't know how true that is. I think at the margin, certainly, I am able to observe things that are different and

I think one way in which it's very helpful is what you really realize is just that most people's world just doesn't revolve around any of this stuff. The things that people care about, the things that people pay attention to, the things that they're upset about, the things that break through into their lives are not the things that everybody's obsessing about inside the Beltway in New York City. But I think to a significant extent, the causality probably runs the other way, that as somebody who...

you know, at my own, and I always emphasize, I'm not saying that my own choices should be everybody's choices. I want people to have lots of different choices about how they live their lives. But as someone who did take this outlook on what I thought was important, you know, just what was important in my own life, I think that both led toward a lot of the thinking I brought to my politics and also the thinking I brought to how I wanted to live my own life.

Yeah, it's an interesting juxtaposition between the investment banker you had. We had a guest on, and I'm forgetting the gentleman's name. I should apologize to whoever he was for that, but he was talking about how in the past –

Before the flight of wealth to the coasts, every small town in America had its two or three patron families that were the wealth generators who were connected to those communities. They sponsored the high school football team, Began's Rotary, Lions Club. And even within the cities, individual communities had those individuals. And the flight of those people to these ivory tower, New York, D.C., L.A., and within their bubbles –

Do you think that is leading to this perception that you talk about in your book about the consumption poverty line being the key to success, that they're just kind of throwing chattel at the masses while they continue to accrue greater and greater wealth? To what end? It's hard to say sometimes. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's a very good way of putting it. And I think it touches on two really important points. One is in sort of how our economic system has failed and the way in which just thinking about the economic pie is

did not serve people well, because economists will tell you and they're right, in a lot of cases, the best way to get the fastest growth, at least according to the models, would be we'll get all the smartest people into the same buildings together. Let's go find all the people with the highest test scores in every town, take them all out of those places, put them all in the same universities, send them to the same companies, the same cities, the same industries, and wow, look at all the efficiency.

And in the short run, and I think we saw this, you can get a lot of efficiency that way. But the cost of that in terms of what you leave behind

you know, in political and social terms, and then ultimately in economic terms, is just too high. Because at some point, what all the smart people in the big buildings, the big cities find is that there aren't even any businesses to run anymore. There's, you know, once you've kind of bought and sold and chopped up all the businesses in the rest of the country, what are you going to do next? And so, you know, that has been a huge failure. And then exactly your point, it's very well put,

But they then turn around and try to say, well, okay, how do we claim we're trying to fix this without actually making any trade-offs or sacrifices ourselves? Basically, just tell us where to write a check, right? And let me embrace a story that says...

As long as I do write the check, I've kind of done my duty and done everything I can. And that is how we built our politics until in the last few years it fell apart. And when we come back, we're going to talk more about how we can get this country back on track with a new conservatism with Oren Kass, chief economist at American Compass, editor of the new book, The New Conservatives, available for preorder now. Follow him on X at Oren underscore Kass. Breaking Battlegrounds back in just a moment.

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Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with yours, Chuck Warren. I'm Sam Stone. On the line with us, Oren Kass, Chief Economist at American Compass. He is the author of the new book, The New Conservative. Follow him on X at Oren underscore Kass. Oren, one question I want to ask is sort of from left field on this. You are the domestic policy advisor for Mitt Romney. Is there one or two things you learned from him regarding leadership? That's a great question. And I'm glad you asked it because he's someone I admire. I admired and continue to admire tremendously. Um,

Obviously, we have our political disagreements. The party has gone in a different direction from him.

But I do think he is someone who was notable in my mind in two respects. First of all, just his personal integrity and his belief that leadership really did mean leading in your own behavior. And in the example you set, you know, not just in public, but even within an organization. And, you know, I haven't been on a lot of campaigns, but from those who were sort of campaign lifers, they would always emphasize leadership.

even how that just trickled down into the campaign feeling different. And so that's something really I admired. And the other thing, and this was then very influential in the work that I continue to do, is that he was a very heterodox thinker himself. I mean, he obviously in many ways represented the mainstream of the old Republican Party, but of course he's the person who did healthcare reform in Massachusetts because he looked around at the problem and said, "I want to find a way to address this problem."

On the presidential campaign, a lot of folks forget this now. Most of the things Trump went on to talk about with respect to China, it's actually stuff Romney talked about first. I still remember the meeting where we were going through the regular, here's what Republicans say about trade. And he said, that's fine, but what are we going to do about China?

And the economist in the room said, well, we don't know anything about China. We say thank you for the cheap stuff. And he said, no, that's ridiculous. Go. And that was how I first got sent off to go find a better answer to understand what was going on here. And so I think his willingness when he had a strong conviction about something to follow that rather than be told, no, here's what you're supposed to say in this situation, that

It certainly made him effective in all walks of life and something I've always wanted to emulate myself. Thank you. The China shift coincided with but wasn't obviously entirely responsible for this.

This sea change from single family incomes supporting the family to both parents having to work in this much more hectic lifestyle. You touch on that some in your book as well. It's something J.D. Vance approached on the campaign trail. And the reaction when he said, hey, you should we should be able to have somebody earn one income, supports a family, builds a young family.

It kind of got poo-pooed by the economists, but I thought that might have been the single most important thing he said on the campaign trail. I totally agree. I think it's such a great kind of concrete way of framing a lot of the debates we have in front of us now because it's really fascinating. You can go find from the past couple of decades the work saying, no, no, this is a good thing if both parents are in the workforce because –

That's higher GDP. You know, the classic example is if two houses next to each other have a parent staying home raising kids, that's zero GDP. If they hire each other to take care of each other's kids, that's lots of GDP. And that's literally how economists and a lot of policymakers have looked at it. How can we get parents away from having to take care of their own kids so they can be in the workforce?

And I think what's so powerful about the way, you know, Vance and others have framed this in saying one income should be sufficient to raise a family is it's not saying only one parent should work, right? Sometimes this gets transposed into, oh, you want women barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen. No, what it's saying is that it should actually be an option available to the family. That if you want to have a second parent working as well, that's the choice the family makes, right?

They should have that choice as well. And by the way, if the one income is sufficient to support the family, then the second income will also be sufficient to cover the costs of childcare and the other things you lose when you send the second parent into the workforce. What's not sustainable is this model we've shifted to, which is, no, no, you have to have both parents working just to scratch together some semblance of middle-class security. And if you try to opt for anything else, sort of, well, good luck to you.

And I think that it actually connects to the point where we were touching on earlier about sort of, you know, a lot of things being concentrated in the cities where it's great that people have the opportunity to move to the city and be an investment banker if they want. That's great. And people say, well, it's always been the American tradition that people do that.

That is great and we should keep it. It has also always been the American tradition that if you want to stay in the community where you grow up and build a good life there, you can do that too. And what has happened in this pursuit of efficiency and GDP growth is we just lopped all that off. We said, no, no, no, the market gets to decide what is and is not an option. And that is sort of, we all live in service to that.

when what is needed and you know now Secretary of State Rubio I think has always been especially articulate on this point

He says, you know, the nation and its people don't exist to serve the market. The market exists to serve the nation and its people. And that's what we have to get back to. Let's talk tariffs. We got about four minutes left here. Do you like how Donald Trump is implementing tariffs? And then I heard in an interview you did, Tucker Carlson, you gave this great example about how Reagan handled Japan and viewed them as a threat. And today, because of his hard line, the South benefits from it.

Yeah, that's right. I think what the Trump administration is doing is incredibly important, both in just sort of in principle saying this, the system we have pursued with globalization free trade has not worked. We need to move on from it. We need to construct something new and appropriate to the modern economy and America's needs. And I think tariffs are a huge part of what's needed to do that.

And it's such a great example of a place where historically, the Republican Party was always the party of tariffs. Abraham Lincoln was proudly a tariff man. Teddy Roosevelt was proud. McKinley, all the way up through, as you just mentioned, Reagan, who, yes, liked the idea of free trade among market democracies, but was also more than happy to recognize that, for instance, the way that Japan was behaving in the 1980s was not consistent with free trade.

And Reagan, very much in the same way Trump has focused on China, Reagan focused on Japan. And so I think a really good example that helps make sense of what the Trump administration is trying to do now is what the Reagan administration did when cheap Japanese cars were flooding into the US in the early 1980s. And basically under the threat of, if we don't do something about this, we're going to impose tariffs.

the Japanese agreed to constrain their own exports. The Japanese ended up going to Toyota and Honda and saying, this isn't going to fly anymore. We want you guys to be successful in the United States, but to do that, you need to go build in the United States. And that's why Toyota and Honda moved to the US South. And that's why we have that entire industry there now.

How critical is that in relation to China given the rise of BYD and their automotive industry at a moment when if they take over the U.S. and European markets, you're talking about an extraordinary additional capital shift?

Yeah, I think the story with China, that's a way in which it's very different because China is not a market democracy. I don't think we want to say just like we were happy to have Toyota here. You know, the Toyota Camry actually has more American made content in it than any car coming from Detroit at this point. You know, Toyota sponsors the U.S. Olympic team. That's great. I don't think we feel the same way about companies that are controlled by the Chinese Communist Party. No, no.

And so I think with respect to China, we need to have a model closer to the way we thought about the Soviet Union, which is just this is an incompatible economic and political system. We can't be embracing it. The future is going to be decided by either America or China, and it's a much better future if it's America. Oren Kass, thank you so much. We love having you on the program. Would love to have you back again. Folks, follow him on X at Oren underscore Kass.

or at American Compass, understandingamerica.co and check out his new book, The New Conservative, available June 3rd, everywhere you get your favorite books.

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Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds. Our next guest up today, Ashley Rinsberg, senior editor at Pirate Wires and author of The Grey Lady Winked. Follow him on X at Ashley Rinsberg. He has been doing some amazing work undercovering, frankly, some fairly nefarious deeds that have been going on in influencing Wikipedia and Wikimedia, which is a lot of work.

too many people still look for as their primary source of information. When you do a Google search, it just pops up. Yeah, it's number one. Right, right. It's incredible.

So, Ashley, I want to talk about what you have written regarding Wikipedia and so forth. Can you give our audience a little history what the original premise of Wikipedia was and how it is now? I understand, for example, you can't even gain access to the most controversial pages unless you do 500 edits. I mean, who's paying these people to do this?

Wikipedia started out as an online sort of crowdsourced encyclopedia. So the idea was that it would be the open source equivalent of an encyclopedia. Anyone could contribute anything they

on any topic. And it sort of took off in that way in the early 2000s and picked up steam, you know, really in the 2010s. Now it's got about 7 million articles or entries on endless amounts of topics. But in anything that has to do with politics or culture or social issues, it's

What you've seen is this kind of ideological battling that's taken place in these articles where if you are an experienced editor, someone who does have not just more than 500 edits, but sometimes more than 5,000 or 50,000 edits, you are very experienced in the kind of parliamentary maneuvering that governs the site. And that means you're able to really...

exert your own opinion or your own beliefs over dozens or hundreds of other people who don't understand the site as well as you do. And that's exactly what we've seen happen is that people capture entire topic areas and sway the narrative on these important topics. Is there a coordinated effort? You've touched on this in some of your work.

How Soros-backed operatives took over key roles. Is there a coordinated effort going on from the left-leaning NGO world to control this narrative via Wikipedia? Yeah, there absolutely is. This all took place around 2017, where Wikipedia, the parent organization, which is called Wikimedia Foundation,

consciously, explicitly shifted its own mission. So the previous mission was just basically building a digital online encyclopedia. And then it became in 2017 with something that they called the movement strategy, social justice movement. This is really about creating, and that's why they call it the movement strategy. It's about turning Wikipedia into a social justice movement. They understood at this moment, and of course you have to remember, this is right after Trump's first election.

election win. The left is in a panic about online disinformation, misinformation. Hillary Clinton goes in front of Congress right after he wins the election and declares a fake news epidemic. And the win is sort of put blamed on misinformation. And it's not chalked up to actual

real shift in political sentiment in the US, they couldn't really explain it in those actual terms. They have to make it about misinformation, disinformation, that it was all fake. And Wikipedia steps into the fray, understanding that this is an amazing opportunity for a website that is seen as the factual ground truth, like the sort of ground zero for objective, neutral facts.

Even though it wasn't that, it's never been that, but certainly in 2017 when they turn it into a social justice movement, it was never going to be that. And that's where we see this real shift towards left-wing ideology being put into place there at Wikimedia Foundation and also within the website itself. So...

One of the things – we've got just about a minute and a half left in this segment. I don't want to get in too long a question, but the left is very good at playing follow the leader. It seems like other groups like Hamas-aligned groups are using these same tactics now and following that lead.

This is really a platform that's primed for this kind of capture by groups like Hamas and Hamas's vast ecosystem of ideological allies because they can work together. They work tirelessly. They are they have they're not beholden to any notion of of accuracy or truth or any of these kind of.

these ideas that they would consider to be just kind of contemptible. And so they are round the clock, and many of them are probably paid, some of them are not. It's not just Hamas, it's probably also China, the 50-second army, it's the army of propagandists. Anyone that's got an interest in subverting the narrative about the United States, the West, Israel, Christianity, and they are extremely good at it. They're extremely adept at

at seeding radical ideas and they're using Wikipedia to launder radical ideology into the mainstream and make them appear to be mainstream ideas. Yeah, these groups are gifted at their own forms of misinformation. Breaking Battlegrounds coming right back with more from Ashley Rinsberg here in just a moment.

In today's digital world, standing out is more important than ever. Whether you're running for office, leading a cause, or hosting a vote for the cutest pet in town, you need a web domain that's simple, memorable, and action-oriented. You need a .vote web domain. It's clear, impactful, and establishes a lasting presence for your campaign.

Don't wait. Head to GoDaddy.com or Name.com, type in your name.vote, and get started today. Because after all, every pet deserves a web address that's as special as they are. Welcome back to Breaking Battlegrounds with your host Chuck Warren. I'm Sam Stone. On the line with us, continuing on with Ashley Rinsberg, Senior Editor at Pirate Wires, author of The Grey Lady Winked. Follow him on X at Ashley Rinsberg.

Folks, one thing I want to get clear of, and then Sam has a question, is why are we talking about Wikipedia? Well, 53% of American Internet users go to Wikipedia as a source. And a lot of this is highly educated and young adults, especially college adults, and that's why you see the spin towards Wikipedia.

the Palestinian cause, two-state solution and so forth. So there's a reason why this is an important topic and the reason why people like George Soros are spending money on it. And it comes with a high level in premature of legitimacy. Yeah. I mean, the perception is that it is a highly legitimate source of information. Exactly. So let's talk. You have a great article, an article out about Wikipedia editors

are in open revolt over the American Pope. What is the revolt, and why is this causing such controversy? Well, he's a White Sox fan, so I can't stand him. Well, that point shows he has faith. Go ahead. So when the Pope Leo was elected—

Wikipedia article and the talk page is sort of behind the scenes. There erupted all these arguments about whether the Pope is or is not American. Of course, he actually is. We all know that. He's from Chicago. He's about as American as you can get. But obviously what the editor's

on these articles we're trying to argue is that they're trying to resist the idea that he's an American. This would have been one of those great firsts, like the left loves to talk about first, this first black this or gay that, but they couldn't talk about the first American pulp. That would sort of, you know, destroy their own narrative on what it means to be a first of anything. So they started to call him the first, um,

South American or Peruvian because he had worked in—he had been a bishop in Peru for a while. He was there as a missionary, essentially. So it was not that he's the first American. He's now the first American and Peruvian pope, which is obviously ridiculous.

And this just went on and on and on. And it eventually sort of devolved into a discussion about using the term American to refer to the United States as being an illegitimate form, illegitimate reference, and how America has to dominate everything, dominate the world because they use the term American. All this kind of nonsense and this is the stuff that we've seen in all these, you know,

settler colonial argumentation, all this kind of stuff that got blended into these talk pages. Why do you think that matters to these folks? I mean, honestly, like, I don't imagine that many of them are devout Catholic.

I think this is just classic leftism. I really believe they hate the idea of America as a successful, something that transcends itself, that it is actually a force in the world on the global stage.

as a force for good, they see it as the exact opposite. They see America as this evil empire. So the idea that there could be an American Pope, which would sort of, you know, it would elevate the status and the prestige of America as a nation is odious to them and they just would resist at all costs.

I have a hard time understanding them at times. Well, it's a different mindset. I can't look in the mirror and hate myself that much. The problem is you're not going to understand. It's a different mindset. You're the senior editor at PirateWire. So let me ask you a question about NPR, then tell us how that relates to PirateWire. So Catherine Meyer, the NPR chief, says we're a nonpartisan news organization, but we need federal money. Why do these people think you don't support the First Amendment if you don't give them government money? Are you getting government money at PirateWire's?

Unfortunately not. We'd probably be paid a lot better if we were. But

You know, Catherine Mara, incidentally, was the former CEO of Wikimedia Foundation. She is the woman who led Wikimedia and Wikipedia through this transition. It was her brainchild to create this massive shift from an encyclopedia to a social justice movement. And I think that has a lot to do with this idea that NPR is

is entitled to government money. It's this notion that the government and government largesse is

is somehow wedded to the kind of center-left establishment that they are one and the same thing, that NPR is an extension of the government. And the rest of the media, I think, thinks the same thing, which is why they call themselves the fourth estate. I mean, they actually refer to themselves as an extension of government. They believe that not only are they entitled to government money, they're entitled to legal protections that nobody else in the country is entitled to.

So it's this web of entitlement. They believe that they are the sort of spirit, the heart and soul of true governance and that everything else is sort of getting in the way of what the mainstream media is there to do. And they believe they should be paid for it in actual hard cash. You know, one of the things most people don't realize with NPR, we talk about the federal funding all the time.

But the flow of public dollars to NPR. Oh, no, through state grants and foundations. It's enormous. Well, almost every NPR outlet is in a government building. Yes. A government-owned building on a sweetheart or no-cost lease. I mean, there's just so much money that's transferred. They place a mannix with it. They are highly government-funded. Yeah.

Tell us a little bit about how you enjoy working at Pirate Wires and why people should subscribe to it. I subscribe to it. It's my favorite read in the morning. It's one of my favorites. Tell me what you guys do different than, say, the Washington Times or Free Beacon or something of that nature.

PowerWire takes just a little bit of a different look at the world. Rather than sort of classically conservative, we have a technological lens that we look through. So it's very tech optimist. We look through that lens at the world. We're critical of tech as well. But we are really thinking about the world today.

from that point of view, which is a point of view of progress, it's a point of view of technological progress, not progressive progress. It's a point of view that is unabashedly pro-American. We see America as a good thing, as a good force in the world.

And that we are also ready to do these kind of deep dives and spend a lot of time looking at topics that aren't really, you know, the crest of the news cycle, but are stuff that's really more under the surface, like the Wikipedia stuff. You know, I spend weeks diving into this stuff, investigating it, and that's become

becomes a bigger trend over time. So we have the benefit, thanks to our editor, Mike Solana, of being able to do that kind of work, whereas some of the other, our colleagues are doing stuff that's more about breaking news, which is amazing and that's necessary. It's just we do something a little different. But it is the type of investigative journalism that there isn't enough of anymore.

because you've had a real impact on what's going on at Wikipedia. One of your recent articles focused on their, quote, Supreme Court enforcing a sweeping ban on the pro-Hamas edit gang. So this kind of work makes a real difference. Yeah, it does. You know, there's more risk associated with it because it's costly. It takes a lot of time. Also, it sometimes takes

gets attention from people you don't want attention from like these pro-Kamath propagandists. But on the flip side, when you do find a story of that kind of significance that people actually do pay attention in the long term, that Congress starts to pay attention, which 23 lawmakers, Congress members signed a letter to Wikimedia Foundation asking for an explanation of what's going on on the site on account of our reporting.

And it does move the needle and it gets people looking at these issues which deserve attention. Well, let's talk about one of your deep dive articles. You wrote an article, The Terrorist Propaganda to the Reddit Pipeline. People use Reddit a lot. They go down it. And like Wikipedia, I am sure that the terrorists have just gone in there and taken things over so they can spend all day on it. Tell us a little bit about your article and what surprised you when you were doing your research.

The article shows that there is a pro-Hamas and actually Hamas-tied propaganda network operating out of Reddit. So it's on Reddit and operating out of Reddit, which means it extends to other platforms. It's sort of based out of one of the subreddits, which is called rPalestine, the community that has been co-opted by this group.

And they operate not just in political subreddits or communities, but in non-political ones. They've taken over really big communities on Reddit, like Documentaries, which has 20 million members in that community. And they subtly seed

anti-Israel propaganda into the community. They're very insidious. They're very clever about it. They also work on X, on community notes. They try to get people to sway votes on community notes. They put propaganda into politics.

Quora, they do this all with a very acute awareness that this type of information on these particular platforms ends up getting funneled not just onto Google, but onto the LLMs and to chat GPT. They do that consciously, and this is something that we describe as data poisoning, because they're poisoning downstream data sources, and that's probably the biggest effect of this.

What really surprised me as I was reporting this and working with a group of sources who helped me understand what was going on

Is that this is actually directly tied to the to the terror groups in question. So foreign terror organizations, U.S. designated, that includes Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and probably about 20 others or so that post their own propaganda directly on Telegram because Telegram has no controls for this kind of stuff and then is forced.

funneled via a group called Resistance News Network, RNN, onto Reddit. So it's grabbed by the propaganda group from RNN, translated, and then

laundered into Reddit and from Reddit onto all the other platforms I talked about. So this is directly, this is not abstract. This is directly from these foreign terror organizations. And these efforts, as you've just touched on, are really broad. I was talking a couple of days ago with my girlfriend's kid, and he said when you're going in like the PlayStation forums, right?

This stuff is present in there as well, that they're constantly pushing that. But that's a recruiting ground for them. Exactly. So this is part of the strategy. So if they were only staying in their own sort of hard left or pro-Palestine communities, it wouldn't really have much effect because they'd just be preaching to the choir. So what they've done is they have this group of moderators that operates this propaganda network have captured moderators

non-political communities on reddit of stuff that is often targeted to younger people and that there is where they are actually doing the most damage where they have the greatest effect because you would go into the groups not thinking that there's anything

political about it and subtly and slowly it kind of seeps into the content. This is something they do very deliberately. They use a lot of imagery. They use the banners in the top of the community on those pages to put anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian imagery into them. And gradually and slowly that's how they shift that narrative and they do it almost without these users or sometimes completely without those users really knowing that that's what's going on.

Now, talking about shifting topics to, in a sense, vehicles that don't shift anything, you had a couple of pieces on Tesla, the Tesla takedown movement tied to short sellers and another piece, why the Tesla takedown movement, why is the Tesla takedown movement doing pro-war Ukraine activism? What is this about with Tesla? Yeah.

The Tesla takedown movement cropped up, or seemingly cropped up, after the inauguration where Elon Musk did the famous, or infamous, however you see it, arm gesture. And it looked like this very organic movement

about like, we wanna stop Elon because he's fascist. That was the narrative, that was the talking point. But when you really dive into the movement, what you start to see were some very, very strange trends. So number one, what happened is, this is sort of tied back into Reddit coincidentally, or maybe not so coincidentally, which is that right after the day after the inauguration where Elon does this thing, you get this movement on Reddit to ban

any links from X, formerly Twitter, on Reddit. So anytime there would be a link dropped onto Reddit, that post would get deleted or banned. There were proposals to do this across Reddit, hundreds and hundreds of communities, suddenly doing this all in the same time period, all within literal hours, and the vast majority of the early ones were sports channels

So we're talking about UK soccer groups, professional soccer. These are communities dedicated to these groups. The reach of these left-leaning and far-left organizations is astounding. It's extended literally to every portion of the Internet. Ashley Rinsberg, we want to thank you so much for joining us again. Folks, follow him on X at Ashley Rinsberg and join Pirate Wires. You're going to get great stuff there. It's a fantastic read every single day.

Breaking Battlegrounds will be back on the air next week, but you can always go to BreakingBattlegrounds.vote and get all of our past episodes and subscribe to the podcast. You don't want to miss Kylie's Corner. It's on the podcast every week. I say this every election cycle, and I'll say it again. The 2024 political field was intense, so don't get left behind in 2025. If you're running for office, the first thing on your to-do list should be securing your name on the web.

With a yourname.vote domain from GoDaddy.com, you'll stand out and make your mark. Don't wait. Get yours today. Welcome to the podcast portion of Breaking Battlegrounds. There's Chuck Warren. I'm Sam Stone. Of course, as always, the irrepressible Kylie Kipper. She's got Kylie's Corner coming up. We're starting out with a clip. Yeah. Jeremy, go ahead and play that clip from Stephen Smith.

The only way for Trump to pull this off is to make the argument that it's all about America. It's all about America. And anything that contributes to America being number one is something that we should support. That has to be his argument. And it gets very, very interesting because now it's a debate. And having that debate, here's where the advantage is. At least in the Trump administration, there appears to be a debate allowed. What has ailed the Democrats?

It's not an ideology alone. It's not their feelings alone. It's the fact that if you refute it, what they said, if you are part of their party, cancel culture kicked in. If you are not a part of their party, it was ostracism and it was ultimately hate mongering and fear mongering that was thrown into the equation. There was no room for debate and enough voices weren't being heard.

Diversity amongst those voices not being heard. You're black, you're white, you're gay, you're lesbian, you're heterosexual, you're transgender. It don't matter. You still had to have one form of thinking if you fell under their umbrella. Otherwise, you were pushed out. If Trump is saying there needs to be a healthy debate about America first, meaning the country or America first, meaning people born in this country and sacrificing their

the best that may exist out there across the globe, and that's a discussion that's worth having, all of a sudden that opens the floodgates for an abundance of other things that we can discuss. But most importantly, I agree with the idea of there being an open, robust debate about it because it is not something that the Democrats allow. The Democrats stop letting people decide. One could easily argue.

Their mentality seemed to be you must obey the party line or you're out in your ass. That seemed to be what they were saying. Censorship, cancer culture. There was no debate. That's why they're home. And Donald Trump is on his way back to the White House. I found that clip interesting based on our conversation with Ashley at Pirate Wires. The Democrats and their left-leaning donors like George Soros, they absolutely do not want debate. No, no.

I think we would be absolutely horrified if we knew how much money George Soros Foundations, foundations that take money from U.S. NGOs. The Arabella Network as a whole. Have infiltrated Reddit, Wikipedia. You know, for example, I was just looking at this up. 44%.

Of those between the ages of 18 and 29 use Wikipedia to look for information. So now you wonder why we have this on college campuses, this anti-Semitic behavior. But they're targeting every part of the population. Gamers, everything. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you look at his purchase of the, what was it, the third largest network of conservative radio stations in the country that are now progressive radio stations with no audience. And it was fast-tracked by the Biden administration. Yep.

So, you know, what they're doing is insidious. I don't know what you can do with it other than counter it. You've got to have some – You have to fight. Yeah, you have to fight. You have to get the people to get on it. We've had this – I've had this conversation with a booking agent at the RNC meetings two weeks ago, and we were just discussing how horrible –

Republican congressional staffs are in the communication office. Kylie's dealt with that a lot. They're slow. Oh, they're terrible. They don't make decisions. Whereas the Democrats are quick to make these decisions. They're quick to always try to spread their message. And I guess our side needs a little more missionary zeal on all these platforms. I will push back on that. I think Democrats always know that their interviews are going to be friendly. And I think Republicans might have to second guess. You think there's a little fear on our side. Well, in –

So that's a great point, because even on our side, when we bring guests in, you and I have challenged guests on their views at times. I mean, obviously, we want to let them. Yeah, but we're never cruel about it. We're never cruel or nasty. But I mean, we do we do question back. Right. You never see that on the left. No. Well, no. And so anyway, we have to get better at it.

We need to go be pushing and get involved more. I got to say, though, this is an area, again, and you and I have talked about this ad nauseum over the years, where our donor base and the Democrat donor base is.

Our donors do not play the game as well as the other side does. Because if we went out, if our donors said we're going to mobilize like the Democrats have 50 or 100,000 young people across the country, we're going to pay them full time in 80 different organizations. We're going to have them out in the field in every election. We're going to chase. We're going to go after all these sites and the narratives and really try to push back. If we did that.

That cost would be far less than the money we blow in every presidential election cycle. It would have more impact. That's what the Democrats are doing, and we're not matching them. Yeah, I agree. Well, Jeremy, could you tee us up for Kylie's Corner here? ♪ Talking about crimes and the ones committed ♪ ♪ Murder and mayhem in a world of sin and awe ♪ ♪ Kylie's on a roll ♪

Well, I thought it was fitting today if I gave an update on my mockingbird issue, since that's how we ended the show last week. And I'm happy to report. I did have one of my friends send you a suggestion of a large tennis racket. Yes, yes. I didn't have to resort to that.

But I'm happy to report the babies did leave the nest. There's flight practice on Saturday. Sunday, I was outside. They were still practicing a little bit. She was a little antsy. But by Monday, I got my yard back. Hey, hey, hey. I can walk back and forth, take my trash out today in peace. It was very nice. By the way, what was the number you gave me? How many mockingbirds are there? There's between 30 and 50 million mockingbirds. They're a protected species. They're protected. They're the most populated protected species. So if there is one...

Well, we need to take off the list. I'm really surprised Trump hasn't got rid of that. Yeah. He doesn't know. He apparently hasn't had a pestering mockingbird. You know, it's it's like I think I think and I'm trying to remember which congress member we had on that was talking about this. Yeah.

The sage grouse issue where they identified this one population of sage grouse. And it turns out it's identical to the populations of sage grouses in every other state, but it got its own special subspecies designation that's basically, you know,

hosing any economic development in a four-state area. Yeah. It's stupid. No, and apparently there's a bald eagle at Chaparral Park that a mockingbird is terrorizing right now. And the bird watchers there feel bad because the bald eagle is so much slower than the mockingbirds that it actually is upsetting it. Oh, really? It's actually upsetting it. Yeah. It's kind of sad. That eagle needs a hawk friend. I know. We've got to get him one. Okay. Back to...

Mayhem. All right, what's going on with mayhem? That was mayhem. So on May 24th, there was a 12-year-old girl and her sister, and they woke up their grandmother because their mom hadn't returned that night, that evening. So the grandma took...

There is no answer on why the grandma knew where mom was, but grandma took the 12 year old and the other daughter to the Baymont Inn in Indianapolis where the mom was there with this man named Bruce Pierce. They're in the lobby. I don't know what's going on, but grandma's like, let's start moving your stuff out of his hotel room. Right, right. So they're moving her stuff out. The 12 year old daughter stays in the room with Bruce because he's not she's not feeling good. This is so Bruce stayed in the room as well.

This is where the mother and the grandma start taking stuff out to the car. And apparently Bruce had invited the 12-year-old to sit on the bed with him and then grabbed her arms, pinned her on the bed, and started ripping her clothes off, her shirt and her underwear. When the mom walked in, he was on top of her daughter. She was yelling, no, no, no. And the mom shot him. And then the 12-year-old daughter ran out. They all ran from the scene. They called the cops. Then the cops obviously showed up. So they returned back to the scene, arrested Bruce.

So she didn't kill him. She didn't kill him. No, they arrested him. But then he had to go to the hospital. So he went to the hospital. The dot. He also had a gun and he shot the daughter, the 12 year old daughter. So she went to the hospital as well.

And then he fled the hospital. And the last time he was seen was at a Motel 8. And he is still on the run. And this is his third. He's been convicted twice of child molestation. Again, so how did he get involved with this family? There's no answers on why. It seems very sketchy what I read. Yes, yes. And it has come out that he was calling and communicating with the 12-year-old daughter prior to this incident.

trying to get her to leave town with him. But it's unclear why the mom was with him. I have a really hard time understanding why we do not castrate these people who are convicted of child sex crimes. I did Google it, and Indiana does not have castration. However, there was a bill that went through this year that failed. But this is his third time. I think...

It's fair enough. Well, it goes back to what we were saying last week. 80% of crimes are committed by people who have had three strikes, basically. Right, right. We really need to get back to the three-strike policy. Yeah. This actually leads me into my next topic.

I love when a segue happens. I know. That was an easy segue. Totally accidental. So yesterday, I was watching Court TV. Chuck actually called me. He's like, where are you? It was so loud, I thought she was at a rally. And she couldn't, for the record, folks, she couldn't turn the TV down, so she had to walk outside. That's how loud it was. I couldn't find the remote. I couldn't find the remote.

So anyway, so I'm watching Court TV and I see a headline and it's Laurie Daybell is trying to get a judge removed from her case because she thinks he's going to be biased because he's already convicted her of conspiracy to commit murder. So I'm like, what is she on trial now? I've seen for the past two years this lady has been on trial. So she's been convicted in 23 of killing her two children, seven years old, JJ, and then 16-year-old Tylee. And then also conspiracy to murder

The fifth husband's wife. Her fifth husband's wife. Okay? She was sentenced to three consecutive life sentences. Then, in April of this year, she was found guilty of conspiracy to commit murder of a 2019 of her fourth husband. And then now she's on trial for conspiracy to commit murder of this guy, Brandon Bordeaux, which is her niece's ex-husband. But here's my... She's already got...

It's a real life census. Well, here's my thing. Why are we wasting our time? Yeah. Why are we? Why are we? Why is anyone bothering? She's not getting out of jail. Yeah. I've wondered that you do a lot. So you see when they get a federal charges, state charges like this gangster in Los Angeles that Trump. Yeah. Yeah. But then it's like like, well, he's not going anywhere. He has 110 years still to serve for the California. Yeah.

Sentencing. Right. Right. So I don't understand it. I find it very odd. And we do a lot of things for money. I don't know why they can just not leave it open ended and get tried another day. They feel like they need it because say a pardon. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. But this is just insane. This is insane. It's too much. It's just a waste of time and money. At least she's representing herself. She's not taking a state resource there. Would you think?

follow up next week with the child molester I want to know more about this story because it just seems sketchy that his involvement even with I

The family. I have a bad suspicion about that one. Yeah, no, I don't think it turns out well. But nonetheless, he's shot and he's now on the run. Yeah, the mom took – she was like, you're going out. Folks, we're going to end here with a segment from News Nation about basically an illegal act by Joe Biden. He was doing race-based loans that hurt white farmers. News Nation did a great report on it and there was a Department of Agriculture whistleblower

who talks about the loan forgiveness policies under the Biden administration. And what the whistleblower discussed is that through the passage of the American Rescue Act, and now Section 1005, that it provided loan relief specifically for socially disadvantaged farmers. The section provided race-based loan forgiveness granted only to those who qualified as socially disadvantaged farmers or ranchers.

I think this was also contrary, Sam, to court ruling. So on behalf, we're going to leave that with this video. But on behalf of Sam, Jeremy, Kyla, and myself, have a great week. Follow us at BreakingBattlegrounds.vote, wherever you get a sub stack. But listen to this clip from News Nation and feel free to share it with your friends. The illegal acts by the Biden administration, I don't think they know any bounds. No, they don't. This was a rogue operation.

I mean, I think Tom Cruise had a mission impossible for a rogue nation. I think he should have gone to handle Biden. For all the screaming about Trump ignoring the courts, the Biden administration ignored every single court ruling they didn't like. Period. Yeah, I agree. Folks, have a great weekend.

When former President Joe Biden left Washington, D.C., he was leaving behind a DEI secret involving American farmers and $800 million in taxpayer money. And the United States Department of Agriculture whistleblower is now sounding the alarm. It was to pay off anyone who wasn't a white male's loan. That was the only qualification for this loan forgiveness. And what was the reaction?

So it was really silent. They were trying to keep this hushed because of the obvious implications of...

race-based loan forgiveness. Race-based loan forgiveness. It's in black and white, buried in the American Rescue Plan Act. The United States Secretary of Agriculture shall provide a payment in an amount up to 120% of the outstanding indebtedness of each socially disadvantaged farmer or rancher. The act explicitly lays out who's considered socially disadvantaged.

so just to be clear if you were american indian alaskan native asian black african-american native hawaiian pacific islander hispanic or latino and you were in that group you were told you didn't have to pay your bills essentially yes that's correct and that your loan would be forgiven up to 120 percent of the loan value to me it was just

It was combating racism with more racism. I couldn't believe that it was happening today's age. James Dunlap owns a small family farm in Baker City, Oregon. He works two other jobs to keep his farm afloat, but did not qualify for the loan forgiveness because he's white. I knew what they were saying was that minority farmers were going to have their loans forgiven for no reason other than they decided to, they being the government. So...

And how much money they had had nothing to do with it? As far as I understand, not at all. It wasn't about hardship. It wasn't about financial situations at all. It was purely what box you checked under that ethnicity line on your application. If you checked a non-white box, you got the free money no matter how rich you were.

James and other white farmers sued the Biden administration and were successful. The loan forgiveness for any farmer who's not white was stopped. The judge writing in his decision, it was an actual constitutional harm that cannot be undone. And James and other white farmers will suffer the harm of being excluded from eligibility for that debt relief program solely on the basis of his race. That harm he has shown is irreparable.

But this is where things get interesting. The Biden administration was not ready to give up. They passed the Inflation Reduction Act to help farmers who couldn't pay their loans. It was supposed to help all farmers, but NewsNation has learned all farmers were not told about it. NewsNation obtaining a copy of this email that was sent out to share information about new payments and or loan modifications that may assist you.

But here's the catch. Our whistleblower says it was only sent to the minority farmers, aka the socially disadvantaged group. And he says USDA workers were even instructed to tell that group to stop paying their loans because they would still be forgiven. The whistleblower says none of the white farmers he works with received the email.