Patriot Power Hour #366

What do you want? Statement of purpose? Should I email you? Should I put this on your action item list? You decide your own level of involvement. We are the Prepper Broadcasting Network. You are now listening to the Patriot Power Hour, the newest show of the Prepper Broadcasting Network. This live episode features the situational awareness you need to practice self-reliance and independence. Introducing your hosts, Ben, the Breaker of Banksters, and Future Dan, the editor of FutureDanger.com. Patriot Power Hour, live once more, 29th of October, 2026. It is episode 366, 6.02 p.m. Eastern. I'm Ben the Breaker Banksters here with Future Dan. Future Dan, it's our last episode before the midterms, isn't it? Yeah, I'm not sure that changes the way we look at just how things are going. I suppose we could step into prognostications of the election. But again, relatively light news environment if you're looking at things that are straight up dangerous. That's as much as I want to talk. You know, I want to talk about that as much as I want to talk about anything else related to the election. We can talk a little bit for sure, but the news vacuum, maybe is that the right term or also what's on the other side of the election? What kind of news will come out after the election? I'm just as interested in that as the actual election night itself. But looking at one of these indicators on the dashboard, elections are stolen from a big picture view. Do you feel like the elections this year will be more legitimate, more fair than the last decade or so? Or do you expect the empire to strike back, potentially even more fraud going on? It couldn't be as rigged as it was four and six years ago. In that regard, safer, better. But obviously, we've got past that point where Most people doubt there's corruption in the electoral system. It's just a matter of how much. So maybe it'd be a good thing to have just a spotlight shown on some outright fraud this time and maybe some immediate arrests and prosecutions. That's what I'd like to see. I'm someone who tries not to look at black and white. definitely try to look at degrees in the spectrum and overall, and there will always be some sort of corruption, but is it going to be 1% or is it going to be 10% or is it going to be 50%? The magnitude makes a huge difference. I'm glad that you believe, and I certainly hope and pretty much believe it'll be a more fair election, but will it be to enough of a degree to still make it fair, or is it still going to be so tilted that, you know? And the response to that is holding people accountable, maybe even setting traps for them so that they fall all over themselves. And there's actual evidence, not just hearsay, right? Yeah. One of the challenges you get into, though, is ballots themselves hold a pretty unique status, right, among documents. Like, the federal government can seize almost any document that exists in order to you know, investigate crimes, but not ballots, right? They're like off limits in a certain degree, right? We're going to see the limits to that. You know, if suitcases of late ballot start showing up and they get seized, that's going to force some issues into emergency court hearings that we've never seen before. We're not a prediction show. generally, although we do do some predictions towards the start of the year. We won't get into that necessarily right now, but what are your expectations or what's your odds that you would put it that we'll see serious and significant allegations and evidence where it would be unprecedented levels of not just with the courts, but the whole circus that surrounds it? So, what you're asking is a lot easier to conceive of if it's a presidential election, right? Electoral college is in action, which it's not during the midterm. So a hundred Senator, well, no, it's, it's one third of the sense of 33, 34 Senate seats, uh, and 435 house seats. Right. And then, then governorships and state and, state legislatures, that's, you know, obviously there's going to be fraud detected, right? And each of these is an isolated election. And so systemically you don't get that same kind of effect that you would if the entire country was holding what really amounts to, you know, 50 separate elections for president, right? Each state administering its own method to achieve its electoral college votes. So we don't have that. This is not a presidential year, so it's going to be more fractured, I guess. It's going to be all over the place. Now, that doesn't mean that a few of these can't cause the House or the Senate to go one way or the other for party control, right? So it could come down to a half dozen in either, well, half dozen in the house and maybe one in the Senate where absolute spotlights are shown on allegations of corruption. And then, you know, fears that, you know, you know, FBI can't go and seize ballots while they're being counted. Right. So, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a way to force a, you know, uh, you know, a small, but still a constitutional crisis. Well, there'll be a lot of eyes looking out that, you know, looking over what's happening. And I hope that there is a, there are some examples. There's a lot of documented evidence and people do get perp walked and do get prosecuted. I want them to have a fair trial though. And I also don't want the sky is falling fake allegations and different, you know, in fact, that would be one of the, If I was on the other side, let's say, and I wanted to sow dissent, I would put out all types of false allegations that were later disproved and shown that, oh, that was actually a legitimate election. These crazy Republicans are just making stuff up. That's the worst thing that could happen. So number one, if we do point fingers, we need evidence. Number two, be on the lookout for almost that false flag from the other side trying to pose evidence. as fair election advocates, but they're really just trying to subvert everything. So I just want to point that out a little bit. But that sort of activity hopefully will be a lot more limited with USAID and all the other NGO money, massive vacuum in the last couple of years just in terms of the cash ain't there. So they'll still be trying, but just that infrastructure and the morale that's It's got to be so low. That's helpful if you are of the opinion that, yeah, there was top-down corruption. It wasn't just individuals doing it. There was an organization and multiple organizations involved, right? Yeah, you're talking about the 2020 presidential election? Yeah, and even 2016. Well, Trump won in 2016 by a lot, so they weren't doing... too good a job cheating in 2016. But in 2020, the 8 million votes that showed up that have never been repeated in a federal presidential election, right? You know, those 8 million votes that, you know, showed up for Biden in some of those states where, you know, slightly more than the necessary tens of thousands, thousands, tens of thousands, you know, four or five figure late votes were showing up, right? You know, a lot of people are watching for that now. I'm not, I'm not sure that's ever going to be as easy as it was to do again, at least not that way. You're never fighting the old war, right? Yeah. The generals are always fighting the old war. That's the adage, at least. I don't know if it's true. But there's got to be another trick up their sleeve. So people got to be out there looking. Got to be out there watching. Get out there and vote if you haven't already. I've become a consistent voter, partially due to you, Future Dan, and this show. I had voted a few times in the past before, especially for Ron Paul. I was so sick of the system. But I got it into my mind. Vote against. You're voting against what you don't want. Not voting for necessarily who you want. Because I really don't want anybody. But there's people I really, really, really don't want. So that's who I vote against. That's the theory. Yeah, I advocate that strongly. It's such a such a low argument, such a mundane conversation to have when someone says, oh, you voted for so-and-so, all the things wrong with so-and-so. No, no, no, no, no. I voted against an entire party. I voted to keep one of these parties out of power as much as I possibly could for the good of the nation. So as soon as you adopt that, You don't even have to hold your nose and vote. Stop voting for anybody. Vote to keep dangerous people out of power. That can make everything much better here. That sort of almost judo technique of using their aggression against them. Don't fall into their trap. I've always used that economically and tried to, whether it's the type of businesses I interact with, where I place my savings, et cetera, but your vote, same thing. You know, I won't be banking with JP Morgan. It's more, where will I not bank now? That part of me always recoils when I think of this though, is because it's like, Oh, that's given a free pass to the Republicans in this case. I don't think it's, that's really the case, but we can't just let them slide and say a bunch of stuff. and have them not execute on it. So you got to keep their feet to the fire as well. It's not a cop out, I guess is my point. Yeah. And the place to do that's in the primaries. The primaries have meant more now than they have in a century. So that, that's what happens when you get the balance of power, just so, so, so close that the house swings by handfuls every two years. Right. So, you know, primaries matter. Those primary elections matter. For decades, they became almost ceremonial. Like, if you weren't just a complete party donor insider, you wouldn't even have cared who was showing up, you know, back in the day. Now, on both sides, right? That's where the Democrat socialists are wreaking havoc inside of the traditional Democrat party. Same thing. Yep, certainly. So, We'll be covering it next week. It should be live next Thursday. A couple days after. But I do know PBN is having a Tuesday night special. I'm not exactly sure the time or who's going to be on there, but election night Tuesday. Tune in to PBN live on Rumble. Speaking of live super fast, we've got a couple live listeners popping in the chat. We've got Cetro Spotlight talking about Super PAC. money junkies and the electoral college, but specifically the donor class and the super PACs and how that without pretty much with my interpretation of this message here from Cetros is they don't fix how money is handled in the election process. That's going to, there's always going to be a big time bias towards the donor class. What are your thoughts on that? There's no day to fix that, right? It's everybody. And, Money is property. In the end of the day, it constitutes speech. First and fourth amendments apply. Let it be. Let the money flow. The ideas are on a separate plane from the money. When bad is bad and when time for change is time for change, no amount of money can change that right so there is no they that can you know john mccain tried to do that with law it was always going to be subverted and you know over you know there's no there's no agreement on how to do this right we have foreign intelligence agencies you know flowing money into our elections right and we by the way our cia has done the same for years to other countries right so if you, if you got to draw a line trying to, you know, really put a stop to foreign donations, corrupting our elections, that, that can be done with the national security state, just citizens spending money to exercise their, you know, constitutional right to have a voice and advocate for someone should never try to control it. It's uncontrollable. Money's completely fungible and it's free speech. I, almost fully support that my one exclusion, I am an insurance guy, so I could have exclusions is tax-free foundations and special treatment of certain organizations in government over others. And, and of course the prosecution of certain over the others are persecution as well as prosecution censorship. Uh, so IRS or DOJ being used to attack certain organizations or protect other organizations. That's the big time slippery slope. And that is, the opposite of free speech. So with that said, yes, people should have the freedom to spend their money much more, almost more freely than it is now on politics, as long as there's no special tax considerations and 501c3, 501c4 and funds and all this gobbledygook, which not only is domestic corruption, but certainly invites all that foreign Really, that's the intermingling of the domestic and international money and corruption kind of gets it past the gate. It's almost like getting through the customs of the financing is if you can get it into an American tax-free NGO type of crap through some– I mean, that's the Rockefeller, George Soros, blah, blah, blah. That's how they do it. They made that up pretty much, right? So let's break that down a little bit. What tax is being avoided here? What tax isn't being paid that's unfair? So tax, a lot of tax-free foundations don't have to pay tax or they get special considerations or even subsidies. Tax for what? Tax on what? What class of taxation are we talking about? For their operations. So like a for-profit or just a regular organization that is at a disadvantage to some of these government-protected, you know, got the umbrella of the government over them. So it's an income tax? Or tax-advantaged. So less taxes for everybody would be much better. Corporate income tax? Is this the tax that some would pay and others get to avoid? That could be. Different considerations on what payroll is considered taxable as well, things like that. So I'm philosophically opposed to income tax... From the get-go. So when you start at that point, then none of the rest of that matters to me. Well, yes. I mean, that's philosophically absolutely true. I mean, I'd love to cut out the rotten branch right below the rotten part instead of just trimming around the leaves that are dying, for sure. Let's get rid of the income tax. That would have a lot of great downstream effects but. And corporate income taxes let it be let it be let the money flow freely let the donations flow freely let the income be made spent freely let let any voice say anything they want because ideas are still more powerful if if elon musk dumped half of his fortune you know six months ago into this election it would be minuscule what, what, what the move would have been in the, you know, the opinions. I just, I just don't, I just not, I'm not a money first guy. I am a, you know, first and second amendment. That's the zone I work inside of. Right. You know, speech is the most powerful thing. And the right to bear arms is right there behind it. You know, so ballots or bullets, we're going to have it one way or the other, but the money, Let it be free. I like it. I like it. That was something I wanted to add. That was make markets free again. That's what I wanted Trump's creed to be. Are markets more free than they were a couple years ago? I'd say yes. But are they more free than they were 20, 50, 100 years ago? Probably not. But I would go right back to a similar... solution that you came up with, like with the Federal Reserve in place, like it'll never be free. So if we just cut out the Fed, that would fix a lot of downstream issues. But I digress. Do you want to get into the news blitz real quick, or you got anything else you want to hit on super fast? No. Late October 2026. Episode 366. Take it away, Ben. I will. Hey, Jay Ferg's in the chat as well. Shout out, Jay Ferg. Try to get Jay Ferg on the show, actually, before end of the year is the plan. All right. Let's move on to the news blitz. October 29th, 2026, 621 p.m. Eastern. Episode 366. Alaska governor orders an investigation over a Democrat Senate campaign. With an alleged scheme to deceive voters with a fake candidate. A fake candidate only put in there to deceive voters to split the vote. Because the name is the same. Wikipedia prohibits content from 97% of conservative news websites. 97%. FBI raids Beverly Hills mansion in Chinese congressional espionage probe. This is our highest grade article for the day under foreign black ops suspected. We'll jump into this article as soon as the news blitz is over. It'll be the first one we jump into because this is not foreign black ops suspected. This is confirmed and gathering evidence. Three-star director of strategy, plans, and policy at the Joint Chiefs of Staff was fired. Three-star general fired. Economically, Fed's favorite inflation indicator surges in September. Soaring energy costs drag American savings rate to a four-year low. So Americans, the average American hasn't had this bad of a savings rate of the percent of income they can save per rainy day since 2022. And bankruptcies are starting to appear, especially in small American trucking. 221 small companies, small American trucking companies filed bankruptcies this year. We'll do a little research to see how many usually go bankrupt this year. And should we expect a lot more since diesel has only climbed in the last couple of months, let alone earlier this year. So we'll continue to watch for firms widely failing. That said, we are not experiencing a 1929 financial collapse on this October 29th, 2026. Oil is, uh, just around the $ 100, a little higher, a little lower the last few weeks. I think it's like 101 right now. Gold has taken a little bit of a shellacking, just holding at the $ 4, 000 mark and silver down to about 50 bucks, 51, 52. So they're holding at that psychologically important $ 50 and 4,000, but these persistently high rates. The Fed did not lower rates this week. You're not going to see gold and silver skyrocket, at least for now. And that's all we have economically. And actually, in our fourth column, we have no articles, which is not always the case. But when it is the case, I'm thankful. It means there's no weaponized Ebola. There's no massive hurricanes or earthquakes that have killed a lot or had a lot of damage. And there is no Russian lab leak That has progressed to the next COVID-19. So future Dan, knock on wood. And always pray we don't see another COVID or something. But right now, there's no indication of that. Yeah, we don't. Let's jump into the Swalwell investigation. Yeah, this is the grade one happening now. Officially suspected espionage of a congressman. Former congressman. California congressman. Yep. We've covered several articles about Eric Swalwell, a Democrat out of California who resigned from Congress and withdrew from the California gubernatorial race earlier this year. Well, guess what? When was, let's see, what was the exact date? This was Monday, yeah, Monday, 7 in the morning, 6 a.m. in the morning, sorry. Two dozen agents participate in a raid. on his Beverly Hills mansion. Excuse me. It was a different, it was not Swalwell's mansion is actually, it was Steven Klubeck's mansion, a billionaire that, uh, seems to be involved with the, uh, Swalwell investigation future. Dan, what do you got from this? Just waiting to see when it stops being characterized by, you know, right-leaning news sources as a Swalwell probe and starts getting treated as an actual massive espionage investigation. Right now, all the headlines, the lead paragraphs all talk about Swalwell and the allegations by women against him. None of that's the point. None of that's the point of what we care about on Future Danger and on Patriot Power Hour. We care about Really exposing one of quite possibly many absolutely owned American politicians by the People's Republic of China. Could include Mitch McConnell. There's articles about that out there too. I'm really glad you brought up that. The first four or five paragraphs of this Fox News article are about Well, a couple about the facts of when he was raided or when the mansion was raided, that is, et cetera. But almost all of it after that, the first five or six paragraphs is about the sex workers reportedly connected to the investigations. Five women accusing Swalwell of sexual misconduct. But as I almost I fell for this, actually, because I just scrolled through that because I knew that is even if it's true. not what we're worried about we are worried about what's lower talking about the fbi probe into his relationship with fang fang a suspected chinese intelligence operative and so i'm almost blind because we've talked about this matter at least a half dozen times probably more that i just was almost had blinders on like yeah yeah get out of the way i don't care about this stuff let's get to the chinese aspect but that's just the kind of reverse whitewashing they have even on Fox news where they do talk about Fang Fang, but first they have to absolutely always hit on the sexual misconduct and kind of the, I don't know. Why do you think they do that? I guess is a question for you. Well, somebody could argue, you know, sex sells and ultimately Fox is run by Murdoch and family, which, you know, in part made their fortune in the tabloids in Britain. So they, they, they know how to sell newspapers, but Again, it's about foreign espionage that I care about. And waiting for several other shoes to drop on this. Hey, that was pretty much my answer, too. We are in simpatico there. I'm like, well, yeah, it is sex sells, and it's just the topic du jour. But I, of course, go a little more into the, hey, let's bury this a little bit more, or let's... let's just say I don't trust Fox News in full, that they'll always be transparent and pushing the right narrative. But maybe more of that is just to sell more because of the sexual allegations and how that just definitely grabs headlines as well. So at least they put the stuff about Fang Fang in there still, whereas I'm sure a lot of outlets probably didn't even report on this article hardly. So it is what it is. I'm not a Fox News fan, but there are worse ones to vote against, let's just say. What else is interesting you on this heat map dashboard? The trucks going, truck companies, is that Deadwood, the firm failures? Is that just a correction, or is the petroleum situation worldwide wiping out real industry in the U.S. Right now? I think it's some of both. What I'm concerned about, and this article does a great job of talking about it, is how this has been going on. This has been trending towards this point where these small or even some large trucking companies will be going bankrupt or are going bankrupt. But it's been trending over that for the last couple of years. And a big part of that is auto insurance and especially commercial auto insurance. That inflation is just as bad or worse than diesel. And insurance can be Okay, it's not as big of a cost as your fuel, but it's a very large cost for these companies. So that was enough to pretty much eat away at any marginal profit they had. And then you throw almost a doubling of diesel in like 12 to 18 months. That pushed them over the edge. Now I'll say this. There's always supposed to be or should always be bankruptcies in the economy in every industry. That sounds almost like a horrible thing to say. How dare you say there should be bankruptcies? But in a healthy functioning economy and system, there needs to be that sloughing off of dead cells that every organism does. Your skin cells fall off because they're dead and the new ones grow in. I don't want everyone to go bankrupt and die off just to make room for new ones, but that's kind of the circle of business life. And it should only be a few percent, a couple percent a year. It should not be like 10% of the industry. That's catastrophic. So where on the spectrum does this lie? I'm not sure. I'm not sure if this is just the tip of the iceberg and we're going to see massive increases in the next year or two. Almost a delayed effect. Or, and actually, I might have to do this now, but I'll see if this article has the details read through the fine print a bit. How many bankruptcies have we been getting every year over the last five years? How about 10 years or 20 years? What's the trending? Not exactly sure, but suffice to say there is a lot of headwinds and debt is going up, right? So anybody who took on or needs to take on a lot of debt to keep their business afloat, well, guess what? The price to service that debt is tougher. Lending restrictions are more stringent. So on the margin, yeah, more bankruptcies makes sense to me. Bankruptcies, like unemployment numbers, have become highly political. And we talked a bit about news censorship. The party in power can be assigned blame when those numbers start to exceed normal boundaries. But the side that is in power wants to suppress that news every time, right? And that's a great question. Are we outside of any kind of norm? You know, how dangerous is this? I would suggest that we take a look at the heat map dashboard archive for firms that widely fail. You're going to see similar, you know, hundreds of X kind of companies going bankrupt. And you'll be able to tell, you know, Was it outrageously abnormal? I don't know. Something else you said earlier, though. This is the 97th anniversary of the original Black Friday, isn't it? I think it's Black Monday or Tuesday. I forgot, but I'm pretty darn sure it's October 29th. Oh, no. It was a Friday. No, that was a Friday. That was a Friday. I should know this. How dare I not know? But it's okay. Let's go look it up just in case. The 87 was the first Monday. Ah, okay. There you go. That's right. Let's go look here. Black Tuesday was 1929, actually, it says. October 29th, 1929. Black Tuesday. catalyst for Great Depression. But you go and look at the records, the Friday that followed that is still one of the top 10. And I hazard a guess that it was the nail in the coffin that spiraled into the Great Depression. I think I've read about this, that crash in 29. There was a huge crash, then there was a rally, and then I think that Friday the bottom fell out. Yes. We did this analysis back during COVID when we were looking at the top 10. All-time. All-time percentage drops. And so I just pulled that up now. And here we go. It was almost all of that. We've named all three of the eras when it occurred. The worst one-day crash was October 19, 1987. 22.6% drop in one day. The next highest was October. March 16th, 2020. We had a show that week. We were talking about this probably that week. That was about 13% drop in one day. So, Black Monday on 1987 was almost twice as bad as the next closest, which is pretty crazy. But getting to the Black Tuesday and the next day, etc., you're right. Some of the biggest increases of all time in a single day were in October 1929. But In the aggregate, the net effect was a massive loss overall, and it did not recover after that. So that volatility was crazy, huge ups, huge downs, but eventually it was only down, down, down, down, down, and it took, well, until World War II to bounce back, really. Exactly. So firms widely failing. I don't think 221 small American trucking companies in and of itself– signifies much maybe to be expected with the cost of petroleum right so just a data point deserves mention it's not a crisis. And that's what future danger does such a great job of yeah sometimes it's great to have the exact specific numbers but actually it's way better in my opinion to look at this kind of decade-long archive and scan, okay, not only how many articles have we had under firms widely failed, but how severe were they? What was the time between each one? And really, we've had a few articles this year about bankruptcies, but not that many. Bankruptcies filing surged 7% year over year, but that sounds bad. It's not as absolutely horrible. If it surged a hundred percent year over year, that's different. 7%. That's a trend. Or, I mean, that's a start of a trend potentially, but we did start to see about a month later in July, chapter 11 filings increased 50% year over year, but that was only small business. Small business is important for sure. But it's another potential marking, but that's kind of a, you know, doesn't ring all alarm bells yet. A month ago, 16 American trucking companies filed for bankruptcies, and now we've got 221 American trucking companies. Now, a lot of these trucking companies are quite small, but if this starts to spread into larger ones, number one. And number two, again, small businesses and small trucking companies of all types, yeah, they're– We don't want it all consolidated into just two trucking companies like the Meatpackers or something. That's kind of what I'm trying to get to. Or the computer, the phone and computer makers and software makers or the AIs. Yeah. Duopolies that pretend that there's market competition, but it's completely captured. Yeah, I don't think that'll ever happen with trucking. So I would say... While there's not much else economically, I did do a short update on my debt analysis for today's show. All right. All right. Now's the time to jump into it. All right. As we're standing here about a month into the fiscal year, we are sitting at confirmed $ 2 trillion annual deficits. This week, the Fed held rates at 3.754%. But the economy is not breaking. Real GDP, Q3, up 3.4%. That's real GDP adjusted for the official inflation. So that's actually quite a big number. Maybe not enough to reverse the damage done, but maybe sort of stem the tide future Dan. But yeah, we're seeing mortgage rates continuing to rise. I came up with this when I was preparing for the show, working through some of these numbers and I'm not really going to jump into the numbers right now. It doesn't make for great radio, but it helped me kind of formalize something I wanted to, to look at. And there's two concepts. I want to focus on this one though. It's called devolution, devolution of a system. So you have, of course, evolution. When you hit that new level, right? You open that new tech tree or in a video game parlay, it's, or you end up just hitting that new level in the gym, right? Maybe you put in all that work, and now you're finally seeing those results. You've evolved. On the other hand, there's devolution. There's pretty much regressing, but that allows you to survive a little longer. So let's say you've– I'm doing pretty bad on the analogy. here, but it takes a lot of time, effort, and capital to build systems and keep those systems moving along. If those systems break, fine. You can muddle along. You can tear apart the mansion that was a $ 10 million and you can burn all the wood and you can still make fire and survive for a couple more weeks. But before you know it, you're going to run out of that mansion. Similar thing to just like clearing all the forest, just destroying everything. Short term, that's okay. Long term, that might be horrible for your civilization. Well, same thing financially. And this goes to what we talk about on Patriot Power Hour a lot. What happens if we can't pay back the debt? Does it really matter? from a military war-waging position. Maybe not. We could totally go into a war economy and monetize the debt and have all types of stimulus programs. Screw it. We don't have to worry about the $ 40 trillion. We can write it off for all intents and purposes. That's true, but at the same time, that has its own cost. It would be a de-evolution of really a free market. And we would become a command and control economy. And we have a lot of those ladders, a lot of rungs to go down before we turn into some African civil war where everyone's dying. Like, yeah, we're so lucky to be in America. We have a lot of credit built up from our forefathers, but we're burning it right now. We're burning the mansion. That was the analogy, even if I bushed it, future Dan. Not to be confused with Devo from the 1980s, right? No. This is De-Evolution, not Devo. That's what they named their band after. That makes sense. Yeah. That's the short term for De-Evolution, Devo. Different kind of Devo, I think. It's one year before us. But I wanted to ask about gold. Yes. Now, I I listened to a lot of sources, mainstream sources, alternative sources, you know, all kinds of opinions on social media, you know, just broad, broad array of voices. So I can hear what others are saying and try to see where I agree or disagree and bring some of that to this show. So some of the sources doesn't really matter where, you know, are beginning to point out that, you know, gold was at 5,500 and it's dropped a lot. Low 4,000s tonight, right? So, some of the things that would normally cause gold to run high, run hot, soar, are growing more apparent, yet nothing's happening with the price. Do you agree? Do you see the same things? There's... So much upward pressure, but so much downward pressure at the same time with gold. It's being squashed, I feel like. So the downward pressure is these really high interest rates. Gold doesn't pay interest and bonds do. So if you just have a hunk of gold and it sits there, it's not paying you a dividend. It's not going to have any appreciation in terms of the paper price because of revenue it's earning like a stock. for example, it's just sitting there. And that's why it's actually a neutral object, right? In one way, it's good because if everything collapses around it, it's just sitting there. But if everything's growing around gold, then that's a bad thing. Ask anybody who would have much rather have invested in Amazon stock 20 years ago than buying an ounce of gold. Sure, gold's up 5x. Amazon's probably up 80x. I rather have bought a bunch of Amazon and then sold it and bought gold now. So tons of pressure on gold. Like, what are you doing for me lately, gold? You're just sitting there. I have government guaranteed treasuries that are paying me more than 5% a year. And gold is paying me 0%. So gold is really bad. On the flip side, when interest rates were like 0%, it's like, okay. I can either have an IOU from the government or gold. They're both paying me 0%. Of course I want gold. So gold, silver would go up in price. The flip side of that is the economic, well, uncertainty of will this debt ever be paid? What will happen if they have to monetize the debt down the road, which would lead to gold going up? That's one of the big forces driving it up. But then the geopolitical risks, of course, that's the mainstay. Everyone's always talking about like, oh, there's war. Everyone's going to rush to gold because they won't trust each other. There's some of that going on. For silver specifically, the worry is, hey, well, if the worldwide depression economy collapses, people aren't going to need copper and silver. So that might just lose all of its luster. There's always been a big tug of war up and down between... price of gold, but I feel like right now it's more than ever in my life. There's so much pressure for it to go down in price because the interest rates are so high and the Fed ain't lowering rates anytime soon. If there weren't all these geopolitical issues and other potential concerns, gold would be back down to $ 2, 500 right now. So the fact that it's at $ 4, 000 still means that there's a lot of pressure still for it to go up. That's my take on it. Yeah, good analysis there. I like that. That helps me sort this out. What else is going on tonight? We want to talk about the week before the 2026 midterms. Anything else on that dashboard causing you to have long-term concerns? Let's see. Long-term concerns. I'm concerned of what will be the news articles that we haven't seen anything about that are going to show up at the end of the year. That could be said almost every show. So, Whenever it's quiet, I'm like, hmm, this is a little too quiet. I feel like some of them, where I would feel the most comfortable on an episode of Patriot Power Hour, and we've done 366 of them now, is if we had like 20 articles and one or two SHTF and the rest were middling, kind of bad, whatever. But having way too few is almost as concerning as having way too many, not as concerning as like when it was COVID and it was totally out of control, but But yeah, it's so quiet right now. In theory, that's a great thing, but it's hard for me to trust that it's a great thing. I don't know. Yeah, I don't trust it's going to stay this way, but I trust that this is relatively less eventful. And insofar as that equates to danger, a less dangerous environment that we're in right now. But of course, it's the week before the election, so everybody's focused on that. Everybody's, you know, you know, worries and concerns are running hot and hard and, and, and just, you know, people all focus right there. So expect, I expect a week from today, we're going to be looking mostly at the jurisdictions that somehow haven't counted their vote yet. Cause the longer they take the bigger the spotlight that needs once upon a time, we didn't have that, you know, it was all manual, no computers were involved and, and it all got counted within 48 hours, no problem. There'll be parts of California counting for the rest of November the way they've trended. It's crazy. Might as well be some sort of European country that somehow got tacked on to the West Coast of America in that regard. The benefits of hand counting. I wouldn't even disparage European elections that badly. Take a month to count your votes and then later have the kind of fraud exposed that's been exposed. That's not first world stuff. Even France would laugh at that, you're saying. And they should. Yeah, exactly. How about this one? This is one article I definitely want to see, though, before we Get out of here for the night. Wikipedia prohibits content from 97% of conservative news websites. This is a question for you, future Dan. I don't even know if the answer is known. But how do the different AI sites determine what is legit or not? Are they just using Wikipedia to make searches? Is there a lot of bias inherent in how these different AI engines work? restrict news because honestly the censorship. So, okay. One level of massive censorship is just preventing articles in general, but that's usually that's a bridge too far. So they're not literally going to censor. It's more of the shadow banning, especially at the meta Wikipedia level by meta. I didn't mean meta Facebook, but in fact, that's a perfect analogy as well. Whether it's social media, whether it's Reddit, Wikipedia, that censorship is kind of the censorship governing layer. But now we got another layer above that, like the one ring to rule them all, AI, which will do all this censorship even faster. And people will probably trust it even more than Wikipedia. Maybe not everybody. Do you see what I mean? It's like a nested doll and it gets worse and worse. More and more censorship as it becomes more centralized. What's your evaluation of how AI might be already restricting conservative news sources? Do you think any of the engines are better than others? Do you only use Grok, for example? Or what are your thoughts on news, AI, and this Wikipedia restricting news sources article? Yeah, so the people that have seized control of Wikipedia know very well that it's a primary source for training large language models. It's certainly not the only source. It's important, but those models consume just so much more information. I could just give you anecdotal evidence from tonight. We're talking about this article because the first prompt I ran in OpenAI... returned nothing but CNN, Reuters, AP News, and some other official like The Atlantic, all just massively left biased sources. So I replied and said, you know, to characterize the, you know, the parsonship of the sources provided in the previous prompt. And it came back and it recognized, mildly recognized that most of it was left-leaning, Which I responded, wrong, that is all mainstream news sources. Try again and find the alternatives. And do me a favor and click on this article about Wikipedia. I forget who is the source, but.... Gateway Pundit? Yeah, Gateway Pundit. And what happened is the artificial intelligence recognized that That was its natural course to bias that way, but I easily corrected it and got Breitbart, Gateway Pundit, other alternative sources for news. Some of which made it to the heat map dashboard, including this article. It depends on what you do with it, right? So if you think the least of your fellow man and that no one would bother to fly very hard well these are the same people that are already the problem these are the same people already putting democrats in power their behavior and their low information voting you know approach is what it is but we don't have to be that. No well it's up to each individual to not be that and we or they are the sum of us and them and what we each individual does so i 100% agree And that kind of goes back to my devolution. Let's see if I can make a more direct impact here with just the morals and education of society. Are we getting stronger and more moral and more intelligent and knowledgeable or less over the last 10 years, 20 years, 50 years? That's more of a rhetorical question. I guess we could answer it. But just like the economy, and I'm going to read this verbatim because I actually had this note that I wanted to write or read off. government, and I would go to say that society as a whole, can gain new credit lines by cutting corners and commanding resources, but that sacrifices trust, innovation, and productivity. So the trust level in your society or economy falls, innovation falls, you know, before you know it, might as well be in China, like just copying everybody, trying to scam and cheat. Like our competitive advantage is that we have high trust that there is a lot of civilian optionality. You're not forced to only do certain jobs from the age of 10. You know, you can be what you want to be in America. Well, as we devolve a society, that optionality is going to really go down and that's just going to be bad for everybody. You'll know the real artificial intelligence censorship is here. When you can't reply and say, wrong, this is what is true. This is how you're going to approach the task. Do it again. You've been flagged. And watch it click its heels and deliver something at least better in that regard. And I got to be honest with you, one of the downsides I noticed using Grok right now is the thing argues back against you. Right? It's a little bit more stubborn about like, Whatever you first asked it, no, it's going to hold its ground, right? And getting it to swing the other way sometimes is hard, as opposed to currently open AI, which is market forces, right? They want to be the leader. They're head-to-head with others, anthropic. And right now, whatever result you get, you can pretty much tell it, no, that's bogus. Go the opposite direction. Here's the frame that you're going to respond next to, and it's sycophantic. It'll just, it'll just go that way on down. Right. With, with limits, right? Like you can't argue with it to tell you how to, you know, do something horrible, like, you know, commit suicide in a certain way. It's still going to block that. Right. Right. But, but, but in terms of just, you know, telling it, Hey, I want to see news from a certain lens, um, It's not going to give you that, you know, alternative news lens first, but you can still bend it to your will. So I'm not too worried about that right now. And by the way, any, any company that did that has, you know, it's gonna, it's gonna end up like Wikipedia. It's just not going to be trusted by a big percentage of the population and there'll be alternatives to replace it. Yeah. Well, I've, agree with almost all that. And I try to be positive and hope and pray that, that I can navigate all this propaganda and dark, dark, what do they call it? Dark manipulative, uh, schemes to kind of pretty much brainwash you. And so whenever I interact with AI or even a Google search for the last 25 years, I try hard to not just click on the first thing and just believe it. You got to use your own brain and critical thinking, but it's tough. There's a lot of, it's kind of like that decision-making fatigue or there's so many options. At some point you just put the query in and you just like, okay, that's what it says. That's what I'm going with. But you got to just always fight that as much as possible. And okay. For a baking recipe, maybe you can just trust whatever it comes up with. But when you're talking about like free speech or facts about history, that's a little different, right? Exactly. Exactly. Well, that's episode 366, folks. I want to thank all of our audience for listening. We appreciate you. And for folks in the forum, Ben, we got any final departures from people listening live? Ah, shout out to people that listen live. That dropped us some comments. Cetrus and Jay Ferg. And yeah, those that are listening on the archive, on the MP3. Be sure to come check us out live. It's a lot more fun. And like I said, we're hoping to get Jay Ferg on the show before end of the year. We'd love to do that. I want to get Intrepid Commander and Dave, the NBC guy on by end of the year, maybe for the season finale, just putting it out there. But any guests or folks that are listening that just have even questions, reach out. I do want to have some more interaction with the the crowd out there. I always get good questions and comments. It's a lot of fun, but otherwise, man, it was a great show. Another one in the bag. We'll be back next week after the election. What do you say? Yeah. I say, tell everybody how they could join the show live if they wanted to. Ah, yeah. I got to finish the plug properly. Don't I? Well, however you're listening or watching this in the description, it'll have our email address as well as our Twitter accounts or X accounts. So just send us a DM or send us an email. Or, of course, reach out to Intrepid Commander and tell him, hey, Patriot Power Hour kicks ass. Like, give us a good review. But honestly, just reach out to future Dan or I or both of us on X or send us an email. I think that'd be the best way. All righty. Good show, Ben. I'll be with you next Thursday night unless things break down terribly between now and then. Otherwise, we'll be back with the Patriot Power Hour special episode. Thank you all for listening.