Trump Restarts War While Sons Cash In? The Corruption So Obvious Even MAGA Sees It

0:04Joining me today on IHIP News is my good friend Nathan June. He is a data analyst and communications strategist who unintentionally, kind of like me and Pumps, became a political and economics analyst. Nathan, welcome to IHIP News.

0:19nathancjun:Thank you. I want to talk about something that you put up that I thought was very compelling. And you posted this on Instagram last week and it really caught my eye. Let's pop this up. And he said, scientific studies have said that we can't equate what a billion dollars actually is. Stanford neuroscientists, Elizabeth Tamarian and Lindsay Hasek, I always mispronounce people's last names. So to the two neuroscientists, my apologies if I mispronounce. I don't know if they'll be watching, but. Found that people place one million halfway between 1 ,000 and 1 billion. In reality, a million is 1 ,000 times closer to 1 ,000.

1:04And then there's a little graph down there. So as we're dealing with this massive, grotesque corruption, all the Bezos of it all, all the Elon Musk of it all, I thought this was really incredible messaging.

1:18nathancjun:Yeah, you know, like, I would say 70 % of my time is spent ratioing like dipshits all the time who just come on to the internet and they post the dumbest things ever and because they saw it on prager u or they saw it on fox news or newsmax or oan they just like to parrot it and they take x posts and they just post them and try to act like they're some sort of like political genius and what i did with this was i wanted to remind people that because people always just keeps screaming, why do the poorest Americans keep defending billionaires? I don't understand. Why do they think this? And you could say that it's because of Reagan era economics with trickle down being the best for our country.

2:03nathancjun:But I had actually realized it's actually a lot to do with the fact that people can't equate in their head what a billion dollars actually is. When you have 30 something percent of the country living just a fraction above the poverty line, they're thinking they just want to be a millionaire and they just think to themselves like if I just had a million dollars like my life would be set and so you can't comprehend exactly what a billion dollars is but one of the things in that post was you know a million seconds is I think it's like I forget what it was it's like a million seconds is like 12 days a billion seconds is like like a thousand years or something like that it's something crazy like yeah yeah I think that's I think that's so true.

2:47When you think about the way the billionaires are behaving right now, this is what's really disturbing to me because Trump is able to govern the way he's governing. And I like to call it, he's governing as though he will never face accountability. One fascist collaborator was the Supreme Court. They gave him immunity. The biggest fascist collaborators, in my opinion, are the industry titans. Yes. Because they have bent the knee and said, it is okay. We are endorsing your regime because we want to see what benefits we can get from it. And what's so stunning about this to me, Nathan, is they arrive at the inauguration already rich as shit, hundreds of billions.

3:31nathancjun:And they've only gotten wealthier. Right. Yeah. It's funny because you and I are sharing very similar viewpoints on Israel and how much collusion there is with the United States and the funding of a genocide. I am in a camp where I won't endorse a candidate unless they are not taking corporate PAC money of any kind, and that includes AIPAC. AIPAC funding has become this really hot topic issue in both far left and moderate Democrats. It's become something that everybody is talking about. But in this topic, people don't understand that like, APAC, yes, we should get rid of APAC funding in politics.

4:12nathancjun:It's manipulating, you know, we just recently saw in the Illinois elections, where they pumped money into, they pumped$14 million into an Illinois primary. That is insane. But it is still fractional compared to how much the finance, tech, crypto, housing, health insurance industries pump with their billionaires into campaigns. We are still beholden to billionaires and how they are manipulating these campaigns. And billionaires are trying to navigate this like you have a good billionaire, I guess, which is like the CEO and founder of Anthropic right now who refused to capitulate to the administration when they demanded that he make Claude easily accessible.

4:57nathancjun:But the rest of the billionaires, they are fully understanding that their future is personal and company is basically hedged against this administration just opening up every single door possible. And what we've seen in the past 18 months is one of the fastest increases in wealth inequality getting even worse. Yeah. So we've seen unprecedented corruption in the second Trump administration. Explain the scale of it in a way that viewers can understand. You know, oh man, see my head, if you ask me like, go through the corruption, like, it's like that meme of all of like the dollar signs just floating around my head and I'm just like, where do I even start?

5:43nathancjun:But I would say the most topical corruption in the Trump administration with the war in Iran, which we have now started war in Iran too as of today. Like I don't know if you saw this, but he basically came out and said, I am re-invoking the 1973 War Powers Act because technically the war ended two weeks ago when we had a ceasefire. So now I'm resuming it and it's a brand new war. So I still don't need congressional approval. Now, when we talk about corruption, I think the one that every American, including the intellectually lazy people who buy lots of merch to just profess their extreme racism and xenophobia and bigotry.

6:29nathancjun:Sorry, dad. He won't watch this. I think what they can understand is look at Trump's own children leading up to his inauguration all the way to the war in Iran. You have his children, Eric and Don Jr., who within weeks after he won the election and after Kamala conceded, invested heavily in a drone manufacturing company. And they became board members. One of them became a board member. Over the course of the next 16 months, you have them continually investing in drone manufacturing companies, sitting on the board, including getting a$500 million government contract, I think, for one of them. They're obviously on the receiving end of this.

7:20nathancjun:And when you talk about corruption and people are talking about like, oh, what about Hunter Biden? Hunter Biden, if you even want to classify him as a consultant, getting hired to do a consulting job, and the, I think,$3 million he was paid. Now, that's a lot of money. But when you compare that to the hundreds of millions that his children stand to benefit from this war, because as you know, wars are not fought on the ground. They are fought through drones and missiles. And right now, you have us producing in mass drones, and you have his sons who are sitting on the board or as investors in each and every one of those.

8:02nathancjun:That is skimming the surface of corruption right now. You know, if you just look at all of the dealings in the Middle East that even Jared Kushner has. It's terrible. You know, so we're not looking at things where it's like, oh, this seems kind of sketchy. This is like an idiot can make this connection, which is, huh, it's really interesting that his sons are investing in drone manufacturing. And it's really interesting that we're in this war that just doesn't seem to want to end. And we keep producing drones to keep fighting it. Like, wake up, somebody. Well, and it's the corruption is so staggering.

8:40And then you get to corporate media, traditional media. Do we have media anymore? It's barely touched. And so we have a, there is a backlash to status quo. And Trump was the initial in 2016, he was the initial anti-status quo, anti-establishment candidate. And then Kamala became kind of the establishment candidate, especially when she started campaigning with Liz Cheney. It was like, look, we're going back, you know, we have to keep things as normal. And then Trump became the anti-establishment candidate again. And now a lot of, I mean, there's some far cultists that will never jump off the Trump train, but there's fissures out the wazoo with the MAGA movement right now.

9:25And you have MAGA political leaders in the ecosystem, talking about Tucker, Megan, et cetera, total fissures, they're all jumping ship. And on our side, you have candidates like Zoran, you have progressive Democrats living, winning in special elections. And in a really stunning turn of events, you have somebody like you and somebody like me and my co-host Angie, who are not trained in this, but there is such an appetite on the left and in the anti-Trump that people don't trust any of it. If you're a part of the establishment and you're a part of a corporation, we don't trust you. And just grown exponentially in a very small period of time because they know that you're not bought and paid for and the same thing with this podcast i self-funded it when we started it we're completely independent and um voices like yours mine and so many fabulous others a lot of mutual friends we have in the left left uh wing media ecosystem are really you know taking off what's your take on that what's your take on how people like you and me that were seemingly normal five ten years ago and now kind of have these political voices.

10:40nathancjun:Yeah, I mean, you said at the beginning, I accidentally fell into this. It really started the day after the election because I have several MAGA family members in my family and I'm a gay immigrant and I'm adopted into a white family and they're white evangelical Southerners. What? Yeah. Where, where did you grow up? I grew up in Tarpon Springs, Florida, which is about 40 miles Northwest of Tampa. But my mom and my family are originally from Southern Georgia in an area called Folkston. Are they mega churchers? Yes. Tongue talkers? Yes. I grew up in a charismatic fundamentalist cult church. No. I did not know that.

11:19nathancjun:Oh my God, I'm sorry, dad, if you're watching this. But when my family found gay porn on my computer, they took me to a church and they actually put me in this tiny room with about 25 elders where they just put their hands out and screamed in tongues at me for like 25 minutes. Is this like tongue talk the gay away? Yes, but I was also put in conversion therapy as well. So like, how long did you go? I was in there for about six months. Oh my, Nathan, I had no idea. I'm very, I mean, from the Bible Belt. So I'm very familiar with this type of cruelty. But tell me about like, the shame, the unnecessary shame that you were put through, which I don't think you should have felt shame, but I know that's what religion puts onto you.

12:02nathancjun:You know, like I didn't fully come out until I was already lived here for three and a half years. Were you terrified? I had ingrained in my head that I was going to just burn in hell forever. And my parents reminded me that frequently. And you know, it's funny because when you go through religious abuse therapy, and you unravel all of this, you are actually able to get to a place where you can actually look even at your parents and say, you did what you thought was right because you are brainwashed. And I'm not mad at you about this. And you can compartmentalize it. I take a lot of things that happened in my life previously and through therapy, you put it over here and you're like, that is just an aspect, but it influenced me, but it doesn't define me.

12:50nathancjun:And so getting back to what we were talking about though, I know this took a sidebar, but like - No, I'm very fascinated in all the religious stuff though. It's funny because people think about conversion therapy and they think it's like you going there and they have this vision in their mind of it's like a weird Christian pastor who's like making some 13 year old kid watch straight porn or like, you know, doing all these things or just praying over you. No, it was like a psychological deconstruction of like telling me and forcing me to read the Bible and over and over again and just fear mongering me into believing that I was going to have my skin burned off for eternity if I ever enacted on the way that I was biologically born, you know.

13:37nathancjun:And so when you go through that as a young person, you carry that. I haven't met a single person. I call us survivors of religious abuse. I've never met a single person who is angry about it. I don't meet that many people who have actually gone through religious abuse therapy and they've come out the other end feeling furious and mad. I meet a lot of people who are like me, who are just like, I'm just angry that churches are basically mega corporations in themselves and they profit off of this ideology of just constant fear mongering. That's what I'm angry about. I'm not angry at the people because people inevitably - I'm angry at them.

14:19nathancjun:I know you are. And I will be angry for you. Yeah. I think people, you grew up in the church, right? No. My parents are atheists. but I grew up in the Bible Belt. You grew up in the Bible Belt. So you get the same sense of constantly my peers in junior high and high school, if you've been saved and like, from what, like, you have to accept Jesus or you're going to burn in hell. And these demons will like peel your skin off and then it will grow back and they peel it off again. And they would tell me these horrific stories and it'd be at a sleepover. And one of my friends would be like, I think there's a demon in the room.

14:48And I was just like, this is insane. I'd go home to my mother, who was an atheist, who thinks like religion is like an intellectual weakness. She's like, Oh, for God's sakes, Jennifer, that's ridiculous. Let's read about religious addiction. I should pull out the encyclopedia. This is before the internet. So my life was this split screen of these indoctrinated kids that I wanted to fit in with. And everything was rigid and black and white. And you could not question, you could not ask, you cannot say, well, that sounds kind of crazy. You couldn't say that. And I go home to my mother and it was just open-minded, any question, any, which is how it should be.

15:23You want to ask on the planet. So let me ask you this. So you go to the pray the gay away, the conversion therapy, and then you come out and do you think you're straight when you come out?

15:36nathancjun:My girlfriend's in high school and college thought I lost.

15:42nathancjun:I lost my gold card. I aggressively tried. I really, really tried to be straight. You really wanted to be straight. Well, because. Of course. It would have made your life easier. It's a very controversial take, but because of what I went through, I was asked on a podcast maybe a year ago during Pride, it's like, if you had a choice, would you be gay or straight? And I was like, if I had a choice, I would be straight. And they're like, and everybody's just like, that seems so anti-gay. And I'm like, no, I went through psychological torture all of my life. My life would have been exponentially easier.

16:18nathancjun:I wouldn't be where I am now. I want to affirm that because what my mother would say to me, I would say, Mom, but like when I would ask her, this person, they seem gay, why would they be gay? And my mother would say, darling, all you need to know is nobody in their right mind would choose to be gay in the Bible Belt. And on top of that, nobody in their right mind would choose to be trans in Alabama. No shit. Like that's the part that people do not fundamentally understand. It's like, it's the choice is basically accepting who you are and choosing to live whatever is going to make you happy. Like, if the choice is, would you rather do this or rather not nobody in their fucking right mind would choose to be trans in a Bible thumping red ocean where they are just going to face ridicule and be attacked by everybody in your community in your state.

17:14nathancjun:and now in your country, in a country that is built on the foundational principle of everybody is created equal. We are currently in this constant battle where people are believing that parents are forcing their kids to do something or that there's all of this healthcare coverage going towards it. And it's all just bullshit propaganda to just foundationally allow somebody to have comfort in just because i'm a idiot and i don't understand trans people means that it must be wrong right all just perpetuates itself into that scenario and getting back to what you asked me god we went on a tangential one more question are you religious now or did you deprogram all of it i believe in god but i believe in the god that i think i imagine you have viewers who who would say like you know that they believe in the god that i believe in which is a god and in a you know person individual who spoke about loving each other is this god non-binary um you know i i sometimes say god is lady gaga so i don't know um so you know you're spiritual i'm a spiritual i have a spiritual connection and like and i believe i believe that the the the shitty the part that drives me crazy is that the fundamental mean, the fundamental teachings of Jesus Christ, and I'm sorry to like, force this down people who are maybe going to be mad about somebody talking about like Christianity on here.

18:45nathancjun:But like, the fundamental teachings of Christianity were to love God, but then to love your neighbor as yourself. And he literally said that there is no other law except to love me and then to love your neighbors. That's it. Well, he was radically empathetic. He was radical empath. Right. So I I mean, it's like when I hear Bernie Sanders speak, who's an atheist Jewish person, and then I hear Ted Cruz speak, the one who sounds most reminiscent of the central character of the Bible, Jesus Christ, is the atheist Jew. Yes. Or Zoran Mamdani, the woke Sharia Muslim, Mamdani-stan mayor. How are you dealing with Sharia law in New York?

19:25I love woke Sharia law. It's great.

19:27nathancjun:Every day I walk out and just be like, another beautiful day in Sharia. Okay. All right. I just can't thank you enough for sharing that. I'm very fascinated by all of that. And I tell my listeners all the time about what a problem evangelical Christianity is in the Republican Party. And it is a cult. And it is, people will ask me constantly, how do religious people support Donald Trump? Like people in the Bible, I'm like, oh, it's easy. He is an evangelical preacher. Easy. It is the easiest thing to understand. And because Christianity foundationally, and I'm not shitting on the religion by saying this, foundationally, Christianity is built on a premise of putting your faith and trust in something you cannot see.

20:11nathancjun:And it is basically, and it teaches you, suffering is good. Going through hard times is good. It's like, it's all meant for the greater good. So you look at this pedophilic, crumbling physically and mentally in front of us every day, can't even stay awake in a single war briefing person. And they worship him because there is no reason for them to worship him, though. The economy is in the tank. We're in a war when he promised no new wars. The war in Ukraine and Russia is still going on, and he promised to end that on day one. And we have no new jobs. Agriculture industries are doing awful right now.

20:51nathancjun:FEMA has been destroyed. So you have You have states like Nebraska who just went through wildfires. They're getting nothing, but they're still blindly putting their faith in somebody because they believe one day it will all make sense. Yeah, no, you're 100 % right. Okay. Thank you for sharing all of that. I'm always fascinated by that. And that won't be our only conversation about it because I think there's going to be a huge need at some point in the next 10 years for mass deconstruction therapy groups. and helping people deal with religious abuse deconstruction. My co-host Angie has gone through all of that.

21:26She's still sifting through it. I mean, and it took her a long time to get there. It was not a short period. She's still so liberated. Yeah. Okay. Let's talk about the Democratic Party right now.

21:38nathancjun:Okay. Okay. So you have the centrists that seem to like kind of traditional Democratic candidates, and then you have more progressive slash leftist Democrats. I was probably a lib a couple of years ago. You lived out a lot. Loved to live out. Yeah. Loved it. Yeah. So fun to live out. I have grown tired of living out. and listener for those of you that don't know living out is like you know like yes we can and you have your kamala stuff and you're kind of ignoring the problems where they're taking a lot of corporate money wouldn't you say that's living out yeah it's basically like the person is fighting for democracy or some key phrase and you know i'm with her you know and you just feel that was me Yeah.

22:28And then after you, we lose to Donald Trump, that was so painful to everybody that didn't vote for him. I just, just like, what in the actual fuck? How do you, how do we lose elections like this? And I got off of MSNBC and I started really reading and opening up my mind more and I've gone further to the left. And I worry about sometimes when I get online looking for news to talk about here, I see there's just a lot of like, people on the left calling the centrist Blue Maga and the Blue Maga calling the leftist communists. And all of that is good and well. And I think it's healthy to have disagreements.

23:09And I think it's healthy to make each other think critically. I don't think we should all be in a cult. I don't have that many problems with some of the bickering on the left. I think it shows diversity in thought. Where I have a problem is like the canceling of Hassan Piker from within the party when they don't have the same litmus test for like politicians that go on Bill Maher, who is a brazen, Islamophobic, misogynist.

23:38nathancjun:How do you really feel? He is. And I used to be a big fan of his as an atheist. I used to watch his shows all the time. So what's your take on that, the tussling going on within the Democratic Party? You know, I think there's two things happening. Believe it or not, I regularly get called a shitlib, a neolib, blue maga. You get called blue maga? I get called blue maga. Really? Are you blue maga? I'm not. And it's funny because I've only platformed candidates who don't take AIPAC funding. I've been very, very open about Israel and Netanyahu's, you know, responsibility and the U.S. enablement of the genocide that killed 20 ,000 children and displaced hundreds of thousands of people.

24:23nathancjun:Who calls you Blue Maga? It's because I will still take a stance of, I can't go so far to say I'm going to vote for Jill Stein. Oh, I wouldn't either. No, but like that is what gets me called Blue Maga. So, so basically if I say I will still like... begrudgingly vote for Gavin Newsom in 2028, I'm blue MAGA because I am not like I'm not platforming him. I'm not like promoting him. But because I will say things like I will still vote blue down the line. I will too. I vote working family down the line now in New York City. And so it's kind of this idea of that kind of bothers me a lot just because I'm like, I kind of fit the criteria.

25:11nathancjun:for somebody who would be considered to be very, very far left. It's just because I am looking at the Voting Rights Act being abolished that is completely disenfranchising Black voters. I'm looking at the SAVE Act, which is going to be attacking women. I'm looking at all of these things that have happened over the course of the past 18 months, and I'm still on a position of, personally, I think you're crazy if you say something out loud like Kamala would have been just as bad. That's my position. That's nuts. I'm with you on that. That's fucking crazy. Now, Mr. Piker, who I don't agree with everything that he says, but I agree with a lot of what he says.

25:46nathancjun:And I think that that discourse to your point is very important. I do too. You know what I mean? And if I ever sat with him, I would love to have that conversation where it's like, we don't agree 100%, but we're like 80 % there. Right. The thing about Hassan Piker that I've always said is that, you know, when he was with you and he said that he wouldn't vote for Gavin Newsom, I think that I want, like, it was taken moderately out of context in the clips. I agree. Based off of the full conversation. And I think watching the full conversation is very important. But when I saw that, you know, I was kind of like, okay, that's where I don't agree with you.