Underground USA Podcast Podcast By Underground USA cover art

Underground USA Podcast

Underground USA Podcast

By: Underground USA
Listen for free

LIMITED TIME OFFER | Get 3 months for $0.99 a month

$14.95/mo thereafter-terms apply.
No Fear. No Political Correctness. No Wokeism. An irreverent fact-based podcast heard and read across 50 US states and 44 countries.

www.undergroundusa.comFrank Salvato Political Science Politics & Government Social Sciences
Episodes
  • MAGA: America First — Strategic Strength, Not Isolationism

    MAGA: America First — Strategic Strength, Not Isolationism
    Jan 5 2026
    With all the hyper-partisan, ideologically contrived “blah-blah” going on after the Meduro “get,” it seems that now is as good a time as any to clear up a purposefully crafted misconception, manufactured by the Deep State and the American Marxist movement.Many who oppose the MAGA movement—globalists on the Left and neocon remnants of the old Republican establishment alike—have spent years trying to brand it as “anti-war.” They’ve painted Trump supporters as retreatists and anti-intervention pacifists. They’ve done this deliberately, to fracture the conservative base ahead of the midterms and 2026. But here’s the truth: The MAGA movement has never been anti-war—it has been anti-stupid war. It rejects endless, special-interest-driven foreign entanglements that bleed American lives and treasure, while doing nothing to advance our actual national interests.In fairness, there were some early voices within the MAGA camp who misunderstood the core meaning of “America First.” They mistook it for “America Alone.” Figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene and others who argued for total disengagement from the world’s strategic hotspots revealed, over time, that they were never truly understood or aligned with the founding spirit of the movement.Isolationism is not America First—it’s America abandoned. The roots of MAGA don’t lie in retreat or withdrawal—they lie in reasserting American leadership on our terms, not the global elite’s. Those who preach total non-engagement, who see any use of military or economic power abroad as betrayal, are not defending American sovereignty—they’re surrendering it to those who would happily fill the vacuum left behind, like China, Russia, Iran, North Lorea and the rest of the usual suspects.The MAGA movement rejects what we might call the “military industrial forever loop”—the endless feed of troops and tax dollars into foreign wars orchestrated by career bureaucrats, Beltway consultants, and defense lobbyists: Major players in the Deep State. These wars have no constitutionally defined mission, no concrete objectives, and no exit strategy.Trump’s foreign policy revolution brought clarity: military force is a tool for defense, deterrence, and direct national interest—not for global social experiments or permanent occupations. MAGA does not dismantle American power—it redirects it. It refuses to repeat the moral and logistical blunders of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but it also refuses to abandon the world stage to tyrants, cartels, and ideologues.MAGA means the US throwing off the global elite’s unilaterally mandated idea that the United States exists as the world’s policeman.America’s armed forces should not be used as the enforcement mechanism for UN bureaucrats or NATO technocrats trying to sustain their multilateral illusions. Washington spent decades letting unelected committees dictate where our troops were sent and why—and the results speak for themselves: trillions spent, allies emboldened, and Americans forgotten.America is not the world’s policeman, but those of the MAGA movement recognize the difference between servitude and strength. Restraint is not weakness—but absence of resolve is.MAGA is the belief that America has a sacred duty to protect its citizens, property, and interests anywhere in the world. That’s not “interventionism”—it’s sovereignty extended beyond our borders to shield our people from harm.Take Venezuela: the Chávez and Maduro regimes didn’t just strangle their own population—they waged a soft war on the United States. They facilitated narcotics and human trafficking networks that directly targeted the American heartland. These networks, along with their Mexican cartel partners, have killed more Americans annually than any conflict since World War II.Standing up to such regimes—seizing their illegally attained assets, supporting legitimate liberation movements, and repatriating stolen US wealth—is self-defense, not meddling. It’s about protecting Americans from the slow-kill of narcotic and economic warfare.Where the MAGA mindset differs sharply from the old establishment is in its understanding of partnership. True allies are those who take the initiative and assume responsibility for their own defense. Our support should reinforce their will, not replace it, creating dependency.Israel provides the clearest example. Facing Iranian aggression both directly and through proxies like Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis, Israel didn’t and isn’t asking America to fight its wars—it’s fighting them itself. Under Trump, America’s role was to equip, deter, and support—not to occupy. MAGA stands firmly behind allies who stand firmly for themselves.The MAGA foreign policy vision extends beyond mere military posturing—it’s about strengthening independent nations that share our commitment to sovereignty, order, and liberty. In Europe, MAGA-supported leaders ...
    Show more Show less
    42 mins
  • Tucker Carlson: Has Qatari Money Purchased America’s Former Truth-Teller?

    Tucker Carlson: Has Qatari Money Purchased America’s Former Truth-Teller?
    Dec 29 2025
    It’s hard to overstate just how jarring Tucker Carlson’s recent rhetoric has become. Once the sharpest populist voice in American media—a man who tore through both neoliberal and neocon orthodoxies with surgical precision—Carlson has suddenly started speaking as though he moonlights as a Qatari press attaché.His now-infamous claim that “Islamofascism is less of a threat to the West than OnlyFans” didn’t just disturb his conservative base—it detonated it. The outrage was less about prudish moralizing and more about disbelief: when did Tucker Carlson, of all people, start downplaying a totalitarian religious movement that literally burns homosexuals and stones women?To dismiss this shift as mere contrarianism is naïve. Carlson’s pattern of commentary over the past year shows a deliberate, consistent softening toward the ideological regimes of the Middle East—most notably those orbiting Qatar and its wealthy Islamofascist allies. And the timing is impeccable for Doha’s global media strategy, which is aggressively investing billions in Western media ecosystems to “humanize” Islamofascism, rehabilitate its image, and subtly attack its two favorite enemies: Israel and the West.What better vehicle for such propaganda than a once-beloved right-wing populist now spurned by American corporate media—someone whose credibility among millions rests on his seeming independence?Let’s talk about Qatar. This is a country that has spent decades laundering its authoritarian ideology through institutions that Western elites mistake for academic and journalistic philanthropy. The Qatari government bankrolls think tanks, buys media stakes, and funds universities with one hand, while promoting Islamofascist political movements throughout the Arab world with the other.Its greatest export isn’t liquefied natural gas—it’s moral inversion. The idea that rigid theocracy is preferable to decadent individualism. That submission is order, and freedom is chaos. It’s a message tailor-made for a West exhausted by its own nihilism.Carlson’s newly Islamofascist-friendly messaging fits this playbook too neatly to ignore. His post-Fox ventures are remarkably well-funded for an “independent journalist.” Lavish travel across continents, smooth production, global exclusives with controversial heads of state—yet his revenue sources remain clandestinely opaque. Various financial trackers and independent investigators have noted loose ties between some of Carlson’s production operations and foreign financial entities linked to Gulf intermediaries.But nothing definitively proves a direct wire from Doha, of course—if you know how modern propaganda markets function, you know that raw bribery is passé. Influence is purchased by ecosystem, not by envelope.What we’re witnessing is the Islamofascist narrative disguised as moral realism.Carlson’s brand has always relied on moral conflict narratives—he pits the spiritual sickness of liberal elites against some vision of prelapsarian order. But lately he has recast the Islamofascist model—theocratic submission through violence—as the moral antidote to Western degeneracy.When Tucker tells you that OnlyFans is more dangerous than Islamofascism, he’s not making a religious argument. He’s offering a false dichotomy: that your choices are between soulless consumerism or pious tyranny. That moral order requires uniformity of thought and suppression of freedom. It’s the same rhetoric that Qatari-aligned media platforms like Al Jazeera Arabic have pushed for decades—always cloaked in “moral clarity,” always demonizing Western liberty as sexual chaos dressed up as tolerance.The eeriest part isn’t that Carlson flirts with that narrative—it’s that he seems to believe he’s still being simply contrarian.Another thread in his transformation is impossible to ignore: Carlson’s creeping antisemitism, couched in pseudo-intellectual populism. His recent insinuations about Jewish influence over global finance and American foreign policy echo the oldest fascist tropes on record.Once, Carlson criticized Israel the way a serious commentator might criticize any ally—based on policy. Now he joins the Islamofascist chorus accusing the Jewish people, collectively, of masterminding global immorality and media corruption. These ideas are not original; they are imports. They flow directly from the same ideological streams that run beneath Qatari mosques, Iranian propaganda outlets, and Turkish state media. The same narratives were prevalent in 1939 Germany.It is not coincidental that Islamofascist regimes have long tried to translate their own antisemitic propaganda into language digestible by the Western Right: moral discipline, family values, economic honesty—twisted into theological antisemitism camouflaged as cultural critique.It’s important to realize that today’s propaganda doesn’t leave a paper trail.The modern influence industry is ...
    Show more Show less
    41 mins
  • How For-Profit Health Insurance Turned American Healthcare Into A Predatory Enterprise

    How For-Profit Health Insurance Turned American Healthcare Into A Predatory Enterprise
    Dec 23 2025
    The story of health insurance in the United States begins not with Wall Street sharks circling for profits, but with a modest act of community solidarity during the Great Depression.In 1929, at Baylor University Hospital in Texas, administrators faced empty beds and unpaid bills as economic collapse kept patients away. So, they devised a prepaid plan: for a small monthly fee, teachers could secure hospital care without fear of ruinous costs. This became the blueprint for Blue Cross, a nonprofit model that spread rapidly across the country in the 1930s. Soon after, Blue Shield plans emerged to cover physician services. These were explicitly nonprofit entities, often granted tax-exempt status and special regulatory privileges in exchange for serving the public good—community rating (charging everyone the same premium regardless of health status), acting as insurers of last resort, and prioritizing access over profit.During World War II, wage freezes pushed employers to offer health benefits as a perk, cementing employer-sponsored insurance as the dominant model. By the 1950s, enrollment exploded from millions to over 140 million. The Blues dominated, focusing on broad coverage and affordability. Commercial for-profit insurers existed but only on the fringes; they couldn’t compete with the Blues’ nonprofit advantages until they adopted “experience rating”—charging higher premiums to sicker groups—allowing them to cherry-pick healthy customers and undercut the Blues in certain markets.This nonprofit era wasn’t perfect, but it kept costs relatively contained. Patients and providers dealt directly, with insurance stepping in as a safety net rather than a profit extractor. Medical loss ratios—the share of premiums spent on actual care—hovered around 95%, meaning nearly every dollar went to healthcare rather than overhead or dividends.The enactment of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965, while a landmark social safety net achievement in expanding access to the elderly and poor, tragically hyper-intensified the demise of nonprofit health insurance and healthcare. By injecting massive third-party government payments into the system—reimbursing hospitals and physicians on a cost-plus or fee-for-service basis—these programs severed the direct link between patients and providers, unleashing unchecked cost inflation. Providers, shielded from price sensitivity, charged whatever they wanted, knowing the government check would arrive. This “third-party payment problem” flooded the system with money, rewarding volume over value and creating irresistible profit opportunities. Nonprofit hospitals and insurers, once focused on community service, faced mounting pressure to expand bureaucracies, raise charges, and compete in an escalating arms race of costs. For-profit entrants exploited the gusher of funds, accelerating the shift toward shareholder-driven models that prioritized extraction over care.The devastating turning point came in the 1970s and 1980s, when greed began to infiltrate. The Health Maintenance Organization Act of 1973, signed by Richard Nixon, provided federal subsidies and loosened restrictions to promote HMOs. Early HMOs were nonprofit, emphasizing preventive care. But the law unleashed a wave of for-profit HMOs, which quickly dominated the space by prioritizing cost-cutting over quality and skimming healthy enrollees.The real betrayal occurred in 1994, when the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association—under pressure from competitive threats—abandoned its nonprofit mandate, allowing member plans to convert to for-profit status. What followed was a feeding frenzy. Blue Cross of California aggressively acquired plans in other states, rebranding as WellPoint (now part of Anthem, the second-largest insurer). Conversions swept through states: Georgia to Cerulean, Missouri to RightChoice, Virginia, and more. By the 2000s, many iconic Blues had morphed into shareholder-driven behemoths, with assets often transferred to foundations as a deceptive fig leaf for public benefit.This shift to profiteering transformed health insurance from a public service into a rapacious industry. For-profit insurers face relentless pressure to deliver shareholder returns, leading to skyrocketing administrative costs—marketing blitzes, executive bonanzas, lobbying armies, and denial machines designed to avoid payouts. Studies show that for-profit plans have higher administrative overhead (often 6 percentage points more than nonprofits) and lower medical loss ratios, meaning less money reaches patients and providers.The result? Exploding prices. US healthcare now consumes nearly 20% of GDP, double what most developed nations spend, with worse outcomes like lower life expectancy and higher infant mortality. For-profit dominance incentivizes higher provider payments because insurers can simply pass costs to premiums—especially under rules like the Affordable Care Act’s medical loss ratio requirements, which ...
    Show more Show less
    34 mins
All stars
Most relevant
A quick take on these 3 issues with a common sense and insightful take on the consequences of each

Quick, Factual, Real

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.