Friday Wrap-Up with Bob: April 24, 2026 (Transcript)

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO BOB BARNEY’S 7:11 BROADCAST: Friday Wrap-Up with Bob: April 24, 2026

 Friday Wrap-up with Bob April 24, 2026.

Hi, Bob Barney for the Plain Truth today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com, Friday wrap-up, and I’m doing it, I’m a little under the weather. I had an electric surgery that didn’t necessarily go as good as I wanted, so I’m home recuperating a little longer than I expected. But, we can still do the Friday wrap-up, and I have a lot to talk about this week.

We didn’t do one last week because of the holidays, but this week I think we have some really good topics to wrap it up, and the first one I want to talk about is this idea, is Donald Trump really a Social Democrat and not a Capitalist Republican? Because, in my opinion, unlike Trump 1.0,Trump 2.0 is almost using the playbook of the Democratic Socialist parties of the United Statesand of Europe, owning companies. Now he’s talking about the United States bailing out spareairlines and then selling it after the price of jet fuel goes down. That’s really good for people like United or Delta or JetBlue now that has to try to make a living with these high fuel prices that his war brought us, and at the same time compete against a government-owned airline which has unlimited resources in order to compete against them.

And this is the stuff Democrats do. This is not the stuff most Republicans have done, and here’s a person that is from the New York Times, and I want you to hear what he has to say, and I have to say I agree with him. There’s no question that the decision by the administration to take a 10% stake in Intel is a watershed.

It’s a watershed not just for the world of business, but for the much larger idea around capitalism, around free markets, around the idea that the United States has spent the last century exporting the concept of free market capitalism and has been critical of state-run capitalism. And in so many ways, even politically, this flips the entire script of the approach that Republicans and conservatives have taken towards business for so many years. I can’t tell you how many business leaders I’ve spoken to over the last several days who are looking at this and have so many questions.

Have so many questions, not just about the particulars of the U.S. taking stake in this company, but in what it portends, what it means. The last time we saw anything like this, and really the only times this has ever happened in American history where the U.S. government’s gotten this engaged in business, it’s been in the context of a crisis. We had this happen in 2008 with the investment banks, with the automobile makers, but it happened because those companies were considered in absolute distress and that the effect of letting them go bankrupt was going to be cataclysmic for the rest of the country.

Well, I’m going to interrupt and just point out here, in my humble opinion, those companies and the big banks should have never been bailed out in 2008 as well. That was the same Democrat socialism that I’m against, Ronald Reagan would be against, and there’s a good reason for it. You know, the banks, when they wrote off all those homeowner loans that they couldn’t pay their mortgages, and the banks got all of that money back from the federal government in that great big bailout that we all paid for in 2008, what happened to the people who owed that money? Did it go away when the banks got repaid by our government? No.

They still owed the money. Most of them still had to go bankrupt. Most of them still ended up on the short end of the stick.

The bank got bailed out, but not the person who actually bought the house. They didn’t get bailed out. This is the problem when the government wants to pick winners and losers, and especially when it comes to business, and what happens you have is democratic socialism.

That’s what the Democrats for a hundred years have stood for, and the Republicans for a hundred years have been against it. Ronald Reagan brought true capitalism back to America. There were some flaws in some of his capitalism, I will agree, but for the most part, the best economy that we really have lived off for the last 40 years started with Donald Trump.

Let’s finish. Right. The idea then was that these banks were too big to fail.

Incidentally, the title of your book on this subject, the idea was this was necessary to contain major economic fallout. Exactly. And look, that moment unto itself created all sorts of debates around the country that last even to this day around the very idea of bailouts and how the government should or should not be involved in the world of business.

And so here we have this example of Intel, which is just the latest in a string of transactions in which the US government has taken effectively stakes in businesses or otherwise collecting tolls or other things that they haven’t done before at a time when we’re not in crisis and how that may rewrite the rules of capitalism. Well, I can tell you how it’s going to rewrite the rules of capitalism because it’s not capitalism. The actually end result of these policies is going to be socialism,which leads to communism, which leads to a dictator.

There has never been a socialist country that has ever been able to stop themselves from eventually becoming controlled by a small group of corporatists. And then after that, a dictator. It happened in Germany.

It happened in Russia. It happened throughout the history of mankind. And our forefathers with our constitution established a liberty for all Americans and an equal opportunity for all Americans, at least in principle.

It wasn’t always in reality, but it was in principle. And our courts in the past have upheld that principle that everyone could succeed with hard work, good luck, and maybe a helping hand from friends or church. But no, the Democrat party came along because it really was a party that represented the immigrants of their day, the Irish Catholics, the Italians, the Polish, and many of the Hispanic people that came in between the 1840s and the 1920s.

And they really are a type of people, unlike the founders of this country who were white Anglo-Saxon Protestant with that white Anglo-Saxon Protestant work ethic, there’s a reason for that word, that these new people came looking for the government to do everything for them because that’s what they were used to, a pope doing everything for them or a government doing everything for them. Unfortunately, that government had a king, and that king might have done everything for them, but he also enslaved them. And that’s what the American forefathers were trying to get us away from, and that is what this government under Donald Trump 2.0 is doing.

And if you can’t see that his involvement in Spirit Airlines and mineral companies and all of these Navidias and Intels and all these companies that our government has taken stakes in, there’s a problem there, including the oil, where we’re confiscating oil tankers, which I think we should, but who gets that oil? Well, it looks like the United States government is going to be in the oil business. There’s a problem, and if you don’t see it, you would have seen it if you were a Republican when Bill Clinton was doing it, when Barack Obama was doing it, when Joe Biden was doing it, you all found a problem with it. But right now, so many people who want to just support Donald Trump blindly don’t see a problem with it at all.

It’s going to make America great. Now it’s going to make the American government great at the expense of the American business and the American citizen. Liberty is on all your coins.

There’s a reason for it, but we’re losing our liberties. I’ll be right back. Bob Barney for The Plain Truth today, brought to you by theplaintruth.com, the place to go to to find out what’s happening in today’s news and what you can do to protect you, your family, and your loved ones.

That’s theplaintruth.com. Go there every day for the message board, for your health today, for the main page stories, and these podcasts. Thank you. And we’re back to the next subject I wanted to talk about, and that’s the Virginia elections.

Because the thing that happened in Virginia is probably the most evil things the Democrats have done this year so far by absolutely putting a ballot measure up to vote and trying to tell everybody, oh, the people voted for it. But this is what really happened, and that no one that I hear is explaining it this way. There are 11 districts in Virginia, and right now six are held by Democrats and five are held by Republicans.

And in 2021, under Governor Youngkin, the state of Virginia passed probably the fairest redistricting measure of any state in the union, where it was non-political, it was non-party, it was bipartisan. Three Democrats, three Republicans, and a neutral person in the middle. And they drew the districts that the people voted for at the time when they understood what was on the ballot of getting politics out of redistricting, and it came out six Democrat and five Republicans.

That’s fair, because 1.5 million voters in Virginia are Democrats, and 1.49 are Republicans. So what happened? They lied on this ballot measure, and they lied because they made the ballot, if you voted yes, it sounded like you were voting for fair elections and not a rigged election. And if you voted no, it sounded like you were voting against it.

It was so much confusion that I predicted to my wife when I read the ballot, college education, and I couldn’t understand really what yes or no meant. I knew what you needed to vote was no, because the Democrats were trying to pull a fast one. So what is the results that you’re not hearing on TV? The results is, this is the representation that we have in Virginia.

1.5 million Virginian residents will get 10 house seats, and 1.4999 Virginians will get one house seat. Does that sound very Democratic to you? Does that sound apportionment correct for you? Does that sound fair to you? I am glad a Virginia judge kicked this out as unconstitutional,because it is on many points. We’ll probably run a show next week, all about this vote, and all of the mistakes that were made, and the violations of our own Virginia Constitution that was made to pass this illegal act.

I understand Donald Trump started this, and when he did what in Texas, the Republican Party should have pushed back. But at the same time, that doesn’t give Democrats the right to illegally change the Constitution of states in order for they can have an unfair advantage in a federal election of senators, and in this case, of house members. And that’s what went on, and I want to call it out, because I think so many people around the United States not living in Virginia do not understand the implications of what just happened.

And again, to explain it very briefly, which you’re not going to hear on any news station, including Fox News, or what you consider conservative news, is that 1.5 million people get 10 house votes, and 1.4999 Virginians get one. That’s basically 50-50, with one person breaking the tie, and 10 votes goes one way, and only one goes the other. And if you think that’s democracy, then yeah, you’re a Democrat, and unfortunately, no one calls it out for what it is.

Now, I want to get on to the next subject, but we’re going to wrap through this pretty quickly,because a lot really going on, and I want to get to these missing scientists around the country over the last year or two, and they all have something in common. Some have been found dead, some are just missing and disappeared, and it seems to me, just from an outsider looking in and not having any FBI files to look at, but it just seems to me that these people all are into about the same thing to do with atomic research. One woman that was murdered, it looks like, was working on a propulsion system for rockets, which was antimatter, something my brother and I talk about a lot of times.

The only way you’re going to get to Mars, the only way you’re going to get to faraway planets, if you’re ever going to be able to, is to be able to almost go back to the old Star Trek days, with the warp speed thing, where you travel almost as fast as light, because according to Einstein, if you travel at the speed of light, you disintegrate into light, and you never get back to what you were before. But the idea, rocket power cannot get us to Mars, like you’re hearing from this Artemis adventure. Well, this woman was working on antigravity matter.

Do you remember the guy in, well, it was MIT that was murdered, but the guy also murdered all those college students, and I said at the time, I don’t believe that those college students that he murdered was the real target. I think that was just a, he was trying to get people looking the other way. He was only trying to murder that one scientist that he used to work with in Spain.

Well, what was that scientist doing? He was working on a replacement for oil for energy. He wasworking on, and was very close, supposedly, according to those colleagues, on a replacement for gasoline and oil that did not depend on solar and wind and things we already know doesn’t work.And all of a sudden, this former colleague of him kills him, and then a week later kills, what, six or seven college students at MIT.

And that, like I said, was just a diversion that he was trying to do to throw the police off. He got caught, but those kids were unfortunately slaughtered just as an excuse to get the police looking the wrong way, because his, I believe, his intended victim was that one scientist. So what are, where are these missing scientists today? Well, either some have defected, and many times we have scientists working on secret projects like atomic research or things like that.

And they sell out to the, used to sell out to the Soviet Union in the past, but probably now selling more out to China and being bought by China. And they might have voluntarily exited the country illegally as diplomatic baggage of some Chinese embassy somehow to China to work in their scientific programs for nuclear research or atomic energy or even alternate fuel sources. Because remember, the one thing China does not have, they do not have any oil in their country.

That is a big problem for China. They have to import all of their oil. They have not been able to find an oil resource.

They’re full of minerals, they’re full of gold, they’re full of everything they need to be a dominant factor in manufacturing in the world, but they don’t have a stitch of oil and they got to get it all from the Middle East or from us. And that is a problem. So if they could find a way around oil and fuel their economy without that, that would put them in the lead.

And so maybe they coerce some of these scientists to change sides and go and live in China. There’s another more sinister answer to some of these missing scientists. It almost goes back to World War II.

Wernher von Braun, who was the German rocket scientist who invented the V2 rocket that decimated London, he was the German scientist that the Americans absolutely stole, captured, and brought to America before the Russians could get them. So we wanted him for our space program and it was Wernher von Braun who actually was the brains behind the Gemini and Apollo missions that put us on the moon. And I’m sure he loved living in America other than Russia, but he didn’t come here voluntarily.

He was stolen. He was stolen away from when we invaded Berlin and we stole them before the Russians could get them. If we weren’t there and Patton was the guy who did this, did not get him, then the Russians would have had Wernher von Braun and they probably would have been the first on the moon.

Something, a little bit of history you probably don’t know. But some of these scientists, I think, have been kidnapped. They haven’t flown the country for more money.

They might have just been kidnapped by the Chinese or other people. There are not just Chinese, could be Europeans because they are the end-time beast of the Bible, but somebody is trying to get the knowledge that they were working on. And it’s all similar type sciences that they’ve been working on, and to me that is going to be the answer no matter what officially comes out as the answer later on, because never listen to the official report after the fact when the government’s trying to hide something.

I’ll be right back. ThePlainTruth.com, the source to go to to find out what’s happening in the world today. That’s ThePlainTruth.com. This is Bob Barney.

I hope you go there every day. Thank you. And another subject I want to get into.

We have a string on the message board. It’s called America Has Never Seen Corruption Like This. And we have many articles going back a long time.

Daycare scandal deepens. This was going on in Michigan, for example. Or mayor sneaks through reparations bill just before Christmas to give black residents five million dollars.

But there is a lot of stories we have about the Trump administration and people trying to make money off this war or make money off this presidency. And to me, it even goes into the Trump family. But Pentagon denies—here’s a headline—Pentagon denies that Pete Hegseth, broker, tried to invest in defense companies.

What do you think about that? Or one of the most prominent investors in the Trump family, crypto companies, is now criticizing it. Justin Sun, who said he pledged 75 million dollars to the World Liberty Financial, which is a Trump coin, Bitcoin type thing, is now saying the company actually built in a trap door for the Trump family to allow them to escape if the coin went down in value, which it has gone down 80 percent, by the way, in value, and they didn’t lose a dime. The next thing is what we talked about in a Friday episode about three weeks ago.

Traders placed over a billion dollars 10 minutes before the Iran war tweet came out, or social tweet, whatever Trump’s social media is, and made a billion dollars off when the war would start on PolyMarket. And guess who is an investor and an advisor to PolyMarket? Guess who? Don Trump Jr. Donald Trump Jr. is part of PolyMarket. Think about that inside information that he has and what that can mean.

That’s like the owner of a casino. And I don’t know if you know this, but owners of the casino cannot play poker in their own casinos. Why? Because the dealer is going to make sure they win.

It’s corruption. And the state gambling laws will never allow a casino owner to ever be able to bet or gamble or play blackjack or roulette or anything like that in their own casinos. There’s very good reason.

And here’s another one. J.D. Vance’s shadow campaign exposes he quietly courts billionaire donors at six-figure dinners. Here’s another thing that people do not know.

The 100 companies that gave a million dollars or more to the inauguration of Donald Trump have received individually over $25 billion each of government contracts. Here’s another one. Eric Trump-backed robot firm has just won a $24 billion contract with the Defense Department of the United States government.

$24 billion to a Trump-backed or owned company for defense. It’s a robot company. If this was Hunter Biden, would people have a problem with it? Well, they did when it was Hunter Biden.

I reported this two weeks ago. Forbes magazine says that Donald Trump has earned $3 billion. This is not Donald Jr., this is not Eric Trump, this is not Barron Trump.

Donald Trump’s fortune doubled in the first 12 months of his presidency. He went from a $3 billion total net worth to a $6 billion net worth as president. That’s not a problem.

I don’t know what is. But anyway, that is a story that we follow on to plain truth. And I don’t think you read it too many other places because everybody’s covering up the scandal.

And it is a scandal. And here’s another one. Howard Lutnick, who I can’t even, I can’t take the guy.

Now, he went on and boldly said they sold a thousand Trump gold card visas that were a million dollars apiece to buy to give people visas to come to America, had Trump’s picture on it. And I have another problem with the arrogance of putting your picture all over the place. That’s the stuff that Mao Zedong did in China, or Joseph Stalin, or Adolf Hitler.

Everywhere you went, you saw their picture. Everywhere here, you see a statue of Trump or a picture of Trump. And you get a U.S. card, a visa card with his name on it and Trump visa card gold.

Well, he said he sold a thousand of them at a million dollars apiece. Well, guess what? He sold one. He lied.

He lied to Congress how many were sold. And when an investigation was revealed, turned out he sold one, just one. Where’s the ramifications? Again, what would so-called Republican, mega Republicans, or any Republican say if this was going on during the Biden administration? And you know, if you’re honest with yourself, it would be called corruption to the hilt.

Lying, deceiving, and corruption. And this is what’s going on. And the last thing I’m going to talk about in this show is about the tariff, because now the tariffs are being forced by the Supreme Court to be refunded to the people who paid them.

And that’s simply not the case. My company has paid probably, I don’t know, almost $100,000 in illegal tariffs, and we have not even been able to go past one to get our money back. The people, and there was a New York Times, I believe it’s a New York, yeah, New York Times article that is tariffs raise consumer prices, but the refund go only to businesses.

FedEx, who started this lawsuit, never paid a dime in a tariff. They charged the end-using customer that tariff, yet FedEx is going to get the money to their bottom line. Does that seem fair? This is that corporatism that Donald Trump and all of these deep staters have always been for.

Big companies get all the rewards, and a little guy gets screwed. Remember about the banks gets the money because you couldn’t pay your mortgage, and they got all that mortgage money back, but you did not get out of that debt of your mortgage. It didn’t get wiped clean like the bank’s debt did.

That’s the kind of thing that goes on which really turns people off of what’s going on in the government today. It’s that simple. And unless things change, the American people are going to have a revolution.

They’re going to shut down. They’re going to refuse to go into the military. We talked about that last week.

They’re going to refuse to participate in this government real soon because it is broken. Finally, I want to go over this weekend shows. Remember tomorrow is the Sabbath day.

The Sabbath day, the seventh day of the week, is still in force. The Ten Commandments are still in force, all ten of them, including what day is the Sabbath day, and you have to honor it. So every Sabbath morning, we have a 7-Eleven Sabbath show.

Tomorrow morning is going to be an older Garner Ted Armstrong show on the rapture. So many people believe there is a rapture of the saints before the end of times, before the tribulation happens. It’s a nonsensical theory, never found in any page of your Bible, and he goes and just absolutely proves the fact that the rapture of the saints before the tribulation simply does not occur, and that it is false Christianity that is teaching it.

Also, in the p.m., Saturday, we never have a noontime show like we do Monday through Friday. Remember, Monday through Friday, you have a 7-Eleven a.m., a noon, and a 7-Eleven p.m. show, but on Saturday, you only have a 7-Eleven a.m. and p.m. show. The a.m. is the Sabbath show.

The p.m. is an entertainment show, and then Sunday, we only have one show as a present anyway, a 7-Eleven a.m. show you can watch any time anyway. You don’t have to be up at 7-Eleven to watch it or listen to it, but in this case, watch it. We usually put up a video from YouTube of weekly events.

A lot of times, it’s Mark Halperin. Sometimes, it’s some other people, and they wrap up what happened during the week. Think of, you know, Face the Nation kind of show, and that’s the only show we do on Sunday.

But tomorrow, the Sabbath day one is on Garner Ted Armstrong, and then the p.m. entertainment show is the final episode, and it was really two episodes, so it’s a two-hour, so it’s pretty long if you really want to watch it, but it’s captivating if you’re a student of my age. It’s the final episode of The Fugitive in 1967, and it was color then. Most of the fugitives were in black and white, but by 1967, they were in color, and it’s the last two shows put together as one where the killer is finally caught, and the good doctor clears his name and has a life free again to re-enter civilization.

It was a phenomenal show. At the time, it was the largest watched show in the history of the world at the time in 1967, and I remember, I was in the seventh grade, and I remember my mom and myself and my brothers, I think my father was working, watching those two episodes, and we had watched The Fugitive since the beginning, and it was like, what, the sixth year of it, so it was just captivating for us to see. That’s tomorrow night at 7 11 p.m., the final episode of The Fugitive.

Well, anyway, thank you for listening. This was the Friday wrap-up, and we wish everyone a safe and happy weekend. I hope everyone does start to look into following the Sabbath day, and we will be back here again Monday morning at 7 11 a.m. with a show, noontime, and a 7 11 p.m. show for the rest of the week.

I usually do the noontime shows except for the Friday wrap-up, but sometimes I put other shows in in that place as well. I don’t do a show every day. I don’t have the time right now, but I’d like to someday.

This is Bob Barney for The Plain Truth.com saying thank you for listening. Bye-bye.