From Brown To Bondi, Misinformation Is Worse Than No Information

Two scenes, two continents, the same sick pattern: quiet signals ignored, then a day broken by violence. We take you inside our process for reading those signals sooner and acting smarter when the story starts to spin faster than the facts.

We walk through the Brown University shooting and the Bondi Beach attack at a Hanukkah ceremony, not to rehash play-by-play, but to pull out the lessons that actually change outcomes. You’ll hear how “he wasn’t right lately” and months of warnings from local rabbis fit a well-documented pattern: most attackers leak intent. We talk about what those leaks look like in real life, how to build quick family check-ins that calm the worst kind of phone call, and why pausing five minutes before posting might be the most lifesaving habit you add this year. We also call out the damage of leaked names, press conferences with no substance, and the seductive myth that complicated training is required to do simple harm.

From there, we shift into practical preparedness. We break down a lean, realistic IFAK for everyday carry, how to practice tourniquets and pressure dressings under stress, and the simple venue habits—knowing exits, identifying cover, clocking changes in crowd behavior—that keep you and your people safer. For faith communities, we outline layered security that pairs off-duty officers with trained volunteers, and how even small steps like radios and posted medical kits can change the first two minutes. Finally, we talk about the social aftershocks: protests at vigils, rising tensions, and how to protect space for grief without escalating conflict.

If you value clear thinking under pressure and common-sense prepping that respects real life, this conversation will sharpen your eyes and your plan. Follow the show, share it with a friend who needs a calm voice right now, and leave a quick review to help others find it. Your support helps this community stay ready, steady, and useful when it counts.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Updates And Prepper Camp News
• 2:04 Setting The Stage For Tough Topics
• 2:57 Brown And Bondi: What Happened
• 5:01 Laws, Blame, And Bad Takes
• 8:05 Missed Signals And Situational Awareness
• 11:16 Social Media Misinformation Spiral
• 13:46 Investigations, Leaks, And Public Damage

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:17

To the Common Sense Practical Prepper Podcast, where prepping doesn't have to be complicated or expensive. Coming to you from a well-defended off-grid compound high in the mountains. Coming to you from his Florida room in Richmond, Virginia. Neither off-grid nor well-defended, unless you count as chickens and cats, here is your host, Keith.

SPEAKER_01: 0:41

Everybody, this is Keith, and welcome back to the Common Sense Practical Prepper Podcast, December 15th, 2025. And as usual, I want to get some administrative items out of the way up front. Hot off the press, the dates and location for prepper camp 2026 have been released. August 14th, 15th, and 16th. There is a new venue. It's the Try-on International T R Y O N in North Carolina. And I looked them up. It's like a resort with a conference center. They have really nice rooms, camping, cabins. So if you get a chance, go to preppercamp.com. You can get your tickets. And there is a coupon code for 25% off your accommodations. So go to preppercamp.com as soon as you can. I would suggest you make your accommodation reservations as quickly as possible. It looks like a huge venue with plenty of stuff to do, restaurants, all sorts of stuff. So I'm really looking forward to Prepper Camp 2026. One little tidbit over the last 30 days, download and listenership has increased about 275% to the podcast. Again, I really appreciate everybody stopping by and getting their information. You can get your information from a hundred different sources, but I appreciate you taking the time getting your information from me. Okay, let's dive into the meat of the podcast. And as you can imagine, we need to talk about the active shooters at both Brown University and Bondi Beach in Australia. And I know the term thoughts and prayers is overused. Certainly my condolences and my thoughts to the students, their families, the faculties at Brown, as well as all the people in Australia that were there on the beach. A very nice day, enjoying a Hanukkah event, the first day of Hanukkah. So we'll talk about that in more detail in just a minute. So we're not doing run, hide, fight. I've beaten that horse like a rented mule at a 12-year-old kid's birthday party. Tonight it's about spotting the cracks before it all caves in. So Saturday afternoon, early afternoon, Brown University, Jorgensen Hall, graduate students were getting ready for finals. They were taking finals, study sessions, that sort of thing. And then that same day, half a world away, 14 hours ahead, so it was Sunday morning, at Bondi Beach in Australia, the first night of Hanukkah, a father and son walk up to the menorah lighting ceremony, pulled out some shotguns and rifles, and opened fire on families. Last I heard was 11 dead and dozens injured. Some kids were among those affected. So this was a father-son team, and I'm not going to give their names. I'm not going to give them any sort of bandwidth. The son was killed, and the father is in critical condition at a local hospital. Now, Australia is a gun-free country, and I'm not going to start digging on the Aussies about guns and you can't have guns, you should have guns. That's not what this is about. But it's very evident, and people say that here in the United States, well, we just get rid of guns. Common sense gun control. You've heard it a million times. Bad guys don't care about the laws. Now it's my understanding that either the father or son had six firearms registered to them and they were legally registered or they were legally obtained, but yet you see what happens. Here's a quote that really struck me that sounds like a lot of quotes you hear here in the United States. So this comes from New South Wales Premier Christopher Minnesota signaled that his state will tighten its gun laws, but decline to provide specifics. Quote, it means introducing a bill to Parliament to, I mean to be really blunt, make it more difficult to get these horrifying weapons that have no practical use in our community. End quote. Another part of his quote If you're not a farmer, if you're not involved in agriculture, why do you need these massive weapons that put the public in danger and make life dangerous and difficult for the new South Wales police? What an asinine thing to say. Again, it all goes back to the playbook. Blame the weapons, not the person. To make it more difficult to get these horrifying weapons that have no practical use. So if you're a farmer or you're involved in agriculture, I guess it's easier to get a firearm, to get a shotgun, or whatever it happens to be down in Australia. But again, like politicians here in the States, we want to blame the weapons and not the person using it. Because it's very simple just to blame the gun. Because a firearm will sit on a table fully loaded and not discharge around until it's interacted by a human, until somebody puts the finger on the trigger and pulls it. But somehow it's easy to blame the weapons and not the person. All right, I'll get off my soapbox on that. So these two scenes, less than 24 hours apart, the same rule, predators normally telegraph. At Brown, students were whispering among themselves, and there was a quote, that he wasn't right lately. In Sydney, rabbis have been sounding the alarm for months about the rise of anti-Semitism. You don't need a decoder ring to figure this out. You just need to keep your eyes and ears open. I always tell family members, if you're somewhere and plans change, especially at a public event, if I don't hear from you, hey, on the way home, hey, we're going to lunch, we're going to dinner, I start to get a little worried. And then when you hear about things happening, especially in your hometown, you're wondering if your loved ones are involved. So I always ask my family members just to check in from time to time. So there was a text message that a student sent to his mother. There was an active shooter, and he was going to run, and he said he loved her. And I'm sure there were other videos, other text messages, but this one basically went viral. So at both of these scenes, less than 30 minutes after they happened, social media feeds were jam-packed with all sorts of misinformation. At Brown University, somebody said it was a foreign shooter. Folks in Australia mentioned, oh, this was just a false flag. So let's walk through the incident at Brown University. The shooting happens at approximately 1.05 p.m. Shooter's gone. Nine hours later, the police have a person of interest at a day's inn, like 20 miles away. They were acting on a tip. They didn't elaborate on the tip. So they detain him, they interrogate him. It wasn't the guy. So Sunday evening, they quietly released him. Now, his name was leaked to the press, death threats coming in. Basically, his life is over. Now, I don't know if he had nothing to do with this, or he had something to do with this. I don't know. They have a person of interest, the name gets leaked, and now this guy's life is over. Reminds me of Richard Jewell, the security guard at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia. He was the one that found the pipe bomb, saved dozens of lives. CNN crowned him the killer. But guess what? He was not the suspect. Months later, his name was cleared, but the damage had already been done. He died alone and he died broke. The DC Sniper. Now I was directly involved in the DC Sniper investigation. The following is my opinion. Chief Moose led the investigation and led all the press conferences. He fed the press crap, fake codes, all sorts of stuff that was misinformation, in my opinion, just to hype up his involvement and to plug a book that he obviously was gonna write down the line. I have not read the book, I've read reviews, and I've heard from other people that were more involved in the investigation, and their opinion matches up with my opinion on what he did. Brown University is wired head to toe with cameras. Law enforcement is saying they don't have any shots of the suspect's face. That is absolutely crazy. And there's no way that anybody believes that. I think Angelica Pickles from the Rugrats put it the best. This smells like yesterday's diapers, and that's exactly what it is. As I looked into this, as I did my research, the person of interest they had detained and interviewing, something just did not sit right with me. I don't have any inside information, but something just did not sit right. That's why I did not record this last night. I knew something else was gonna happen. It just didn't sound right. And again, trust your gut when it comes to situations like this, take a pause, take a deep breath, take five minutes, and don't go ham or as kids say. Do they still say that? Don't go ham on social media and start posting everything and retweeting everything because you're just adding to the misinformation. Apparently, the father-son team in Australia used bolt-action rifles or bolt-action shotguns. In some of the videos, I saw dozens of shotgun casings on the ground. People went as far as there's a close-up video of one of the shooters cycling the bolt and firing the shotgunner rifle five or six times in pretty quick succession. There were people that commented on the video saying, obviously, this terrorist received professional training because nobody can fire, nobody can cycle a bolt that quickly. Well, they can. It's very simple. It's pull back, push forward, and down, and you cycle another round. It doesn't take military training, or it doesn't take training in some terrorist camp in Afghanistan to learn to shoot a firearm like that. Again, it's people looking for clicks, looking for a few dollars for their social media site without really knowing anything about the situation. So the FBI says that in eight of ten attacks, 80% of all attacks in active shooters or mass shootings, the shooter always brags about what they're going to do beforehand. They'll post it on a forum, tell an ex-girlfriend, Parkland Shooting, Poe, Christchurch, they all left a trail of breadcrumbs. Not all of them, but most of them do. So when you're out and about, carry smart, have a fanny pack, an IFAC, a tourniquet, quick clot, bandages, a trauma kit. Just have something on you or very close to you that you can get to to save yourself or save somebody else. As far as the religious community, lobby your synagogue or your church for off-duty police officers, and that's money well spent. A lot of churches here in the United States, a lot of their parishioners are retired law enforcement, retired military, and they do it for free. Both of these events were absolutely tragic, and in my opinion, could have been prevented. The fact that the two people in Australia seek out a religious function and kill as many people as they can is absolutely disgusting. Apparently they're both from Pakistan, they live in Australia, they've been there for a long time, but it's very difficult to get some solid information that I can confirm whether they're on tourist visas, were they there for 20 or 30 years, they became naturalized or whatever the immigration and citizenship process is in Australia. It's hard to find out solid information. And as far as Brown University, law enforcement has been absolutely useless. Don't get out there and say a bunch of crap that cannot be verified just to have something to say. Six hours after the incident at Brown, the university president held a press conference. Six hours and she had nothing to say, no details to provide. Now it wasn't like she wasn't allowed to, and only the police chief or head law enforcement was going to provide the information. She was asked directly, What information do you have? She had nothing. Don't get up there and mug for the camera just to have your little 15 minutes of fame if you're not ready to answer some tough questions. When I was a detective, I led one of these press conferences. I knew what to say, I knew how to say it, and I knew when to say no comment, and I knew when to stop the press conference. Well, it was my sergeant who pulled my belt loop on the back of my pants and whispered, I think you're done. So I think I said my sergeant says I'm done. All right, folks, thanks again for stopping by. Sorry didn't have a lot of good news today, other than prepper camp, but it's just a very sad situation. And another thing about this that really gets to me is in Amsterdam, they were holding vigils for the folks that were killed at Bondi Beach. They had vigils and little ceremonies in Australia for the victims, and some Palestinian activists or pro-Palestinian protesters showed up to a lot of these events. They showed up at the memorial services in Australia. They showed up at the memorial services in Amsterdam. I've seen videos of several Palestinian activists, anti-Israeli activists walking around waving flags and saying some very nasty things. There's a time to protest, there's a time to say what you mean, what your political values are, what your religious values are. And in my opinion, going to a memorial service and just instigating more hate and fanning the flames of anti-Semitism, anti-Islam, whatever it happens to be, you're just asking for trouble. You're just poking the bear and egging the situation on. So if folks in Australia or folks in Amsterdam were not already anti-Muslim, anti-Islam, anti-Palestine, someone showing up and spouting the hate that they did does not help the situation. Now, these protesters, I don't think, were there for anybody's approval. They were there just to instigate and fan the flames of the hate that is being propagated. I will leave it at that. Folks, thank you so much. Practicalprep podcast at gmail.com. If you need to reach out to me, I have not forgot about our giveaway. I have not forgotten about our mailbag episode, but I wanted to get some of this information out and provide my opinion on Brown University and Bondi Beach. As always, folks, take care of one another, be careful out there, and until next time.

SPEAKER_00: 16:38

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