AOC Laughs Off "Woke 1," Fauci’s Secret Texts Exposed, Trump’s Air Force One Decoy

And we're live. Welcome back to the LOOPcast. It's Tom, Tom, and Josh. We have the one and only Tom McCluskey joining the show today. Very excited to hear if he knows about the whereabouts of Mitch McConnell. We got August recess for the Senate, so we're going to get some good insider information. Hopefully, we can break on the show. Do you know, is this like a National Treasurer situation? Do you have any insider information?

About where Mitch McConnell is? Yeah. I do think it would be a great children's book. Show just a beach full of turtles, and it's like, where's Mitch McConnell? Sweet. Well, hey, we got a full show for you guys, and for those of you that miss Erika, don't worry. She did an interview with Archbishop Coakley about this new documentary coming out about Blessed Stanley Rother. It's going to be awesome. So, that'll be at the end of the show. Hang out if you want your Erika fix, but today, we have a lot to discuss.

We have primaries that just happened last night in Wisconsin. A little bit of chaos there, a little bit of surprise. I need to hear from Josh. Famously, he follows the money, but the polls, way off once again, second time in a row. We got to get to the bottom of that. A couple other elections that happened, not just at the top of the ticket we want to talk about. Then also, we have AOC kind of casually laughing off Woke One. Seems to be the new strategy of some of the more extreme elements of the left to kind of laugh off a little bit of what happened in the 2020s.

Got a little bit of analysis on that. Maybe strongman the other side from some lefties. We'll see what happens. Good news, Twilight Zone, and we got a new text dump from Fauci. Some pretty explosive text revealed there, and what he was talking about behind the scenes, and what he revealed to the public. So, I've got a full show here. It's going to be great. Thank you all for joining us on this Wednesday. We are live at 11 a.m. on YouTube and wherever else you can see the stream, and then, of course, Spotify, anywhere you can grab it after.

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That is CharityMobile.com, promo code LOOPcast. Thank you to Charity Mobile for sponsoring today's episode. And even before we get into the Wisconsin primaries here, Josh and I are excited to talk about that. Tom, just because we haven't had you on the show in a minute here, the Senate is about to go on recess. I'm kind of asking Jess, but in all seriousness, I don't think people understand kind of how crazy the Mitch McConnell situation is. Could you maybe update us on that and some other things moving in the Senate and in the House?

Well, with Mitch McConnell, there's actually a... A Twitter handle is Mitch McConnell dead or alive, and for the last month and a half, the emoji they've been showing is, who knows? Question mark. I'm assuming he's probably alive, except he did release a statement saying that he's going to be working from home, which is completely ridiculous, because that's not what the good people of Kentucky elected him to do, to work from home, to phone it in, more or less. Yeah, we didn't get his vote on Blanchard nomination.

And there was a... We did not get his vote. He is usually an advocate against legalizing marijuana. He was, of course, silent during all of that, and that is one of the things that we sort of lost on in the CR. There were a couple of things, the CR being a continuing resolution to fund the government until I believe it is December 11th, and one of the things was all of the majority of congress voted to um uh to make certain marijuana emphasize that this is illegal synthetic marijuana mostly uh this is most of the stuff that's being sold like in your 7-elevens and quickie marts and is manufactured towards children um with different names like spongebob uh and things like that um you And the White House came in heavy to delay that implementation.

It was supposed to happen in September, and the White House won on that one, as did the marijuana industry. There was OMB. The rules that were going to be delayed anyway, because they got so many comments, including some from CatholicVote and CatholicVote listeners, but that was delayed until December as well. And one kind of victory that we had, there was a sports bill that, after looking into it, and especially a friend of mine who's an attorney up on the Hill pointed it out for me, if passed, it could override the 27 states that currently protect women and men from participating in women's sports.

The NCAA, who is for men participating in women's sports, would be given the power to decide. With this bill, thus overriding what a lot of the states would say. Unfortunately, the White House was again on the wrong side of this one. Alliance Defending Freedom, which has defended a lot of cases on this issue, thankfully came out vocally against the bill, and it's now delayed. And we're working to try to get language in there that would protect those states. But I've got to say, it's a Ted Cruz Bill and Ted Cruz is really, in my opinion, we're losing John Cornyn, and that's great.

I think it's about time that Texas loses Ted Cruz as well. Yeah, I mean, no bill is better than this bill. Right. So, I don't even understand the rationale. What's the rationale of why Ted Cruz would put this forward?

It does a whole bunch of other things that organizes college sports. I don't know enough about it because it's not really our issue. It does worry a little bit about me when Congress gets involved in something like this.

However, it is supposed to more professionalize the college sports. The NIL stuff, I think. I think there's a lot of that stuff in there, yeah. And hopefully it protects the students, student-athletes as well. But unfortunately, it gives the NCAA way too much power. Right, and would sacrifice a pretty key issue to keep men out of women's sports. And this is being pushed by Cruz and the Trump administration?

Well, Ted Cruz is pushing it. There is a Republican House bill that has protective language that the White House also supports. So, what we would be pushing for is either the House version or to fix the Senate version. Yeah, Alliance to Defending Freedom has A quick fix. They proposed language that would just, like a paragraph, that would fix what is wrong with the Cruz bill. So, it is an easy fix. So, we will see what happens.

Senator Jim Banks has an amendment. That he was trying to get a vote on, and that is what ultimately sunk the bill, was Tommy Tuberville, a coach, running for governor currently in Alabama, were pushing for an amendment, and Josh Hawley, of course, was as well. And because that amendment was gaining so much esteem by Republicans, they delayed the vote.

Interesting. Interesting insights there. Well, because they wanted to get out of the door and get home. For the August recess, so. Ah, yes, got to get home. I mean, so, here's Tuberville Michelle Trafoya. She won her election. This is them at Auburn game back in the day. Yeah, she was, you know, a sports anchor for ESPN, and then later went on to, what, Embassy, and she's interviewing Coach Tuberville. So, now you've got the...

Republican nominee for governor in Alabama being interviewed by the future Minnesota Senate Republican candidate. So, it is just kind of interesting. Okay, and then, Tom, I don't even think we can... So, you are saying... He sat out, Mitch McConnell sat out these votes. Sat out might be a generous term, because he might physically be unable to be present for these votes, is the implication. Your job as a senator is to vote. That is kind of what we send you there to do.

So, wouldn't it be the honorable thing to be to resign? One would think, except historically, that has not been done. You're probably going to need legislation to kind of force them to do so, because it's not just Mitch McConnell. Like, last year, for the last six months of last Congress, the head of the House Appropriations Committee, Kay Granger, arguably the most powerful position in the House of Representatives, because you're in charge of all the money and where it's going to go.

She was in a hospice for dementia the last six months of her term. Nobody knew about it. Nobody. Her staff, obviously. And she's now dead. Right, and she's now dead, which, as we've possibly seen with Mitch McConnell, would not stop her from legislating, apparently.

But there's Tom Keene in New Jersey, who, depression is a very serious illness. But he just disappeared for four or five months during some very important votes in a very close house. Yes, you need to get treated. You need to be treated with respect. However, you also need to understand you were elected to a position, and you need to treat your voters with respect. Instead, they were just like, no, no, no. I will deal with you peasants later. I am dealing with my thing right now.

Tom, you spent a lot of time in the swamp, because we could talk up and down about how outrageous a lot of these things are. You mentioned legislation would be required if you could wave a wand. What is even the path forward? I think a lot of people actually care about this. We want to see like an 80s too much type law passed or something. Is there an even possible solution here? Certainly. I mean, there is probably a couple. There is an age limit you could have, certainly.

But that would have to come from the people who are 90 and still hang on to power. And it could possibly be a U.S. constitutional amendment would be needed for something like that. Well, for age limits, yes, but couldn't, Tom, couldn't we do this? Couldn't, you know, again, it's going to be the members of the House and the Senate that would have to ultimately change it. Yes, there's no getting around that, unless you, you know, do an Article 5 and blow up the whole Constitution.

I mean, and I don't want to do that just over this. But you could say, you know, you could if the public were outraged enough about some of this stuff. They could demand that, you know, the House and Senate pass a rule saying that they will unseat a member automatically if they don't show up for work for, you know, two months in a row. And they don't, you know, if the Senate isn't in session or the House isn't in session for two months and they don't come up and vote, then you say, yeah, you're automatically expelled.

That would be something, you know, of course, then that would be challenged, but the court wouldn't pick it up. The court's not going to touch that. Or even like a cognitive test as well, because you get somebody like Dianne Feinstein or Jesse Helms who showed up, who would just show up for work.

But they'd be wheeled out just to vote and things like that. It would be news, though. If they rolled in Mitch McConnell in a hospital bed into the Senate to vote, people would be like, you know, maybe it's time to hang it up. It becomes more of an issue, and it becomes harder to kind of hide rather than just saying, oh, I'm at home.

It is why I am supportive of TMZ-DC. I think TMZ is a godforsaken thing and everything else. Well, it will be around for a year or two before it gets too boring. I think that is my prediction. But, you know, ultimately, I don't buy the cognitive test. I trust the politicians to say, oh, I passed the cognitive test. Yeah, I just don't see how, I think they could manipulate that. Age limits is an easier way to go.

Okay. Or a Hunger Games situation, where it's televised. Tom, you've got to be so tired of being in D.C., right? Just throwing out Hunger Games proposals, man. Tough session. I get it. I get it. I'm just as frustrated. But hey, let's get into some Wisconsin primaries. I know CatholicVote was involved in at least one race here. I want to get Josh's perspective. Let me just do a little setting up here. So, really quite an incredible story. We've had a couple of these weird ones, but super high profile.

David Crowley defeats Francesca Hong in a stunning. With all votes counted, Crowley had 39.8% to Hong's 39.4%. Margin of just over 3,000 votes. Hong was leading in polls 20 to 30 points. I mean, I can pull up the aggregator. All we're saying, this is going to be a blowout.

It's not even that. It's even more so. I mean, it's crazy. David Crowley dropped out of the race a month ago. He dropped out. And then another establishment candidate was the anointed one that she was going to be, and then she dropped out because of a scandal. So, the governor, Governor Evers, the most boring Democrat guy, old white dude, listens to NPR, he goes back to Crowley, he's like, you're back in. Yeah, yeah. Tapped him on the shoulder. We need you.

You are going back in the game, buddy. Yeah. But, I mean, Tony Evers, man, I will give him credit. The governor, I do not like him. I do not like his policies at all, but he campaigned with Crowley all over the state and drug him across the line. There is no doubt in my mind, Tony Evers is the MVP of the Democrats in Wisconsin. He is the difference maker, but we got to talk about the polls, right? I mean, this is what drives me kind of crazy about this.

I have said. polling is not, everyone just looks at, well, this poll says that Hong is up by 20 points, therefore she's going to win. I mean, that's a good indicator, obviously, but it's not a guarantee either. I mean, you're taking a snapshot in time, and then a lot has changed since that poll was taken. You have the sitting governor of the state actively campaigning side by side with the challenger. Crowley. And so, as it becomes news. Yeah, but these were like the last five taken.

These weren't taken before that happened. This is State Navigate, Hong up 22, Public Policy Polling, Hong plus 18, Marquette University, Hong plus 25, State Navigate, Hong plus 29. And this is the same thing that happened in Michigan. Everyone was saying that Al Saeed was going to win by 20 points as well, and we're getting now, you know, it really is crazy how off the last four. What do we mean?

You know, some of those polls were taken, you know, just days ago. That's true. But, like, again, what people just expect is it to be predictive, and, like, not that people won't change their minds. Like, there are people that change their minds. There's also more people that voted than might have voted, because the governor said, you got to get out there, and you got to vote. So, he probably did, you know, make a difference on this. I got to say, if Francesca Hong would have just stayed in her pajamas in her apartment.

She would have won this race, but she does this interview with CNN, and she keeps fumbling and fumbling and fumbling about Thanksgiving, and she ends up losing by 4,000 votes. So, again, you have to take it into account. Josh, I'm curious your thoughts on this. It says, I'm seeing some Hong show that the field is overrated, but she's going to end up with around 300,000 votes, enough to have won any previous Wisconsin Dem Gov primary this century, more votes that were cast in some years.

Normie Dem primary turnout is just reaching biblical levels. Al Saeed got 743,455 votes. If he'd gotten that in 2018, he'd have won the job primary by a 2-1 landslide. Pollsters are just not catching these armies of quieter Dems, and some crossover indies cannonballing into the polling booth. What do you think about that? I think David Weigel, even though I don't care much for him, he's absolutely dead right on this one. What's going on right now is the DSA socialist takeover of the Democratic Party is still ongoing.

And right now, liberals, you know, so-called moderates, they're not moderates, they're liberals. Liberals are trying to fight back for their party, and so what's going on is primaries are getting elevated. They're almost like general elections. They're getting everybody to come out and vote.

So, Haley Stevens was able to use James Clyburn and get a lot of blacks in Detroit to come out and vote for her, and she almost won. So, what's happening is, like, the total number of people who are voting in these Democratic primaries is going up precisely because they're going through a revolution in their party, just like Trump had done in 2016, right? So, it's creating a lot of noise. A lot of people are like, no, I don't like that.

Look, the polls in Minnesota, two of the last three polls out of Minnesota were dead even on the Minnesota Senate race, right? You had Peggy Flanagan, endorsed by socialist Bernie Sanders, that is Tim Walz's lieutenant governor, versus Angie Craig, a liberal, okay? She is a liberal. She is endorsed by the pro boards, Emily's List, and all that other kind of stuff. She is actually the congresswoman for two of my siblings.

And so, it's not like moderate versus socialist or whatever. It's liberal versus socialist, and the socialists are winning it a lot of times. Now, the poll in Minnesota, a lot of them were even. Peggy Flanagan won by 20 points, the socialist candidate. So, like, these polls are just, that's why I say, you've got to take them with a grain of salt. I don't, I mean, it's not DSA.

Peggy Flanagan might not be DSA, but she's endorsed by Bernie Sanders. She's the socialist candidate. Sure. Okay, now let me pause you, because Francesca Hong was not endorsed by AOC or Bernie, like they all held, and then Flanagan did get the endorsement of these people, but is not DSA. So, what's going on here? Well, if Bernie Sanders would have endorsed Francesca Hong, she probably would have won. I mean, it's 3,000 votes. Right, so then why did they hold?

Well, maybe they're just focused on federal races rather than state races. That would be the one reason why they endorsed Peggy Flanagan. You know, Bernie endorsed Peggy Flanagan and Graham Platner. Here's the real question. Graham Platner was up by 20, 30 points in all the polls, and the sitting governor, Janet Mills, dropped out. Maybe those polls were baloney. Maybe she could have won if she had stayed in the race. Yeah. I mean, again, and I would just say this. There's a lot of Democrats who are already, you know.

Super excited that they're going to win in a massive blue wave because they trust these polls. Well, what if the polls are also wrong in Texas? What if Talarico is not ahead in the polls? What if he's actually down by five points? You know what I'm saying? So, polling doesn't tell me that much. It's a snapshot in time, but it doesn't measure intensity. It doesn't measure the grassroots. It doesn't tell me how many people are actually going to show up. It's a guide, but you can't take it to the bank.

And in fact, you need to look at what is happening on the ground. In the case of Wisconsin, the sitting governor campaigned with David Crowley for two weeks. That paid off. That made a difference. Now, Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, endorsed Haley Stevens, but didn't campaign much for her. So did the senator, but he didn't really campaign with her. That might have made a difference. She only lost but 1%. So, again, I always say you have to look at these things.

There's multiple different factors. Polling on its own is not enough. Well, here's a factor that I think is worth considering, because people are trying to look now at the difference between Flanagan, who is really successful, is pretty much a blowout, and she was running against someone who is... Maybe you can't say as liberal, but pretty liberal. Yeah, Angie Craig is very liberal, for sure. The only thing she got dinged for was voting for the Lake and Riley Act, which is hilarious.

It turned into kind of an argument over immigration, but she's got all the liberal bona fides. So, let me pause you real quick on that, because Hong... I think that the calculus in my mind is she just was not a very good candidate, as you said. If she ran a basement campaign, it might have been better, but she's doing these things where she said, oh, I wanted to be a sports reporter, so I used to throw out crazy tweets, and her tweets were crazy.

I mean, she was a chef. She had a restaurant. She was a chef. She ran on universal free childcare, free school meals, broader healthcare access, like one payer, one-year moratorium on data centers. She had Thanksgiving as a white colonizer holiday.

Just the craziest stuff you can imagine, right? And all very, we're going to get into it in the woke one stuff, but she was very much like a woke one prototype candidate. And then Flanagan, you could say, yes, she's very liberal. Yes, she hit on immigration, which is close to the home of the base, but she wasn't as flamboyant. You know what I mean? No, wrong, wrong, wrong. Oh, you think she was just as flamboyant? You don't think that's it? She had the t-shirt that's, you know, like, protect trans kids with like a knife, like she's going to come at you.

She wore the hijab. Like, you know, in campaign with Ilhan Omar, it's like, why is a Catholic woman supporting abortion, number one, but why is a Catholic woman wearing a hijab and, you know, like, pretending like she's, you know, Somalian? Like, this is the most bizarre thing in the world. She's very, very, very, very left-wing. Peggy Fanning, part of it is just that the Democratic primary voters in Minnesota are even more left-wing than in Wisconsin, and in Wisconsin, you have a governor who's not a complete psychopath like Tim Walz.

You had... Tony Evers, who went and grabbed, you know, David Crowley by the back of the neck and dragged him across the line. So, I mean, again, there's a lot of factors in terms of why the victory happened, but it's worth noting.

Just the sheer number of, as David Weigel said, normie lefty voters that came out and saved David Crowley and prevented the Democrats from nominating Francesca Hong. Francesca Hong almost won. I mean, 300,000 Democrats in Wisconsin came out for her. It's amazing. It's scary. So, the DSA, if you're the DSA, you're like, that was a fluke. We could have almost won that, and that's not going to make them think, hmm, we've been repudiated. No, I mean, they won Peggy. Flanagan, they won Troy Jackson slash Grattan on Platinum in Maine.

They got Al Saeed in Michigan, and even if these candidates say, well, I am not technically DSA, they are for socialism. They are for Medicare for all. They are for everything. They are for taxing billionaires and all that kind of stuff that Bernie loves. It is all of a joke. The socialist takeover of the Democratic Party is continuing. So, that leads to an interesting conversation about the national effects, because you look at Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota. These are almost a definition of swing states.

Well, not Minnesota, but yes, the other two. Yeah. So, Sorry, I can't think of what I was going to say in Minnesota, but yes, basically like Midwestern states, and then now the message is being sent to the federal level, Tom, and you're probably interacting with people on the Hill that are like, I guess maybe more on the right, but they're kind of watching this internal civil war on the left going on of finding their identity, or do they feel threatened, and do you sense a difference on the Hill between people that identify as liberal and then people that are now full DSA, or do you feel like they're all pretty much the same?

Well, one, I do feel like their policies are pretty much the same, because if you look at the majority of bills that Democrats fully support, it is socialist. It is the Medicare for all or some version of it. I mean, every single Democrat signed on to The friend of the court brief in the Louisiana case on Mifepristone, every single Democrat signed on to it. They're kind of universal. How it's probably going to affect is, Hakeem Jeffers, if the Democrats take over the House, is probably safe.

So, if the Democrats take over the Senate, or even if they don't, I'm wondering who the Democrats in the Senate will choose as their leader, because Chuck Schumer is kind of seen as the old guard. He's as liberal as heck, but he's Jewish, which this new guard is not a fan of, and he's also I hate using the word mainstream Democrat, because that is not right, because the word mainstream and Chuck Schumer should never be in the same sentence, but Chuck Schumer tries to be an old-time politician, get things done.

I have a question for you, McCluskey. Yeah. So, if you are Chuck Schumer, and the election results come in, and Democrats do not take the Senate. Which would be a disappointment, I would think, for the Democrats. You are Chuck Schumer. Would you take yourself out of the running as Senate Leader and say you are going to focus on the issues that matter to New York? I started working with Capitol Hill before Tom was even born, probably in the 1990s, and the joke then, and it's still today, is the most dangerous place in D.C.

is between Chuck Schumer and a camera, and I think that's still true today. Chuck will fight for power until the very, very end. Plus, he figures he's from New York. He thinks New York, and perhaps it does, it's a pretty big state, but he thinks New York deserves to have a majority leader, as opposed to, I don't even know who they'd, I mean, Elizabeth. Like Van Hollen or someone like that. Perhaps Van Hollen might be seen as more reasonable.

I just think that he's going to be vulnerable to a Senate primary. You know, like, if AOC decides not to run for president, she could take him out in the Senate. Ooh, I want to get to AOC today. I will bet if the elections do go a certain way, he'll stay as majority leader, but maybe not run for re-election.

Fascinating. That would be the way to do it. So, to round out what is going on, Tom Tiffany cruised. Basically, my read on it was he did not even really have a serious opponent, so he got to just run as he would run in a general election. General, yep. And I think that's a huge, I don't know, would you say that's actually an advantage or a disadvantage? Of course, usually, I think it can be a big advantage. He's stockpiling a lot of money, and I got to say, Tom Tiffany's campaign has been nearly pitch perfect.

Obviously, barbecuing Francesca Hong over the turkey stuff, but now they'll focus on David Crowley, and he's got a lot of skeletons in his closet. There was a fake Twitter account he had under a pseudonym with a couple other people sending out tweets that were extremely gross and profane. I think a lot of voters won't like it, you know, and again, I would just like, you know, like, it's funny, like, the Twitter pundits are all like, well, this is over now. David Crowley is going to win.

Tom Tiffany, obviously, lost. Tom Tiffany had a great. Tom Salvo, the other day, brought in former Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, talked about how Glenn Youngkin had done a lot of reforms on bringing the cost of housing down. How can we streamline the regulations? How can we expedite permits and do it in such a way that drop the cost of a house like $40,000? This is the kind of issues that if Tom Tiffany continues to focus on, yes, I think he has got a great shot.

of getting elected governor. You know, and I just, I laugh at this idea that somehow Crowley is, you know, just because he's not a communist doesn't mean he's, you know, not a liberal. You know, like, as somebody said, well, thank goodness the DSA candidate lost in Wisconsin. Instead, our next Democratic governor will be merely soft on crime, hard on business, and support abortion up till birth. Like, he's still a lefty radical. You know, we've got to push forward on this, and Tom Tiffany's bringing a lot of common sense.

He's talking about the issues that matter to people, and I wish other Republicans across the country would look at what he's doing in his campaign. I have to say, I kind of appreciate the DSA. I saw a funny tweet. It was like, Trump said that he agrees with the DSA, that sometimes he wants to abolish the Senate, too.

But Tom, maybe you agree with that as well. A little bit. My brother-in-law, my former brother-in-law. So, my sister wised up, but a good guy. He was a good guy, except he was vice president of the New York Democratic Socialist Party, and in, I think it was like 2012, maybe, or 2008, he was asked to run as vice president. Thankfully, he said no.

Vice president of the United States under that party's banner? Under the DSA banner. Oh, interesting. I just find the DSA to be more honest. It shocks me they have this kind of power today. It doesn't to me, because I feel like the liberals, or maybe the more centrist Democrats, they try to have it both ways. They try to be a real, super hardcore left-wing in the streets, but then in the time it gets to the halls of Congress, they're like, eh, we'll make some compromise.

We don't really care. We kind of like the status quo. I think the biggest, a couple big separators, one, policy towards Israel, I think is just a huge divider. It has been a huge player in all of these races. There is no question. I really hesitate to go as far to say Jewish, but I think there is a lot of Americans left and right that really want to see our relationship with Israel revisited, and liberal Democrats really seem unwilling to move that direction, and the DSA is just pure like, we got to cut it off.

Like, we are not going to do anything. Some go further, but that is just the message I see on the ground. But the other thing you said is how I agree with you. Hold on. The other thing you said I think needs to be highlighted a little bit more, though. I agree with all that you just said, but what you said before, that they're just more honest.

And so, like Francesca Hong talking about how she hates Thanksgiving, and Abdul Al-Said saying he hates fireworks, and he hates, you know, football is too toxically masculine, or whatever. You know, there's a lot of left-wing voters who are like, yes, let's stop pretending we love America. You know, we hate it. You know, and you campaign with Hassan Piker, who says America deserves 9-11. There's an honesty there, and it's repulsive, but they're not full of crap. And in fact, what is happening now?

When she said that about Thanksgiving, there's a lot of left-wing voters who are like, just lie about it. Just lie about Thanksgiving. And then she's like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's my favorite holiday. I mean, it's such a joke. So, this is why it actually leads to our other story with ASB. She's saying, she's now realizing, oh, wait a minute. I need to lie. I got to pretend everything I said five years ago was all just a lie. All right.

Before we get into that, though, I just wanted to congratulate the other. Fun race going on. Basically, Tom Tiffany needed to be replaced in Congress, so he left the seat open to run for governor. Michael Alfonso, age 26, ended up winning that race. In a crowded Republican field, he is Sean Duffy's son-in-law. He's married to the daughter of Duffy.

And Trump adores crowded field, as I said. He is going to represent the same congressional district if he wins the general election that Sean Duffy himself represented in 2019-2020. He could inherit his old father-in-law's seat. I believe CatholicVote was involved in this race. Yeah, we adored him, and we liked what Michael Alfonso was bringing to the race. He said, look, if we're all really concerned about young people being enamored and lured into socialism, we need people who are of that same generation that can talk about this in a convincing manner why socialism is not good for you.

And he says, his grandparents came from Cuba, and they fled socialism. He goes, That's not the answer. We need to fix what's wrong in Washington and return to the American system and not fall to the lure of socialism. So, he's been great and on message, and it is true that he had, obviously, his father-in-law, who once held the seat, and he got the Trump endorsement, but he did not. run a basement campaign. His father-in-law joked, hey, you're going to need two sets of shoes to go all around this district, and he joked, actually, I ended up using three sets of shoes.

The guy who's campaigning all over the place, he was at every parade and everything, he didn't take it for granted, he hustled, and it is a red seat, so he is the presumptive, you know, he's likely to win, yes. Catholic as well.

Yeah, he's very Catholic. I mean, he's very Catholic and, you know, down to earth, and we're happy to support him. So, let me also, before we move on to AOC, there was a lot of speculation about what was going on, and why it took so long for the results to be had.

That race in Wisconsin. Yeah, Milwaukee. Yeah, someone here is kind of detailing the journey here. 28,000 absentee votes that remain to be reported in the city of Milwaukee are likely going to determine the race winner between Crowley and Hong. They are likely to be reported in one dump around 11 p.m. Now, the reason that, and Josh, correct me if I'm wrong, is because each state has their own laws regarding how they count ballots. This one, absentee ballots, could not be counted beforehand.

So that they could just be submitted right away. They have to be opened and submitted the day of the election when voting opens, so it just took a long time, and so... Right, and this is one thing where sometimes Republicans get a little stupid on it, because they're like, well, there's shenanigans if they get to count it days ahead of time. It's like, no, it's much worse to make these people wait until after the polls close to count everything. In Florida, they count all the ballots ahead of time, and so many people vote early, so that when you got election day votes, they can get everything wrapped up.

Within an hour. I mean, everyone knows what happens in Florida. I want everyone. to adopt the Florida model. Florida was, I mean, this, again, hanging chads. You were like two years old at the time, I know, but it was a national embarrassment, and it took 35 days, whatever, to figure out what happened in Florida, and there's all these different things, and the Democrats, like Al Gore, only wanted a recount in the three counties that were super Democrats. Like, yeah, that's not going to work, bro.

Either recount everything or what? So, Florida then, you know, I mean, Jeb Bush, we like to joke about him, you know, whatever. Jeb, exclamation point. He got this one right. He cleaned, he worked with the legislature there in Florida, and they've gone from being the national embarrassment to being the gold standard, and every state should do what Florida does when it, you know, comes to voting, you know, counting their ballots and all that kind of stuff, and there's, you know, integrity, so.

So, yeah, and then to round this out, basically, this bipartisan commission and Milwaukee election staff signing off downloading totals from tabulators, so they take the tabulators and then head into the courthouse, no results in about a half hour, and then five of the nine USB drives had audit logs, not actual results, copied to them. Bipartisan commission will go back to election warehouse, re-download, drive back again. 15K ballots believed to be impacted, one-hour delay, human error, says Paulina Gutierrez, which literally decided the election.

Yeah, I mean, maybe it's a human error, or maybe there's hijinks going on. This is what I'm saying. Like, you know, again, so here's an interesting thing. Let me come at you this way. Number one, this is why I like having an electoral college. You know, like, I mean... Can you imagine if we had, you know, all these different states that were waiting on their ballots and stuff like this? This way, we, you know. When Florida blew up in 2000, we could actually concentrate on the one state instead of having a nationwide recount.

But I want less shenanigans like this, and I have to say, yeah, there's the late night thing. Is this also your reaction, Josh? I guess the exact thing, yes, is if five of the USB sticks were missing results from the election, so then they have to go try to re-grab them.

Yeah. This guy is like on no sleep. All the folks behind the scenes are talking about this as well. Live on NBC, and he's just like losing his mind. Look, it's unfortunate. The folks behind the scenes hear what you're saying. Yes. How do I ask this artfully?

Dude, I'm putting that one in my bag, how to ask this artfully, whenever I'm so stuck, I can't speak. We don't have to do elections like this. That's why I think we need to adopt the Florida standard, the gold standard, when it comes to counting votes, you know, counting absentee ballots ahead of time, and not having these shenanigans where you're, like, driving thumb drives and all this other kind of stuff.

You know, I would love to have the Save America Act passed, and I'd love these things to be fixed. And by the way, Donald Trump made a lot of good endorsements overall this year, but he made some clunkers, and one of the clunkers he made was the MyPillow guy. No, Mike Lindell. I was going to say it if you didn't, man. He says a lot of conservative stuff, and so people like him, but he is a toxic candidate. He's just not good.

Don't nominate him, and Trump endorsed him to run for governor in Minnesota. And thank the good Lord that Republicans in Minnesota were like, yeah, no, no, no, no. We're probably not going to win, but we're not going to completely torpedo our chances and suppress, you know, the vote. And so, Mike Lindell lost by 10 points to Lisa DeMuth, who's a really solid, you know, conservative candidate. Relatively speaking for Minnesota, has a chance to possibly be competitive, and the idea is, well, why does it matter?

Neither one of them is likely to win. You want someone at the top of the ticket who's going to actually inspire people to vote and give you a sense that you might actually win so that the other races down ballot, attorney generals, auditor, all the legislative seats aren't forgotten, but if you have somebody like Mike Lindell up there who's just throwing out verbal grenades and blowing up.

And he doesn't have the talent like Donald Trump to pull it off, by the way. It's a disaster. And what does Mike Lindell say? He's like, oh, I think it's electioneering problems and something goofy, and he's challenging he won't concede. Brother, you lost by 10 points. It's one thing in Donald Trump in 2020, when it was like a total of 40,000 votes over three states, like less than 1%, like Arizona, Wisconsin, and Georgia. That's one thing. But you, brother, you're not even close.

Another Trump endorsement, and look, I love Donald Trump as much as a main Democrat loves his cousin. However, down in the South Carolina Republican primary. Thank you. Someone's got to say it, dude. This Darlene Graham thing is so weird. It's so weird. I hate it.

One, it goes back to the privilege like we're seeing with Mitch McConnell. I'm sorry, elected offices are not inheritable. That's what England does, baby. That's not what we do. And secondly, We don't know what our positions are. South Carolina has not had a good senator, in my opinion, since Jim DeMint, and that's like over a dozen years ago. This is my opinion. CatholicVote has not gotten involved in this primary or race. Ralph Norman has a solid record. Because he endorsed Nikki Haley prior is one reason why Trump kind of stayed out of the race, but Trump did say this morning, he's here like, I endorse all these guys.

I endorsed her early in the Because that is what her brother would have wanted, and out of respect for her brother. So, I can see that, and that is a good sign. He is giving permission for people to vote for Ralph Norman by saying that. Exactly.

Which is what you should do for South Carolina, by the way. Exactly. To finally have somebody solid again in the U.S. Senate like that. But look, McCluskey, a majority of Republicans in South Carolina were given the chance. You know, and if she would have had 50% plus one vote, a simple majority, she would have been, you know, re-nominated, but she couldn't do it, and so now we're in a runoff. Yeah. And so, you know, she gets appointed to the seat, all this goodwill, you know, for her brother, all the great stories, all that kind of stuff, and the president's endorsement.

And yet, still can't get over a majority. So, that tells me Ralph Norman's in a good spot. I say vote for him. Yeah, if we're just popping off about frustrations, him endorsing Byron Donalds in Florida for the governor, it feels like such a... Middle finger to DeSantis for running against him. I'm almost positive that's going on there, because Byron Daniels is not a good candidate. I don't think he'd be a good governor. I don't think he's legitimate at all. To have to follow up one of the greatest governors, red state governors of my lifetime, Ron DeSantis, is a disappointment, and it's keeping him from being able to really like...

He hasn't endorsed Byron Downs. I doubt he's going to, but I think he's just going to look at the calculus and be like, he has future ambitions. He doesn't want to tangle on this, but I see this as very much a middle finger. He was a trailblazer, but I like Byron in the U.S. House. He was always there when you needed him on votes and everything else, and to speak out. And I can understand the endorsement there. Trump rewards loyalty, and Byron Donald has played the long game.

Um, and back Trump very early on. So, I could see it. I know there's personal stuff, I think, perhaps, and it does sound like, I mean, you get into the Susie Wiles stuff and DeSantis stuff early on and stuff like that. I don't know and don't care about any of that stuff.

For people that don't know, Susie Wiles, DeSantis fired Susie Wiles from running his campaign, and then he went to go run Trump's campaign. She certainly went on to bigger and better, bigger things. Um. All I'm saying is that I would give Byron Donalds a chance. Okay. And I would just say this, too. We always talk about how we want term limits and all that kind of stuff. Like, this is the reason why term limits are bad. Ron DeSantis should be, like, governor there for the next 30 years.

The guy's freaking amazing. The emperor of Florida, yeah. And Ron DeSantis was not a great member of Congress. That's true. He was not a standout or anything like that. As governor? He is easily America's best governor. He was not America's best congressman. Interesting. Interesting background. The other one that's a real head-scratcher to me is Vivek Ramaswamy in Ohio.

I mean, we got a win, but it is going to be a race to the finish. He is so reviled by people of my generation, it is outrageous. I saw him get booed at a Young Americans for Freedom, because he is pro-H1B, and we are like, we are so tired, and the crash out on Doge over Americans being lazy, and not going to math camp, and all of that, it is just like, who? There is going to be a lot of conservatives who are going to look at the top of that ballot.

Maybe leave it blank. I'm one of them. I wouldn't vote for him if I was in Ohio. It's just amazing to think that Michigan might elect a Republican to the Senate, and Ohio might elect a Democratic governor. It's just like Bizarro. I think it's super possible. I mean, take what you want about polls and back to the Senate.

Yeah. I don't think so. Interesting times. I don't think Sherrod Brown gets it. Interesting times. I hope you're right. I mean, part of this, people make strategic decisions. So, independent voters are like, okay, I'll vote for Amy for governor, and then I'll put Houston back in the Senate. So, people make those... I always have to remind myself that John Houston is a U.S. Senator. The thing is, so many people... Like, you have a situation where, you know... So many people, the partisanship level has gone up, and so most of the people you know vote all Republican, and then you've got cities where everyone votes all Democrat.

I think that will change. But there are people that vote. That's my hot take. There are people. That split their ticket, and they vote for the Republican for governor, and maybe the Democrat for the Senate, or vice versa, and they're not as many as they used to be, but sometimes in a race like in Ohio, it might prove to be consequential, because you might get a situation where they vote for the Republican for the Senate, and they vote for the Democrat for governor, and they balance their ticket that way, and, you know, stranger things have happened.

Okay. So, AOC has been on quite a run. If you have been paying attention, I believe she made a video in which she froze her eggs. I saw an announcement this morning. She broke up with her fiancé, and she is now going on and downplaying all of her personally held policies and the policies of people that are on the more extreme end of the left. I will play that rationalization on ABC. Here we go. It's possible to win the Senate, so I've been focused on.

What do you make of those controversial statements I'm sure you've seen? I mean, she's, you know, the Thanksgiving dust-up. She says she doesn't, you know, still believe that, but, you know, the abolished prisons, abolished police, which is also positions that have been taken by a lot of the progressive candidates who have won. How do you get around that? Yeah. Those are not positions that are supported by most people. Right. I mean, I think that a lot of these races...

Even right now, they'll have a tendency to be nationalized, but these races ultimately are local, and all politics are local. My understanding is that Francesca Hong has made clear her present stances to her electorate. Yeah, she's moved away from a lot of that. Right, she's moved away from it, and I have a local city councilman that has this...

Saying woke one was crazy. And I think that what is important is that we have to assess what... Did the movement go too far with some of those positions? You briefly supported the idea of defunding the police. Well, you know, I think that...

During this time, and especially during COVID, there was a huge opening of the overtime window. We were shut down. There were some of the highest unemployment rates that we have seen because of those shutdowns, and I think that the doors were really open in trying to entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place, and I actually think that the discussions that were had in that time were quite... Fruitful. I think that when we talk about crime today, it's fundamentally different than the way we talked about crime in bringing crime down, right?

And I think that we all share in the goals of having as low a crime rate as possible. I think that during lockdown, of course, rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today, and I'm grateful that these candidates have the opportunity to present who they are to their electorate and what they're campaigning on in this moment. So, apology accepted?

No apology. There was no apology. It wasn't an apology. ABCs, Jonathan Karl, and everyone else out there in the mainstream media are going to carry water for this and say, Ooh, we've got a new moderate AOC. Begins the process of, you know, running for president in 2028, but like, I have to, it's just, it's all baloney. It's absolute joke. As Bishop Barron, thank you, Bishop Barron, for stepping up and pushing back against this. He says, woke one was not only misguided, it was cruel.

One of the bitterest fruits of wokeism, he says, was the cancel culture that resulted in armies of people losing jobs, reputations, and careers because they didn't correspond to the reigning orthodoxy. He's absolutely right. It's not like, oh, oops, my bad. What are you talking about? These people were absolutely psycho.

Against anyone who dared go against them. And what happened? Oh, crime? Hello? After George Floyd, like, the police, you know, defund the police, and police all around the country were, like, taking a step back, homicide rate went sky high. Like, that means people were dying because of your policies.

But, Josh, it's not about the people hurt. It's about the friends you make along the way. Yeah, right. How can you hold her accountable for something she said 10 minutes ago? I was trying my best to go find, like, so basically, this dropped, and all of the normal people Like, this is a story of when politics gets to a level where you have broken through into, like, the normie sphere, and I think, undoubtedly, I don't want to know what woke two is, but woke one truly broke through, whether it was boys and girls sports at, like, the local high school level, men and women's bathrooms, police, like, there was a Seattle, like, zone in which people...

Like, I'll just go through some of the hits here real quick, because I went back to try to remember. There was an eight-block cop-free zone after police abandoned the East Precinct. It lasted about three weeks and saw four shootings, two fatal, along with robberies and assaults, before the police retook the area, let alone that you allowed these protests to happen while shutting everyone else down because of COVID, which was bizarre and kind of... Yeah, crazy. The whole defund the police movement, in general, actually did cause real damages to police departments, and then was repudiated at the ballot box.

It was not a convincing argument. Many places eventually reversed, Minneapolis being one of them. This is a fun example. I remember the Chicago's Teachers Union, to put out a tweet. Oh my gosh. The push to reopen schools is rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny. I remember that. These are like normal people. Who wanted their kids to go back to school and saw this. Another fun one would be renaming. San Francisco tried to rename 44 public schools while classrooms were still closed.

The school board meant to strip names such as Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, while schools were closed. Talk about missing the point. Leah Thomas and the NCAA, of course. We all are familiar with that. Youth gender mutilation becoming totally institutionalized across the country before we had any. Evidence to support this at all. I mean, it was all totally experimental, but then, hook, line, and sinker, everyone, vaccine, and religion.

FBI went after Catholics, as well as PTA parents. I mean, the federal government's role was very heavy in this as well. I mean, these people declared a country to be... They're irredeemably racist. They fomented mob violence. There was a massive crime across the country. They declared war on law enforcement. They ruined people's lives. All the Black Lives Matter, all the, you know, COVID lockdowns, that kind of stuff. And then they're like, oh, whoops. I mean, that was so long ago. These are the people that pretend like slavery was yesterday.

Like, we're not going to let them get away with this kind of crap. They're so full of it. This is four years ago. It was so long ago, but let's talk about 16, 19, like it just happened. Yeah. Like, give me a freaking break. So, I went to go find some of the lefties that I think are trying to rebrand that kind of just allowed the craziness to happen. I got Derek Thompson. I think he wrote a... Did he write the book on Biden?

He's kind of like a lefty intellectual, I guess. What would be the Republican equivalent of Democrats deciding that woke one was crazy? I think it might be something like a party-wide acknowledgement that their party leader, now polling at record lows, really did lose the 2020 election and doesn't deserve kingly fealty while he rakes in billions in crypto schemes. As inflation rises and Iran squeezes the Strait of Hormuz. So, I think conservatives are right to be miffed about lefties saying ha-ha whoopsies about some of the worst SJW nonsense of the early 2020s.

The bigger story, I think, isn't Democrats letting go of World War I, but rather the Republicans' amazing inability to let go of the million-pound anchor dragging down the party. And then Maddie Iglesias, same deal. The mistakes of Woke One, people expressing very strongly held, very simplistic opinions about complicated issues based on peer pressure and superficial memes without bothering to learn anything about the topic on hand, just continue today on new subjects rather than policing.

So, is it all kind of... I guess I'll just say, I remember. I have not forgotten. It wasn't that long ago where every major institution, universities, hospitals, corporations, school systems, sports bodies, city governments adopted so much of it. If it was just this kind of insignificant whoopsies, why did all these places adopt it within a year?

And why has nobody been held accountable, or even an apology from any of these people? Fauci is their god. And here's a guy, and I know there's stories about him we want to touch on, too, but everybody applauds this Anthony Fauci, and even Joe Biden, how he saved lives and everything else.

Nobody has been held accountable, and part of that is on us, and on the Republicans for not holding them accountable. Well, we're starting to with Fauci. Not enough. Yes. Not enough. And we had a vote to hold him in contempt.

We had a vote to hold him in contempt. We're starting some of this stuff. Okay. Not enough. Something like Arctic Frost, I think on the Catholic memo, there has not been enough. That's right. Supposedly, FBI people were fired. Who?

Ooh, it's been a couple of years now since they've supposedly been fired. We should be able to know their names by now. So, basically, I think you mentioned it too, Tom. That is not a real apology. That is like the new, ran by a focus group answer to try to reposition under, and even in the Derek Thompson thing. I think the Trump administration has done a number of very corrupt things. The war has been a disaster, in my opinion, and inflation has been bad.

So, there's real economic populist arguments to run under, but I don't think that this is a sincere apology at all. And if anything, I just wish you would come out and be more honest about it, as some of the DSA candidates have, of like, oh, no, we believe this, but then run the economic populist arguments as well, because they're finding success against what's been kind of a flailing. Right, on a lot of the affordability, you know, kitchen table type issues. Like, basically, I don't want this because all of this are just like, this is failures of the left, and I think it really is.

But I was curious to put in front of both of you, this was making the rounds as well, like, potentially real failures of the right. And this is coming from people that I very much disagree with on their approach to the Iran war. This is John Potters and the commentary mag crew, who have been very supportive of the Iran war. I'm curious what you think about their analysis at this point from Republicans. Running in midterms, John Podhurst. His poll numbers stink.

The war's poll numbers stink. The war's poll numbers are starting to stink among Republicans. This is the major commitment of his first term, and it's failing. And so he and the Republicans are going into the midterm elections with absolutely no positive case to be made.

About the last two years of governance, aside from the passage of the one big beautiful bill, which doesn't seem... To have much in the way of electoral legs, since you don't hear anybody on the campaign trail talking about the greatness of the one big, beautiful bill, and the tariffs are in question. The ballroom has been frozen. The ice is now sort of quieted down. It's public raids.

His numbers on immigration are bad. His numbers everywhere are bad. I disagree on that. And in the end, this is all going to be the fault of refusing to do the right things to win the war. Because winning the war would have all sorts of ancillary benefits you can't entirely guess at.

Surge of national pride, a sense that, you know, a country's monstrous regime has been ended and that the people there have been liberated from its horrible yoke, even if you don't quite know what's going to come next. Restructuring of the Middle East so that the so that we are less beholden to or.

Wow. In bed with forces like Gutter that are doing domestic damage to the United States in terms of their propaganda campaigns. I don't know what. He knows about propaganda campaigns. But losing is the end of everything. So, there's a beautiful moment of unity with me and John Potter. It's right up until he said, we didn't do what we needed to do to win the war.

Maybe we just shouldn't have gotten into this war to begin with. I'd love for him to say, what do we have to do, John, to win this war? War crimes, hitting civilians. We're going to need people on the ground. Roots on the ground. We're going to have to hit civilians. We're going to have to, all the reasons why we didn't want to get involved in this war to begin with. Because to go all the way, nobody wants to do that.

And I'm not advocating to do that. The current situation in stalemate with Iran is a drag on the Republican ticket. On the Republican, you know, all these Republicans running, but if they, you know, if they won, that minus two, three points or whatever would no longer be there, but it's not like it's a positive, it would be a positive development other than just removal of a negative. Like, there's no surge in national pride. Most people would be like, oh, thank God that's over.

That's what they would say, and then we move on. And it may not be a bit, you know, again. I did not want this war. I still don't want it. Obviously, I'd like Trump to declare victory as much as he can. I think it's not as bad as others think it is, but American voters don't really care for it. That's true.

But ultimately, you know, Republicans don't have to have all these great policies. I mean, I think the one big beautiful bill was good, but you don't necessarily always have to have great, tons of great positive policy stuff to run on when the other side is losing their minds. And you have candidates like El-Said and Peggy Flanagan who are basically saying abolish private health insurance. But we can't always rely that the other side is going to, we can't always rely that. The other side.

I'm not saying rely on it. You know that. You just did, though. I'm not saying that you should rely on it. You like the other side so bad that you've got to vote for Republicans. That does not mean the Republicans are good. I go to a lot of meetings up on the Hill with leadership staff and people who are running these campaigns and everything, and the main argument I hear is why the Republicans should win is because it could be worse.

That's not something to run on. That's not what Trump ran on. It's not what Reagan ran on. I mean, the one thing from what you just quoted on from John Ponhoritz, I would say, is true. It's like Republicans are not running on the one big, beautiful bill. They should be hammering on how good that is for lots of different reasons, like we extended the tax cuts, no tax on tip over time for seniors, and the child tax credit, the federal school choice provision in there, which needs to be talked about and explained.

Part of the problem is that that doesn't go into effect. Until January 2027, so you're not going to be able to see the fruits of that, necessarily. But yeah, I mean, again, I think those are the things you should be talking about.

They did have some accomplishments. Very hard to get policy wins when you have a razor-thin majority, but they did it, and they should talk about it. But my point is not that, you know, again, it should be the Democrats to win. The Democrats should win the House and the Senate.

But they fumbled a lot with the DSA, and just because Francesca Hong came up short for governor doesn't mean that the DSA socialist takeover isn't happening, and it is causing dark clouds. And if these DSA candidates like Al Saeed and Peggy Flanagan, you know, it was Graham Platner, now it's this Troy Jackson, whatever.

They are a new Democratic Party, and they are calling for, you know, not just liberalism, but like socialism, abolishing private health care, you know, and all the other myriad of crazy proposals that they have, and Republicans have a chance to make it a referendum on them. On these socialist candidates, like, do you really want socialism? Is that the answer? Now, I do think Tom Tiffany, like I said, talking about housing affordability, that kind of stuff is the kind of thing that I encourage all Republicans to be running on.

Do that. Talk about that. That is what we want. We want more family formation. We want affordable housing. That is what we should be talking about. Yeah. Go ahead, Tom. When we had our event, Zeal 250, out in one of those flyover states. Wisconsin, yeah. Hey, Beltway, Tom.

I was working security, like letting speakers in and everything else, and this guy comes up dressed like a Midwesterner, all by himself, no entourage. And it was just me out there, and I'm here like, hi, can I help you? And then he like leans in and goes, Tom, it's Congressman Tiffany? He just showed up all by himself.

That's why I love Tom Tiffany. Tom Tiffany, he's just a, he doesn't have the entourage or anything like that. So, that and the way he's, just as Josh said, he is. Here is what other candidates should try to be. I recommend that model. It was so interesting for John Potterhurst, who I basically blood oath disagree with on Israel, foreign wars, the Middle East, everything. And I guess we occupy the same party at this point. Making all the same points that I'm making, or people at this office are making, obviously a different conclusion.

My message would be, it's not good enough. And I actually see some parallels, too. Remember when Trump ran, and Democrats tried to run their entire campaigns on, well, look how crazy Trump is, look how bad he is. You just give that attention to the other side. And I'm seeing a lot of this going on. It's like, Trump's just giving a layup to all the DSA people. He's like, these people are so extreme, they're so whatever. Some of the more well-spoken, effective communicators.

Are you succeeding because of that? And maybe you could say they're trying to set them up in the primaries to run against a better opponent coming forward here. There could be some truth to that. But I would just warn at the vote for me because the other side is so bad, because that really is not a positive argument based on your accomplishments over the last two years, in which there's been large, in my opinion, a lot of flailing. Right? I understand.

I just want to make sure people know. I think it is fair to have said that that is what I was getting at, and I think the more accurate thing I am trying to say is I think Republicans should champion their one big beautiful bill more. I do think there has been success at the border and deportations, maybe not as much as people want, but there are two things that the election of Donald Trump that have... We categorically changed the country for the better.

One, the border was closed, and we have begun deportations. That is true. Maybe not as many as people like, but the numbers are not that bad, actually. And number two, we did break the fever of the trans stuff, and we were getting medical communities revisiting their guidelines.

The administration yesterday finalized a rule preventing Medicaid funding from going for this kind of stuff. So, we are having successes, and I do think Republicans need to say, like, what did we talk about the last episode? Donald Trump has this thing where he's like, well, if I'm president, everything must be awesome. That's not the approach to take, actually. What you should do is say, we've done a lot of awesome things so far, but we need more to do, and that's why you need to keep voting for our candidates.

Then, that is why I think we need a campaign on housing affordability. That is what I am saying with Tom Tiffany. So, I am not saying rest on their laurels and just say the other side is bad. However, the fact that the other side is committing, like, you know, going crazy for socialism does provide an opportunity. That is what I was trying to get at. Point taken. All right, let us run good news now. Tom, you are actually up top. I do not know if you had.

Oh. Well, while he thinks about his good news, do you want me to do mine? Sure, yeah, go for it. Yeah, go ahead. Well, I mean, I alluded to it just now, but I mean, you know, it's official now that Health and Human Services Secretary R.F.K. Jr. said, Carry serious risks and cause irreparable harm to children and vow that the federal government can no longer use, no longer have Medicaid and CHIP dollars go to fund procedures that fail to meet the evidentiary standard our children deserve.

So, no more funding for sex-rejecting surgeries on children. So, this is good. This is good news. Positive development. That is great. And then, mine was going to be, I don't know if you've seen this fifth inning piece, be with you.

The Sox down on the south side did a Pope Leo promotion in which they gave everyone hats. And here's father in the fifth inning. We offer each other a sign of peace, because we want to bring peace to the world, and I think the Pope would really love that, whether you're Catholic or not. So everybody should stand and find a new friend around you, and offer each other the sign of peace.

They're good times. You know, the Pope's smiling at that. I'd like it to be in the stadium like that. I did see one of my trad friends getting a little dig. It's like the sign of peace is now where it belongs, at the ballpark.

I'm kind of the same. I'm not a trad mass guy. I'm like Josh. It's fine. It's not my cup of tea, though. However, whenever I go to a mass where they have sign of peace, I just look at my wife, and I'm here like, yeah, this is a liberal mass. This is a little, could be a lot of the sign of peace.

Yeah, totally. Well, it is also just like, yeah, it is wrong, but I mean, this is good. I think it was kind of cute. Very fun. Like, you know, I think Pope Leo is smiling. I think the good Lord found this good. I do not think it is irreverent or anything. I think it is kind of fun. And the Pope hats. Yeah, the Pope. You thought it was a problem with the Pope hats? No.

Not a huge fan. Someone in the chat, what is that actually, what is the theological term for it? The mitre? Is that a miter? Yeah. You can point it to the popes. Is that the... What is White Sox themed?

Yeah, Tom, is this like your version of the Met Gala, when they did like a Catholic-themed Met Gala, and they were like dressing up in all the drip? Well, you allow the camel's nose into the tent sometimes. You go from, you go, the White Sox lead directly to the Met Gala, and the Met Gala gives us the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, and then we're all in hell. I'd rather have the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, I'll tell you that.

Tom, did you have a good news, or do you want to rock, Fauci? Well, just because we're talking about Swamp and everything else, it is just... Staffers up on Capitol Hill, because we were talking about the sports bill before, I really was not paying a lot of attention to it. We cover a lot of issues of CatholicVote.

And it was a staffer who contacted me and said, have you looked at this? Even before she went to her boss, they went to their boss, I don't want to get the staff in trouble. And this is the same staffer that a couple of months ago came to me and said, there's some bad language in this NDAA bill that would create basically a frozen embryo bank funded by taxpayers. In the National Defense Authorization Act? That's where the Democrats were. What are we doing?

I've tried to put IVF in there. Because that's, again, the camel's nose under the tent. Yeah, almost single-handedly, because she contacted me, and I contacted the right people and all, and we took it out before it was ever in the news. That is insane. That is so insane. That's why you support CatholicVote, people.

That's why you support CatholicVote. Recent convert, the person I'm talking about, another person who's a friend of Tom's, is also like... You have these people on the inside who make sure their bosses… By Tom, I mean Tom Bukasik, even though he's a friend of mine now, too.

You have these guys doing the inside baseball stuff who actually care about these issues, are faithful, and stop things before they get bad, and that's a sign of a good staffer. Not that you read about in the news how their boss stopped something. It's you don't even read about it at all. Yeah, absolutely. I've seen some interesting analysis. Part of this is just the frustration that we have such a geriatric.

Senate and House in general, and even one of the takeaways from a lot of these primaries have, even at the state level, a lot of those people have been unseated. A lot of the people that have been around for a long time, very old, have been replaced by younger people, but even the people that are at that level have younger staff, and younger staff that are, they're not popping off on Twitter, they're not, you sent me that article that Well, Rachel wrote, Rachel Bovard, about this kind of like hysteria over Groyper staff members, invisible Groyper staff members, and just such a ridiculous smear in an attempt to basically get at J.D.

Vance. Like, J.D. Vance's foreign policy is unacceptable to many people, so they come up with these smears like, oh, they're Groypers, blah, blah, blah. It's like, those are the people that actually probably deserve the credit and aren't getting it and probably don't want it because... Um, they actually are principled, conservative, America first people that got into a very low-paying job, but have worked for a long time to hopefully do what they think is best for the country, and see from a perspective of a younger person, too.

So, I got a lot of love for a lot of you. I just want to, for one second, though, but like, outside of the Stafford thing, like, you know, you mentioned the geriatric, you know, representatives that we have, um, you know, like, on the Democratic side, they just ousted someone who is super old and replaced him with someone younger.

We're seeing a lot of primaries. The thing is, I feel like 20 years ago, you know, almost no one voted in primaries, and you're just stuck with whoever you got in the general or whatever. And I do think that one of the good advantages of the internet, where you can show people the records and talk about this stuff, and you can have these discussions, we're getting more people participating in primaries, and that hopefully then we can get rid of some of the stuff.

So, we're not just, oh, well, I guess we have to expect... You know, Lindsey Graham's sister. It's like, well, no, actually, we're not just going to be spoon-fed stuff. We can actually say, well, wait a minute now. Maybe there's somebody else better. So, again, it doesn't mean we're going to win every time on these things, but we are hopefully getting to, like, you know, John Cornyn. Like, no, actually, you know what? Let's get somebody better. Let's get someone instead of Ted Cruz.

I love that. Okay, let's go headline now with... Yeah, so the Fauci tax, and I want to do a good job setting this up because I've seen a lot of different takes on this. It is pretty outrageous, frustrating, but I want to be as accurate as possible. So, Tom, you're probably... Have been around on this. We have Ron Johnson and Rand Paul released the first batch of text messages recovered from Anthony Fauci's government-issued iPhone. The HHS turned the phone contents over on August 5th, and according to Johnson's office, it contains more than 34,000 texts and 522 voicemails.

If you remember, Fauci was brought in front of Congress and pled the fifth for just about everything. It was a pretty outrageous display. And so, We now have an explosive exchange between January 25th and January 26th, 2021. This was between Dr. Fauci, CDC Director Rochelle Walensky, and Vivek Murthy, who is about to become the Surgeon General. They were discussing whether pregnant women should receive the newly authorized COVID vaccines and whether timing during pregnancy mattered. So, Fauci initially said there was no data or theoretical reason to prefer vaccination.

Earlier or later in pregnancy, this is all over text. Then he followed up after asking around, quote, since many people have significant, oh boy, C-Y-T-O-K-I-N-E-S. Cytokines, I think. Thank you, cytokines. There's no way I was getting that one. Storm and fever after the second dose. This theoretically could be associated with miscarriage in the first trimester. Walensky responded, definitely a good point, especially after dose two. Murthy also called it a really good point. This is newly disclosed to the public. This was all just text messages on the phone.

And it matters because pregnancy had largely been excluded from the original vaccine trials, meaning the officials themselves acknowledged that the data was incomplete. Then, it comes to the public nine days later. On February 3rd, Fauci publicly discussed vaccination during pregnancy. His message was, more than 10,000 pregnant women had been vaccinated and regulators had found no red flags. Then on February 10th, he said approximately 20,000 pregnant women had been vaccinated, quote, with no red flags. So, this is basically why it's controversial, because privately, he's saying, theoretically, you know, talking between doctors, there could be problems.

We don't know because we don't have the data, but there's reason to suspect that, you know, there's a connection here with miscarriage. But then he publicly comes forward and says, there's no red flags, there's no reason to question at all.

Now, I want to also say, another thing that was revealed that makes it even crazier was, on January 26th, Murthy tells Fauci and Walensky that the World Health Organization had advised against giving Moderna's vaccine to pregnant women because of the lack of data. Murthy tells them that he worries that the WHO's recommendation could create a, quote, flurry of questions. Yeah, that's it. Murthy responds that pregnant women should weigh risks and benefits. Murthy then says he was surprised the WHO issued such a strong recommendation because it could be...

Quote, potentially quite damaging to public confidence among pregnant women. Well, Walensky then said she'll flag the issue for the next ACIP meeting, ACIP. So, outrageous. The thing you've got to remember, if you or a pro-life organization said anything that they just said on text, they lost their Facebook page, they lost their ex-account, because this was before, it's a Twitter account, because this was before Elon bought it, and they were shunned. You would have been laughed off the media if you tried to say this in the media, because some people did.

I know when I was at the March for Life, we were trying to say, like, you need to be cautious here. That it goes back to the woke stuff, and that there have been no repercussions, and that they so casually just dismissed it, that, yeah, maybe there might be some miscarriages, but we don't want people to lose confidence in this vaccine that doesn't even do what they say it does. Right. I don't think I could say it better than that.

That was perfect. Words fail me. You know, these guys, I mean... But here's one thing, and maybe this is the thing that's so frustrating with Fauci, is if you were confident in how you acted, clearly you went on every news show, you soaked up all the praise you wrote in your diary, how much you loved being on all these shows, and your reputation, and you were proud of how you acted, then you have no reason to hide. You got a presidential pardon.

You could go in front of Congress and be honest and say, we had these concerns, we didn't have the data, here was the conversation that I had. It's not like he thought this wasn't going to come up. Obviously, this is one of the most contentious health issues of anyone's lifetime. It's just the lack of honesty. If you believed in it, stand by it, and you owe it to the public because you shut down the public based on your, quote, science, that you're not willing to reveal to the public the process and how that's even created.

It's actually anti-scientific. It's authoritarian. Yeah, and by pleading the fifth, I mean, you know, and silencing dissent and all this other kind of stuff, it's created a storm where people don't believe anything, anything really from the government. And so, if Dr. Fauci wanted to try to begin to restore public confidence in our health officials, he should have been open and honest, just like you said, and been forthright and said, you know what? We were concerned, it was a pandemic, that if people started getting worried, everyone would second-guess it, and no one would take it, and that would be a problem.

Level with people. Instead, they just continue to ignore it, and it drives me up the wall. And I don't know what happened with your lighting there, Tom. Yeah, dude, I'm dark night mode right now. Let me change my, it's because we got storms coming. I'll be there in a sec.

Go on, Tom. Well, I just remember, because if you remember, Blacks, when the vaccines first came out, they were finding a problem that a lot of African Americans did not want to take the vaccine, and it is because their institutional memory or their memory is a lot longer, because in the 1900s, there were these Tuskegee experiments. Where blacks in America were told they were being treated for something, sometimes it was syphilis, but other things as well, and usually weren't. Sometimes they were actually given diseases just to see how the effects would be, and none of this came out until the early 1970s.

Um, that the government was doing this. It's like, it's like when a conspiracy theory like that is proven, and you lose the credibility, Anthony Fauci now is just ruining the credibility even further by not being, as Tom said, honest. Um, I, something like this, um, I mean, coming from Tom especially, who is just like the rest of us, is a firm believer in the moon landing, you need a counter.

Ah, yes. You need to counter these things, otherwise they become conspiracy theories, and it hurts you down the line, and it hurts the country a lot more down the line, lack of honesty. I think you got a good point there, because remember the clip, and it resurfaced again when Fauci refused to testify, where Fauci and this other public health official or whatever is going around neighborhoods, I think it was in Baltimore or something like that, and this black guy is just like, hell no.

I ain't taking it. Get out of here. Like, that guy was a hero. It's long ago now, long ago enough now that... Because I was called into a private meeting with Francis Collins, who has kind of worked alongside, NIH director, and this was kind of my first personal interaction with him. It was me, a guy from the USCCB who is not there any longer, and also a doctor who had dealt with Dr. Fauci for a very long time, this guy, Dr.

David Prentice, fantastic bioethicist. Except the guy from the USCCB was just perfect in just asking Francis Collins, so would you experiment on babies that were just born? He tried to walk him, like, would you experiment on political prisoners? Would you experiment on prisoners in death row? And Francis Collins, and I bring him up because him and Anthony Fauci are from the same cloth. Twins.

No humanity. It was just, it was a matter of, in the name of science, he would not answer equivalently. No, we would not experiment on, like, babies. No, we would not experiment on that. Oh, my gosh. That's like supervillain stuff. That is exactly how, and this meeting was supposed to, Roy Blunt set it up, because Francis Collins was a Christian, you know.

Wait, you are talking about Francis Collins' famed folk guitar player? Yes, yes. Ah, okay. I actually know more from that. Sorry about that. Well, yeah. I mean, who doesn't have a CD and used to? They are both considered Christians. So, it is Fauci, right?

He is Catholic. I think Fauci is Catholic. Oh. Has he gotten a permanent zero of the year, or zero of the century award from us? Francis Collins is evangelical. That is supervillain stuff. I was shocked, and couldn't really talk about it. I figure it's enough time now, have passed. He's out of government, Roy Blunt's out of government, and... The guy from the USCCB isn't there any longer. And Dr. Prentice, he's a folk. He's been fighting this fight for decades. He wouldn't mind.

All right. Well, speaking of fights, we've had a lot of people emailing about this video in particular. Here is Governor Maura Healey in Massachusetts. She is signing a bill for abortion up to birth. It's grounded by all women.

So, the rationale is, sign this law on August 10th, removes virtually all remaining restrictions on late-term abortions in the state, allowing abortion up to the moment of birth passed based on a physician's judgment. You want to hear the title? This is always my favorite part. Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act. Sounds pretty reasonable to me. It repeals the previous statutory restrictions on abortions at or after 24 weeks of pregnancy, except in cases involving the mother's life or health. ...or certain severe fetal diagnoses.

Under the new law, an abortion may be done at any stage based on the professional judgment of a physician scheduled to take effect November 8th, 90 days after Healy signed it. Massachusetts joins Alaska, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington, D.C. in removing gestational age limits on abortion.

Yeah, so the governor there, she is a lesbian, and she claims to be Catholic, and she just signed a bill to make abortion up until the moment of birth. She loves getting photos. Yeah, there's the photo of her with Pope Francis, and she talks about, you know, many times she's had priests over, you know, for dinner at the table and all that other kind of stuff as a Catholic. Yeah. So, at least Fauci doesn't claim to, Fauci claims he's culturally Catholic.

He doesn't actually go to church anymore. So, at least he's not faking it, whereas she's actually faking it. She still realizes there's something to be gained by lying. And pretending you're still Catholic. And so, this is what really frustrates me about this, because the Archdiocese of Boston put out a statement after this that said, the passage and signing of a bill radically expanding abortion in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a grave offense against the sanctity and dignity of every person. That's the Archbishop Richard Henning of Boston.

Yeah, you know, that's true. And he goes on to say, I realize that those who worked up, hold, and promote that dignity may feel discouraged in this moment. Yeah, you know why I'm discouraged? Because the bishops only put out a statement. Like, they still pretend like this is like 1984, 1985, when Mario Cuomo gave that speech saying, I'm personally opposed, but we're not going to be, like, enough. We can't talk to these politicians anymore.

They still see a value of promoting themselves as Catholic and supporting baby killing. So, don't, I mean, you know, at least Archbishop Corleone said. Don't go to communion anymore. Like, at least that was a step. I wish more bishops would do that, and in fact, eventually, it would just excommunicate them. Like, that excommunication is always thought of as... Kelsey was saying she is de facto excommunicated. I don't care about the de facto. I want it done. What does she mean by that?

Is that because she got married? Okay, so if I were to go out and join the Masons... That's an automatically excommunicatable offense. If I become a Freemason, I can no longer become a Catholic. It's an automatic excommunication. So, that's what they mean by de facto. Like, you've done an action, which means you are outside of the church. But what I'm saying is, like, if just Joe Small off the street decides to become a Freemason, and he's de facto excommunicated, fine. You know, not good, but yeah, whatever, sure.

This is the governor of the state, and it's incumbent upon the bishop to actually do something more, rather than just saying a statement. Like, these statements, we've been having statements like this for 40 years. Like, it's just not enough. Like, the hope that, well, gosh, maybe if I talk to them and walk them through. No. They're playing you for fools. Stop it. Joe Schmoe the Mason would still keep on going to church unless somebody explained to him and told him, no, you can't anymore.

You're excommunicated. You're exactly right, Josh. These people need to be made an example of that what you did was wrong. Anybody who supported this bill, you should consider you are not worthy of communion. Yeah. It is discord in our community when you support this stuff.

It's that we don't do that is how we have lesbian governors meeting with the Pope and then signing into these bills. I mean, I don't have the issue, I guess, with them meeting, but it's like, in that meeting, it's like, well, what are we talking about? Like, hey. You just signed this bill. By the way, I think the Pope should meet with all sorts of world leaders, and if he wants to meet with the king of Brunei or whatever, fine, but actually, I wish you'd have a higher standard for when it comes to Catholic officials.

And if they're a Catholic official who supports abortion, maybe he meets with them, but there's no cameras. You know what I'm saying? So that can't be used to kind of promote what's going on. But I do want to just point out one other thing, by the way.

A lot of secularists have long told us... Hey, we can have morality. We don't need religion in order to have morality and have good laws and all that other kind of stuff. And you're like, okay, sure. And then they turn around and support, I don't know, the killing of babies every time.

I'll stick with religion, thank you very much. These people are psycho. Like, killing babies. Like, this is the worst thing ever. Well, so here's kind of a crazy situation, and this kind of gets to... Tom, we actually haven't talked about this. Like, at this point, it's up to the states. And so, you get this kind of state-by-state kind of... Jiu-jitsu between laws and people traveling across borders. Dobbs was, of course, amazing. I never thought it would happen, but it still leaves a hole.

And so, we have this abortion or surrogacy story. It's just so crazy out of Texas. Looks like Ken Paxton is actually fighting to save this kid, but let me... Share this. Well, the fact that it got in a way, I mean, surrogacy itself is, of course, wrong. Yeah. But now that the child exists, we need to do everything we can to save it. So many layers.

What Dobbs did, did not throw it back to the states. Dobbs threw it back to the legislators, be they state or federal. And it'll be very interesting. What's interesting about this case is because Texas is also involved in a case similar to Louisiana, where they do not allow the abortion pill, except the abortion pill is being flown in from like California and other states.

And there, the federal government, the Justice Department in the Louisiana case is backing California in being able to send the abortion drug into Louisiana, even though Louisiana bans the drug. So, here is a case where Texas law sees the surrogate mother as the parent, where I don't believe Alaska law does. Right. What a mess. I mean, so just a basic summary. So, a California couple demanded that the surrogate mother that they paid abort the baby that the surrogate was caring for them named Gabriel.

After he was diagnosed with a heart condition called HLHS, and it is treatable, the surrogate mother refused. She offered to adopt and raise the baby. They are now at UTSW in Dallas, which has a near 100% success rate for treating this type of heart condition. Despite this, the parents are demanding that the surrogate give the baby to them in California after Gabriel is born. What will they do to that baby there? Palliative care, which, for those that don't know, it's a euphemism for just like, Keeping it comfortable while it dies, basically.

It is murder and infanticide. The Texas Attorney General's office now is saying, okay, we want to try to intervene because the treatment is available, we can save the child, and we do not want to let the baby go back to California in which they could just basically commit infanticide by letting it die.

Even if the baby is cured, I'm not familiar with it, even if the baby is cured, it should not go back to the parents now. In my opinion, because the parents wanted the baby killed. To me, that should automatically disqualify you as being a good parent or not.

Yes, for anyone ever. Perhaps. Tom with a strong take there. There might be some parents like, oh, I could kill you. But when you actually advocate to do it and go to the court to do it, maybe you shouldn't be a parent.

So. I applaud what Ken Paxton is doing. It is a messy situation, and it shows why the Catholic Church is right when it comes to surrogacy and IVF and egg harvesting and commodification of women and children, but it is... And it is also why I do believe there needs to be a federal standard, something along the lines, be it a 14th Amendment of recognizing humanity of the unborn child, to if we need legislation or a constitutional amendment, whatever it is, except the Trump administration needs to stop sitting on the sidelines and start getting involved in stopping the abortion drug and stop promoting IVF.

It is bad. Yeah, and obviously... Amen to that, brother. Okay, let's run Twilight Zone now. Josh, what do you have? Well, first, I just want to say, you know, a little levity here. One of the greatest, you know, walking, talking soundbites ever is Senator Kennedy from Louisiana. So, let's roll the tape on this one. Listen to Vice President Harris. No disrespect, but Vice President Harris is no longer relevant. She had her shot and she missed. She can cozy up to the loo-loo linens all she wants to, but she has me confused with somebody who cares what she thinks.

I mean, she is yesterday. You like that, but you disagree. You think Kamala is going to be the... I do think Kamala Harris is still the frontrunner for the Democratic nomination in 2028, but just the idea, you know, Lulu Lennon's is such a great little moniker. It's right up there with Neiman Marxists. I mean, it's great. That's good stuff.

Okay, Tom, if you don't have one, I have two. I can split it with you. Yeah, why don't you do that? Because the only thing I have is... I tried to look up weirdest news of the week, and hundreds of moviegoers in Colombia fled a screening of Spider-Man Brand New Day because one person's flatulence was so overpowering that the stench emptied the theater.

The culprit remains unidentified. I don't think that really qualifies. Hey, you got it all, Columbia Tom. I was not in order. My wife would probably think so. So, yeah, you go ahead, Tom. All right, yeah, yeah, that's what this one would do. This one, you know, it's getting everyone riled up on X, the Everything app. I will share the worst way to reveal that you're not going to take your husband's last name. Ladies and gentlemen, it is my honor to present the newly married couple, Mr.

and Mrs. Brandon King. Mr. Brandon Key and his wife, Regina Aloui. Oh, brother, get out while you still can. You did not tell me that! I thought you knew! You didn't tell me that! Now, I'll paint a quick picture for people who are maybe listening on the audio. This has been making the rounds. First problem, it wasn't in a church. It was in some courtyard. Second problem, I think I saw what death looks like in a new husband's eyes.

This new bride did not reveal to the officiant, whoever that is, that she's going to be keeping her last name, not taking on the last name of her husband, new husband, and yeah, just an awkward... I love that the officiant took a big, deep breath, too. He was mad. You saw the eye roll? Yeah, she killed his flow. He's like, I was all prepped here, and you did not tell me. Yeah, I don't... I always find that fascinating. So, you're not going to take the name of your husband, but keep the name of your father.

Okay. Oh, interesting take. I haven't heard that one. I like that one, Josh. I've never, is there any rationale, maybe someone in the chat has one, to not change your last name to your husband's last name? That just seems insane to me. Well, if the husband only thought about this on the day of the wedding.

Hey, there's an easy fix. You just walk away, bro. It wasn't in the church, so maybe there's that, but I mean, that is... I wasn't captivated either. I don't think that matters anymore, usually. Dude, how does that not come up? You're like, hey, that never came up once. You're like, hey, I don't want to take your last name. That's just like a nail in the... No, I don't.

I mean, again, this just gets to the big feminist debate about submitting to your husbands and all that other kind of stuff, and it blows up in a big way, but I just feel like, would the Blessed Virgin Mary not take, I mean, the naming customs were different, but if that were the case, would she not take Joseph's family name? Of course she would take his name, and it is not that Joseph is going to be sexist and misogynist. The whole feminist argument about this is just very toxic, toxic feminism.

The fact of the matter is, you take the name of your husband as a sign of respect, and what does the man do? The father, the husband, is supposed to be the servant of his family. Like, everyone's missing. I think so many people read the Bible wrong on this one. Who is Jesus Christ? Jesus Christ is the king of kings. Josh, you are talking about the verse that gets read at almost every wedding of like, woman submits to your husband, husband lay down your life basically for your wife.

Yeah, I mean, again, Jesus Christ is the king of kings, but what does he do? He comes to this in human form in the most weak way possible. He does not come in with an army and ready to kill everybody. He comes in. In the most vulnerable position ever, like a helpless child.

And what does he say? He's like the servant, like everything he does, he's washing the feet of the apostles, and they're just like, what are you doing? Like, you're the Lord God, you're the son of the Almighty, and you're washing my feet? And the whole point is, you know, Jesus Christ is telling us that, yes, I'm the top dog, and I'm serving humanity. I'm willing to serve you guys. I'm willing to die for you. That's what the husband's model is. The husband is like, I'm willing to sacrifice for my wife, for my children, and I'm willing to die for you.

It's not like this 50s caricature we have of, oh, I can drink whatever I want to at work and grab the secretary in the behind. No, get over this. That's not what's going on. And remember, the Democrats oppose voter ID because they think women are too stupid to be able to change their ID identifications. That one, and then that also reminds me of, was it Kamala Harris was like, black people can't operate laptops? Well, there was something like that, like they couldn't.

I thought that was Hillary Clinton. Hillary, there's one crazy one, just like. But again, you know, like the whole, the voter ID thing, like you're right, like, oh, we can't pass the Save America Act. Because women, when they get married, they change their names, and they're not going to be able to prove that they're citizens of the United States of America anymore. Like, what a canard that is. And it's like, well, wait a minute now. You're requiring people to have voter ID to go to grocery stores in those new government-run grocery stores in New York City.

Like, are married women not allowed to go there? Oh, yeah. It's almost like you're full of crap. Yeah, I don't know what to say. I don't think you're really set up for a super happy marriage if that happens right when you get announced, but... I know, danger, danger.

Danger. All right, so mine, this is what I've really wanted to talk about the entire episode. This is a story created perfectly for me. So, the Washington Post is now reporting about Trump's departure from last month's NATO summit in Turkey.

It seems described in many ways. Extraordinary secret... Flight operation because of an Iranian threat against his life. July 8th, the day after Trump ordered renewed U.S. strikes in Iran, he publicly boarded legacy Air Force One in Ankara, but according to the Post, Trump was secretly moved off the plane inside an airport catering truck and transferred to a smaller Air Force C-32A. The legacy Air Force One took off carrying reporters and White House staff who believed the president was still aboard, effectively serving as a decoy, and we have video of this now, which is...

I mean, obviously, you know, not great that our, I mean, the threat is so credible that our president is moving like this, but I don't think I would have ever saw this. So, here he is boarding Air Force One in Turkey.

So, we think he's on the plane. Okay. Yep. Staff think he's on the plane. Reporters think he's on the plane. Yep. And then, here is the airport catering truck that he went away in. And the media is boarding the play, and he's going to a different play. That is crazy.

This is creative. Did you see that, you know, what's the guy who runs the TMZ? Oh. No, but Tapper had a funny one who's like, as soon as this came out, he's like, I want everyone to know that we were not put at threat, that they wouldn't do this. Jake Tapper, this is not about you, bro. So many people came out to be like, oh, we were safe the whole time.

Okay, so that is Jake Tapper's claim, but then the guy who runs, what is the Harvey guy that runs the TMZ? He was super angry about this, because he was like, you know, you put all these people at risk. How dare you do this? And the fact of the matter is, if there was a real risk, like, it is not like it was like in.

Like, there's levels of risk. If it was completely unsafe to actually move the airplane at all, then they would have grounded it. But there's at least some risk. So, they're like, well, it probably is not a problem, but let's just take the plane off with everyone in it, the staff and the reporters, and we'll smuggle the president in a more secretive thing, just in case something does go wrong. But he was like, this is so dangerous, how dare you do it?

And he was mad that he didn't even go with the reporter. You know, to record anything, it's like, if they had told one reporter, forget it. Like, everyone would have found out in four minutes, because no reporters are going to keep a secret. Right, although I think, unfortunately, the message to me about all this, I mean, this is like something you drop in like a... This is a B-list movie or something like that. Turkey's a NATO country. We were in Turkey.

I understand there's a war going on. But Air Force One, the strongest, most... We're told this is an impenetrable plane. Unfortunately to me, this doesn't really project American confidence or power, especially after for how many months we've been told we won the war, we completely destroyed Iranian capability.

I don't know. They felt like they needed to take these precautions. Sure, counter it. Well, first of all, maybe the administration was checking on a leak or something like that, or they're trying to find out what's going on. This threat came from Israel. It was in Times of Israel today. They said they found a man that had a shoulder rocket near the hotel, and so they told Trump about it, and that was how all this got post-reported, and then Times of Israel today.

But I don't look at it as a sign of weakness. In other words, you should have these kind of things in place. You should run these kind of drills, even if it's... You know, even if there isn't a threat, you should try to do certain things like this every once in a while to just test your systems to make sure it doesn't, you know, you don't get a bad situation. So, I don't have any problem, you know, with it inherently. Yeah, right.

I think, though, that the scary thing about all this to me is if something did happen to that plane, even if Trump wasn't aboard it, you know, like all the Secret Service and all of the reporters, like, we'd probably be at war.

You know what I mean? Like, this is such a tenuous situation. I think Trump said if he died, like, just nuke Iran. Amazingly, that's in my will as well. It's like, you gotta laugh or you gotta cry. I don't know what to say. I choose to laugh. I'm glad everything worked out. I mean, this is all like a month after the fact, so I'm like, okay, can we, you know. We can talk about how crazy this is, and I'll end it up okay.

I did laugh at this one, I can't lie. This is Trump as Bane. No, they expect one of us in the wreckage, brother, and it's Marco Rubio. Because Trump left Marco Rubio on top aides in Air Force One as he secretly... Alright, that's all I'm going to do. I'm glad that he's okay. I'm glad everyone's okay. Okay, so we're going to do... So, daily prayer now, and then we are going to play an interview that Erika did with Archbishop Coakley, and then we will show you the trailer.

Yeah, I am looking forward to that interview. That is good. Coakley is awesome. Yeah, Coakley is the man. All right. Say a quick prayer. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. O mother of perpetual help, grant that I may ever invoke thy most powerful name, which is the safeguard of the living and the salvation of the dying. O purest Mary, O sweetest Mary, let thy name henceforth be ever on my lips. Delay not, O blessed lady, to help me whenever I call on thee.

For in all my needs, in all my temptations, I shall never cease to call on thee. Ever repeating thy sacred name, Mary, Mary. Oh, what consolation, what sweetness, what confidence, what emotion fill my soul when I pronounce thy sacred name, or even think of thee, thank God for having thee for my good, so sweet, so powerful, so lovely a name, but I will not be content with merely pronouncing thy name. Let my love for thee prompt me ever to hail thee, mother of perpetual help.

Amen. St. Thomas More, St. Fidelis, Arle Guadalupe, pray for us. Tom, thanks for hopping on today. Have a great day. We've got an episode of The Deep coming for you, and let's get into that interview. Archbishop Coakley, welcome to LOOPcast. Thank you. It's good to be with you. It's good to be with you, and I knew this would be a great interview when I looked you up, and I saw that your Episcopal motto is Duke in Altum, put out into the deep, and that's sort of my motto for my work here on LOOPcast in the Deep, and I think it's in many ways the perfect motto for the story of the American saint we're discussing today, Blessed Stanley Rother, or is it Rother?

Do we say Rother? We say Rother. Yeah, his family. Yeah, well, yeah. We'll go with how they say it in the great state of Oklahoma. So, Blessed Stanley Rother, and he's the subject of a new film, American Martyr, which will be in theaters August 25th and 26th. I believe there's a Spanish option as well coming up, and I had a chance to screen it last week. It's a beautiful film visually, but also the story it tells. So, talk to us a little bit about your involvement and how this Well, my...

The story regarding this film actually goes way back to when I first encountered Stanley Rother. I was a young seminarian, and I went to the same seminary he went to. He was already a missionary in Guatemala when I started seminary at Mount St. Mary's Seminary. He was kind of a hero, well-known to some of the faculty that were still around.

He was a missionary in Guatemala, and we heard, I remember, that he had been killed, and didn't know much about him, and there wasn't much written about him. He was kind of a local hero for us at Mount St. Mary's Seminary, but I took a great interest, providentially, from that time forward, and would read.

Take in everything I could learn about Father Rother. And fast forward many years, I received a phone call telling me that I had been appointed Archbishop of Oklahoma City. I didn't know anything about the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, except that that's where Father Rother was from. And I had heard that my predecessor, Archbishop Beltran, had opened the Diocesan phase of his cause for canonization.

As a martyr for the faith. So, I kind of inherited the cause, just as it was moving from the diocesan phase to the Roman phase, and I was privileged to be a part of the preparations for his beatification here in Oklahoma City, at which point, for part of that, the beatification ceremony, we worked with Lampstand Studios.

The production company that produced the beautiful, brief, 15-20 minute video that was used at the beatification. Years later, we decided we wanted to expand that original video, do something like a feature-length film to introduce more people to the story of Blessed Stanley Rother. And so, that is what we did a couple of years ago. We started talking again with Lampstand about expanding that, and they are wonderful storytellers.

Right. So, we returned to the drawing board and completed that, and it was a great coup that we were able to interest Martin Sheen to serve as a narrator. He was very intrigued by the story of Blessed Stanley, and that was a great enhancement for the storytelling itself.

Yeah, and the whole film hangs together so well. I think that when it comes to the martyrs of the faith, and I remember when the beatification as well, and you hear, okay, well, he's canonized because he was killed in Odeum Fidei, in the hatred of the faith, and so he's a martyr. But I think what the film really drew out for me, personally, was that his entire life, up until that very dramatic moment of his final moments, was a... A Gethsemane, a crucifixion, a living out of the passion of Christ.

So, tell us a little bit about his life, the place that he came from, his family, all of those, the drama that went into that last act of gift that he made. Yes. Blessed Stanley was raised on a farm about 25 miles from where I'm sitting here in Oklahoma City, the little town of Okarchee, Oklahoma. He was from a German Catholic farm family in Okarchee and lived a very ordinary life and came from a devout family.

The faith was very much a part of who they were. In fact, the day that... It was at a family dinner one evening that Father Rother's sister, Young Stanley Rother's sister, he wasn't even in seminary yet, told the family that she was going to enter the convent, and I don't think anybody was surprised, because she's a very devout and pious young lady, and Stanley surprised everybody when, I think it was at the same dinner, he said, well, while we're on the subject, I've decided that I'm going to go to seminary.

So, both Stanley and Marita, or Elizabeth, as her name was, Prior to religious life, announced to their family that they were going to seek to serve the Lord in consecrated life and priesthood. So that was the upbringing that he had. He was a hardworking young man.

The struggles that he encountered in seminary were such that everybody thought that he was going to take over the family farm, and he was involved in FFA, Future Farmers of America, and all of that. The fact is, he hadn't really prepared himself for seminary academically. He didn't study Latin, and back then, this was in the late 1950s, that was very much a part of the course. And so, he struggled mightily in seminary to the point that he was invited to leave Assumption Seminary College in San Antonio, where he had gone to study philosophy.

So, he was asked to leave. He didn't give up on his vocation, nor did the bishop here in Oklahoma City, and the bishop found another seminary that would accept him. He went to Mount St. Mary's Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland, and there he flourished.

He was such a handy guy. He was good at everything, you know, mechanics, and he could fix anything, so he was often called upon to use his mechanical skills, and that was really what caused him problems in San Antonio, because he was doing everything except applying himself. Except studying Latin. Yeah, exactly.

But the fact is, you know, he was a hard worker, and he was everyone's favorite. He had developed a strong Marian piety, I think, when he was growing up, but when he was at Mount St. Mary's Seminary, he became the assistant chaplain to what became the National Lourdes Grotto in Emmitsburg, Maryland. He had been Monsignor Hugh Phillips there.

If one were to visit the National Lourdes Grotto in Emmitsburg today, they would see a lot of seminarian stands, handiwork in the gardens and the stonework. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. It's beautiful. That was his traditional Catholic upbringing.

Then he flourished in seminary. He was finally ordained a priest in 1963, just as the Church was undertaking the Second Vatican Council. Five years Later, in 1968, he volunteered to serve in the diocesan mission in Guatemala, a little parish of St. James the Apostle in Santiago Atitlan, on Lake Atitlan, and that is where he spent the rest of his life. Very, very happy there.

The irony, of course, for those who know his story, is that this young man who flunked out of seminary because he couldn't pass ecclesiastical Latin when he went to Guatemala, not only had to learn Spanish, But most of his parishioners didn't even speak Spanish. They spoke a Mayan dialect called Sutuhil, and he applied himself to learning that language, which by the grace of God and the work of the Holy Spirit, he was able to make greater progress in Sutuhil than any of the other American missionaries that had served in the parish, and he was part of a team that eventually succeeded in...

Producing a New Testament in Sutu Hill, and he could celebrate the Mass in Sutu Hill and minister in that language. So, he found his place in God's. Providence, and flourished there. Yeah, and I love how much time the film takes with interviews with people who knew him, the indigenous people there, and you get a real insight, the time that it takes to tell the story of this mission that he built almost single-handedly with the help of the indigenous, that there's a story where slowly, one by one, he arrives and the other missionaries.

Slowly leave one by one until he's finally the only one left, but I love that picture of the mission. Because I think that in, you know, the American public school system right now, education system, the message we get about the church's missions, like the Spanish missions in California, is that somehow the church was, you know, forcing the indigenous peoples and sort of capturing them and forcing them to work and forcing them to take the faith. And when you actually have these first-person interviews of people who knew him, you get a sense that all of these institutions...

...sprang up out of the love that the priests and the missionaries had on this desire to help the people. So, maybe you could talk a little bit about the work of the mission and what it did for the indigenous peoples, and then how it all kind of fell apart. Yeah, it was...

A place of terrible, dire poverty. When Father Rother arrived there in 1968, the mortality rate for children was way, way, way too high. But Stanley was the right guy for the job. I mean, he could fix anything. And he put his skills to work. He knew how to farm. He knew how to fix things. He helped set up and operate a radio station that they could use for catechesis, called the Voice of Atitlan, so to use it for catechesis, get the word out, communicate with the people around Lake Atitlan.

So, he applied the skills and the talents that he did have, which were uniquely his, to the work of the mission, evangelizing, catechizing, providing social services, care and concern for the people of the community and the parish. So, it was a... A great match, you know, what he could offer and what the people needed and the needs of the church at that time.

Yeah. So, tell us a little bit about the road to martyrdom for him, and obviously, there's a lot of unrest going on in Guatemala. There's the cities are kind of overrun by the socialist communists, and then there's also the guerrillas in the hills.

What did that, how did that appear to him, living on this mission, as someone kind of watching it close in on them? You know, when he went there, I think, I can't, it wasn't enough. ...idyllic situation because of the grinding poverty, which you found there, but people were getting along, and those first years were very productive and happy years, I suppose we could say, but late in the 1970s and into the 19...

As the 1980s were dawning, there was a lot of unrest throughout Latin America, civil unrest, guerrilla movements, and oppressive right-wing governments as well. And the mission found itself kind of in between the leftist gorillas and the authoritarian government, and all Stanley was trying to do was take care of his people. He had a pastor's heart. He wasn't interested in politics. When he first went there, as a matter of fact, some of the fellow mission team members kind of... Look down upon him, in a certain sense, because he didn't seem all that interested in the latest theology and the latest trends that were happening in the church in the 1960s and the 1970s.

He went there to be a parish priest. He went there to be a missionary, to take care of people, to preach the gospel. That is what he did. That is what he applied himself to doing, and he was kind of the odd man out, if you will, but eventually, he was the one that persevered in the mission.

Later, when it became dangerous to stay there, he was being advised that he needed to come back to Oklahoma because in the unrest, there were death threats. People were being disappeared, as they said. People were being kidnapped and never seen again. Some of his parishioners were disappearing, and sometimes he would be the one that would be out to look for the bodies. So, that was the world. It changed rather rapidly over the course of those ten years or so. And finally, when his name was on one of those death lists, he was advised and finally accepted that he was going to go back.

To Oklahoma, until things cool down in Guatemala. He famously wrote in a Christmas letter in 1980, back to Oklahoma, he said, a shepherd cannot run at the first sign of danger. But eventually, he realized that the urging of his family, his bishop, and the people around him, even down there, that he needed to go back for the time being, but he pledged to the people before he left that he would return, and he did return. He returned just in time for For Holy Week in 1981.

So, that was kind of the story of his return. It was kind of his Gethsemane period. He came back to Oklahoma, but he was Totally uncomfortable being back, knowing that his people were without their shepherd, that they were suffering, and he felt a certain amount of responsibility for that and for them. So, he went back as soon as he could, and he returned for Holy Week, and by late July, he had been killed.

Wow. Yeah, his story reminds me of other stories of the saints. I was reminded of Saint Isaac Jogue, who went back to France after suffering terribly, and then chose to return to North America. And just the confidence in the power of the sacraments, and the great gift that the priesthood is to people, that conviction would take them home, that you are the pastors of our souls.

I wanted to ask you as well, his story sounds in some ways so far removed and very exotic, right, in the jungles of Guatemala and missionary life and martyrdom at the hands of guerrillas. It sounds removed and exotic and very exciting story, but as archbishop and as someone who knows him well, what would be the connection? Yeah, let me correct. Something that you just said, however. Please. It was not killed by the guerrillas. It was by the other faction. Excellent. Okay.

Thank you. I appreciate that. There are so many. Yeah, there were multiple factions, but it was kind of a right wing. Death Squad that actually killed Father Rother. From the government? Yes. Nobody was ever held accountable for his murder.

Some people were arrested, but they were released because it was recognized that they could not have been involved with the crime. So, anyway, it was... It was a mess. Yeah, completely. But to return to the question of, for you, what is his connection for American Catholics? I mean, we live very comfortable lives. Not many of us are facing death by firings, God, or by anyone. So, what do you hope, especially the people who you're the shepherd of, will take from their relationship with him?

You know, I think... For me, I think Blessed Stanley is a great reminder that God chooses ordinary people. There was nothing really exceptional about his life. He was a hard worker. He had to develop the talents that he had and compensate for those that he did not have.

But he was patient, he was faithful, long-suffering, if you will. He endured misunderstanding from those around him, and didn't let anything distract him from simply doing what he had been sent and called to do, to be a shepherd of souls, to be a parish priest. So, you know, I think...

Father Rother, Blessed Stanley, has become already a great inspiration for many young men who are pursuing a vocation to the priesthood. We have quite a number of people that come to the Shrine of Blessed Stanley Rother here in Oklahoma City to pray at his tomb.

We have parish priests who find great consolation in him and encouragement in his Determination to stay the course, if you will, and to do what they had been sent to do. So, I think that those are kind of ordinary lessons and ordinary virtues that are applicable to everyone's life. He went to be a missionary, but... For all of us, you know, we each have a mission. It is whether it might be to be a schoolteacher, it might be to be a husband, a wife, a businessman, it might be who knows what, a journalist.

Our mission is where the Lord has placed us, and to apply the talents and gifts and graces that the Lord has given to each one of us to the mission that he has entrusted to us. That is what I think Blessed Stanley can teach each one of us. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and that is really what I took away from the film as well. It is a beautiful testament to an incredible life, and what a way to celebrate America 250. We get to learn about another American blessed, and hope that our own children will join him in heaven one day.

Amen. Amen. So, thank you so much, Archbishop. We will look forward to the film, and everyone watching, if you are interested in seeing it, make sure that you check out the link in the description. Stan's life in the church was a place where he belonged.

Before he went to Guatemala on the inside, you have your family, and I have my family. Priests he knows are being killed. For signs of danger, the shepherd can't just run and leave the sheep to fend for themselves. He didn't go back to Guatemala to die. He went back to Guatemala to live. They get him.

They knew that he had died for them. This is his family. These are my people. Father Rother, he died for us. Father Stanley went into the third world, and they cracked open his heart.