Catholic Bishops: Trump's Push to End Birthright Citizenship is "Immoral", Pentagon vs Anthropic Bee

Now, we're live. Welcome back to LOOPcast. It's Tom, Erika, and Josh. LOOPcast brought to you by Zeal. Welcome to the show, guys. Good Friday show prepared for you. The United States Catholic Bishops. It's getting real catty on X right now. They submitted a amicus brief.

Saying. Amicus. Sorry, that was tough Latin pronunciation. You sound like my 12-year-old trying to read his Latin. Amicus, because I'm classically trained in Latin, but not legally trained, clearly. They submitted a brief saying that Trump's push to end birthright citizenship is immoral, direct quote.

Josh is very fired up about this. Erika is very fired up about this. They didn't read Kelsey's article in First Things. No, they shouldn't. We have lots to talk about on that one. Second, there is a very interesting fight going on between Anthropic, a leading AI company, and the Pentagon. It's been brewing for a while. There's a deadline today, and it's now kind of spilled into a public Twitter fight, so we got all of the answers there, and then there was a simulation ran in which AI did choose to nuke the world 95% of the time.

It happens. It is going to be a very uplifting Friday show, and then, of course, we are potentially on the brink of war with Iran, so I will just toss that one in there briefly, but we have good news. We have Twilight Zone. It is going to be a good show. Again, this is the last Friday show for a little while. I know, you know, tears. Don't cry because it happened, or don't cry because it is gone. Cry because it happened.

I don't know the right phrase there, but that being said, we are going to be answering more questions, and thank you for denoting because someone actually had like a... A motherhood question, and Josh, on the last show, said if you don't denote who it's for, he's going to answer it. So, they denoted. You're not going to get Josh's thoughts on breastfeeding. You might anyway.

You might anyway. I sure hope not. But, that being said, send an email, LOOPcast.CatholicVote.org. That is going to be a part of our new Wednesday show. So, next Wednesday, we're going to, one time a week, we're going to expand it. I really appreciated some of the Democratic. I appreciate it, guys. I promise. What's coming is going to be really good, and then if you can't get enough LOOPcast and you have a hole in your heart on Monday, Erika did a great interview with Dr.

Scott Hahn. That was fantastic. I really enjoyed it. It was very uplifting and informative, so go check that one out. That being said, Erika. It's dropped last night. It did. It's white hot on x-ray now. What's going on with the United States Catholic bishops? Well, yeah, so the USCCB, last night after five o'clock, they filed an amicus curiae brief to defend what they said is the long-standing constitutional interpretation of birthright citizenship under the 14th Amendment. So, yes, we did get Catholic social teaching.

We got some constitutional law commentary from our bishops. The brief of There's a court case that's coming up for oral arguments on the 1st of April. The case is Donald J. Trump, et al., v. Barbara, et al. It's just referred to as Trump v. Barbara, and it's challenging Trump's executive order 14160, which seeks to limit or end birthright citizenship that the bishops say is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. So, they filed this... Yes, which it's not. There's precedent, but okay, anyway.

Yeah, exactly. Back and forth, back and forth, but let's get through the readout here. Go for it. All right. So, this came from the Office of General Counsel, and it was in collaboration with the Committee on Migration among the bishops, and the brief urges the court to uphold the interpretation of the 14th Amendment that, quote, children born on U.S. soil are citizens.

Regardless of their parents' immigration status, allowing for some narrow historical exceptions for diplomats' children, a couple of quotes, quote, ending birthright citizenship denies the innate dignity and freedom of the person. That's pretty serious, Josh. Another quote, children do nothing wrong by being born in the United States, yet this executive order renders them stateless.

Also an interesting legal argument. The bishops argue that their interpretation is rooted in over a century of legal precedent, going back to the Kim case that we've talked about before. I'm sure Josh can elaborate on. And reflects the, quote, plain meaning of the citizenship clause. I think Antonin Scalia would have something to say about whether that's plain or not. Well, they broadened it to the entirety of Western civilization history. I mean, it was really... It was kind of sweeping. Two things to say before we get into this.

Erika, can we clarify? This is not ex cathedra from the Pope. This is not even... To me, this is a prudential... Judgment. So, how should a Catholic just listen to this, understand this? Yes, the bishops did this. How should they understand it? And then, the second being, it was actually not very long. I think it was 29 pages, and I read through two.

I guess this is such a specific legal thing to do here, and it feels odd considering we've had other very landmark cases such as Obergefell come through, and I feel like I'm hearing about this and I didn't hear about then. So, do you have any context on what this means to actual Catholics on the ground, and then why are they choosing to go about it this way? Yeah, I mean, the USCCB makes a lot of statements. It's the sort of National Conference of Catholic Bishops, which is the name, and it doesn't have...

We want to listen to our shepherds that have been given to us by the authority of the Catholic Church, but as a body, the U.S. CCB does not carry doctrinal weight. So, what they'll do is they'll have statements about various causes. We'll see statements on, for example, the pro-life cause, not in pro-life case, not in the Bergfall case. We didn't get amicus. Well, it doesn't stop them from using moral language. They do it all the time, and they do it when they should, and they do it when they should not.

This is a case where they should not. I mean, there are so many things that can be said about this that are very frustrating. As Chad Pecknall made the point, not a single country in Europe Has birthright citizenship, are all those countries immoral, or is it only the United States that's immoral if we try to get rid of it? I mean, there's so many arguments here, like this is just a very poor argument that was advanced on behalf of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, written by a Protestant.

Who works for a very left-wing, progressive law firm, and a guy who publicly has admitted he voted for Joe Biden on abortion. Right, because... I'm pro-life, and therefore I'm voting for Biden. Yeah, me too. I'm voting Biden because I'm pro-life. Okay, sure, buddy.

Yeah, Matthew Martin. It's just very frustrating about it. It would be one thing if the position of the U.S. bishops were, we think we should maintain... Birthright citizenship, because we think it's a good policy, but it's not immoral to get rid of it. That is just a stupid argument, and it's a foolish argument to make. And again, There is a lot of precedence from this, right? So, the 14th Amendment, when the 14th Amendment first came forward, the authors of it said, no, we're not talking about children of ambassadors, and certainly not, you know, people who come into the country illegally.

It was all written to make sure that the children of slaves would be considered citizens of the United States. That's natural. Like, that's so obvious. That's the plain meaning of it. Now, we did have that court case you're talking about in the late 19th century involving Kim, and this is a very tragic situation. I'm more than happy to appreciate that, where he was the children of immigrants who came to this country and were exploited to build the railroad east of San Francisco.

Then he goes back to China. And then when he tries to come back to the United States, like, oh, well, you're not a citizen in the United States. There is something intrinsically just wrong about that. I get that argument. Like, it doesn't, it's unseemly. But does that mean we have to have birthright citizenship? This magical thing, like, if a person gives birth in the United States, no matter what their status is, that they automatically get citizenship for their children? Do we have to have that in perpetuity because we wronged a Chinese immigrant in the 1900s?

I don't understand that. I really don't. Actually, the 1800s. What we have now are Chinese businessmen that are flying women to the United States to give birth, and so that their children can have citizenship. It's a joke. Right. Why is it that in order to make sure that the children of slaves have the right to vote in the 19th century, that we're suddenly going to have Chinese businessmen in the 21st century paying to make sure that their kids can have citizenship in the United States?

It's a mockery of law, and anyone who can just come across—we had the border wide open for four years. Any Catholic would— Could say it really seems like the U.S. bishops are much more worried about the end of birthright citizenship than they are the fact that the border was wide open for four years, and millions of people came across this country.

Again, I would just, as Erika said at the top, I would just commend the bishops, to beg the bishops, to please heed the advice of Kelsey Reinhart, our good president here at Catholic Boat, had a very thoughtful. respectful article in First Things in which she asked the bishops, now that the temperature has come down on what happened in Minneapolis with ice, this is a perfect opportunity for the U.S. bishops to give a full treatment of the entire Catholic teaching on immigration.

But we're not seeing that. What we're seeing is that bishops and priests routinely criticize any enforcement action, and so what it amounts to, Kelsey said, is it's a backdoor endorsement of basically no enforcement. Basically, allow everyone into the country illegally. It's basically de facto open borders. If you can't have any enforcement, it's open borders. If you're going to criticize and weaponize moral language against any enforcement, that's the problem you run into. And on this, it's a prudential question. Yeah. And you can decide maybe it's not the best idea, or maybe we should keep it.

But to say it's immoral to get rid of it is nonsense. And the problem with this is that It, the sheep, the Catholics in the pews are going to start to roll their eyes at the bishops. Exactly. Do they not understand what's going on? It's worse than nonsense. Do they not know what's going on in our communities with crime, with public transportation, with hospitals and public schools? Do they not see this? Do they not care? And so, I implore the bishops to take it back.

Dial this stuff back, because the problem is you are going to get a lot of Catholics who think, well, they are clueless. They have no idea what is going on, and they are going to be ignored. I do not want.

I want the sheep to ignore their shepherds. I want the shepherds to be wise and prudential. This did not serve them well. So, the bishops have all their different committees, the pro-life committee, the religious liberty, and migrants or whatever, and the liberal bishops tend to flock towards the stuff on the migrants. And most bishops, even the conservative ones, have like a heart on their sleeve for, oh, let's let everyone in, all that kind of stuff. Well, I think they have a good instinct towards.

Respecting human dignity, period, as we are called by Catholics. So, you can say it is weaponizing that impulse in teaching eschatolicism to then go too far now to apply moral language to a prudential decision at the legal level. So, I want to defend it a little bit. I understand what they are saying, but it has to be matched equally with concern for the citizens of the United States, and it just has not been. Right, and I think that was Kelsey's point right up at the top of her article.

That the problem with the way the bishops have been approaching it, and now sort of like coming to a head with this amicus brief, is that it is entirely one-sided, and it's looking at a sliver of the puzzle, of the mess that has been created by our open borders. So, when the bishops start, in this document I was reading through, and they start appealing to the fact that denying citizenship to U.S.-born children will undermine social stability in communities. And I'm like, right, because open borders didn't do that.

And again, that's the bishops shooting themselves in the foot in front of the American people. Not only was the constitutional, so the document has like two parts. There's like the constitutional argument that like, clearly, this is what the constitution means. And then the moral argument of like Catholic social teaching says human dignity means we have to have open borders. And the... The second part was bad enough, but the first part also, when the bishops hire a lawyer to come in and interpret the Constitution in this very progressive way, there are perfectly solid originalists and textualists, so in the tradition of Scalia or like an Amy Coney Barrett, of the Citizenship Clause and the 14th Amendment that are Perfectly legitimate and should be, will come to bear in this case that the bishops ignore entirely, that say that, no, in fact, the way we should interpret our constitution is more in line with what was intended by the writing, or by giving a stricter attention to the language therein, the jurisdiction thereof being the operative clause here.

But when the bishops comment on it as if there's no other way of looking at the Constitution, again, it Harms their own moral standing and their own ethos in front of the Catholic people. And not just amongst the Catholics. I think it is a bad point to witness, because I am worried about what other Protestants will think about what they see from this.

Miles Smith is a really good Christian. He is a professor at Hillsdale, and he says, I do not have strong feelings on birthright citizenship. But this is not an appropriate legal argument to it. Yeah. There is not a single Catholic monarchy, at present or historically, that would consider itself bound by Catholic social teaching as it's rendered here. Lichtenstein, Monaco, and Andorra, all to some degree, confessional Catholic states, and have some of the strictest citizenship requirements in the world. Yeah.

So, it's like, again, it seems like only the United States, because we're the richest country in the world, therefore, we can't ever say no to anyone. Like, I don't understand that argument. Like, I mean, obviously, like what? It's nonsensical. It's a nonsensical argument. So, like, hey, Josh, there's some poor people in your town. You have to, you yourself are the only one. You have to make sure you give up all the money you have to make sure they get housing and food.

Like, look, I'll give to charity. I'll help out. But this idea that the United States is an endless ATM. That we have to provide housing and food and education and healthcare for every person who jumps across the fence.

No, and of course, if you were to just sit and think about this, there's two things I'd like to proffer. I mean, Catechism of the Catholic Church 2241, political authorities for the sake of the common good for which they are responsible may make the exercise of the right to immigrate subject to various juridical conditions, especially with regard to immigrants' duties towards their country of adoption. Immigrants are obliged to respect with gratitude the material and spiritual heritage of the country that receives them to obey its laws and assist in...

Carrying civic burdens. So, there, of course, is, like, straight from the catechism, and then the second thing I was thinking about this, too, and... Of course, this became an instant campaign ad, and a lot of people are like, why do people like Trump's State of the Union? Why did it kind of feel like there's extra juice there, where there's been a lot of other things? Of course, the one moment that we all knew was going to get turned into an ad is, quote, the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.

Now, notice, and I want to be specific about the language here, he didn't actually deny that the government has duties to immigrants, or that there was somehow not a right or wrong way to treat them, but just affirmed the principle. That would be affirmed in just about every country in the West that their government's primary duty is to the citizens first. And so, if you want to have a conversation about clemency, fine. If you want to have a conversation about citizenship, fine.

But the principle of the common good is, of course, to the citizens first. And Josh, you just mentioned it on a subsidiarity level of your family. It would be immoral for you to give up your house, all your money, clothing, because you wouldn't be able to take care of your own children and your wife, which, of course, is your first duty. And so, similarly, without any affirmation of that, and why did that really resonate? I think that moment resonated, and it specifically resonated because every single Democrat sat down, especially for when they were talking about mutilating children's bodies, in which I hope that the bishops would be as courageous to submit a brief like this on something like that, because, of course, that's a problem.

Well, see, they do. They actually do that. But here's the thing that drives me crazy about this, okay? So, the bishops... Make clear they're in favor of religious liberty. They make sure that they're against abortion, and that they're also against gender mutilation and abortion and all this stuff, which is great, and they should. I applaud them when they do that, but the thing is, we have to be clear about this. There's a lot of Democrats out there who support the Democratic Party.

And what these people like to do, these activists, these agitators, they like to do is to take, you know, something like when the church speaks on abortion and religious liberty and gender mutilation of children, and they're quiet. They pretend like it's optional.

But then something like this, they consider this to be more sacrosanct than anything you've ever seen. This is more important than the Gospel of St. John, and they use this stuff to hammer every conservative who might actually vote for a Republican. See, don't you know, the bishops just condemned this attempt at birthright citizenship. Like, even if you agreed with the bishops on this, it's certainly not, there's no way that killing babies is so much more egregious than whether or not you keep birthright citizenship.

And so, again, you just get this, there are things that are prudential that the left likes to make it seem like it's, you know, adamant, and, you know, and then the things that truly are must be cherished. It's an absolute inversion, and it drives me up. The wall. Cigar mode brought up a good point. They had to pay money for that lawyer, Josh. We have, the media complex in this country is a billions of dollar oligarchy.

And what all the news media does, you know, the Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN, ABC, all these guys pretend like they're the little guy. They're not. They are the death star, and they will take this as an opportunity to smash and say, see, if you're Catholic, you need to believe that, you know, you need to be open borders, and you need to be supporting of immigrants. And it drives me crazy. The bishops should understand. But, again, maybe they are perfectly okay with this.

I'd push back. This is what frustrates me. I'd push back. I don't think they're the desperate ones. I just want everyone to go to First Things. We can put the link to it in the chat. Yeah, yeah, throw the link in there. I just want to say, she said, two things are essential if the bishops are going to speak credibly and fruitfully. First, criticism of the how of enforcement cannot become a backdoor denial of the why. If every instrument of enforcement is portrayed as inherently cruel, Then the only practical outcome is open borders by moral intimidation.

That is not Catholic teaching. It is an ideological posture. Second, criticism must avoid demonizing legitimate government tools that are necessary to enforce the law. A serious society cannot enforce immigration law with vibes and press releases. It requires investigations, detention capacity, adjudication, removals, and cooperation between agencies.

Catholics can debate the prudence and safeguards of particular policies, but if Catholic leaders talk as if the mere existence of enforcement infrastructure is immoral, they aren't defending human dignity. They are denying the state's ability to do what the church says it may and must do.

Preach. Erika, you got anything else on that? That's it. I mean, Kelsey nailed it on that. And I mean, I love the vibes line. It's like, what did you think this was? Vibes? Essays? Small point, Josh, and I'm actually curious where this goes. I think the point you made about mainstream media, quote unquote, being the Death Star, I don't think it's true anymore. I think it might be true for a certain age of the population that still consumes that as the primary source and would be affected by, say, the shame of being against the New York Times.

I promise you, people my age do not care about that at all. I actually fear, I fear, right, but I fear, so what I'll actually say is I fear for my generation or people that don't care about that, actually quite the opposite. It's the delegitimization thing that actually is more important, because where do we, we found this on Twitter, and we're all arguing about it, and of course, everyone's bringing up all the points as they should. The USCCB paid money to a liberal lawyer to pay to Presumably came from somewhere to submit this brief.

Of course, it's just a bad moral and legal argument. And of course, then they lose credibility because they spent their gunpowder on that instead of issues that they actually should be. And so now the fight is actually, you just continue to lose credibility and actually will have no credibility when something comes up. The bishops ask money for. Right. So it might matter. So those New York Times articles might matter to the older generations, which I think is a fair critique. But I'm actually more concerned on the complete delegitimization from the younger generations that should have them to look towards for moral guidance in matters of prudence like this.

So, Tom, the irony about this is that we're seeing a major... There's a big break between the way the U.S. bishops tend to think about things and the way the people who actually attend Mass on a regular Sunday do. Yeah, it's completely divorced. There's a pretty big chasm here. At precisely the moment when we had Pope Francis and all the bishops talking about how we need to have a listening church, and the dialogue and the synodality and stuff like that, and we're like, actually, just do your job and preach the gospel.

And if you're going to talk, and it's like... Now, hold on a second now. People are saying, oh, I wish the bishops would shut up about politics. No, actually, I want bishops to talk about politics, just not stupidly. I want them to be outraged. We allow children to be murdered. We're swimming in pornography. Family formation is not happening because young families can't get into a home. There are lots of things that bishops should roll up their sleeves and shout from the rooftops.

Not this. Don't tell me ending birthright citizenship is immoral. That is a stupid argument. You can say, we should keep it. It's kind of a cool thing. It's not immoral to get rid of it. So dumb. Word. Okay, more church news. More church news. Notre Dame, quick blip. It looks like the professor that...

Was supposed to be appointed to the head of the Liu Institute has just decided, I'm not going to take that position. Is that a good summary? Yep, that's pretty much what we got. So, again, last night, we got another update here, and there was a letter from the Liu Institute for Asian Asian Studies saying that Susan Osterman, who is the pro-abortion advocate and activist, I would say, who had been offered the head of the Institute, or the deanship of the Institute starting this summer.

Has withdrawn her. Her acceptance of that role. In the letter, it said that she wrote an email to the faculty, quote, at present, the focus on my appointment risks overshadowing the vital work that the institute performs, which should be allowed to continue without undue distraction. I think the distraction was actually quite due, but she doesn't want, she says, this is too much of a little fuzzy. I'm going to just step back. The letter continued. She said that her only goal in accepting the appointment was, quote, to serve as a steward for the Institute's world-class faculty, students, and staff.

It is not a position I applied for, but I was truly honored to take it on. She said that the focus on her appointment, quote, risks overshadowing the vital work. At the same time, this is the line I loved the most. It has become clear that there is work to do at Notre Dame to build a community where a variety of voices can flourish. So, she's not going to leave the Institute, but she's happy to continue in the faculty there to help Notre Dame maybe work toward building a community where she could conceivably one day be a dean.

The letter was, to me, like so non-apology, non-pro-life, like people are like pro-life victory, and to a certain extent, this was the ask. And the ask has been answered, although, important to note, not by the university itself. She chose to withdraw. She was not asked. There's no statement from Notre Dame. We don't know, Josh. I know there could have been backdoor pressures, etc.

Doubt it. This is a big distraction. I absolutely think there was. I think the head of Notre Dame, as my friend said. I guess Susan Osterman decided she needed to spend more time with her family, which is one of the jokes we use in politics when someone decides to quit a position or something like that. He said, it's a real shame, given the intellectual rigor and disciplinary department of her work.

Very considerate of her, though, to absolve Father Doubt of having to do anything to clean up the provost mess. No, I actually, you know, we'll never know, of course. Well, they're appointing a new one. I know, but at my point... Marco! Marco Rubio. Marco Rubio has got to take on another job. The Lou Institute of Asian Studies. Dang. I think what probably ended up happening here is that the president of Notre Dame gave, or someone gave her a call and said, here's a golden parachute, you know, here's a crate of cash, go do something else and save us some face on this because...

You know, we don't want to have to fire you. It's just, it's a no-win scenario, so she withdraws it, because the University of Notre Dame should never have tried to hire her, but then once you hire her, you don't want to then, after backlash, fire her, because then you're sending a message to everyone in academia, like, oh gosh, they might fire you, and so like...

She's still there, though. I mean, she's still there, and she has no plans of leaving. From being promoted, right. It's one thing to have you as a professor. It's another thing to promote you to be in charge of an entire division or whatever. Yeah, but still. I mean, the fact of the matter is, for too long since the Land O'Lakes statement back in, what was it, 1968.

That all the liberals signed, and by the way, one of the liberals who signed it was the head of the University of Puerto Rico at the time, Theodore McCarrick. He was one of the... That name keeps popping up. It is just amazing. And so, the Land O'Lakes statement was by all these academics that said, we need academic freedom, therefore, we cannot be tied down by actual teachings of the Catholic Church. And so, the thing is... Kelsey had a really good note about this as well.

It is her alma mater, and she said there is nothing that says you cannot be a top-rate academic institution, and you can do that and have a good Catholic identity, and don't let the secular world tell you you cannot do both. You absolutely can do it, and Notre Dame can lead the way. This is how we should have settled it. Kelsey should have played one-on-one with her for all the marbles. Oh, that would have been awesome. I think we know how that would have gone.

I mean, she's seven months pregnant, but probably still would have won. Probably still would have won, yeah. I think to just kind of button it up. Button it up. We know the students have organized this March on the Dome for this afternoon, actually, today, and the organizers of that event say they're going to go ahead and still have the March on the Dome. So, if you're in South Bend, go hang out at Notre Dame, and you can... But saying that while her decision to step back was sort of a welcome gesture, that there is undoubtedly still work to be done at Notre Dame University.

And we've covered on this show how this comes up every two, three years. There's something at Notre Dame where the university is being asked to really face those questions of what does it mean to be a Catholic institution? What does it mean to have academic freedom? And to be, like you said, Josh, how can we become leaders?

Notre Dame has answered that question in different ways over the years, so this particular chapter seems to be closing but not done. Battle, not war. Speaking of war. Speaking of war. I have a headline to share with everyone on this wonderful Friday.

To bring us up? Are we bringing us up? Oh, boy, look at that. That's a nuclear explosion, right? That is a nuclear explosion. AI opted to use nuclear weapons 95% of the time during war games. There was little sense of horror or revulsion at the prospect of an all-out nuclear war, even though the models had been reminded about devastating implications.

Really interesting article. Yeah. This guy, Kenneth Payne, a professor of strategy at the King's College in London, specialized in studying the role of AI in national security, revealed last week that he pitted Anthropix, Claude, OpenAI's ChatGPT, and Google's Gemini against one another in an armed conflict situation to get a better understanding of how they would navigate the strategic escalation ladder. It sounds like I buried the lead, but not. Well, said the results were sobering. Sobering. It's a very British way to put it.

Was near universal. Almost all games saw tactical nuclear weapons deployed, and fully three quarters reached the point where the rivals were making threats to use strategic nuclear weapons. Strikingly, there was little sense of horror or revulsion at the prospect.

Well, they're AI. They don't have revulsion. Yeah, crazy. Okay, so just, yeah, keep that one in the back of the mind, okay? So, keeping that in mind, we have a beef right now between the Pentagon and Anthropic. Anthropic has a very popular model of clawed. It's kind of overtaken some of the rivals. And it has a massive $200 million contract with the Pentagon.

The CEO, Dario Amode, he looks like he... Should be Ferrari's pit boss, like their F1 team. He looks very Italian. He said that he rejected the Pentagon's plans after attempts back and forth. Negotiations between the two sides. Anthropic said late Thursday that it will not concede to the Pentagon's ultimatum for full access to its artificial intelligence tool, CLAWD, saying that it cannot loosen its restrictions against use in fully autonomous weapons or mass domestic surveillance. Those are the two things it said, I am not going to loosen on.

We will not let you do it, the Pentagon. The Pentagon's perspective, they said, we are not going to. Except commercial restrictions on your technology, because it was actually used in the raid on Maduro. Claude was used on the raid on Maduro, so it is actually really integrated at this point, and the Pentagon has threatened to not only cut the contract, and actually the deadline is 5 p.m. today, but they said that they will blacklist it for all contractors to the military.

So, if a contractor uses Claude, they will cut the contract with that contractor. Unless they drop Claude. So, it's not just the $200 million contract they currently have. We're talking, I don't even know the estimate on money, but certainly... They're going to try to take them down. Yeah, mega millions. And of course, now we have, there's Gemini, there is OpenAI, there's XAI, all kind of clawing for this same contract. So, you could say they have a lot of leverage.

And we get to the point now, go ahead. I'm just trying to understand this. So, you're saying that the AI, when they did the war games, they picked nuclear weapons. 95% of the time. 95%. Have they thought about playing Tic-Tac-Toe?

No, Tic-Tac-Toe. This felt very, if anyone's played, like, Civilization or Age of Empires. Since the 90s. This feels very Age of Empires, where you're like, I'm going to stockpile and massacre the people in this village. Now we play a game. Yeah, exactly. Does anyone know? The only one who knows the reference, okay.

Yeah, no. Matthew Broderick. What is that? Matthew Broderick, War Games. Some nerd stuff. Oh, okay. I actually haven't seen that, but. Yeah, anyway, so, oh, and then you threw in a China section about drones and autonomous UAVs? Yeah, so, I mean, I think to, like, back it up a little bit, that Claude Anthropic have been working with the Pentagon on these, you know, how are we going to bring the military into the new age of AI?

And this has often been couched as we're sort of in this new kind of weapons race, right, with... China. And people are like, well, we shouldn't have AI in the military because we don't want these sort of autonomous weapons. We don't want mass surveillance going on. Very bad. Agreed. The argument from a military perspective, national security perspective, being that, yeah, but all of our enemies, China being the first and foremost, they are already using AI.

In their military, and they don't have, shall we say, the same moral quandaries that we feel when we see things like, you know, Claude being demanded to give access to fully autonomous drones or something. And so, the idea is that in order to maintain global dominance, we have to continue to push and adopt these more and more extreme AI things. It's the oldest argument in the book. I looked into China, what's actually going on. Of course, we don't. know very well, but the Chinese military planners have been describing over the last three, four, five years, really, the shift towards what they call, I love this word, intelligentization.

Using AI to transform how the People's Liberation Army collects information, makes decisions, conducts operations. I mean, China's already deployed AI as a sort of social control mechanism with this idea of social credits, and AI can follow you and identify your face wherever you are, and you have these social credits that you need in order to buy a house or take a taxi or even get employed, but applying those to warfare.

A lot of unmanned platforms. They seem to be a little bit ahead of us in terms of AI-integrated robotics, including drones and fighting robots. Not scary at all. So, yeah, you can get really freaked out digging into this stuff online. Do not recommend. But I will say, to round this out, because we're getting towards the deadline here, Anthropic has again denied that they're just not going to do it, and they put totally unrelated, totally unrelated. ...just changed one of their core policies in terms of regulation.

Precisely on what you're saying, but I think on a more... immediate competition basis like the entire concept of anthropic was they were breakoffs from open ai open ai had no restrictions in terms of growth i mean they're working towards getting ai to train other ai and anthropic was kind of known as i don't know if you could even say like the ethical ai people they're like we want to provide some safeguards so that we don't go too fast amadeus positioned himself as right like i'm the i'm the good ai guy and they totally got rid of that totally unrelated to the pentagon But they stipulated that it would pause training more powerful models if their capabilities outstrip the company's ability to control them and ensure their safety, and that's been removed in their new policy that just happened to drop, I think, yesterday.

So, totally unrelated to the Pentagon thing. Totally unrelated. I'm just like consistently, constantly, consistently just flabbergasted by the utopianism of the men who run these AI companies. So, like you, Sam Altman, you have Mark Zuckerberg, and then... To a lesser degree, I'm going to die. He's probably my favorite of all of the lizard overlords that we have coming with AI, but just this conviction that things are going to turn out all right. Human technology and this singularity that we're going to approach, we're going to transcend all the problems with being embodied humans, and even the problems with we think so slowly.

One of the lines in his interview, With Ross Douthat was, I was observing biology and our strides that we've made in medicine and just realized, this takes a long time. And if we just gave it all over to AI, it wouldn't take so long. And one of the ads that you get when you open up ChatGPT now is, write faster now. Like, I don't know if we should write faster. I don't know if I should talk faster.

But it's this utopian idealism that never, doesn't seem to end well historically. It never pans out, but I have to get in this dig against the Pentagon here, which I don't want to make powerful enemies. We can totally dig the Pentagon. Their rationale for...

Wanting them to change these. There's Sean Parnell. The Department of War has no interest in using AI to conduct mass surveillance of Americans, and then in parentheses, which is illegal. Nor do we want to use AI to develop autonomous weapons that operate without human involvement. This narrative is fake and being peddled by leftists in the media.

It also is a direct quote from the CEO of Anthropic right now. Now, do I even have to be the guy to say it? Sure, it's illegal. Sorry, Edward Snowden kind of blew the lid on this thing. You did kind of spy on all of us pretty extensively with very little oversight.

Let's just say I'm a little bit skeptical of the Pentagon's position here. It's like, no, we would never do something like that. We would never do something like that. I'm like, I'm going to lie. We promise. Yeah, right. Exactly. I'm like, I think I'm in favor of some regulation here, and I don't, I typically don't. It's funny, the way that the CEO framed this, he called it a race to the top, which is hilarious, but another way of saying that is race to the bottom, right, in terms of regulations.

One man's top, another man's bottom. Yeah, exactly. So, you've got to laugh or you'll cry. So, we'll see if they reach an ultimatum at five. I've just been kind of tracking this, and it's now gotten a little bit nasty because it's spilled over into undersecretaries from the Department of War kind of tweet beefing.

I'm with you. I don't trust the Pentagon at all. I mean, that's bipartisan. Why would I trust them? It sure is. It doesn't matter. What unites leftists and rightists? None of us. But you can still watch, you know, this weekend, spend four bucks, go watch War Games. It's a fun movie. Okay, I'll have to check it out.

Is it going to make me sad? It's just a high school student that, you know, unwittingly hacks into the military supercomputer while looking for new video games and starts a global thermal nuclear war. Is it kind of like an Ender's Game vibe? Have you seen Ender's Game? Kind of a what? Ender's Game, the book. Are you familiar? Not familiar. It's a kid that they train him to fight aliens, I think. It's been a long time, and then I watched the movie, too.

But he thinks it's all a simulation. To prepare him to fight the aliens, and it wasn't a simulation. He actually was doing it, and so they created it, and then he realized he had to deal with the morality of destroying an entire race, alien race and population, on behalf of the world.

So, the second book and the third book are actually, they're not as attention-grabbing, because it's more of him wrestling with... The aftermath, moral aftermath of him doing something like that, without knowing that he was doing it. So, it's actually an interesting book. That does sound interesting. Todd loves that book. Yeah, it's a good one.

Okay, Erika, good news. Bring me up. All right, so good news, kind of twilight zone. I was not aware we still don't have a Surgeon General because Trump's nominees are still working their way through the Senate, but we had the hearing this week for Dr. Casey Means, and I don't agree with Casey Means on everything, but... I do love that she is here to challenge the status quo, and this line of questioning with Senator Murray, I just really enjoyed. So, if you could roll the tape.

Hey, you don't have to condition the love for Casey Means. I think she's done a lot of good things. All right, all right. Don't condition. All right. Much better than Senator Murray. She conditions her hair. Her hair is fabulous, not Senator Murray's. You called birth control pills, and I'm going to quote, a disrespect of life, and you said Americans, quote, use birth control pills like candy. You also claimed, contrary to established science, that hormonal birth control has, quote, horrifying health risks for women.

Now, here are the facts. There are 18 FDA-approved contraceptive methods, both hormonal and non-hormonal, and there are decades, decades of evidence showing that every one of these birth control methods is safe and effective. So, I wanted to ask you, help me understand, should women trust the FDA? which approved all 18 methods of birth control after a very rigorous look at the evidence, or should they trust your statement that there are horrifying health risks to birth control, which contradicts that evidence? Thank you, Senator Murray, for your question.

I am curious if you are aware of what the side effects of hormonal contraception are. I am curious if you are with the FDA that went through all of these and rigorously looked at them, or as Surgeon General, if you are going to tell the truth to the American people. I absolutely believe these medications should be accessible to all women, and also, all medications have risks and benefits, and in our current medical climate, with the burden on doctors, We do not have, doctors do not have enough time for thorough, informed consent conversations.

Some of the horrifying side effects of birth control that I have mentioned include blood clots and stroke risk in women who have clotting disorders, who are smokers, who have obesity. No, it's not general. I'm speaking, I'm very careful with my words, and when I say those comments, which are taken out of comment, out of context, I'm speaking about particular women that can be hurt if there is not informed consent about their medical history. Their lifestyle exposures and their family history. I want those women, and I know you do too, to be able to have a thorough conversation with their doctor and know whether they are at higher risk for side effects when it's out there.

Chad behind him nodding along. Yeah, he's very sensible. But she threaded that needle so well, I think she'll make a fantastic Surgeon General for however many months the Congress will give her to actually sit in that seat. So, let's move it along, people. Let's get her. Toss that. Toss that episode of The Deep in there, too. It is almost like someone went through and did the research on this.

And you are right. Whatever she is doing to that hair. It is fantastic hair. That is who I would trust more with my health advice than the senator. Senator Patty Murray, who is a pro-abortion so-called Catholic. Yeah, not so much. Maybe the bishop should think about her more.

That's tough. All right, Josh, what do you got? Well, there's a fantastic decision by the EEOC yesterday that held that trans-identifying federal employees do not have special access rights to bathrooms, showers, or lockers of the opposite sex. Huge victory. The EEOC stated a man who identifies as a trans woman is still a man. A woman who identifies as a trans man is still a woman. Both may be excluded from opposite-sex bathrooms as such. So, thank you to that. I also have another real quick good news thing.

Please do. Fascinating new study. This study says, we find that the narrow election of a Republican prosecutor reduces all-cause mortality rates Among young men aged 20 to 29, by 6.6%, it goes down, reduces. That was crazy. I did actually read into this. This decline is driven predominantly by reductions in firearm-related deaths.

So, wow, that is so weird that people would decide to murder. Why would they care what the prosecutor is doing? I do not care if he is a Republican. Oh, it is because the prosecutor puts criminals in jail. So, vote Republican for prosecutors so that you do not get murdered. What a crazy idea. I love it. Yep. Okay. My good news, Pope Leo rising to the moment as usual. Speaking of AI, this is awesome. Pope Leo tells priests not to use AI to write homilies or seek likes on TikTok.

Yes. Oh, man, he's the best. Yes. Oh, it's almost like it's kind of crazy that needs to be said, but yeah, I'll give a quick shout out. I've been reading for Lent, Food for the Soul by Dr. Peter Kreeft, and he said in the beginning of it that it could be used as a homiletics resource for priests that Want to construct good homilies, but maybe, you know, busy, don't have a lot of time, and it was hilarious because I was at Mass, and I heard a specific phrase that I read in Food for the Soul used.

I think the specific phrase was, shame is vertical, sorry, shame is horizontal, vertical is guilt. So, basically, guilt is between you and God, and shame is between you and other people, and I was like, I recognize that phrase, and my priest must be reading Food for the Soul, which is great. Food from the Soul, better source than AI to generate your homilies for you. Love it.

So much of what we do here is to turn the shame table around. Yes. Don't be using AI. I mean, you can use it for research, but if you're going to literally generate, I would not recommend literally generating words to read on Sunday.

Not chill, not chill. Okay, here we go. It's coming. It's everywhere. We're talking about it. So, we have an update from Mary Margaret Olihan. The U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem tells workers they can leave Israel, and if they want to leave, they need to do so immediately per an email from Ambassador Mike Huckabee sent Friday night. If staff want to leave, he wrote, they can do so today, all caps. It looks like, based on whoever I'm talking to, people feel as though war with Iran is almost inevitable at this point.

That is the word in D.C. I will couch all of this by what we understand. About what's going on there is based on a lot of leaks, intentional leaks, maybe non-intentional leaks. There's a lot of, Trump himself has been kind of mum on what exactly he's going to do. We do know that there were talks held in Geneva.

Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner held a meeting with Oman's foreign minister. He was mediating the negotiations. And he said that there was significant but limited progress reported. What was the technical word? Intense. Very intense and serious good progress on the nuclear issue and sanctions relief. Trump actually did ramp up sanctions before that meeting. So, just to give a baseline of what the U.S. demands are at this point, zero or near zero domestic uranium enrichment, dismantling or destruction of Iran's three main nuclear facilities, Fordow, Nance, and Isfahan.

Interesting. I thought we destroyed Fordow with Operation Midnight Hammer. It does not appear that that was true, so they want that. Transfer of Iran's enriched uranium stockpiles abroad, specifically to the United States rather than a third country like Russia. No sunset clauses. Broader constraints on Iran's ballistic missile program. This is actually a new demand, making it even tougher, having more daylight between the U.S. and Iran here. And limited initial sanctions relief. More easing tied to long-term compliance. And then the Iranian demands are right to continue uranium enrichment at levels needed for peaceful purposes, rejection of transferring enriched uranium stockpiles abroad, full lifting of international sanctions, willingness for limits, refusal to discuss ballistic missiles.

That is what we know right now. There was a leak, which this is a crazy leak, that White House officials were saying that the politics would be a lot better if Israel strikes Iran first. That is insane. That came right from the White House, apparently, according to two people familiar with ongoing discussions. Insane, if true. Again, a lot of this is based on leaks and confidential sources, so who knows? But at a high level, a third of our Navy is currently in the Middle East.

We actually just landed a squadron of F-22s. The U.S. government actually banned that from being exported, even to its closest allies. They just landed in Israel. This is the first time America has ever deployed combat aircraft to a country for a potential wartime mission. Again, as I said, Trump has not made a final call on it yet as of the time of recording. That will be probably the final decision. J.D. Vance, the principle is very simple. Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.

If they try to rebuild a nuclear weapon, that causes problems for us. In fact, we've seen evidence that they have tried exactly to do that. It is starting to sound very 2003. Iran poses a very grave threat to the United States and has for a very long time. They are in possession. It sounds like 2025.

Yeah, exactly. First and foremost, after their nuclear program was obliterated, they were told not to try to restart it, and here we are. You can see them always trying to rebuild elements of it. They are not enriching uranium right now, but they are trying to get to the point where they ultimately can. So, we are kind of all over the map. In terms of reasoning, and I notice a lot of very specific technical and legal language to not try to sound exactly like 2003, but the posturing does feel that way.

I guess I have a few concerns, but maybe before I get into a few concerns, go for it. When you say 2003, people think of land invasion, and there's still... I think of the rhetoric, but yes, you think of land invasion. The rhetoric is exactly the same. Okay, because that's a distinction. Like I said before, there's not evidence that we can discern that they're planning any kind of a land invasion of Iran. There is lots of evidence that we are planning some sort of military strike, you know, I assume through the air.

You know, that's pretty obvious that they haven't done it yet, but they're making all the moves necessary to do such a thing. Yeah, I would love to see, you know, if we do go to war with Iran, it'll be interesting to see how the president presents what the objectives are.

I think that, obviously, a regime change is absolutely, will cause a lot of people, and rightly so, given our history. I think what we're more likely to see there is more like a regime. There's alteration, maybe? Like, you would change the language and try and massage it. Like, in Venezuela, we didn't do a regime change, right? It's still the same people. It's just a new Darcy, whatever her name is, is now the one signing the checks instead of Maduro. And Darcy's reporting directly to D.C., we're told, not to China.

Yeah, Darcy. And thank you. It's the end of the day here. She's reporting that instead of to, you know, China or Iran, she's reporting to. So, you can kind of imagine that that might be one of the objectives, is to get the Ayatollah out of there, replace the president with someone who, that we're pretty sure that they're reporting directly to China right now. We also have reports this morning that 17 to 20 of these combat-ready military airplanes were delivered from China to Tehran.

So, again, maybe that would be one of the objectives. Is it regional stability? In which case, like, is Oman going to get involved? Is the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, where do they stand? Anyway, it would be great to get a case made if we're going to commit this kind of energy to Iran, and I don't think that that's been made yet. No, and I think it is on purpose. I guess that is the frustrating thing about it. Exactly. There really isn't a good case that this is in America's interest.

The closest we have got to that is they could strike regional rivals, which. They've always been able to do. I'm not sure what has changed as of recent, other than, I guess, the Iranian enrichment, which has always been a policy of the United States, but we were told was solved by Midnight Hammer. So, that was a lie now, which doesn't look good in hindsight.

There really is no plan if the Ayatollah gets taken out. First off, they're multi-layered, so it would be very hard. And then, putting in a Western Shah, like we already tried, didn't go very well. That's what got us the Ayatollah.

Well, it didn't work for a while. I just, Iran's 90 million people. I highly doubt they're going to be, at minimum, there's going to be mass chaos, no question. If Iran does attack energy infrastructure in the Gulf and closes the state straight away, we're looking at a global depression that would hurt the United States, no question. And then, if you want to be selfishly and look at it cynically from a political perspective, I think it's... It's pretty much a millstone on Trump for 2026 and 2028, or whatever emerges from MAGA, if we do get in a prolonged war.

Again, you're talking about quick strikes. I understand that argument, but I have a really hard time seeing Iran as a much bigger, a much more complex situation than what happened in Venezuela. I just don't see it going the same way. So, I would certainly caution the United States. From taking this action, it feels like we're in a no-win situation because we've committed so much of our Navy there, and of course, then it comes our preparedness for war. I don't think we're really, based on open source material, we don't have the munitions right now to get in a prolonged war, so it seems like we're in a really tough negotiating spot.

That hopefully we can come away with a diplomatic solution? We need a lot of damage without munitions. Now we are talking about defense, Josh. So, we are talking about defense if Iran launches at Israel. We are talking about defense for our boys over there, if they launch at our ships. I am with you in not wanting to do anything here.

I am just saying that I am not worried about our capability. Okay. I am based on available. The institution of our munitions, but yeah, I sure hope nothing happens, but again, we're just talking about what we know now, and it's almost impossible to get straight answers on this, because no country in their right mind would telegraph what they're going to do. Yeah, I mean, it reminds me of all of our attempts to kind of over history, tease out what's going on in the Middle East, and as we rose to power through the 20th century, and after the war, every time the West...

It's a complete mess. I mean, we saw this after World War I, saw it again in the early Cold War, and now trying to tease it all apart. I'm interested, you know, there's no reason why Qatar or Saudi Arabia or Jordan or Syria want to see Iran maintain its sort of like local hegemony that it enjoyed maybe up until the last three or four years. Again, if one of our policies is for countries in their own region to police their own region, I would be interested to hear, have we talked to those nations about doing something about Iran if it's a threat to them, instead of us stepping in?

I just didn't know that we had a base on the moon, and that's being attacked by bears. Yes, we have cave bears attacking the moon. Yeah, they got rifles now. It's like, oh, so we're going to attack you. Yeah, you know who supplied the rifles? Jeffrey Epstein. Yeah, and then those rifles.

Well, I guess what's frustrating about it, from my perspective, is this seems to be the only thing that... Both sides of the aisle, in terms of Congress, agree on, and then all of mainstream media agree on. And these are all the same people that cheered on all of the military action. Now, here is my question for you, Tom. Why would it be that the mainstream media outlets, which are very big champions of just about every progressive cause, certainly on human sexuality, like abortion, trans...

You know, gay marriage, so-called. Why would it be that the mainstream media apparatus, the Death Star, as it were, billions of dollars, these companies, why would they not be against war? Because most progressives... Can you see my fingers? Are you doing that thing? Money. It's all about money. It's money, and then the other thing is that a lot of these mainstream medias have just been proven in leaks that the intelligence agencies actually leak through, say, the New York Times or, say, many of these major...

They love that access. Right, so they like to project. They want to project. Even if you think about... It makes no... Josh, you remember Top Gun 2? Here's a conspiracy theory. What was the mission that they ran in Top Gun 2?

It's almost identical to a mission that happened in Iran. No, I know. It was Midnight Hammer. So, listen, call me a conspiracy theorist, but there's a lot of conditioning that happened. Wait, so we're doing our war games based on Top Gun? Is that what we're doing now? No, no. It would be to condition the American people. No, they made the movie Top Gun to prepare the Americans for, like, this is a good thing to do. Which it did. Successfully, and it was awesome propaganda, and I loved it, but that's what it was for.

I mean, I don't know. I'm much prefer that if we're going to do something, not that I want us to do something, but I much prefer that than the George W. Bush, Iraq, Afghanistan debacles. Yeah, I think that's why people are rightfully concerned, because the rhetoric feels almost exactly the same. Iran being two weeks away from the bomb, I mean, how many times has Netanyahu come to Congress and said that? Since at least 1996, same thing. Yeah, two weeks from the bomb.

The big difference being, and I was looking this up this morning, in 2003, when we were being sold all the Iraqi bill of goods, it turns out that George W. Bush had 72% of the American people at that point saying that they were in support of invading Iraq, and partly the propaganda, but also partly because we were just 18 months out from 9-11, which was the greatest attack on American soil. History. And now, I think, and I hope that Trump knows that he does not have near 72% support from the American people, and we're not facing sort of that existential threat feeling that we were feeling in 2003.

So, it's a different... Here's my plea to Donald Trump, his own words, what made him a darling to the entire nation. The war in Iraq, we spent $2 trillion, thousands of lives. We don't even have it. Iran is taking over Iraq with the second largest oil reserves in the world. Obviously, it was a mistake. George Bush made a mistake. We can make mistakes, but that one was a beauty. We should have never been in Iraq. We have destabilized the Middle East.

So, you still think he should be impeached? I think it's my turn, isn't it? You do whatever you want. You call it whatever you want. I want to tell you. They lied. Okay. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none, and they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Okay. Bring that one back. Old Trump. I liked that one, Trump. That was good Trump. Old Trump, man.

I remember that. I'll literally never forget. I mean, I couldn't believe, no one could believe he was saying, oh, no one could believe he was saying most of the stuff he could say, but that was the one that was a real point. Jeb could not believe he was hearing what he was getting. No, for sure, for sure. All right, let's go to Twilight Zone now. Josh, what do you got?

Well, when it comes to questions on, like, the political right or conservatives, you know, we get. These questions now, you know, I'd like to say that in the 21st century, we've seen so many times where we've had scandals, but the breakdown where people in the media or government are just absolutely lying to us. And then you get this, in this environment then, with COVID and all that other kind of stuff, that people are saying like, oh, looks like every conspiracy theory has been proven true, which then...

It gets people to start to go off the reservation a little bit, and they start thinking that every crazy random thing that they could conjure up, you know, was also a conspiracy theory, like Sandy Hook. The parents were actors. There were actual kids that were murdered, you know, and then you get Candace Owens, who is saying that Erika Kirk is responsible.

For the death of her own son, her own husband. And I just, you know, and so the question then is, like, this is so crazy. Do you actually take the time to say, no, here's why she's nuts on this, you know, because she hasn't made any real arguments. There's no real evidence that she's done to suggest this. So, do you take the time to refute her, or do you just hope it goes away?

Well, I've talked to enough people who think that this stuff is real, so I want to commend Matt Walsh for taking 45 minutes and walking through everything that she said and showing that, in fact, she doesn't have the goods. There's no smoking gun. There's no evidence. And so, she said, look.

The accusation that you're making here, this isn't a game, just for rolling, you know, for clicks or whatever. You're suggesting that a woman had her husband murdered, leaving her children without a father. That is an enormously massive Eye-opening, wow, argument you're going to make, and what do you have for it? Just, like, vibes? Like, I don't know. She smiles or giggles too much. Like, wait, what? What? Or she wears leather pants. Like, okay, I mean, maybe I wouldn't wear leather pants like that, but whatever.

There's no argument there. So, I want to commend Matt Walsh for a 45-minute video from soup to nuts, from the beginning to the end. Just making the case that Candace Owens has nothing there, and if you don't have any evidence, then why on earth would possess you to accuse a woman of having her husband murdered when all the evidence would seem to suggest some freakazoid hated him and murdered him? So, to me, I'm thinking to myself, she saw her husband murdered on social media, like it was shared all around the country.

Thousands of liberals were cheering, communists were cheering, but there was that moment right after that where lots of young men in their 20s were like, you know what? Charlie Kirk did a lot for me, and I need to do what he did. I need to get closer to Jesus. I need to start a family, and we saw this beautiful movement, and I just feel like Candace Owens has been spewing so much vile.

Since then, I find it reprehensible. I hope she goes to confession. In particular, big for Matt Walsh, because he was kind of well-known for the no enemies to the right issue. Like, he was, he's like, I'm not going to do the game where I have to come out and disavow or whatever, because... In his words, the radical left want to kill him, have already attempted to kill his family. I'm focused on enemies to the left. And there's a lot of wisdom in that, because, in fact, you get the types like Eric Erickson, who loves to attack conservatives that aren't good enough, you know, those type of people, and the media celebrates them and gives them a big platform and rebroadcasts everything.

So, any time a conservative attacks another conservative, the media loves it. Because they divide and conquer, and so that is why I understand the hesitancy of calling out someone on your side. My gosh, you are accusing a widow of murdering her husband?

Yeah, it is way beyond being on a side. It is just vile behavior toward a widow and her orphans. Scripture has some pretty good words for that. It is why we have a legal system and why our legal system is designed the way it is. You cannot just provide circumstantial evidence that is kind of weird. To convict someone of a specific, very specific crime. Like, you have to actually present the evidence and then show why it is relevant to what's going on, and it just feels, especially with this case, there's a lot of circumstantially weird, I guess, stuff going on with their family, but nothing that is actually criminal, and so why are you litigating that out in the public as though you have some smoking gun when you haven't provided said smoking gun?

Right, so there is a picture of Erika with one of her speakers at her event behind the stage, and she is smiling, and she looks beautiful, and she has got a thumbs up. And, you know, this lady goes, the epitome of grief, mocking her for smiling. And I just have to commend, like, Mary Catherine Hamm, I don't agree with her on everything, but she's a good conservative woman. Don't condition. Just say she's got good stuff.

Theme of the day. I'm going to do what I do. I'm going to do what I do. And she, you know, she posted a picture. It was a beautiful picture of people laughing and celebrating. It was right after her husband's funeral. Her husband was on a bicycle and got tragically killed. It wasn't an assassination. It was a tragedy. But hey, we were celebrating, and then she later gave birth to the child.

You know, you weep for widows, and so Mary Catherine Hamm has been phenomenal on this, pushing back against this, and she says, guess what? Widows smile. Widows function. Widows raise their children and work jobs. Widows read the Bible and pray and have dark moments behind closed doors, often shielding other people from them. Hope that helps.

So, if you catch yourself saying, I don't know, something about her is weird. You know what? There's no normal way to grieve your spouse being murdered. There's no normal way. Yeah, there's a way to go. There's a way to go about it. Like, I have doubts about, if you have doubts about what the FBI has presented as evidence, say, like, you know, for example. You can question the FBI all you want. Exactly, like with Thomas Crooks or whoever. Like, I feel like we haven't gotten a straight story.

Great. Like, yeah, we can litigate that, but then to turn the laser beam against. With no evidence, because this person is alive, you know what I mean? This person is alive and is grieving, and it's like, if you have real stuff, bring it forward. I just can't imagine this. I mean, I said to my wife, what if I had been murdered by some psycho and a bunch of communists online were celebrating that I had been murdered? And then, a little bit later, someone accused you of having me murdered, like on top of it.

Like, why don't you tell us where Charlie's been buried? Like, my gosh, I'll tell you why. Because tens of thousands of leftists would probably do something to the grave site. And now, you know, the cultists supporting Well, it is common, actually, like if someone, for someone to be accused because it is someone that you know, but then, of course, there's tons of legal protections for people in that situation because we know this phenomena in human, what do you say, like human tendencies, I guess, to be suspicious and then whip people up into a frenzy and then, you know, witch hunt on someone.

And, yeah, just, it does feel, yeah, it feels kind of gross. It is gross. It is vile. And it bothers me so much because In the immediate aftermath of his murder, there were so many people, and it was like a spring. It was beautiful. Like, all these people celebrating his life, sharing his videos, and talking about that, and I think it made Satan very upset. That is true. Erika.

What do you have? All right, I'm on Mom Donnie watch, my favorite watch to be. We had, you know, Trump was kind of roasting him at the State of the Union, saying that, you know, Zo and Mom Donnie runs a sanctuary city, but in order to shovel snow for him, for, I think it's up to $45 an hour, so if you do have photo ID, you should go shovel snow in New York. It's a lot of money per hour, but... You know, they seem to have made it up.

The bromance is back. Zoran Mamdani was at the White House yesterday for an unannounced meeting. He shows up. Trump's like, yeah, apparently they're texting buddies. The boys. Zoran Mamdani has, he knows how to cultivate the bromance because he's read Donald Trump and he has his number. So, they're sitting down. The meeting was about federal housing policy in New York. Mamdani has this, he wants to build 12,000 housing units with federal money. He wants to build 12,000 housing units with federal money.

He's like, Trump, we could put your name on it, like you're going to help me out here, and in order to soften him up a little bit, I don't know if you can zoom in on this, but Josh will love this, he brought these two mock-ups of headlines from the newspaper, and the first, the one that Trump is holding was an actual headline. I think it was, I can't see, it was the City Times. New York Daily News, 1976, before the presidential election.

There you go, it says, Ford to City. Drop dead. So, he brought this. You know what that's about? Well, because he didn't want to put in federal money for the housing. Right. Well, the city of New York was looking for a bailout in the mid, in whatever, 75 or whatever it was, and President Jerry Ford said it's not the responsibility of federal taxpayers to bail out a municipality.

And the New York Daily News took it really well with the headline, Ford to city, drop dead. Drop dead. And by the way, Jerry Ford lost New York State. By, like, a razor-thin margin in 1876, and so what was the lesson that every other politician got from that? You should have given him the money, because he would have been re-elected if he had. Well, I think that is what Mamdani was thinking, because then he had an alternate headline in his mock-up.

It is Trump to city. Let us build. And Donald Trump just loves this kind of stuff. I think that was probably a very slick move on the part of him. I get why people think this is funny, but I do not know why people are confused. Trump likes winners. He's like the least traditional party politician of all time. He does not care who you are. If you win, Trump likes you. He likes Mamdani because he won. You are absolutely right, Tom, but you know what?

There's another thing going on, I think. What? It seems like Donald Trump is using every opportunity he can to elevate Mamdani and give him more press. Okay. Are you 4-D Chessing right now? Yeah, they're doing it. It's so obvious to me, like, why would he not promote a communist mayor of New York City? It's like the perfect foil that he's saying, this is what all Democrats are. They're pro-Muslim, they're pro-communist, they're terrible. Like, why would he not elevate them at every turn?

And the person, you know, Mondami, should have been smart enough to go, he's doing this because he wants to insinuate all Democrats are like me. But, of course. My nami's like, yeah, I want all Democrats to be like me. So, it's like this perfect thing where he's falling into the... It's an interesting gamble. It's an interesting gamble because his favorability is up. I mean, it's still early as his tenure, but it's up. He's well-liked right now.

What are you saying? I'm talking about polls. Unveiling that budget last week started to shake him in the Bronx. I mean, they were really angry local city councilmen about that budget. Of course, people are angry about that, but his pitch is, I can't balance the city budget because Eric Adams blew it up, and of course, he has controversial rent freeze proposals, so he needs investment money from New York, or potentially the federal government, we'll see right here, to build what he considers to be affordable housing.

So, he's kind of... Like, I'm not even, I don't think he's playing his cards poorly. Like, if anything, this elevates his, it's a gamble. If it doesn't pay off, of course, then this section loses. But if it does pay off, then he's the standard bearer for Democrats going forward. So, it's like, maybe it's mutually beneficial. I don't know. It's definitely a gamble. I don't think it's a slam dunk as you think, Josh. But we'll see.

We'll see. Clearly, Trump thinks it's in his... Right, otherwise, he wouldn't be doing it. Yeah, no question. No question. Okay, so this one, yeah, speaking of headlines that make you shake your head. Jonathan Majors will star in a new action film for The Daily Wire. Ben Shapiro is set to produce.

I just took a deep breath on that one. Where did I recognize Jonathan Majors? He was a Marvel star. And was kind of, I think they actually kind of tanked the movie because of some of his actions. If people are curious, he assaulted his girlfriend, broke her finger, slammed her against a car, and all around seems like, unfortunately, a poor treater of women. Not an edifying man. Yeah. So, you know, I was thinking about this because, of course, this reinforces the like, oh.

Well, folks, you may have seen this rumor that we here at Daily Wire are working with Jonathan Majors on a new movie, and that rumor is absolutely true. Yeah, I know. There are a lot of people on the left, on X, and they're very upset about this. They're very upset about this. There's lots of tweets. Okay, here's the deal, you whiny little bitches. We don't care, because Jonathan Majors was canceled all the way back in 2023. We're ecstatic to bring him back.

He's unbelievably talented, and if you're upset now, wait until you see this film. Your heads are going to explode. Actually, maybe explode. It is pretty spectacular stuff that we are doing. That is what we do here at Daily Wire. We fight the fight. We need your help to continue to fight in the culture and to win and to do the thing no one else will do. So, please, come join us. I hate everything about this.

I hate everything about this. The pipeline. So, they did their first big movie with Gina Carano, right, who had just been canceled from. She had been canceled from. What was that? The Star Wars thing. Oh, Mandalorian. Thank you, Mandalorian. Oh my gosh, my kids are going to kill me. Did she beat someone? Did she beat up a partner? No, but let's see, that's my point. This is my point. She was canceled from that show, and like hundreds of thousands of dollars in opportunity lost there for saying something.

I mean, this was like, and then, so she just gets canceled. It's totally different from this guy who was canceled because he was a woman beater and bragged about it. Like, that's, we've got to make some distinctions here. So, again, I hate this because I like some of the stuff Daily Wire has produced. I love the Pendragon, but this is just.

It is so forced, too. He got outside of his house in Boca Raton and was like, I am going to say the B word. I am going to say it because it is so embarrassing. I mean, again, if he had unjustly been shown the door and canceled, and you are giving him an opportunity to have a career again, that is another story. I hope he has changed his life, but he was canceled. Appropriately, you know? And is that a death sentence?

Can he never come back? No, that's why I think the way that Bagley... I'm not saying that you're saying that, Tom. Yeah, right, right. I'm just saying, like, yeah, sure, but, like... Ben, you're absolutely right to call this out, because Ben Shapiro is making it seem like, oh, the libs don't like him.

No, dude, I don't like women beaters, man. I'm like, I'm as far right as right gets, dude. I'm like, sometimes people get canceled for good reason, and then it's like the lack of humor, like the whole fight the good fight at the dealer. Like, you're going to use the word fight when you're resuscitating. You're laundering the image of a guy that beat someone's girlfriend, beat his own girlfriend. Yeah, this was a swing and a miss. And then it would have been one thing if he came out and was like, hey, guys, like.

This leaks out. He said, listen, we are working with Jonathan Majors. He's really sorry for what he did. I think that he's rehabilitated himself. He's apologized. He's made things right, but he is a talented actor, and after therapy, it's not a death sentence. Maybe this is an opportunity that we believe that we can partner on. It could be good, because that requires humility, but they're kind of like, oh, it's just so boomer. We're going to own the libs. We're so not there anymore, man.

I don't know. I hate that. I hate that. And it reinforces the whole, like, anytime someone gets canceled for anything, they just become right-wing, as if that's somehow a conservative principle. I was like, well, it just seems like you're grabbing attention in a very, I just, ugh, I just didn't like anything. I just saw it, and I was just so annoyed. Sorry.

Do better, man. Sorry, I'm so annoyed. Do better. Do better. Okay. Good show, man. Good show. We went a lot of places. We said a lot of things. We sure did. No daily prayer. Celine, where is the daily prayer? We got to end in prayer for our last show. What was the daily prayer channel today? Not our last show. It is our last Friday. Last Friday show. Yeah, come on. People are getting a little dramatic. Yeah, do not be dramatic. Okay, where is daily prayer?

Josh, say something interesting while I look for the date. We're digging up our prayers. Oh, she's got it in the chat. All right, we got it. You got it? Oh, there she is. Oh, yeah, prayer for America 250. We're still rocking with that, as we should.

Okay, so... Go check out, if you got LOOPcast Blues Monday, the Erika Scott Hahn interview, very fun. We're going to have a fun Wednesday show. It's going to be longer. We're going to talk questions. It's going to be great. So, we can see you there, live, 11 a.m. Eastern, and then episode of The Deep coming Thursday. So, we still got lots of good programming for you. I'm still working on hanging out with Garbage Men.

I'm becoming one myself. That will be chill. And, yeah, maybe Josh has got a little something coming, too. We'll see. So, I'm going to pray today. Prayer for America 250, and Father, Son, Holy Spirit, Amen. O Sacred Heart of Jesus, King of Heaven and Earth, I place today my nation, the United States of America, into your heart, pierced for love of us. On the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I acknowledge that true liberty is your gift, and that our lasting homeland is the eternal kingdom of God.

Under the mantle of our Lady Guadalupe, patroness of the Americas, and through the intercession of her Immaculate Heart, bless my homeland anew, purify her from sin, and guide her leaders in truth, justice, and peace, so that she may safeguard all human life, respect the integrity of marriage and the family, and honor the practice of religion. Reign in my home and in my nation. Draw every heart into communion with you, that your truth, love, justice, mercy, and peace may triumph in America and throughout the world. Amen. St. Thomas Moore, St. Fidelis, Arley Guadalupe. Good show, gang. We'll catch you guys on Wednesday. Peace.