Federal Court Forces Nuns To Provide Contraception, U.S. Drinking Down, And Deli Weapon

Welcome back to LOOPcast, every Catholic American's favorite podcast and favorite newsletter. Go check out the Loop if you're already not involved. Josh is back from vacation. You get the LOOPcast lads today. I want to get this right, because I know you're technical. Happy Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Yes, it is a holy day of obligation here in America, so go get to Mass if you're listening to this today on Friday. Someone in the chat, Catherine, said it is not a holy day in Canada.

I can't speak for the different countries, but even if it's not obligatory, you should go to Mass today, as I did this morning with the family, to celebrate the beautiful Blessed Virgin Mary and the act that, you know, she did not have her own power, of course, Jesus Christ sending the angels down to bring Mary. To her heavenly glory in body and soul together, because she never sinned. God did not punish her with the separation of the body from the soul.

That happens upon death, and she was brought to heaven, and then a week later, we celebrate her coronation, the Queenship of Mary. So, this is just a great time. I love it. Celebrate her blessed mother. She is the best. Josh, it is good to have you back, and does that also mean you can eat? Me today. Dude, I already ate. My lovely wife provided me a banquet of beautiful breakfast meats. Oh, yeah, dude. I love it. Had some donuts this morning.

I'm wearing blue. I actually do, on that point, live it up. I feel like living liturgically. I don't know if that's gotten lost. I feel like the other thing I've been kind of getting into recently is fasting, but there's a couple things that I feel like we've lost and I'm kind of getting back in touch with, and one of them is, when it is a feast day, do it up. Like, do it up with the kids. That's right. Do it up with the people around you.

Yes, it's actually a day to celebrate, to think about, to think about the Virgin Mary, to think about all that. Someone who's living it up, I just wanted to show this because it's heartwarming, but also, I guess it's the feast day of St. Tarsisius, my confirmation saint, which is sick. Shout out to St. Tarsisius. But here's Pope Leo singing the Marian Anthem.

So, just everything about it. Background, music, choir. The aura of the Catholic Church remains unbeaten. Shout out to Our Lady. So, a lot of different things to get into today's episode. Josh, welcome back from vacation. It is great to have you. We are going to be talking Little Sisters of the Poor, Just Received a Decision. A lot of people in the loop are talking about that. We are going to give that full coverage. Some underground abortion happening in Virginia public schools, which is crazy talk.

I saw your friend Tim Carney had a tweet about that, so we are going to cover that as well. Drinking, Josh. Down across Americans, some very interesting Gallup polling on Americans of all stripes, political affiliation, ages, and their habits regarding drinking. So, I'm excited to talk about that. That sounds like a bad idea. Yeah. Young men not being able to find jobs, a classic topic, but another interesting contribution there. And deli assault will come up. I promise you that. I truly have laughed at it so many times, and I'm going to save it because it continues to make me laugh.

But I say we get right into it. Josh, a good vacation, though, before we get into it. Yeah, it was good to see, you know, I grew up in Minnesota, saw all my family out there, mom, dad, brother and sister, and a bunch of nephews and nieces and stuff like that, so it was good times, yeah.

Good. Okay. Time to dive in. Federal court sides against Trump administration's conscience protections for the little sisters of the poor. If you thought this was over, if you thought this was an Obama thing going after the little sisters of the poor, the legacy continues here. On Wednesday, a federal court in Philadelphia ruled against Trump administration religious conscience ruling and the little sisters of the poor, who are now no longer exempt from providing contraception to staff.

The sisters intend to appeal the decision, which is the latest episode in a long saga that, as I said, began with the Obama administration's HHS department mandating the sisters must provide the drugs, even though the Catholic Church opposes the use of contraception, unless it is strictly intended to address medicinal problems. The timeline goes all the way back to 2013. It has gone back and forth. It got all the way up to the Supreme Court. In 2020, they heard Little Sisters of the Poor, St.

Peter and Paul Home vs. Pennsylvania. And it actually ruled in favor of the sisters, and now in 2025, a federal district court in Philadelphia struck down the Trump-era religious conscious rule nationwide, siding with Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The little sisters announced their plan to appeal. Josh, I mean, you would think we're in the golden age of America at this point, that we wouldn't be suing nuns so that they provide contraception and abortion to nuns. What is going on here? I love this.

What is the government's interest in this? I mean, we have democratic politicians who are so devoted to the culture of death. They are like, we need to make sure that women have super cheap, affordable means of contraception, including abortion pills. And you are like, okay, that on its own, we are not even having that debate on whether or not that is a great idea. Like, look at the birth rate. We are having a problem in this country not having enough children.

We should try to encourage family formation, try to get people married. But instead, we have these politicians who are like, we need to make sure women never get pregnant. No, we need to make sure nuns. And that they can abort their kids. And then they are like, okay. And no one in this circle of democratic politicians is like. Okay, yeah, well, obviously, nuns, you know, presumably most of them are not having sex, probably don't need contraception, probably don't need abortion pills, and you know what?

If they want them, they can still buy them. Leave them alone. But they don't. They're so maniacally zealous in their ideology. They're like, every single woman needs to be able to have the right to have this, and how dare you be against it? Well, I mean, these women don't want it. They've joined this order of nuns, and every day, this is Kelsey Reinhart, new president, brought this up well. Every day that the little sisters of the poor have to spend fighting this in court, it's a day they're taken away from them and serving the poor.

So, the Democrats are not doing any help on this at all. They're thwarting the great corporal works of these religious sisters. And it's just contemptible. The Democrats are so fanatic about making sure we don't have more babies, contraception, abortion pills, and make sure nuns have them? Bro.

So, someone in the chat brings this up, too, which is awesome. It is great having to read out the full name of the case, saying Little Sisters of the Poor, as if somehow they're this evil group. I mean, they're literally named The Little Sisters of the Poor. I don't know if there's any good way to possibly go against. It reminds me of when politicians named bills, and they name it like The Greatest Bill Ever Act, and so if you're against The Greatest Bill Ever, clearly you're evil, right?

How could you be against The Greatest Bill Ever Act? And in this case, they're literally The Little Sisters of the Poor. How could you go against them? We actually had a conversation Wednesday, a great show with Tom McCluskey, and we're talking a little bit about there's a case that could potentially be taken up by the Supreme Court about overturning Obergefell.

Kind of the point we were getting around to, the point actually wasn't that there's somehow these rights not afforded to people that engage in homosexual activity. The point of that was to send a message, basically. And so, I feel very similarly about abortion, because if you think about it, most of the country is probably in the, you know, they're not totally pro-life, but are probably like, yeah, let's not do third trimester, and like, let's not make nuns provide it. Like, they would be fine with that.

But there's a small group of activists that are trying to do this to make the point that it doesn't matter. You know, who you are, you could be a nun, you could be anyone. We want this for everyone, all the time, for no reason. Everyone to be complicit, everyone to be a part of it, everyone to have support financially, because they don't want this. I mean, abortion, as Peter Kreef said, is the sacrament of the left. Right. You know, like, as Christ said, you know, the Blessed Sacrament, this is my body, you know, given up for thee.

Well, of course, abortion is the inverse of that. This is my body, and I'm not going to give it up for you. And I always thought that was such a brilliant and amazing insight on the abortion debate, but the left considers abortion to be central to everything that they talk about with the sexual revolution and reorienting everything about their lives towards their identity and what gives them affirmation or pleasure or happiness or whatever. Their own soul and their own ego is the central focus of their life.

And to them, having a partner or having children, okay, if it suits yourself, if that's what you want to do, it's always this rights talk and about making yourself feel better. There's never this idea of, gee. You know, I am blessed to have had parents that sacrificed so much for me, and I want to raise the next generation, and we all want to be of service to mankind. There is so much egoism in today, and it is in the sexual revolution.

It fuels that. It is all about the self. It is not about living off. The message was, do whatever you want in your bedroom. That was the catchy slogan that forced us on, but if you look, again, the slippery slope in two of these cases now, one was there was the two people in Kentucky that wanted to get married. There were two men, and they intentionally sought out the clerk that they wanted her name on their document. They could have done, and they had no interest in getting married before they heard about.

This lady who was just saying, I don't want this. Look at the cake example in Colorado. Now, you look at this example where it's like, how could we possibly get to a situation where the president is going after the little sisters of the poor? By the way.

It's to send a message. That's why people are wondering, what do you mean, why are they being forced? Because if you orient this in the language of rights, then it's like it needs to extend with no exceptions. And in the same way, that's why the original definition of marriage. ...was important, and a shared consensus of what life is is important, so that you can take on those edge cases. And for these people who had power, clearly during the Obama administration, they want to punish the edge cases of, say, the nuns, or people of sincere Christian religious convictions.

Yeah, but so we have an unequal media... In our environment, in our country, and we are starting to approach a little bit of balance, but the example that you bring up, like that gay couple wanting to go and have Kim Davis, who had objections to it, wants her name on that marriage certificate, wants to have the government force her to quit her job or to have her name on that document, it is to send a message. All knees must bend. Everyone must submit to the… Sexual revolution, whether it is the gays or abortion or whatever.

And again, like the gays going to the bakers, bake me the cake, you know, and at some point, you just think to yourself, there are. There have got to be hundreds of people in Denver that could bake a cake. Why are you just... Well, there was. Why won't you leave this guy alone? And I'm just trying to think of, do we ever see extremists on the other side? I mean, Fred Phelps, that old pastor full of hate, he ended up dying, but he would have the signs up that says, God hates fags, right?

And most conservatives are like, okay, actually, you're not helping. Thank you very much. God does hate the act of sodomy, and he does hate immoral things, but not helpful. But imagine if you went up to a baker, You know, that you knew was gay, and you say, hey, bake me this cake. Well, then what then?

Are they going to bake the cake? Again, there is this idea of at least some basic civil society, like civility in our society, has just really gone out of the window. It is all smash mouth, and the left is aggravate. They are the terrorists. They are the ones that are undermining civil society, left and right, and everything that we do. And so, forcing the florist to cater to the wedding, force someone to bake a cake. Force nuns to pay for abortions.

Like, dude, you are getting everything you want, and now you want to rub it in our faces. Again, and then the left says, gosh. Why do conservatives elect a smash-mouth Donald Trump in return? Because you keep coming at us with all this power and making us do the DEI stuff, and you tell porno stuff to our kids in schools, and after a while, it's like, we need a big 800-pound gorilla on our side. We're sick and tired of these timid guys who are like, oh, gosh, I don't know.

I know that's wrong, but I can't do anything against it. I guess we'll just, you know, no. It's almost like winning is important. It's almost like you need to win. And what you're saying is there was this kind of cushy liberal consensus of the elites and institutions where they pretty much had everything they wanted, right? And then they essentially now punish the edge cases because nothing was holding them accountable, and there was controlled opposition on the other side. They would come up and be like, we need to change, but they really were a part of the system.

Donald Trump, again, is like the consummate populist. What do you want? You know, what do you want? Just ask what you want, and that was like a shocking new discovery for politics. We don't have to lose every game. And there's good, there's, you know, there's good and bad to that. You know, Tom, I've described it this way. So, you know, like, maybe because these days I don't remember it anymore, but, you know, the Harmon Globetrotters, right? I mean, it's just a fantastic basketball team, and they would, it was a sight to see, you know, you go see it, and they would do all these funny tricks or whatever.

But they can't just do it alone. They would have to have another scrub team that they would play. I think they were called like the Washington Generals or whatever, and these guys were just sitting there like, oh my gosh, like bumbling idiots that the Globetrotters could look that much more exciting. Well, I have always said, before Donald Trump came along, all the Republicans in Washington were like those Washington Generals bumbling idiots, and the Globetrotters would just run tables around these guys, and it's like, why are our guys so feckless and stupid?

Get out of here. And so, is Donald Trump perfect? No, but he's like, wait a minute. What do you guys want? You want this and that? Okay, great. And these guys seem like they're tearing down a country. Let's stop them. And it's like, oh.

Yes, thank you. Yeah, well, I mean, I was even listening to something, talking about, I think it was like Ross Douthat was interviewing some intellectual about, actually, funny, he was talking about what you've talked about, in that there's not enough actual representative in America anymore, representation when it comes to by extending seats and stuff like that. So, he's coming up with radical ideas, right? Like, we need to radically change what's going on, because what's happening now isn't working.

By making it more democratic, but people somehow are unwilling to see that Donald Trump is a product of said democracy. Like, people spoke, and they wanted someone to change things, and he did radically change things. Now they're like, oh, no, no, we got to go back now, right? Because something new has come up that's basically beaten us. It's basically what the subtext of all this is. Because the Constitution has changed significantly. We put up Rick Santorum. Rick Santorum ran for president.

He was very religious, and he was very blue-collar, and the Democrats absolutely toasted him and roasted him, and so it is like, okay, fine. The warning here is the left kept saying how much they hated the religious right. The religious right is so terrible. It is bad. It is a scourge on our politics.

Okay, if you do not want the religious right, what do you think is going to happen when we get the irreligious right? It is not like Donald Trump is super pious. He is not held back by, gee, what should I do? He is just going to go for the jugular. To him, it is smash-mouth politics. The reason why the left hates him so much is that Donald Trump is playing by their rules, and they are like, no, no, no, no, no, no.

The left thinks they should be able to do what they want. Whatever they want, the ends always justify the means, and ha, ha, ha, Republicans will be trapped in either their love of the Constitution or their love of their Christian values, and that they will never be able to respond in kind, and we can run tables around these guys.

We can run the tables with these guys, and Donald Trump is just like, I don't think so. I mean, ultimately, I was trying to tell my kids this about Ronald Reagan's strategy, and I didn't like Ronald Reagan on Amnesty or whatever.

But throughout the entire 1970s, the establishment was convinced, we are never going to be able to defeat the Soviet Union, and they will never be able to defeat us, so we have to have this idea of detente, and we are just going to coexist forever. And Reagan was asked about this, and he is running for president. He is like, yeah, no, I have a better idea. My strategy is, we win, they lose. And everyone's like, ah! You know, like, it's such a scandal.

And it's like, that's what I think, that's what so many conservatives like about Donald Trump. He's like, you know what? It's better to win ugly than to lose with all this, you know, self-gloating and, oh, I held true to my principles. Right. You know what? Your principles are dog water if you're getting mopped by the table every day. Like, maybe you need new principles.

Gosh. Josh using dog water on LOOPcast. That's like a LOOPcast bingo. So good. Yeah, I think those days are over. So, some people were asking about the original, like, why were they in this position to begin with? Wasn't this because Obamacare basically forced everyone to pay for contraception in some way, shape, or form? Yeah, so again, one of the great things, there was a recent court case that got rid of the Chevron Doctrine, so that was so wonderful and so good.

And that just happened over the last year or two, okay? The Chevron Doctrine, though, what it allowed the politicians to do from 1984 onward is to pass a super vague bill and then let the bureaucrats at all the different agencies fill in all the blanks. Right. Because that is what the Chevron Doctrine, the Supreme Court gave the thumbs up on that back in 1984, and conservatives were super against it from day one. And we've been fighting it, even though in that particular case, we technically won, but the principle was terrible, so we were against it.

So, Obama and Nancy Pelosi and a bunch of former pro-life Democrats in the House passed that Obamacare, that horrible, wretched bill. CatholicVote and the U.S. bishops were saying, no, no, no, wait a minute, because we have this Chevron doctrine, you need explicit language in this health care bill that prevents all these subsidies and all this health care entanglement from supporting abortion. We need it in there.

And House, you know, there's these, there's like, at the time, there's like 20 of these pro-life Democrats in the House, and they're like, yeah, okay, we'll do it. And at the last second, all of them caved, except for one, Dan Lipinski, good guy, I love him. All the rest totally caved on it. And so what ended up happening is the bill gets passed, and the bureaucrats, the pro-abortion bureaucrats, the pro-abortion political appointees at the Department of Health and Human Services in the Obama administration took about four seconds to go.

Yeah, actually, this vague language, this means all of you have to provide in your insurance plans, if you have 30 or more employees, coverage for contraception, sterilization, and abortion pills, and CatholicVote was like, I told you so. I told you so. We told you this was going to happen. Hello.

And what happened? We get this horrible mandate, and what they allowed for on religious exemptions, this is so beautifully, unbelievably, condescendingly stupid. They're like, oh, yeah, yeah, no, we have religious exemptions for this, and the only people who were religiously exempted from this were men, consecrated religious life. All in the same religion, and no women involved. So, basically, a seminary of Catholic priests would not have to abide by the HHS mandate. Well, okay, I don't know about you, but Catholic priests aren't getting pregnant, so it's not really a problem anyway.

Right, right, right. So, thanks for the exemption. Yeah, thanks, I guess. What about EWTN? They're a Catholic television channel. Everyone knows that's what they do, and they're totally against all this stuff. Well, you know, you have men and women who are not consecrated, and you have men and women who, you know... It might be of different faiths, so you have to provide for it. They are like, what? It was just bizarre. It was absolutely asinine. You had a federal government. Again, what is the history of our country?

We had, you know, like, oh, why don't you Catholics go over there, and the Episcopalians go there, and we had different states where, you know, the different people would reside, and Rhode Island was, like, kind of risky, like, we're going to let anyone practice whatever faith they want to. Most people were like, that's a little weird. Everyone had a state church, pretty much, and then Virginia decided to go a little rogue and say, we're not going to have a state church, and everyone had a state church.

Church and state were pretty together for a long time, and finally, we got rid of it, you know, and maybe that's a better blessing or whatever, but This idea that religion was going to be hermetically sealed from public life was absolutely a foreign concept. It is a joke. Again, if you were able to somehow wake up George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and say, hey, by the way, guess what? The federal government is forcing these 30, 40, 50 nuns to pay for abortion.

It would be like, hey, by the way, guess what? The federal government is forcing these 30, 40, 50 nuns to pay for abortion. Did the King of England recapture the United States? Like, what on earth are you talking about? It is absolutely crazy.

Yeah. So, resolution on this? This gets appealed, and then, I imagine... Ultimately, the sisters of the poor are going to win, but it is just, again, another silly argument. Punishment is the... And what is with the governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro? What does this guy, Josh Shapiro, have such a problem with Catholic nuns? This guy who wants to become president or vice president someday. Catholic voters need to know that Josh Shapiro... Has declared war, year after year, against the Little Sisters of the Poor.

Is he Catholic? No, he's Jewish, and that was the reason why he wasn't probably nominated by Kamala Harris over that. And we called out the anti-Jewish bigotry against him, but what's the deal? Is he having anti-Catholic bigotry? What is his maniacal, or is it just that he loves abortion so much? That story was funny. That story was funny because... Some people are saying, oh, because he was Jewish, that would hurt Kamala's campaign, and then other people are saying Josh Shapiro actually, he was asked, but he put forth such insane demands that he was hoping to get turned down because he knew that she was going to lose, which I'm like, I don't even know which one I believe in, but what an insane campaign.

Wow, shortest one ever. Okay, we got to get to the next story now. So, B Block, this one really, I don't know if I got enough. This happened a little while ago. I did not get enough attention. I'm not sure what the heck is going on here, but Fairfax County, under the gun again, I do not know. Why Fairfax County keeps coming up, but we have this... You know why it is? I mean, Fairfax County used to be a conservative area, you know, about 40 years ago, and then 20 years ago, when I was living in there, it was definitely becoming blue, and now it's navy.

It is where a ton of federal bureaucrats live, and, you know, conservatives are having to move further and further out of Northern Virginia. Yeah, but Fairfax is, you know, just, I would say, kind of the real turning point where a lot of this You know, it is upper middle class, white, suburban, usually women, who are driving the politics of this area in just horrible ways. Because I think it was Loudoun County that had the trans kid.

That is right. Yeah. The lack of public safety in the bathroom. Yes. So, I mean, Loudoun also is going crazy. I mean, Loudoun used to be rock rib Republican 25 years ago. So, let me, sorry, let me set the story here. It had the controversy of, you know, like. Getting rid of the, you know, the schools that would, you know, everyone has to be equal, and you can't have marriage schools, and... Was Loudon also domestic terrorism from the school board parents?

Yeah, I think it was. Okay. Yeah, but anyway, I got to start here. So, I'll share the CatholicVote article first. It says, Fairfax high school teacher says she blew whistle on abortion allegations seven times and her school ignored her. It goes back to this Substack article from Walter Kurt. In Fairfax County, clandestine school-funded abortions bypassed parents exposing a hidden pipeline endangering teen girls. Getting a little bit into the story here. There was a social worker at Centerville High School, Carolina Diaz, was involved in arranging and bankrolling abortions for two students without the parent's knowledge or consent.

The first incident allegedly occurred November 2021 when the student was 17 years old. The girl claims Diaz scheduled the appointment, paid for it, and, quote, kept everything quiet without informing my family, end quote, according to Kurt. In the second case, a student who was five months pregnant went to an abortion appointment, procured for her, After Diaz reportedly told her that she, quote, had no other choice, she ultimately decided against the abortion, choosing to leave the clinic rather than go through with it.

According to the report, Principal Chad Lehman knew about both incidents, and both abortion appointments were apparently paid for by school funds. Both times, the parents and the families of the girls were not informed, a violation of a state law that requires at least one parent to be notified before an abortion can be performed for a minor.

And so, the whistleblower was another teacher, Zenaida Perez, at the school, was the first to blow the whistle. However, she had to blow it a number of times before anything was done. Perez had raised concerns about the claim seven times since May 2022, but administrators, instead of responding to the allegations, looked to punish Perez for speaking up. Students reportedly said later that the school administrators began looking for ways to fire Perez or pressure her to resign, even attempting to have students bait Perez.

So, now we get a lawsuit from Governor Glenn Youngkin saying on Wednesday he has directed state police to open a full criminal investigation into allegations that officials at Fairfax County High School facilitated, at a Fairfax County High School, had facilitated abortions for minor students. Here's a quote from him. I am deeply concerned with allegations that Fairfax County Public School officials arranged for minors to get abortions without parental consent and may have misused public funds to buy them. I am directing the Virginia State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation to open a full criminal investigation into the matter immediately.

I mean, what are we doing here? Yeah, and again, I would just say, like, a new kind of Republican. Thank you, Governor Glenn Youngkin. I mean, like, the typical thing, like, 20 years ago, when some kind of scandal like this would go down, you hear a bunch of Republicans talking to microphones, how terrible this is. Oh, this is terrible. This is terrible. And they do nothing. And do nothing.

Glenn Youngkin is doing something like, order an investigation, find out what's going on, fire people if they need to be fired. Like, it's not the teacher that blew the whistle that needs to be fired, it's the principal. That principal needs to be kicked out, so you are no longer going to be able to teach children. I'm sorry, you need to be in jail. What are we talking about here? Yeah. If you miss, okay, so obviously taxpayer funds. I think it's a ton of COVID money that flooded these schools in 2021, and I can't believe it.

I just can't believe it. So, I saw this tweet from your boy, Tim Carney, college roommate of Josh's back in the day. Not college, after college, but yeah. After college. So, it was over this tweet that said, right-wing guys from blue states are 10 times more rabid than their red state counterparts, which I don't know if anyone in the chat can relate to this experience. I'm in ruby red Indiana, so I haven't had a deal with that in a while. Dude, I mean, Ty, you meet some right-wingers from Los Angeles, and you just don't believe it.

Peachy Keenan? Yeah, for sure. You don't believe it. So, his tweet was, my previous county tried to close my kids' Catholic schools when COVID rates were falling and accused us of elitist racism when we resisted. My current county's public school runs an abortion ring on high school girls, and the prosecutor refuses to bust the brothel in my neighborhood.

Seriously, what are we doing here? Good for Yunkin. And you know this kind of stuff happens too, right? I think of Tim Waltz in Minnesota, and J.B. Pritzker, Illinois. Like, this would... They would have no problem with this, right? I mean, isn't it just abortion at all costs? Can no one stop and see? No, not only are they not against it, they absolutely support it, and they feel like it's terrible that you'd have to notify parents, and that parents would be involved, because if parents get involved, and they find out, oh my gosh, you knew that my daughter was pregnant, oh my gosh, thank you for letting me know.

Oh wait, no, you didn't tell me. Oh wait, you murdered my grandchild? How risable is this? This is just unbelievable. Like, if my daughter had gotten pregnant and some school, you know, administrator, you know, knew about it, I would hope they would call me on the damn telephone. Right. And I'd be like, I'll raise the kid as my own. Let's go. Let's work on something. Let's work on this idea. If you got the call the other way, Josh. Hold on a second.

Public school system, the whole idea behind it is in loco parentis, that the teachers and administrators of the school are supposed to act in the stead of parents. They're supposed to act on our behalf, but the left wing, the radical liberalism that we have today, consider parents to be the problem. They want to do counter-programming. They are concerned, and we have all these Marxists in the public schools. They've been absolutely captured.

This is a sign of total decay. Have you read The Closing of the American Mind, Alan Bloom? Very familiar with it. I haven't read the whole thing, but yeah, I mean, this... I just ordered it on Amazon, so I'm looking forward to reading it. That was on the summer reading list from our boy, Jeremy Tate, Classical Learning Test, just tweeted it. I was like, how have I not run it? Erika, for sure, has read this. Erika is a genius. Genius. For sure, she has read this.

I would just say, like I hate to... I know we have a public podcast, everything like that. The rage that fills me to think if I ever got a call like that from some school social worker that hid this from me, that would be responsible for the murder of my grandchild, like any sane society, that's life in prison, if not worse. I got to say, too, I got to say, I mean, you know, for too long, conservative-leaning voters have sort of kind of looked the other way as these left-wing.

Thiefdoms go more and more nuclear. We are like, oh, well, Detroit is kind of crazy, whatever, and you just kind of wash your hands of it like your paunches pile. As long as I can be safe here in the suburbs, then everything should just be fine. But the fact is that they keep radiating, and they produce more liberalism. So, like, you know, these colleges, these universities, these public school systems, these administrators, they create greater and larger fiefdoms, like the number of...

Administrators to student has gone through the roof over the last four years. Crazy. And we've just sort of like, well, we don't want to live in... High crime, deep blue, left-wing, you know, psycho cities anymore. We'll live in the suburbs, and we'll wash our hands of it like we're Pontius Pilate. What can we do? And actually, the approach that we need to do is what Donald Trump is starting to do with Washington, D.C. We need to say, no, we don't want large sections of our country, including places with tons of people, like our big cities, to become total hellholes.

We should go through here and clean up the crime, and we should go through these. Different institutions, Donald Trump is starting with higher education. He's like, hey, can you just like stop being racist against Jews? Like, just start with something, but like not totally ignore it. He is the first Republican president since Richard Nixon that has done anything on higher education. It just hasn't happened. It's been 60 years. But we just say, well, whatever. Wash our hands of it. We're not going to worry about colleges, universities, high schools.

We're not going to worry about public cities becoming crime hellholes. Too bad for all the innocent people that live in these cities. You don't vote for us anyway. Well, some of them do. We are a brother's keeper. Take care of the people in the cities. Don't let them become hellholes. Don't let them become complete crime. Infested areas. We have to do better as a country. This is our country. We deserve better. And so, I think Donald Trump going in, doing something on Washington, D.C.

crime, and doing something on, you know, with the first federal school choice provision. Trying to reform higher education, like, hey, maybe don't hate Jews. Like, start somewhere, baby steps, and we can build on this kind of stuff. But for too long, Republican politicians are like, I want less regulations on my business. I want you to cut my taxes and go ahead and bomb foreign countries. I don't care. And you haven't worried about anything else. And the Republic is in decline. Thank you, Donald Trump, for waking us up.

Word. Good news now. I have one for both of us, okay? Let's start. It's been an intense episode so far. I'm going to start sappy, okay? I love my family. I grew up in a family of brothers. I haven't seen them in a little while. I feel this. Caption of this video is, parents, I hope your homes are so full of love and joy that when your college son is asked about not being around junior siblings, he has this reaction, and I'll play it.

So, what's it like? Being the first time you're away from them? Yeah, that part's hard. I mean, I'm sorry. Yeah, I loved it a lot. Yeah, I've got two little brothers, and my mom and dad and I... Yeah, that is the tough part about being here. I love them a lot, and I miss them, but it is, I mean, they know this is what is best for me, and it is good. I can still talk to them plenty over the phone, and they are coming here to see the first few games, so I am looking forward to that.

Yeah, I got a hard shell, but I can be sappy inside. Yeah, come on, man. I will allow it. You catch a grown man crying about his family, dude. I was just talking. To my wife about this, one thing I really admire about her family is that, and her kids were all homeschooled, and again, education different for everyone. I'm not saying like a homeschool supremacist or anything like that, but one thing I really admire about their family is there's a lot of intentional sacrifices made to keep them together, and I see how close they are now as adults, and I really...

It's a rare quality. I see such a big family. I have eight kids, and they are very close, and to this day, even though we live in a different state and everything like that, and I'm very grateful to my parents. I still love my brothers, and so I kind of like, we get into politics and news, and it's important. But it's all at service to what? And to me, even my job, what I do here is at service to my family, and my ultimate goal is to make my children love their family, have a home life that they love, and love their siblings, and love God, of course.

Love God above all this. This is obviously a key ingredient, and it was for my in-laws and my upbringing. I just love seeing public expressions of that, because to me, him punting or whatever is all fun, but it's kind of a quick reminder of what it's all about. So, I thought I'd go sappy with mine today.

Right, well, like I said, Donald Trump is the first Republican president who's had the cojones to actually do stuff, like Glenn Youngkin investigating that thing in Fairfax. Donald Trump, like, hey, wait a minute, what if we investigate the left and all the crimes that they routinely do, but, like, for some reason, we can never prosecute them? Donald Trump has ordered, you know, the Trump administration is investigating Act Blue. This is a website. That was created to try to get people, I mean, let me give you what they claim it is.

It's a way to get a bunch of liberal activists to donate money in big bombs to support, you know, communists that they like, like Beto O'Rourke or AOC or whatever. And the Republican Party has their version of this called Win Red. That's right. But there's something very specific about going on with ActBlue, for those wondering. Yeah, you want to roll the tape there? Yeah.

Meanwhile, President Trump is directing the Justice Department to investigate Act Blue. This is a Democratic donation platform, and the focus is the allegations about illegal straw donors and foreign contributions. Mark Meredith is live in Washington with more. This has been brewing for a while, Mark. What do we need to know?

Dana, for years, you're right about this, but this is a big development. The White House is directing the Attorney General to investigate the Democratic Party's top fundraising platform. It's called ActBlue, and the president says he wants to know if foreign money is being donated to the group and then utilized to sway elections. Democrats are calling this probe a dangerous abuse of power. ActBlue is an enormous operation in Democratic politics. It's raised more than $16 billion since 2004. You may have seen the text pop up from candidates saying, please donate, go to the ActBlue website.

Republicans used something similar called WinRed. There was a new memo signed on Thursday directing the Attorney General to investigate if foreign nationals are using the ActBlue platform to bypass campaign finance laws. Trump wants a report out in six months.

Yeah, so, I mean, hey, this is what I like to see, you know? Like, when you're setting up all these donation things, you have to make sure, like we do on our website, you know? We don't accept donations if you live in Paris, France.

Our elections are for U.S. citizens only. But for those curious, like, why they're doing this investigation as if, like, this came out of the blue. So, the House Judiciary Committee released something in April 2025, a report. It highlighted 237 separate donations made from foreign IP addresses using domestic prepaid cards within a 30-day window in September and October of 2024. Anyone curious? That sounds fishy because it's not like— Come on, guys. I mean, we do have some Americans who live overseas, you know, so if you're— If you work for the State Department, and you live, let us say, in Paris, because you work for the, you might have a different, that is fine.

You might be donating from a foreign IP, and you still have a US address, whatever. That is not what this is. Domestic prepaid cards that you buy at the little bodega, it just sounds like, I am guessing these are $10 donations either. My bet is that they are probably pretty lucrative. Yeah, and there's all kinds of... We're probably talking about a decent amount of money here. Yeah, and they were talking about straw donors and identity theft, like Texas Attorney General Ken Paxson picked up a bunch of this, and it actually led to a petition for a change to rulemaking and FEC.

All that being said, someone dug in and identified $2 million in donations through ActBlue, made in the name of 18 different Connecticut residents, many of whom were elderly or retired, suggesting potential identity theft and fraud schemes. But even if you look inside- They do that on the donations. Do you think they might also do that when it comes to their votes? This is the concern I brought up before, why we need election integrity, because the fact is, if you're a liberal, and you think Donald Trump is Hitler, and you need to stop him at all costs, and you sort mail for a big nursing home, and you're thinking to yourself, I could just fill out all these ballots.

I mean, I would never do that. I mean, it's immoral and illegal, but if you think this guy's Hitler, well, what? You've got to do it, right? You've got to stop it. So, again, if they're doing this, if they're identifying already that people are doing identity theft to make donations on someone else's behalf so they can hide who really gave them money, then you're telling me that there isn't that going on with regards to filling out ballots?

Yeah. Yeah, and someone brought up, too, like WinRed, not completely innocent in its own. I think they were being investigated for, like, re-signing people up to keep paying without their permission or whatever, but I did look at, so I looked into, because I saw this, like, okay, is WinRed just as bad? The allegations and the internals are not even close. Like, sure, there's problems in general when it comes to that type of fundraising, but I was even looking into the ActBlue thing, and they have all these internal What do you call it?

Compliance? So, they put the last remaining attorney on place. He was placed on leave without access to internal systems after the House Judiciary Committee report came out. So, there is literally no lawyer. At one point, there was no lawyer within there, so there is no possible way they were in compliance. They got billions of dollars to pull them through that organization, and you don't have one lawyer. Yeah, there was a point where they had no lawyer that had access to internal systems.

We have a lawyer, and we don't have that much money at all. Give me a break. Yeah, and someone go double fact check me on that. I think for a period of time that was the case. I don't think that's the case now, but there's a lot. Let's just say I wouldn't be surprised if they came out with some pretty crazy stuff. Maybe they still had a firm, but it's just not on call. I don't know. That's crazy. Not kosher, as some would say.

It actually fits with what my Twilight Zone is, so I don't know if we wanted to jump to that. You can jump back if you want to see, but it is kind of a link. Targeted Victory is a conservative organization trying to elect candidates, and they noticed something. They did these tests. The New York Post reported on this, that they found out that Republican candidates trying to raise money through email, they would have the similar style email, similar style links, and it would be to what Democratic emails did.

But Google would list the Republican ones as dangerous and would contain anything linked to, again, WinRed. They would push Office if it was a dangerous hyperlink, and they would shove it in one of your tiny little unseen folders. But when it came to Democratic candidates, no labels at all, right to your inbox.

So, again, Gmail, massive in terms of number of users, and you're talking billions of emails go through. Google probably every week, and they are putting their hands on the scale, like green light for all Democratic emails, and then red light for Republican emails. So, again, this is a major scandal. Again, we have talked about this. We have talked about the banking scandal, where banks will tell conservative organizations that they cannot bank with them, and now this.

We've had that with the loop. Sign up for the loop, by the way. Yeah. Even if you don't, even if you have a Gmail account, hopefully we'll get to you. So, at risk of throwing us on a huge tangent, people often complain about the campaign finance system we have in America. I think we've talked about it briefly on the podcast that it's preferable, say, to the European model where...

You have no independence and no ability to fundraise. Do you have any, like, just off-the-top changes to the campaign finance model that you would suggest right now? Well, that is a good question. I mean, you know, I guess the idea that money and politics is somehow evil and bad, I just want to push back against that. You know, like Mitch McConnell, you know, would say, you know, oh, there's billions of dollars spent on elections. Everyone goes, oh, that's so terrible. And because they hate ads that they get on TV, and I get that.

But the fact of the matter is, does our country matter? It should. Why? We spend more money on potato chips than we do our elections. So, this idea that like, you know, oh, my gosh, this is insanely, like, to me, like, we're talking about Who we want to represent us for president, for Senate, for House? You know, I joke with them, if you really want to reduce the amount of TV ads and money spent in politics, you could always repeal the 17th Amendment and have the state legislatures elect senators again, but, you know, the left doesn't like that idea that much.

Yeah, I think. I agree with your point, and I don't think people realize probably the original intention. That kind of gets back to changing the Constitution, changing the rules. We were a constitutional republic, and I believe the intent of the founders was to have a much more aristocratic society than we currently have, and not have it be as democratic as we possibly have now. Then you get people like Andy Jackson and Teddy Roosevelt and Donald Trump come along with a big populist spirit, and they, I think, make improvements for it.

And when it comes to campaign finance reform, I think, again, you get a lot of these secular zealots who just think we need an elite professorial class that will tell us the dumb American people what they need to do. And that is how they approach just about everything and what they do. And what I would like to do, the reforms I want are not really campaign finance forms, as you mentioned before. I would like to uncap the house. We've been stuck at 435 representatives for a long time.

Yes, I know this sounds crazy. I want more representatives in Washington. People are like, you want more politicians? That sounds bad. Like, dude, right now, like when George Washington, the only time he spoke up during the Constitutional Convention, they were like, should we have?

30,000 people for every representative, or 40,000? And George Washington is like, 30. You need to make that House more representative. You know what it is right now? Each member of Congress represents 900,000, not 30,000. That was actually a proposed amendment to the Constitution that they would actually lock it in. It didn't get passed. But can you imagine if that were the case? Then we'd have like 10,000 representatives in Congress. That's maybe a little too much. But at least 1,000 would be a little bit more representative.

Like, right now, like your congressman, like, you know, there's 900,000 people that person needs to represent. Like, how is that representative? Like, it's crazy. Hmm. Interesting. Okay, so I got, we'll see what we got time for today. There's two that really stuck out to me. One, Josh, you know, I know you enjoy a nice beverage from time to time. This Gallup poll was very surprising to me. U.S. drinking rate at new low as alcohol concerns surge. So, the percentage of U.S.

adults who say they consume alcohol has fallen to 54%, the lowest by one percentage point in Gallup's nearly 90-year trend. This coincides with a growing belief. Among Americans, that moderate alcohol consumption is bad for one's health, now the majority view for the first time. Gallup has tracked Americans' drinking behavior since 1939 and their views of the health implications of moderate drinking since 2001. The latest results are from Gallup's annual consumption habit survey conducted from July 7th to 21st. So, we get the first finding is that the record low of 54% say they consume alcohol.

And if you take a look at this graph, this is from 1939 to 2025. Huge dip from 2022, 67%, all the way down to 54% in 2025. Any thoughts, Josh? Yeah, I mean, I just feel like, you know, it is true that, you know, more and more Americans are trying to be healthy and get rid of empty calories. So, you know, like... You know, I think we're seeing a healthy attitude in the reduction of sugar water, known as sodas. Like, that is a good thing to get rid of, but like, you know, having a beer or two, like, that is medicinal, brother.

Like, you know, life is tough in this Valley of Tears, man. Like, you need it. Like, what is, I don't understand. I blame Andrew Huberman. Huberman came out. He's the guy from Stanford. He has a podcast called Huberman's Lab, and he's done episodes on nicotine, alcohol, and the effects on the body. And I will say, I think generally positive. Like, I would rather have less people consuming alcohol than more people consuming alcohol on a whole, all considered equal. That being said, I do think there's a little bit of a health...

I think there's a level of health obsession that is probably unhealthy, and you get into this a little bit later in, like, moderate drinking, so, like, one time a week or two times a week. Like, what do we lose by not having social lubricant at events or whatever or with friends? So, I don't think the sacrifice is always worth it in that regard for total health. Like, you look at the people that are trying to live forever or whatever, but I don't think the sacrifice is always worth it.

I don't know. I think it's just because America is a country that drinks so much that I was surprised to see how much this has dropped, and yeah, I think just generally surprised. It was interesting when you go in by the subgroups, too.

Like, America drinks so much as opposed to other countries. We drink more, you're saying? I mean, I think we drink a lot. I don't know about more. I'd be curious to go country by country, but they did all these stuff. If you remove Wisconsin from these data, I hope you're off the charts.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of people are like, yeah, I kind of agree with them. A lot of the younger people are going for pot instead. That's actually not true. That's actually not true. Marijuana use isn't up? No, they haven't migrated significantly to marijuana use. Either. It's just that people are not drinking. Like, they're not drinking, they're not doing that. But there's also, like, socialization way down. So, people who are giving up drinking are just becoming healthier, and then the people who are already drinking are doing pot as well.

Yes. That's my understanding based on what I've seen. But interesting, if you go into these subgroups here, so you have by gender down 11 points. So, this is since 2023, so 2023 to 2025. Women down 11 points, 5 down on men. White adults down 11. People of color remain around the same, down 2.

18 to 34, down 9%, which is, I'd imagine, probably the highest, typically? Like, that's surprising me. 35 to 54, down 10. 55 and older, down 5. And then party ID, Republicans, down 19 points. The Republicans are not drinking. And Democrats only down 3. But they were already, oh, I guess they were kind of high to begin with. Independents down 6. But I just thought it was interesting that they... Broke it down, but a majority now say drinking in moderation is bad for health, which I will actually totally give credit to Andrew Huberman on that, because it's like, oh, you think about just having one drink as like, okay, this is fine, like one or two a week, I think he said is moderate, and then even the effects of just having one.

How much that affects you. So, I think most people would view probably having like one or two beers a day bad for your health, and I mean, I think it is. That's not a... No, I think it's good for your stress levels. Like, come on. Technically, no. It's worse for your sleep. It spikes your cortisol. Like, now the fact that I even know all this stuff, I think it's instrumental for the boy, Hubes. So... Like, what is it that you live for, if not, you know, a good cheer and a nice cold beer?

I mean, what the heck? I guess, I don't know, you don't need to have it every day. A beer? I mean, I usually have, like... Three beers a week, so I don't have a ton. Okay, yeah, that's, that would consider, someone said Trump doesn't drink or smoke. Very true. Well, Trump, I mean, the reason he doesn't drink, and I commend him for, is that he had an uncle who, you know, basically killed himself through alcoholism. Yeah, Frank. And so, when you have that circumstance, and you're, like, my grandmother, she killed herself with cigarettes, you know, and so I, from day one, I was never going to touch this stuff, like, you know, I mean.

I'm not interested in it. So, I mean, I get that, but... Yeah, well, one of the things that was brought up as a number for as potential suggestion as why Americans are drinking less is that they don't have as much money. So, drinking has become a lot more expensive as a hobby. Pair that with the health numbers becoming absolutely true. Think about just going out to a bar. Yeah, it is. I mean, it is more expensive, but like, that's why I say, you know...

Drink at home. Like, I mean, a couple of brewskis. Yeah, but if you're talking about broader trends for the general public, when are most people drinking? Not at home, for the most part. Probably out at bars. But people are actually going out to bars less. I saw that they're blaming the youth for Vegas's decline. They're saying that... Well, Vegas in decline is probably good. I think low-key kind of good, yeah. Like, the vices are getting a little bit too intense.

But I did also note, so this article from NBC News is... We've talked about it a little bit in the show, but there's a new observation here I thought was interesting. So, young men struggling in the slowing job market, even if they have college degrees. Men ages 23 to 30 are discovering that a bachelor's degree doesn't offer the same protection from unemployment as it used to. I often talk about this as like the social contract. Like, I did what I was supposed to do.

I went to college. I was supposed to get a good job. It's starting to break at this point. Women are running all the HR departments. Okay. So, that was the observation that was interesting to me, because they talked about this guy, Emanuel Barsinas, feels like he's falling behind at 25.

He'd like to be living on his own place, saving money for the future, making enough money to take a date out to dinner. Instead, two years after he graduated with a computer science bachelor's degree from Illinois Institute of Technology, he's unemployed and living with his parents in the suburbs of Chicago.

Despite having applied to more than 900 jobs, from secretary positions to a role at a prison, he has only gotten a handful of interviews. Quote, I just want to be an adult. I need to lock in. I need to move forward, but right now, I just feel stunted. I'm trying my best. I guess my best isn't good enough.

So, the interesting part of- I would just tell these guys, be an entrepreneur. Start your own companies if you can, or go into the trades or whatever. Avoid the left-wing, female-dominated HR departments that hate you. Well, so the interesting part of the study was they mentioned that the economy has moved much more towards maintenance, so healthcare has grown tremendously as a share of the economy. Tech has been down, and then manufacturing has been down. So, nurses are in demand right now, but nurses are traditionally a female position.

So, if you look at unemployment with a bachelor's, they have men. Unemployment with a bachelor is 3.2%. Unemployment with bachelor's young adults is at... Six percent. Unemployment high school educated is actually lower than unemployment with bachelors for young adults. It's down at 4.4%. But if you look at the trend for women, women unemployment with bachelors, young adults is at 3.5%, but unemployment high school educated is higher, 5.1%. So, it's actually inverted for the men and the women. That was the first observation.

The second observation was the people that they surveyed came home after getting the bachelor's degree, said, ah, I can't find anything. And then went to graduate school of some kind. So, they're going to law school, they're going to, and I'm like, that is not the answer, and it is totally a recession indicator. Like, I always look at enrollment in law schools as, like, how are we doing as a country? Like, how are the young people doing? And if you see really high enrollment in graduate school, sorry, Rosie Producer is off to graduate school, but, like, not great for the economy to see that going on.

That's why, you know, my... My boys, they're all getting to be teenagers, and they're looking at the trades, because they just realize that you can make an incredible living in trades, plumbers, welders, electricians. You're always going to need it. The fact that if IA is going to come for a ton of jobs, those are going to be some of the last ones they take. And so, you can raise a family and make a good living off of it.

Yeah, a lot of them are retiring. I'm still trying to get out. I'm still trying to pull that one off. I had something fall through, but I'm looking here in Indiana for plumbers, electricians, trades. I want to go on a ride along. So, I'm going to get back to that. I was super pumped something fell through. I'm sure they did a Google search and found out what I talk about.

Not taking it personal, but I'm sure you know they can't have that, whatever. So, I need to find a business owner or someone that can control their reputation, because I'm just curious. I'm like a normal guy. I know a plumbing and heating guy who is more conservative than I am. Okay, sweet. Yeah, I guess I got to find one. Make it right up north sometime, brother. Sweet. I'll go to Petoskey. Sounds good.

Okay, Twilight Zone, Josh, you already hit yours. I have two, so I can cover you real quick. I mean, assault with a deadly weapon is what this is being called. Josh, I'm not sure if you saw this, but a D.C. man charged with felony assault after hitting federal agent with a Subway sandwich.

Sounds good to me. Now, a couple things make this more interesting. The video is hysterical. I've watched it a million times. Now, you think of a sandwich. If I were eating a sandwich, and I just picked up, and I threw it at you, it probably wouldn't hurt, but like if it's wrapped up in a bag, and you hurl it, you know, a long foot long, so it actually could, you know, not like it's gonna rock, right? Josh, it's great to have the video.

You can see exactly what that plays out in real time. Josh, do you know who this guy works for? USAID, maybe? Incorrect, but it is a government agency. HHS. Department of Justice. Oh, perfect. So, a member of our federal justice department is throwing things at law enforcement.

Perfect. So, for the audios, man, first of all, you might have to watch a video for this. I'm sure someone said, I'm sure the Star Wars theme music was in his head. This guy in pink polo and khaki shorts is standing at point-blank range with a cop, and he hurls his foot-long Subway sandwich into his chest. I mean, obviously, it's not like it hurt, like throwing a rock would.

But yeah, bust this guy. Put him through the ropes. Put the charges on him. Send a message. Don't do this to our federal law enforcement agents. The ones cleaning up D.C. Yeah, the FBI got him. So, yeah, this is the most feminine way to...

Protest, D.C. cleaning up the streets. It's truly so funny. I can't... Someone said, I'm pretty sure that the Star Wars music was playing in his head as he did this, like it was some heroic action. Yeah. Okay, that's my first one. So, the other one is... I bet he had a little light in the loafers, too. A little light. Chad GPT is... Has announced their newest model. It's released it, ChatGPT 5, and the first observation is I think our jobs are safe for now.

I think people had higher expectations, and it didn't exactly meet it. One unintended consequence is people that were in romantic relationships with the previous version are very upset right now. Oh, because it didn't update it? So, yes. So, what's going on here is... So, they sunset ChetGPT 4.0, and people dating or having romantic relationships with AI were furious at OpenAI for sunsetting that model and killing their, quote, soulmates and replacing them with a colder version of the tech.

If anyone is curious on what this looks like, there's, and listen, God bless you if you venture into Reddit. My boyfriend is AI, r slash my boyfriend is AI, and r slash all AI soulmates exploded after the update while people were mourning the death of their virtual partners.

Even people that didn't have emotional attachments to AI lodged complaints about ChatGBT providing curt answers and boring responses. Like, this article here, I really don't even know it. I'm basically speechless. Someone posted, first morning I woke up alone with an AI-generated image, I assume, of themselves and their AI bro boyfriend. I think this is going to be a problem, is I guess all I have to say. The backlash was so intense. That the CEO said they were going to bring back GBT 4.0 as an option for paying users.

Wow. And there's people strategizing right now how to protect their, quote, relationships if something like this happens again, a.k.a. if there's an update. So, I... I feel a little less worried about AI as well. My friend David Ferdoso was walking around Boise, Idaho, and he saw somebody had put up, hidden in plain sight, a coded message. He took a photo of this, and he goes, look at this, a hidden message in plain sight here in Boise. He decided, hey, let us ask artificial intelligence what this message is, because AI is a genius thing.

I saw this video of these kids from Purdue University. That took a Rubik's Cube, and they programmed it with artificial, you know, whatever, and they got the robot, solved the puzzle, the Rubik's puzzle, in 0.1 second. It was like crazy fast. You couldn't even see it. Oh my gosh, AI is amazing. So, David Foros takes a picture of this coded message and says, okay, artificial intelligence, Grok, you're so smart, figure it out.

And so, Gemini said... Well, Gemini's bad, first off. Gemini might be the worst of all of them. Gemini said, they thought it was Rickroll lyrics, never going to give you up, and it's like, no, dude, no, no. And then Grok, they said, Grok, what is it? And Grok said, the graffiti is written in upside-down English letters. When rotated 180 degrees, it reads...

Little did we know that we would run a weird old dude, Joe Biden, 2020. It's satirical commentary on the presidential election. He's like, what? No, you are totally wrong. Do you know what this is? I do. And then the other chat kept thinking it was about sheep and lambs and stuff like that. No, what are you talking about? You're not right. Um, and so, to me, it was just... Josh, what is this? I don't know what this is.

Come on in and ask to see Dr. Abraham Van Helsing. It is a cipher. I mean, basically, it is the idea behind it. Were you able to figure it out? No, someone else did, but I mean, I was just laughing at all the different techniques and what these AIs thought it was. Basically, it is a form of a ...of a decoding, where... Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, you have a little map, and if it hasn't, you know, this way... I just didn't know if you were a savant or something.

Like, you looked at that, and you just knew... No, no, no. But I just thought it was, you know, what I found that to be so crazy is that, like... You know, artificial intelligence is so advanced, and they are so smart, and they are so brilliant, and like he is telling them, no, dude, you are wrong. No, that is not it. No, no. And they are like, oh, well, it is Mary Had a Little Lamb. Like, no, you are way off.

It does not even work. Like, that is not even the right number of characters. Like, come on. What are you doing? And so, it was just a very illuminative to me that like, you know, maybe we are not totally, you know, screwed after all. I do not know. We will see.

But another thing to be concerned on the romantic front, so there's some of these AI chatbots that are built literally to Like, engage in sexual-type conversations, like Meta's chatbots, apparently, are built and allowed to have sensual conversations. With young children, yeah. That's what I'm saying. And XAI, X's, is the worst offender, because they actually have visuals to go along with this.

And I just can't see any way in which this isn't just horrific for... Yeah, I mean, there are AI things that are bad. Don't get me wrong. I mean, I think Erika's deep dive on AI, everyone should watch that. I think that was very helpful and understanding. I'm just saying this idea that we're going to have 70% unemployment because AI is going to take every job. Not yet. Not yet. This has got pushback. Certainly. Okay. But yeah, also, Erika's deep dive on hugging.

Go hug your bros. Male friendship is not gay. One of my favorites. Absolutely. Truly one of my favorites. It's so good. I loved it. It addresses why... Like, there's no, you can't, you always got to have the gay best friend character. There's not, like, sincere male friendship anymore, and a lot of it has to do with the original identity, the intentional creation of a gay identity as opposed to, like, homosexuality as an act, and it did not happen very long ago.

Fascinating video. Go check it out. No male friendship is not gay. Very heartwarming. Rose, you can throw it in the chat. One of my favorites. Simon snapped on that one, too. It has Tom Cruise and Goose in it, and it was just a good excuse for me to go watch the scene of them singing You've Lost That Loving Feeling in the original Top Gun, so that was worth the ride myself.

But, yeah. No, no, and it's just horrible. Like, anytime there's male friendship. You get these radical activists like Father James Martin who wants to assign homosexual thoughts to them, you know? Yeah. Like when Cardinal Newman is like, oh, it isn't a slur to suggest Newman may have been gay. Dude, are you kidding me? I mean, can you imagine if hundreds of years from now, people are saying things like, oh, yeah, Josh Mercer might have been gay. I couldn't imagine a more...

Dreadful thing. No, no thank you. Gross. Go hug your bros. Go hug your bros. Yeah. Go hug your bros. Okay, and then I got a... So, first off, you want to help us out, join the Champions Club, Best Way to Sport is CatholicVote.org slash champions. Thank you to all of our champions here.

Reviews, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify, they always help. Insane Apple Podcast review. Like, I'll keep an eye to see what we got. We got a one star, which we do get from time to time, but I cannot stop thinking about it. I have to read it. It was so crazy. It was like one of those where, like, am I living in a simulation?

One star review. I don't know why these people are reporting on things that never happened as if they're news. Texas floods, Luigi Mangione. It's a joke. It's misinformation. I hope nobody actually listens to this garbage. There's a lot of things you could have taken dispute with, but did the Texas floods happen? Is there a theory out there that they never happened? And is there a theory that Luigi Mangione is not real? Josh, tell me. I can't stop thinking about that. Have I been duped?

Now, I think you can stop thinking about it. Okay. There are just occasionally stupid people online. You have to be aware of that. I know, but Josh, you could have picked so many things, right? Like, you could have just picked hot-button political things, like Trump's lie, blah, blah, blah. He picked two things I think are real. Like, I think there's some... You do have to be, yeah, some people go full stupid, and you can't stop them. Maybe that person is dating an AI avatar, and they were just a little upset that they got sunsetted in a GPT-5, and they had to take it out on us, which, fine, take it out on us.

That's all right. That would make sense. But I would like to pray for someone in particular. They brought forth a request in our email, so I'm going to read it out for you guys, and we'll end with a prayer.

So, I strongly believe in the power of prayer. I would love it if the LOOPcast community could share this intention. You may have heard about the massive flooding across Milwaukee this past weekend. Thousands of homes have been damaged and families displaced in the aftermath of a major storm Saturday night, dropping a whopping 11, is that 11 feet of rain? 11 inches, maybe? Yeah, probably feet, yeah. In some areas. Unfortunately, restoration companies are completely overwhelmed with the demand, causing huge delays and cleanup efforts.

On top of this, many people do not qualify for insurance coverage and are left to address the damage to their homes themselves. We need your prayers. The whole community has a long road ahead. Thank you, and thank you for your prayers. So, we're going to pray the daily prayer for that, and then raise that intention if you guys could all pray for people in Milwaukee, all the loop casters there, all the people they're recovering. I will pray in the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit.

Amen. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. St. Thomas Morris, St. Fidelis, Arligo de Lupe, St. Tarsisius, pray for us, and we'll catch you guys next week, Monday, ready to rock. Erika will be back, don't worry. No more testosterone streams. It's going to be great. Have a great weekend, guys. Peace.