Refugee M*rder Scandal, Jobs Report Spin, and Gen Z’s Dating Crisis

And we're not live. Welcome back to LOOPcast. Today, we have LOOPcast Lite. Tom is off in the wild, the wilds of middle America, filming for us. I believe today he's shadowing a plumber, and I can't wait to see what that ends up looking like. So, that's fun. And Josh, you're looking fabulous today.

Why, thank you. Yes, and we're filming early because Josh is off traveling the world as well, but we wanted to make sure that we touched base with you all. We have an intense, is that the right word? Intense show lined up for you. The story out of Charlotte, there's been more details, more video released of the incident with the stabbing of the Ukrainian refugee that I think there is more to be said about, so we will definitely dive into that. We've got another jobs report revision.

And maybe things were not as great during Biden as some people were reporting that they were. Shocker. We're going to talk about that, some thoughts on the economy, what's going on there, and then we have this crazy poll out on Gen Z, and it explains in part why the guys and girls cannot get it together, literally. And then, of course, we have good news in Twilight Zone, though. But first, our sponsor today, I'm sorry Pogo's not here to read it, because this is his favorite, Ave Maria Mutual Funds.

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All right, so 1-866-Happy-Maria, check it out. Okay, so the story that continues to dominate the news cycle is that we started to cover this on Monday. More details, more video has been making the rounds on social media, and the mainstream media is picking up on the story, finally, I guess we could say. So, just a recap for anyone who missed Monday's show on August 22nd.

Say it again. August 22nd, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, Irina Zerutska, was fatally stabbed aboard the Blue Line train in Charlotte, North Carolina. The killer, DeCarlos Brown, 34-year-old, launched a sudden and unprovoked knife attack. Captured on surveillance video, Zerutska died of multiple wounds. Brown has a history of mental illness and prior arrests.

Actually, he has 14 priors, so this wasn't like, oh, he'd been arrested a couple of times, but he'd actually had 14 mugshots. He has been charged federally at this point. Pam Bondi announced that he was charged by the federal government, which means that we're looking at life in prison or the death penalty. His first hearing, he is in custody now. His hearing is on September 19th. I think Josh and I were kind of passing the story back and forth yesterday afternoon.

The new footage that came out, we're not going to play it for you. It's really disturbing. This is a still from the image. This is in the moments, this is about two seconds after he stabbed her, and he's getting ready to leave the scene, and she's looking up at him.

Absolutely, and shock and surprise, before she can even realize what happened. It's absolutely terrifying. It's everyone's nightmare, and obviously a nightmare because she would perish. I just want to say something about this as well. We're going to talk a lot about it. The immediate passengers nearby did not necessarily react in a positive way. They didn't confront the attacker. Actually, I kind of understand this attacker is A large man, you can hardly see his face even. He, you know, I got the white girl, I got the white girl, is what he said.

And, you know, it's kind of terrifying to kind of approach him as someone who just attacks somebody else. It's a little bit risky. The thing I don't understand, or at least it's harder to understand, is why other passengers didn't come to her rescue. There were two passengers that eventually did come up to her. But, like, there are three passengers that were very close to her, and none of those three came to her aid. They just sort of ignored it, and there is a part of human psychology that it's not, is it, you know, it's just that they don't care.

They don't want to be involved. There is something about human nature where something that transpires that is absolutely shocking. People sometimes just get numb, and they just... They just stare, and their brains just don't process, and thankfully, there are others who jump to the rescue and try to do something, but in this case, the stab wounds on her neck were way too much. We are not going to show the footage, but she quickly loses consciousness and falls down, and the amount of blood there was way too much.

I doubt anything could have been done to save her life. I mean, just because, I mean, it's basically a kill stab, kill shot. You stab somebody in the neck, and it's just not going to... Yeah, and I think watching the whole video, it is so disturbing, and I understand that you're in the moment, you don't react, but like you said, Josh, the fact that we're watching the other passengers there, and they're going to have to live with this for the rest of their lives.

I don't know if they'll think about it much, but they're out there on social media, like their faces are out there all over the internet. And one of them just stands up and leaves. People are going to come up with an answer that is going to make them feel better, whether it is justified or not. I was shocked. I was worried he was going to hurt me, which is a reason why you certainly don't confront the man himself. He has got a knife, and you are not.

What are you going to do? A big guy that is much bigger than you, and he has got a knife, and he has already shown he is willing to use it against anybody. The question, though, is, well, yeah, but why didn't you help the girl?

Yeah. That is the question that is a little bit harder to answer. Yeah. People are reacting on social media, of course, so strange. Some people are like, well, there was a guy who showed up, but it's a minute and 35 seconds, like I timed it, it's a minute and 35 seconds later. So, this is a long time, and maybe no one could have saved her, like you said. Possibly, right. Possibly.

But if you would have got to her within five to 10 seconds, and you could have put pressure on that to prevent further bleeding, there's a possibility that. Possibly, she could have survived. We don't know. It is possible. But a minute and a half, that's not going to work. Yeah, and that there is no impulse on anyone to just rush to her aid, because the stabber leaves.

To me, this has become, yes, you have the issue of crime. You have the issue of, you know, he should not have been on the street. The blood is on the hands of not only this man, but also anyone who continued to put him back on the street. That judge. Politicians, the district attorneys. Politicians. Yeah, exactly. And it turns out, we also learned yesterday that the judge who most recently released him back out onto the streets on... The cashless bail. She actually was never, she never even passed the bar.

She was appointed to be a judge. She's never passed the bar in North Carolina. That's another thing that people don't understand. I mean, before this, I would have assumed that every magistrate or judge had to have. A law degree. Yeah, how to at least pass the bar, have a law degree. That is actually not the case. Again, I guess you are like, well, wait a minute, why not? Is there that many? People that are up for arrest and stuff, that we don't have enough judges and stuff like that.

Again, the criminal justice system, the more we learn about it, the more we start to wonder, why are we doing things the way we do? It doesn't make any sense. I'm confused. Seems like we should rethink the way that we're doing something. So, there's that piece of it. There's this story, just totally putting the spotlight on a broken criminal justice system that has been infected. I mean, this is the result of the... The BLM riot policies that we got out of this, the defunding of the police, the DEI initiatives that went into our criminal justice, into the selection of judges, into the way that they view crime and keeping people out of jail and putting them on the streets instead.

This is direct fruit of that. But it is also, for me, maybe even more disturbing. To see this is a public space, and this is a society without any good Samaritans, right? Again, in the moment, we have fight or flight, we may freeze in these moments. I totally get that, and I even get that the vast majority of human beings, for better or for worse, we are sheep, right? And if everyone else is acting one way and reacting one way, most of us are going to react the way we look around.

We're like, okay, how is everyone else acting? We're just going to do that. Herd mentality is huge. Yeah, exactly. Herd mentality is a thing, but there should be at least one person. Who immediately gets up and goes to this girl. But we have to remember, Erika, the city of New York declared war on Good Samaritans. Yes. Because, in fact, we had a situation in our very recent past where a violent man was harassing and threatening a bunch of subway train passengers, and thankfully, a Marine by the name of Daniel Penney said, to hell with this.

And subdued the passenger, put him at a headlock, did not intend for the man he was subduing to die. That was the ultimate result, unfortunately. But the city of New York had the choice to give him the keys to the city, to build a statue to Daniel Penny. But instead, they decide to arrest him. If the city of New York had had its way, Daniel Penny would be in jail. Like, let that sink in right now for people. So, people realize, wait a minute now, I stop a violent passenger, I could end up in jail.

So, who is there to stop this guy in North Carolina who ended up killing somebody? Well, you know, like, You attack bravery, and you get less bravery. I mean, I don't know how else to say it, you know? Yeah. So, I guess my question that I've been like mulling on, of course, and I think every American of goodwill is watching this story and asking themselves, how would I have reacted?

Who do I want to be? What kind of person do I want to be in the public sphere if this kind of thing happens to me? Because all of us, I think we should reflect on that. And As a mom, too, I'm asking, how do I raise children to be more like a Daniel Penny and less like the people on that Charlotte bus line? Well, in this case, we are not even asking people to try to subdue the attacker. Right. In this case, what is more important now is because someone has been victimized, and it is to rush to this person.

I mean, she obviously collapsed. Something is going on. She needs immediate help. Yes. You know, and rush to her aid. Like, you know, I mean, again, there are so many things about this case that... Our major alarm bells, we do hear him on the video saying, I got the white girl, I got the white girl. So, it does feel like, since there was absolutely no provocation, she was reading her phone. She was not yelling at the guy. She wasn't saying whatever.

It is not like he said something nice to her, and she blew him off. She literally had no idea he was there. She just came in, she sat down, right? She just was reading her phone. You know, his attack on her, whether or not he maybe doesn't have all his marbles, there's no question it was motivated by some deep, racist animus against white people. That is troubling, you know? Again, so Scott Jennings, he's on CNN a lot. You hear him. He's one of my favorites.

He brought up a great point. He said, now listen. Again, I hate to do this kind of thing, but what if the rules were reversed? Honestly, think about this. Think about if you had a white man who was arrested 14 times, let out on no cash bond, right? He is on a subway system. He attacks and murders a black or a brown woman, young brown woman, and she dies.

What would be the reaction? We would board up the shops because riots in the street. Riots in the street. Scott Jennings is like, you know what? Every single major media outlet would be broadcasting live from Charlotte 24-7. They would be talking about the history of racism in North Carolina and how bad everything is. And by the way, they are already talking about the history of racism in North Carolina. I mean, in one of the articles, the New York Times.

They make the point that white supremacists had- Harmed Blacks, murdered a bunch of Blacks over 150 years ago or whatever. Right. So, what do you expect? Is that the message? What are you talking about? That is why a Ukrainian girl should just expect to be knifed on a train? It is absolutely asinine. And again, this happened August 22nd. We only found out about it because the video footage was leaked. Why is it this is a story in the mainstream media now?

Only because conservatives complained, only because Elon Musk purchased Twitter, and the story is really, in the mainstream media, that we are complaining. That is the story. It is not that this woman was murdered. It is that conservatives are trying to make an issue of this. Yeah, we have a great clip of this, so here is a good example of what Josh is talking about. Celine, can we pull up this clip here?

Your favorite, Josh. I picked this one for you. Oh, yes. Mr. Potato, Brian Stelter. Second, the energy from pro-Trump activists. They picked up on this video from local news and ran with it. It is a little bit like the times when civil rights groups have raised attention about police-involved shootings. In this case, it is Trump-aligned influencers who are posting up a storm about this case on social media. Really, over the weekend, Elon Musk, Charlie Kirk, other Trump-aligned figures. President Trump succeeded in making this senseless death a symbol of big city crime.

We heard President Trump asked about it yesterday when he was heading home from New York City. He didn't seem to know much about it. He said he would get briefed, and then today, Trump did know all about it. That's exactly what has happened here. This story has trickled up from local news to social media, and now to the president's attention, and it's being used, as you said, Brianna, as a political symbol, with MAGA media calling for more forceful punishments and more incarceration.

I have to say, some of the replies to Musk's Some of the comments around this story are baldly racist, stoking fear of African-Americans because this man attacked a white woman. The open racism on sites like X Today, it's eye-popping, but there are also legitimate questions about this so-called career criminal, someone who had been a repeat offender, and those questions, I hope they're not lost amid all of the cesspool kind of comments on social media. All right. Some no-name jackasses on social media might be racist.

Gee. Who gives a rip? This is like the biggest nothing burger ever. That's the reason why you can kind of diminish the story. It's not a symbol. This is an actual dead woman. Give me a break. This guy is such a jerk. But by the way, CNN, CNN, do you see this headline?

I just put it to you in the chat there, Erika. Okay. Unbelievable. To CNN, this is what the story is. This is how they say it. How the lives of a Ukrainian refugee and a Charlotte man with a criminal history converged in a fatal stabbing. Oh my gosh. So happened to happen. Wow. Pow.

Romeo converged in a fatal stabbing, where he stabbed her. What is this, like, Romeo and Juliet? I mean, it just so happened that the seed fell from the tree, and it grew another tree. Like, what are you talking about? This was a man deciding to kill somebody. It's not like it's just, oh, whoops, did my car run into you by accident, you know, because I didn't see, you know, no. It just converged. Again, this is using language to deceive. I keep bringing this point up again and again.

Mainstream media, when they talk about providing news coverage, yeah, they want to provide news coverage. You want to cover it with a pillow and suffocate it until it dies. This is such baloney. I am sick of this. People see through this garbage. I mean, lawyers.

People who run after ambulances are still held in higher esteem than mainstream media. These people are loathsome, and it is a scandal, and they are harming the body politic. How can you have a country like this when this kind of absolute chaos is happening, where you have media saying, A refugee from Ukraine and some Charlotte man with a little bit of a criminal history. They're paths crossed. Converged. Yeah, they converged.

Like they're meeting over tea. Oh, whoops, is there a fetal stabbing? How did that happen? Yeah. Because he stabbed a woman, you dumbass. Gosh, this is so baloney. Let's CNN it. Evil people. They are evil people. It's not just like they have an agenda. That's all they have is an agenda.

100%. And they are mad. They are mad that you notice. They are mad that Elon Musk has acquired X. Now, some Catholics are like, Elon Musk isn't perfect. You know, he has kids out of wedlock. He's kind of crazy. That's true. Transhumanist issue. I get it. I get it. I'm not saying he's a saint. I'm not calling for him to be canonized. He's not Saint Carlo. Okay, I get it. But...

The mainstream media despise Elon Musk precisely because you, you have the freedom to share this stuff with other people. Just remember what the other social media networks were like. Well, for example, Twitter, before Elon Musk bought it, and Facebook, before Elon Musk bought it, or before Zuckerberg finally decided, okay, I got to chill out a little bit. You try to share stuff about COVID, you try to share stuff about the FBI, and it would get... You get deplatformed, or you wouldn't be able to, you know, you'd post it, and no one would see it.

You know, all these kind of garbage things. We put up videos, right? On CatholicVote, our webpage, our YouTube page, we're like, hey, you know, we're dedicated to stopping the scourge of abortion because we think it's a repulsive, evil thing. We put up a speech by Mother Teresa in front of the National Prayer Breakfast. It's so awesome. And underneath every video that mentions abortion, YouTube puts a little disclaimer talking about how wonderful abortion is, and basically, screw these people. I mean, this is the kind of stuff that we're dealing with on a regular basis.

You know, it's like playing a football game. And the referees are wearing your opponent's jerseys. It's absolutely asinine. Yep, 100%. Yeah, and I think this story, thank God for Elon. God can use... Strange lives. I always refer back to King Cyrus of Persia in our good old Old Testament. I mean, is Trump not like Cyrus? Trump is my Cyrus of Persia. God is going to use all kinds. And Elon Musk too. We have this time of reprieve. We have this window now, and something that I love that I did want to mention is CatholicVote joining in the America 250 prayer campaign, and to help spread this news.

Trump gave a speech at the Museum of the Bible. That's a refreshing change, talking about how we need to get religion back into American life, and for me, yes. People in the mainstream media, like the poo-poo Christians, and in mass entertainment, Christians are always the stodgy old people who are holding down the woman and all that, but if you look at that bus, what happened on the bus in Charlotte, and you think, If Christianity had been the water those people were swimming in, I think it would have been a very different picture on that bus on August 22nd.

So, absolutely, we need to bring religion back to America. I'd highly recommend everyone go check out our coverage of Trump's speech at CatholicVote. You can get it in The Loop, everyone's favorite morning newsletter. Before we get into B Block, and we're going to talk about this jobs report, talk about Yeah, the purpose of a system is what it does. I wanted to talk about our second sponsor. Did you know?

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You know, again... I echo Matt Walsh's call that after you have a situation, after a conviction, let us say this man in Charlotte deserves, of course, a fair trial, but once they convict him. The punishment should be death, and it should be 24 hours later, and he should be hung high. Now, I know there are Catholics who have a pause. They have a hesitation on capital punishment. I understand that, but I am with the 20 centuries of Catholic tradition on this, and I think capital punishment is a justified thing.

Here is the other thing, though. Out in the West, before we had established communities and stuff like that, you are living on the frontier. Someone would steal a horse, you'd hang them high. And again, this idea, when you see, you know, why is it, oh, just people have blood lust, they want to see someone die. Like, no, dude, you don't get it. You don't understand. They do that because they're like, that's what happens if you steal our horse. That's what happens if you rape one of our daughters.

That's what happens if you kill one of our brothers or sisters. That's why we do this. It's not that we are, ha, ha, ha, ha, revel in seeing somebody perish. No, you're out of your minds. That's not why it's done. It's done because, actually, I believe, of course, in the long tradition of the Catholic Church, that it is a justified sentence. It is an appropriate sentence for the crime. But also, yes, it is a deterrent. You want less people to stab innocent people on the subway system?

Hang them high. That's what I think. Yeah. Yeah. One of the lines coming out of this from, I believe it was Abby Phillips' group, she said, you can't incarcerate your way out of this problem. And to me, I'm like, no, I think you can, actually, because if they're incarcerated, if people who are convicted are not on the street, he wouldn't. We might be able to stab the Ukrainian refugee, to me. We know who these people are. The police know who are the repeat criminals.

Yeah. You know, and we had, after the George Floyd riots, we had a lot of nonprofit organizations spread a ton of money around, and George Soros electing a lot of DAs and getting politicians like the former governor of North Carolina, Roy Cooper, like saying, we need equity in our sentences, which basically meant...

We needed to lower the sentences. We needed to lower the bail on a lot of Black criminals. And you're like, well, why? Because it's racial equity, and then we have to deal with hundreds of years of injustice. There's other ways to rectify our country's injustices. We thought, of course.

That is what we were told affirmative action was in job placement and university placements. That is what we thought that was a way of dealing with equity. I am not necessarily in favor of that, by the way, but that was what we were told. But no, actually.

Lowering bond and lowering sentences for criminals because they have a certain skin color, that's not justice. That's injustice. That is not helping the situation at all. And yes, we can incarcerate ourselves to more safety. Absolutely. Because you know what? It's not just Black people, but there are white people. Yes, of course. But if you look at the criminals, it's not like... Suddenly, Erika Ahern is going to walk down the street and go, I think I'm going to start assaulting people and start doing robberies.

No. If there is a certain subset of people. Of various skin colors, yes, that decide to do crime, and then once they decide on that, it's not like they, I mean, there are people who do it once and get the lesson never to do it again again, but a lot of them are recidivism. They do it again, and they do it again, and they do it again, and we had this problem in the 1970s and the 1980s. We had big crime waves.

Why do you think Joe Biden, as the senator from Delaware, was bragging about for the longest time how he ...was instrumental in passing the crime bill of 1994, because crime was a massive problem all through the late 60s, 70s, and 80s. Right. Three strikes and you're out, passed by California and all these other states. And we got it down. Rudy Giuliani got elected mayor of New York City on this. Giuliani, Casey. I have been to New York City. I saw the difference.

Yes. It's insane how clean it was, how safe it was. And now, murders are on the rise again. Again, in big cities. It's a choice. It is. Decline is a choice. We know what works to bring crime down in cities. It has been done. We've got to get back to that. Nothing racist about it. This is just...

You know what? If you're going to be called racist anyway, might as well do the right thing. Exactly. All right. So, we're going to get into that. Actually, we're going to talk about New York a little bit, but we have another revision. We have an annual revision. This happens every year from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, talking about the jobs report, the famous jobs report that was already revised once, but now it's been really revised. So, just a little context, these annual revisions, they come out.

They're usually 3% to 4% off. I went back through the last 25 revisions. You're usually 3% or 4% off. This data shows that from April 2024 through March 2025, so the last months of the Biden administration, first two of the Trump two, employers created...

911,000 fewer jobs than originally reported. What? Whoa, the largest such revision ever. In fact, the BLS was off by 50% in its original projection. Not 3%, not 4%, 50%. That sounds like a lot, Erika. It seems, I'm not, you know, this is girl math, but even to girl math, that seems a little extreme.

Monthly hiring averages dropped from roughly 147,000 to 70,000. That's another big cut, indicating the labor market was weaker than previously believed. The downward adjustments were particularly steep in sectors like leisure and hospitality, professional services, and retail. There were actually, it held steady for health care services.

Now, why does this matter? Well, We are concerned when there is- Oh, this does matter. Oh, this matters greatly. And in fact, Josh, I'm going to let you explain, why does this revision matter, and why would they have been so far off back in, say, the waning days of the Biden administration? Yeah, I mean, okay, so the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they gather this data by doing surveys of businesses or whatever. And it is true, on one sense, that it is true, but on the other hand, it is true, that the Bureau of Labor Statistics, The participation rate of businesses in answering the survey data has gone from like 70% down to like 30%, so there's less data for them to use, which, of course, is a problem because then they can just sort of make their best guess estimates like, oh, well, if we're only getting from like the worst people, all the other ones that aren't reported, they're probably too busy hiring jobs because the Biden economy is so great.

Right. But, I mean, like, this just cracks me up, because why does this matter? Obviously, it's one thing if it was off by, it would be like twice or almost three times what it was off. This is by a factor of 10. Like, it's not even close. Why, why, why, why does this matter? Dude, the reason this matters is because the Democrats, what did they say? Look at, I got to show you this headline. This is just true. Okay, okay. We got a visual coming from Josh.

I know, I know. The old man here is a little slow on the uptake. This is a headline from May of 2024, the New York Times. The headline reads, why Joe Biden isn't getting credit for the economy? Oh, maybe because he's dead. Prices still feel too high. Wages still feel too low. Everything's so great, though. It's just too bad. Because the fact is, the left was lying to them. The government was lying to them. They keep saying everything's great. People are hiring more jobs.

If it were true. If the Bureau of Labor Statistics, if their numbers were right, and employers were hiring tons of jobs all throughout 2024, right, a million more than actually it had occurred, right, if they had hired so many more jobs, what would happen to wages?

Wages would be ticking upward, because you are trying to hire somebody off, and everyone else is, you are competing. All these other businesses are competing for labor, and you're like, I need more people. I need to hire more people. No one's knocking down our door because everyone else is hiring them. I've got to raise my prices. I've got to raise my wages to try to attract new people. But wages weren't going up, so people are like, wait a minute now. Where are all these jobs coming from?

Biden, the BLS, the Bureau of Labor Statistics keep saying more and more employers are hiring people. People are like... What are you talking about? Where are you getting hired? Because I can't get a job, right? Right. People are like, I'm trying to find a job. I can't find it. Where are these listings? Where are these jobs? These magical job listings. These companies that are hiring- Turns out they didn't exist. They were literally rainbow unicorns. Absolute fiction. Yeah, totally fake. Yeah, and I was thinking, too, about how Trump has been trying to get the Federal Reserve to lower the interest rates now.

That's right. For months, and this jobs report was one of the factors that Jerome Powell kept pointing to, being like, jobs are good, jobs are good. We're not going to lower the interest rates, and Trump is like, you've got to help this economy. We're worried about inflation, because obviously, you know, there's tons of people that are employed. Everyone's doing great.

Lower the interest rates and make it cheaper for people to borrow, then the economy is going to overheat. And Trump's like, what are you talking about? This economy is needing a good jolt. It needs help, and we're artificially having the rates high. So, again, the prescriptions that the Federal Reserve are calling for, well, here's the deal. Wall Street now, they all, when this came out yesterday, all this, the All the stock indices took a big digger. They started diving really bad, and then halfway through, they realized, now, wait a minute, actually, you know what?

Next week, the Fed's just going to lower rates. There's no way they're not going to lower them now. I mean, this is ridiculous. A million jobs. And so, the stock market rebounded on thoughts like, yeah, actually, you know what? The Federal Reserve can't keep this going much longer. Like, this is kind of ridiculous. Right. And I have said, I have very much been against the Federal Reserve having artificially low rates for many, many, many years, like during COVID and before that.

You know, like the rates right now aren't necessarily historically bad or high. But I do want them a little bit lower, simply because we have a lot of baby boomers who would normally be shedding their larger houses for smaller inventory, smaller townhomes or something like that. Leaving their houses for growing families, right. Allowing those homes to be picked up by families that are trying to build, you know, this is the problem, family formation. It's being stunted right now, because boomers are like, well, wait a minute, my mom and dad, they have a large house that they raise three children in.

They don't. Really need that big of a house right now, but then again, why would they leave? They've got a 3% mortgage rate, and they'll buy a smaller house and pay 7.5%. Actually, that's not good for them. That's not a good decision. There's a lot of people that are in that same spot. So, what we need to do is the gulf between, that's why you don't want it super artificially low, like COVID, like, oh, we need to bring it down to like 0%.

Like, no, dude, no, no. Yeah. Hey, I bought it. Yeah, it's bad. I took advantage, but yeah. I get it. I get it. Yeah, so like these, again, like these, I mean, people were criticizing Trump last month for firing the head of the BLS. I mean, this is just proof in the pudding that he was absolutely right to have a turnover there. We need more people to, anyone who was involved in those projections, because it has real world consequences for families and Americans in general.

Okay. I want to get into the good news. We are a little short on time here, so I am going to say, let us do... I am just having so much fun. I know. Tom is not here, and we can just like... This is awesome. All right. I hope you are having fun, Tom, plumbing. But, good news, we had some new Banksy art drop in the UK. This is a little follow-up from Monday, and it is not good news anymore. I put this in as my good news, and then as we were going to record this...

Bad news dropped, but anyway, can we pull up the picture from the Banksy? Banksy is this anonymous artist over in the UK who goes around painting things. Okay, yeah, here's who's Banksy. He paints on walls, he paints on old train cars, and they're all very whimsical, very nice, but if you go to the second link, here's what showed up. Yeah, zoom in on that. So, Banksy, on the wall of the Court of Appeals in London, he actually painted a pro-English protester being beaten over the head by a judge with a gavel, and of course, speaking about the lack of free speech in his country, people being arrested for tweets.

We covered this ad nauseum on Monday. The bad news is, oh, and the other cool thing was, tourists were actually So, there's these like footage of tourists like lining up to get their picture taken in front of the Banksy. Good thing they did because what do you think happened this morning in England to the anti-censorship mural? It was censored.

They actually got the guys out there. Shocking. Shocking. Shocking. Yeah, and I could be a lot of paint on the wall. First, they covered it up, but then people were taking pictures of themselves in front of the greats, and then this morning, they just... People should keep getting their picture taken in front of it, and just point to where it was before, and just like, yep, I haven't forgotten. That'd be awesome. Yep, that's right. That'd be good. All right, Josh, what's up?

Hey, I got some good news. A church in India has dedicated themselves, and now named after... After St. Carlo Cutis. I love it. Oh, that is cool. How awesome is that? I love it. That's very cool. In India, too. Hey, they have the internet in India, too. Yeah. All right. Let's go India. Hey, actually, there was a prayer card that the Vatican put out that asked his intercession as they're posting stuff on the internet, and someone was like, you're invoking, though.

The Holy Trinity, as you're doing posting on social media, as if it was unseemly, and I'm like, yeah, actually, you know what? That's good. I would rather people be thinking about the Holy Trinity as they're tweeting, as they're posting on Instagram and Facebook. I mean, yeah. I mean, why would you not? Why would you not want that? I don't understand that. It makes no sense. Pray without ceasing, including if you're online. Yeah. I mean, the problem with the internet is that it's been sort of a Jesus-free zone.

Yeah, that reminds me of people who are like, was it Madeleine L'Engle? She wrote Wrinkle in Time. How dare you pray before eating? Eating is so vulgar and gross. Yeah, exactly. Someone went to her house once, Madeline Lingle's house, and went into her bathroom and saw that there was a Bible in the bathroom, and they were like, how can you have a Bible in the bathroom? And she's like, well, it's a great place to read a couple of verses, you know, and they were like, oh, how shocking.

I mean, I don't bring it in the shower, but yeah, there's other things you do in the bathroom that could take five or ten minutes, you know. There you go. There you go. Okay. You don't have to just do the crossword on your phone. We've had our scatological devotions for the day. Hey, I said it carefully. I think this might have to double as my Twilight Zone, because I know, girls, we are up against the clock here. Josh has to go catch a plane or something, and I just wanted to put this out there.

This is a new poll about Gen Z adults. They polled people 18 to 29 years old on what they consider important to a successful life, and we have got some different sets of priorities if you break it down by demographics. So, what happens next? We have men who voted for Trump versus women who voted for Harris.

All right. Top marker of- Same age group, but we're just comparing men and women. We're comparing men who voted for Trump amongst the younger kids. There we go. Women voted for Harris. Okay. Now, before I go through this, I did a whole script on this for The Deep, so my thoughts are coming out tomorrow, but I wanted to get Josh's thoughts 100% on this poll. So, here's what happened. Top markers of success in life for men who voted for Trump. Number one, having children.

At 34%. Then we have financial independence, fulfilling job, career, and then being married. So, not in the right order, but top priority, having children. Women who voted for Harris. Top priority, fulfilling job or career. Having children comes in at dead last, totally the bottom at 6% for women who voted for Harris. And you might say, okay, okay, fine. Well, we know the liberal women are lost, the girl boss, all that. Okay, they're not going to want kids. They hate babies, blah, blah, blah.

That's the easy explanation. But at least we still have the conservative women, right? At least we've still got them. Wrong, because they also broke it down by conservative women. For whom having children comes in at number six, top marker, successful life. Slightly better than the bottom, but it's still just at 26%, being married down at 20%. But it's easier to get them, I think, to change, because again, priorities can be changed. New ideas happen, you meet somebody, you know, it's possible.

It's easier, more to work with there, is what I'm saying. Okay, so we have having children not doing well for anyone except for men who voted for Trump. Having children in a healthy society should be the number one marker of personal success for everyone, right? Because without having children, there is no future society, right? Well, at least the vast majority of people, yes. One more thing I want to point out before I let you rip, Josh.

That for all four cohorts, men who voted for Trump, men who voted for Harris, women who voted for Trump, women who voted for Harris, in the top three occurs some kind of money. So, having money to do what you want, financial independence. What have we got down here? We've got financial independence, again, fulfilling job or career, fulfilling job or career, having money to do what you want. For all of them, Money is in the top three. Only for the men, though, are children in the top three.

Okay, so the money and resources. Again, this is one of those things where... I would love to have opportunity not only to parse this data out, but to ask maybe, let's say, better questions. You know what I'm saying? This is one of those things where you ask, like People Magazine will ask, who's the most handsome actor or whatever? And you've got like 100 different answers, and the person who gets to be number one might not even be the... Person that they pick, they might be the guy that they actually got to do the photo shoot.

You know what I am saying? Yeah. So, and again, some of these things where you are basically having to balance 10 goods, you know, like of these 10 things, which do you consider the most important? Having money, having resources, it is not like it is necessarily pure greed. It is the ability to be able to do what you want to be able to do. That is why it has value. So, it is kind of ridiculous to think. Everyone is going to act like they are seeing Francis, like, what do I care about money?

I will just sing for myself every day. I just want a wife and children. All you need is love, right? Yeah, no. I mean, as I keep saying this with regards to men and women, you know, men prioritize attractiveness of a woman, and attractiveness, obviously, is physical beauty, but it also is...

Personality. So, you know, personality is part of that in terms of attractiveness, because you could have somebody who is absolutely gorgeous, but if they're a total girl boss, then that's not attractive. You're like, okay, too bad. See ya. And women are much more forgiving of men who aren't super attractive, handsome, which is why I'm blessed to be married. But it's also the case, though, that, you know, I think men and women are both sort of unfair about how our number one attractiveness factor that we care about.

Men care about, you know, women complain, oh, men just care about looks. It is all you care about. Well, it is not all we care about, but it is a priority, and it is a signal, and that is how we act. Yeah.

Whereas resources are not as important to us, because we are like, well, we are going to be working our butts off for the rest of our lives. We just sort of take that for granted. Yeah. Whereas a woman is like, well, wait a minute now. If I am going to… Start a family with this guy and have a lot of kids with this guy. I got to make sure he's not a drunk or a bum, and so I got to make sure I look at him and see, is he working hard?

Does he have a well-paying job? Has he got his act together? Is he going to be there? Is he going to show up? And so, it's not like women that think like that are greedy. It's just that they're being rational, actually. Right, but what happens when the women aren't even thinking? About that, right? When they're not thinking about having children, and they're not thinking about that. And I mean, it's so easy. I know, we have a whole generation that are like this, a couple of generations like this.

A couple now. I mean, I think we're in onto the third one. If you think like, okay, Betty Friedan starts it with like the feminine mystique, being a homemaker, and a mother is like being in a concentration camp, I think is how she compared being in the suburbs to was, and that when you have this whole generation. Two generations of women really. Okay, so let me ask you. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of women out there that will look at these women who get a job, and they have resources, and they're not necessarily married, and they have expendable income, and some of them would go to Walt Disney World every year.

That just kind of makes my eyes go crazy. But the ability to post on their social media, Instagram accounts, and say, here I am enjoying a weekend in Belize, or I'm going to- I'm child-free. My child-free weekend. I'm spending a week in Paris.

Now, how do you answer that? How do you tell younger women, like maybe your own daughters or other young women in your church, doesn't that have an appeal? How do you say to them, like, look, is that person posting about that week-long vacation in Paris? Are they miserable? Yeah, are they lonely? I know. Can you say that about them? To me, it speaks so much to, one, the loss of transcendence, and two, just the total propaganda of telling girls that they're not allowed to want the things that they naturally want.

I mean, to me, it's like, Yeah, are there trade-offs with giving up free weekends in Paris and having children? Yes, and I start going down this journey with myself about, okay, what do I say? And to me, it does have to do with this belief that there is life beyond this life, and that the only thing I have ever produced in the world, and I've had some cool careers. I've gotten to go cool places. But the only thing- You do the deep.

Right. I get to do fun things. But the only thing that will outlast me is the fact that my husband and I have been blessed to bring eight immortal souls into the world, right? We have been blessed by that. And God willing, they themselves will then bring more mortal souls into the world. And when I die and I go to heaven, I'm not going to be able to- Right. If heaven is what we believe it is, I'm not going to care that I didn't go to Belize for a week and go down the lazy river on a float.

I'm not going to be like, oh, darn it, I didn't get to go to Paris for Christmas every year or something like that. I'm going to be with God, and the only thing I will bring him with my otherwise completely empty hands, because we all go to heaven with empty hands, is the souls of children who he gave me. And to me, We have to rediscover the truths of our faith and make it exciting and reorient our kids in that direction.

I also struggle because I think there are actual benefits here on Earth in our mortal lives here, on this mortal coil, to having children and the joy of having Thanksgivings and Christmases. I think you're right, and I think one of the things that we've sort of lost… In our very transient society, one of the things I would like to see younger kids not make the mistake my generation did, where they immediately go off to, I mean, I tell this to my kids all the time.

I grew up in Minnesota, and I left right away. I went to school in Michigan. I went to live in Connecticut, D.C. I never looked back, and I say to my kids all the time, don't do what I did to my poor mom and dad. You know, get a job, at least let me be, wherever you live, maybe just even in Michigan, make it so that I don't have to drive so far to see you. Let me babysit your kids so that you and your husband or spouse or whatever can go have a date night.

And part of this is like, I do think that, you know, every society has its blind spots, its myths, its sort of decisions. I get it. Some of them are wrong. And one of the things that I think we do wrong as a society is, oh, you're 18, get out of the house, be independent, pull yourself up by the bootstraps, go get yourself an apartment. I tell my daughter who's 18, I'm like, look, you can stay here as long as you want to.

Other societies would keep their children there as long as they were able to, to save money. Right. You know, and be closer, and help out with the family, and why would I tell her to go pay $800, $1,000, $1,200 in rent to some guy who owns it, and why not just stay in my home? Like, intergenerational wealth. Yeah, and that's like a radical message, Josh. Like, that is, I never heard that growing up, right? Like, no one in my circle in high school.

We're talking about this. Most countries do this. You think the government's going to be on your side? You think the local state or county government's going to be on your side? Dude, you need to build up families. Look at this. I'm going to show you a picture now. Congressman Ron Paul. I'm not a libertarian, okay? I'm not with him on a lot of issues, but this is the dream. That is the dream right there. So, for the audio, this is a picture of the congressman and his...

I assume it's these children, grandchildren, maybe great-grandchildren even? Yeah, look at this. I mean, wow. This is the dream. This is what I want. There's dozens of them. This is good. This is a good dream, Josh. I like this. Let's do it. That's what we live for. That's the legacy. That is what we live for. You know? How can we be of service to others? Not just taking pictures and, oh, look at what I did. Who cares?

Yeah, right, right. Amen. All right, do you have a twilight zone? Well, I just, again, I mean, everyone is talking about this, you know, the stabbing in Charlotte, and I just, I want to focus again just on the media scandal here. Again, you know, how often does a newspaper mention a murderer's race? Well, if the murderer is a white guy, bam! 23% of the time, the articles will mention the race. You know, if they're Black, 6%. If they're Asian, 5%. If they're Hispanic, 3%.

I think that's supposed to be a 0.5% for Native American. 0.5%. So, that's kind of weird. Maybe you should have the standard policy. If you think, kumbaya, my lord, no one sees race. Race sometimes sees you, but again, if they didn't have double standards, they would have no standards at all.

Well, you know, it's a good point. Gotta have something. Gosh. I mean, like, you read a news story about a murderer, and you're like, huh, they haven't told me what the race of the suspect is. Guess he's not white. I mean, am I wrong in thinking that? Right. No, I think, did Ann Coulter go on Bill Maher a couple months ago, and they were talking? Yeah, she just said it out there, and they're all like, who can't say that? She was like, I just did.

It's true. And they're like, yeah, you're right. Even Bill Maher was like. It's true. That's true. All right. So, that wraps it up today. Josh, happy travels. Bon voyage. We will be back in the saddle on Friday to hear all about Tom in the Wild and his travels throughout Middle America. Thank you to our sponsors. We are grateful to Home Title Lock and Ave Maria Mutual Funds. We love you guys. Thank you so much. If you want to support the program, please leave us a review.

If you're on audio, please on Apple, give us... What did you do on Apple? Five-star review? All the stars. A little comment. Share all the stars, just all the stars, and if you're not into stars, go on YouTube and give us a thumbs up. That would be really helpful as well. Episode of The Deep Drops tomorrow, all about this Gen Z romance twilight zone that we are living in. Can it be recovered? Will the world continue? Will there be baby Gen Zers?

I hope so, because I love Gen Z. They're great. And yeah, as always. Please pray for us, and we'll end in prayer. In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, amen. Breathe in me, O Holy Spirit, that my thoughts may all be holy. Act in me, O Holy Spirit, that my work, too, may be holy.

Draw my heart, O Holy Spirit, that I love but what is holy. Strengthen me, O Holy Spirit, to defend all that is holy. Guard me then, O Holy Spirit, that I may always be holy. Amen. Our Lady of Guadalupe, St. Fidelis, St. Thomas More, pray for us, and we will see you on the next LOOPcast. Thanks.