Surprising Reactions to Trump's D.C. Takeover, Marijuana Push, And Schumer's Fake Constituents

And we're live. Welcome back to the LOOPcast. It's Tom and Tom. It was requested last show. What do we do in Josh's absence? It said get the Toms involved, and usually, it's you're replacing me because they're concerned about the collective power of two Toms on the show, but today, we're going to try it out. How are you feeling, Tom McCluskey?

I'm feeling Tom terrific. That sounds good. I'm lefty Tom today because today is left-handers day. Okay. I am one of those. I am a lefty. One of those. Okay. I'm a little, I'm left-handed in a few things, but a few things to get off the top. The Loop, America's favorite Catholic newsletter. You got to get involved. If you're not, go sign up. So, of course, it's brought to you by that. And then second, the amount of people that have sent me the fact that the Vikings are going to have a male cheerleader so that Josh can react to it is unbelievable.

I'm already getting clamored in the chat. I've had people text me this to put this in front of Josh. So, maybe he's listening on vacation, maybe not. I honestly am concerned. Like, I know it will push its buttons. I'm concerned to put it in front of them.

I saw the video, and I did not want to post it to our office Slack, because I didn't think it was proper. I know. Because it is so disturbing. I saw people saying that it looked like J.J. McCarthy, too, who's supposed to be the quarterback, which is insane.

Anyway, it's going to be a fun show. I'm really happy to have you here, Tom, as you do live in the D.C. area you have for a while. So, let's get started. Of course, lots of talk about the D.C. takeover. I personally have been surprised, actually, at some of the media debates over it, debates over statistics, impact. I know they suggested going into new cities, so I am excited to get a personal and political analysis of that from you, Tom. Tom, I am not sure if you are a weed guy, but there is talk of reclassifying the schedule from type 1 to type 3, so we are going to get your thoughts on that as well.

Did you have any... Sorry, this is the rundown. If I could just... I'm not a weed guy. Getting out in front of the weed guy accusations. Love that. And then we potentially have a challenge to Obergefell coming along the pipe, and something I know Tom's been following for a while. But we have good news. We have Twilight Zone, all the good stuff you can expect on a Lootcast episode. Before we get into that, though, of course, we got to talk about Charity Mobile.

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That's CharityMobile.com, promo code LOOPcast. Thank you, Charity Mobile. Awesome. So, I have DC Tom on board. A little bit of context. We covered this at the end of last episode, but now it's kind of broken into the national conversation. President Trump has placed Washington, D.C., the Metropolitan Police Department, under federal control, and has deployed about 800 National Guard troops to D.C. The legal basis for this, as explained, was Section 740 of the District of Columbia Home Rule Act. This allows presidential control over the D.C.

police for up to 48 hours without congressional approval. ...or 30 days with notification to specific congressional committees. I assume that's what he's going for here. It'll be about 30 days. And overseeing, we have Attorney General Pam Bondi to oversee the police department, and DEA Administrator Terry Cole appointed as Interim Federal Commissioner.

And Trump has said things such as to address a public safety emergency due to crime, homelessness, and urban decay, violent gangs, bloodthirsty criminals, roving mobs of wild youth, and the assault on Doge Stafford Big Balls, Edward Korostein, that we talked about earlier as well. It's an action to take the Capitol back and make D.C. safer, cleaner, dubbed, quote, Liberation Day. Tom, are you feeling liberated right now?

I'm going into the city right after this, and I'm hoping I feel a lot safer. I moved here in the 90s, and I generally lived not in great places. My first house was at 10th and D Street, southeast, or northeast. And one of my first nights there, my mom called me, I was my mom's baby. She just called, how's everything going? I thought I heard a car backfiring. My housemate comes running in going, there was a drive-by across the street. I got mugged, I think, in the 90s about three or four times, personally.

I used to volunteer at the Anacostia High School, helping them through Martha's Table, like through a tutoring program at night. And I would talk, I never told my parents this, I would call them up and talk to them from the metro to the school, and it was mainly because if I disappeared, they would know something happened. Wow.

And it kind of cleaned up a little bit in the 2000s or so, just like New York did, which Josh mentioned. Crime is, it's still very rampant here, and I think one reason why you have all these media and the statistics saying, oh, but murder is going down. I don't know what the appropriate number of murders is that makes you feel safe in a city. Right. But I think my theory is that what's different is that murders might be going down, except...

There are certain areas of D.C. that more minorities live, Southeast being one of them, Anacostia being one, parts of Northwest, where the crime just continued, where people were dying and everything else. I think what is happening now is that the crime is affecting areas where there's tourists and up around Capitol Hill.

Yeah, and that is the reason why all of a sudden people are paying attention, because they didn't pay attention before, because it was all people, I hate to say it, they didn't care about it as much. The news didn't care about it, it didn't make news. Yeah, and so why do you see, I know this is your opinion, but why do you think that this is... I think probably, and you guys, I don't want to, I'm glad I listened to the last show, but I think the COVID really put a lot of people out, and then you had the whole Black Lives Matter, where it's like laws don't seem to apply for certain crimes, like protesting against.

The president or President Trump or anything along those lines, that you just have a generation of kids right now that some of them, they don't really, they have even less respect for the law, except maybe they have more respect for the community where they're going outside of their community and going, instead of like, if I live in Anacostia, I'm going to cause crime around Gallery Place, which is a totally different section of town.

Why it's increased now, because it's all across the U.S., is because I think there's been an attitude towards the police that is disrespectful, and it's really affected policing. Yeah. I mean, right now, we're having these debates, and this is why I said I'm almost surprised in some ways by the reaction. This is the one that kind of went viral on Axis from Peter Baker. Citing a non-existent crime crisis, Trump plans to take over the Washington, D.C. police and put troops in the streets of the nation's capital.

Contrary to his claims, violent crime in D.C. is at a 30-year low. You're hearing this a little bit from Mayor Bowser as well, citing this decrease in crime since. I think specifically since 2024 as well. What was interesting about this was they had a commander, Michael Pulliam, as I believe it's pronounced. He was placed on administrative leave in mid-May 2025, accused of altering crime statistics in his district. This is the third district covering Adams Morgan and Columbia Heights. The allegations claim Pulliam made questionable changes to crime data to show a false decrease in violent crime, such as downgrading felonies like shootings or carjackings.

...to lesser offenses like felony assault or theft. In some ways, I'm surprised they actually put him on leave over this, because it's almost happening legally as well. They're finding ways, basically, to make statistics seem better so that you can trot this out, but I almost find this a little bit hard to...

But you can cook numbers, you can argue over numbers, but I almost take, well, one, homicide rate we talked about last show, because there's going to be a body, but then also anecdotal experience, and you would think that media would kind of come together and be like, all right, we're going to have this story, right, about how this isn't actually that bad, we need to oppose Trump. But I'm seeing places like Morning Joe, I mean, I'll bring up the Sean Davis quotes, I just thought it was hilarious.

This morning, a visibly drunken vagrant blocked the entrance to our office today for several hours. Trapping staff inside and refusing to let staff into the building. Took nearly three hours and multiple calls to police to get a totally wasted and obligerant vagrant who is openly drinking and screaming profanities removed from our property in the middle of D.C. But yeah, non-existent crime crisis. You absolute clown.

The one that really surprised me was Morning Joe apparently didn't get the message on this. I want to read you a text from someone who, I won't say their name, but... They're, we'll just say, they're very liberal. And he says, this may sound controversial, but I'm not totally opposed to Trump's National Guard move in D.C. I know he's doing it for politics, but crime remains rampant. I've had too many friends carjacked, shot at. None of us will walk more than three blocks after 8 p.m.

Thirteen-year-olds are committing many of these crimes, quite a change from a decade ago when things were much calmer. Well, that actually sounds like the D.C. that I lived in when I lived a block behind the Supreme Court. And, you know, every three days, one of my neighbors was getting held up at gunpoint. I mean, there has been a crime problem in D.C.

I mean, that's not great from the resistance media, you know. We have George Soros prosecutors, and I don't think he showed this video. One of the tweets that I came across, I'm sorry I didn't save it. was a neighborhood, I think it was around Capitol Hill, the neighborhood did like a little march with their ANC commissioner, their local, like, not quite a city councilman, but somebody who watches over that neighborhood, and they did a march with about 15 to 20, maybe even more people, I only saw that many on the video, and they went to the local police station, and the police station started citing to them how the statistics are going down.

And the residents, and in this neighborhood, it's mostly liberal residents, were all scratching their heads and challenging the police that that's not the life we're living. They're afraid to park on the streets. As Morning Joe said, afraid to go out at a certain time of night. I cringe whenever I, and I'm glad Erika's not on the show right now, because I cringe whenever I hear of a young lady who's going to be living in the district.

Because it is not something I would recommend for anybody. And to clarify, we are talking about the capital of the United States of America? Right. I mean, what are we doing here for our own capital? You would recommend a young woman to live in the capital of our nation?

Because it's just not safe, and a lot of us scratch our heads. There are people who have raised families in D.C. and done a wonderful job with it. They usually have to send them to private schools. They're usually more strict with them and everything, but generally, it is not a safe place to live, just as many of our big cities are not, and that's the whole point of what Trump's trying to do. Right. Trump's trying to show that all these, because all these cities...

The one thing they have in common is they're being run by Democrats. And another thing that many of them have in common is the prosecutors were elected by George Soros. So, if you do catch a criminal, they're being let go. Which, of course, begs the question, you know, why would someone be intentionally making a country less safe? Which I don't know if there's a good answer to, but I don't know if it's...

Not everyone, though, is concerned about this. I have the other side. I think it's really important to be clear about what is going on here, and a relatively small crime problem is being used for specific authoritarian purposes that we know and understand. So, let's be clear about, D.C. does have a really, one really big crime problem, which was the January 6th insurrection incited by the current president. President of the United States, and his first act in coming back was pardoning all the people who tried to overturn constitutional republic order in Washington, D.C.

When I go to D.C., I'm not afraid of losing my wallet so much as I'm afraid of losing my vote. I'm not afraid of losing my wallet so much as I'm afraid that my children's freedom to breathe will be stolen in a world where climate change policy is non-existent. I'm afraid that the future of middle-class people will be stolen by the very things you were talking about, cutting the safety net, cutting Medicaid, cutting rural hospitals. Right, right. And of course...

Well, one, and I'm the last person to make fun of somebody's hair, except I'm glad to see that Snowmeister finally found a job after all the Christmas specials. I hope his brother Heatmeiser is still doing well as well.

Oh, man. This is a very elite view, because all he's talking about is Capitol Hill, and I'll tell you, when I go up to Capitol Hill, I'm very concerned about my wallet, because they're usually using the IRS to take all my money out of it. True. But where the crime is happening, well, it's happening in the neighborhoods of Capitol Hill, not at the U.S. Capitol. Do you know how many cars were jacked on January 6th? None. You know how many innocent people were killed on January 6th?

One, and she was shot by the police. Right. I mean, so... I mean, it's, you know, I often take the metro and worry about someone getting me at gunpoint, stealing my vote, you know? It's... What are we doing here? So, you brought up an interesting point of like, so if Trump comes in... And, I mean, this is the classic 80-20, right? So, people have to defend the status quo. We tolerate a standard of living in our own nation's capital, let alone all of our major cities, that is pretty much unthinkable to the rest of the developed world.

Certainly, in terms of homicide rate, but just in terms of decay, crime, violence, homelessness, and sure, I'm all for efforts to Attack the roots of those problems, and I don't think they're all, like, no one just wakes up one day and decides, yeah, I'm going to be spraying graffiti and shooting people or whatever, but if we can't... Enacts some type of rule of law. If whatever the current status quo is, has been unable to stop major media personalities and their friends in the nation's capital from being carjacked, threatened, guns in their face, something needs to be done, and whoever does it is going to reap the rewards, and whoever now has to get on the other side of that and say, oh, no, no, no, it's fine, when it obviously isn't, is going to lose.

So, he's even floated, yeah, I'm going to go to Chicago. I was looking at, can he actually go to Chicago? There are some real, you know, in the weeds. I think I saw... Declaring a national emergency under the National Emergencies Act to redirect federal resources to address crime. I think they did this. I saw Operation Legend in 2020 during a lot of the 2020 riots, cities like Chicago and Kansas City. Yeah, it'll be resisted, but I think if you genuinely does solve this problem in D.C., it does kind of now put a lot of these mayors and governors in a position where, well, why haven't you solved this, or why do you allow us to live like this?

Um, this is kind of exactly what I voted for. Like, I'd like to have access to my cities again and not fear for my life, especially the nation's capital. He seems a little different since it's more or less like a protectorate or something of the federal government, whereas the president can take over the police force for 30 days, the National Guard can stay as long as he wants. Okay. He can have the National Guard patrolling the streets as long as he wants, and that's what he did in some of those other cities in 2020.

If the White House, hopefully the White House is reaching out to maybe some very frustrated mayors or governors of blue states, or there are big cities and other that are facing crime in red states as well, and have been invited in. And I think showing that type of partnership would go a very long way in helping.

This should not be a partisan problem. This should be a partisan solution. This should be a bipartisan solution. And I think reaching out, trying to get invited into a city and show like, okay, this is what a partnership looks like. And that's why I think Mayor Bowser has been somewhat muted.

One, because he understands he has the authority to do this, and two, I think she understands the city is turning to crap. At the same time, it's being rejuvenated. We're going to get a new football stadium. Thank you, taxpayers. We got a new baseball stadium. We did the whole waterfront and a lot of Anacostia. Again, thank you, taxpayers. They're rejuvenating a lot of the district, and unfortunately, Those who are supposed to enforce the crimes have not gotten the memo.

Yeah. I even saw that the police chief, I think it was the police chief or an ex-police chief, was saying, like, yeah, if I heard that you're going to send me 500,000 extra police officers when we're in a shortage, I'd be pretty thrilled about that.

Yeah, the partnership idea is good, and I will just say, for me personally, A lot of, the Trump administration isn't a monolith. You can be frustrated with a lot of different things that are going on, but to me, this is what America first means. Like, safe cities. I would love to put my federal resources towards safe cities instead of wars, or somebody even talked about the FBI. It's like, yeah, I'd rather have the FBI not spying.

I'm like, I don't want people or just involve, you know, the app scene stuff terrible, but like, yeah, it'd be great if they had them in cities to keep them safer. Like, that'd be awesome. Like, isn't that kind of the point? So, I don't even know why people are mad about this.

Starting with Washington, D.C., which you have, because the last thing this country needs is a whole bunch of diplomats all of a sudden, or their children all of a sudden end up being victims of crime. Yeah. New York City is also, unfortunately.

Well, the incoming mayor, the most likely incoming mayor of New York City is probably going to be okay with all of this rampant crime, but that is where the UN is. That is where, I mean, if I was President Trump, I would suggest after he cleans up DC is to work with the people at the UN and say like, hey, you know what? Why don't you move down to DC? Ah, interesting. Because they didn't start in New York. They originally originated in San Francisco.

Why did they move? Um, who wants to stay in San Francisco? San Francisco could probably use some National Guard, too. Yeah, I don't exactly know why, except I don't think anybody is regretting the decision right now. Yeah, someone brought us to the chat. At least in New York and in D.C., people are pooping in the right places.

Am I the first one to use that word on the loop cast? The poop map? I think we covered the poop map back in the day. Oh, that's right. Was it Newsom cleaned up San Francisco for Xi Jinping to come, and magically the streets were... This whole thing just feels so insulting to me, and transparent. You're not worthy of a clean city, so we're going to clean it up when Xi Jinping comes in town, or when the Olympics come into town.

As soon as they leave, it's going to go back to normal. You're not worthy of safety. Right. It's insulting. Like, the fact that this even needs to be done, to me, is kind of insulting as an American. This is what I'm actually, my tax dollars should be going towards.

And it's what the Snowmeister, Snowmeiser commentator just did not seem to understand. No. Is that crime, I'm, when I go up to Capitol Hill. And plus, everybody, all the police up there are very heavily armed in the security up there. There's like four different jurisdictions for police forces. There's the Park Police, there's Capitol Police, there's D.C. Police, and Secret Service, usually for a few people as well. So, it is probably one of the safest parts of town. Yeah. Yeah, I think I was talking to someone about this, too, like the origins of the mob.

Like, we essentially... Certain gangs in D.C. are kind of like the mob in a way. We're actually pretty fortunate to have the police. Like a centralized police evolved to where it has, because the origins of the mob actually were kind of altruistic. Like, the Italians felt like they didn't have any protection, and therefore, families came together to protect their families and people in that region, and then it started to go bad when they started to extort people. Like, oh, if you want protection, we'll pay us 15%, and then if you don't pay the 15%, it's like, well, it's not really a question about you paying 15%.

If you don't do that, we're going to start hurting people. And if you don't have that centralized police force, I'm not saying police has been perfect. But it seems like it's evolved to an area where, yes, it actually does. There's oversight, there's a regulation, body cams, all that kind of thing, as opposed to, what's the alternative? Like, small militias? Like, that's, again, that's kind of how third world countries operate. So, yeah, happy about this in a lot of ways. Speaking of, Tom, I know you've just come out, not a weed guy, but we did talk about weed last episode.

And the Trump administration is saying his administration is looking at reclassifying marijuana, so a little bit of background on that. At a press conference, he said they're looking into reclassifying marijuana from a Schedule I drug, a classification that includes substances like heroin, to a less dangerous category like Schedule III, and includes everything from hormones like testosterone to drugs like Tylenol with codeine.

The U.S. marijuana industry, of course, pretty fired up about this. Despite seeing rapid growth from legalization around the country, it still faces huge tax and financial barriers. One, under its current classification, dispensaries and other marijuana companies can't deduct business expenses from federal income tax. They are also often shunned by traditional banks and credit card companies.

This is nearly an $80 billion industry, and it could definitely be boosted by the change. Trump expects to decide on the issue in the next few weeks. And so, I did a little bit of a deep dive into legalization around the country, excuse me, some of the impacts that that had. People were kind of debating in the chat about it. Tom, just any quick thoughts before I get into a little bit of the background?

Marijuana, I have friends and family who have been severely affected by alcohol. I have a brother who is in the marijuana industry, has smoked since he was about 13, and he is now 63, 62, and it has ruined his life and the career path he was on. So, you cannot tell me that marijuana is harmful. Yeah.

I have all these baseline anecdotal stories as well that I think in some ways are more illustrative than the kind of like, oh, well, look at the revenue, look at this and that. Just at a baseline, no one that is intaking weed regularly is killing it that I've ever seen. You know what I mean? I've never been like, oh, you smoke a lot of weed, you really got it going on, right? Like it really... You're weird. So, that's just number one, right?

Beyond anything else. Let us just say that is my baseline. I know there are medical reasons, but anyway, I just wanted to get back into the history a little bit. So, recreational marijuana was legalized in Colorado and Washington in 2012, with 23 other states following suit. Medicinal marijuana is legal in 48 states, plus Washington, D.C., and some territories. So, we talked about the classification previously. It was given this classification back in 1970, during the Controlled Substance Act, CSA, which was Initially meant to be temporary pending a federal review by the newly formed National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Policy, and I was trying to look into really like both sides, like what are the positives and negatives, and it does kind of impact everyone differently.

So, at this point, though, according to Pew Research poll from 2022, a majority of Americans feel that marijuana should be legalized everywhere. I believe that's at about a 70% clip now. And so, some of the health benefits, saying it's good for treating nausea, spasticity, appetite, can't treat appetite loss, chronic pain. People are saying it's safer, you can use it better than other drugs, maybe they're less addictive, say, than opioids. It's versatile, and it's natural, which I actually will dispute because, yes, what was grown in the 70s in people's backyards was probably pretty natural, but we have some real strange high- Exactly.

And so, I would argue it's become a lot less safe. And if anything, outside of even being laced with other stuff like fentanyl, like the strains that are being created are so powerful that you get the nasty things like psychosis and mind altering. So, yeah, I mean, some of the arguments I saw against marijuana, everything from respiratory difficulties, pregnancy-related risks, and increased risk in testicular cancer. Severe cyclic nausea and vomiting, adolescent brain development issues, psychiatric disorders, addiction, increased risk of other substance use disorders.

Not great. The main argument I've seen levied against criminalization of it is that it puts more people in jail. We have a high incarceration rate. I saw a really interesting analysis of those numbers that actually disproved it. I have it here. It's a really long article, and funny, this guy was in Josh's shoes. He kind of grew up libertarian and was, you know, what's the third rail of libertarianism? It's like, oh, we got to decriminalize all drugs, right? Like, no one should tell us what not to do.

So, there is an analysis. I just threw it in the chat. I was looking, too, on the Catholic issue. The difference in classification between alcohol, as in, like, you can drink alcohol and not get drunk, but you cannot smoke weed and not get high.

It was interesting. I found it somewhat inconclusive from a religious perspective. Is it good to not use? I actually appreciate when people go deep into that, but I almost see that as besides the point in terms of what we should allow as a society. Sorry, Tom, it looks like you were going to say something. I didn't want to interrupt.

Well, no, I agree with you there, and especially, I mean, with IVF, it took even the church a while to come to the conclusion it ultimately has about why it's... Except with marijuana, I work closely with a group called, through CatholicVote, Smart Approaches to Marijuana. And I don't agree with 100% with everything that they stand for, because there's some medical marijuana stuff and everything in there. But they did polling... And the religious group that is most opposed to legalization is Catholics, which was very interesting to me.

And usually when I'm citing that up on the Hill, I'll point out, well, we don't like the competition when it comes to incense. So, it took me a second there. Thank you. That was a delayed laugh there. Thank you.

Sorry, that was good. But no, that is one reason why they reached out to us at CatholicVote, because they were surprised with that poll, and it is mostly the group itself, it is mostly evangelicals or people who have been harmed by marijuana.

So, I mean, a lot of the benefits that you listed, the so-called benefits, nausea, spasticity, appetite, I think can be solved either with other drugs or extracting even those parts out of marijuana as opposed to making it widespread. I know this because my brother is in the industry.

And when it was just medical marijuana, he thought it was the biggest joke in the world, because you just found any sort of physician assistant, and I have a headache, and they would write you a prescription for an ounce bag. And that is why I want to make clear, too, we are talking about the reclassification of the drug, so not full-scale federal legalization, but to me, it is almost a joke, exactly what you are saying. You are making it more accessible.

I am even looking at some numbers here in terms of revenue, which is a main argument for it. provides tax revenue to the state which is hilarious it's like okay we're gonna you know maybe some marginal benefit to people but yeah we're gonna make a ton of money off it it reminds me a lot of gambling like i see reading gambling very much in the same category of like um You know, is it going to kill you? Probably not. Is it degenerate behavior that will severely impact and make, you know, certain parts of societies worse on average?

A hundred percent. Like, if someone's even out there, say, they gamble their house away, they gamble their life savings away, because gambling was made more accessible, say, you can do it on your phone, et cetera, that's a net negative, and I think, like, if we're to order society around that, I would rather just keep it much more restricted, as restricted as possible, so that, you know, it's not It's not available to the extent in which you could actually seriously abuse it.

I think it's great that gambling was just refined to Vegas. Look, you knew what you were getting into. You fly into Vegas, you do that there, but if you're in Indiana, you're like, well, I can't just do it in my backyard.

With all the negative side effects, one thing that wasn't – because it is kind of like a frog in a boiling pot. Because you put a frog in a boiling pot, it doesn't realize it's dying until it's dead. The places where it was legalized, like the first few places, the most notable, Colorado, just look at how that has affected. And it's not because everybody's high, it just brought the whole society down in Colorado. And that's kind of what they're pushing now for on a national level.

Yeah. Even the amount of weed shops you see everywhere, too. We were talking on the show, the border of Michigan, all of the signs, it's everywhere. Even just small things like smelling it everywhere you go, like around restaurants, downtown, we're talking about cities. Oh, yeah, you smell that everywhere. It smells terrible. I don't want my kids around it.

I don't think we talk enough, too, about the psychosis issue. Like, something that can mess with your brain like that. Pretty negative. I wouldn't want that readily available to children, especially. Especially at 23 and younger, when your mind is still forming. Yeah. People make the same arguments, too. People make the same arguments about the legalization of all vices. That is why I see this very much in the same category as legalizing prostitution, say, like a Denmark thing.

The arguments are the same in kind, often. It is like, well, people are going to do it. You might as well have it be safe, and you can make some money off it. You can regulate it, and then people can make a living, and that is great. I am like… In no way, shape, or form do I think we should legalize the boon that that would have on society as it already has had in places like Denmark, or even just look at online examples like OnlyFans and stuff.

Has this made our society better? Are we a more moral, happier, more thriving people because of this? The answer is pretty obviously no, I would say. Yeah, I mean, if legalizing drugs and prostitution was the answer to all your ails, then Amsterdam would be the leading country and city in the world. They legalized both decades ago.

Yeah, and even getting back to the homelessness problem, too, like, everyone's approach to the homelessness thing is like, well, we'll just leave, we'll give them needles, right? Like, we'll give them needles, make sure Narcan's around, and we have, like, you know, Baltimore, San Francisco, we have cities full of zombies.

When I lived on Capitol Hill, in the 90s, the debate was to federalize allowing needle exchanges, and what they would do is create free zones, and they created this free zone up around Capitol Hill, up around Eastern Market, where you can go and get your needle if you're a drug user, and within those confines of that area, you could not be arrested for drugs. So, what did the drug dealers do? Go to that area and sell their drugs to the people getting their brand new needles.

It is just a cycle that the arguments fall apart when you really start looking at them. Yeah, and Mark's in the chat asked the right question, what is the purpose of laws? And I actually see that as a huge break. I never really had a libertarian phase. I guess there's always the alluring elements of libertarianism, but there isn't a good enough answer for what is the purpose of laws. The purpose of freedom is not to be able to do what you want.

It's that you have the freedom to do what is good. Laws are meant to order society towards the highest good, towards the common good, and that's why we have robust debates about this. I think all these vices very clearly, gambling, oh my gosh, what has gambling done towards the common good? It is enriched specific parts in the industry who basically play a rigged game, make a ton of money off of the average person, and take that money, like, sure, there is going to be small percentages that can handle all of these things, but for the mass population, what we are trying to get towards the common good has overwhelmingly been negative.

So, never back down on that. Yeah, I testified actually in front of Congress on internet gambling. And shortly afterwards, and I've never probably told this story, shortly afterwards, my wife really wanted to go down to Charleston Races and Slots to see the horses. So, we go down there, and it's all slot machines, or at least it was at the time, and it's a beautiful area without that, like countryside and everything around Harper's Ferry.

It was people, it was machines playing machines. It was just one of the saddest things, and even the horses look sad that were running. And as we were leaving, my wife was like, see, it wasn't that bad. And I'm like, as we're leaving, look at all the businesses. And all the businesses and all the billboards were all like addicted.

Get help here, or it was dollar stores, or Goodwills, and things like that. It was all for an industry that's supposed to be so rich, it was surrounded by poverty and depravity. And that's what it does. Gambling might make a few people rich. Just like legalizing marijuana, but ultimately, for the rest of society, it's a bad and an evil. Yeah, ironically, too. If you get good enough at gambling with a lot of these draft kings or whatever, they actually ban you from playing anymore.

It's like the OG casinos. Talk about the mob, the mafia. If you actually get too good, they're like, okay, nope, you can't play anymore. So, it literally is a rigged game. You might win a little bit, and they actually finance themselves off of the biggest losers. So, people that do gamble away a million dollars, two million dollars, that's how they finance. It's not the people throwing five dollars down on some slots. It's people that they actually genuinely know have a problem or are addicted, are gambling beyond their means.

There's actually been a bunch of lawsuits about this from family members who had someone who's addicted, say like VIP people reaching out to them from DraftKings or whoever, saying, hey, you know, come back, come back, we're going to set up these experiences for you, knowing that they were... You know, gambling well beyond their means, took all their life savings. And then the hilarious, like, as you said, on a billboard on the way out, oh, got a problem? Like, they'll tack that on the bottom as if they care, but their entire business model is built around bankrupting people like that.

Shameful. Totally shameful. Okay, good news now. No, Tom, you're up. Um, my good news is, and it's pretty self-explanatory, I think, once the picture goes up. When I was growing up, I didn't really watch as many Saturday morning cartoons as I used to watch the old Abbott and Costello and Three Stooges and things like that. And here, it has finally happened. Who is on first? I don't know if, um, if what is on third base, or, I don't know. I don't know if it's third base, but If you have never seen the Abbott and Costello routine of who is on first, you've got to watch it.

A hundred years later, and it's still hilarious, and now we're finally there where who is on first. Who is on first is so good. Do we give context to the audio listeners? This is a baseball player with the last name H-E-U on first base who is on first.

Tom, this is painting a picture about your sense of humor, if you're a big Abbott and Costello guy. And more Abbott and Costello than Three Stooges. Yeah, Stooges is good, though, too. It was nice, clean humor, and I just liked it better in the cartoons. My dad had a, or he might still have this, it's a poster, like a tin poster of the Three Stooges. It says, turn your... Boy geese. Turn your birdies into boy geese or something like that. It was a golf episode.

I have certainly taken in my fair share of three stooges. I have another positive athletic good news story. So, if we have any Bears fans, he was drafted there. I think he is in Baltimore now. You are never too old to stop learning. So, Georgia native Roquan Smith, he is a linebacker place for the Ravens, wanted to learn how to swim, and so he shows up to the pool.

I thought he was a little bad because he's in the pool, but Rokhan Smith has got to be 20. He's in his 20s for sure. Never learned how to swim, always wanted to. He's doing a little kick paddling backwards with an instructor in the pool with other grown men trying to learn how to swim. It's just a great reminder that these are some of the most genetically gifted best athletes of the world. And to see them really just take that humility of like, I want to learn something I never learned.

It always brings a smile to my face. So, that is my good news. Shout out, Roquan Smith. You are never too old to learn. It is good that you know how to swim. Were you a swim lessons guy growing up, Tom?

I took it, but I hated it so much, and that is kind of how, and I. I stopped going, and my parents weren't happy about it, and my mom, because at the time, six kids, I was the youngest. She didn't want me underfoot because I was an early riser, and I wasn't going to swim practice, and that's how I started my love for books. She went up in our attic and found an original, like about 30 copies, 30 of the Hardy Boys series.

Oh, that's so good. Love Hardy Boys. And they were like originals from 1930s. Lord knows where they are now, because they might be worth a few bucks. I think one of my nephews has them. But she's there like, you're not going to be watching TV, and if you're not going to swim in, this is what you're going to do. And just, it gave me a lifelong love of reading. That's awesome. So, do you know how to swim?

I do know how to swim. Don't know how to dive. I know how to cannonball. Yeah, actually, fun fact, there's like a part of my, sorry, I'm looking up, but there's a part of my chin that can't grow hair on it, the bottom of my chin, because I jumped off of a diving board during swim lessons when I was a kid, and I scraped it on the diving board, and it was one of those, like the diving board had the texture on it, so it was really hard, so I had bleeding like crazy out of my chin, but still to this day.

It's very smooth. No hair can grow there. I hit my head on the doggone board, to this day. That explains it. That explains it. Yeah, someone wants a book recommendation from you, Tom. Do you have one? I might have mentioned it, but it's just a book I love so much, Fields of Blood, which was written by a...

Back in the 1800s, right before building up to the Civil War, a house clerk kept a daily diary of everything that was going on, so all the debates over the Civil War, and it turned into this book, Fields of Blood, about all the buildup towards, I mean, the greatest divide our nation ever had, the Civil War in 1860, and this is a very interesting read.

Tom being a Civil War guy? Not surprising. Well, that's when I was born. Love that for you. Actually, I actually don't even know if this book is still good as an adult, but one of my favorite books growing up was Rifles for Waity. Have you ever read that?

I have not. Okay, so I don't know if it holds up because I read it when I was in fifth grade, but it was a really... Formative book for me because it was about a Civil War soldier that was from the North, fought for the North, and then was a spy. So, like a double agent went down to the South.

And then he started serving, like serving as a double agent with the South. And I remember him, his recollections were that the men from the South were good men. In certain cases, actually better men than some of the men he was serving with in the Union. And I think it was just because I was young or something.

I feel like it's really easy to get tribal, right? It's like, well, the North was right. No one in the South was good or had any admirable qualities, and that sent me down. You go take a look at General Lee and a lot of men that served in the South. The reason the Civil War is so sad is because they were brothers. In cases, sometimes literally brothers or relatives, but they were all Americans. Not everyone was good, and everyone in the Union wasn't good.

Everyone in the South wasn't good. I don't know. It was a very formative book for me. I'm not sure if it still holds up. Let me know if anyone's read Reference for a Waity. I'd actually like to go back, because that really stuck with me. The guy went down to the South and the people were good to him and seemed to be good men, and it kind of broke his assumptions. Then he was kind of torn about where he was in the middle of all that.

So, anyway. The whole slavery thing. Yeah, the whole slavery thing. Not chill, for sure. Not chill, obviously. I want to make an obvious point there. Slavery, not chill. Glad we got rid of that. Earlier in the program, you were praising the mob, so I just wanted to clarify here.

I am a man of many mysteries. I can't remember the name of it, but I did read an interesting book about the origins of the mob. And that also was surprising me, too, because the way it's portrayed in movies is the mob's always bad. And in Italy, the mob was seen as good to a lot of Italians that they were protecting, at least in the beginning. I'd have to go back and look.

They were there to keep order. Yeah, right. Again, you can't say, okay, but you get into, like, what is policing, what is the idea of, and then you get organized crime out of that, of course, but, yeah, anyway. Tom, you're going to make me defend things that are hard to defend. I'm not even saying I'm defending them. I'm just saying that it's interesting. You're trying to really nail me down.

This is the TomTom episode. Maybe it hasn't happened for a reason. We're getting into the mob and slavery, but C-Block, we have the U.S. Supreme Court. So, Tom, I'm happy to have you on this. This has been something that.

I think you've followed for many, many years now. So, here's the news regarding the Supreme Court. After the Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage across the United States, it could now be overturned. Senior Washington correspondent Devin Dwyer is on the story for us.

All right, give us the deal, Devin. Who is actually asking the justices to overturn this? Well, in recent years, Kira, we've been waiting for a case like this as some of the sentiment in the country has started to shift. A little bit softened, rather, against same-sex marriage. There's been a lot of talk about whether the justices will get a chance to reconsider the case, and as you said there, they are getting that opportunity next month. We've learned that Kim Davis, she's that Kentucky clerk from back in 2015 that was at the center of international controversy when she refused to issue marriage licenses to a gay couple in Kentucky in defiance of the Supreme Court.

She spent six days in jail. She lost a defamation suit. She had to You pay $100,000 in damages, $260,000 in legal fees. That is what she is appealing to the Supreme Court, but it is the first time, Kira, that anyone has technically asked the justices explicitly to overturn Obergefell v. Hodges, which was that landmark ruling, and she does just that. Her counsel in this petition, which was filed last week, says that decision was egregiously wrong, and if that sounds familiar, That's the same type of argument that was made by opponents of abortion when they sought to overturn Roe v.

Wade just a few years ago. So, a lot of eyes on this petition. It's unclear whether the court will take it up, but certainly a lot on the line. Tom, are you familiar with the Kim Davis case? Familiar with her originally, because at the time, I was at Family Research Council, and at the time, we were winning all the state marriage amendments across the U.S. We won in California, and then she came up, and I think Alliance Defending Freedom was the group that, I don't know who's defending her now, but I think they're the ones who defended her then, and not a lot of To our detriment, and I think we were concentrating more on the marriage amendments, which I think was the wrong path, probably, in retrospect, though it certainly helped delay things for the other fights, not a lot of groups who were fighting for marriage embraced her.

We embraced the ideals. I mean, here she was, a county clerk in Kentucky. So, with the current case, I'd be shocked. I don't know anything about the current case. I'd be shocked if the Supreme Court even takes it up, let alone if they then throw out the merits of Bergefell. Yeah. And it is a little different court.

But, I mean, I wish, but I don't see it happening. I have a follow-up question to this, because what was interesting about the Kim Davis case to me was, so that the people that wanted to get legally married, they weren't considering marriage before. They heard about Kim Davis on social media, and they could have gone to many other clerks. They repeatedly tried to get Kim Davis, because they knew about her public stances, and they wanted her name on the certificate. So...

A lot of things have been established. I see this as pretty clear. Harassment of this individual who could have, whatever, basically to fight over the principal. So, that's interesting to me. The second thing is, I don't know about you, you were in the pro-life movement for a long time. I didn't expect the Supreme Court to take up Roe vs. Wade in really any capacity. I remember being talked about as a pipe dream.

I know that a lot of people, I don't know if it's like edgy or fun to talk about, but Obergefell has, the decision has ushered in the slippery slope of all slippery slopes in terms of marriage and morals and law in this country, that a lot of laws have actually been now used, weaponized against people of sincere religious beliefs. So, I know you said you're surprised. Did you feel differently about Roe v. Wade at the time, and is this kind of a pipe dream that actually will never happen?

That's a good point. In the case that ended up being Dobbs, It wasn't really, on the national level, the groups had a different strategy. And the court strategy, and it's one I fought against in all the places I worked, the court strategy was basically, where is Justice Kennedy, who was the Supreme Court, Anthony Kennedy, the Supreme Court Justice, who was just, he was liberal. Not with us on life, not with us on the marriage issue. And so...

Very, very smart people within the conservative legal community were all crafting their arguments and their strategies around what is Justice Kennedy going to wake up today and decide, instead of what is right, what is the right thing to do.

Me, with my stories, another good book is a book by Juan Williams about Thurgood Marshall. It is about his time when he was at the American Bar Association. He is the one who argued – he was a horrible Supreme Court justice, but as an attorney, he argued what became Board of Education.

Sorry, I am having a brain freeze for that. And when he was – brought the cases about separate – To strike down Plessy versus Ferguson, separate but equal clause, he was told by the elites that, no, don't do it. The court isn't right. The court isn't right. And he was convinced by younger lawyers that, no, I'm going to fight this all the way. This is the right thing to do. What happens is, you have the first elections in 1950, and Eisenhower becomes president.

So, the Chief Justice, Vincent, who was not with He would have ruled against separate, but he would have kept up segregation. He was against desegregation, would have kept up segregation. It probably would have been a 6-3 decision or 5-4 decision.

He held off on giving the ruling until the new president could get in because he realized, okay, this is going to cause some trouble. We want the new president to be able to get troops. So, Eisenhower gets in. Vincent dies. Eisenhower names a new chief justice, Chief Justice Warren, and it is probably the only good decision. He is the one who got all the court on the same page to overrule strictly on the case of education.

And desegregation, allowing for black and white children and other children to all share the same facilities, which ultimately led to the Civil Rights Acts in the 60s, etc. So, Thurgood Marshall ignored all the elites and trusted his gut in what we would call God. That God will prevail, and that is kind of what happened in the Life case. There was a lot of arguments not to do it. Even when the case was going to the Supreme Court, there were pro-life groups that were saying, oh, maybe we should not ask for Roe v.

Wade to be overturned, but ultimately, everybody except for one group, National Rights of Life, came on board and said, no, we need to ask for that brass ring. That is what we want. Let your yeses be yeses and your noes be noes. We want marriage to be between one man and one woman. We want every life protected. So, why should we hide behind it because of politics or something like that and hide behind our views? Because it is, the reason there's resistance to challenging Obergefell is politics, right?

Because you wouldn't want it to come across as like, oh, you hate gay people, or whatever. Even though, my whole problem with this is like, marriage. For 2,000 years, and for a good reason, because you're ordering society towards the common flourishing, is between a man and a woman. You open up all kinds of worms, and then when it comes to, are you entitled to children through different means in terms of surrogacy, etc., are you entitled? It's not a good way to order society in unions that clearly are not fertile.

You can't have children, and open up to all kinds of gray area, ethical, bad, you know. I think it's best for society. I'm fine with some type of legal partnership that you're not calling marriage, that just isn't the name. Am I missing something on all of this debate? I feel like I'm not even able to articulate a good enough reason. It's more like I have issue with the societal impacts, and then also calling it marriage, because it's not marriage. I think there's stuff beyond that that maybe I'm not able to articulate.

What would you say to that, Tom? They argued, those who argued for same-sex marriage argued on the basis of benefits, even though all of us knew that that wasn't the case, because you could get a lot of those just by taking legal steps. What they want is acceptance, because just look what has happened since Obergefell. They start going after churches. It is about acceptance. It is about, I have a lifestyle that you disagree with. I am going to force you to agree with it.

If it was just about the benefits, it could be easily solved. As you mentioned, there are legal ways to do it. By the time of Obergefell, very few know, like if you had a same-sex partner, you were not being denied going to see them in the hospital. If you were, it was because the hospital staff, something was wrong. Not that the hospital staff was bigoted, they were just too bureaucratic. So, it is just a matter of they want to force us to accept, and that's why whenever I see like love equals love and things like that, it's like, well, unless you have views like mine, then you don't really love me all that much.

Love for me, not for thee. Because it's also not as if, like, homosexual activity has not existed since the beginning of time. Like, two men could live, there was nothing stopping two men from living together before, two women from living together before, and living this kind of, or maybe in the 80s, like, from what I've been described as, like, it was an understood alternative lifestyle, and it was okay, like, kind of leave me alone, I'll do my thing. Like, yeah, no one was coming after you.

So, to your point, what was the change? The change wasn't any type of... If this was over tax benefits, is basically what the argument is, it was acceptance was what changed, and now the slippery slope of all the things that get allowed now, and actually now, you need to acknowledge, and a lot of people will say the trans movement was exactly where it went too far, where people are like, yeah, the slogan before was, let me just love who I want to love, get out of my, the government shouldn't be involved in the bedroom, yada, yada, yada, and then I was like, well.

Why is a drag queen reading books to my kid in the library, or why is my 12-year-old coming home from school saying that their counselor gave them testosterone? That's crazy. Why are women getting hurt in their own sports by men who are claiming to be women? And it's just the logical end, unfortunately, of what you just opened up by not just affirming the first truth, that marriage is between a man and a woman. In law. Conservatives, and by nature, I think, are very disorganized because we all feel a certain way.

We all have certain beliefs, and our main strength is that liberals are stupid, and so they overreach. And that's what allows us to, I would never have thought, after Obergefell, I was just like, okay, now that with Tran stuff, it's just going to go full steam ahead and everything else, but they overreached, and they did the drag queen. It was like, and they would publicly come out and say like, yeah, we're coming after your kids. Yeah, that was a wild, dude, that's out there.

That's a video that was made. Yeah, like, yeah, I can't believe that was said out loud. Yeah. But thank goodness it did, because... It really helped change where things are going. It bud light with that guy who's hawking the beer and everything else. Yeah. The other side overreaches, and that's when we need to know how to take advantage of that, and at the same time, not come across as mean, because we should never be mean, but just maybe take a step back, and when the other side is hitting itself, allow them to hit themselves.

Yeah, I think it almost like, if nothing else, it just, the overreach allowed people who kind of all, actually, it's going to come up in my Twilight Zone, all feel a certain way, but the slogan and the movement felt like it was so good, you couldn't voice your very reasonable opinions or objections without the trap of being, you know, called a bigot or whatever, which could have ended your career or whatever you want to say. And now it feels like the craziness.

Has allowed the normal people to be like, listen, I'm for this and that, but this is crazy, and it actually is okay and good to hold these opinions, and I can now find new ways to articulate, because in order to respond to the craziness, you actually had to firm up exactly what you thought or why you thought it was bad, and there's very now easy, provable examples. They're coming for your kids, the drag queen stuff, the gender mutilation stuff. It's like, yeah, this is a fruit of what just happened.

And, therefore, this is the good. I don't know. I think it's been bad in a lot of ways, of course, for people, especially people that are irreversibly harmed by it, but in terms of messaging and the average person in America, and as that relates to the country. Even just think about what Trump did first day in office, all the executive orders. It was like the most layup, low-hanging fruit, like, okay, no more men in women's sports, right? Done. He's the 80% president.

Right, but I think 80% of people always felt that way, but they didn't, like I always bring this up on the show, there's a great book called After the Ball, How America Will Conquer Its Fear and Loathing of the Gays, or Fear of the Gays, I bring it up all the time. Like the movement itself, it wasn't some organic groundswell of there's so many people that, you know, want to live homosexual lifestyles. It was very smart advertising executives came up with a playbook of how to...

They did enact this in law and in culture, and they succeeded in many ways. And the things they actually said in this book, that would actually cause people to turn against them, have been done. Exactly what we said, they went too far. And they advocated against those uses in this book. Funny enough, this book is not in print anymore. So, it's super hard to get a hold of a copy of this thing, precisely because the things they warned against this book would now, as of a couple years ago, put you in a category of, you know.

Deplorable. Like, you can't hold this opinion in polite society. I think I read that when I was at FRC. It's been a while. It's hard to get, like, if you, I don't even know, if you look at Amazon, you might find it, but it's expensive. Like, I found some online versions of it, but to get it in print is actually pretty rare. So, anyway, good book. We're giving a lot of book recommendations on this episode. Go read. It's good for the soul.

Very interesting guy. Two ad executives in the 90s who were gay. They laid out a very strategic vision for how they were going to take this minority issue and turn it into a bigger issue using emotional levers, law levers, things like that. Very much succeeded.

Okay, Twilight Zone, Tom, you're up. I am trying to remember what my title is. Oh, yours is Money. It is about Chuck Schumer. Oh, as some of you might know, I am originally from New York, upstate New York, going up there this weekend for a wedding, and very, very unhappy about who my current senator is, Senator Schumer.

Um, and if you think Joe Biden had cornered the market and crazy when it comes to democratic leadership, just watch this video where you have John Oliver, who's extremely lefty, exposing Chuck Schumer. Yeah, Shakti still has a job, but actually, you are now shaking hands with the liberals. They don't like Chuck Schumer. I actually don't know who likes Chuck Schumer. I've never seen someone from both sides get so much hate. Chuck Schumer likes Chuck Schumer. The old joke used to be never get in between Chuck Schumer and a camera.

Well, Joe and Eileen Bailey really like Chuck Schumer, apparently. I'll play the clip. Less about Chuck Schumer himself, and more about two of his favorite people, Joe and Eileen Bailey. They're a couple that, throughout Schumer's career, he has talked about a lot. They're a middle-class couple in Massapequa, which is a suburb on Long Island. Joe and Eileen Bailey, this middle-class couple, they bought into Reagan Republicanism in 1980. Joe and Eileen are worried about losing their jobs or their friends' jobs. The Baileys really don't believe in trickle-down.

They don't believe in a whole lot of government spending, but they believe in tax breaks for kids to go to college. He's an insurance adjuster and lives in the New York suburbs. By New York standards, He makes $50,000 a year. If he lived in the middle of the country, he'd make $40,000. Wife works in a medical office. She makes about $20,000. She might make $15,000 elsewhere. And, you know, I have guided my political life through the Baileys. The Baileys have guided Chuck Schumer's political life, which is a little weird given.

They don't exist. Seriously, he invented them. Schumer first introduced the world to the Baileys in his 2007 book, Positively American, winning back the middle class majority, one family at a time. In it, he mentions the Baileys. An astonishing 265 times in 264 pages. But he'd apparently been talking about them for years before the book was published. One of his former spokespeople said he's always asking, what would the Baileys think?

These people aren't real? And you actually, who is? You actually bring up a good point, though, about how the liberals don't like Chuck Schumer. That's probably why John Oliver is going after him, because he got the green light to go after him. Green light to go after him, for sure. Yeah. That was definitely in the back of my mind.

When I was at... National Taxpayers Union, I wrote a thing on Al Gore's tax cuts. He was running for the president in 2000, and his tax cuts, they were targeted tax cuts, and it was like Christmas trees and fishing boxes. Instead of giving everybody an across-the-board tax cut, he wanted all these tax cuts that you would have to jump through hoops for. So, I wrote an op-ed saying, no, Virginia. I made up this character called Sandy Claus, and Sandy Claus was this manufacturer who made toys, and he employed disabled people, and so he would get all these different benefits from Al Gore, and the title of the op-ed was, no, Virginia, there is no Sandy Claus.

After that was published in a couple of newspapers, I had a reporter calling me up if they could interview Sandy Claus. I'm saying, this person sounds really interesting, and I think it would be great to be able to interview them. Yeah, did you give them their address at the North Pole?

Well, that's what I had to keep on saying to them, like, say the name again, Sandy Claus. But slower. Sandy Claus. Yeah. It's like, and what do they do? They make toys. Yes, Sandy Claus makes toys. And that is why I have lost a lot of respect for reporters. Tom, I have two things for you. One, the first thing I saw, I think the account name on it was Blue Georgia, and I saw John Oliver.

So, clearly, the message has gone out to, like, it is cool to kind of rip on Chuck Schumer now. And then I thought of the grilling incident where he, 4th of July grilling, what was it, frozen burgers with cheese on them?

Yeah. Tough. And then the second is... Well, one of the best comments on the John Oliver video was, RIP the Baileys, they died after a cookout at Chuck's. Oh, so good. And then my second observation was. He took it to another level, but I think that's actually a pretty standard marketing tool to create personas of people that you are attempting to reach with whatever you're doing. So, I forget the exact technical name for it, but Joe and Eileen would be, you know, you make them up, what their lifestyle is, how many kids they have, how much money they make, what entertainment they consume.

So, you have in mind, like, a consumer you want to reach. But it's interesting to me to see a politician take what is such a supposed to be a theoretical marketing tool and actually pass it off as if he had real friends and these are the people that he talks to. I imagine this probably isn't super unusual for national politicians in D.C.

I think at this level, and since we gave a couple of book recommendations, my favorite movie ever is this movie, Harvey, based on a play starring Jimmy Stewart, and Jimmy Stewart is a guy who likes to drink, and he is the only one who can see a six-foot-tall invisible rabbit named Harvey.

And Harvey guides him through his day and everything and helps him make decisions and everything like that. And you have to watch the movie to see if Harvey, how it comes out. It's a very funny movie. Jimmy Stewart at his best. But I guess the Baileys are kind of Chuck Schumer's Harvey. I mean, he has talked about them so much.

That it goes beyond just like, I'm just using these people as an example of this modern family, like I did with Sandy Claus. Right. It goes so far, it is delusional. Yeah. When you're leaving the impression that these are real people.

Yeah. Might suggest you're a little bit out of touch. Me, or? Because you're probably right. This is crazy, man. Like, man. I'm just wondering how you get to this position where, say, you're Elizabeth Warren or whatever. She's making cringy videos with Mamdani. I mean, she's got to be so old at this point. Again, this isn't an ageist thing, but Dianne Feinstein, rest in peace, passed away in the 90s.

What is it that makes people—is it just like the classic story of money and power and prestige? Chuck, if you're doing this, you don't actually have real people from your district that you're actually friends with that live a normal life, and aren't all those the things that actually animate you, make you happy, make you feel fulfilled? Is your local community that you're making an impact, that you're there, that you're present, and you're not in any of that in D.C., and you just get sucked into this lifestyle?

You have to pretend that you do that, but your life revolves around money, power, and prestige. It's kind of sad. And you forgot why you went up there. And Dianne Feinstein and Kay Granger and even Jesse Helms towards the end of his life, my beef isn't as much with them. They should have retired when they knew, like, I can no longer serve the people that elected me, continuously elect me.

It is all the senators and congresspeople around them. Even Kay Granger was the head of the Appropriations Committee, but she was living in a nursing home, like a convalescence home, because she was that far gone, for months before the Speaker of the House knew that his head of the Appropriations, the most important committee supposedly on Capitol Hill, was MIA.

Wow. We just allow this to happen, and it just makes you question, like, what is the purpose of Congress if you're just turning into some sort of retirement home or issue of the day type game? Yeah, and you take back to, like, wasn't all the founding fathers, like, when they were actually part of Congress back in the day, they were, like, in their 30s, which I know there's, like, life expectancy differences, but they were young, virile men.

And they had other jobs. Right, and then they leave. They would go to D.C., then they'd leave and do whatever they were doing elsewhere. Right. Crazy. Air conditioning was the worst thing that ever happened to Washington, D.C. There's probably a couple other things, too. Crime, we mentioned as well. I have a quick twilight zone after all that. Thank you for your insight, Tom.

So, I saw this. I know that this happens, but it's always surprising for me to see it play out like this. So, there's a study. Between 2023 and 2025, of 1,452 undergraduates at Northwestern University and University of Michigan, for those that are going to be pretentious about it, found that 88% pretended to hold more left-wing views than they actually had in order to succeed socially or academically.

And the study itself is interesting. They're not studying politics. They're studying development. One question was clinical, not political. What happens to identify, to identity formation when belief is replaced by adherence to orthodoxy? Outside of that, 88% of students told us that they self-censor on their beliefs surrounding gender identity, 72% on politics, 68% on family values, more than 80% say they had submitted classwork that misrepresented their views in order to align with professors, and then to test that gap between expression and belief, we used the gender discourse, a contentious topic, both highly visible and ideological loaded.

In public, students echoed expected progressive narratives. In private, however, their views were much more complex. Perhaps most telling, 77% said they disagreed with the idea that gender identity should override biological sex in such domains such as sports, healthcare, or public data, but would never voice disagreement aloud.

I faced that when I was in my college. My advisor came up to me one day, and she's like, because whenever I had like a, I could take an extra course or whatever and wanted to blow off course, I'd always pick sociology, because it's a made-up science. It's not real. And to any sociology majors out there, you know, go back and make that guy his coffee.

The prize in the bag. Yeah. I love it. So, my advisor goes, you know, if you take this one course, you will be able to get a sociology minor. And I am like, well, why not? I am getting a history major and a policy major. Why not?

Tom, do you remember how much debt you went into to go to college? Oh, yeah. I paid it off, I think, right before I finally got engaged. Not as much as people are facing now, but, I mean, I… I don't know.

That is the question. Close to 100,000, I think. Okay, you're kind of a trendsetter there, then. I wish I went to a state school, but anyway. So, this advisor tells me to take this course. It was a women's studies course, and I go to the professor because I had to be signed in because it was like two days after the classes had started, and she just looked at me and she goes, oh, yes, we'd love to have you. And the normal class size at my college was about 20 or 30 people.

Walk in, it's like 60 or 70 people. There are only two other guys in the classroom, so all the rest were women. I was the only one who was attracted to women in the classroom, and I never held my views. I had to defend some of the stupidest stuff, like holding a door open for a woman.

They were opposed to that. And the... The women's center on campus was spelled W-Y-M-O-N, because spelling woman the regular way was degrading to them, because it meant the part of man. Every time something came up, she'd always go like, this is a class like about 50, 60 people. She'd always go, so what does Tom think of that? Oh, man. And just always call on me, except she was fair. I had other professors who were not, and I had to fight constantly, because I never held back my views when I was on campus.

Though I did write a, me and a couple other guys wrote an anonymous column in the newspaper, and we were told by the liberal editor, you need to make it anonymous, because professors will come after you. And that kind of segues into... So, there's an argument about anonymity, and actually, I believe it's guaranteed by the First Amendment, like Thomas Paine wrote.

Gosh, I'm blanking towards the end of an episode. Common sense. Common sense, thank you. And much of the, like, publius, like, we had all kinds of pseudonyms. But isn't, that's actually, this study is a great case for why we actually do need anonymous discourse. Like, I know there's the frustration with trolls and everything, and I actually think a lot of those are probably bots anyway, but there certainly are some problems with that, no doubt. But it's actually important intellectually for anonymity to actually debate ideas on their merits, rather than the power structures.

Pressuring people into certain viewpoints if they want certification or the next step into society. The best paper I ever wrote in college I wrote anonymously because the dean was not happy about one of the columns we wrote for the newspaper.

And I think it was one line, because there was a female pornographer coming to, sponsored by the Women's Center, make sure you spell it the right way, coming to campus. And I was just like, how ridiculous this is. I don't care if the pornographer is male or female, they're exploiting women. Except I ended it with, you know, if y'all keep this up, I'm going to ask for my rib back.

I was in college. And so, of course, there are people on campus who got upset about that. They're like, who wrote this column? Who wrote this column? And the liberal editor defended us to the very end, would not release our names.

Wow. And the best paper I ever wrote, and it was passed out anonymously, was on how the history of writing anonymously and why it is done, like even Jonathan Swift when he was a satirist. I probably still have that. If you have that, send it. I'm actually very interested in that.

Remember the time frame. If I have it, it's in paper form, so I'll have to, maybe I can bring it to a retreat. You're going to have to dig into archives for that, yeah. Yeah, bring that to a retreat. I'll recite it at the talent show. And I'll say, this isn't me. This is from an anonymous member of the staff.

And if you do it in, like, three Stooges' voices, like, finally, finally, you got to hide. Yeah, Tom, we're going to have to work on our talent show act for the staff. Anytime someone says talent show, I always am like, I have no talents. That's always my first.

And we have so many talented, like Steven, and so many talented people on staff. It's like, okay, I wonder who's going to win. Do you have a preview of yours? Oh, I don't go professional. Don't go professional. Got it. Got it. And this is very internal. Yeah, we have an internal talent show coming up that I could use ideas for. So, sorry to out the internal, but yeah, I need ideas. I'm struggling. I honestly don't know. I just yap all the time.

Like, I get paid to yap three times a week. And so, outside of that, I don't know. I think I'm the funny guy, but I cannot perform on a... You weren't there for the roast that we did for Brian at the last one. Oh, boy. We're going to have to keep that one internal. Yeah. I think Brian requested that before he left. Yeah. Oh, he requested the video?

Oh, no. No, he said we did not video this right. Yeah, right. We don't want that to end up in congressional hands before it became the... Oh, man, that's good stuff. Yeah, there's so much internal stuff here that's just so funny. Good stuff. I can't out right now. But, hey, fun show. This is the Tom Squared Show. Someone come up with... The chat needs to come up with a...

A name for the show when it's just Tom and Tom. So, we need one for Tom and Erika, one for Tom and Josh, one for Tom and Tom, and the reverse. So, think on that, chat. I appreciate the help.

But, best way to support us, go check out our sponsors, Charity Mobile. Thank you for that. Leave us your reviews, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Join the Champions Club, CatholicVote.org slash champions, where you can do that. Thank you so much to all of our champions that support us. It is the only reason we can do this, and all the work that we do here at the CatholicVote and the Loop. So, we appreciate the support. So, Francis was concerned. I did not see it.

I did see it, Francis. So, here is the email that was sent. I appreciate the thought on this. I am a regular LOOPcast listener. I join live in the chat. When I can, but I always listen afterwards if I can. August 13th is the feast of Blessed Father Michael McGivney, the founder of the Knights of Columbus. He was born on August 12th, 1852, and died on August 14th, 1890. In his honor, would you please recite the prayer for his canonization on the 13th?

The text is below. Thank you. He also said the Knights are more than the feathers and the swords, which I often opine about, that they're no longer present. Heard. Still frustrated? So, if you guys want to end with prayer with me, in the name of the Father, Son, Holy Spirit, Amen.

God, our Father, protector of the poor and defender of the widow and orphan, you called your priest, blessed Michael J. McGivney, to be an apostle of Christian family life. And to lead the young to be generous, to the generous service of their neighbor, we humbly ask that you glorify blessed Michael McGivney on earth, according to the design of your holy will, through his intercession, grant the favor I now present, and then make your request here, through Christ our Lord. Amen. St.

Thomas More, St. Fidelis, Arlo Guadalupe, pray for us. Blessed Father McGivney, pray for us. Shout out to all the knights, anyone knighted up in the audience. Thank you, guys, and we will see you guys on the next episode. Peace.