Top Fauci Advisor Indicted, WHCD Shooter Charged, and Pope Leo x Anglican "Archbishop"

And we're live. Welcome to the LOOPcast. It's Tom, Erika, and Josh. So happy to be with you guys today. It's going to be a great show. So much to talk about, as always. So, today's show, we will be covering, are we getting some justice over COVID? Finally.

Possibly. Top Fauci advisor. I had Erika go get all of the juicy details there. There's a couple of other actions by the Department of Justice that interesting timing with Pambani's departure all of a sudden started happening. So, I'll let everyone else speculate, but we're going to be covering all of that. The second being, we had this very strange, tragic White House Correspondent Stinner shooter enter the security. Strange security detail. We're getting some more pictures today actually released in the indictment, so I'm going to talk through the indictment.

What happened? What were some of the failures? And then, of course, the ballroom. I was like, I never cared about the ballroom until they made me care about the ballroom. I now care about the ballroom, I guess, so I am going to go take a look at the original proposal, how the proposal has changed, and then where we are going forward. I mean, it also, a lot of...

Political violence, I hate to even use that word because it sounds so academic, but it just feels so normalized. It is almost like this happened, and we just kind of moved on. I mean, it is just on to the next one. I guess it is something that happens all the time. It makes me think of the 70s a little bit, but we are going to be covering all of that.

Erika has issues with the name Archbishop given to people who are not the Archbishop. So, we are going to be talking England. We are going to be talking Canterbury. Pope Leo had a few interesting things. He talked about the German bishops, but then also he met with... The, can I, I'll say it, but we'll talk about Erika's issues with it. The Archbishop of Canterbury may or may not be, we'll see, but we're going to be covering that as well. But we have good news.

We have Twilight Zone, really packed show. Just very excited to be back with you guys. If you want to see what I was working on in the meantime, I was in a dirty situation. The latest time across America is me working as a port-a-potty technician in the Chicagoland area. Yeah, we watched it last night. We watched it last night. I watched it with the teenagers. And the 13-year-old's comment was, Tom looks like he's going to throw up most of the time.

Listen, I can confirm there's no stunt doubles in Tom Across America. I was there in the trenches. I was there in the arena, the small plastic arena. Totally. But I will say, I'd just like to give a huge shout out to the Schweinsberg family over in the Chicagoland area. They welcomed me into their operation, and they're kind of a well-known Catholic garbage family, and I made the joke that's not the reputation, that's the line of work that they're in, you know?

And, man, just the joy. Exactly. And their attitude and their whole vibe, their work ethic, it was just fantastic to be there. And I was happy to be able to shine a light on people like that because they totally deserve it. So, thank you to our garbage workers. And then my papa texted me because he was a garbage worker back in the day in Detroit. And I think like a long time ago. He's like, why did you not interview me for this?

I would have had great stories. It's like, papa, your stories can't be public. But anyway, that's what we got today. Go check that out. Selene, if you want to throw that in there, really appreciate it. Up on YouTube, go ahead and subscribe, too. Just look up Time Across America on YouTube. We could use as many subscribers as can join us. So, really happy to be with you all. But before we get into today's show, and we got a ton today, I got to talk Charity Mobile, my favorite sponsor.

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Here we go. Let's do it. Erika, take me through. What's going on with since Pam Bondi's been fired? Go ahead, Josh. It just feels like justice is the theme of today's episode. A lot of justice going on, yes. We're excited to see some action here. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is on a roll. The first and top story in the loop this morning was that a top Fauci advisor has actually been indicted and will be charged over COVID cover-ups. So, the Justice Department yesterday charged David Morins, he was charged, a former senior advisor at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, I have a lot of allergies going on today, with conspiracy and other charges related to tampering with federal...

Records. So, he allegedly hid records related to COVID-19. Specifically, he would send these emails that indicated perhaps there was a lab origin for this virus. He would send them out to his personal private Gmail, where he would destroy them.

He suppressed research on the origins of the virus, deleting the emails on his government account, which is illegal. Illegal. Kash Patel made a statement. He said, Circumventing records protocols with the intention of avoiding transparency is something that will not be tolerated by this FBI. Emphasis on this. Not only did Morins allegedly engage in the illegal obfuscation of his communications, but he received Kickbacks for doing so. Kickbacks including bottles of wine and promises of dinners at five-star Michelin restaurants, if you're interested in what's the price, the going price.

Yeah, it's not that much. It's a steak at a nice restaurant in New York City, maybe on the water. So, Warren's activity, these actions were actually brought to light in 2024 during a congressional investigation, and he testified before Congress. So, we possibly have some perjury going on, too, claiming he never deleted records.

The prosecutors say he did exactly that to push the natural origins narrative, like, you know, eating the bad bats at the wet market, that theory. And the road does lead straight back to Fauci, who is named in the indictment, I believe, 38 times. He's called agent, or it's like agent number F1 or something is Fauci. Dr. David Morins might have an opportunity to flip and do something. That gets Fauci in trouble, but he is certainly facing prison time, if convicted, minimum three years.

Maximum, we're talking decades, possibly up to 35 years in prison. He's 78, so that's a life sentence. Now, Erika, let me press you briefly. So, is this a reach, as in were there no specific... Things that he wrote that might indict him in, I don't know, deleting emails to avoid FOIA. Was he very secretive and smart about how he went about this, or was this pretty... Yeah, subtlety was not the name of the game at the NIH under Dr. Fauci. There was a lot of...

It's just the hubris. It's either utter stupidity or complete hubris that somehow I will never be held accountable to what I do, because we have emails from him to colleagues saying, I have received information from Dr. Fauci, I have received information from Dr. Fauci, I have received information from Dr. Name redacted. I've received information on how to avoid FOIA. Another email, he said, the best way to avoid FOIA hassles is to delete all emails when you learn a subject is getting sensitive.

And it goes on and on. It is quite the read. You can read the whole indictment, but there was no subtlety. There weren't code words. He was just like, I'm destroying evidence, and here's how I'm doing it. Again, the arrogance that sort of this ruling expert class had during the COVID pandemic is just on full display in the indictment. It's pretty damning evidence. Let me stop you there. The hubris of the ruling class, period. I mean, you say during COVID, but maybe I get your perspective on this, Josh.

It just feels like this type of hubris and being so casual about flaunting the law doesn't happen in a vacuum. It happens over years and years and years and years and years and years of people not being punished. For this kind of thing. Right. It's not just that, but I mean, I also, you know, again, we rag on the boomers. I love the conservative boomers, okay? But the liberal boomers are crazy. And they were big on this whole idea of credentials.

You know, like, everyone's got the most number of degrees, and this and that, and we have to listen to the experts. And, you know, that... That overabundance of relying on experts, that came home to roost with COVID, because the so-called experts are like, well, you know, actually, it'd be safest for us if we all stayed in our houses and never talked to another human being ever again. Like, wait, what? If we shut down the world economy, that would be safer. Right.

You can go into a grocery store, you know, in Michigan, but you can't buy, you know, plant seeds, you know. You can go to a strip club or an abortion clinic or a dentist, but you can't go to a, like, what?

Absolutely. Absolute bananas. And so, this is the biggest thing. I think you have been very on the money on this, Tom, that there's been a lot of voters in the Trump coalition who have been very frustrated with what's going on in Iran.

And the Epstein thing, or whatever. Yep. And I get that, and they're still upset about both those things, and I understand that. But the other part that was sort of unsaid was this third thing, just a lack of accountability and justice on a lot of these guys, on what was done to us over the last decade. And so, I mean, thank the Lord.

That Pam Bondi was fired, and we got, you know, this new guy in as acting attorney general, and we see movement on this guy, the top COVID person under Fauci, or whatever. This, you know, like, you know, just, we had two tiers of justice for so long, and it's like, when are we going to start putting people in jail? Or at least trying to, for the crimes that they did against the American people. This is a beautiful start. Last week, the info dump on the Southern Poverty Law Center and their horrible actions, like absolute, I mean, absolute fraud, whether it's bank fraud or not, it's total fraud, fraud.

And so, I think, you know, EPSI became sort of like Bigger than it was even, because people are like, we're not seeing any action on anything. And look, maybe you can't get Epstein because, you know, the... Powerful people bury the files, but at least getting something on this, and then Comey being indicted a second time. Now, I don't know if that one I'm as big on, but just- Yeah, I'm going to get into that. Yeah, we got more than that. We need some action on this kind of stuff.

I think that's the key, because regardless, it reminds me a little bit of, remember Trump ran, he's like, I'm going to put Hillary Clinton in prison. I'm going to put Hillary Clinton in prison, and then Bill- And Hillary went to testify on the Epstein stuff, and he said, it's actually really shameful, you know, they shouldn't be dragged into this, and it kind of goes. Like, to me, there needs to be a step towards national healing on so many different things, and until we, like, for example, with Obama, like, Obama bailed out all of the banks after 2008 that were responsible for that crisis.

Bush did. The people, Bush did. Same thing. We had all these war criminals, Condoleezza Rice, all the people that lied getting us into Iraq. None of them were punished, if anything, they were promoted, and I think that was maybe the hope and the retribution of Trump when he said, I'm going to come in, and I'm going to change things. I'm going to be transparent. I'm going to go after the deep state. And I think that's why you see the obscene stuff with Trump.

Make your arguments about the files themselves, but the promises made by the people in his campaign were promises stacked upon what you just said, which is years and years and years and years of no accountability and promotions. So, I think in order for us to even take a step forward, we need radical accountability, and then there also needs to be legitimate punishment so that we don't have government officials making decisions to ruin people's lives so casually, you know what I mean?

We need that accountability, and so, like, just think about what's happened since Pam Bondi left. Okay, so, again, I'm not so sure about the second indictment on Comey, okay? I don't know enough about it, but I'm not sure it passes the smell test. Just, you know, if it's just the shellfishes on the ocean, the beach, or whatever, that 86-47, that doesn't seem to me to be enough.

There's that. There was the revelations about the Southern Poverty Law Center funding the Klan. There was, as we're talking about right now, this Fauci advisor indicted for covering up COVID origins, and then the Somali daycare centers that were fraud centers that were raided yesterday. All of these things. Now, not all of them were going to end up with people in jail, let's say, but some of them will, and there will be at least some accountability.

Because the thing is, what's angered so many conservatives has been this lawfare, using the Justice Department to go after political enemies, like Donald Trump, when he was a former president, like our good friend Mark Hawke, he was willing to turn himself in, and then a whole bunch of FBI guys raided his house on a Saturday morning. This is insane. And so, like, usually the typical Republican response is to say, that was horrible. Let's go back to normalcy and try to rewind, you know, hit rewind and go back in time somehow to the way it was before.

But the communist left doesn't want that. They want us all in jail. And it's like, okay, they need a taste of their own medicine first. Now, maybe, like I said, maybe Comey doesn't spend jail time. Maybe he gets off, whatever. But some of these guys.

They are going to pay some jail time. I think, and you mentioned, Josh, like before we got going on the show, that today's theme is justice, and I think another theme, though, is also rebuilding institutional trust, and one of the steps toward that national healing is specifically a step towards, is there a way to claw back some kind of trust for the justice system? Because a civilization cannot do politics in the way that we as Americans understand politics should be done.

If we lack If we're all looking at our institutions thinking, all the institutions have it out for us, everyone has it out for me, the little guy, because then that translates into a lack of trust for each other as well, and we can't exchange anymore because we're all living in this, okay, if I'm in power, I've just got to get my own. And I think that it will take multiple arrests like this around some of these national traumas like COVID.

For that to even begin to be clawed back. And I mean, I'm on the fence whether we are too far gone or not. I have my good days and bad days where I'm like, it's over. But I also see things like this, and I'm like, it could happen. If we can get back to a rule of law, to an equal system of justice, with this, we have some promising Supreme Court rulings that just are coming out right now that we're parsing through.

It's possible, and this is the first step. Well, so, and that's true. I think it's the aspiration of most conservatives that we could get to a spot, hopefully in the near future. Where we actually believe that the Department of Justice will actually treat everyone the same. The thing is, the liberals don't actually believe in universal principles that should be applied to every individual group or nation or whatever. They believe in the raw use of power. They believe in the oppressor and the oppressed.

Therefore, any bad actions done against the oppressor are fine, and anything done to help the oppressed is okay. Right, we'll get into that with the assassination attempt, right? So, when you said that, it reminded me of what Robert George said. Now, Robert George is a good man. I've met him many times. Very solid Catholic guy. He teaches political science over at Princeton University.

He's a very noble person, and he said in the wake of the attempt on the third attempt on President Trump's life. He said, I will probably get clobbered for this, but here goes. Please, can everyone, right or left, MAGA or anti-MAGA, Republican or Democrat?

Stop catastrophizing and trying to get people on your side to wake up into a rage. It's not flight 93. We're not on the verge of fascism. We do not need to take desperate measures. Our fellow citizens with whom we disagree are not devils incarnate or personifications of evil. We need to argue with our political adversaries, perhaps passionately, but with respect for their humanity and dignity. We do not need to destroy them. That mustn't be our aim. We should all believe in democracy.

This is what he's saying. But democracy is all about persuading, giving reasons, engaging one another as fellow citizens despite our disagreements. Let's rebuild civic friendship. We can do this. Now, that's what Robbie George says, and I would just say, as a counter.

How do you deal with this? Because, literally, Robbie says that, and the next day, he retweets this little news story. The Manhattan Institute is a conservative-leaning organization. They found that 46% of voters in the Democratic Party's coalition believes that, quote, the assassination attempt against Donald Trump in July 2024 was orchestrated by his supporters. Right. Increased sympathy for him. And Robbie's just like, this is insane. And I'm like, yes, it is insane. Because for the left, a lot of them were hoping that he would die.

And they cheered when Charlie Kirk died. And they were disappointed when Donald Trump again managed to avoid being, you know, murdered. And it's like, how do you have civic friendship with people who are cheering for your... President to die. Josh, can I separate? Because I actually think what he's talking about is something valuable, but he's almost speaking to the 80%. As conservatives, or as Americans in general, political leanings kind of notwithstanding, we need to have ideals. We need to have principles.

And those principles, I think, still apply. But if we don't have an even-handed rule of law, and even the example you brought up, like, okay, 46% think that was orchestrated. Immediately, what happened after this correspondence dinner or shooting? The security was so bad, so strangely bad, that people immediately started being like, was this a setup? Was there something going on? It was so bizarre that people were like, what's going on? But it's almost, in a way, hard to blame a lot of these people because COVID.

Uh, Charlie Kirk assassination, this, like, we're living in a time where, like, Because institutional trust is at an all-time low, so I don't blame a lot of those people for even being like, this is so bizarre, this is so crazy and out of the ordinary, that there could be something weird going on. Because even look at Butler. A teenager got on the roof of a presidential event, got off a shot at the president, and we still know nothing about him. The most we know is that some independent researcher went and dug up internet history that was publicly available that the FBI didn't come forward with.

So, it's like we're living in this time where there is this institutional distrust. I don't blame people left or right, per se, for jumping to that. The left is confronted with the situation because they cheered on Charlie Kirk being murdered, and they were hoping that Trump would have been killed at Butler or killed on Saturday at the White House Correspondence Center.

And so they're confronted with this kind of unfortunate situation where they're like, okay, you know, do they believe that political violence is okay? But they have to somehow, there's so much on the civility, oh, no, no, it's okay. So then they're like, oh, no, no, it was a setup. Instead of saying, like, no, actually, people that agree with you, this was a progressive liberal. This wasn't just like a lunatic.

This guy believed what you believed in. Yeah, if you watch the NPR coverage, you actually had the NPR roundtable discussing the online profile of the alleged shooter, and they're saying things like, wow, he's not a radical at all. Like, that was literally their commentary was, oh, he held pretty mainstream views.

And you're like, well, I mean, if it's mainstream to wish that the president was dead and to think. That it's okay to kill him because he's Hitler. I know we'll get more into this, but... But I guess my point, though, with that is that they can't come to grips with the fact that they have a problem on their side with violence.

Yeah. Oh, absolutely. So, I mean, the point, and maybe I'll bring this up sooner. Oh, it was a setup. Let me bring this up sooner, Josh, because a lot of people quickly were pointing out, like, Hassan Piker is kind of the new liberal darling of the left, right? Oh, my gosh. And there's even Democrats that are having the debate as to whether or not, you know, candidates should even go on his show. He's very popular. He's very influential.

Name the reason, you know, he's in the zeitgeist right now. And he just did a New York opinion piece, a New York Times opinion piece, podcast video format. The rich don't play by the rules, so why should I? Yeah, they interviewed him, right. Right, they interviewed him, and the main thing that came out of this interview that everyone was talking about was that he invoked the concept of social murder, quote-unquote, arguing that Thompson, as the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, participated in a system that produced widespread suffering and death.

So, the argument wasn't that murder is good, quote-unquote, but rather the U.S. healthcare system causes death and suffering at scale, so many people understood the rage behind Thompson's killing. Even if they didn't formally endorse murder, he described the healthcare system as a systematized form of violence. And then earlier, he's famous for saying, if you cared about Medicare fraud or Medicaid fraud, you would kill Rick Scott out loud in a 2025 Twitch stream. His whole shtick, he's basically a race communist, but this is kind of what I think you're alluding to, Josh.

You have people that are just actively darlings of the media left that even just using the word murder and social. It's like, do words have meaning, and are they important? You used the word murder. And you're somehow equating the literal assassination, cold blood assassination, of an American, the UnitedHealthcare CEO, and you're saying that somehow he deserved it. Even if you're not using the words, even if you're not encouraging the violence, it's like, well, if you do that over and over, and he's only one example, there's tons of streamers that do this, over and over and over and over and over and over again, you have the conditions for, yeah, it's okay to shoot at a CEO.

Right, because it's like you're building up energy, and then someone's going to finally just snap. I mean, that is the whole point, and again, this is what communists do. They first do violence to the English language. They completely radically change what words mean. So, the idea that you would just come up to somebody in broad daylight, you know, wearing a business suit, and you are like, oh, you are a CEO of a healthcare company, and you just murder him.

That should obviously be so obviously immoral and unjust. And so, like, what Hasan Piker and these guys have to do is, like, well, wait a minute. How can we make it seem like I'm not going to say what the guy did is okay, but I'm going to basically totally justify it? How can we put this construct that a businessman participating in the healthcare industry is creating social murder?

Wait, what? And you would think the left would be happy. Like, you got what you wanted. You are the ones who transformed the healthcare industry in 2010. Haven't we had nothing but a golden era of health care for the last 16 years because of what you passed with the Affordable Health Care Act, and you're still complaining? And then you get these lefties like, you know, when we did the— We did the flyby to the moon, and the left was like, oh my gosh, we have all this money to do Artemis II, but we don't spend enough money on health care.

My goodness gracious. It was another great production. It was another great production. We're spending so much money on defense. It's like, are you out of your mind? We spend so much money on health care, both private and public. What the hell do you think Medicare is? What the hell do you think Medicaid is? We spend... Well, it is all entitlements. Billions. Yeah. It is all entitlements. Okay, pause, pause, pause, pause. I prepared this show in a specific way and purpose. We did not get to Fauci, and we did not get to the quality leering centers, okay?

I want to know, Erika. I did not miss both. We did miss both. I know, I know, but we did not say what the indictments were. We did not say what the raids were. We did not say any of that. So, is that a fair summary of what we are doing with Comey here? Because it is round two. He is coming back. Was it just over the seashells? Pretty much. This was the second indictment of... Comey, of course, the first one didn't stick, so we're going back for round two.

Seashells. This comes immediately in the wake of everything we were just discussing with the third assassination attempt of the president. So, we got a federal grand jury, North Carolina, returned a two-count felony indictment and an arrest warrant. He was actually arrested this morning as we were coming into the show against Comey for making threats to kill or harm President Trump, and it did center around that one social media post he made about a year ago. He's walking along the beach, and according to him, he stumbles upon these seashells in the form of, what is it, 8...

You started it out like the, you know, this had to have been in every, like, kid's household at one point, the, like, you're walking along the shore, and there's a part where there was only one pair of footsteps. What happened is where I carried you. Was that not in everyone's... Someone knew someone with that in their bathroom. Yeah. No, my grandmother had that on a bookmark in the bathroom, actually. Distinctly remember. You carried me. Anyway, I prefer the gospel of Mark or something.

Just give me the straight gospel. But that being said, Comey, of course, issued a brave and stunning response on his sub stack this morning, because that's where the boomers go to post their videos. And he said, you know, I'm innocent of all charges. I had no idea that these numbers meant anything harmful. Bring it on. And I can't wait for the DOJ to get back to being a true harbinger of justice the way that it was under me, to which I say.

Also, why does he record every response video like he's in Guantanamo Bay? He uses this framing. It's really bizarre. The lighting's bizarre. Just does seashells up here. I don't understand this guy. I'll just put it that way. But then, okay, quality leering centers. Yeah, so we actually had some action over in Minneapolis of perhaps a good kind. So, the FBI and Homeland Security, they executed raids on Tuesday morning, targeting numerous Somali-owned businesses as part of the Trump administration's crackdown on fraud there.

So, they executed warrants at about 22 different locations in the area. Including the infamous Quality Learing Center featured by Nick Shirley on his now-famous video, and the DHS made a statement, Homeland Security Investigations, in cooperation with our law enforcement partners, executed criminal search warrants in Minneapolis relating to the rampant fraud of U.S. taxpayer dollars.

No arrests were made, but they took a bunch of case files, and someone else took the credit. That's right. Governor Tim Walz got right on the social medias with this statement. This is something. Let me do this one. Can I do it in his little boy voice? Go for it. I'd love to hear your impersonation. No, no, no. I'm going to just do me because I have a cold. If you commit fraud in Minnesota, says Governor Walz, you're going to get caught.

And that's exactly what we saw today. We catch criminals when state and federal agencies share information, joint investigations work, and securing justice depends on it. Kash Patel immediately fired back, saying that, excuse me, my computer's not loading. He says, come again?

This FBI and DOJ, with our DHS partners, drafted and executed every search warrant today. But go ahead and take credit for our work while we smoke out the fraud plaguing Minnesota under your governorship. And just a few weeks ago, you'll remember Tim Wells testified before Congress that all of this fraud was just, you know, made up by the Trump administration, totally racist, all that. But today... There's trouble in paradise, though. Because the city of Minneapolis is saying... We have nothing to do with this.

The city of Minneapolis is not involved in the federal operations reported around Minnesota today, and as of 9.30 a.m., MPD has not been asked to assist with the execution of federal warrants. So, there's a lot of credit disputing going on in Minnesota. Yeah, I think Mayor Fry and Tim Walz need to get back together and hash out their story because it's not jiving right now. And to maybe make a broader principle point, I mean, this was just... The most obvious slam dunk in your face.

There's such obvious fraud going on right now, and I think the frustration for a lot of people that are on social media, at least, is the White House accounts and the Trump accounts or whatever, they do all this talk, they do the hype edits, like, we're going to bust up fraud, we're going to do this and that, and then that's all we get. And it's like, well, no, actually, we want federal rates. Like, we want... Fraud. Ripped out of society. It's the same thing like I saw...

Actually, fewer hype videos. Fewer hype videos. No hype videos. Not that you can't do any. I just saw another video in Texas about H-1Bs, and there's basically shell companies operating H-1Bs out of Frisco, Texas, and a guy just went around and knocked on every... Because you have to register, so he knocked on every... Home address or office address for everyone that is taking these H-1B immigrants, and they're empty offices. They're literally all ghosts. No one's there. The equipment in there is brand new.

There's still screens on the TV, and it's like, well, why? So, if there's normal Americans that can walk around, know about this problem, especially if you're in Frisco, you know about this problem, we would actually like to see some arrests. I mean, this is fraud. This is fraud in order to restore law and order, in order to restore trust in the American worker. Because we talked about the justice element, and this applies. There's your physical safety, right, like being able to walk around without being assaulted and then having to be blamed on you, but also as a worker, you're like, my taxes go to pay for this kind of thing.

And how can we even have trust in the tax system if there's such obvious, in-your-face fraud that any American walk around, get out their phone, and do? And so, this, to me, is another part of national healing. Like, we need to have trust that the system that we're a part of is actually fair and will enforce its laws, and it can't just be loopholes that big businesses can take advantage of in the case of either small, insulated communities or big businesses that take advantage of...

Immigrant labor. Like, it's not a good situation for anyone. The American worker is the one that ends up losing. So, before we get into the next section, I have more on, there's actually more dropped on the indictment and pictures of the... The correspondence dinner would be assassin, but before we get to that, we have an important opportunity. One, if you have questions for us, LOOPcast at CatholicVote.org is where you can send those. We love to answer your questions, so if you have one, specific, non-specific, in general, if you want to hear Josh's thoughts on modern dating, that is the place to go, but before we get to that, we have...

Okay, let me get the share link ready. It's going to be a banger. Be a part of a historic Catholic rally, America 250. We are throwing a rager in Wisconsin, in La Crosse, Wisconsin, at the Shrine. It's going to be amazing. If you want to learn more about what we're doing to celebrate America's 250th and get a lot of unique and amazing prayer resources that we've put together, you can sign up via this link. Selene, I'm going to have you send it.

It's going to be awesome. Josh, do you have any, can you? Can you hype us up here real quick? Look, I mean, first of all, my father's from La Crosse. It's a beautiful town on the Mississippi River, beautiful bluffs. You know, if you think of the Midwest as like super flat, boring, La Crosse is absolutely a gorgeous town right on the river and the major bluffs. You've got a beautiful shrine dedicated to Our Lady of Guadalupe there. That is fantastic. And we're going to have this big rally in the Civic Center there.

We're bringing in people like Michael Knowles. We've got Coach Lombardi, who's one of the coaches over with the Baltimore Ravens. His grandpa is none other than the legendary Vince Lombardi, who brought the Green Bay Packers to the Super Bowl victoriously. So, we've got a lot of great people. We have a country music singer performing. I mean, this is going to be a lot of fun. And so, Hey, why not make this your family vacation or whatever? We got all the information.

You can go to CatholicVote.org, click on the event, Zeal for America 250. This is our way to celebrate. What a beautiful moment we have. It's a great moment for, obviously, our country with our 250th anniversary. It's a great moment for our church, obviously, the first American pope. Can't promise you'll be at the event because I don't think it's going to happen, but... I wouldn't even whisper that, dude. What the heck? I was just thinking how sick it would be if we get Brian back for that.

It is too busy, isn't it, my man? Yeah, Brian is actually going to be giving the commencement address at Thomas Thomas College. Ah, yes. Very cool. Great choice. Very cool. He has got to take a break from being the mediator between feuds and eating gelato. He has got a fun job these days. God bless Brian. Hey, can I just give a really quick plug, too, for the deep? I got to interview yesterday. We recorded an interview with Father Ambrose, who will also be at this event, which I realized.

As we were having our conversation, but we got into so many fascinating questions for him about his personal vocation story, how he deals with being like a celebrity priest. Also, we talked about Catholic education, what went wrong, and of course, we talked about hanging out in June in La Crosse. So, if you want to meet Father Ambrose as well, that is what I am looking forward to now. And that interview will drop next Thursday on The Deep, so make sure you are subscribed and hit notifications.

on this channel. Did you ask him any cinematography or lighting questions? No, because my lighting was better. I don't think I've seen a better cinematic order than the Norbertines. Those guys take camera works very seriously. Yeah, he actually told me about the guys who he works with. It's two lay guys. It's just two of them, and they do all of that. They have to be JP Caffey guys, right? Great conversation. Because they're right by... I was just out there for Time Across America, but they're right by Escondido, I think, or not right there, but that's where J.B.

Catholic is. The Abbey is. He lives in Springfield now. Yeah. Sick. Love J.B. Catholic, though. Shout out. Very cool. Shout out, Simon. Graduate. Okay, on to the next one, but yeah, join us. It's going to be awesome. Hopefully, we get to see you there, and we'll get to chop it up about all kinds of things. Pray, most importantly. Okay, I'm waiting for this article to load here. But Zeal has done, as usual, a great job.

Let's take a little bit of time here. Basically, they did a wrap-up of the White House assassin. What we know now, we got some more information this morning. I am just going to do a general wrap as someone that was trying to take a media fast over the weekend and then got sucked back into it Sunday evening when someone told me, like, did you hear about this? I was like, oh, gosh, I got to look it up. So, I am glad we had a little bit of time.

It seems like some more details are coming to light. So, the would-be assassin, his name is Cole Allen. He is the 31-year-old California man accused of opening fire on the White House Correspondents Association dinner. He was charged April 27th with attempting to assassinate President Donald Trump, transporting a firearm across state lines, and discharging a firearm during a crime of violence. A little bit of background, he's 31 years old. He's from Torrance, California.

He has a BS in mechanical engineering from Caltech, an MS in computer science from CSU Dominguez Hills. He worked as a tutor, a part-time teacher, and an independent video game developer. He was previously named Teacher of the Month by a tutoring company. Previously had no known prior criminal record. And yeah, someone went through the online activity. If I could just give a summary. He seemed to be like a... ActBlue liberal. I think he was pro-Israel, pro-Ukraine, kind of a radical centrist, if that makes sense.

I think he actually condemned Hasan Piker. Based on what we can glean, he seems just like a pretty run-of-the-mill centrist Democrat. And he released this manifesto, which I think was instructive on his motives. And then even he updated it. To send after he got to the Hilton, and he was even like, the security is so bad, I can't believe it. Like, it's almost a joke, but I'll read through some of the highlights. So, also a Christian, because that comes up in this manifesto, he said, I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist, and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.

Well, to be completely honest, I was no longer willing to a long time ago, but this is the first real opportunity I've had to do something about it. His targets were administration officials, not including Mr. Patel. They are targets prioritized from highest ranking to lowest, and then he addressed objections to his actions, kind of in a sadist, very like sumo style. As a Christian, you should turn the other cheek. Rebuttal, turning the other cheek is for when you yourself are oppressed.

I'm not the person raped in a detention camp. I'm not the fisherman executed without trial. I'm not a school kid blown up or a child starved or a teenage girl abused by the many criminals in this administration. And then this is where he kind of did an edit when he got to the event. He said, P.S. Okay, now that I'm done with the sappy stuff, what the hell is the Secret Service doing? Sorry, gonna rant a little bit here and drop the formal tone.

Like, I expected security cameras at every bend, bugged hotel rooms, arbed agents every 10 feet, metal detectors out the wazoo. What I got, who knows, maybe they're pranking me, is nothing. No damn security, not in transport, not in the hotel, not in the event. Even the assassin himself was like, this really doesn't make any sense. We get a picture that he took as of this morning from Calcini and Politico. Here's a picture or selfie that he took in a hotel where he's all armed up here, got the tie tucked into the belt.

Interesting move. So, the official story on what actually went down has changed slightly as well, at least what the prosecutors are saying in the indictment. He said that Allen reserved a room in the Washington Hilton for three nights. Allen traveled by train from his home near Los Angeles to Chicago, and then boarded another train that arrived in Washington around 1 p.m. April 24th. About two hours later, he checked into the Washington Hilton and remained there overnight around 8.40 p.m. April 25th, Allen approached a security checkpoint on the hotel's terrace level and ran through a magnimeter while holding a long gun, according to an unsealed affidavit reported by NBC News.

Secret Service personnel then heard a gunshot, and an officer was struck once in the chest. The affidavit said the officer, who was still wearing a ballistic vest, suffered minor injuries. At first, it was reported that Allen shot someone. That appears to be false. It was another member of Secret Service that hit the other, and then new as of this morning.

The prosecutor's memo drops any reference to the USS officer being hit by a bullet. It now says an officer observed Allen fire in the direction of the staircase toward the WHCD. That officer then fired at Allen five times, but did not hit him. Allen was carrying a 12-gauge shotgun, a Rock Island Armory 1911 .38 caliber pistol at the time of his arrest. This is according to the affidavit. Records reportedly show that Allen bought the shotgun in August 2025 from a California dealer, and the pistol in October 2023 from a dealer in another California city.

That kind of leads to, I guess, what the gunman was saying, and I'll get into some commentary after this, but I was looking into a lot of these oddities, and this is especially odd because a lot of people that were attending, even members of Congress, were like, this is, no one checked my ID, nothing's going on. So, here's some of the irregularities that I kind of summarized. There was no national security. There is no national special security event designation. So, this is unlike major gatherings of the president and cabinet.

I mean, again, I think if something horrible would happen at this event. Like when it goes to the Super Bowl. Right. Exactly. I think Chuck Grassley was basically, would have been the next one up if everyone here would have been taken out, which is insane how many people were at this. Because, again, the correspondence dinner, it's kind of like a nerd prom for people that cover the Hill. Like, usually the president doesn't show up. It is kind of chummy. Left to right media, they all kind of chum it up.

They get dressed up. So, it is unusual that he was even there. Trump had never gone previously as president. First time as president. Barack Obama loved it, but not his cup of tea. He had a better relationship with the press. Let us put it that way. Maybe insult them a little bit less. So, there is no full federal coordination or maximum resources for the entire venue. The Secret Service only secured the ballroom and the immediate perimeter, not the full hotel. Also, as he said, he checked into the hotel days before, and there was no background check of the people that were checked into the hotel.

So, there's people that were checked into the hotel that could just kind of mingle as they wished amongst many of the VIPs. I saw people even got selfies or pictures with the Beast, the Beast being what the president rides around in, which is insane to be able to get that close and not have any check done on you. And, of course, the Hilton has a history. Josh, maybe you're the history guy. The Reagan assassination attempt happened there in 1981.

So, they knew of this place as kind of a... As a hotel. Exactly. Well, security got tightened significantly after the attempt on Reagan's life, because, of course, it was only 20 years earlier when we lost President Kennedy. And so, ever since the attempt on Reagan's life in 1981, the President of the United States has been basically in a moving bubble, and the security has been very, very tight. So, this seems to be a little bit, not that it was lax, but it should have been enhanced any time the President leaves.

But it is calling for a lot of people to say, Hey, why not build a ballroom at the White House so that you can have maximum security? And it's like, this is the kind of thing where I don't really care if we have one or not, you know? Did you get the text?

Did I get the text? No. So, immediately after, you get all of the... Anyone that's spent any time on Twitter kind of knows, you know, sometimes there's a social push. Let's put it that way. You know, Andrew Colvett, Libs of TikTok, Jack Posobiec, Ed Wokeness, Wall Street Mav, Meghan McCain, Terrible, Dustin Grange, Chernovich, Tom Fitton. They all basically said the same thing. This is why President Trump needs to build the White House ballroom. So, it seems like the message went out.

This is what we got to push. Trump himself, right after this... I think he actually said, I want this to continue, but they're like, no, you absolutely can't. So, he went over to the press briefing room, and he had this to say. Before we get into the ballroom, I mean, this is just straight from the president. Let me share this.

All of the conditions that took place tonight, and I will say, you know, it's not a particularly secure building. I didn't want to say this, but this is why we have to have all of the attributes of what we're planning at the White House. It's actually a larger room, and it's much more secure. It's drone-proof. It's bulletproof glass. We need the ballroom. That's why Secret Service, that's why the military are demanding it. Yeah. We need the ballroom.

A couple of thoughts here. So, I am actually a fan of the ballroom. I think it would be great for the United States, being the world power, to have a larger scale venue that is the executive branch where we can have state dinners. For example, King Charles III was there. They had a big dinner last night. Could have been a lot bigger, but... Actually, hold on.

According to Ilhan Omar, that is actually King Charles the 111th. Oh, right. Sorry about that. Thank you, Ilhan. Eleven Han, as we want to say. Stop jumping my twilight zone, okay, Josh? You're jumping. We've got to leave something for Tom. Josh is like jumping the entire show today. You're jumping the whole show. I got this set up. We worked hard on it.

I'm a chaos agent, sorry. He is, he is. Boom. Okay. Back to that. So, I am a fan of the executive branch having this kind of a facility. I don't see anything wrong with it. I liked it better when it was going to be privately funded. Actually, I know you have objections to that, Tom, but now it looks like the taxpayer is going to foot the bill because of the security concerns. Which is stupid. But I also think it's important that we work towards a security system that allows our president to be mobile.

I think the White House Correspondents Dinner is... Dumb. It's like you said, it's a nerd prom. It's kind of like you'll get a few good clips on it for social media, maybe some campaign clips, whatever. But at the same time, it's not supposed to be something hosted by the administration or the president. It's supposed to be something at which he can be an honored guest. And if you have everything that the president attends is now going to be in these ultra drone-proof facilities, then you're kowtowing too.

The whole point of terrorism, right, which is to say we can't live a normal life anymore. Our politicians cannot go out in public anymore. What I would rather see is mobile security that allows us to continue to have events at which our high-ranking leaders could go without fear of being assassinated. And I think that that would be, it would be a lessening of. American culture and democracy, if we just said, okay, that's it, fine, we're only going to have this one secure location where the president is and everyone comes to him.

Yeah. I mean, it's a trade-off. I mean, so you have to understand, I mean, like, you know, Lincoln gets assassinated, you know, and then you have Garfield assassinated, you have McKinley assassinated, and so people are like, eh. Maybe we shouldn't just have the president randomly going out and shaking hands with people anymore. Maybe we should have, you know, a secret service that would make sure that these guys are safe. That, you know, I mean, that's what you got to do. I mean, like, there's been now two assassinations.

Right, so why is that not the solution, though? Secret service. This is the problem. That is why I think ballroom is good. I would let the White House correspondents dinner have their nerd prom at the White House ballroom. I would say go for it. The concern here is that the president might end up being in a bubble. Maybe, but I prefer my presidents not be murdered.

Yeah, it is a break from American tradition. Like, as Erika was saying, there was a time where people would line up, like Theodore Roosevelt, people would line up outside the White House to shake his hand, literally shake his hand, and it is an important point that he is, he's not a king. He's not separated from everyone else. There's not two tiers of society. He's one of us, and we're just so far removed from that, and I understand the trade-off concern, Josh, but to me, The problem, and I'll get into my issues in the ballroom, because Trump made me care about it.

I've looked into it. It's frustrating for many reasons, but the problem is the Secret Service. How could we have so many horrific security lapses, and there's not been any substantial changes since Butler? I think the biggest is that Kim Cheadle stepped down. Butler, obviously, was during the Biden administration. Sure, but he's still at Secret Service detail.

Yes, I know, but the Secret Service detail was under Biden's administration, and we thought they were incompetent. Now, the question is, so I am not going to put Butler on the current administration. Okay. But the question about security, that hotel where they had this, the Marriott or whatever.

Hilton. Hilton, I'm sorry. Yeah. There is extremely, I mean, they should have done more security, yes, but there's so many entrances to that building. It's just not an event to have a president at. I mean, should they have enhanced the security? Certainly. Yes. You could have easily done that. You could have easily created a perimeter. You could have done the same barricades you do for the DNC or the RNC. This isn't like a... A monumental task. It's just interesting. It's a harder one to do, but yes, it could have been better.

Sure, but I guess the broader thing that I'd like to point out, and Erika pointed out here, it's almost like we have this, it's odd that you're using this opportunity to me, as President Trump, to immediately be like, well, I'd really like to get my pet project done, that for various reasons, blocked by judiciary, it is also you destroyed the East Wing. Odd. But a bit more of a legal quagmire. I don't know if I have a true, you know, moral objection to it, but it seems like I'm frustrated with the defensive posture.

It's like. Okay, I just talked about Hassan Piker. We just talked about the SPLC. There's people in the country that are creating conditions for crazies to come out of the woodwork, and I just don't believe that if the FBI could hunt down J6ers in their homes and create a database and lock them up without trial, I'm not saying that's good, but they clearly have the potential to go after this. Why are we so defensive at this point that it's like, well, too many people are shooting at the president?

We just need to retreat into this ballroom at all times forever, instead of being like, well, let's go after some of these violent cells that are sending people out to go do things like this, or at least investigate deeper into this. And better secure buildings. I get it. Sure, like it could be a both-hand, but it just felt like a very odd, like, you're using your political capital here, because clearly we have another assassination, instead of being like, we're going to go crush a lot of these people that are violently agitating.

We're going to go crush protesters that are doing stuff during George Floyd. We were bringing up all the national wounds today. The George Floyd protesters, the left-wing networks that are going after people. You could say, look deeper into the Tyler Robinson thing. I would just rather you be more aggressive. You literally, at this event, going into it, there's footage of protesters lining the sidewalks from Code Pink with signs saying, death to tyrants. And the irony just abounds. They're literally standing out there.

Death to tyrants. Maybe they didn't have guns on them, but they're using that rhetoric. You watch Man on the Street videos of these protesters. They're like, yeah, I wish that Butler had been successful. I wish this. And it's these people who were raised on the central moral question of their childhood education was, if you could, would you go back and kill Hitler? That was the central question. Like, every American schoolchild was confronted with in third grade from 1970 onwards, and now they're like, oh, Trump, orange man, Hitler, bad.

Ergo, I mean, what do you think is going to happen? This is, if you're calling him, and I loved his interview, I have to say, Trump, after being shot at, is like the coolest cucumber. He just has this amazing mellowing out that happens to him when he's been, like, someone's tried to kill him. He gets on with Nora O'Donnell less than 24 hours later, right? Is it CBS?

Yep. Sorry, Nora. I don't care. It's on CBS. He's with Nora. She starts reading what you read to us, Tom, the manifesto, and she's like, pedophile, rapist, and he just stops her. He's like, I was waiting for you to read that out loud, because you're a horrible person. You're horrible people. And he's just, like, straight shy. He's like, why do you platform that? And the reason why... You don't think that's relevant? No, the reason why the manifesto had those accusations in it isn't because this guy, Cole Allen, was living in some dark dredge of the internet where, like, you have these crazy theories.

No, those are the mainstream titles for Trump that you can get just... By watching MSNBC, oh, what is it now? MSNOW, you know, on any weekday. That's not even radical, like the NPR guys I mentioned earlier. He's just a regular blue sky liberal. He's just a normal guy. I don't even think he's insane. Someone in the chat was like, oh, he's just a regular insane guy. Don't think he's insane. Here's the question I had on that, Erika, though. So, the guy tries to kill the president, and his manifesto is immediately shared by every single left-wing media outlet, like within 24 hours.

Quite the 180. But the troon in Nashville who killed a bunch of Christians at a school, what is it, 18 months? We still have no idea why. Oh, they still haven't released that. Yeah, you're right. Or did they? I think they might have done it. It took 18 months or something like that. It's like, what is the deal with that? How come, huh? Well, our information on the Butler shooter, it's just this incredible 180, and it's because it feeds their narrative.

It's all about narrative. It's not about evidence. It's not about truth. It's not about what actually happened there. But it's... Everyone, immediately upon these tweets going out, okay, shooting at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, as soon as that news hit, everyone starts spinning it. It was just like a spin ride. Okay, can I make a principal question?

Advance the cause. But wouldn't you prefer, okay, so people have this debate all the time. It's like, if you release a manifesto, you're going to create copycats, and it's going to inspire whatever. I would prefer they just release manifestos immediately. No, no, no. I'm not objecting to that. Yeah. Great. So, like, in the case of the shooter covenant. No, I want one standard as well. That's the thing, and it is frustrating that there is not the same standard, but that's a debate that comes up every time something like this happens.

Like, oh, well, we had to hold on to it because we don't want to create copycats. No, the real reason you're holding on to it is because it was anti-Christian. Like, the covenant thing eventually comes out. It's like, oh, this person really hated Christians. It was probably schizophrenic. And was trans up the wazoo. Exactly.

Yeah. So, okay, but if I could just get in on the ballroom, okay? The first proposal was like, I'm just going to do it privately. All my friends are giving me money. It's going to be awesome. And it was supposed to be $200 million, and it was not supposed to destroy anything. It was basically going to be like a tent. It wasn't going to be major changes.

So, kind of slowly, they're like, well, no, we're going to destroy the East Wing, and I have a picture, and it's going to cost $400 million, and I'm kind of like, still, I don't really care about it, although it is kind of, you see this picture here, and this is what it looks like for King Charles. They really have to build something there. You got to build something at this point, okay?

And as of today, site's an active construction area. Approval has been granted by the NCPC, but the project remains under litigation. Construction is temporarily allowed to proceed until the June 5th hearing, because they're building something under it that they're...

They're saying it's like military stuff. I think that was a direct quote from Lindsey Graham. Yeah, a bunker. It's a bunker. Yeah, it's going to be a bunker. Fallout shelter. But now Lindsey Graham is like, everyone wants to fund this. This is going to be awesome. They put forward a bill, Graham-Britz-Schmidt bill, $400 million in federal funding. So now they're going to put up $332 million in taxpayer funds to, I think he said, private donations could cover things like China and stuff like that.

Direct quote from Lindsey Graham. Well, I think the concern was that if you had too much... private money that there could be influence, and so it is like, is this something that is necessary for the President of the United States to conduct business and to do the things he needs to? Then, yes, we should pay for this as taxpayers, and then if incidental things could be paid for by private things, that makes sense. So, that actually makes more sense to me.

Okay, so then, but then Rand Paul put forward an authorization-only proposal that would basically just break through all the gridlock and be like, okay, we approve as Congress, which is what you should have done to begin with, instead of destroying part of the ballroom, and then saying, I'm going to fund it privately, and then getting stopped. It's like, wait, just have it go through Congress, like the normal way you would, and this is the push. Why would Trump have not gone to Congress?

I wonder why. Yeah, well, Congress would do their job. I mean, for Donald Trump, I can imagine why, because it's like... You have the Democrats in the Senate, and also in the House, obviously, who are just like, oh, Donald Trump? No. Yeah, just no. It doesn't matter what it is. They are intransigent. They are dogmatically against him.

Sure, but make the case. I don't know. I'm a little bit annoyed with how it's gone through. I don't have a problem with it in principle, but I'm like, make the case to the American people, and I guess they're doing that now. They're using this opportunity, but paired with some of the actions by the Department of Justice that have given me some hope because This is really all of this, just to sum up, is an erosion in the trust of the rule of law, and that you would actually be protected as a citizen if something is wrong.

And even now, up to the top. I was at inauguration, and they moved it inside, and they're like, oh, it's because of record cold. And no, it wasn't. It's because there was legitimate threats on its life. And that's just, yeah, I guess that's where we're living in now. Well, part of it, the reason why I could understand why they didn't say, oh, we're moving in because we're worried about a safety, then the whole story becomes about. Okay, let us move now.

Good news. You want to bring us up? Erika, what do you got? Alright, so we have two items. I'm going to do two good news. This was just a great clip that we wanted to share. So, Turning Point USA had an event last night out in Idaho, and it featured Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles, the Daily Wire Catholic pundits. I guess Isabel Brown's Catholic, too, so that's kind of cool. But, that being said, we had this little boy, and this is just super heartwarming.

We wanted to ask the guys. Hi, my name's Bryce. I came here from Billings. A 10-hour drive. I want to be a priest when I grow up. I just wanted to ask, what would your advice be? Don't be a Jesuit.

No, there were good Jesuits sometimes, and that's great news. How old are you? 10. This is like the biggest... Why, I think it's a wonderful thing. Why do you, why have you decided you want to be a priest?

Kind of just because God's calling me. Awesome. Love it. Love it, man. That's beautiful. You know, just... This is great. This is so wonderful. I don't need to give you advice. I think you, at 10 years old, probably need to give me advice. This is really great. There are many moments when you work in politics, you feel jaded, you say all hope is lost, the culture is dying, no one has the right ideas anymore, and then you meet a 10-year-old kid who says, I want to serve God and be a priest.

And you say, guys, we're going to make it. You know? Amen, brother. Amen. Erika, question for you, and maybe if a 10-year-old comes to you, maybe you wouldn't make a Jesuit joke. That probably went right over his head. Have you had experiences like this? I guess I'm even thinking for myself, what would I tell a 10-year-old that's maybe super fired up, just went to a retreat, thinks he wants to be a priest, but I hate to say, you're kind of in the scenario where if a 10-year-old comes up to me like, hey, I want to be in the NBA, you're like, well, I don't want to.

I don't know anything about what's going on, but like, that's a beautiful inspiration to one. Clearly, he's around good people, but yeah, what would you even say? I guess that's an interesting question. Yeah, I mean, this happens. Praise God, I encounter this regularly because I'm in a community where multiple families come together, and we're all raising our kids and presenting to them all the vocations that the church offers as a possibility and telling them to listen to God and to learn to hear his voice.

And so, I've had kids, I've had my own children, I've had other people's kids say this, that, you know, I'd like to be a nun, or I'd like to be a priest when I grow up. You're talking like six, seven, eight years old. And the most important thing, I think Michael touched on this, but the most important thing is, right, to pray, to build your relationship with God. And if He's put this desire on your heart, it's not going to go away.

So, don't be afraid that you have to somehow, like, do the right thing. Like, you have to do the right thing. Don't be afraid that you have to follow these steps. It's not all on you. This is going to be there if this is God inviting you, but the most important thing to be a holy priest or a holy religious sister is to, first of all, seek ye first the kingdom of God, and all these things will be added unto you, and a small child can understand that.

A small child understands prayer. They're very intuitive about relationships with God if we haven't put barriers in the way. And then send them out to play with no screens, because I really do believe that the best training for contemplative prayer is kids being bored. I really think God built that into childhood, so that we would be able to then enter into contemplative prayer as adults. Call me crazy, but I have been watching kids now for 23 years, and that is what I think it is.

It is basically what being a monk is. Cultivate boredom and priesthood. Being a monk is basically that. Being boredom and stuff like that and getting away from screens. I saw a news story. I have a story saying that people are spending, the reason why more people are going to baseball games, they get to, you know, go outside and touch grass, as it were, and more and more people are buying the old school programs where they, you know, the scorecard. Oh, that's sick.

That's awesome. Where they actually keep track, not on a phone. You have a pencil, like a gold pencil. Yes, and you write in. It's chill. Those are funny. Have you done games on radio, Josh? Games on radio. Yeah, like baseball games. Like, listen to baseball games on the radio. Oh, of course. It's the best. It's super chill. That's one that, that's a hack. If you guys, like, can't, because you don't need to watch. Like, you can just kind of have it on.

It's so nice. You get a nice announcer voice that's kind of rosy, and you hear the crack of the bat. It's really nice. That's another show. I'll get back to that. Sounds of the crowd. Yeah, dude, I love it. Okay. Before, Josh, have you had that? Have you had a kid come to you and be like, I think that I'm being called to be a priest? Have you yourself thought you were called to be a priest? I want to get your two cents.

Well, I have three boys. I'm pretty sure two of them are not inclined towards that. One of them might. We had a parish mission recently, and My wife went to it, and my son, he's like, can I go? I'm like, oh, that's good. We'll see. We'll see.

As for myself, I never felt so much the call, and I figured if my grandmother and Father Frank Pervone were both praying for it, and it didn't happen, it was probably not meant to be. That's cool. I don't know. I'm just like, yeah, I hope that happens.

That's just, what is that, like the ticket to heaven, Erika? Punching a ticket to heaven? Well, you punch a ticket to heaven. Oh, you mean if one of my kids becomes a priest? Yeah, yeah, if one of your kids is a priest, it's like punching a ticket. I know, there have been some very wicked mothers of priests in church history. I don't think it's a guarantee. No, lock in, Erika, lock in. It's like Augustine of Hippo, okay? You're going to be the mom that prayed him into the priesthood.

It would be so cool. So, you know the pallium that the priest receives when he's ordained, and the tradition that the priest's mother is buried with his... Is it a pallium or a stole wrapped around her hands? That, to me, is like totally chilling. That is so cool. Whenever I'm at an ordination, that's when I cry, when they give the pallium to the mom. That's so amazing, yeah. Wow. Especially when she's not a believer, that's always like that.

The best is when you have someone in your family that is a priest, because then they can celebrate everyone's sacraments. It's like, all right, call up uncle whatever. He's going to come baptize the kid. He's going to go do the wedding, like whenever we shoot weddings. Unless, of course, you know, he's your great uncle, and he's been living in Tanzania for four decades, and then you do find out he's going to be in the country, but he already committed to someone else's wedding.

Come on, man. Are you speaking from autobiography? Maybe just from experience. Maybe. That's so cool. Come on, Uncle Joe. There's so many, yeah, we had a kid, shout out Father Sam, but raised in our church, and then his parents still go to our church, and then he had his ordination, and it was just, it's so cool. It's so cool to see, like, one of the sons of the church kind of rise to the call, and it's cool that he's asking for that advice.

I just... Yeah, so I just think about... That almost was probably unthinkable at a certain point, especially when a lot of priests were kind of leaving, or there's a lot of priests disgracing themselves or distancing nuns leaving the church, and to see kind of the seed of that call back up and the call of that, like, I've witnessed that among a lot of my classmates through high school, college, and now I'm kind of at the age where guys my age are becoming priests.

Like, people among me are getting ordained. Very cool. Yeah, it's amazing. Anyway, I'm fired up for that. I feel like that is everywhere. That's not just that kid in Idaho, but... Cool moment. So, Erika, what was your other good news? Yeah, so this just broke this morning. I have not had a chance to read the whole opinion, but we got this amazing SCOTUS decision. They just ruled that the racially gerrymandered map in Louisiana is unconstitutional. So, this was the opinion from Justice Alito.

It was a 6-3 decision. I'll leave all of you to guess what the breakdown was of the justices, but basically in some... Because the Voting Rights Act did not require Louisiana to create this additional majority-minority district, there was no compelling interest justifying the state's use of race to create this one district that was in contention, and it had gone back and forth through the courts, and it makes it up to the Supreme Court eventually, and it did say it violates the plaintiffs, which was a group of Louisiana voters saying that you can kind of zoom in on Louisiana there.

I don't know if you can, but it's like, Brutal. It's an insane gerrymander, connecting the inner city Black communities in New Orleans, all the way up with these very remote rural, it's like a diagonal line. It looks like a sash. It looks like a sash. Yeah, very nice. Very sartorial reference there. Thank you. But again, we got a great concurrence from Justice Clarence Thomas, and everyone's asking, well, does this end the Voting Rights Act? No, it doesn't end the act, but it's telling states, look, you've got to walk.

I want to take this back in terms of how you're using it now to actually violate the Constitution, which 15th Amendment says you can't sort voters based on their race, for lack of a better word. Josh, I'm sure you have a better, but just a quick on the- Well, this all started because a federal judge said Louisiana's map, which had, you know, four Republicans and one- Five Republicans and one Democrat. The federal judge said, no, you need to create a second majority-minority district, a majority-minority.

In other words, carve out a district where a majority of the people are Black, in this case. In other areas, it includes Hispanics and stuff like that. You have to understand something. After 1965 Voting Rights Act, what happened is states like Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, and whatnot, Tennessee, What they had to do is they would have to submit their maps to the Justice Department to get pre-approval before they could actually pass them in the legislature. So, a lot of these states have had to go to the Department of Justice for the last 50 years, like, okay, are these districts okay enough?

We've carved out areas where we have majority-minority districts. And you can see that up on the screen now on the left there, what that came out of. Right, and so, you know, We've talked about this before, but right now, we're seeing states like California and Virginia that are redrawing the maps for a maximal advantage. So, Democrats now in Virginia have a 10-1 advantage, and Republicans have been wanting to do this in other states like this in the South, but the Voting Rights Act says, no, no, no, no.

It is not how the law was written, but of course, how federal judges have ruled in the decades since, that you had to carve out these majority-minority districts. And so, Tennessee is like a super-red state, but they have to have a majority-minority district over Memphis.

And at least they had one for New Orleans and Louisiana. Now, they are trying to force a second. So, we are going to see a lot of changes right now. Even before this really came down, the lawmakers in Florida this week were already working on a redistricting plan, and so they're already ready. They knew this was coming down. A lot of people thought it really wouldn't happen until June, but that came down today gives these states enough time to be able to implement it before the midterms, and this is going to make a major difference.

On the current map, if you are talking about the deep, not even the deep south, just the south, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, and Florida, okay? Under the current map, Republicans have, obviously, an advantage. It is the south, right? There are 65 Republicans. There are 24 Democrats.

If all these states redistrict this year, you could see it jump. To 77 to 12. In other words, Republicans could pick up 12 seats just because of this ruling. Right. Because they could finally end it once and for all. And, of course, the Democrats are absolutely apoplectic, and they're screaming bloody murder, but if, you know, and they're like, oh, this is disenfranchising blacks. No, no. There were special districts that these states were forced to do for decades. Democrats were able to hold on to more power, more seats than they deserved, because they were able to browbeat, you know, the feds on this.

Oh, the terrible... Was there injustices against Blacks voting for over 100 years? Right. Yes. And the opinion recognizes that. Alito talks about that. You know, hey, guys, we passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965. Like, do we have to keep this nonsense going just so that Democrats can have... Twelve more people support abortion on Capitol Hill and vote for, you know, transing of kids and creating, you know, communism here abroad. Like, did they reference affirmative action in this decision, too? Like, they thought of it as a temporary solution to bring people that were legitimately discriminated against into the fold.

And then at a certain point, it's like, okay, well, justice has been done. It's less about affirmative action, though. It's just like, basically, they're saying, like... What it had been, the jurisprudence that had evolved over these last 60 years was that, oh, the only way we can create, you know, crack the racism is we have to make sure we can bunch together all the blacks in Louisiana and Mississippi in this district so that they have representations.

No. Like, what are you doing? It is the kind of thing, like, it is similar to affirmative action, but no. And they did not completely gut the law, though. And so, if a state like Alabama, let us say, does not pass gerrymandering, you actually can go to them and say, The opposite of what happened in the last 10 days, 10 few decades. You can actually have Republicans sue and saying, Alabama, you are racially discriminating with this district. They can empower the Voting Rights Act to go and bust these blue districts up.

But, I mean, again, Florida is already working on this. The governor of Mississippi last Friday called for a special session, so I expect rapid-fire work on this. Okay. Josh, what do you have for your good news? Well, my good news is, okay, so President Biden had done an illegal mining ban in the Superior National Forest, affecting a lot of blue-collar workers that live up in northern Minnesota. And credit to Pete Stauber, the congressman from the Iron Range up there in northern Minnesota.

He has been on this, and he fought this. There's a thing called the Congressional Review Act, where it works against this incentive where, as a president on his way out the door, just tries to put all these regulations in and shut these things down. It gives the Congress a chance to say, no, no, wait a minute now.

And they can pass legislation to undo some of the... You can't undo a presidential pardon, of course. Those are absolutes. But a lot of the other executive actions and orders, you can have the House and the Senate vote and say, we don't want it. And if the president signs it, you can get rid of it. And so they've done it. The House and the Senate passed it. President Trump has signed it. We have ended Joe Biden's ridiculous illegal mining ban, and so, good.

We need more mining. We need more precious minerals. What were they mining up there, Josh? Well, I mean, for the longest time, they would mine iron ore. That is why it was called the Iron Range, but it is possible that they are getting other minerals these days, but it is a great victory. These mining jobs are good-paying jobs, and so this is an area that could use a boost, and this is once again The Democratic Party used to be the Workers' Party.

The Iron Range in northern Minnesota, a very rural area, but it was a very pro-union, blue-collar area. It was an area that was so democratic for so many decades. So, when Ronald Reagan won 49 states, and he just lost Minnesota by that much, it was the Democrats in the Iron Range that were stuffing the ballot box to make sure that Mondale wouldn't lose 50 states. That's true. Oh, gosh. To get to the bank. Yeah, if anyone thinks things are kind of tough now, go take a look at machine politics in the late 1800s.

It was hilarious. They were just hand and fist cash. Yeah, you go stuff that one. You stuff that one, well, when is this crazy? But the idea of stuffing a ballot was that in the 19th century, 1800s, it wasn't a universal ballot.

Not all the ballots looked the same, okay? So, today, you get a ballot. Everyone in my city gets the same ballot. Here is the president's race, here is the Senate, here is the House, all that kind of stuff, right? And you fill it out, and then the ballots get counted. In the 1800s, it was not that way. The Republican Party would go around and hand people ballots, and they would go, here, Tom, here you go, stuff it in the ballot box, and you would go and you would take that ballot and you would put it in.

It would have the names on it. It was the Republican ballot, and the Democrats would do the same, and then you would count the ballots. But Australia, I think it was, that came up with this idea where we should have a ballot where all the names are on there, and you just vote for who you want to. Right. That was something that's only been done in about 100 years. Yeah, well, then there's also, you couldn't vote in primaries at a certain point.

Like, if I was just an average student. There were no primaries. There were no primaries. Like, it was the party picked out who they were going to put up, and then you voted for the person they put up. There are pros and cons to that. Yeah, I agree. I'm not actually totally against it.

I'm just only so. They're talking about that, though, here in Michigan, because there's a lot of, you know, we just had, you know, the party conventions in Michigan nominate candidates for the state offices, like Attorney General and Secretary of State and that kind of thing. They don't for governor or whatever, but the other, call them row offices, they do that, and the Democrats went totally bonkers and nominated people or posting things that they love Hezbollah, and it's like, whoa. Right.

So, parties can sometimes go crazy, and then the voters, you know, correct them, so. I think I'll say he'd polymarket. Looks like he's in a hurry. Did you see the, was it McMaster's just deleted tweets making fun of the Midwest? McMorrow. McMorrow, yeah. Yeah.

She's, of course. She is the worst. Yes, MS now. So funny. Yeah, it's like she had like a really cringy dance into the DNC, and then, of course, raised Catholic, but pro-abortion, and it's just like a whole... Then she went out to New York and L.A., and then she had these tweets. It almost would have been fine if you would have just kept them, but she came back to the Midwest, and then she got back into politics. So classic. I mean, it's like Pete Buttigieg's thing, too, right?

You know, like Pete Buttigieg is all of a sudden like, oh, I'm from Michigan now. I'm going to be transvestite. He's like, come on, dog. The thing with the internet, though, is nothing's ever... Really, gone. It's forever. Okay, I'll end with some levity here. You guys went very technical. I'm just going to go levity on both counts, okay? So, you guys may be familiar with this format. It's the dude from Tangled said, what opinions do you have about parenting young children that would have you like this?

It's a bunch of swords pointed at him, just doing some audio work here. Okay. God sends small children into the world to expose men. You think you are holy until a three-year-old throws a bowl of cereal at the wall for the third time. You think you are patient until you have not slept for five nights straight and the baby is still screaming. Every half-man is found out by his own offspring. Children are judges, sent in miniature to read your verdict out loud.

God could have judged us from the throne. Instead, he sent us toddlers. It should have been good, but like it's thrown, you should have done like from the high chair. Josh, maybe he needs a writer, whoever this is. Oh my gosh, I was just dying about this. That was perfect. Yeah, I tell people I was really holy until I got married. It's so true, and I will, let's take a shot across the bow. There's so many of these dudes online that are like.

Manosphere, whatever, and they're giving all this advice about how you should be a man and whatnot, and none of them are married, and none of them have kids. Yeah, but do you have a two-year-old? Go have a two-year-old and talk to them. Seriously, go get married, go have a two-year-old, and then get back to your advice racket, because you're 37 and childless. What do you know about being a man? Like, part of being a man is being a father, and it does make you a better person, and it does expose you in many ways.

I've been exposed many times. It's hard. Young children are not sleeping, so you know what? What is it? Diamonds are formed under pressure, so I'll leave it at that. There you go. And then, finally, I have a banger quote for all of us from St. Francis de Sales. Anxiety is the greatest evil that can befall a soul except sin. God commands you to pray, but he forbids you to worry.

Ah, I needed to hear that, actually. He's the director for a reason. Banger quote. Speaking of, so no one can be anxious about where gas is at right now, so... I'm not worried. I have... I'm not changing my summer travel plans or anything. Some news on the gas front. AAA, national AAA average, $4.22, 22.9. It's always hilarious when they add that extra one, but 22.9, 4.22.

So, they're the highest since 2022. In particular, the Midwest, as I felt it, is getting hammered right now. Michigan gas prices could see a double spike this week, reaching around $4.50 per gallon. That is due to, quote, refinery challenges, kind of compounding what's going on in Iran right now. We have the Wood River Refinery in Illinois.

The oil refinery took its crude oil unit and some other parts of the refinery offline at the end of February for a 45-day maintenance period. Marathon Petroleum's Robinson refinery in Illinois has also been planned, had planned maintenance in mid-March, just terrible timing. And then Whitting, Indiana, Whitting, Indiana, I'm not sure how to pronounce that, unfortunately, because I am from Indiana, BP's 440,000 barrel per day oil refinery experienced a brief power outage that caused one of its... processing units to be shut down.

I believe also there's a strike going on there right now, kind of hindering production. So far in April, there have been about 150,000 barrels per day of unplanned outages in the country, and around 670,000 barrels a day in planned outages, according to the Rystad Energy data. I'm talking about this because my wife texted me yesterday, she's like, did it gas shoot up 75 cents overnight in Indiana? And it literally did. It shot up 75 cents. Crazy. I think it's around $4 by me.

But another thing going on at the same time, and I'm going to get to where we're at, and a bit of a stalemate right now in Iran, the United Arab Emirates are deciding to leave OPEC May 1st. Now, Reading into this a little bit more, this was kind of a headline. I was like, okay, let me look into this. A lot of energy experts are saying this is a huge shift. United Arab Emirates, as part of OPAC, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, if I just give you a real politique, is a cartel.

It's all the major oil exporting countries that can raise or lower oil supply. That affects gas prices, inflation, and global energy markets. The UAE has been in for 50 years. So, basically, all these countries, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Venezuela, the United Arab Emirates, and Nigeria, et cetera, they all get together, and they decide.

How much oil they're going to produce so that they can control the prices of oil globally, the prices of commodities, and they all cooperate. And so, they've been cooperating for a long time. It's been very successful. The economic argument for that is when you operate in a cartel, you might sacrifice some short-term benefits of, say, someone going out on their own and just pumping a ton of oil and then making a lot of money. But in the long term, you're going to make more money.

So, it said the UAE is going to leave OPEC as of May 1st. Their government kind of coach-speak language is long-term strategic and economic vision, but maybe some real politique here. This war and the Strait of Hormuz has definitely factored in, and I think that a couple things to consider. It weakens OPEC's control over oil supply. For context, United Arab Emirates contributes, I believe, 10 to 12 percent of all oil to OPEC. And they're also responsible. So, they have the option to drill more and to sell more.

Some of these countries don't. They can only meet the quota and then contribute that. But the UAE has actually had to kind of hold back at various points for different reasons. Like, we want to pump more, but because we're a part of OPEC, we're not allowed to. And so, they're like, all right, screw that. We're leaving. We're going to pump more. It seems to be the direction they're going to be doing that. It's been pursuing roughly $150 billion capacity expansion.

And they have tension with Saudi Arabia. So, this is big. Because the United Arab Emirates is very financially tied to the United States, and if you look at the Strait of Hormuz, much of their oil has to bypass the Strait of Hormuz, so even if they do pump more, they have a bit of an issue. It can bypass it through, I believe they have a pipeline, but they can't, the full capacity that they wish to.

And it goes through Saudi Arabia, I believe. Right, I have a map, actually. All right, yeah, pull up the map. Yeah, let me pull up the map. They have land on both sides of the Strait. They do, but not a lot. And then to use the pipeline, it's not built for what they're saying. They don't need to. They're not going through Saudi Arabia for that pipeline.

Roger. So, if you take a look at the Strait of Hormuz here, which is, everyone's had to look it up recently because this is... This is what we all voted for. Geography lesson here. Geography lesson. Here is the UAE. Abu Dhabi is right here. And so, yes, the stratiform moves, if they want to get around it here, they would have to, but they could. I believe there is a pipeline here that they can potentially get over here. Obviously, a hot area.

Iran right next to the UAE. They are probably affecting them the most. So, people are reading into this. Yeah, there's a whole new, basically, sometimes things happen, decades of history happen within a week, and sometimes it takes decades for something to happen. I mean, this is 50 years of cooperation, gone. And it could be the first of many, but because of the new situation we find ourselves in with Iran, people are shifting. The United States has a lot of energy that we have not tapped into.

This kind of goes into the theory that Josh liked from our boy, Professor Zhang, that this is all a play for the United States to bring back domestic manufacturing and really tap into our energy resources, make people come through us. So, the United Arab Emirates seems like they want in on that type of situation. They are going to start drilling. They are going to start selling, but we had a deal from Iran to basically open the strait of Hormuz and not address the nuclear question.

From what I have seen, the U.S. seems pretty cold on that proposal. It does not look like that. Currently, we have a blockade, and we are using a lot of economic pressure, but Iran is saying, we will reopen. We will ease control, but you are just going to have to leave us alone. And we're going to have to defer the war. Right, which doesn't seem like it's going to happen from the Trump administration. Yeah, no, the UAE thing is interesting. I think at the beginning of this, as the first few weeks unfolded, we still don't really know what's going to go on.

What's the outcome? It seems like it's dragging. It is dragging on. We're going into week eight here. Not good. Gas prices, not great. But we did talk about how regionally. The United States making this move kind of unilaterally with Israel and not bringing in their regional partners, that there would be kind of this realigning in the region. And I think that the UAE leaving OPEC is one of the... Like most major realignments that we've seen here, the UAE, I looked this up, Iran targeted them more than any other country, while they still had the capacity to be sending ballistic missiles and drones.

And Israel actually lent them an Iron Dome battery a couple of weeks ago in order to fend off these attacks from Iran. And also, President Trump has been very friendly with the UAE. Trying to build that relationship, strengthen them, part of the Abraham Accords. So, it'll be interesting to watch this. Interesting, meaning I just hope that we get out of there and it won't be over now, but I think this is part of that realignment that we're going to be watching.

Trump was briefed on different possibilities if we were to just leave and claim victory. I think that was confirmed. And then he also brought in the CEO of Chevron and had the entire staff there. I mean, Treasury Secretary Scott Besant hosted it. But he brought in different oil executives to be like, okay, how do we maneuver? How do we take advantage, yeah. I think Iran understands that they can just wait us out. So, politically, gas prices are going to sink Trump, and he understands that.

The market, and it's not even just... Are us filling up our cars, this is every good that we buy that is exported into the United States, increased prices. I mean, potential catastrophes in other countries, just not a great situation. The cost of holding that kind of blockade, super expensive. So far, I've seen that they waived the Jones Act, which requires U.S.-built and owned ships to move goods between domestic ports. So, yeah, basically, we have no updates. It doesn't seem like we have really great military options.

Like, if we resume bombing, it doesn't seem like that's going to move the needle. Clearly, we were unable to break whatever stranglehold, you know, Iranian leadership's had in the country, and it was very unpopular domestically, and we have to just continue this blockade. It seems like we're back to the maximum pressure economic sanctions, which Iran survived since the 70s. So... We're in a bit of a deadlock. I don't have anything really new to report, other than the fact that UAE- I agree, too, though, that the gas prices are obviously a very big concern, and so if the United States, you know, worked with UAE to get them to bust out of OPEC, so that they can start releasing a lot more oil, that would be a major win that could alleviate a lot of that pressure.

Not maybe cure everything, but, you know, again- Yeah, they're there. Mitigate against some of these... Price spikes. There is good economic news, at least some good news. U.S. core capital goods orders posted their largest gain in nearly six years. That news hit. New orders for key U.S. manufactured capital goods increased by the most in nearly six years in March, while shipments of those products rose solidly, suggesting that business spending on equipment helped drive economic growth in the first quarter. So, that looks like good news.

I saw consumer sentiment, too, was up. Slightly. Yeah, I was surprised by that. I was surprised by that. It's still low as a whole, I should put it that way, but slightly. No, no, no, but I think the spike, the reason why consumer confidence went up is precisely because people were getting larger than they expected tax returns because Republicans cut people's taxes, and all of a sudden they have more spending money. It was a good month. Not me. I wish Trump would have crowed about that a little more.

Yeah. Okay, Erika, you are our certified Pope Watcher. We are on Pope Watch. We are on Pope Watch. Now, I had a conversation with you yesterday, and you were very enthusiastic. Yeah, I was pretty amped up yesterday. Which is awesome. I think I have mellowed out a little bit. So, let's bring the boom. Let's bring the energy of the show. There's two major events that I saw that I was like, Erika, Pope Watcher, what's going on here? Yeah, here we go.

Number one was comments on the German bishops, okay? The craziest thing about that was... I saw people use the same quote to say the exact opposite thing, which was just a crazy, am I living in reality moment, but that happened in terms of referring to the German bishops, and then number two, I saw he was hanging out with a female cleric. Some are referring to her as the Archbishop of Canterbury. Erika, you took great offense to that word, so let us just start up at the top.

What is going on with the German bishops, and then we will hit Canterbury. Yeah, we will go chronologically here. He was returning from his four African countries visit last week, which there were some amazing moments during that visit, but on the flight back, we had another in-flight papal press conference, and the Pope was asked, and this stole the headlines, of course, and they didn't even, these headlines had nothing to do with, like, are you having a feud with Donald Trump? It was all about Germany.

So, a German journalist asked the Pope, and I'll just, I'll read straight from it. I would like to know how you assess the decision of Cardinal Reinhard Marx. That he gave permission to the blessing of same-sex couples in his diocese in light of different cultural, theological perspectives. He goes on about Africa, asking, how are you going to preserve the unity of the global church on that particular matter of the same-sex blessing?

That is a good question. And Pope Leo, it is a great question. Pope Leo, he comes back, and this is in English, he said, First of all, I think it is very important to understand that the unity or division of the Church should not revolve around sexual matters. We tend to think that when the Church is talking about morality, that the only issue of morality is sexual.

And in reality, I believe there are much greater, more important issues, such as justice, equality, freedom of men and women, freedom of religion, and that would all take priority before that particular issue. Then he said, the Holy See has already spoken to the German bishops. The Holy See has made it clear that we do not agree with the formalized blessing of couples.

And then he referred back to Pope Francis' expression, tutti, tutti, tutti, all are invited, all are invited to follow Jesus, all are invited to look for conversion, but that a formal blessing going beyond that. would be a cause of more disunity than unity, and that we should look for ways to build our unity upon Jesus Christ. So, there were two lightning rods. If you did not catch them in there, I am sure the comments are going to point them out for us.

The first was the comment that he made on sexual sin. And that when the church is talking about morality, there are more important issues than just the questions of sexual sin. And on the one hand, you get people who are like, yes, absolutely, Pope is for justice, he's anti-immigration, all that. So, we get that from the Catholic left, like, wow, we love this. Then we get the Catholic right saying, wait a minute, is that the best way to present what's going on here with this question?

Especially given that sexual sin has been sort of the root cause of millions of deaths from, say, abortion, and deep confusion in the Catholic Church in the first world, especially. Yeah, exactly. So, again, a lot of people wishing that it had been a stronger statement, but also looking, I mean, he did go back and say, we're going to reject the German proposal.

Which he's already said three times publicly. This is the third time he's been asked this question about the German bishops, which led me to ask, what were the Germans asking for that the Pope is saying negatory to? So, the German bishops' conference leapfrogging off of fiducia supplicans, which allowed that spontaneous, non-liturgical, vague blessing of a same-sex couple under Pope Francis, we covered it here, led to all kinds of confusion.

The German bishops came and requested that the church allow them or approve, Vatican approve, a formal framework allowing blessings for same-sex couples in the church. So, they wanted a pre-written rite, a liturgical form to kind of codify these. The informal blessings that Francis mentions in that document. Sorry, to formalize informal blessings? Exactly. We wanted a formalization of the informal blessings, which again, the Vatican has now rejected, and he has publicly said three times, they are a no-go. It is too confusing.

According to the pillar, Which was some great reporting. The Germans came right back after the Pope's plain comments, and the president of the lay Central Committee of German Catholics. She told German media there's no reason to withdraw their guidelines proposal, following Pope Leo's remarks. She said that their document, the German bishops' liturgy thing, was aimed at encouraging the provision of blessings of ceremonies for couples who, quote, do not wish to enter into a sacramental church marriage, or for whom such a marriage is not an option.

I assume she's referring to male-male and female-female relationships there. But also for couples who are just cohabiting, and they don't want a sacramental marriage. They just want a blessing on their relationship. So, all kinds of things going on here with the Pope on a plane.

So, I kind of feel like this is kind of cool. For once, we get to say it's the liberals who are totally obsessed with sex. Right? They've been the drivers of the sexual revolution. They've been trying to push everything on us, and Pope Leo's like, Yeah, chill. There's other things. Facts. Love that take. Well, I was just thinking about that. Okay, so I feel like the response... There's another take. Before you get into that, because I want to back you up on that.

I want to back you up on that. Think about the context. He had just gotten back from meeting with the worst dictators in Africa that, like, murder people on the reg, and had to stand there with them and, like, be diplomatic, try to figure it out, and then he gets on the plane, and someone's like, so what are you thinking about these... He's like, dude, like, I was just, I was in the arena. And so, I think this is kind of...

It's hard by war, by death. Right, exactly. Like, where people are starving, getting killed. Yeah, exactly. So, I think part of this, the reaction I saw on social media is like, it kind of just depends on what you think about Poplio going into this. If you like him, you're going to see the context. If you don't like him, you're going to nitpick over the thing. Maybe that's a lot of stuff, but that's kind of how I felt about it. Well, actually, so, I think Jonathan Lytle...

He's the editor of the National Catholic Register, a fine publication, I might add, where I first got my start. Anyway, Pope Leo, he said, when Leo was a missionary in Chalucanus, he didn't outright ban youth group members from going to the discotheque. Instead...

He would schedule a mandatory meeting at 9 p.m. on Saturday nights. I expect the pushes for blessings for same-sex couples will get the same kind of gentle sun setting. Yeah. So, that is what I think what we have with Pope Leo.

You know, certainly not like Pope Francis, where he would confront, like, oh, you guys are having babies like rabbits. Oh, and in your face, very Trumpian, which is very non the way popes usually are. I think Pope Leo is just, like, trying to tell the crowds here to slow their roll and button things up. Josh, I have a question.

I have a question I'm a little bit scared to ask. What is the discotheque? Have you ever heard of a discotheque? No, never. It's like you go out dancing at night at the bars. Okay, so it's not like a secret. It's just like if you go to a disco?

Yeah. You're going clubbing. Yeah, okay, okay. Just making sure. Is this like gay or something? I don't know. No, no, no, no. You're just going to a club where usually, if you're going to a club on a Saturday night, like at 9, 10 p.m. or whatever, It doesn't always lead to sinful stuff, but a lot of times does.

So, that was his way of being a very, that's why I like Pope Leo. He's more of the Benedict Ratzinger kind of like gardener, like just trying to steer things the right way. You don't have to always be confrontational. Now, I would say in domestic American politics, we need Trump. Okay, we can't go for like the soft approach, but when it comes to the church trying to bridge the gap and try to move forward, you know, I think there is some merit to what Publio is trying to do here.

I think I would also like Trump to maybe take a page from that a little bit. Dare I say? Like, not celebrate Rob Reiner's kid getting killed? He's got a couple moments where you're like, come on, dog. Can we chill?

Okay, now, Josh, does your take apply to the Archbishop of Canterbury? Or, sorry, I said that, the A word of Canterbury. Erika, what is your beef with what's going on here? Well, look, I mean, I think Erika, the resident Anglican, I got to give her a chance to jump in on this. Okay, so when he got back to Rome, Pope Leo, Met with, or received, I should say, the woman calling herself the Archbishop of Canterbury in the papal rooms. They prayed together.

They talked ecumenism or something together. She had very positive takes. So, this is, of course, Sarah Mullally. And she is the first female for the Church of England to instate as their leader. It is not just me and Rad Trad Catholics who object to her title. This actually split the Anglican communion itself. So, we have the global Anglican church, basically Africa, and all the third world saying, no, negatory cannot be because she's female. I'm going to take it a step further and raise you.

There has not been an Archbishop of Canterbury since Reginald Pole under Bloody Mary, as she is known by the Anglos, Queen Mary I. So, this isn't a woman thing. No. And this isn't a gay thing, because I believe she's lesbian as well, right? She has a same-sex relationship. Yes, this is accurate. But it's not even about that for you. For you, it's the break, the original break. For me, it's the actual break. So, when we as Catholics call someone a priest or we call someone a bishop or archbishop, that title carries a very specific ministerial meaning that is tied to our connection to Christ and the apostles themselves.

And all that went away in England, in the Church of England, when King James I, son of Henry VIII, changed the wording of the rite of ordination in the Book of Common Prayer. They haven't ordained anyone validly since those days because they haven't had the form or the intent of the sacrament or the matter. They've had the matter, but not the form of the sacrament. Ergo, Reginald Pole was the last true Archbishop of Canterbury. Now, everyone can say, okay, it's a matter of politeness and form.

To use her self-identified title. Which is, in fact, what Catholic media did, overwhelmingly so. Although, I will do a shout out to Stephen Herriot in The Loop. His description of her was the woman called the Archbishop of Canterbury, I believe, in our blurb. Shout out there. But I think it is important, while we can disagree about, you know, what are the demands of courtesy at visits like this, we can definitely have a conversation about that. I think it's important that Catholics do a mental reservation, at least.

When we realize that, in fact, this is not the same thing as, say, the Archbishop of Westminster, who would be the reigning Catholic prelate there in England. Just because the Anglican Church looks like a Catholic Church, their liturgies sound the same, does not mean that, in substance, the same thing is going on. Well, we do have the Orneriot Rite. We do have the ordinary, and this was Benedict XVI's attempt to allow Anglicans in the Church of England especially, but all over the world, to come back into full communion with Rome.

And this is really interesting. The Pope's visit with this woman, Sarah Mulally, this was on the 50th anniversary. Of another meeting between the Pope and what the Church of England calls the Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the Church of England. That's fine. I can call him that. But he met with the Archbishop of Canterbury and called for, what he called for in his statements was Paul VI in 1966. He called for, quote, a restoration of complete communion of faith and sacramental life.

So, what they were working toward in 1966 was this reunion. ...of the Church of Rome with the erstwhile, the Church of England. Our sister, our Lady's Isle, is what we used to call England, right? It was beautiful. You know, and what was it, 15 years ago, 20 years ago, they changed the law governing secession so that it wasn't male-dominant, that if the first offspring of a monarch was a woman, that she would be the queen. But they had a chance. To get rid of, like, oh, well, but it's still gone.

Can't be Catholic. And then they kept that in. They kept in the anti-Catholic thing. It's still a thing. Eventually, you wonder if they're going to have a Muslim monarch before we have a Catholic monarch again. Yeah, and I thought, just to finish the thought, 50 years later, we get from Pope Leo, it was a very carefully crafted statement. He never actually called her by the title, and he said, this is a direct quote, this is also pointed out by Jonathan Lytle.

Well, while much progress has been made on some historically divisive issues, new problems have arisen in recent decades, rendering the pathway to full communion more difficult to discern. To which I say, what was it? Was it the raves in Canterbury Cathedral? Was it the LGBTQ female archbishop?

Was it the fact that the head of the Church of England, King Charles III, refused to give an Easter greeting, but was happy to do a practice of Ramadan and join in a Muslim prayer service? Not sure, but Pope Leo says. What do you think he's referring to?

Understatement of the century, yeah. He says Pope Leo does. I think it's something else. I think it's all of the above. Yeah. Is there an option C? One big fat K, which is absolutely tragic, because we know that the heart of Christ is for union among Christians. We continue to pray for that, but it's not looking good for the C of E.

So, okay, so then let me ask you on this whole episode. We don't have, so he was very careful about his wording, and he continually, as Augustinians do, expressed the desire for unity under the body of Christ, which is what really we shall want as Catholics. We truly do want this. We want unity between Christians and the One Holy Catholic Church. So, but...

So, do you have an issue, I guess, with the meeting, or do you think it's even possible in its current state if you're meeting with, you know, fake woman Archbishop? Like, the legitimacy you grant through that, or, I guess, like, how do you read that, Erika? You read the most into this, like... I don't object to the meeting. I don't object to the meeting because, I mean, he met with David Axelrod, for heaven's sake. Like, he'll meet with anyone, right? He was just with African dictators, yeah, for sure.

He's met with dictators before. I mean, he's met with everyone. Right, the Pope meets everyone. I think what I object to is the coverage of this, as if this was some meeting between two equals, and the way that she, I mean, the way that what she took She said in her post, she's like, I really enjoyed this meeting. It was between two pastors, and we both just want the same things. And that's what I object to, because it is not two pastors.

She is not an archbishop. She does not have a connection to Christ. And I think that it is absolutely incumbent upon Catholic media when they're presenting this to clarify for Catholics consuming this kind of content and watching this happen. What exactly is going on here? I don't think it's a kindness or a courtesy to call someone something that they're not, because it just gives them that permission structure to persist in their error. The cruelty of heresy is a phrase I keep coming back to.

We don't have recent examples of people that potentially have mental disorders that are forcing people to call them things that they are not, and then that had tertiary effects in terms of law. Right, well, this is the entire progressive, I would say, transhumanist, in a way, ideology that's been embraced by the Church of England, that you can be whatever you say you are. It doesn't matter what biological reality is. It doesn't matter what sacramental reality is. It doesn't matter what Jesus said in the Gospels, because who knows if those are even true?

But you can determine all meaning for yourself, and that's what's on display here. The meeting between this woman who calls herself the Archbishop of Canterbury and Pope Leo, who represents the transcendental view of life, that we are given who we are. The world is given to us, and we are stewards of what's given to us.

It's the opposite worldview of what the C of E, the Church of England, is proposing here. I just find it funny when she's obviously radical. She's obviously meant to undermine everything that… The Christian church has taught for hundreds of years, an absolute advocate of the sexual revolution. You know, and yet she's, you know, she's the head of the Anglican Communion, you know, and she's the Archbishop, and she's got, and she's, you know, always going to be wearing the clerical garb to the nines, you know.

Very traditional clerical garb, I would say. Yeah, of course. Very shiny. But now that she's visited Rome, she's like, oh, you got, you know, there's Leo with his popemobile, then now she can go back to Canterbury and have like a Subaru mobile, I guess, or something like that, you know. Yeah, but is it? Like, this is, so you mentioned it's the fundamental worldview shift with this one of this, but then isn't this the logical conclusion of breaking with Rome in the first place?

Like, if you throw off the shackles of authority and secession and church teaching and magisterium, what's to stop you from something like this? I mean, we've, and I'm not even just making this up. Like, go take a look at mainline Protestant denominations. Like, if you drive by your local Reformed Baptist church or Evangelical church, you'll see it draped with the pride flag. Every cottage green, every village green in New England has. The flag's everywhere, and it's all over the church, the original church buildings, for sure.

It's crazy. So, it is the logical outcome. I think, basically, wokeism and transhumanism is the child of three elements. We've got the Protestant Reformation, going all the way back to the iconoclasts. You've got the French Enlightenment, Descartes, like, I create reality because I doubt everything. And you've got... The third one, oh my gosh, German idealism. Thank you, Hegel. And so, all of these kind of working together, they bring about this, well, it is just whatever I say it is, whether it is religion, whether it is political power, anything.

It is all just whatever. It was your sex, you can just change it. Word. Hegel, man. Interesting cat. Thanks for wrapping it in the bow in the German segment, too. We started up top with the German bishops, and we end with Hegel. I mean, probably nine out of ten of the worst ideas in history have come from Germany.

So, I mean, I say this as a quarter German. Except beer. They nailed beer, dude. They nailed it. Okay. Twilight's out. Josh, and Pope Benedict. Come on now. Give Pope Benedict some time. I mean, and the Norbertines. Yeah, no routines. Come on. Yeah, you've got to give Germany a little shine, okay? We can't be too hard on Germany. The best and the worst. The best and the worst. Yep. So... The city of Ann Arbor, Michigan, is where we have the University of Michigan.

It is full of crazy left-wing voters. One Republican governor referred to Ann Arbor as 36 square miles, surrounded on all four sides by reality. Well, they had a new little thing they decided to do. You might see in neighborhoods the little signs with the logo here, like watchdogs, like watch for crime, be on the lookout for crime. Ann Arbor thought, well, wait a minute now. Let's roll the tape here. I'd say that's one of the best descriptions of Ann Arbor I've ever heard as someone that grew up in Michigan.

And they're inconsistent with our values. Ann Arbor is a welcoming community. We don't want to push people away. We want to welcome folks in. You know, there are people that look like me and those from my community that have been questioned, quite frankly, in their own neighborhood by others, you know, wondering what they're doing there. This is just representative of our values and how we want people to feel in Ann Arbor. So, crime, having up signs in neighborhoods to watch for crime and watch for strange and mysterious people in the neighborhood, that is unwelcoming in Ann Arbor.

So, they are taking down 600 of these signs all throughout the city. There's a time when that, so I listened to them say that, and I remember that that was just being browbeat on everyone from the federal government for four years, and we've moved, we've broken the fever, we've moved past it, and it's so on brand that Ann Arbor, of all places, would be hanging on to this. Like, no. We've got to get back to the basics. Yeah, and I think, too, like, we haven't moved beyond it.

I do just want to point that out. Like, there is still a very A significant percentage of the country for whom this is still the most important thing. So, it's... Wokeism is not dead. It's just... Yeah, they want a virtue signal. They want to show how virtuous that they are to everyone, and it's like, you know, this all comes... Again, in much of the way we talked about earlier about how COVID, like, we're still dealing with fallouts from that five years later.

We're also dealing with this crime watch thing. We're dealing with, you know, George Floyd, you know, and that fallout five years later. I mean, this is like, oh, we're not welcoming. If we see strange dudes in your neighborhood, you're like, what the heck are you doing here? You know, I mean, George Floyd riots caused more than $2 billion in damages, injured over 2,000 police officers across the United States, resulted in more than 20 deaths.

Now, contrast that with when, you know, how... I could go on and on. It just gets me so angry to think about this. Josh, think about Ann Arbor. You don't think about, what's the pizza place there? Is it Cottage Inn?

We're opening up one in my town now. That's good, dude. That's maybe the best thing to come out of there. This is coming from someone whose mom went to Michigan State, so I'm not super. Pretty campus. I'll give them that. Pretty campus.

Erika, you are up. All right. So, we had a hearing this week, House Judiciary Subcommittee on the FACE Act, which we've covered here multiple times, and its weaponization by the Biden-Harris administration against pro-lifers. On the panel testifying were a few just rock stars, Chris Ferrara from the Thomas More Society, Roger Severino, I'm a huge fan of yours, VP over at the Heritage Foundation, but we also had Representatives of the pro-abortion side talking about how the FACE Act is so important to protecting access to abortions.

And rising star of the GOP, I mean, this was just brilliant political, it was theater, but it was theater with a purpose of exposing reality. Exactly. So, if we could just play this tape. By the way, this is his thing. This is, like, I can't tell you how good.

I've seen him doing this. He's like trying to pick up the mantle of Kennedy a little bit, it feels like, in some of these areas. You're an advocate for abortion, for abortion policy. What's your favorite type of abortion?

I am an advocate for patients having access to the full realm of reproductive health care. But do you have a preferred method of abortion that you like? I do not. I'm going to read through a couple different methods, and I want to get your take on how much you like these. The first type is called a suction abortion. This is when the cervix is dilated, and a strong suction, 29 times the power of a household vacuum cleaner, tears the baby's body apart and sucks it through the hose into a container.

Do you prefer that method? I stand by my former testimony. That sounds kind of gross, doesn't it? That was pretty gruesome. Do you agree? It does to me. I stand by how I answered your question fully and accurately. Okay, what about this one? This one is called dilation and curatage. After dilation of the cervix, a sharp looped knife is inserted into the uterus. The baby's body is cut into pieces and extracted, often by suction. Do you prefer that method?

What I believe we are here to talk about today is the FACE Act. We are not here to talk about I am asking you, you are a pro-abortion advocate. I am asking if you prefer the deletion and curatage method. I am an access to reproductive health care advocate. You do not want to talk about abortion itself. Why is that? I would prefer to talk about the reason that the committee called the hearing. Is it because it is uncomfortable to talk about?

It should be uncomfortable. It goes on. It goes on. That was brutal, but this is what has to happen. This is what I'm talking about, what I want, which is we want facts. We want what's actually happening. What are we actually talking about when we say these words like reproductive health care? What does that mean? And if you can't confront that, like she can't even confront that, she doesn't even look at him when she's responding, then you have no business being up there saying, yeah, shout your abortion.

Good job to Brandon Gill. I just want to, as an addendum to what you said there, another bit of good news. The other thing that came down from the Supreme Court ruling was that the state of New Jersey, which went after pro-life pregnancy centers that are trying to let women know, hey, you have an alternative, and the state of New Jersey said, no, this is a big fraud thing. They went after the pro-life pregnancy centers.

You know, with a reproductive rights strike force issuing a consumer alert accusing these pro-life pregnancy centers of trying to prevent people from accessing reproductive health care by providing false or misleading abortion information, the Supreme Court ruled and shot down New Jersey's horrible law. So, that is a pro-life win for the Supreme Court. Tom, did you hear about how the vote went down on this one? Mm-mm.

Take a guess. 6-3. No. I'm going 8-1. No. Let's go to Spingo. 7-2. Still incorrect. It was in 9-0. What? 9-0. That's crazy. Even the KGB? KGB? KGB? You just created a new Twitter hashtag, fan club, KGB. No one thought of this. That's what I do. Oh, my gosh. That's incredible.

KGB. That was a banger. KGB. The court was unanimous. It's her Broadway name. And why was it unanimous, Josh? I mean, I'm still going over the verdict, too, myself, because that just dropped, and I had to read the other one. But, like... I saw unanimous, and I'm like, what? How is that possible? Someone clip that. Did she have, like, stomach flu for two weeks? I have no idea. Yes, we're going to use that all the time. I'm going to get that so I can use that noise on the show.

I can just hit a button, and then we'll get dropped. Okay, that's great news. Man, where do I begin with this statement? Yeah, I don't know. You would think, like, this is just... Like, this is so bad. You're like, someone's clipping this, doesn't have context. It's just so bad. I venture to say anyone that makes this mistake in any context should just be denaturalized, but we'll start this one. The last time the Alien Enemies Act was invoked, it was used to detain and deport German, Japanese, Italian immigrants during World War XI.

That sounds like my first grader who's trying to learn Roman numerals. I, I. I mean, it's just amazing. In what world could you possibly think, we're world 11? And what do you know about the Alien Enemy Act? What do you know about anything? That is what I am saying.

What do you know about the Alien Enemy Act, and what do you know about World War XI? World War XI. If you do not have enough of a grasp on English... And on history, to where you would even think that it could possibly be World War XI, I do not want you representing anyone in this country. Nope. That is insane. And yet, the election... That is insane. I'm so tired of this. I will say this. I like Back to the Future a lot better than Back to the Future XI.

World War XI. Oh, gee. Dude, I'm just so tired. How does this happen? How do you get... When you're elected to serve, when you have such, I don't even, where do I begin? The same way Eric's followed. We have people that come to the country and then take advantage because they have a small ethnic group in which they represent. And then they go in to just raid the government and the country, the taxpayer, to benefit their friends.

And it's just like we're just dealing with something on a scale of which, like, the founders, how could they possibly have imagined this happening? I don't even, like, I really don't, how are we here? Yeah, Alexander Hamilton, Alexander really hated King George the I-I-I, he just couldn't. Dude, like, we have a guy, Sri Tanidar, in Michigan, who, I'm not exaggerating, barely speaks English, somehow got elected, and his whole thing is impeaching Trump, and it's like, dude, and I think he, like, abused dogs and stuff.

How does this happen? How do you get enough people to vote for you to actually send you to office if you can barely speak English? Well, I mean, one guy on Twitter made the comment, perhaps the greatest irony of the post-war consensus is that we've mass-imported people for whom the war itself means nothing to them. It's true, but I don't even blame, like, how could you? If you're from... A country that wasn't even involved, and there's no, you have no relation to the people.

This is what I, this is why I think Trump is actually not, like, everyone's, oh, you think he's a messiah, you think he's a savior. No, but he is kind of like Moses. Okay. Oh, boy. Where are we going with this? He's not going to get us to the promised land. He can't make it there, but he's done so an invaluable service of just showing that the ruling elites that are running our country are a bunch of morons. Now, I happen to grow up in Minneapolis, where I was born in the very city that she now represents in Congress, and I can actually tell you, of all ironies, 25 years ago, I was watching TV, and there was a news anchor woman, and she said, World War XI.

Damn me, I fell out of my chair. I couldn't believe it. And that poor woman is thinking, thank the good Lord, that now Ilhan Omar is going to be remembered as being the person who said World War XI. Yeah, and here's what I'll say, too.

Don't put it on the script. She'll say anything. This is a funny moment, but maybe the broader point I'd like to make is this. It's precisely what you say. This is why I have such a strong visceral reaction when people say America is an idea. And the concept of citizenship that, say, Vivek Ramaswamy puts forward is essentially that everyone in the entire world is an American without knowing it. They just haven't realized it yet, because America is just an idea, and if you ascribe to the ideas, it doesn't matter where you are.

It doesn't matter where you came from. It doesn't matter your ethnicity. It doesn't matter. You can be American, too, and I just categorically deny that. has family roots here in which they fought in our wars. They took part in the Civil War. Maybe they go all the way back to the Revolution. They've built in America. They've adopted the culture. They've assimilated. They contribute civically. They learn the language. They learn the culture. They take part in it. They are more American than someone that arrived two seconds ago.

I'm sorry. I'm just like, it's insane to me that you would even suggest that that's not the truth, and I'm all for ideals, too, and America, of course, was built on ideals, but America was also built by a people, and it has A border, and it has laws that need to be respected, and you should be expected to come here and assimilate. And this isn't a place, and this is another frustration I have. People come here, and they lobby our country to go fight their ethnic struggles in different countries.

I hate that. You should not come here and say, hey, we want to take the full force of the strongest military in the world, and we want to go punish our ethnic enemies somewhere across the world. Those problems are not America's problems. We need to make decisions in America's interests. And so, this to me, this is a funny example of all the other things Ilhan Omar has done that are much worse than this little flub that she had, but she is not the only one.

There's many people in here that do this, and I just cannot stand this idea that America is just an idea and that people can come here and do this. So, Josh, you have a clip. You send me. Well, I mean, basically, that is exactly what I was getting at, because we were, all of us, the three of us, we went down to Nashville last year, and they had a great fundraising event for... Courage and Fire, yes. Yes.

And I had the opportunity, I asked Michael Mills about this kind of question, you know, like getting ready for America 250 and celebrating our country, and I think he gave a good answer here, and I kind of got a little interjected in there, and I think I was on the Monday on this, we should watch, roll this clip, because by the way, he's coming to lacrosse. This is my question to him, if I did this right. Dude, you're shameless, brother. Wait, sorry, I see you.

Okay, wait. Which clip do you want me to play? The one from... No, no, no, but the one from when we actually asked him the question, or... Just that one. It should be right there. I think it's... Sorry, Selene sent me another one. I'm confused. Oh, I'm sorry. Probably Selene's got the right one, then. I'm sorry. I think I picked the wrong one. Always go with Selene. She's always right. She's better than I am on just about everything.

All right, here we go. What does it mean to be a patriot? Yep. To preserve their way of life, and to fight for their countrymen, and their extended countrymen. If you look at the historiography of the country, you know, there's a changing conception of what America is. What is the country? What does it mean to be a patriot? What is the thing that we're preserving? I think that we've just come out of a highly ideological moment, on the left and on the right.

And I think we're returning to a more profoundly conservative understanding of history, which is that we're not ideological. We're actually anti-ideological. Ideology is this shallow, abstracted thing, and that's not what I want to preserve. You know what I love about America? I love some of the ideals that we say that we hold. I also love hot dogs on the 4th of July. I love Buc-ee's. I love... You're pushing back at this idea that America's just an idea. That's right. It's a way of life, and it's a people, and it's a place, it's a geography.

Exactly. It's a home. And so, I really hope and I expect to see that kind of understanding. Come back up as we celebrate America's 250th, because I'm attached to many ideas, but I don't love ideas the way I love my mother, or my father, or my wife, or my home. That's what it's all about. Josh, you smiling, leaning back in the background, like Count Dooku or something, like, yes, yes.

Yes, he's spinning right now. I'm asking Michael Dole's a question. Oh, okay. Spitting. You were spitting. Mike was spitting. It was a fun day. That was a great day. That was a good time. Looking forward to seeing you guys again in person. I know. It will be cool. It will be a rager.

Speaking of, we have our Daily Prayer for America 250 by Cardinal Burke, and we will end the show on that. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. O Sacred Heart of Jesus, King of Heaven and Earth. I place today my nation, the United States of America, into your heart, pierced for love of us, on the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. I acknowledge that true liberty is your gift, and that our lasting homeland is the eternal kingdom of God.

Under the mantle of Our Lady of Guadalupe, patroness of the Americas, and through the intercession of her Immaculate Heart, bless my homeland anew, purify her from sin, and guide her leaders in truth, justice, and peace. So that she may safeguard all human life, respect the integrity of marriage and the family, and honor the practice of religion. Reign in my home and in my nation, draw every heart into communion with you, that your truth, love, justice, mercy, and peace may triumph in America throughout the world.

Amen. St. Thomas Morris, St. Fidelis, Our Lady Guadalupe. Pray for us. Man, fun show, gang. We will catch you guys. Well, Thursday, we've got an episode of Deep coming for you. If you want to check out more, go check out Time Across America, Chicago Port-A-Potty Edition, and grab a ticket. Go see us in Wisconsin. It's going to be awesome. Have a great time. Catch you guys then. Peace.