Trump's Iran Deal Sparks Fierce Debate, JD Vance Press Tour, And Scots Invade Boston

And we're live. Welcome back to the LOOPcast. Just Tom and Erika today. Josh is on a super secret mission that we can't talk about. I'm actually not sure. I don't even know what it is. That's how secret it is. He will be missed today, but we have a great show for you today. We are just on the heels of our Zeal for America 250 event. It was an outrageous amount of fun. Way more fun than even I thought it could be.

It was amazing. We have a little bit from that. We'll give you guys a little bit of a wrap. If anyone listening was there, so good to see. I got to see some, got to meet some people. It was awesome. But, of course, today's show, we have the MOU. The MOU that is ripping through the halls of Twitter debates, the halls of Congress, the halls of the White House. It has been very controversial. There's lots of thoughts and feelings flying around about it.

We have just the hard details. So, there's been a leak of the MOU. It is very fluid. Trump said G7 right now, but we are going to give what we understand based upon the leak, a few of the hard and fast, say, implications of what could be happening, and then, of course, we are going to cover a bit of the debates. So, some of the freakouts over it, some of the people that think it is good, everything in between. We also have the J.D.

Vance press tour. All of a sudden, he is all over my social feeds. He reappeared. Where has he been? Yeah, this is like he was in hiding. He was hibernating for a little while. He is back. He's been sent out in full force.

To the ladies of you, speaking very specifically on the Iran war, but then also this kind of right-wing, great divide civil war, if you will, for the first time, it feels like. And so, I'm going to get into a little bit of the timing, a little bit of the book tour that he's doing on his Catholic faith. It's going to be great. Now, we're just going to get over this. I just hope we can get through the rest of the show.

Europeans in America for the World Cup have single-handedly surged the patriotism in my body to levels I did not think was possible. I want all Scots to have immediate citizenship based on the performance so far. They're the best, so we just have kind of a fun compilation of cultures. Seeing American culture through the eyes of foreigners has been delightful, so we have that as well. We also are going to get into a little bit of church news today, in particular on some of the consolidation efforts in places like the Archdiocese of Detroit.

Erika did a lot of great research there. I know I am going through it personally. Many members of my family are. So, we have a little bit on that effort, a little bit on banning kneelers, I believe was the latest.

Yep, out of Washington, D.C., no more altar rails. Yes, we'll be hitting that as well. But we have good news. We have Twilight Zone. We got a little bit more space, too. It's hard to fit in three big personalities into one show. It's just going to be two today.

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Thank you, St. Joseph Partners. Okay, I'd say we start up top. Erika. Yes, sir. Where were we out over the weekend? Did you have a good time? Oh, my goodness. So, we were out in La Crosse, Wisconsin for the Zeal for America 250, which was kicked off by my favorite part of the whole weekend, was the Mass for Consecrating America to the Sacred Heart. I had never been to Our Lady of Guadalupe Shrine there.

It was founded by Cardinal Burke. He was there. He said the Mass. He led us in the prayer of consecration. It was moving. What an What a beautiful, beautiful pilgrimage site that I just highly recommend anyone who can get there should get there at some point in their lives, but he gave a beautiful moving homily about the importance of the consecration, and I also, I got a plenary indulgence, too, because it was the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart. They had confession going all through Mass, so everyone could get to confession.

You knock out all the indulgence requirements right there, right then. It's like one-stop shopping, like In-N-Out Burger, but for Catholics, it was Great, and I was very excited about that. So, that was wonderful, but I think the highlight for sure was just, and this is going to sound cheesy and cliche, but just being together in person, getting to meet supporters in person, and donors, and thank you very much to everyone who supports CatholicVote. It was great to shake hands, put names to faces.

Yeah, it was a wonderful weekend, and I think such a gift to the organization as well. Totally. Just being on board. How about you? What was your favorite part? I found out that I actually met Cardinal Burke when I was in middle school. I had to text to confirm that to my mom. I was at a luncheon as an altar server. Shout out to St. Cyril Methodius.

I remember that experience, because I remember being nervous about how to greet a cardinal, because I was like, I wasn't sure exactly how to do it. You kiss the ring, you're like, oh, this sounds kind of funny. And to fast forward to an adult and go, I think I was most excited to see Cardinal Burke, because I'm just thinking in my head is one of those things. There's only been in the thousands of cardinals ever in the church. There's hundreds of them on earth right now.

And the more that I was talking to people around him, shout out to the Canons from Institute of Christ the King, they kind of go hand in glove. Cardinal Berg's like their champion in Rome, and so they staff him so that they help him do his daily tasks, and he also has an office in Rome, and so there's a lot of work that goes into being a cardinal, if you can imagine. And he is considered an old-school cardinal in that he still operates with the decorum of a prince of the church, so in terms of dress, in terms of...

Greeting in terms of, even like the dinner that we had was very formal, not in a stuffy way, but I think my impression was, I love that he gives everyone that opportunity to partake in the rich history and tradition of the church, instead of kind of waving away with maybe well-meaning, but in my opinion, misplaced humility of just like, I'm just a normal guy. Just call me. By my first name. Call me Sean. No, you are a prince of the church.

There's not many of you. You have sort of an important function, and so to be able to go and like kiss his ring, get to talk to him for a little while, he has a savant-like memory, so he apparently remembers everyone's name, and it didn't fail. I met him briefly just greeting him the first time. Then the next day, we were backstage. I was like, he comes up to me, oh, hey, Tom, how's it going? Yeah, he reminds me of the stories about John Paul II in that way, and I think like To your point about, and we will talk about how other cardinals are conducting themselves later on in the show, but to your point about the, people will look at how Cardinal Burke conducts himself or like his masses, and they are like, oh, you know, the lace and the formality, and it is so traditional, and like it is so pompous, and you are like, when you are actually with the man.

So, that's not the impression you get at all, but it's that he's had this radical humility to bear the office that's been given him. And I think in American culture, we tend to be more casual. We tend to be a little more buddy-buddy, which has its strengths, but I think that it's sort of a necessary correction to have an encounter like that, where the emphasis is on the sacred nature of this office. You can literally trace him back. To the apostles themselves who walked with Christ.

He's not the vicar of Christ himself. That's obviously the Pope, but he's in that line and in that vein, and it just recalls the enormity of what the incarnation was, what God did for us there, and it's a tangible connection. So, that was an amazing experience. And he's a warm man. You can't beat the Wisconsin out of someone. He was born in that area. He's a dairy farmer's son from Wisconsin. You can tell. For sure. You can't be that out of it.

And it's like what you said, it's all about. Because you're going to reverence something subconsciously or consciously, and so it makes sense to order what you reverence in order of what's most important, and so he acts like a cardinal of the church because that's an important function of the church and the sacraments that he partakes in. It reminds me, too, of, like, even down to the base level of priests, you know, with the nuns, super sad, and you've done a couple videos on it now where they've just kind of given up the habits and have just gone, like, that's not important, and then you get priests that For a while, we're just, oh, just call me Jim, or like, you know, not wearing a collar, not being formal, and I feel like that's reversed, but it's not reversed because it's comfortable or because it's fun, but it's because people find that it's an important function of how they operate in the role in society.

So, anyway, there's that, which was awesome, can't get enough of that, and then the people that recognized me said the following. One, I'm taller than they thought I would be. Whoa, taller? Awesome. Two, the acid reflux thing. Three, I wore shorts on a live stream one time, and I'm not kidding, I was told that the most. The unforgivable sin. You'll never live it down. Remember that time you wore shorts on a live stream? I do. Yeah, I haven't thought about it in a while.

And then the final is that I mispronounce a lot of words, which is also true. All the allegations correct in what I was confronted on. I meant some really, really lovely. The overwhelming message I got was, Erika, thank you so much for keeping the guys in line. And I'm like, do I? Because I don't always feel like that's actually what's happening.

No, the dogs are out. And then someone was like, bring back the percolator. This is for the real fans. Someone was like, I've been listening since the beginning. I remember when your intro music had the alarm clock and the percolator. I was like, oh my gosh. I forgot about that. We might have to bring that back. I have it in a, like on a. SD drive somewhere, probably. So, maybe we can bring that back for like an anniversary or something. Vintage loop cast.

Yes, but that's, you know, a fun talk. I think it was a really successful event. You can go check out the live stream if you want, Zeal for America 250. But we have some news to talk about. We have an MOU. What does MOU stand for? Yeah, we have a Memorandum of Understanding. So, this is not a peace treaty. This is not being called another ceasefire, although you might... Say that that's what it looks like. But this is, Trump announces this on Sunday night, literally as he is like about to walk out onto the, what was that called?

The UFC fight under the claw on the White House lawn. At 5.30 p.m., he says, the deal with the Islamic Republic of Iran is now complete. And like the war's over. It's all just over. And so what he says is, the United States and Iran have reached a framework agreement.

That's intended to end the war between the two countries. We did get confirmation from the foreign minister of Iran, Arakshi. That the negotiations had produced this agreement, which will purportedly be signed on Friday, so about 48 hours from now, President J.D. Vance is expected to travel to Pakistan for the signing, where he will be met by Arakchi and other leaders of the Islamic Republic.

So, we also had confirmation that this was happening from the Pakistani Prime Minister, who has been sort of the dealmaker between the two countries. Oh, sorry, not Pakistan. They're going to sign it in Switzerland. Of course, Switzerland, the place to be.

Yeah, some people are calling it a peace deal. It's not really a peace deal. From what has been leaked so far, and the 14 points were leaked, Bloomberg put it out yesterday. It was later confirmed that this was the most recent iteration. Things could still change between now and Friday. But the memorandum basically outlines another 60-day period for negotiations. During that time, The U.S. will lift its blockade, and the Islamic Republic is expected to fully open the Strait of Hormuz. That's sort of like the most immediate action item that the world is looking at to get that oil flowing again.

So, there also are provisions for America to end sanctions on Iran, provide financing, perhaps, through regional allies for Iran's economic rebuilding, and then establish some kind of mechanism to oversee the final agreement. One of the 14 points is that Iran will agree never to pursue a nuclear weapon, which it has also agreed to. Like 18 times in the last 60 years. So, there's that again. But a lot of different reactions to these 14 points have been. Just floating around everything from a shrug, like, I don't believe this will make a difference, to, oh my gosh, the United States has surrendered, to, Trump wins again.

Like, go America. I think the big freakout, a couple things that are notably different, is we get confirmation from Iran on this one. The second one is that it seems like Israel was boxed out of this MOU. They weren't given the text. I think they may still not have been given the exact text. Really interesting there. There's elements of this that are shrouded in secrecy. They pretty immediately, after this announcement, started bombarding Beirut, a new part of Beirut that was past a red line for both Iran and the United States, and I think what makes this difference, too, is you look at Trump at G7, what he's saying, he's going far beyond anything really any president has said about the conduct of Israel in this war.

I'll play a brief clip. And he does not like them, and I'll tell you what, Israel's fighting Hezbollah too long. And too many people are being killed. And you don't have to knock down an apartment house every time you're looking for somebody, because there are a lot of people in those apartment houses, and they're not all Hezbollah, that I can tell you.

I think he then went on to float that he should let the guy he put in in Syria go fight Hezbollah, that he's better and more equipped to do it. Yeah. And then you pretty quickly get, you know, approval rating in Israel, and the span of three weeks is flipped.

Used to be positive 58% three weeks ago, negative 35, completely flipped. Latest poll, 38%, 61%. And you're getting some pretty vicious attacks from Israeli media as well. I have... A prominent right-wing commentator in Israel denouncing Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff for negotiating the Iran deal and turning their backs on their, quote, real home. The exact quote, quote, we are here, among other things, to defend you, too, she said. In the end, this is your real home, and we are guarding it for you and for your future generations, and you turn your backs on us like this, simply losers.

Yeah, let's just say that the divergence between the Israeli and United States goals in this conflict have never been clearer, I think. And look, Trump came out, too. He was like, another comment he made was they should never have bombed Beirut. So, they did bomb Beirut the day that this announcement was made, and he said, this morning's attack on Beirut should not have happened, particularly on a special day. We're so close to a peace deal with Iran. Israel has a right to defend itself against threats, but the attack it was responding to was very small.

And this has been an issue from the beginning. It's like Trump is just finally owning it and articulating it from the American point of view, but it's been very clear from day one of this conflict that the Trump administration's goals have tended much more for what has been spoken to the American people, never quite as clear as we wanted, but that the Trump administration's goals have always just boiled down to they can't have a nuclear weapon, right? And maybe some rebuilding in the region.

It was just reordering the order of power in the region, but for Israel, it has very much been about total regime change, just almost the last man, unconditional surrender language, although Trump also used that himself on a couple of occasions. Yeah, you have to separate almost what has been blustered and what actually is happening, because Israel has had a state policy of regime change in Iran for about 40 years. I think they said this is a dream come true. We're finally getting the United States to attack, and like you said, it's coming to where there's a clear divergence in priorities.

I think the other one was Ben-Gavir came out and was like, we have no plans on stopping, essentially. I think it's in Arabic, but here's a quick quote. Netanyahu said that as well. The struggle's not ended. Yeah, or sorry, Hebrew, but we cannot stop destroying houses in southern Lebanon. We cannot stop, period. We cannot allow the population of southern Lebanon to return. We must continue to control the territory, even if Trump disagrees. We are an independent state. I think Netanyahu has not gone as far as criticizing Trump directly.

I think he has said a version of what you just said, where it's like, we have diverging interests. I'm sensitive to that. It's his deal. Right, not our deal. I don't have anything to do with this. There's a lot of, I've seen some crazy stuff coming out of Israel, like protests where they have Trump puppeteering Netanyahu. There's clearly a large segment of the Israeli population that sees this as betrayal.

Right. And so, yeah, I think you have on this, we have big unanswered questions before we get into the reactions, because J.D. Vance has seemingly been sent out now. It feels like unleashed, and I have a little bit of background on some of the leaks of Situation Room, potential recordings, and his stances behind the scenes. It seems like now, it's like, okay, J.D., here's your time. Go talk to your people that are the people that didn't want to be involved in this, thought it was a mistake.

So, do you have some, based on what we know about the memorandum, Some of the big questions to address. Yeah, so some of the larger questions would be, first of all, this question of nuclear enrichment. So, the enrichment of uranium. We've gone from Trump saying that we have to take it all back, they need to surrender it, to last week making comments that, oh, well, they hardly have any of the dust anyway. It's just dust, like it doesn't really matter. And then the 14 points that we have access to right now don't really address that.

Straight on. They do say that the 60-day extension of the ceasefire is the time in which those details will be negotiated out. I'm not sure what that... What relief from Western sanctions is going to look like? Will there be an immediate unfreezing of Iranian assets? And you remember back in the Obama administration and Biden as well, when they unfroze these billions of dollars, we heavily criticized that because you're just sending it to the regime. They're going to use it to rebuild their military, rebuild their terror network with the big three H's, the Houthis, the Hezbollahs, the Hamases.

And Trump then coming out of G7 immediately saying, Not one cent. We're not giving one cent to Iran. Don't worry about that. But again... My subtext for you on that, just important, because I think it's important to be specific about this. The assets that were frozen were Iranian assets. It's not like we're taking U.S. taxpayer money and being like, here you go. We're going to pay you. There were money that got frozen because they were sanctioned internationally. They're, say, money in Swiss banks or all across the world.

They were not allowed to reclaim that money. So, when people talk... That's why the pallet of cash thing existed. Because they couldn't actually give them what was being sanctioned, so they had to find a way around that. I could see a scenario in which they do recoup money, maybe not paid by the United States, but by regional partners, or they find ways to lift these sanctions to get this money back. It might not be. So, that's the kind of, when I'm listening to Trump speak, he can say that, like he said that very specifically.

They still might receive some financial compensation from elsewhere without having to say. Okay, it was the United States giving the money. Well, things can be true, right, and understanding that is kind of key. Another big concern that has come up is that at the beginning of the war, there was a lot of talk about reducing their ballistic missile capacities and how important that was with any sort of end-in-sight plan was that Iran would have to Massively reduces its ability to shoot missiles regionally.

That is not part of the 14 points at all. The only weapons reduction or prevention is the nuclear bomb, basically. Again, we decimated a lot of their infrastructure. We've decimated their Navy, their Air Force, a lot of bunker bombs going on there, but nevertheless, Iran has continued to be able to fire ballistic missiles into the region. American bases have been hurt, and the agreement, we're wondering, like, will that be part of it? Because I would be much more comfortable if it was.

You have to decommission your ballistic missile program as well. Another, yeah, go ahead. I was just going to say, if we zoom out here, before I get into the specific criticisms, I think the people that are saying this is a bad deal, first off, we haven't even seen the full text. It hasn't been negotiated out. We're in some type of agreement to make an agreement, and so it's more like the freakouts have been over, we're not going to, quote, finish the job, whatever that means, right?

The original problem, people are saying this is a bad deal, is because this was a bad war. We got into this under the wrong pretenses, saying, oh, we take out the Ayatollah, the whole thing's going to fall, we're going to roll through like Venezuela, and that just was not the case. And so, I would just ask, what are our options to the people that are saying, quote, finish the job? And they're not good options. I think I can maybe skip ahead, J.D.

Vance went on Megyn Kelly's show, and essentially wrote out to the people really... You know, beating the war drum at this point. I'll play it. So, first of all, why do they believe Iranian propaganda only about one thing, the peace deal? They don't seem to believe Iranian propaganda, rightfully so, about anything else. So, if you're in the position of endorsing Iranian propaganda only when it's related to this peace deal, then maybe you should check yourself a little bit and question your sources.

The second thing that I'd say is, what is their alternative? If you look today, Brent crude is around $78 a barrel. West Texas crude is even lower, $75, $73 a barrel. I mean, the numbers float around a little bit. But what that means is lower gas prices for Americans, lower energy costs for Americans. That means that this little blip that we've had of an increase in energy costs, which has caused a lot of people some problems, we're now getting back to normal.

And I think that fundamentally, if you look at what they're proposing, they're proposing an endless Conflict. They want this to go on until every bomb has been dropped or until every Iranian is dead. That is not what the President of the United States wants. What he said is, I said about this to end their nuclear program, to eliminate their ability to threaten their neighbors and project power, and to fundamentally make sure that no future child would have to deal with a terrorist regime with an atomic bomb.

That is why the President set out to do this. He feels, and he is right, That he's accomplished that goal, and now we can get to the negotiation to see what are the other benefits that we can get from this, and frankly, what are the benefits the Iranians could get from this if they behave? I just don't think that the people who are criticizing this, one, They're not actually dealing with the reality of what's in it, and number two, they don't have an alternative.

If your alternative is just to drop bombs without any clear goal or any clear American interest implicated, then you're not making the wise decisions on behalf of the American people. The president is, and that's why we're in this position.

This is the brilliant part of rolling out J.D. right now, because he is going to pivot. The entire project. Which, as you said, we have some inside information that he was very against in the situation room from the get-go, but he's going to pivot the entire outcome here to America first. That, look, your prices are going to go down, affordability is going to be improved, your children won't have to worry about this in the future, this is good for America to get out now.

Which, to be fair, is what we have been saying for the last eight weeks. It's just like, get out now. And this is how we have, if we have to, like, If we have to let Trump get out there and be like, I won the war. I did what no other man in history has ever done. I am Alexander the Great. In order to get out, I'm happy with that. Let's just get out. And I think to the point, too, what's the alternative?

I think when the Warhawks come out and they say we have to finish the job, they mean they want a regime change. They mean they want us to be in an occupation situation with our boots on the ground and be in there completely changing their form of government because that's worked so well every other time we've had to do that, and to which I just say absolutely not, no.

So, to have J.D. be the face of this, I think, is really smart on Trump's part. Not sure it's the greatest for J.D. for his prospects, but I think he's going to ride it. I think it's necessary. Yeah, I think it is necessary. And it's also an opportunity for him, looking to 2028, that if he can demonstrate in presenting this argument to the American public that this is the best deal, you're better off now than you were before we went in, even if he was really against going in, that's a presidential stance.

It's a presidential posture. That people can remember, if they even think about it at all, right? Like, I feel like if gas prices come down, we have oils down in the 70s, dollar per barrel, which is way low. It's been in the 90s to 110s for the last eight weeks, that a lot of people are just going to sort of by August be like, well, I had my summer vacation, prices are coming down again. If we have another adjustment from the Federal Reserve on the interest rate.

You know, we might sail into the midterms, and people are like, yeah, remember when we went to war with Iran for those eight weeks? That was kind of bad, but... Yeah, it's the Josh Mercer argument of, like, if it comes down and we're out of this, then people forget. Yeah. Another interesting point. I was going to say another interesting point on this, because obviously, I've had to do a weekly show, and I've been very frustrated from the beginning. I think maybe my best thing to wrap that would be, this was a bad war.

It's going to take a bad agreement to get out of it. That's just the reality. So, people looking for a silver bullet, people looking for smashing regime change, boots on the ground, they're not going to get it. So, I'm happy to.

You know, praise the way out the door to get us out of here, because it has to happen. The longer we're there, the lower the returns are, the more it's going to be inflating our dollar through spending in the military, the more our munitions are going to be sapped up to not defend us. Like, this is just, this was bound to happen. We tried the bombing thing. It didn't work. We tried the assassination thing. It didn't work. They're still there. They still have control of the Strait of Hormuz.

This had to happen. He goes on and he talks about this, like, conservative civil war, because now we're seeing, like, Even as far as Mike Huckabee coming out publicly against the president in Israel, which is crazy, but Mark Levin, a lot of the high-profile, Ben Shapiro, high-profile people that are really in favor of this war, wanted to continue, see this as a capitulation.

He's now kind of speaking to, and Megyn Kelly, of course, has been very publicly against this, against the turn on Trump, two people that feel, you know, how should they think about this, quote, civil war? Here's J.D. Coalition that made Donald Trump. The President of the United States and J.D. Vance, the Vice President of the United States, people have to remember this. It was Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan. It was also Mark Levin. It was also a lot of people like John Podolitz, who won a more aggressive foreign policy.

What I think is important, I'm never going to say that John Podolitz is not welcome in the Republican Party. He is. But just as he's disappointed right now, sometimes other people are going to be disappointed at other times. You can't... Just quit politics because the leader of a country of 330 million people makes a decision you disagree with. I agree with you. I know a lot of people don't agree with us here. They're very, very angry over the Iran war. It was like their number one issue, and they feel like Trump is not the man they thought he was because he betrayed that promise and didn't explain much about it, and I understand their feeling, too.

So, look. Convinced? Yep. I think that... I've consistently agreed more with, you know, J.D. Vance's. I'm very against blackpilling. The Iran war, I think it's going to take time and certainly some aggressive rebuilding of trust to keep the coalition together, heading into the midterms and certainly heading into 2028. Iran was a big blow.

You know, the Epstein files were not my... Black pill. They were for a lot of people as well. So, for me, it's more the Mifepristo and IVF stuff coming out of NHS there, and I agree with JD, and I think it's just sort of obvious. Look, when you have that big tent coalition, it's going to be very hard. In fact, you're never going to please all the people all the time. It takes some serious politicking skills, which, to be fair, to this point, Trump has demonstrated.

I mean, he's... A consummate politician. Just from a political perspective, can he pull it back together? He's done it before. I think he can. I wouldn't count him out. I wouldn't count him out, and I certainly wouldn't count him out looking at the opposition. And again, like last summer, when we were going through, or two summers, was it two years ago? Oh my gosh, two years ago, when we're going through the campaign, and you're just seeing what you're up against and what your alternatives are.

That alone is enough to bring a lot of people together. And it could be, again, because certainly on the Democratic side, they are not ameliorating or softening any of their radical agenda, and they're just going to come back with more of that in the next campaign. J.D., I... I don't envy him right now. I hope the best for him. I would love to be able to vote for him in 2028 for president. I like that Trump is continually, apparently there's this parlor game now in the White House.

I was reading about this. Someone at Axios, of course, is like, this is a parlor game where Vance and Rubio will be in the same room, and whoever is there, whatever billionaires there or tech giants there, Trump will turn to them and say, who are you going to vote for in 2028? And everyone just sort of like stops and is very awkward. It's awkward. And Trump's like, I think they're both great. And that's just the end of the conversation. Before we get into that a little, the back parlor reporting, Erika, Nazareth Organics.

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Sounds fun. Sounds very fun. So, yeah, kind of what you're talking about. I've been talking a little bit behind the scenes. So, there's this book called Regime Change Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. It's coming out June 23rd. So, June 23rd, 2026.

Yeah. So, you have a preview. So, we have a preview, because they've been putting out excerpts of it. Some of them apparently so accurate that there are concerns that they are taping the Situation Room, which is crazy. And the White House actually has not disputed any of this, which is another sign that this is potentially pretty dang accurate. So, I think what you're talking about is this Vance versus Rubio 2028 succession drama. In particular, you asked Rupert Murdoch to compare J.D.

Vance and Marco Rubio as future GOP leaders. Murdoch repeatedly praised Rubio as brilliant and described Vance as having the potential to be great, which attendees interpreted as Trump's stirring 2028 intrigue. I mean, it's Rupert Murdoch. Yeah. No, I think I got Rupert Murdoch's stance on the Iran war pretty clear. I think we're predicting Iran war. Pretty clear. So, yes. And then the other thing that comes up is that he was one of the major dissenting voices on the Iran decision.

Trump weighed his own instincts against the deep concerns of his vice president and a pessimistic intelligence assessment. Vance is portrayed as one of the senior figures worried about the risks of escalation and regime change fantasies. New York Post column discussing this leak says, Haberman and Swann's reporting described Vance in the situation room scene saying, this is a huge problem. During sensitive internal discussions, same report says that the White House has not disputed the substance of the reporting, though the politics around the leaks are obviously very contentious.

And then the third, which was interesting to me, was Vance in the Epstein file damage control meetings. He appeared in sections of the book about administration's panic over the Epstein-related files. Access reported that the book described... the Situation Room meetings where senior Trump officials tried to manage the fallout, including floating an idea involving Tucker Carlson interviewing Ghislaine Maxwell.

That would have been fascinating. Crazy. Oh, my gosh. But yeah, split pretty even. I think it was Vance Cash and Dan Bongino. Dan Bongino to the point of like screaming matches with Pam Bondi. Yeah, he left pretty fast. Predated his exit, which...

To then go back to the show and then just get right back on the praising train is kind of like, what are we doing here? Like, again, and this is all, you know, I guess this is insider reporting. This is in this book. They may have tapes. I don't know. None of it's been disputed, even by, even personally by Ben Gino, to my knowledge, but it all felt like.

I'm, from my perspective, I'm like, is this just JD's, you know, 2028 team trying to save face? Like, bad decision that's going to hang my future, political future, I need to wait, and then kind of soft roll behind the scenes, hey, I was actually against this, you know what I mean? But then a part of me is, you're the vice president, you can't do any, like, I guess you could quit, or.

You have these debates behind the scenes. It doesn't go your way, and then now it kind of seems like, hey, this is your opportunity to now, like, we know your feelings on both of these things. Now is your opportunity to go out and sell. You're going to go on The View. You're going to go on Megyn Kelly, and that also made me think, like, he's really been on the back bench in terms of addressing. What we've been doing the podcast on, what people are talking about at the kitchen table, the App Scene stuff, these are all major sources of podcast intrigue.

These have been dominating the conversation, and that's what's even refreshing about even starting to talk. There might be an end in sight. This isn't going to be a forever war. We're not going to have a third of our Navy in the Middle East. We might actually be rethinking our bases. I mean, most of our bases right now in the Middle East are total liabilities. Most of them we can't even operate on. Really makes you rethink the future of what's the point of these here, and so it's just this big opening, it feels like, to kind of now all the people that have been spurned, and I don't want to let Trump off the hook for this, like a lot of the things he said about major supporters that helped get him elected, held rallies, did all these things, you know, saying, I am MAGA, you know, Tucker Carlson, low IQ idiot, you know, Megan Kelly Griffith, like all these things, you know, will he have the same energy for the people that got everything they want?

In terms of foreign intervention, Israel, et cetera, remains to be seen, or is this kind of a moment where you're like, I don't want to be a gloating, you know, I just want what's best for the country. So, I'd be willing to swallow some of that pride to be like, yes, you denigrated me and all of that, but if this action actually, if you have the ability and the fortitude to actually get this to a table, to come up with a good deal to get us out of the Middle East, and which was bad action to begin with, it might be a bad deal.

But could just somehow get us out of the quagmire. Like, I'll swallow it. Yeah, I think it's really interesting, too, to kind of look back on the J.D. trajectory, and if what the book is describing is accurate, that from the beginning and even leading up to the start of the war, he was the naysayer. He was like, this is not going to be good. The American people, your approval ratings are going to go down. We're risking getting stuck in another forever war.

It will not be five to six weeks. It will be longer. I mean, now, well, initially, J.D. is sent out to fight fraud in the hinterlands of the northern, you know, Minnesota. And, like, he's sent out of D.C. And some people were reporting he was excluded from the Situation Room multiple times. But I think that. Trump is a pragmatist, and he is seeing now just data, and some people will say, well, he's just totally irrational, but I don't think so. He's older now.

Happy birthday, Mr. President, 80 years old. But at the same time, I think he can still see evidence that The people who were cautioning him before he went into Iran are, it's playing out the way they said it would. It was getting longer. Iran was not easy to negotiate with. There's the, certainly Trump's approval ratings have just tanked, primarily as a result of this war. And J.D. is now, you know, I think everything here is allowed by Trump. If Trump did not want him out right now, he would not be out on the podcast circuit.

No doubt. But Trump is allowing him to go out because, in a way, I think, because he is right, and you know, McCluskey and Mercer might tell me that I'm being naive, and like, no, that's not, there's some other like 4D chess going on, but just on the face of it, Trump, Trump likes a winner, and he likes people who are right, and people who called it, and it happened. He likes prophets, and Like I said, J.D. Vance's cautionary warnings might be being rewarded right now.

But again, I want it out. I'm willing to take a less-than-ideal deal to get us out of there. This is hopefully good news. I hope that it happens, because 60 days from now, we're into August, and I think the worst thing that could happen would be Iran backs out of the deal or starts firing to such an extent that we actually have to go back in there in August, and I think that would be— It's going to take a lot of discipline, because there is a hardline faction in Iran that hates this, that have been public— Yeah, we are the great Satan, after all.

I mean, that didn't go away. Well, not just that, but this has clearly been framed in an existential crisis, destroying an entire civilization, unconditional surrender. When those words get thrown around, it's like, yeah, we're prepared to probably die before we surrender, and it makes sense.

The best case scenario here, and again, this is based on the MOU, we don't have a deal, is if we somehow normalize relations and we have an economic buffer to work with the Iranians on as kind of a buffer to stop from just constant wars breaking out or constant proxies fighting other places.

There's no doubt in my mind that these sanctions are crippling. Like, they've kept an economy, a massive country, 90 million people, a very old, sophisticated people. I think their economy, the GDP was somewhere in the 400s of billions, and I think Israel's is like 300, and they're much smaller, much smaller. If we can actually... It kind of reminds me of the other approach we've taken with other countries, is our economies are intertwined. And the reality is, our economies are intertwined right now with Iran.

I mean, yeah, case in point. They're holding the gun. So, it'd be much better to work with something like that than to have to go back to this because we tried it and it didn't work. And then it can normalize, if this also ends in restraining Israel from just being the constant aggressor in the region. In starting wars and having the fullback in the United States, then there can be a little bit more parity, and I personally, you know, best case scenario, there's regulation by the GCC countries in how to actually moderate their own disputes.

...in the Middle East, we don't have to be the global policemen. I don't see us leaving, leaving a big vacuum, say, for China to take over. I don't know why the heck China would want, they're way too smart to take over that region because of all the different warring factions and interests. Like, it just, I keep coming back to this as really not our responsibility, and every time, almost every time we've acted has resulted in Christians dying in large numbers, bloody civil wars, a more dangerous reason like...

You can just put up the strategy of the last 40 years and ask, has this made us safer? Has it made the region more prosperous? You know, the answer is just obviously no. It's made us poorer. So, I guess I'll just end there, and we can go on to the fun part of the JD tour. Oh, yeah. He did indeed stop by the view. He went into the lion's den. No, tell me.

Is this a hostage picture? Yeah, I think it's a hostage picture. We've got a couple members of The View. Maybe begrudging smile would be the... The word that I use, a couple big cheeses. Joy Behar, big cheese. Okay, so Joy Behar actually was the most delightful of all the hosts, I have to say. I watched like 80% of it, probably. And so, she was actually the most delightful of all of them. Apparently, backstage, she even told J.D. that he was fine for a Republican, which is the highest compliment any Republican will ever get.

He is, and he is, this is the first Republican vice president. President ever to go on The View, or presidential candidate, I believe. It's an institution. I believe that was another first. So, go The View. People are like, well, why do you care? Why do you care about The View? It's just really good content, so let's go. You picked out some clips for me. I sure did. I sure did. So, this was one of the hosts asked him, you know, you flip-flopped on Trump because you used to be so anti-Trump, and they're obviously setting him up because they want to say, well, you know, you flip-flopped on Trump because you used to be so anti-Trump.

You flip-flop just so you could get into the vice presidency seat, and here's what he said. It's been well covered that I was a critic of Donald Trump back in 2015 and 2016. Now, obviously, I'm sitting here as the Vice President of the United States in the Trump administration.

Well, Joy, a little humility, actually. I think that when you make predictions, and those predictions turn out to be false, you've got to ask yourself, well, what made me wrong about that? What did I not understand or not appreciate? For example, I said that Donald Trump's economic policies would not lead to wage growth. They did in the first term. That was actually a major, major thing. I said that we couldn't bring back any of those factory jobs, because I kind of had given in to this idea that those jobs were disappearing, but actually, Donald Trump, you saw a manufacturing boom during that administration.

So, there's a certain point where you say, you know, I made predictions about this, I ended up being wrong, and in politics and anything, I think it's important to just say, you know what, I got some things wrong. And I was wrong about him. He was a very successful president. It's one of the reasons why I've been so supportive of him. I love that there's no way to disarm, like, flaming leftists more than to say, I was wrong, and I changed my mind, because that's something that's, like, just not in their psyche.

Didn't he address the cat lady thing, too? He did address the cat lady thing, and he said that was the most boneheaded thing I ever said, and then he had this really great explanation to the ladies. He's like, look.

Every time I speak now, I ask myself, are the words coming out of my mouth going to invite conversation in our country, or are they just going to shut people down? And he's like, that was an example of, I said something, it went viral, all of my supporters went crazy, but it shut down any kind of conversation. And what I wanted to have a serious conversation about was the fact that people aren't reproducing, people aren't getting married, and they're unhappy. But instead, I chose to say this nasty comment about childless calories.

So, he did a great job of walking that line, but Tom, I pulled the Epstein Files comment just for you. Thank you. Just for you. You were thinking of me. Yeah, I was. One of the things you see in the Epstein emails is that Jeffrey Epstein hated Donald Trump, and that Donald Trump literally reported Jeffrey Epstein to the police. That is one of the things that came out of these files. They were best friends for about a decade. And remember, he signed that Transparency Act under duress when some Republican women, Congresswomen like Lauren Boebert, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, did not give in to his.

He brought Lauren Boebert into the Situation Room to pressure her into caving on not voting for that bill. So, let me respond to that. That's all true. Let me respond to that. So, number one is, yes, Donald Trump, he said this. He knew Jeffrey Epstein back in the 1980s. He also threw Jeffrey Epstein out of his club when he found out he was a creep and reported him to the police. That's something that the media often misses when it reports this story.

They tell the fact that they knew each other in the 80s. Which the president himself admits, they ignore the fact that he narked on him to the police and led, ultimately, to Jeffrey Epstein's downfall. To that point, Anna, you know the Republican Party.

Well, it's one of the things that led to the law enforcement investigation, but on the point that you made. And it was allegedly over a real estate deal that they got into a fight over. But the email says, the email says, actually, he. They didn't just know each other. Let's just be truthful and transparent here. They didn't just know each other. He's in a lot of places. They were incredibly close friends. He reported him to the. That's what I'm saying. That is objectively true.

But Anna made another point that I think I would be if I may. Anna made a very important point. This question about did Donald Trump release these files only under duress from Republicans? And Anna, you know, the Republican Party probably better than I do. The idea that Donald Trump runs around afraid of Republican congressmen as opposed to the other way around is kind of. crazy bipartisan i don't know about that one jd you need the republican sign off i don't know about that one jd okay so do you buy it tom did he put your heart at ease about trump and epstein i just need to know you know i'm sympathetic you know because uh peter teal has invested so much in jd vance that he has to succeed in this environment um and it's also funny seeing this because after seeing the behind the scenes reporting J.D.

was right. Like, he was right. If that's correct, he was correct. Yeah. And basically, he, Susie Wiles was like, you're a conspiracy theorist. Yeah. But he was like, I understand what this is going to be to anyone that's been on the internet, and what we've been promising and getting this up to be. So, again, it's kind of like, it's like watching press secretaries when the president does something stupid.

You have to, like, they have to find a way somehow to make it positive. Like, that's actually your job. It actually isn't to, like, not to be transparent about the facts on the ground and whatever. It's to spin to defend your boss. And, you know, in terms of spin there.

It's quite a spin. He's doing a good job. He's very talented. He's very talented. But I'm trying to think, like, with JD, he clearly is very talented, and he's good at putting words together to put a positive spin on what otherwise would be pretty damning. You know, experiences. But then I'm thinking to myself, if you want to succeed in politics at that level, you kind of have to do that at some point. So, I don't even know. It is dishonest in a way, but if you want to play team ball, you got to play team ball.

So, I guess, what do people expect them to do would be my question. I don't know. I guess I'm not sure. Maybe not be in the administration or something. I don't know. Yeah, it is tough. It is tough. I think we could do one more from The View. Do you want to do one more? Whoopi? Yeah, we can do Whoopi. This one is the one making the rounds. Whoopi accuses Trump of being racist or something.

Color in your family. Sure. So, when you see, you know, the Emmett Till stuff coming down, or them doing all kinds of removal of information of black heroes, how does that sit with you? Well, what exactly are you talking about, Whoopi? I'm talking about the... I can tell you all the... No, no, I want to know what she's... You don't know what I'm talking about. I want to respond to your actual point. So, in a lot of the...

Museums. Museums. There's so many, you know, where they're taking down the actual history that happened in this country. Slavery happened. All kinds of stuff happened, and it seems that it has been very easy for this administration to remove that, and also to denigrate black... Folks who have worked their behinds off to get this American dream, how do you, I mean, you know that.

And we're back live. We're back. I don't know what's going on there. All right. Okay, Tom. I guess we were done talking about Whoopi Goldberg. Someone did ask about tornadoes. I know there has been a lot of tornadoes. I don't know what's going on. My Wi-Fi is down. I'm off hotspot now, so I might be a little grainy, but yeah, it's probably a good segue into good news, Erika. Okay, so I was going to continue the JD conversation for my good news because this was just so sweet.

So, JD and Usha gave an interview on Sunday morning amid His 36 other Sunday morning interviews. But this was just so sweet. Starts off with the reporter just being kind of an ass, though, so I don't know if you want to play that.

Yeah, let's play it. It feels like he is someone that you love. How do you feel as a couple bringing a fourth child into the world? The world's kind of a wild place sometimes. Does it bring you anxiety, joy, a little bit of both?

Well, my view is that the world is always a chaotic place. There are always dangers in the world. There are always uncertainties, but having children has given me a sense of purpose. And it brings infinite joy and hope for the future. So, I don't see having a child right now as any different from having a child nine years ago when our first child was born. There's still that sense of promise that comes with it. Amen. I love that. It's different in the sense that there are creature comforts being the vice president of the United States.

We have this beautiful house. I never have to drive the kids and then yell out in the backseat to stop hitting their brother or hitting their sister. We just have Secret Service that drives us around now. So, there are these sort of little ways in which life is just more convenient, I think, to bring a new baby into the world. So, that is something that I am actually looking forward to a little bit. Obviously, we travel around in the Air Force too now.

Yeah. Aw, that was great. I know, that sounds a little bit funny today. Go for it. Yeah, it is a little weird. Sorry about that, guys. So, things not to ask women who are 36 weeks pregnant. I think she's due on the 4th of July weekend. Are you anxious about bringing a baby into the world? It's like, dude, I'm bringing the babies here.

Babies, yeah, it's common. Yeah, but I thought she handled that so beautifully and so well. Just, look, it's no different from 9 years ago or 100 years ago. Babies are a promise and a sign of hope for the future, and they bring so much joy.

I was here for Usha. The reporter asked her about her husband being Catholic, and of course, she's not. And he's like, you know, it helped him to find his way in the world and heal from childhood trauma. It's kind of like therapy. She's like, therapy didn't work for JD. He just didn't buy the premise of therapy. So, I think the church was better for him than therapy. Sounds like a dude from Ohio, if I've ever heard it. Sounds like a wife who knows her husband really, really, really well.

So, that was a great interview. Very sweet. Okay, so my good news, shout out to low-stim children shows, if anyone's been on the Little Bear train. We show Little Bear to our kids. My in-laws, big Little Bear heads.

I didn't know the lore on Little Bear, though. Or actually, no, it wasn't Little Bear. I have a different thing on Little Bear. It was about Fred Rogers and child psychology. Yes. So I'll keep that up while I read. This is a tweet. Fred Rogers met with a child psychologist every week for 22 years to build this show. Shaped everything, script, prop, and song. The whole point was to give a child's nervous system time to slow down. In 1984, a single regulatory decision ended all of it.

The psychologist was Dr. Margaret McFarland, who co-founded the Arsenal Family and Children's Center alongside Benjamin Spock and Eric Erickson. She and Rogers understood that the prefrontal cortex in children The part of the brain that controls impulse, emotion, and attention takes decades to fully develop. At the start of every episode, Rogers tied his sneakers and changed his sweater while the children settled in. Those pauses were intentional, designed to help a child's nervous system shift into a calmer, more focused state. What ended it had nothing to do with child development science.

In 1984, Reagan's FCC chairman, Mark Fowler, abolished the advertising limits that had protected children's programming from commercial pressure. Toy companies moved within months. Between 1984 and 1985, cartoons tied to toy lines increased 300% from a handful of shows to more than 40 animated series. In almost every case, the toy was designed first. The cartoon was built to sell it.

Researchers later put numbers to what parents were already noticing. A 2011 study in the pediatrics from the University of Virginia tested 64-year-olds across three groups, one watching SpongeBob, which cuts scene every 11 seconds, one watching a slow PBS show, which cuts scene every 34 seconds, and one drawing. Nine minutes later, all three took tests on attention, impulse control, short-term memory, and problem solving. The SpongeBob group scored significantly worse across every measure.

In the 1970s, children began watching television around the age of four. Research from the pediatrician Dimitri Christakis found that by 2009, the average age of first screen exposure had dropped to four months as the content got faster and the audience got younger.

Researchers separately found that each additional hour of daily screen time at ages one or three raised the risk of attention problems at age seven by nine percent. Crazy. That is crazy. So, what's the good news, Tom? The good news is Little Bear is great, and because it's calm, there's slow scenes, wholesome setting, mother, father, child, Little Bear is gentle, well-adjusted, and respectful to his parents. That was why my parents never liked D.W. from Arthur, because she was a brat. Oh, yeah.

Arthur's terrible. Are you also a brat? Um, mother bears, motherly and caring father bears, a classical father, not the silly dad. You often see nowadays, not overly saturated colors. Nice calm music. So if you guys want to see.

Program for your children, Little Bear. One of our favorite slow-stem children's shows is Kipper, which was United Kingdom, Great Britain, BBC. Did you ever watch Kipper the Dog? Oh, my gosh. That sounds really familiar, maybe. Oh, sweet. It is very calming, very slow. Mom does not mind having it in the background while she is making dinner, setting the table. So, Kipper was a favorite for us. And, yeah, we have gone down the bluey train. I have mixed feelings, but in general, I do love Bluey, but the ones that- It's Australia's state propaganda.

It is, and I'm here for it. I'm here to be brainwashed by the koala bears and kangaroos. That's fine. So, Bluey's a big one, and I was trying to think, what was another really vintage show we were letting the kids watch? Oh, there was this old cartoon of the Swiss family Robinson that was kind of lame, but very, very slow.

And it's okay if the kids get bored. Yeah, but it's almost like, it's kind of like ASMR. It reminds me of what we were talking about with the nostalgia thing. Like, if you ever go watch nostalgia edits, it's always from the low-stem shows, because it evokes a different feeling than the kind of rock and roll, high-cut, high-intensity.

And then, oh my gosh, like every day we stray further from God's light. If you go over to YouTube and look at things like Blippi, what are we doing? Oh, no. I'm not going to do it. Every day. Every day, we stray further. So, yeah, shout out Little Bear. I thought that was an interesting background on the science behind children's programming. Speaking of programming, Erika. Yeah, we had Major League Baseball. We know that they're flirting with the rainbow flag there. Yeah, we've talked to them before.

You might remember the Dodgers honoring the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. You might remember just a few. Months ago, we had the, was it the Nationals, the DC Nationals, the head of communications, was saying how he deplatforms Christian players because, you know, they're anti-gay or something.

But we had this story come out. So, Major League Baseball has warned three San Francisco Giants pitchers after they wrote Bible verses on their Pride Night caps during the June 12th games against the Chicago Cubs, which they lost, saying the markings violated. League just had to throw that in there, saying that the markings have violated the uniform rules of the league. So, in particular, you see the picture up there on the screen. Giants starting pitcher Landon Roop. He pitched nearly five innings with, so you see, they had to wear these hats.

He's wearing the hat, and they took the logo, and they put a big rainbow on it for this pride celebration night. Well, he took a little white sharpie and wrote Genesis 9, 12 through 16 right next to the little rainbow thing, and I'm just going to read these verses because it's the Holy Scripture. It's the Word of God. Please do. What was he referring to? So, next to the little rainbow, we get Genesis. And God said, this, the rainbow, is the sign of the covenant I am making between me and you and every living creature with you, a covenant for all generations to come.

I have set my rainbow in the clouds. And it will be the sign of the covenant between me and the earth. Whenever I bring clouds over the earth and the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will remember my covenant between me and you and all living creatures of every kind. Never again will the waters become a flood and destroy all life. Whenever the rainbow appears in the clouds, I will see it and remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures of every kind on the earth.

The OG rainbow connection. That is what it is, and that's what he put on his cap. So then, the Major League Baseball team... Wait, wait, wait. Is it possible that that's actually what all of the MLB teams are pointing towards when they put rainbow over top of the logo of their team? No, Tom, that's not possible. No, that's not happening. That's not what's going on? That's not what's going on. It's not even a little bit? No, we're celebrating sodomy and hello fresh, kind of.

Yeah, actions. I had to ask. I was hoping. Yeah, I know. Well, you know, you want to make sure you're steelmanning the opposition. I get it. That's really honorable and kind of you. So, the MLB says that writing on the cap violates our rules, consistent with normal practice. We have warned the players about future violations, including possible fines for this.

So, the internet goes bonkers. We get this from Kelsey. Our president here at CatholicVote, she put out a statement. She said, oh, first Rob Schneider, the comedian, he said he would pay any fines that the players incurred by putting Genesis on their caps. Kelsey said, the MLB should understand this clearly. CatholicVote will not stand by while players' religious freedom is chilled or punished.

Pride Month is not a constitutional right. Religious liberty is. We've taken on MLB teams twice before, prevailed, and are prepared to do it again. Flex from Kelsey. Tough talk from Kelsey. I love to see it. But here's my question to you, Tom, and I really want, we need to think about this. So, I looked up the actual rules, and in fact, the MLB players sign a contract that they will not put any writing or personal causes of any kind, including like, hi, dad, or hello, mom, or apparently.

Scripture verses on their caps, and so they agree to this when they sign on. They are allowed now to decline special uniform pieces. So, we did get one player. This was Sam Hentges, who wore the giant standard black cap with orange. So, he didn't wear the rainbow logo hat. He just wore the usual one, and he got a lot of flack for that online, for sure.

Did the MLB do wrong here by the players who wrote Genesis, or were they just, you know, neutrally enforcing the rules? What think you? Ah, interesting. Well, I'd be curious if there'd be other times, because like with NFL, they have the my cause, my cleats, which I think is really carved out. You can do that with MLB cleats, yep.

Okay, so like, is there times where causes are put out? Just to table that for a second, it's hilarious that Like, if anyone knows a baseball, there's not a ton of far-left, leftist ballplayers out there that I'm aware of. Like, it's got to be one of the most conservative leagues out there. It's like, dudes that play baseball are American as Americans. So, this is odd that this would be forced, you know, top down upon people. I think in the case of the baseball players, it kind of reminds me of other examples of protests for players.

Like, they, yeah, they probably know what they're doing is protests of some kind. They want to take an even harder stance on it. And so, you know, if they get fined, the consequences become, that's a part of. Protesting. I think it is a worthwhile protest. I think it's disgusting that sodomy is promoted by the MLB and a lifestyle that is not going to be for human flourishing for anyone and capitulating to activist.

Groups, or I don't even know who this is for. Is there a big gay contingent in baseball I'm unaware of? Seriously, this is baseball. Yeah, I guess, but it's just so odd to me that this even exists, and no one wants it. Every time I see this, it pops up in the NFL, NHL, the stupid, all the various activism-y things that pop up. It's like, no one wants it. We just want you to play baseball, and it would be nice to have a space for players.

Who dedicated their lives to becoming excellent at a game, and making a living doing that, to just be able to do that. That would be awesome. Just play baseball, for heaven's sake. So, to answer your question more directly, yeah, if they could find it, I think they understand what they're getting into, and they're making a living by riding on the hat, and I respect that.

But yeah, I think it's probably the league's prerogative, if they want to define it or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting because we had... Yeah, we had like the attorneys general of Missouri, we had Senator Josh Hawley got in on it, and I believe we had word this morning that the EEOC is going to look into a Title VII violation. And again, because of the way it's written into the contract, probably the MLB can legally be fine with it. But to me, it's just laughable that the spokesman for the MLB come out and they're like, we're just, you know, we're neutral, blah, blah, blah.

We're in for like the last five years. They've shoved down the throats of the fan base this rainbow jihad every June. Every single team but one, and you can name which one, has a pride celebration night, right? I believe they ended up winning. Texas Rangers, right? Yeah, they ended up winning the World Series that year. And to me, it's like, what do you think is going to happen if you're forcing this religion on the players and on the viewers with these rainbow flags?

Special seating for sodomists, like, you're going to, of course, you're going to get a protest back, but don't use that as an opportunity to be like, hey, we're the neutral ones here. I mean, MLB is just about baseball, when that has not been the case from your comms departments for many years. So, like, spare me, spare me that, like, oh, we're just following the rules, you know. It's just really lazy activism, though. It's really lazy activism. Yeah. It's like, yeah. If you actually cared about this cause, what good is putting a rainbow logo for one night over the hat?

It reminds me of putting end racism in the end zone. Oh, yeah. What does that actually solve? Do you think a racist sees that and is like, gosh, I can't be a racist anymore? So, like, it just is like a lazy form of activism that, of course, sparks these conversations and just pits people against each other, and you could have much more effectively, like, if you had a specific community.

So, say you wanted to help out AIDS, you know, people suffering from AIDS or something, and so you, as the owner of the organization, were like, hey, I'm just, I'm going to give a ton of money to this AIDS organization. Like, that would be way more valuable than putting, you know, this lazy activism to force views upon people that don't share them. Yeah. I see you have it in here. It reminds me of the Seinfeld episode. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, I love this clip from the Kramer.

I don't know if we can play it or we'll get dinged or anything, but. We'll probably get dinged, but it is the best. I mean. Okay. Seinfeld's got an episode on everything. Okay, you're checked in. Thank you. Here's your AIDS ribbon. No, thanks. You don't want to wear an AIDS ribbon? No. But you have to wear an AIDS ribbon. I have to? Yes. Yeah, see, that's why I don't want to. But everyone wears the ribbon. You must wear the ribbon. What you are, you're a ribbon bully.

Hey, where's your ribbon? Oh, I don't wear the ribbon. You don't wear the ribbon? Aren't you against AIDS? Yeah, I'm against AIDS. I mean, I'm walking, aren't I? I don't wear the ribbon. Who do you think you are? Put the ribbon on. Hey, Cedric, Bob, this guy won't wear the ribbon.

Cedric. Who? Who doesn't want to wear the ribbon? It is the best. Oh, my gosh. It is awesome. But I think to your point, Tom, it is clearly not about actually doing something in the world, and these sort of rainbow nights. It is the pinch of incense to the Roman god, to the Caesar, right? You think of the early Christians under the early persecutions, and it is like, just pinch the incense. Just burn the incense to the emperor's image, and you can go free.

It doesn't... It was always about control, and it's always about putting a chilling effect on any authority outside of the reigning power. And the Rainbow Jihad is no different from the early Roman Empire. They have their own structures. They have their own authorities, their rituals, their patron saints, Harvey Milk, right? And the wearing of the pride is your pinch of incense to that, which is why I really hand it to the guy, Sam Henkes, who just wouldn't wear it. And he's like, look, it's perfectly within my right just to say no.

And I was reading the San Francisco Chronicle, like the op-ed section, the last couple of days to see what they were saying about it. And just the way that it was framed was like, these people are hateful. They're going to tear down gay rights. These players should not be allowed to play anymore. And you're like, that's it, because they wouldn't burn the incense to the emperor.

I don't think it's about actually affecting change in the world, after all. And we all know that. And I'm monologuing. Here we are. Well, hello, chat. It's just me. Tom left again. And the saddest part about Tom leaving again, guys, is that we were about to go into his favorite segment. Oh, he's back. Thank God, because Tom, I was about to do Scotland without you. No, no. You were going to miss the Scotland segment. And I'm a soccer defender. I'm a soccer defender.

I played soccer in high school. I love soccer. I like watching soccer. Josh doesn't understand, but I love soccer. Michael Knowles was telling me backstage on Saturday that soccer is gay. I mean, and I'm like, you know, it actually takes a lot. All right, Mike. I'll catch you on the pitch. That's right. You and Mike should duke it out over that. You're my new buddy, Michael Knowles.

Yep. Okay, so where are we starting with Scotland? You're doing the Boston City workers. We got to do stuff. Okay, so just to like set it up. Everything's good. Set it up, because not everyone is a World Cup head here, so. Yes. Go ahead. Yes, so the World Cup has restored my faith in the global community and my own country.

Basically, teams from all over the world come, their fans come. And they have places where they're kind of stationed throughout the country. So, the one that got a lot of attention was Algeria. So, Algeria got stationed in Kansas, and the Kansans fully embraced the Algerians because I assume maybe not a lot of fans were able to make it out or whatever, and so I heard things such as Rock Chalk Algeria, which is hilarious, but I think they got their band to learn Lawrence's, or sorry, Lawrence's band got to learn Algeria's national anthem, They welcome them to this Midwestern town.

It's just the best. Like, it's the KU marching band, yeah. It's so awesome. So, anyway, the one that's getting the most attention right now is Scotland and Boston, because they are literally drinking the city of Boston dry. Now, that, on its head, is an unbelievable accomplishment. Yeah, it is. But I'll play the clip.

They deep, man, and they can drink, too. What? Are you kidding me, man? They must have got no water over there, Scholar. After they're gone, I'm one person cleaning up after them, man, and it ain't that bad. They came, conducted themselves, man, with class, dignity, man, and they like our city. So, I'm happy they came, man.

I love that. Boston embraces the Scots. There's pictures of them, like, marching down. Yeah, here's the Boston Bars. It's so good. Those guys are the best. There was no beer. The Scots fans just drunk the place dry, and all they had was, like, bud light. If your favorite beer is missing from a tap, there's a decent chance Scotland had something to do with it. Sam Adams downtown ran out of their signature Boston lager over the weekend and needed an emergency delivery to keep up with World Cup fans, and they're not the only ones running dry.

Pretty much everything. We ran out of everything. And it's being number one. White Bull Tavern may have run out of Scotland's iconic tenants' beer, but that didn't stop the party. The fans have been unbelievable. They're great, they're fun, they're drinking, partying, having a great time. So, you have a drinking kilt, for obvious reasons, because it might get some spillage on it. You have a dress kilt, so you always have two kilts. The Dubliner has also been hopping. We had our biggest week ever last week.

And it's the one place Scots can still find their... I managed to plan ahead and get an extra delivery last Saturday, and I was told yesterday the distributor has ran out also. He's getting his today, and the rest of the city is getting theirs tomorrow.

That is awesome, and I love the juxtaposition of the Irish, Scottish, and Boston accent. It's amazing. It's like accent city. The other cool thing I saw was Scotland fans have donated nearly $30,000 to charities in Providence as a thank you for welcoming them for World Cup matches. $10,000 to Children's Hospital Cancer Unit, $10,000 to soccer for underprivileged kids, and $6,500 to help kids learn bagpipes.

That is awesome. These guys are the best. I love it. Yeah. And then what do we got? We got French dude. So, here's a French guy discovering Texas barbecue for the first time. It's French. Mesdames et messieurs, we need to talk about l'Amérique.

It's French. We need to stop saying vive la France and start saying vive l'Amérique. This is incredible. C'est incroyable. I just want Texas barbecue. For the first time in my life, poof, better than any moment in my life, and I am married and have two kids. Sometimes you have the crepe, the petit pain au chocolat, the croissant. No, I give my life croissant.

for a texas brisket i'd give my love for a softball my last croissant for a texas brisket yeah the the norse are also uh apparently the thing is going and here's them broke up and later yeah man they're doing it in times square they're getting they're teaching americans how to do it Oh, my gosh. What is this compilation of? Don't do the compilations. It is too long. It is too long. We got to get to American Pie. All right. Scott is in American Pie.

Here we go. All right. It is the best. I mean, everyone loves America. Does this not look like the most fun time of all? Maybe of all time. I also, we got the Scott singing. We've got, like, the trill on the R there at the end, right? The country road. Just, we need all these people. Where is everyone from? Okay, this is one of my personal favorites. Where are you guys from? Where is everyone from? Japan!

What do you think of America, of Texas? Texas is good. Everything is big. Texas is good. Everything is big. Which, compared to Japan, is very true. I mean, that's a bar. Tiny little country. It's big. Also, I got, you know...

My lineage, we have the Croatians taking over Dallas. That is a massive Croatian flag going through. That's Croatian pride there. So, I'll finish off Jersey Swap, but this guy from South Africa, he is fired up on there being a clean walking path. Here we go. This is freaking awesome. I've just come for a run, and no one's chasing me, no one's trying to rape me or murder me like in South Africa when you go for a run, but check this out.

I'm in like this wildlife refuge right near where we live. I didn't know it was even here, but look at this. How awesome is this? How civilized is this? This is freaking awesome. It's a bad. This would be completely vandalized and destroyed. I know there was a massive storm that came through, so it's a little bit dirty, but I bet you someone comes here on a weekly basis and cleans it up. But just look at this. And I'm alone, completely alone, safe as can be.

There's squirrels. There's rabbits. I saw a deer early on. Oh, my goodness. I want to see a beaver or something. What the heck? How awesome is this? Look at this. Look at this. That would be vandalized and burnt and broken in South Africa. Dude, that was awesome. This guy gets fired up on it, and then I'll end with this before we get into commentary on how much you love America, but this one was good, too. I'd say my entire life about America.

America, it is happening. Do you see it? People who aren't American, who have travelled to the World Cup, are realising they've been lied to. Before travelling to America, foreigners would just think America is this place they would hear about on the news all the time. It's a horrible place. But when you strip that back, like I've been doing for years, travelling America, so many different states, you realise the beauty of America, the different cultures, how amazing the people are. And the World Cup, Has allowed people outside of America to see America through their own eyes, not through their country's media eyes.

This is incredible, and I couldn't be happier for America. The world is realizing when you strip back the negativity you get, and you realize how beautiful America really is. It is the best. It is the reason it is my favorite country on planet Earth. Every state is like its own country. You have so many different cultures, so much Beautiful scenery, and people are realising it. People are finally realising it. And I couldn't be happier. I couldn't be happier for America and Americans.

America, I'm so happy for you. Yes! Guys, pumped up. This was like the best thing that could happen for America 250, right? Because I think it takes, sometimes you have to step outside of what's familiar to really realize what you have, right? And I think, too, when we were in La Crosse, and we were on the riverboat, right? We got to go on a riverboat as a staff. Thank you, whoever helped us with that, because it was an incredible experience. And you see the Mississippi River and these islands, and then the bluffs, like shooting up.

It was beautiful. And then I was like, you know, I was just in Phoenix a few months ago, which is like landing on the moon. You've got these rocky mountains. It's a desert. And then I live in New England, which has got to be, it's God's country. I'm sorry, guys. New England is like... Pennsylvania, I think, technically. No, it's all right. But New England in summer, and I get to live here. And I'm so grateful that the World Cup happened here so that we could see this reaction to our beloved land in America 250.

So... So awesome. Yeah, what a great palate cleanser. I mean, what's not to love? So good. There's nothing that Americans don't like. Hey, we're watching John Adams, the HBO with the older teens right now, and we just got through the episode where they read aloud the Declaration of Independence, and they've gone through all the iterations of it, and it's so inspiring just to remember what these guys went through, what they were fighting for. John Adams, standing up, let me have a country.

Who would have thought it would be soccer, of all sports, that would make us realize how great the country is? You have a point. You have a point. Maybe Josh should consider it was soccer. The boys played well. I think we beat Paraguay 4-1. That was pretty awesome. They looked really good.

Definitely helps being the home country. Did you see Massey's hat trick? So, you put that in there. I saw some highlights. That was awesome. That was pretty awesome. Yeah, everyone is so fired up on the World Cup. It was like in New York City, too, we had... The Knicks winning the championship, and then you had the World Cup games going on there, and it was just total madness between.

Fans, and fans of different sports, fans of whatever, like, yeah, it is, we do talk a lot about the politics, many of it very frustrating, but then, even like going to lacrosse, as you said, it's like, oh yeah, we live in the most beautiful country in the world, and it is, you know, I think one thing that I think is sticking out, they mentioned like, oh, you get free refills at restaurants, and you can use bathrooms. It's like small stuff that you don't realize until you go away.

I am a cradle American. I am going to Europe for the first time in the fall, and I am excited. I am really excited about that. I am so happy for you, but you do have to prepare. They are going to charge you to use the bathroom. Yes, yes. There are things like that, but there is a baseline of...

Civility and security that we take for granted, I think, certainly for people in these countries. Yeah, we talk a lot about the rise of incivility in America, and we talk a lot about the sort of private equity coming in and forcing the sameness on Main Street, like whatever happens to Main Street kind of questions that we examine a lot in The Deep and on this show. But I think when you realize how much farther past... The rest of the world has gone in terms of public safety and sameness or soft totalitarianism.

It makes you realize how important it is here to continue to push back on those trends and to remember, yeah, every state should have its own culture. We should have these varieties in America, and it is so important to safeguard and not take those for granted and to notice when they are being eroded, for sure. So, again, super grateful to All our new European friends and allies. I mean, right? Yeah. I think safety, security, and prosperity has conditioned the people to be kind and welcoming, and that is a real blessing.

It is something to not forget because, of course, that kindness can be taken advantage of, as we kind of see with the discourse around immigration or war or different things. Yeah. But if you go to Heartland America and you go talk to the average person, that...

You know, life's not perfect, but enjoy a level of security, and you can just, like, think, you know, you can go to a bank and take out a loan, or you can go walk into a restaurant and get served.

Yeah, watching all the reactions has really made me even just like, oh man, there's so much to take for granted. I never want to take it for granted, and I always want to be present and interact and appreciate my fellow countrymen in what we're trying to build here on the local level and the national level, and to not forget that national character. Even just going around the country, Tomacross America, I've certainly seen that. Random people I've interacted with where it's like, oh man, I'd probably hang out in your backyard or something like that.

You just forget with all the fights. So, let us go to Church Corner now. We have SSPX and Detroit Merger. Yeah, so here we have July 1st is approaching, and of course, we are just watching what is happening there. Not a lot to report right now, but that is the date that the SSPX has given for when they are going to conduct these Episcopal ordinations without the Pope's approval or blessing, thereby incurring automatic. Excommunication by the action, not from the content itself.

It's just the act itself. It's schismatic. And, of course, Pope Leo, this was the big news this week, that he was talking to reporters outside an event that he was at. Josh's favorite. Yeah, his favorite. Yeah, Pope's on the plane, or Pope's on the ground here.

So, again, he just made this statement that I'm considering making another appeal, saying don't do this. Let's try to live the communion of the church, but it's their choice. One must realize what it means for them and for the church. Certainly, the division among Christians is a painful point. However, they refuse to accept some fundamental elements of the church, starting with several points from the Second Vatican Council. If they make that decision, I'm sorry, but we have to move on there.

So, hopefully, they don't do this. Obviously, schism is a terrible... Terrible wound on the body of Christ. So, we're just watching that. We will report after July 1st whether the ordinations actually went forward or not, but at the moment, it seems rather impassable.

Yep. All right, so that's just a teaser, but Erika and I were talking kind of behind the scenes. I've had a few people email in about this, that their archdiocese is going through a merger or consolidation of some kind, and that the process has been, of course, painful, but a lot of questions about the way that they've gone about it or confusion about the way they've gone about it or when hard decisions are coming down. So, that was something that Erika also has a lot of research and information on, so I thought we'd probably start the conversation here.

What is going on in these parishes? Yeah, so the story this week is Detroit and Detroit Archdiocese. They announced, I believe, back in November of last year, they announced that these mergers, this restructuring, they call it, would be taking place. And the newest models that were released this week, they show about 58 Catholic churches in the Archdiocese will probably no longer host a weekend mass. So, we've got the grouping, or clustering is the way another diocese might call it. Clustering most churches into pastorates with nearby or similar churches.

So, these pastorates, then, it's multiple old parishes all come together. They have one pastor, a couple of associate pastors, or parochial vicars, depending on your diocese. And then after that process happens, some of the church buildings inevitably close because of financial considerations. They're just old buildings, etc. And the diocese has been pretty upfront about why this is in the last week or so. So, Reverend Mario Amore, he's the executive director for parish renewal for the archdiocese. He said that they had a 40% drop in mass attendance.

I believe this is over just the last decade. $94 million in unfunded building costs, and of course, the decline of the number of men entering the priesthood. And for me, someone in Connecticut, the Northeast, this is kind of old news. I think we've been going through this in our parishes for the last six, seven years. Boston went through it much earlier, but it's just the reality of the decline of mass-going Catholics, the dying off of the generation. of boomers and their parents who were financing a lot of this, but most importantly, it's the dearth of priests.

They simply don't have the men to staff all these individual parishes. Yeah, so I did some digging into this because it always brings up really bad feelings and a lot of accusations from both sides. So, you'll get from the chancery just accusing local parish parishioners of being obstinate or too wedded to their own personal mode of worship or their own building but then from the laity and the faithful this accusations toward the hierarchy of saying you don't listen you already decided on all of this ahead of time before you even told us it was going to happen we had no chance and i think there's like truth in all of all of those but you I did some digging into how dioceses have been going about making these mergers happen and closing parishes.

So, it turns out there's actually three main consulting groups that have been used by American diocese, so the United States in general. We have Meitler Consultants. These are hired for assessing parishes, assessing demographic studies, enrollment projections, restructuring recommendations.

We have the READ group, which is Parish Planning, Stewardship, and Strategic Planning, meaning how are we going to run dioceses in the next 10 years with half the number of priests or less, and Catholic Leadership Institute, which is also part of that renewal phase more after the restructuring. But this is a professional operation for many of these dioceses, which is important. We want to do this professionally. These are vast resources.

Often, I think bishops and priests don't know, like, how on earth am I going to walk in and tell the Italians they can't have their parish? Or in my city, it's, how do we tell the Black parish, the traditionally Black Catholic parish, that they're not making their numbers, right, without being racist? And so, you want to bring a level of professionalism and distance to the process. But then the question becomes, for me, And I think this is where a lot of the feelings of what are we doing here as a church come in from the laity.

The question then becomes how far can you go with these professional organizations sort of top-down telling Catholics this is what we're going to do to solve the problem before you sacrifice the whole point of the parish, which is to be a familial structure that hands on the faith and is driven by mission. And so, I think that a lot of times these The anger swells up because the church, the chanceries, and even the parish staffs have gone too far in the direction of corporatization and bureaucratization, and not enough in terms of the familial spiritual fatherhood that we should be able to expect from our bishops and pastors.

So, a lot of pain there, just a lot of pain. And I don't know, you said your family is kind of going through this now, Tom. Yeah, it feels impersonal. Boots on the ground in Detroit going through. Boots on the ground, yeah. I mean, I think... The reality is, is we're all looking at the same problem for all the things that you just described, and people in the Detroit area can feel that. All of the characteristics of individual churches were published, were recorded and published.

So, it would be, how many parishioners do you have? What's the financial situation? Are you in the red? Are you in the green? Mass attendance, right? They start tracking how many go to Mass on Sunday. They had all these different individual characteristics on each church, and then it was just published for everyone to see. So, if you wanted to go, I forget the website. Yeah, they did that in New Haven like three years ago, right? Yes, and so what's happening is now they're having these, quote, listening sessions where you can submit, you know, I guess your thoughts and feelings, but you're also hearing behind the scenes, and maybe some of them are rumors, some of them are true, that like, oh, they've already decided, you know, which buildings to sell, like, and I'd say in the personal experience of people I've talked to, it would be like, well, our parish is in the green financially, and we have a lot of people that attend.

However, we have no kids, so we're not going to continue. But even for those people, it's like, well, you know, we do fund the parish, we are attended, and yet you're deciding to close this parish because of a geography decision, like it's close to the highway, or you wanted one in this area, not this area, even for maybe a parish that's in the red. And I think it's frustrating kind of being treated like toddlers a little bit. I think there would be a lot more respect if someone came out.

And, you know, a priest or someone in a position of authority came out and said, we know this is really painful. We're making these decisions for these reasons. You can disagree with these reasons, but I'm going to be transparent in how I present it to you. And that isn't happening, unfortunately, kind of becoming a little bit of an expectation for when you deal with Catholic hierarchy in the United States. And so, it just leaves people really angry and disenfranchised. And again, like, I'm sympathetic because I see the problem.

I also... I'm kind of in the inverse now. It feels like there's not enough Catholic churches in Indiana. We have to build them. That's crazy. Which is, at least in the Indianapolis area, which is crazy. So, growing up in the Detroit area and having that be the opposite, where I'm like, there are a lot of, I drive by a lot of empty Catholic churches or churches that clearly have no future, and they are expensive to maintain.

Yeah, these are old buildings. We're just going to bankroll. Yeah, even just heating and air conditioning in a lot of these buildings, the bill's insane. Right. And then, you know what? I almost feel like it is not as much. It would have been harder, I think, the ethnic tension, where, like you said, like, oh, this is a Croatian parish, and this is the Polish parish, this is the Italian parish. Like, maybe 100 years ago, this would have been a lot more contentious.

It almost feels like now it is just aging people, say, 70s, 80s, who maybe remember that, that are holding on to that. Unfortunately, their kids lost the faith, so they are not. The real differentiator to me. Does this Mass offer an Orthodox liturgy, and that's where you go and find all the young people, and they're going to be, you know, rip-roaring success? I mean, it's also a minority within the church, I understand. So, that's why there's so many people that go there.

So, maybe if they made that more ubiquitous, you would still have this issue, but it's a lot of times it's the older, you know, maybe a little bit more modern liturgy parishes with older parishioners that don't have children in them. That are staring down the barrel of their church closing, and I'm sympathetic to that. It would be very challenging, but... Also sympathetic. I don't have a hard line good answer here, and maybe that's the problem, and it comes down to communication.

Yeah, there is really no good answer, and I think that a lot of the tension is generational, because I remember here in New Haven, we had eight churches just all merged a couple, five years ago. It has been shocking to me, even five years later, how we had a big controversy this year about Corpus Christi processions, and St. Mary's, where I go, we started this tradition with the Dominicans, where we would walk to another one of the churches, very long procession, mile long, like all the banners, all of the statues on the shoulders, and amazing.

And this year, we were going to try and do a full parish, where all eight churches actually marched to the same church. So, it was this massive, we just couldn't afford it this year because of the police. Escort, but the... So, the decision then was, because we cannot have everyone participate, we are just going to shut them all down. Ah, then no one can. And you are like, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. So, I mean, a bunch of us call, we are like, you cannot tell the kids.

What are we going to tell our children? Well, we cannot do Corpus Christi this year. The kids look forward to this all year. So, fortunately, praise God, thank you to the pastor, St. Mary's was able to do a truncated version this year. So, we did not completely cancel it, but the conversation among... The different representatives of the churches, this was actually coming from laity, who were like, well, you just think you're so special because you have this, and we don't want you to have this, and the spirit of envy among Catholics in this position, staring down this real existential problem that, like, we all see it.

We know there aren't enough priests. We know the priests are overwhelmed. We know that we can't afford all these buildings, but then for The laity to turn on each other in that way and just be like, yeah, I'm willing to challenge your children's faith, the future of the church, and tell them they can't have their Corpus Christi procession because I'm jealous that your parish has been doing this for years.

It's like, guys, what are we doing here? We have to love each other. We have to get over all of that. Again, I always say I'm glad I'll never be a bishop because I don't envy them. At all, but we're going to have to start thinking about things in new ways, and one of those ways would be, let's look at the parishes that actually have children, like you were saying, Tom. Like, who's going to still be here in 50 years? That would be the most forward-facing.

I think an element to all this, too, is a lot of the Detroit churches were designed before cars were super ubiquitous. Oh, my gosh, yeah. Well, they're neighborhood ethnic churches, yeah. Right, and I'm actually in favor of... The model for sustaining a lot of these places are as historic monuments, because they're just breathtaking cathedrals, and it would truly be a tragedy if they got taken over by someone else, or we had to knock them down. They're expensive to maintain, and so what happens a lot of times is weddings somewhat...

Yeah, we have that here for sure. Which is, honestly, I feel like that's a great middle point. If you can sustain it through that, great. If you want to get married in a piece of art, put up some money to support that. I think that should just be, you know, it's unfortunate if you can't, but if you can, yes, you should. Obviously Catholic. I'm not suggesting people do non-Catholic weddings there. Although, I guess it's becoming more of a trend, which is funny.

So, yes, they're close geographically, but you also get a lot of churches built in the 70s that were servicing a population that no longer exists, and that was even with cars. So, there's kind of like each church kind of has different.

I don't know if I'd say strengths and weaknesses or different purposes. The cathedrals feel like they have a different purpose than, say, your spaceship church that's out in the suburbs that is not attended anymore. Honestly, if it got repurposed, no one would even blink because it doesn't even look like a Catholic church.

Yeah, I wonder, like long-term solutions here, like you said, we're going to have to adjust, but I like the idea of... I'm not going to use listening session because I don't know how genuine they are. I mean, everyone's worked with like a McKinsey-esque consultant that asks, gives you a form. Oh, the SWOT analysis? Yeah, we had the SWOT analysis here. Sure, yeah, sure you're listening. Like, I don't believe you, but if you actually meant it meaningfully.

Yeah, like even someone was talking about, yeah, we go to an ordinariate parish. Is it because of the reverent liturgy? And I'm like, yeah, I think that's probably a part of the appeal. I've been to an ordinariate mass. They're excellent. I can see why there'd be kind of a lifeline for people that are in the Anglican church that want to come over, and why you'd have some extra priests. But like you said, another sad reality of this is we have mission territory here for priests.

That's why you have your Indian priests. That's why you have your African priests come over to help serve, because we don't. We currently are not producing. I am hopeful we will produce enough very soon, but right now, we are not producing enough. Working on it.

And, yeah, I feel like I have no good answers. I just kind of feel bad for everyone, and I feel bad for the church. I think it is a really painful period for the church. It is very painful, yeah. And so, I sympathize with everyone. I do not have a hard take.

Okay, Twilight Zone now. Erika, what do you got? Okay, well, so, I mean, we cannot leave the show without at least showing a couple images from the WFC fight for Trump's birthday on Flag Day, Sunday night. They put up the claw on the White House lawn, and we had a big fight, blah, blah, blah. But the interesting Twilight Zone thing here is today we get this story that there was actually a massive, catastrophic terror attack. being planned on this event. No surprise, it's a giant event at the White House.

Trump is the president. This is just kind of what we do now. We have assassination attempts, but it was just nuts because it involves, I think there are five suspects who've been apprehended and charged. They had plans. They had explosive-laden drones detonating over the plant to detonate over the crowd, and the five guys had sniper rifles that were decorated in the American flag, and they wanted to start. A revolution. The scheme, fortunately, was uncovered by FBI infiltration and the mother, go moms, of one of the suspects calling the police and saying, ah, my kid is stockpiling weapons.

So, yeah, but we did get this amazing image. Can you just put up that image there of the flyover? Of the flyover. The White House. Someone said this is like what a 10-year-old, if he became president, what they would throw for their birthday, because I saw like dirt bikes were like flying. Yeah, we had dirt bike ramps. We had the flyover. We had lightning struck, we had rainbows in the sky, speaking of rainbows.

Oh my gosh, WFC on the White House lawn, but it would not be a White House event without Democrat counter-programming, which happened up in NYC. We had the rise-up. There was counter-programming to this? Yes, because this wasn't cool enough. So, we got Robert De Niro.

Uh, we had, uh, what was her, what's her name? Hanoi Jane. Jane Fonda. Oh, God. It's up on stage. Um, and then we had Bette Midler. I'm, you know, we're running out of time. I think we're just going to play. Here's a, here's a, uh, yeah, we can play De Niro. Uh, before I say that, Trump, Trump has a superpower of. It's objectively doing something ridiculous. Like, it's objectively ridiculous to do a UFC fight on the White House lawn, after bikes and airplanes, for his birthday.

Objectively ridiculous. But then the people that take him seriously and then protest the ridiculous thing look even more ridiculous than Trump did to begin with. And it's every time. And you're like, they're going to learn. There's no way they're going to keep doing it. And they keep doing it. Like, I can't believe that Robert De Niro took time out of his weekend to be like, I'm going to get up. At this kind of... You say you want me to play some of this?

Yeah, go for it. Politics or not, we all love our country. Still with me? Not so fast. The phrase, we all love our country, stuck in my throat. Because our country isn't so lovable right now. I hate to say it, but loving our country is starting to sound like an abused spouse saying they love their abuser.

Look at the age of that crowd. Triple platinum. I can't love a country that starts stupid and inhumane wars. This is Robert De Niro. He needs to just sit down and watch more Europeans coming to America. He just needs a shot in the arm. So, he hates his country, and then we get Bette Midler up to provide some musical entertainment. This was amazing. She's still at it. This is crazy. No way.

No way! When you come for the rest of us, we'll put you at the gate, and you will lose, you fascist battle-oos. There's no way. There's no way. How did they do this? They just need to shut up. If you were to just shut up, everyone would be making fun of the UFC event on the lawn. But you give me this, and this is objectively funnier. It's objectively funnier. Absolutely. Why do they keep doing it? I'm like, I'm trying to give some advice here.

Guys, there's legitimate things to criticize, but you can't be doing... I know. Fascists are gonna lose with Bette Midler, bro. Nah, Dieter. Oh my gosh, Erika, that's so crazy. Twilight Zone. That is Twilight Zone. Isn't it the Twilight Zone?

I literally just rolled my eyes at all of you. I didn't even really watch UFC stuff. The only thing I saw of it was, um... That Pope Leo's brother was invited, which is objectively hilarious. His brother was invited. Yeah, it was great. Hilarious that he was just hanging out there. I saw Joe Rogan up on the stage, like, interviewing some of the fighters. Those were pretty... Didn't someone win and then say Michelle Obama's a man? Yes, that happened, and that's just not okay.

Which, again, if you would have just stopped, if they would have just been like, look at how ridiculous this is. We're not going to do even more ridiculous kind of programming. It would have been... That would be the talking point, but... They had to stick it to the man, not realizing that they are the man. Like, Robert De Niro is literally the man. No, they're literally not the men anymore. I mean, that's how irrelevant, seriously, like they're so irrelevant now. Apparently, speaking of twads, on the Disclosure Day, are you involved in the Disclosure Day?

I watched The Critical Drinker. I read the review on Rod Dreher, and I'm still on the fence. Should I go see it or not? Guys, what do you think? Throw it in the chat. I don't know. So, here's my thing on Disclosure Day. Okay.

Well, maybe I'm even going to say The Twilight Zone, because I haven't watched it, so maybe it is the best thing ever. But the press tour was like, this is the most revolutionary, this is Spielberg, it was Spielberg, right? Yeah, Spielberg at his finest was one of the most. Yeah, got his fastball back, you know, like famous for all kinds of, you know, iconic movies that everyone thinks about.

Schindler's List, watch. Yes, so like. The way he's talking about it is going to be the greatest thing, and it's getting panned in reviews, precisely for being, like, 20 years too late. Like, this would have been cool 20 years ago, but it's not. And then you look at Obsession and Backrooms, made by YouTubers, like, young YouTubers, and that are actually entertaining, clever, well-done, low-budget.

And they're smashing it in the box office. And they're smashing it, just because, like, they're... I don't know what the disconnect is, and I'm not incisive enough to point it out, but there's like a respect or something. What I will say about YouTube, it can be brutal, but you understand that if someone doesn't click, they don't watch.

And so, the only way for you to get views is to position it in a way that's understandable and entertaining enough immediately to a stranger on the internet. And I think there's a certain amount of respect with that that forces you to work and create something. That shows more respect to the audience, whereas with Spielberg and a lot of the legacy people, it's like they know that they got them off of name, and they can do something that's bloated and winding, and you know they're going to get the A-list.

Yeah, it's kind of like you get comfortable. Yeah. And I think he was, like, saying this is going to, like, shake people's faith in God. Someone go find the quote on that. I'm pretty sure it's out there. Like, this is, like, the most self-aggrandizing. It almost makes me not want to watch it the way that he's talking about it.

Anyway, I'm going to get back to Scotland. That's my twilight zone. I'm going to rededicate it. We're back in Scotland. Just look at this procession by Wrigley. Nightmare Airbnb neighbor, though. If you want bagpipe in your face in the morning.

Oh, my gosh. I love the Scots. I get, like, my Braveheart chills. I'm so excited about Braveheart. Nightmare Airbnb, yes, but the Scots do not love them. The original Sons of Liberty with their bagpipes. That's them. They're the best. God bless America.

All right, we'll end on... Oh, we did it. We did it. Josh is on top secret mission, hopefully succeeding. We're going to do Daily Prayer for America 250 as a little bit of a... Excuse me, chef's kiss after our trip. In the name of the Father, Son, and 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.

Out of 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 and throughout the world. Amen.

St. Thomas More, St. Fidelis, Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us. We made it through with all the difficulties. Enjoy the week. Got a good episode of The Deep coming for you tomorrow, and we'll catch you guys next week. Peace.