Are White Men Welfare Queens? Pope Leo STUNS France, and NYC School Choice Debate

And we're live. Welcome back to LOOPcast. It is Tom, the other Tom, Erika, and Josh. We have a great show lined up for you today. Very excited. Tom Pagasic is off in the wild of America shooting, and if you didn't catch his episode this week for Tom Across America, the Maryland crabbing industry, very fun, lots of water, lots of sunshine. Go check that out. But you have us today. Here we are, and we're going to dig into all things The white male crisis.

We have Sarah Huckabee Sanders suggesting that white men are the real problem when it comes to the welfare system in the United States. We'll break that down for you. We have a great, great show, a great lineup with Pope Leo's journey into France, the eldest daughter of the church, perhaps now returning at long last like a prodigal child to her mother, the church, and Pope Leo, great shots there. Can't wait to talk about that. We also have Nicole Hannah-Jones, architect of the 1619 Project, perhaps discovering that the educational choices she made for her own daughter didn't turn out so well, so we'll talk all things that.

But first, we have our good friends at Charity Mobile. Oh, one more good, before I get into Charity Mobile, big piece of news. We have officially hit 50, thank you, Celine, 50,000 subscribers on the YouTube channel. So, thank you to everyone in the chat we're celebrating today. If you are watching and you are not yet subscribed, please subscribe right now, hit the notification bell, and support us. Let's get to 100,000. Yeah, 100 grand. I like that. Let's do it. Josh will eat a candy bar if we get to 100 grand.

Live on air. All right, but now back to our good friends, the OG sponsors, Charity Mobile. Now more than ever. It is important to do business with companies that stand with you and your beliefs. Charity Mobile is a pro-life phone company that serves pro-life customers and supports pro-life, pro-family causes. They send 5% of your monthly plan price to your favorite charity, and they have sent millions of dollars to charities over the past 30 years. Not only that, there are no sacrifices when you switch to Charity Mobile.

All of their plans start under $50 before taxes and surcharges. Their nationwide coverage is the same as the major carriers, and their friendly pro-life customer service team is based right here in the United States. No H-1Bs. Plus, Charity Mobile is running a special promotion for our audience. Use promo code LOOPcast to get their free phone offer with every new line of service. Plus, free activation and free standard shipping. Switch to Charity Mobile, and buy the way you believe. To get started, visit CharityMobile.com.

Use promo code LOOPcast. That is CharityMobile.com. Promo code LOOPcast. Thank you to Charity Mobile. We love you guys. All right, let us get right into it. We are going to start by watching a little video together. And I'm going to get y'all's reactions. Was this a good move or not so much? Just to set it up, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, daughter of Mike Huckabee, is the current governor of Arkansas, and she is running again. And it's a little bit of a tight race polling as of yesterday.

She was at 45% as the Republican incumbent. Her opponent, a Democrat, and he's a black male, I believe, and that is relevant. I'm not just pointing that out for no reason. He is at 40%, and then there's a libertarian spoiler. He's in there for about 7% currently, but she came out with this ad about her welfare program, so let's just roll the tape.

Yeah, you want some of this? Take that. Come on. Meet Brad. Brad has turned relaxing into a full-time profession. But you, you actually work hard. You pay taxes to cover welfare for guys like Brad, who just choose not to work. Whoa. That's why I launched a welfare-to-work requirement.

Almost there. Now, more Arkansans are working than ever before. Whoa. Even Brad. Alright, so there's your ad, and the policy, we're welfare to work, seems like a really good policy. Is this a winning message? Why or why not? And I'm just going to tip it to Tom first.

Well, first off, I like Sarah Huckabee Sanders much better than I like her dad, but it is also a low bar. This might have been effective like 15 years ago, when every terrorist in every movie was a white male, and 9-11, people would have thought that was from white males, but to me, the problem is it covers up what the real problem is. White males are very, are most likely not to be on a lot of the welfare programs she's talking about.

Some of them, like TANF, it's less than 2%, whereas minorities, and that is a problem because when we're trying to address, like, why are these people in poverty? Do these people deserve these things? Ads like hers make us look at the wrong people. We're looking at the brants, and we're not looking at the people who are actually on the programs. Plus, it's turning off a large portion of your base. These are now base elections, and what you're saying is, I think, so poorly of white males, kind of like how fathers were portrayed in 80s and 90s sitcoms.

And lastly, You could not pick up a potato chip with one of those extender things. Have you tried? I've never found a potato chip that could withstand being squeezed like that. Yeah, it's an empirical question. Yeah, Josh, what are you thinking about Brandt here?

Tom's exactly right. I mean, what's so frustrating about this is that White Christian men are the only people that you can safely attack, apparently. Who is going to stand up for white Christian men? Because we were the dominant force in this country's society for the better half of 250-some years, and so now it is like the whipping boy. Like you say, you make fun of dads on sitcoms. They changed Tom Clancy, the enemy, in the movie, so it is not a Muslim terrorist or whatever.

All these kind of, you just kind of roll your eyes at this, but like, you know, this is the kind of ad that they would have done 15, 20 years ago, but the fact that it comes out now, I think there's such a massive backlash on it for several reasons. First of all, we've all seen the numbers, like the percentage of people from Haiti that have come to the United States that are on welfare, it's like 50%. Somalians, it's like 77%.

And so people are like, really? Like the problem with people, you know? Sucking off the dole is white guys? Like, the number of, you know, white men who are on welfare is like 2%. You know, it's like astronomically different than, you know, a lot of these other countries that are coming in. So, just on its face, it's frustrating, it's insulting.

White men work. Why are you attacking on them? Why are you crapping on them? Again, you look at, especially for young white men under 40, they feel like if you celebrate everybody except for whites and men, then you're really targeting whites and men, right?

You know, all the victimhood stuff, what America did to blacks, what America did to American Indians. I mean, look, I'm not saying, I'm not defending such actions, okay? But the problem is, you've created this currency in our culture where you celebrate every victimhood status. So, if you're a white male, like, your only chance to be shielded from this stuff is to adopt one of the crazy LGBT... Thank you very much, and I actually like Christianity, and I don't think our country is horrible, and I love Jesus, so stop attacking me.

Why do we put out these kind of ads? This is garbage. I understand. That the Sarah Huckabee Sanders campaign wanted to highlight this policy, and rather than talking about it in an abstract way, you want to create a story. Right, it's cute. You want to actually focus on the policy, and you want to bring it to life with the story. And, well, if we do a black woman, even though that would be statistically more relevant, well, then they'll say we're racist, and we can't have that.

It's like, well, wait a minute. Well, then why do you pick on us? Like, it's hilarious. So, it's like. You watch any advertisements over the last seven years, and every single couple, it's an interracial couple, when they're like 1% of couplings are interracial, but they're like 99% of the ads. It's like, it's so distorted from reality. Everything is just fake and gay. Why are we doing this? This is dumb. And why are you attacking your own voters?

Yeah, it does. I'm like... What happened to me recently, though, is like, precisely the sheer magnitude... A fraud that is going on at Wellfood that has made so many people upset. You know, people who are like using their food stamp money to buy, you know, cans of pop, and then pouring it out, and then getting the 10-cent deposit. They're just, it's like, that's my hard-earned money. I mean, okay, so CatholicVote, I started CatholicVote with, you know, Brian and Joe 20 years ago, and we couldn't make payroll for a while, you know, and I had to be, you know, okay, well, maybe you'll...

I'll go off and do something else. I tried to work at my wife's Catholic bookstore for a while. There were times, I remember having a grocery cart full of food and not having enough money. I'm like, we have to walk away from it. And I should have, I guess in hindsight, I guess I should have just taken welfare. Because I had a growing family, three young kids. And I'm just like, it's not really the responsibility of the taxpayer to take care of me if the business I started isn't able to get off the ground.

I just didn't feel right. I had that sense of shame or whatever. It's like, I'm not too proud. I can go work at Home Depot. And then I hear about people who are just milking it like we're all fools. And that makes me so angry, and there are a lot of people out there that are very angry about the scandal of this, and you think Donald Trump is like some sort of knuckle-dragging, hardcore conservative on this? Dude, go talk to people.

He is the moderate on this. People are white-hot about the scandal of people abusing the public treasury and playing us all for suckers. Like, young men, young white men are seeing... 20% of their income go to Medicare and Social Security. Yeah, maybe they'll see it in 30, 40, 50 years. Those programs are still around, and then their tax money is going to people who are just absolutely milking the taxpayer. It's an abomination, and I think Sarah Huckabee Sanders, you're done. If I live in Arkansas, I'm not voting for her unless she apologizes.

Forget it. Oh, I'm going to vote for the spoiler? I'll leave the damn thing blank. I'll vote for Mickey Mouse. This is unacceptable. You don't do this stuff. You don't crap on your own voters. I'm so mad at her ad. This is disgusting. Yeah, I mean, it seems to be a unique talent that the GOP establishment has for coming up with the most obtuse, stupid way to offend the pillars of their own base. I mean, I think of their treatment of the pro-life tent as well, and then here, the white males, especially in Arkansas, which is like 67% white.

And, like, to the point that, I mean, people are making in the chat that she really didn't, she didn't have a choice. Like, if she had swapped in, and there are AI re-mock-ups of this ad going around the internet now with, like, you swap in, like, Deshawn, a black man for Brent, or you swap in a black woman, or you swap in a Hispanic family, and you watch those rehashings of this, and you're like, oh, yeah, they couldn't have done that.

But to me, I'm like, was there any other way To promote your welfare policy, which again, I'm in support for the most part of her policy, and she has made strides in Arkansas in incentivizing people who are able-bodied to get back to work. Was there any way to do this besides a mocking TikTok-style video? She should fire her entire marketing staff. To me, this was just such a swing and a miss. Like you said, Josh, something that All demographics can get behind is this fury over the fraud scandals from people coming from other countries, the fact that, you know, illegal immigrants in New York, Mamdani is.

I think it's just the idea that the white men are, you know, like the whipping boy, because, you know, we only were evil for centuries, apparently, and so now we can attack them ad nauseum, but, you know, and so what ends up happening is that young men, you know, Trying to enter the workforce, if they know you're a white guy, like, forget it. You're not going to get hired, you know, like, and so you have to keep, you know. So, there is, if there's any discrimination today, it's against white, young white boys.

Like, this is a problem. And so, like, you would think, and look, obviously, you know, the media, academia, like, all these things in the culture are aligned against it. So, you would think at least, you know. There'll be someone who'll say, no, no, no, hold on a second.

We shouldn't target that. In fact, what I want is I want the Justice Department to come out and start going after corporations that are not hiring white men. I'm sorry. Decades of previous abuse and discrimination doesn't allow you to do it the opposite way, to try to straighten things out. That's not how you straighten it out. You make it by doing the right thing. And so, again, if Sarah Huckabee Sanders is afraid of her own coalition, her own voters, that's a great way to get yourself booted out of office.

And that's one of the things, underrated appreciation for Donald Trump. So, you understand, like, wait a minute now. Who are the people that voted me in office? I need to represent them. Donald Trump gets it. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, his former spokeswoman, apparently does not. Yeah, and I think that you're right, Tom, about the flashback to the 80s and 90s sitcom dads, that there's this sort of hangover that I think older millennials and probably Gen X who are advising her, maybe even a couple boomers in there, they're like, okay, well, the last acceptable bias is against young white men.

Well, clearly not. It's not acceptable because of the backlash. So, it's like, wake up, it's now 2020. And she should have known this, and one, I don't want to buy into the when will white males finally get a break type of narrative.

Well, it's easy for, Tom, it's easy for you and us to say, because we've been, you know, we're now in the workforce, and we've been in the workforce for 20 plus years. I'm talking about. You know, guys who are in their 20s. I know, like the Tom Pagasics of the world and everything like that, they do have it rougher, because the backlash against white males that happened in the 60s, 70s, and going into the 80s and 90s is going way too far, and you have the DEI crap and everything else that is out there.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, she was the spokesperson for Donald Trump. Donald Trump won in 2016, standing up for people. Who thought nobody else was standing up for them, including a very, very large percentage of white males, a larger percentage of ever of black males and Hispanic males, largest Republican ever got.

And Sarah, Governor Sanders is just turning her back on that whole coalition. And this is not an ad I think Donald Trump would have run. Never. Hope not. Yeah, well, I don't know if she's turning the back or she just absolutely shot herself in the foot, and the funniest thing is that her first reaction to it is, some people are attacking me on this policy, and they don't think, no, no, Sarah, we're not attacking the policy. We love the policy. We think you're that stupid.

We think you're that stupid, Sarah. That's what we think. Stop it. If you want to kick the 2% of white males off of welfare that are possibly in your state, go right ahead. We'd probably be supportive of that. However... And let's go after the actual fraud as well. Yeah, let's do something that would make an impact large scale. Yeah, something else that came up in the conversation over this in the last couple of days was the fact, though, that white males have been exiting the workforce, and I think someone else in the chat brought this up as well.

And so, we remember we covered this a couple of weeks ago, the August jobs report. indicated that 98% of jobs in August went to women. And over the last 20 years or so, The percentage of white males who have simply left the economy in terms of they're not in school, they're not in a committed relationship, we'll say marriage because we're Catholic, and they're not in the workforce or pursuing a job has increased.

Yeah, they're checking out of that, but that's a trend. It's a concerning trend. At the moment, the reality is That white youth, so ages 16 to 24, they still have the highest labor force participation rate, 61.5%, compared with other demographic groups. So, it doesn't really speak to the concerns with the ad to be like, oh, but they're exiting. Well, so maybe eventually they'll become brats if we don't do something, but we are so far from the reality of what the ad's trying to communicate.

That I don't think that it really affects that. But just to touch on the sort of crisis of young white men sort of exiting society, exiting the labor force, what do you guys see as major causes of that phenomenon?

Well, I mean, there's lots of different factors. I obviously, I think that, as Tom said, the DEI hiring practices. I also think that Historically, what has been a motivator for men? If you look at single men in their natural habitat, Like, you know, like, they've got the TV, you know, and a very Spartan apartment. They don't, you know, whatever. It's like, they're chill. They're not at Hobby Lobby, like, getting seasonal decor for the, yeah. But it's precisely, you know, like, once they get interested in a woman, everyone's like, let's get this place looking nice, and so guys start working harder, they want to impress, you know, their soon-to-be wife, you know, and they, like, they work harder at their job, they want to earn more money for their...

You know, for kids that are coming down the line. So, marriage is, in that sense, a great motivator for men. You know, I need to be a provider. I need to be a protector. And so, if you don't have that, like if you have, you know, ubiquitous pornography or promiscuity, like, then what's the motivation for actually, you know, getting hitched and trying to build a family? Certainly, if you feel like the price of housing is out of the... Out of range as well.

So, I mean, I don't know if there's any one factor. It's a death by a thousand paper cuts, I would say. Yeah, for sure. I think Josh is hitting it right on the head, and I think faith, of course, certainly sets any young person, certainly young men, on the right path.

But a big secret to women, men, we spend our whole lives trying to impress women. First, it's our moms, and then it's whoever the potential spouse is. Before I got married, I have been much more successful in the world and in the world I live in after I got married than before I got married, and part of it is that inspiration that I need to provide a home. I need to provide a legacy. I need to provide a future, whereas before, as Josh said, I needed to provide a pizza to watch the baseball game and some beer.

Uh, so, it's, if you're not having that factor that is changing your priorities, and I do think men are slower to grow in, boys are slower to grow into men than women are, girls are to grow into women, um, unless they are pushed into it. Not physically, but, but mentally, uh, and that's why you find a lot of 18-year-olds who graduate high school, men who go into the workforce, are much more mature than 21-year-old kids who are still in college. Because they've had to grow up.

They've had to make that living, and I think right now, white males, all males, because the trend is also among Hispanic and African-American males, too, of checking out. I think they've just kind of like... Much more among black males, right? Right, and they've kind of just like it's stacked against us. Women don't need us anymore because of different welfare programs, and the government will fill in the position for you, and whatever.

Feminism writ large. Yeah. Right. So, I mean, it isn't one thing, and we need a cultural shift, I think, to address it. Unfortunately, where I live in Washington, D.C., everybody, what kind of government program can we create to help this out? That's not going to be the answer. Well, I actually want to push back against that a little bit, I guess. I mean, if we actually… Oh, you're a communist. Yeah.

No, I mean, if we actually… Keep it civil. If we actually… You know, reduce illegal immigration and then reduce... Legal immigration and allow greater assimilation, and then we use tariffs to try to reshore industrial base, and then there's going to be people who need workers, and then they can try to motivate people to work. I think that policy matters. We got into the problem we did because of lots of different factors. Policy was part of the reason why we got to where we are, and we can undo bad policies that have created the environment.

That doesn't mean it magically reverses it. Obviously, I still think, you know, cultural and religious influences will aid this transformation, but, you know, I always push back that, like, policy can do. I think we're on the same wavelength here. It's what we're both opposed to is welfare at any level, like corporate welfare that is just for everybody, the socialism type. Yes, government has a role. Well, I think the best will usually get out of the way. Overall, what I'd like to do, I don't have a problem with a government that does robust industrial policy like we have.

There's that steel factory that Trump just announced in Iowa. It was supposed to be my native state of Minnesota, but then the bureaucrats and the Democrats in Minnesota screwed it up, so now- I was like, we'll take it. Yeah.

But it's like, you know- I just feel like this is a longer discussion, but it's better for our government to be less involved in transfer payments. That's why I don't like welfare. I don't actually like Medicare and Social Security either. I think if we want people to make sure they have money to stash for retirement, For retirement, you do not actually have to have the government possess the funds and then dole them out to people. You could say, just like we tell everyone who wants to drive, you need to get car insurance, but that does not mean that the government provides the car insurance.

I would, it will take decades and generations to get there, but it would make more, or maybe we just go bankrupt. We would be like, you know what we should do is tell people they have to get a retirement account, and we encourage that, and we tell them you have to get it, but that we do not have the government provide it, because we are going to eventually go bankrupt. At this point, because, gee, shock, politicians are politicians, and they'll raid the treasury.

Eventually go bankrupt. Yeah. And you almost, like, can't keep cutting taxes, right, because it's something like the bottom 50%. Of earners pay 3% of taxes. Is that, that's like a general, so like you can't just say. You can't, you know, at some point, you can't really reduce federal income taxes anymore for working-class Americans, because a lot of them are paying very little. Right. But again, you can still do other things, like, I mean, if you really wanted to do something different, you want to help out young people, what if we got rid of the employment, the taxes on Social Security and Medicare for, you know, a lot of people, you know, a lot of people, you know, a lot of people, Not the employer half, but the employee share, and finance that through corporate taxes instead.

That would be an instant boost to everyone earning a paycheck. I love that. Can we call Sarah Huckabee Sanders on? No, she is not federal. Never mind. Okay, we are going to move on to the B block because I am very excited to talk about Nicole Hannah-Jones and all things education. But first, we had a lot of fun last week because we rolled out a bunch of questions that I had gotten at an event from our Gen Z fan club here in New Haven, I guess.

So, we had a lot of fun sort of like throwing those questions around, and we want to do more. Like that. So, if you have any topics you want us to address, if you have questions for the LOOPcast, if you really don't like how communist Josh has gotten, then please send us an email, LOOPcast at CatholicVote.org. That's LOOPcast at CatholicVote.org. We would love to hear from you, and your question might just appear on the next show. So, go ahead and check that out.

Celine has thrown it in the chat. Copy, paste. Save it to your contacts and let us know what you're thinking. Okay, so this story actually hit the waves last week, and it hasn't stopped. It is still cooking. NPR is putting out more interviews about this. The Washington Post just came out with an interview about this, but here's what went down. So, Nicole Hannah-Jones, who you might not remember, but I will refresh your memory. During the height of COVID, The New York Times rolled out, in the George Floyd riots, the New York Times rolled out this thing called the 1619 Project, which was a comprehensive curriculum for American public schools to use that basically just rewrote American history.

It didn't start in 1776. It actually started in 1619, when the first slaves arrived, the first black slaves arrived in America. And so, as you can guess, it rewrites all of American history. In terms of the oppressor and the oppressed, in terms of revolution, in terms of identifying and making reparations endlessly to previously persecuted minority groups, and the architect and the face of the 1619 Project was a woman named Nicole Hannah-Jones, and just to give you a sense of the scope of her influence.

It is still in play, so your local public school might still have this. The Pulitzer Center has awarded it multiple awards. It's in about 4,500 classrooms around the United States. Five state school systems have adopted it on a broad scale for all classrooms, and it affects about 25,000 K-12 students with online reading guides and curricular resources and teacher training on how to teach. American history through this Marxist lens. Now, Nicole Hannah-Jones is a woman of deep conviction, so deep, in fact, that she was willing to bring this ideology to bear.

In the choices she made when raising her own daughter. We are going to throw these links to the New York Times articles in the chat. They are behind a paywall, but we're going to... Just real quick, it's so important to note, because so many of the people in academia, media, politics, or whatever, are absolute total hypocrites. They talk about how public education is wonderful, and then they send their kids to the most... The most prestigious private schools ever, right? Right. We're so used to this kind of garbage.

Like, Barack Obama, like, against vouchers for kids in D.C., but he sends his kids, when he was president, to the most expensive schools ever. The friend school. This is not what Nicole Hannah-Jones did, though. No. Which is actually kind of surprising. Well, I mean, and a little bit of props to her, because I appreciate people who have the courage of their convictions. It's just that when you inflict them on your child.

And they're not working, but you persist in them because your ideology is so strong, and it's hurting your child that the issue comes. So, she wrote this long article eight years ago about how she had decided, she and her husband decided, to send their daughter to their neighborhood public school.

So, this is PS332, 302 in New York City, and she said this is how she characterized it. Eight years ago, I told Faraji, that's her husband, that I wanted to enroll Nadja, their daughter, in a segregated, low-income school, like on purpose. Faraji's eyes widened as I explained that if we remove Nadja, whose name we chose because it means liberated and free in Swahili, from the experience of most Black and Latino children, we would be part of the problem, saying my child deserved access to a good public school.

Felt like implying that children in bad schools deserved the schools they got too. I understood that so much of school segregation is structural, a result of decades of housing discrimination, of political calculations, and the machinations of policymakers, and of simple inertia.

So, she said, if more middle and upper class parents like me were to stay in the bad schools, we can change the schools. Somehow engaged parents, false. Fast forward to last week, where we get this follow-up article from Nicole Hannah-Jones. It's just so many quotable moments here, but she said, Toward the end of first grade, so she's walking us through the history now of her daughter's education, which now her daughter's a sophomore in high school.

Toward the end of first grade, Nadja started sometimes saying she didn't like her school, and complaining of how chaotic it was at lunch. So, I, Nicole, she decides to visit during lunch period, and she is shocked by what she sees.

Nadja's class and another class were sitting at their tables in the cafeteria with no lunch. And no adult supervision. Children were running wild, chasing, hitting, and pushing each other, while the teacher's aides and cafeteria workers stood by looking bored. She said that several times she had to instruct the children to stop striking each other, to sit down, and at one point she physically pulled two boys apart, which was probably illegal. When I asked one of the aides why the children weren't being supervised, she told me that the lunch period was short-staffed.

After I sat back down with Nadja, she told me, it's always like this, and that's why I don't want to go to this school. But they kept her. They kept her in the school. The wisdom of a child. Yes, they kept her in the school, and it progressively gets worse and worse. In the fourth grade is the worst year. They discover that Nadja's getting A's and A pluses on all her report cards, but she's actually coming home with homework and then bringing it back to school.

The homework's never getting corrected. Tests are never being given. Teachers are chronically absent and unreachable by the parents. The principal of the school It took like three months for them to even get an email back from her acknowledging her concerns, and still they persisted in sending her there.

Worst day of care ever. In the NPR interview that dropped yesterday, this is what Nicole Hannah-Jones still says about that decision. Quote, she got to be in a school with kids who looked like her. We had Caribbean festivals and African parties. She drew pictures of herself with black skin, and I was like, yeah, girl, you're not in a world that says that's not beautiful.

That's not the problem. That made it all okay? That's not the problem. What's the problem, Josh? The problem isn't that they're not loved. The problem is that it's an absolute... A basket case of dysfunction, and her daughter is right to say, this is ridiculous, and the daughter isn't going to, she's thinking that the daughter is going to thank her for this, like, thank you for giving me this cultural experience, and not try to, no, she's not going to think that at all.

She's going to be like, you achieved all this notoriety, all this fame and fortune, and you can't spare anything to help me? No, no, in fact, what you want to do is you want to show to all your friends in academia and the media. How virtuous you are by being a stalwart defender of the race and all this fairness and all this kind of stuff, and you leave me with a crappy school education.

To the daughter, I hear you. I would want to try to do what is ever best for my kids. Maybe she will become a hardcore right winger after this. This is terrible, and this is why I am so frustrated with the state of education today, and I am thankful, by the way, that we have the new federal tax credit.

Where you can direct, starting next year, starting January, $1,700 of your tax money to a scholarship-granting organization to get people out of schools like this and give them an opportunity to succeed. I would be so irate and frustrated if I were this daughter because it didn't hurt.

For Hannah Nicole Jones, what mattered the most was her own ego and what people thought of her, rather than her child's well-being, and that, to me, is unforgivable. But it's not surprising. I've known you for longer than I've known Erika, except I've seen the sacrifices you and your spouses have made to raise your children, to make sure that the best possible environment is there for your children. For liberals, children are means to an end. They aren't the end product. I mean, if you're pregnant and it's going to affect your job or something like that, abort it.

It's just a child. And that's exactly what this woman is doing. I worked alongside Heritage when the 1619 Project first came out. This woman is a grifter. She's been a grifter from day one, and now she's even using her child, and she's doing all these media interviews. Hey, look at me. With her daughter. I'm creating the worst possible environment for my child. I bet you there's a book coming or something. There's some way she's going to profit off of this, or maybe an NPR show.

Uh, she's a grifter. The 1619 project should not be in any schools. Anything from her or the NEA or any of these things should not be in any schools. It is part of the problem. It is wrong with the public education system. But the fact that anybody is listening to her, and recently there was a TV star, I want to say Cameron Manaheim. Who is speaking at a gay rights type event, or something like that. Yeah, it was a human rights campaign fundraiser.

Yeah, and she was lamenting that her son wasn't gay. Even though, I mean, he's in a theater. That's my toilet zone. Oh. But anyway, it's another example that Josh will go into later about just how the left, to the left, the children are props, either to be disposed of if they're unnecessary, or to be sent into the lab. I don't disagree with you on that, but I do think, I was talking about this actually with one of my family members, not my immediate family, but about what is it that people value?

Right, and this is what, for independents and conservatives, it's largely the same, you know, and J.D. Vance got attacked for this, but, you know, the idea is, Ordo Amoris, what are the order of your loves? Like, you know, your own, you know, spouse and children should be like, right, you know, obviously God is number one, but then right after that, it's your family. I care more about my daughter than I do my next-door neighbor. But progressivism says that is a moral failure on your part.

Right. It is not just that they like to pretend like it should be equal, but in fact, it is not. It is inverse. Right. They care more about the world. They care more about what is going on in Timbuktu than they do across the street or in their own town, so it is not that they do not order their loves either. It is an inversion. It is not like they are trying to pretend they are pure egalitarians. It is the opposite.

Right. So, they did a study on this. We talked about this on the LOOPcast before. Look at what people value. So, for conservatives and even independents, you know, it is right in the middle. It is the family, then the church, their co-workers, local community. Right, it is pre-political, then political. Then working outwards, whereas liberals, it is the opposite. So, for them, it is like, I want to show how virtuous they are. I care about the whole world. I care about the principles of equality more than my own daughter.

I am like, whoa. You should care about your daughter. Well, and this is why liberal education policies are sort of destined to fail, because no matter how much you keep telling yourself that people ought to prioritize those on the peripheries of your sphere of influence, so people in other countries, illegal immigrants who are not citizens, you should prioritize those. The fact is that it is deeply ingrained in human nature. God wrote it on our hearts. To have that order of love that we have a preference for, and not a preference in the sense of, I don't think that people in Africa have unequal dignity or less dignity than my children, but that I, here in this place, I have a more local desire.

It's so deeply ingrained in human nature that if your political policies try to deny that... Or tell people to ignore that, you're going to implode, and you're going to end up destroying your social order. Well, this is what we see with the response to this from the left. So, we get people like Sunny Hostin on The View then coming up and saying, okay, well, so she said, it's not that we need school choice. It's not that Nicole Hannah-Jones made the wrong choice.

It's that we as a society haven't funded these schools enough. So, we need to dump. We need to put more money into the school that her daughter is in, Public School 307, but it can't be the funding. So, guys, get this. This is crazy. Incredible money. United States schools serving low-income and non-white communities get more money per pupil, not less, and have for decades. We have been dumping money. We have been giving them the funding, and they just want more and more.

So, for example, the public school where Nadia experienced all this dysfunction that we're talking about now, they spend over $50,000 per pupil per year. Which is way above not only the national average, but also New York City's average. So, guys, money is not the issue here, and I think the key goes back to what she's talking about in her own observations of that first-grade lunchroom. It's terrible teachers, right? It's terrible teachers who the teachers' unions have made impossible to fire, right?

They can't fire the teachers. That's the one major, massive problem. There's no doubt. Yes, that is one issue. It's a culture, though. I mean, it's like, you could take all the, if you had a bunch of those horrible teachers and administrators, and then somehow put them in rural Michigan.

Like, people, the parents would have an uprising, and they would get rid of them. Like, no, we're not going to tolerate this. So, like, teachers unions have incredible power, but the fact is that the local area that has that school, they're like, they don't care enough to, you know, like, no, that's, I'm just, it's a daycare. I'm dropping my kid off, and it's not my problem anymore for seven hours. They don't care enough to demand more from it. And again, you're absolutely right.

It is not a resource problem. It's not that these schools don't have money. That is the biggest canard. There's absurd amounts of money, but they have terrible teachers, and the teachers, why would any good teacher want to work there? Because you're just butting your head against the wall, and the culture of the students and the parents are such that they don't care, and so there's fights everywhere. It's like, why would you be one person surrounded by a thousand people who completely have no interest in actual education?

So, yeah, it would drive you crazy. They need to watch that deep episode about, was it the Mississippi Miracle? Mississippi Miracle, top video of all time. I mean, they spend just about the least amount on every child, and they went from like, what, 48th to first or second? Yeah. As Josh said, it is not about the money.

Except I think the allure of money, because I don't want to condemn all the parents in this situation. It's the allure of money, and they're always told, like, the parents are told, they ask, what's the problem? And the school replies, we need more money. And a place like New York City goes, okay, here's another truckload. And then it's a whole new next generation that. Nobody sees the exact same problem then, or next class, I guess I should say. So, New York should become more like Mississippi, which is something nobody from New York ever said.

They need to have moral instruction. Strong values, not this rainbow jihad stuff, but like, you know, patriotism, love of friends and neighbors, like, you know, they need some old school back to basics and teaching math. Yeah, no, I mean, these schools are a major problem. There should be a class action suit led by this woman's daughter after she graduates against the New York school education system, just saying, you failed me so miserably. And just bankrupt them, because I think them being gone, we'd be better off with the kids than not.

That daughter, if she really has a true, she carries that torch on this, it would be phenomenal. It would be massive. I doubt it, but it would be awesome. I have a friend who works at the education department. I'll call her Meg, even though that's not a real name.

And whenever I ask her, how are things going, she's always like, I still have a job, so they're not going well, because all she wants to do is dismantle that department so badly. Dismantle the whole thing. I have a husband and kids and everything else, so I'll be well taken care of, except that this department, it shouldn't even exist. Yeah. Or maybe it does need to. Maybe we need to have the federal department of education make sure that we actually have, you know, order.

In the schools in New York City, and, you know, get them to do the Pledge of Allegiance, and teach them the basics, and root out all this crap. Maybe it could be a force for good. Yeah, maybe it could.

I mean, it is not going to go anywhere. I am still on the doge train. Yeah. But what we really need, I mean, the great tragedy of the historical moment right now is that, of course, this is an area where the Catholic school system could make such a huge difference, but we're at a point in history where, unfortunately, New York has been closing dozens of Catholic schools over the last few decades, and so there's this void there that there really isn't a lot of educational choice.

Like, even if New York City got choice right now, the Catholic schools That remain would be so full and over, that not everyone would get to make that choice. So, I think it has to be a both and, right? We have to both promote school choice so that the competition inspires the public schools to actually get the heck better. Like, you guys can't, these are fixable issues, and we've seen it in certain inner city school districts. I want to say Memphis was one of them, where you get a really strong superintendent, they bring in strong reforms that are not based on more Funding, or getting more money to the teachers or the teachers' unions, but on, like Josh was saying, on discipline, on pride in your community and your family and your country, and actually learning, reading, writing, and arithmetic.

So, it can be done. We know how to do it. We had a lot of these Catholic schools closed down, you know, in New York City and other places, but if we get New York to sign off on allowing the federal, you know, school choice tax credit, then everyone in New York, every Catholic in New York can then direct $1,700 of their federal tax money to a scholarship grant organization. To you, the taxpayer, it's a zero, you know, you give $1,700, you get that $1,700 back on your tax return.

It starts January 1st. So, you won't see that money back until the 15th of the next year, April 15th, but it's huge. It's a game changer, and so if all these Catholic schools then suddenly getting $1,700 checks, we're talking billions of dollars potentially, and so, yeah, we could maybe open some of these schools back up and start, you know, hey, give them an opportunity to escape a school like this. That'd be great. Yeah.

Amen. Let's do it. Okay, I did want to just, since we were talking about the education department, we had this breaking news yesterday or Monday, I've lost track of what day it is, that the education department is cutting off student loans for degrees that, as they're putting it, don't pay off. So, the programs that they see are failing that are on the chopping block for 2027, cosmetology, massage therapy, culinary arts. Medical and dental assisting, religious studies, social work, mental health counseling, fine and studio arts, music, graphic design, English literature, and early childhood education.

We have had... Massive reactions, let us say, to this announcement, and I wanted to get your all's take on the most useless degrees, and are these all useless degrees that we should get the federal government out of funding? Not all of them are useless, but I support this 100%.

You could do it in trade schools. Trade schools, every single one you mentioned, trade schools would be, growing up, I mean, cosmetology, not that I ever dreamed to be a cosmetologist, I don't like outer space. Good to hear.

Except every one of those, you used to go to trade school, and back in my hometown, they still, for things like, I have a friend whose daughter is going to cosmetology school, and it is a trade school. It is not a school where you need to bankrupt the bank, or bankrupt your bank. It is funny you say that, because in Hillsdale, there is a cosmetology school. It is Hillsdale Beauty College.

Very different than Hillsdale College. Yeah, I went to Hillsdale Beauty College, yeah. I love that. All right, well, there goes the eating. Well, some people are upset about it, like, wait a minute now. Some of these things are very good, like studying literature or religion or whatever, and it's like, yes, of course, they might be good, but the purpose of the public policy is, I could argue, I would love it for the taxpayer to support zero.

Not a single major. That would actually be my preference, but if you are, then it should really only be for like STEM, and I didn't go to school for STEM. You know, I went for studying economics and history, so I'm sorry. I would not allow for that, but why? Why is this important? The purpose of this is to reduce the majors where the likelihood of people are going to earn enough money to be able to pay back the loans for which they got.

We should eliminate the ones that are not, you know, we have high rates of people not being able to afford it, so it is only a natural thing for the taxpayers to say, these specific majors, some of them might be just fine, some of them might be just good, but that does not mean that we should continue to finance these people for millions of dollars if they are not able to return the money, and they end up, you know.

So, what we're doing by doing this is we're helping people discern that, wait a minute now, if I want to do something like cosmetology or whatever you say, or religious instruction, I'm going to have to find another path. And you know what? We do have charities, people. We do have nonprofit organizations that could say, you know what? We want to help support it. We want to make sure kids get good education. We donate to Franciscan universities so they can make more scholarships for kids who are studying theology.

There are ways that we can address this. The fact of the matter is, everything we are talking about, anything that the Trump administration is saying, we need to redo this, some sort of fiscal responsibility, we cannot have people pushing back on every one of these things. It drives me crazy. Should we borrow money from China?

So that we can finance people going for cosmetology major. No. No. We got to stop doing this, people. We're way in over, like, have you seen what's going on in the bond market? Like, we are, it's going to get much more expensive to borrow money. Every day, it's getting more expensive. So, we can't be, we got to do something. So, like, that's the problem. Anytime you want to try to cut back on any program, people.

Holler and moan, like, look. Cut it. We need to trim some of the stuff. We're going crazy. Right, and are people going to, like, as a result of this, will some people have to change their life trajectory and rethink what they're doing? Yes, and that could be, like you pointed out, Josh, a really good thing. But also, what could happen is, if we continue to cut the federal funding for these degrees, it also could be the case that these schools could start rethinking how they charge and what they're...

asking of students for these degrees. That's a huge player in this. Harvard should not be getting federal funding. They have an endowment that's larger than most third world countries, and they need to start stepping up to the plate and paying for these majors where they know that kids... So the thing is, you go to Harvard, you're going to be paying the same tuition and the same cost of living if you are an early childhood education major. Or, if you are like an engineering major, that's ridiculous.

It's ridiculous that schools have not had to think about this long and hard, and come up with ways to reduce tuition, reduce room and board over the years, and if this helps that. Start to happen, then I am all for that. So, like you said, Josh, we have to do something. We can't just sit around, because clearly higher education is utterly broken, and it's breaking the future generations of America right now. So, I am all for, I love English Lit, I love English majors, love the religious studies, the theology majors, but that should not be the federal government's role to subsidize.

Yeah, I mean, there's other ways to solve the problem. Yeah, exactly. Okay, rolling into good news. All right, I'm a little torn on this one, so I want your guys' take on if it's actually good news. I think it is because I've had to help my children apply for passports, but we got this bizarre rollout. of a new government program this week. It felt like an Apple product rollout. We got Marco Rubio up on stage, and can we just, like, roll him?

I hope I have the right link here, because this was great. Yes. All right. The new U.S. passport. Now, at the State Department, we're not waiting. We move pretty quick. We try to move very fast, so we're not waiting until 2027 to bring you something really exciting.

A passport application experience you can complete entirely from home. All right, so what he's rolling out, this is an event rolling out america.gov, and this is going to be your one-stop shopping for all things government. So, you go on there, you can talk to it, like you talk to Google, like a little bit of AI kind of thing going on here, but you can get your, you put in your information, you can ask questions like, which military service is best for me?

You can enroll. In the welfare programs, if you need to, you can check your status on immigration, on payments, on taxes. It is all one-stop shopping, eliminating buckets of paperwork, and this is sort of what I have been asking for. Like, this is what the internet should be for, and this event was kind of fun. So, a couple of observations. So, this was like government to me, the internet is our infrastructure in a way. It is a highway, right, of information, and this is government actually using the infrastructure, and making it better to tangibly make our lives better.

Like, my life will be tangibly better if I don't have to, well, this will be the state level, I don't have to go to the DMV in person, right? My life will be tangibly better if I don't have to- Do you have to every time? I do. Wow. See you here in Michigan.

Like, unless you're changing something, like, I can renew it through the mail, or online. Oh, renewals. Right, right. Renewals can be through the mail now. That is, like, new, but yeah, if you're going to change something, yeah. So, oh, you can actually, as a married woman, if you change your name when you get married, you can still vote, right? Because you can change your name easily at America.gov. So, there are downsides to it, you're saying. Everything. Yeah. Reveal the 19th this time.

He's kidding. All right. And then, like, to me, this is also reducing the bureaucratic state, right? We don't have to fill out 500 paper forms and mail them in. It is going to reduce the oversight and the number of jobs in the federal government, which is great.

I think one of the things about this is that it is just finally bringing some of the 21st century technology to the federal government. So, banks allow you to cash a check with your phone. You can deposit it.

You don't actually have to go into the bank. They take a picture. Well, and then, like, you know, private businesses, you know, like banks, I have to verify stuff, and I give them a few, you know, like, which of these cars were once, did you drive, and where addresses, as a way to verify my information, and so we're able to move forward with this stuff, whereas getting a passport was still kind of stuck in 1980, where you're having to go to the post office, get a picture taken, fill out the paperwork, send it to the mail.

Two or three months later, it finally comes. It seems so much more natural. I think what is good is that we finally moved away from just career bureaucrats, and we got people from the private sector who said, why don't we do this? Why don't we just have you upload the photo, and you just verify your identification, and then we can just move on with the passport application and expedite this kind of stuff? Why can't government get with it? Right, and be more efficient.

Yeah, and hopefully less expensive, too, because renewing your passport and expediting it can cost a lot of money, and it is still not reliable. They are like, yeah, you can pay more to expedite it. Maybe it will reach you in time. Yeah. So, I mean, there's always downsides that you got to watch out for, and when the government has this much information, they already have all this information. They already have it. You want to make sure whoever's controlling it, like if Joe Biden or...

When Kamala Harris were president, and somebody said, what military service should I join? They'd probably say the Peace Corps. So, you just, well, I think it's Jeff who said, you always need to be vigilant, and that's true in this case. Yeah. But this, I think this is very good news. I think it's great news, and I, yeah, I think the, the nervousness came with the incorporation of artificial intelligence and the sort of like AGI aspect to it, that it, it creates a vulnerability when the government, when the government's more efficient, there is also, like you said, Tom, who's, who's pulling the strings then is going to make a bigger difference in your life when access to all this information, which they already have, is now that much easier to, you know, Manipulate, weaponize, what have you.

Someone else was pointing out, though, that this comes at a perfect time because we have all this sort of like AI nervousness and AI caution going on that, okay, maybe we should slow down the AI rollout. Well, if AI agents are jumping their sandboxes and they're getting out of control, having this kind of vulnerability will actually We require America to stay on top of the AI game, because if we lose, or we get behind China, or we get behind other nations on the AI game, because we are pausing for safety concerns, then that is going to, in turn, make us vulnerable to China accessing all of this information.

So, it might be this sort of, like, Trump sees this as a really good time to roll this out, because it is going to inspire us to want to be at the top of the AI game. I just think part of it is the AI stuff. It's just like helping you, like you said, with Google, like go through the myriad of different, I mean, there's like thousands of federal agencies on everything. Yeah. Like, oh, food stamps. Actually, that's part of the U.S.

Department of Agriculture. Really? So, the idea is that you can type into the question, like, I'm... I am a farmer. I am looking for help on this, and it can direct you to, oh, actually, that is the forestry. Let me send you over there. You are like, what? Oh, okay. So, I think that can be actually very valuable from a customer service standpoint, because otherwise, you are like, I have no idea what I am supposed to do. I need a permit for this or that, or what?

It can be helpful, I think, to direct you to where you need to go. All right, let us do it. Josh, go for it. We're talking about some good news? Well, look, Pope Leo sent a letter to his favorite baseball team. Look at this, huh?

And, of course, the White Sox are loving this. He said, to Mr. Jerry Reisenhoff, chairman of the Chicago White Sox, I was pleased to receive the kind letter that you sent following the game that took place at Rape Field on August 11, 2026. I am most grateful for this thoughtful gesture. As we mentioned before, they did a big tribute to Poblio at the game, and they painted, like, a mural and, you know, all that stuff. As he said, the Pope continues, as I've noted, sport can be truly...

Can truly become a school of life where all can learn that abundance does not come from victory at any cost, but from sharing and respecting others and from the joy of walking together. In this spirit, it is my hope that the White Sox will continue to foster bonds of friendship and solidarity among the people, and thus bear hopeful witness to the possibility of living and working together in peace. With these sentiments, I willfully invoke the Almighty's abundant blessings upon you and your loved ones.

And it's just, you know, it's worth noting the Chicago White Sox, for the previous two seasons, were absolutely terrible. Terrible teams. And then all of a sudden, you get, you know, the Pope, you know, they put a, they paint the Pope mural at their stadium, and they send them a letter telling them what they did, and all of a sudden, the White Sox are in the playoffs! So, go figure. And you know what? The last time the White Sox We're in the World Series.

They had a Pope in the audience, this same Pope, Pope Leo. So, what if they get the... Can you imagine? It's on the screen right now. Yeah. It'd be great. That's great. So, what you're saying, it was good we traded Popes last season? I'm telling you. You know, I wonder how our old boss, Brian, thinks about this, because Brian, of course, now the ambassador to the Vatican, longtime Chicago Cubs fan. Loving it. He's loving it.

Hopefully, there's a friendly bet there. You know, actually, it is possible. The Cubs are in the playoffs, too. You can have both Chicago teams in the World Series. Could you imagine Brian and the Pope, like, all right, who's going to win, you know? I want to see the picture in Brian's living room with a couple of beers on the table, the Pope eating some popcorn. Yeah, feet up on the table, yeah.

Brian and Bob from Chicago, I'm here for it. Oh, let's do it, let's do it. All right, Tom, you got some good news? Oh, did you have another one, Josh? I think you have two in there. Well, I just, real quick, the University of Michigan had that really ridiculous. The first thing they are going to do for the first semester for freshmen, they are going to do no grades, and the backlash was so big, they paused it. So, that is good.

Good news. There we go. All right. Tom? Mine is a little bit of a history lesson, and also there's an addendum that maybe, it's not good news, but of what needs to happen next. Today is the 50th anniversary of the Hyde Amendment, 1976, September 30th. There's a great op-ed this morning in First Things by Representative Riley Moore from West Virginia and Kelsey Reinhart, President and CEO of CatholicVote.

And when Kelsey and we all were thinking about doing an op-ed, recognizing this, Riley Moore was the natural person to reach out to. When Riley Moore was a young man, he's still relatively young to me, but when he was a very young man in his early 20s, he wanted to work for Henry Hyde. But Henry Hyde said, I'm not hiring. Henry Hyde's chief of staff was the owner of an Irish pub that still exists in Alexandria called Murphy's. So, Riley Moore went to the bar and got a job there, and then finally approached the owner and said, I really want to work for your boss.

And the owner said, you can work for him as long as you keep on working here because we're short-staffed. So, he worked for Henry Hyde and worked at this bar, and worked in the Foreign Affairs Committee. When Henry was first approached in 1976, because at the time, the pro-life movement, all they wanted to do was a human life amendment. The concept of what became the Hyde Amendment was divisive at the time, and Henry even went down to the floor. Henry did not want to do it.

He was a freshman member. He did not want to do it, except he was approached by some pro-life activists saying, like, we can save as many babies as possible, and nobody else would do it, so Henry stepped up and became. The pro-life champion that we should all remember him as, and he went down to the floor at the time and said, I want to save all the babies, except I'm going to save as many as I can throughout my career.

And the Hyde Amendment has saved, Charlotte Lozier put together the numbers, and it saved about 2.6 million babies since 1976. And that is a fantastic number. I do not want to take away from that number. However, since 1976, there have been about 68 million abortions. So, the Hyde Amendment overall has saved about 4%.

Of the babies being killed by abortion. Good mockers put together, if you get rid of the Hyde Amendment, it would only increase the national total of abortions by about 2.5%. So, Henry Hyde's job is just not done. For people like me who work on the Hill, for elected members of Congress, the fact that we haven't modified positively the Hyde Amendment or done other things to slow down this number of abortions, and Charlotte Lozier's own numbers also show... Why it's becoming more difficult, and the Hyde Amendment each year is saving less babies.

Because in 2023, the Hyde Amendment saved 36,000 babies. In 2024, it saved 33,000. This year, it has only saved about 24,000, and that is because of Obamacare, which means that they do not have to listen to the Hyde Amendment when taxpayer funds are funding directly these health care exchanges that pay for abortions. And then also the abortion pill. Which, right now, there is a case from Louisiana that could have a big impact. There is a study being done at the FDA, all being slow walked by this administration, unfortunately, until after the elections.

Except, it is about time that pro-lifers wake up, though, and get a little bit more aggressive, because those 2.6 million babies, it is wonderful that they are part of the society today. But there's 96% other babies that should have been as well, and we have a lot more work in front of us.

Yeah, and I know you were just at a Students for Life conference last week that you were at. Well, I did a briefing with SBA List on the history for Susan B. Anthony for Life America, which they go through more name changes than Bruce Jenner.

Well, that is a comparison that is not too flattering. I wanted to ask you. I am going to have to remember that the next time I see Marjorie. Right. I will send her the clip. When you say get more aggressive, if you could do, if you had like. If you had power for a day to do two things, maybe, in terms of saving that other 96% of babies, what would be most effective for the pro-life movement to achieve right now?

Well, the most effective would be getting rid of Mifepristone. That would save the most babies right now, or at least going back to the 1999 regs. The anniversary of that being approved was just this past week as well. Talk about a horrendous anniversary, which the other side celebrate now is like International Abortion Day or something like that, as if it's something to be celebrated. If I had two options, though, Chris Smith from New Jersey has a bill, no taxpayer funding for abortion act.

Which, he's revised since Obamacare passed, because it's a bill he's had for years, and it looks at every single funding stream going to abortion providers, because Labor Department, Education Department, Commerce Department, Small Business Administration, all get money. Right.

From taxpayer, or I'll give money, taxpayer money to abortion providers or abortion supporters. So, those two things, getting rid of Mifepristone, because about over 70%, I think now, abortions are being done by the abortion drug. And then also, just for the sake of the nation's conscience, getting taxpayers completely, completely out of the abortion business.

Amen. Let's do it. Let's do it. All right, rolling into C block. Speaking of abortion, this was really disturbing to me. So, this past week, former President Joe Biden, devout Catholic, accepted an award from Planned Parenthood. So, he received the 2026 Sonia Shore Sloan Service Award from the abortion giant and his own wife, Jill.

I handed him the award and said she had never been prouder in her life. Let's just roll that tape. It is my great honor and my great joy to present this year's Sophie Sloan Award to the 46th... You can see him walking up. I mean, he looks like he's at death's door.

Is that Mitch McConnell? All right, we can cut that. So, he gives a little speech, and he talks about, after the Dobbs decision, how he, I'll just read it. Following the Dobbs decision as president, I tried to do what I knew Sonny Sloan, who was an abortion activist, would have done.

And then he claimed that abortion was emergency health care, and that he took action, quote, we signed executive orders to protect access to reproductive health care, including emergency medical care. And he told the Planned Parenthood audience that they shouldn't be, they shouldn't lose heart after the Dobbs decision, because they still have political power. He said, you have no idea how powerful women are in this country. You're about to find out. And, you know, rah, rah, rah, everyone was very excited. I think, like, for me, just the...

The most disturbing thing about this wasn't so much that, oh, he accepted the award and Planned Parenthood recognized him. None of that was a surprise or a shock, but the shock was seeing this man walk up there, and he's clearly deteriorated in his health. We know he's battling cancer. He's not going to live another 20 years, that's for sure. But someone who's coming this close to meeting his maker? And Almighty God, the creator of human life, and having to answer for all that, that he's still persisting in this celebration of the greatest offense to God Almighty, right up until the moment of death.

And to me, it's such, you know, we just released a video. For the deep, about why don't bishops do something more about these politicians who persist in their error and in scandal? Seeing a man who is clearly dying up there, persisting in this horrible error, to me, it just brings home the reality that it is not because we want to make a political statement that we say these things. It is not because we want our tribe to win or our side to win, but it is for his own sake and his soul's sake is truly in peril that he is still persisting in this.

When a candidate for railroad commissioner in the state of Texas makes a comment about how surprising it is to see hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of students from India in the stands, a bishop, a Catholic bishop, took him, you know, accused him of racism and shook his finger at him. But when a Catholic, former president of the United States, gets an award, From the largest provider and committer of abortions in the United States. Has anyone heard any bishop condemn this? Isn't that weird?

Isn't that weird? Isn't a former president who claims to be Catholic more of a bigger deal than a railroad commissioner? Like, even if you think both are wrong. What? This is what I'm saying. Like, if you wanted to come out, and I didn't even think, by the way, I don't even think what Beau French said was racist, okay? But, like, racism is the thing that will get bishops screaming big time. They'll jump to Twitter, they'll get out there and condemn it.

When it's authentically racist, like, fine. But how about, like, I don't know, the murdering of babies? That seems like a bigger deal to me. I don't know. Call me crazy. And it's not racism as much as immigration. Being the issue here. Beau French wasn't criticizing the Indian people or anything like that. He was criticizing what are all these kids doing at this game that normally shouldn't be there. You expect kids from Texas, right? I mean, Hispanic, white, black, that's what Texas has been historically, those three races.

Again, what animates bishops? You are right. So, immigration, I would say also racism, but racism and immigration are things that will animate bishops, because it is very easy for them to show, I am against this, and this is terrible.

Like, dude, show the courage on this. And then, when you complain about the bishops not doing enough on abortion, they're like, I wrote a letter over here that got published. I'm like, oh, okay, good. Here's a cookie. Ooh, a letter.

I just want to be, because when groups like ours, and all of us personally, when we speak out against the immigration policies of a Biden presidency or anything like that, the first thing the left does is throw at us. Is that because we have those views, it's because we're racists, and it's not.

We all know it's not. It's because we love this country. We see what the problems that Biden's policies and liberal policies do. But back to the award. One, when I was at the March for Life, we found a picture from the early 1980s of Joe Biden raising money for the Human Life Amendment. So, I mean, talk about how Henry Hyde used to say, like, when he goes, When a pro-life activist goes to heaven, he's greeted by a choir of angels not seen on this earth.

Always gets me. I don't know what Joe Biden's going to face. But secondly, Planned Parenthood used to have an award. I think the Sonny Sloan one supersedes it now. It was called the Margaret, and Hillary Clinton got it. It was the Margaret Sanger Award. Yeah, that's the national chapter. This was the Delaware chapter.

Okay. They're all eugenicists. I get them all confused. There's where I'm kind of racist. All those eugenicists look alike to me. Yeah. Well, we should pray for the soul of Joe Biden, and yeah, go ahead, please. One last thing. When I talk about aggressiveness that I want to see from the pro-life movement, it is the aggressiveness I saw from the pro-abortion movement and from Joe Biden's people surrounding him after the Dobbs decision. They were animated. They went through and changed regulations and everything.

They didn't care about the process or anything else. It was all about how can we kill as many babies as possible. I want people to do the exact same thing about how can we save as many babies as possible.

Amen to that, brother. Preach it. Preach it. Yeah, and thank you both for all of your work through the years to try and make that happen, because you have been on the ground with this much longer than I have. All right, so now let us get into some happy turn here. Pope Leo had his apostolic visit to the country of France, and many of us right now associate France with the great Muslim invasion from North Africa, which is happening, the great secularization.

We might even... Think, if we are historically minded, about the French Revolution, where they took down Our Lady in Notre Dame and put up the Goddess of Reason on the altar, and they guillotined the king, and they slaughtered all of the priests and the clergy, and they turned the nuns out of their convents. So, France has had a rough run of it for the last few years, but this visit to France was one of the most uplifting events in European history I have seen, probably since Pope John Paul II was flying around for World Youth Days.

It was beautiful. So, I am just going to walk through a couple of the highlights and get your all's reaction to it. He started the visit at Lourdes, the beautiful shrine at Lourdes where Our Lady appeared to Bernadette, and he really honed in on the culture of death. The whole visit sort of surrounded this theme, but He condemned euthanasia in particular as false compassion, declaring what is legal is not necessarily moral, and there's this beautiful viral image that came out of that event.

He embraces this, there she is, this beautiful disabled young girl named Marie Garance, and this image has just gone. Totally viral all over the world. This little girl, she was once a ward of the state of France. She was abandoned by her own parents, but she was adopted. Oh, that sounds good. She was adopted when she was just 16 months old by this Catholic couple. Their names are Clotilde and Nicolas Noel. They have six children of their own, and they have adopted three extremely disabled children from the state of France.

And why is this important? Because France just enacted a law last month, ahead of the Pope's visit, that allows assisted suicide for eligible adults, and in certain cases, permits a doctor or nurse to administer the lethal substance. This is closely mirroring a similar law that's been in the Netherlands forever, where the Netherlands just revealed that last year, they euthanized the first, or they, excuse me, they assisted in the death of the first. First, non-infant toddler.

A two-year-old boy with disabilities, and of course, we have seen in Spain and the Netherlands in the last year, minors choosing, quote-unquote, assisted suicide for things as, you know, for mental health reasons, for epileptic seizures, for things that are livable with, but the push for euthanasia in France, the Pope comes in, and he just leans into it, and he said to them, To the people who are disabled there at Lourdes, he said, I know that for some of you, because of your particular illnesses and at times your terrible pain, your horizon may appear dark, uncertain, and without hope.

And he said, but no human law. That's you, Emmanuel Macron. No human law should ever make you lose the certainty of your dignity. On the contrary, it is precisely in the name of this inalienable dignity of the human person that we must reject the temptation to cause death under the guise of false compassion. It is impossible to regard causing death as something normal, and again, what is legal is not necessarily moral.

I mean, you can't say much more than that. But here in the United States, we're facing this, right? We're facing this in the United States right now. We have diocese, we have Cardinal Stupich, God bless him, and sisters in Illinois who are fighting through the courts for their right to not kill people who are in their care. We have MAID in Canada, which now kills more people per year than guns kill in the United States, which is an astonishing statistic. So, we talk about abortion, but on the other end of life, I just love that the Pope made this a centerpiece of his visit there.

I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. The first thing I thought when I saw that picture of the Pope with that young woman was it looked like the Pieta. Yeah. It was just like a work of art. Beautiful. Yeah, people have made that comparison.

Yeah. Well, I'm making it. I didn't read it from other people. Because it's true. The warning that it's coming here any day now is completely true. We need to fight back against it. You hear the horror stories. I mean, there's just so many. I mean, up in Canada, you're more likely to get instructions about, if you're diagnosed with any sort of cancer that might be aggressive, you're more likely to get a notice about euthanasia before you are about a treatment plan, and that's why so many.

We lived on the Canadian border. That is why, even to this day, doctors and all still come over to the United States for treatment, because we are so much far ahead. Our system, which the Democrats claim is the worst in the world, so many people come to benefit from it. But I think it is legal now in about 15 states, and the George Soros' of the world are trying to make it legal in all 50. Yeah, I am only an hour from Canada, and there are people in Sault Ste.

Marie who come down to use the hospitals here. Northern Michigan, I can assure you that, to this day. I mean, it's like, you want treatment, you got to pay for it. I mean, it's free in Canada, but as you say, the solutions they have, it's like, you know, maybe you could just kill yourself. Like, oh, I'm actually a brother.

Rather not. Thank you very much. It is bizarre. It is a culture of death. I mean, and I just love that, you know, Pope Leo, you know, he made a point of talking about the martyrs. of the French Revolution. He stopped by the steps where a lot of the priests were killed. I mean, just this guy, I am loving what he is doing there. I am loving this so much, and the youth are loving it too. So, he had this massive rally that drew 80,000 youth, and there were, I do not know if you can pull up some of this footage, Celine, but they had a whole dramatic presentation for the Pope of the Saints.

Oh, there's the Champs-Élysées. So, this is actually leading up to the mass, which drew upwards of a million people. I think it was 800,000 were actually on the Champs-Élysées for mass. You can see just the crowds there. I have been there, and it certainly was not that crowded. It is a massive boulevard through the center of Paris under the Arc de Triomphe there, and this is just so overwhelming. Again, this is reminiscent of Rockstar JP2 World Youth Day rallies from my youth.

I love the photos of the priest doing confessions in the street. That was awesome. Yeah, we had confessions going on, priests saying we were standing there for three hours just hearing confession after confession, and just the outpouring of grace there. I loved it. Yeah, he also gave, I mean, so many great talks. We need to compile all of the talks he gave in the homilies for this pilgrimage into one book or something, because at the closing mass at Metz Cathedral.

Which is a little further out in France. He talked about Europe and its Christian roots, and that you can't understand Europe without mentioning Christianity, and he said this right in front. Emmanuel Macron had said, so he's the, Emmanuel Macron had been like, no, I'm not going to go to the closing mass. I'm not going to go to mass, and then as the visits progressing, Macron is realizing that this pope is drawing tens and hundreds of thousands of French people. To him, and he's like, actually, I think I'll go to that last mass.

I think I'll show up there. So, you know, did he have a conversion of the heart? I'm not so sure, but a politician is like, hey, all publicity is good publicity. So, he shows up to hear the Pope tell him that Europe cannot be understood as a mere cultural and historical reality or a geographical one, but that it's flourished and progressed because it was able to draw on the best aspects of its past, including... Most fundamentally, the Christian faith. So, again, he was just preaching it.

Let us hope this is a true spark amongst the French people. It would be great. Eldest daughter of the church. We need her back. We need her. We do need her back. We do need her back. And as here in America, there does seem to be a resurgence of the faith going on, and it is at a small scale. And yes, all the naysayers can be. Ryan Berg is going to come after me and be like, I'm going to come after you.

Well, actually, more people are leaving the church than coming in, but there's been an incredible turnaround. So Catholic baptisms among French 18 to 25 year old increased about 150 percent in from 1919 to 2024. And the share of adult baptisms rose from 23% before 2020 to 36%. So, the majority of adults being baptized are young adults, 18 to 25. I'm sorry, not the majority, but a growing number are 18 to 25 years old. Young adults are the largest age group of adult converts in 2025, and in 2020, converts ages...

26 to 40 had outnumbered those by 2 to 1, and it is not just Gen Z, but also teenage baptisms. So, 18 and under have increased 50%. So, it is also Gen Alpha seems to be rediscovering. Let us do it. Let us do it. And what is beautiful of it, they seem to be Raymond Burke.

...type conversions, or coming to the church and not James Martin coming to the church. And I only know that anecdotally, except every time I'm fascinated and just want to talk to them forever when I'm meeting new converts. Yeah. Yeah, it's the best. We love converts. I'm a convert. It's pretty awesome. All right, let's roll on into the Twilight Zone. Josh.

Please tell us about Cameron. You stole my thunder a little bit on this one, Tom, but this actress, Cameron Manheim, she really wanted her son to be gay, and she would dress him up and drag, and just was so disappointed that Milo ended up being straight. Let's roll this tape. This woman is crazy. I always wanted a gay son.

I did. I love that relationship between gay sons and their mothers. I want to be the picket sign holding mom who would beat the shit out of somebody for her kid. I mean, let's just admit it. Gay sons are the best, right?

Photographs of my son in high heels, in full drag. He knows every word to every musical ever written. His fairy godfather, Aaron Walton, is here with us tonight. I mean, truly, I thought I had this f****** thing locked up. Pardon my French. But no, no. He's the only straight guy in his entire musical theater company.

Again, this is the same problem with, you know, at the top of the hour, when we talked about, you know, Hannah Nicole Jones, it's like, it's not about, their children aren't about, you know, it's not the idea that you would sacrifice for your own children. You want to show to everyone else how virtuous you are by your own child. And like, it's, to me, it's, of course, strange.

Not only that you would want your son to be, I mean, I still, yes, I still think homosexuality is deviant. You know, it's wrong. It's disordered. I would be mortified if one of my children was gay. Terrible. But it's one thing to be, like, tolerant, I suppose, of the two. But, like, to actually want one? It says a lot about you.

It shows you that, again, just like the person in the Project 1619 project, you want to just signal to everyone else in your own community, all your friends, how virtuous you are. Oh, look at me. Look at my kid.

You know, I don't want grandchildren. I get to go be a picketer protesting. I don't want grandchildren. Yeah, you don't want grandchildren. Well, that's not a problem now, Tom. We can just make them with a surrogate. No problem. Yeah, no, it's the commodification of children that it just rife. And the thing that got me here, too, it's just like we were told, and it was drilled into us for so long, that being gay and having what we would call same-sex attraction is this immutable characteristic that you're born with.

But she clearly does not believe that here, because she spent his entire childhood dressing him up as a girl, hoping that he would somehow trans himself or be gay. And so, clearly, they don't believe that either. This is not inimutable. Like, I'm willing to grant that, you know, all of us All of us are sexual beings. All of us are fallen, and so for the most part, we all have some weird, like, sex thing. Not necessarily weird, but, you know, we have to, like, we have to learn chastity, right?

We have to develop the virtue of chastity, but to say that, like, I hope that they're born with this particular struggle against a whole and normal and healthy lifestyle. It's just, it's so wrong coming from a mom. It's just the inversion of motherhood. It's a gargoyle of what we're supposed to be. And it's the inversion of normal. Like, the normal thing would be for a man to be attracted to a woman, and for a woman to be attracted to a man.

That's what's normal, and why do you want the opposite of normal? Like, I mean, like, you know, if We shouldn't discriminate against gays and stuff. We shouldn't, you know, bully them. Okay, sure, but like, you would still want the normal. Like, I just, it's hard.

Yeah. Yeah, she talks about later on in the clip, she's like, she had so much envy of her friend who had a gay son. Oh my gosh, girl. And what an indictment on musical theater as an art form, right? That we're all just like, how do you turn your kid gay? You show them musical theater numbers from the nihilistic Broadway culture that we have developed here in America. But I could go on and on about that. My Twilight Zone dovetails so nicely, Josh, with yours.

It's like we were on the same gay wavelength. This is amazing. Hey, wait a minute. We got this. Straight wavelength. Very straight wavelength. Straight wavelength. We are very straight. So, we have this study coming out of the CDC.

And it turns out that American teens, sorry, Cameron, are actually becoming straight again, with especially female bisexuality is in sharp retreat in the youngest cohorts. Thank God, right? So, if you look at the graph here, I want you to look at the red line. So, this is American ninth graders over the last few years. So, in 2015, at the far left, the first year that they're counting, there was about 12% it looks like of ninth graders. Identified as some form of LGBTQ+, it peaks massively in 2021, I wonder why, with about 26% of 9th graders saying that they're some form of sexual deviancy.

And now it's way back down. We're almost back to 2015 levels, with only about 13.5% of 9th graders identifying this way. So, to me, this indicates that we had what would be called a massive social contagion going on for the last 11 years, and that the power of suggestion, as Cameron was describing her effort to do the power of suggestion with her son to make him gay, is perhaps more at play here than some...

You know, suddenly, American children in 2021 were able to finally express their authentic selves. Not sure that that's what's going on when we have such a fluctuation in just five years, but this is good news. And to follow up on that, we have this from this middle school in Massachusetts. The administrators are throwing a hissy fit because it turns out the kids don't want to be gay anymore. Can you just... Roll that tape.

Plays of intolerance and homophobia are unacceptable. This type of intolerant rhetoric starts in the home. Parents angry at town hall over intolerance at Marshall Simons Middle School. Kids were asked to wear rainbow clothes in honor of Pride Spirit Day, but some organized a counter-protest wearing red, white, and blue or black. The principal sharing a statement to families that Pride posters were ripped down, stickers ripped up. Some students chanted, USA are my... All right, I'm going to use that. It was an unruly disruption.

It was an unruly disruption. It was organized ahead of time. While some parents were upset, others say it was overblown. Some of the kids threw the stickers on the ground, but, you know, I can only speak for my daughter. She just, she didn't want to wear that to school. It's not that she wanted to hurt anybody's feelings. She says her daughter felt coerced to participate in the Pride event and was offended by some of the messages, like this quote from Tennessee Williams.

Human heart cannot be straight. It is curves and winds, and my daughter just kind of said, you know, Mom, that's offensive to me, who I am straight. I mean, Massachusetts. A little bit of whiplash coming. That mama's doing something right. Yep. Go, Mom. All right. Go ahead, Tom. What's your twilight zone? Oh, no. Yeah, well, I'm going to welcome you to the all-new LOOPcast, all gay, all the time.

There is a hookup app for same-sex attracted people called Grindr. I've heard of it. Yeah, it's right. It's not about long-term relationships, folks. It's a grinder. No, and it's only same-sex attracted, for only same-sex attracted folks. They've been taking a bigger and bigger role in politics. They hired a lobbyist who's actually Deb Fischer's former chief of staff.

What? A Republican senator from Nebraska, yeah. Whoa. And they are now pushing... And their top thing that they want to be pushing for is IVF and surrogacy as their top issues. This is the Grindr CEO. I was at a meeting yesterday, and it's an off-the-record meeting, but this was after the meeting, because during the meeting, I mentioned about this, that we have to be wary of it, because I'm telling you right now, between Hill staff and between too many members of Congress, they have no problem with surrogacy or IVF.

They know people who can, we have a long road ahead of us in convincing these people what is wrong with that process. A guy came up to me after the meeting. He said, you know, the head of Grindr gives a lot of money to the Republican Party, and I'm like, I don't care. I would give that money back immediately because he gives a lot of money to the president as well. You're a big supporter of the president. Well, I'm not a big supporter of him taking Grindr money, though, but there is just this feeling among politicians that is very simple, and there's so many horror stories out there, but I've made it clear.

That, because now the two most visible supporters of IVF and surrogacy are China and Grindr. So, you are either with us or you are with them. And I will put it on the letters I send up to the Hill, because I give a lot of briefings on IVF and surrogacy up on the Hill, because nobody else really wants to talk to it. Friend of the show, Katie Faust, she's been fantastic on this. She's out front. Emma Waters at Heritage, fantastic on this.

And those are just her evangelical friends who are great on the issue. But I'm going to make it very clear to offices that what you're supporting is the same thing that Grind in China is supporting. And if that's the camp you want to live in. Maybe if our listeners could talk more about that, then... Yeah. Exactly. There's the IDF's legacy.

Just an idea, guys. Just an idea. Yeah, this is the modern slave trade, and it's crazy that Grindr, which is a one-night-stand hookup app, would be like, let's support making children. And of course, it's not crazy, because there's a direct line between separating sex utterly from the baby-making process, and separating motherhood and fatherhood from buying children and manufacturing children, and there's a direct line from that to the view of sex that is promoted by Grindr. There's another direct line. To the view of the human person that the Chinese Communist Party promotes, which is, yeah, there is no family.

The state is your family, and so you manufacture more Chinese babies, you manufacture them in America so they can have, you know, double, all, the whole thing is so perverted. That, yeah, we have got to address this as, and like you mentioned our two evangelical friends, Emma, who got this massive hit piece on her in Wired last week, so like she's doing something right, and you've got Katie Faust, who I've had on the program a few times, one of the most articulate spokesmen about this, spokeswomen about this in existence today.

Like, where is the Catholic equivalent? I guess Lila Rose would be one, but. Where are our leadership on the Catholic side? We've got to get them out there. We do need more. This is the thing, guys. This is the thing. Yeah. Yep.

A hundred percent. Okay, well, that was the most, like, rainbow, tinsel town, glittery boots, twilight that we've had in a while. We shouldn't have saved those stories for June. I know. It's just revisiting. Hey, you know, we got to tell people the way it is. What's really going on out there. This is what's going on, y'all. All right. Got to tell it to them straight. Other ministries can sugarcoat stuff, but we're going to give it to you straight.

Amen. Amen. Okay, like I said, if you did not check out Tom Across America, and you would like just a little timeline cleanse, go crab fishing with Tom in Maryland, and it's a very fun episode. My kids loved it. Go check that out on Tom Across America on YouTube or on zeal.co. Tomorrow, I have a phenomenal deep. They're all good, I have to say. They're just all fantastic. They're the best. They're just the best, but tomorrow's is about sports gambling. And this was outside of my comfort zone.

I am not like brilliant. It was pretty fun. It ended up being massive rabbit hole, the sports gambling epidemic. And when I saw that DraftKings commercial on the NFL game, I was like, I know what's going on here. So, check that out tomorrow. It drops at 4 p.m. Eastern. And today is the feast of anything else. Surefire away, you'll never lose.

Just never gamble, guys. There you go. Always a winner. I thought you were going to say bet on the Pope's team. I don't think the Pope would encourage that, Tom, but anyway. All right, today is the Feast of Saint Jerome, so it's Father Mike Schmitz's Bible in a Year favorite day. Is this your day, Father Mike Schmitz? Maybe this is it. Saint Jerome, a doctor of the church who translated the entire scriptures into Latin, gave us the Vulgate, and so we have a prayer.

No, she deleted my prayer. Selene. Oh, man, we switched the prayer. Okay, so everyone should ask St. Jerome to pray for them. We are going to pray for a different cause. We are going to pray for the canonization of Archbishop Fulton Sheen, because we've had the beatification. Now, we want the next step. Make it fast. Make it snappy. So, let's pray for his glorification on the altars. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen. Heavenly Father, source of all holiness, You raise up within the church in every age men and women who serve with heroic love and dedication.

You have blessed your church through the life and ministry of your faithful servant, blessed Archbishop Fulton Sheen. He has written and spoken well of your divine son, Jesus Christ, and was a true instrument of the Holy Spirit in touching the hearts of countless people. If it be in accordance with your will, for the glory and honor of the most holy trinity, and for the salvation of souls, we ask you to move the church to proclaim him a saint. We ask this prayer through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

Amen. Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us. Saint Thomas More, pray for us. Saint Fidelis, pray for us. In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, we will be back next week with a special guest host. I'm not going to say who it is, but we're giving Tom the loophole. So, tune in next week. We'll see you next time on LOOPcast. Thank you. Goodbye.