El-Sayed Stuns Dems in MI, Europe's New Migration Crisis, And The WNBA

And we're live. Welcome back to LOOPcast. It's Tom, Erika, and Josh. So good to be with you guys. Ready to have another great show. So, what we have coming up today, we had these, I don't know if you'd call them shocking, I guess we're going to get Josh's two cents on the primaries that happened in Michigan. Hate to say I called it, but Abdul El-Sayed did succeed against a lot of money and potentially some odds. He moves on to the general election.

We're going to get all of Josh's perspective. I'm sure he was watching that one. We have some other primaries going on across the state, across the country, but pretty close to a Michigander start as Josh is hanging out there.

Up on the northern side, we also will have the abortion pill is back in the news. We had some action on the government level there, and then we had some statements from Acting Attorney General Todd Blanch on the future of Dobbs, the future of the abortion fight in the United States. We also had a, we'll call that islands or places in the world we didn't know about until pretty recently. There is a Spanish sueta. I get grief for not being able to produce.

I like to do the Catalonian list. No, no, no, no, no. I reject that. We can give it an Anglo version. We can give it an Anglo. Come on. But unfortunately, you know, look pretty familiar to the American southern border, circa 2020s.

And so, we have some reporting there on what is going on there in Spain. Of course, we have good news. In Twilight Zone. Sorry, I'm a little out of it. I just got back from Wyoming. Tom, you're struggling. I'm struggling. My camera didn't work. Microphone wasn't going. You're struggling. I'm up all night watching the election stuff. Give me a break. Oh, it's such a struggle. I'm sure that was really painful for you, Josh. I never meant it that way.

But before we get into all that fun, first, of course, I got to talk about the OG sponsor, our favorite, Charity Mobile. If you don't have Charity Mobile yet, you listen to Pocket Hell. I don't know what to tell you guys at this point. Now more than ever, it's 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.

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To get started, visit charitymobile.com and use promo code LOOPcast. That's charitymobile.com. Promo code. Lubecast. All right. Time to get into it. I do have a note up here on top. If you guys can pray for the wildfire victims in Washington and Idaho. I was in Wyoming, and it was really smoky in the air. We were kind of debating, is this from the Canadian wildfires or what's going on? And then, of course, I took a look at Google, and it seems like Spokane's on fire.

So, I saw 67,000 displaced in that area alone, let alone the other places. So, that's one of those things that I think only really God can solve when it's 0% containment. And the flyers are that big, so pray for everyone that they can be spared from these flyers and that we can put them out. I've been to that area. It's a beautiful, beautiful place. That's the beautiful part, yeah. I saw they had a guy in custody, right, for potentially starting one of them.

But I was even thinking, like, out in Wyoming, it was so dry. It was so dry. They said it was especially dry, like, winter, and then the summer's been super hot. And I'm like, even if it was just, like, a lightning bolt.

It wouldn't take much, basically, to set a whole dry area on fire, and it would just be crazy. I would just call upon all of us to pray to Our Lady of Champion. That's the title we give to Mary when she appeared in northeastern Wisconsin, and she saved a lot of the people there from the Great Pestigo Fire, which is called the Forgotten Fire, because everyone remembers the fire in Chicago.

So, just pray, Our Lady of Champion. Pray for the good people of Idaho. And Washington and all the other people who are affected by wildfires. Amen to that. All right, I say we get into it. Mercer, I'm really excited to get your take on this. We have the Michigan election. I'll say it did indeed win. Now, stunning, I think, can go a few ways. It seemed like towards the end, from what I was seeing, he was pretty cocky.

He was extremely cocky. Like talking about being a power broker, putting an ogre on a pike, like that kind of talk from someone that... He took the day off right before the election. I had a full party. Yeah. Like, what are you doing, dude? That's like political malpractice, probably 101. But, you know, especially surprising to me, considering he ran in 2018 against Gretchen Whitmer and lost by a significant margin. That was his only real involvement. And then you look at Haley Stevens, who, you know, say what you want about her strange voice or appearance.

Was a four-term incumbent and enjoyed the support of Chuck Schumer and Gretchen Whitmer. Four-term congresswoman, obviously. She wasn't a senator. Thank you for the specific, but she was a known entity, right? Known entity, established candidate, and she outspent him nine to one. I think it was 11, I saw, or at least that's more. Yeah, significant spending margin, and I was even taking a look here. It might be interesting to go through and kind of get what you were looking at, Josh.

The county level swings for this race were super interesting, and it might kind of reshape people's perception of, say, western Michigan, which you and I kind of know well as this kind of like rural, you know, maybe reasonable, conservative, farmer type. It really does not appear to be that anymore. Well, so we have to be careful about this analysis, though, okay? So, like, west Michigan used to be known as very, very Republican.

They elected a Democrat, though, out of Grand Rapids recently. Hillary Shlock and she's terrible. Need to get her out of there. But we're talking about voters who are only voting in the Democratic primary. So, it's not really a good sense of it. So, for example, I live in Emmett County, which is in northern Michigan. Okay. It's a county that's two thirds Republican. Right.

So, the Democrats are only a third of the people in my area, but how did they vote in the Senate race, right? Well, you're thinking, I live in a rural district, so they probably, you know, Haley Stevens did pretty decent amongst some rural voters, right? But not in my district, because, you know, they're wealthier Democrats, elderly white Democrats, and they voted for Al-Said.

So, we really got to start looking at, you know, like people say, well, this doesn't make sense. I thought Ann Arbor was a, you know, a very liberal area, and Grand Rapids was more of a Republican area. It's like, no, Republicans voted in their primary, so we're only looking at the Democratic votes, and, you know, if you look at what happened across the state, so. You know, Ann Arbor, which is home of the University of Michigan, full of, you know, it's very multi-ethnic.

There's a lot of Asians that live there. There's a lot of other... Super liberal. It's very, very, very liberal, because it's got a university there. Same thing with East Lansing, with Michigan State. And so, those kind of places where they have lots of professors, lots of students, they overwhelmingly backed Abdul El-Sayed. There was one precinct that was like 100% University of Michigan campus, and every single vote went to El-Sayed. It wasn't even 100%, it was 100%. So, I mean, that just gives you an idea.

Now, you go to other places, like the city of Detroit itself, obviously, Black Democrats dominate in the city of Detroit. And Haley Stevens ran up numbers big time in the city of Detroit. She talked about how she was chief of staff under President Obama and saved the automobile industry. She brought Black Democrats from Congress from all over, like James Clyburn out of South Carolina to campaign for her. So, she ran up the numbers in Detroit. Although I saw that Saeed was endorsed by the UAW, United Auto Workers.

Right, which I always like to let people know, by the way, 25% of UAW members are actually not working for the automobile industry, because one out of every four UAW members are graduate students. So, you're starting to see that mutants are trying to... I tell you, the people don't believe it. Look at the DSA. The DSA claims are for the working man, right?

But only 4% of members of the DSA actually have blue-collar jobs. They're all from education, healthcare, you know, it's a mess. From non-profits. Because you and I know these counties, like run down it. Wayne County, Stevens, plus five, that's Detroit. Okay, well, see now, here's where it gets interesting. Yes, Detroit is the biggest city in Wayne County, but Wayne County doesn't incorporate just that. So, if you looked at just Detroit, she ran up the numbers really high, but then... Wayne County also incorporates cities, I believe, like Dearborn.

I am not sure, but I think so. And so, Dearborn has got a very high Islamic population, and they went, obviously, for Al-Said in a big way. So, overall, she did not run up the numbers big out of Wayne County.

So, if you go back to 2016, Bernie Sanders defeated Hillary Clinton in the Michigan Democratic primary. You know, and people are like, wait a minute, how is this possible? Well, it's because you had a lot of people from, you know, Ann Arbor that, you know, Dearborn. So, like, this coalition, LSIE did very well with younger Democratic voters, under 40 years old. I would say a main driver of that is being upset over Gaza and the Israeli government, that was huge. AIPAC loomed large in this race.

So, there is a major factor there. And then, what else? Elderly white voters are big time voting. I love you. They watch MSNOW, which used to be called MSNBC. They are very radical in their views. They're becoming more radical every year. So, it's this weird combination of voters under 40.

And also, elderly white people voting for El-Sayed, and like these socialist candidates, and on the other side, you have Jewish voters and black voters who are still in favor of more establishment candidates, and so in this race specifically, when the Democratic senator, Gary Peters, announced he wasn't going to run for re-election, Chuck Schumer immediately goes to Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, begs her to run in this race. She's like, nope, not interested. She's maybe thinking 2028, you know, and then he's like, oh gosh, what do I do?

I got to find another establishment Democrat, and so he goes to Haley Stevens, you know, in hopes that she can do it, but a lot of things went wrong in this race for the establishment. You know, Mallory McMurrow, she was a darling of the progressive left, super white liberal. She ran in this race, and she was garnering a lot of steam and preventing Haley Stevens from She's comprising a coalition of candidates against El-Sayed. But she dropped out in the ballot. She did drop out, but she was still in the ballot, and she got like 3% of the vote last night.

Yeah, and that's like greater than the margin between the two candidates. Now, that doesn't mean everyone she voted for would have obviously voted for El-Sayed. I'm sorry, would have. Because she endorsed El-Sayed, right, when she dropped out? Didn't she endorse him? No, she did not. She held off. Oh, she did. Okay. Yeah, but see, Gretchen Whitmer eventually, she, so the governor, Gretchen Whitmer, did not endorse, did not endorse, waited, waited, waited, waited, waited, then the last minute endorsed Haley Stevens, and then the senator, Gary, the outgoing senator, Gary Peterson, at the last second, endorsed Haley Stevens.

If those two would have endorsed that, you know, Haley Stevens, like, maybe in January, it would have had the potential. To build a little bit more momentum for Haley Stevens, because that didn't happen, because they waited the last minute. He's going to squeak out with a 1 or 1.5% victory, and here's the thing. The polls. I just want, what did I talk about the last time? The polls, people love themselves in polls, but they're not necessarily always accurate. Here's the thing.

When they do polls, I live in Michigan. Let me tell you, my phone has rang every other day for a different poll, and I'm a junkie, so I answer. But most conservative Republicans, when they get a phone call like this, they go, ah, screw you, and they don't want to answer it, okay? So, participation in polls make a difference. Guess who loves answering political polls?

Elderly white liberals, boomer liberals. They are not working. They are 68 years old, 75 years old, whatever. They get a phone call from a pollster. This is their opportunity to participate in democracy, and they love to give them an earful and tell them how much they love Medicare for All and Abdul Saeed and Bernie Sanders and all this other stuff. Okay? I am talking about...

For those in the audience, I'm ripping on the liberal boomers, not my good conservative boomers. Don't be sending emails to me. Put the guns down. Put the guns down. But it is true that liberal boomers over-represent in polls, and so what does that mean? It meant that Al-Said was leading in all these polls. Every poll that dropped in the last week, he was up by at least 10 points. 10, 12, 15. Everyone's like, oh my gosh, he's going to cruise to victory.

And it ends up that, you know, NBC was the first to make the call, like at three in the morning. It was a tight edge. You were up at three. Now, another question for you on the polling front. I saw some reporting that So, it's either they do their own internal polls and they put it out, or they pressure certain outlets to release polling saying that they're down more than they actually are. So, in order to supposedly inspire more people to get out and vote, or it's like, oh my gosh, we're going to lose, you got to get out there.

So, every side does these kind of things where they release polls that make them look good. Polling, I've always tried to tell people is, polling is instructive. It does tell you something. It doesn't tell you everything. I still look at where are the parties spending money and what's going on. Okay, great. So, the spending on this one, obviously, we see either nine to one or 11 to one, and APAC loomed large in this one. So, what did this level of spending tell you, the story of this for, I mean, this is a very high-profile race, but the spending was big.

The spending was very big, but the fact that if Haley Stevens was truly going to lose by 15 points, Because the money would have dried up a couple of weeks ago, but they went into the end, they campaigned to the end, they were pessimistic, you know, but she ultimately almost got it. And really, it just shows that there were some missteps. And of course, when you get that close, you know, failure has got, you know, I mean, she's just, you know.

What's the saying, Erika? You know the saying, right? Success has a thousand fathers. So, you know, like, you know, there's going to be a lot of, you know, the Civil War is going to continue in the Democratic But I would just say this about the polling. What I mean by this, though, the oversampling of elderly liberals in polling, and also young kids, you know, they're 24 years old, they're getting their graduate degree, they get the phone call, oh, yeah, I love this.

So, Black voters in Democratic polls are perhaps underrepresented, and that's what we indicated here, and then, like I said, the white liberals are underrepresented, and then also, just in general, Republican voters are so I'm disbelieving in polls. A lot of them believe that media companies intentionally put out polls to suppress Republican turnout. There is actually some merit to that claim, but the bigger thing is that they just don't trust them, so they don't answer, and so that's what I'm trying to tell people.

They're not complete junk, but you have to be a little bit guarded on it, and if the polls were this off, they said El-Sayed was up by 15 points, and he wins by one and a half. Then what does it tell us about these polls in Texas where it says James Tallarico is leading Paxton? Like, give me a break. Like, you know, all Paxton has, Paxton doesn't have to win tons and tons of. He doesn't have to win some disaffected Democrats.

He just needs to get the Republicans to come home. That's an easier thing to do, and I think it will happen, but it just tells me that, again, polling is instructive, but it's not conclusive. I remember that from 2016.

Yes, remember? I learned my lesson that year. Wisconsin, oh, but then he won it? Right. So, okay, Josh, now this is going to become the big question. This isn't New York. This isn't California. This is Michigan. I mean, you're pretty familiar with Michigan, a different place. So, now he has to go up and face Mike Rogers. This is the big test. Right, who basically ran unopposed, from what I understand, didn't have a contentious primary.

And so, you get this Hill article saying, you know, Rogers beats Al-Said, but loses to Stevens in a Michigan Senate poll. So, is this potentially a good scenario for Mike Rogers, or could he really? Because I guess the big question, they've already been trying to do this to some of these candidates, and we have Hong coming up. They made very extreme statements in the 2020s, and so now you win your primary, you out-left someone, but you need to now come to the middle somehow, maybe compromise on some things or try to build some bridges here.

Is it possible for someone like an LCA to do that at this point and be competitive against Rodgers? Well, I mean, okay. You know, LSA definitely has a chance to win this race. Let's make no mistake about it. It's not like he's completely out of it. No.

I will say you could win, and Republicans need to take this very seriously. The economy is kind of a little bit shaky. People are still frustrated with gas prices, inflation, the cost of groceries or whatever. Democrats are intent on making this a race about Donald Trump.

By the way, Mike Rogers, he's about, he is, you know, when you do these polls, like generic Republican versus generic Democrat, Mike Rogers is like the generic Republican. He's got a generic name. Here's Mike. Mike Rogers, yeah, right.

There's literally another Mike Rogers in Congress. He's from Alabama. I mean, this is how generic he is. In fact, every once in a while, you see it like, oh, Mike Rogers, and it's a photo of the wrong one. I'm like, dude, that's the guy from Alabama. I mean, it's kind of embarrassing.

But, you know, like, this truly is, like, he's like a, you know, generic name. So, Democrats are going to make this race. They're going to target Donald Trump, and they're going to make this race. And so, if gas prices remain high, then yes, the Republicans are in trouble if the gas prices come down a little bit. And obviously, I'll say, being a very, I think, a very toxic candidate. There are, you know, like, what people happen. When you have a contentious primary, a very divisive thing, the voters who supported the candidate who lost will say, well, I'm done.

I'm not going to vote for them in the general, and sometimes that's just smoke. People are just blowing smoke. But, so, like, for example, I think most of the Black voters that pulled the lever for Haley Stevens will come home, and they will support Abdul Al-Said, but they might stay home, too, you know? Like, so, like, Jocelyn Benson is running for governor as a Democrat. She's got to make sure she gets Black voters to come out, so I think it's even more likely that she picks a Black lieutenant governor candidate, but...

Jewish voters, you know, there's like one and a half percent of the population of Michigan. It's not insignificant. Almost always vote Democrat. I think they're going to pull the lever for Rogers just to stop Abdul-Aziz. So, there are advantages that Mike Rogers comes into this race, and you've got to remember, Democrats need to win four seats to take back the Senate. Right. North Carolina is looking very good for the Democrats. Right, Cooper. Roy Cooper, a very popular former governor, I think is super liberal, obviously, but you could wink people sometimes.

His name is Roy Cooper. And his opponent, Michael Watley, is the RNC chairman. He's not a great candidate so far. He's just underwhelming. We'll see. But, so North Carolina, and then if in Maine, you know, like Collins is a Republican that keeps winning in a very blue state, but maybe her number's up this year. We'll see. So then if Democrats take both those seats, they still need to win two more. So then you're looking at Iowa. You're looking at Ohio. Ohio, Sherrod Brown, the former senator.

Democrat, I can't stand him, but he's running a good campaign against a lackluster Republican, John Husted. Texas, Alaska, if they can win two of those states, but they're all states that went for Trump by about eight, nine, ten points. So, Josh. But what you're, if the Democrats fumble Michigan, it becomes that much harder. Yeah, so I guess my question to you is, you're zooming out now to a national, you're like, you got to keep the four. And so, I imagine that Republicans are having conversations of how can we help out, you know, maintain this majority.

And it kind of seems unclear to me how involved Trump is. Like, he said sometimes, hey, I'm not, you know, go figure it out yourselves. Other times. He's coming out. I saw he's promoting Alan Dershowitz's book. It's just kind of bizarre stuff. I will say this. Donald Trump is very involved in the elections. Right. So, my question is, what advice would you give to him? You're like, listen, we got to keep these four. You mentioned the problems. What national strategy would you propose?

Do X, Y, and Z, and you're going to be able to protect these people. Yeah, I mean, I certainly think, you know, Donald Trump and most Republicans realize now that, you know, El-Sayed, by winning the Democratic nomination in Michigan, it gives Republicans a chance to flip one of their seats, the best chance they have, to try to hemorrhage losses they'll get in other places. And so, I suspect the Michigan Senate race, I mean, I've thought this all year, it's going to be number one for spending, if not, you know, definitely number two.

I mean, there's going to be so much money pouring into the race. Mike Rogers ran for the Senate two years ago, and he came that close. You know, and now he's running again, and, you know, he just, he, I think he can win it. I think he's got a great chance to win it, and I think Abdul-Aziz comes to him with a lot of negative, you know, baggage. He was campaigning with that communist streamer, Hassan Piker, who said America deserved 9-11, you know, so, you know, like, this is a very winnable race for Republicans, and it's an opportunity, like I said, to flip one of their seats.

And make it that much harder for them to win that majority, because, you know, again, it would be terrible for the pro-life, pro-family cause if Republicans lose the House, of course, but we can't lose the Senate. We have to save the Senate, because we're talking about judicial nominations, appointments to the cabinet, you know, there's a lot of things here. So, like, for example, we're having a, you know, A battle, and we'll get into this a little bit later, about, you know, Todd Blanch for Attorney General.

We don't want to lose the Senate. We need to have the Senate for these kind of things. So, if we can flip the seat in Michigan, boy, that's a great opportunity. It opens up a lot of options for us to get to maintain that majority. So, what advice would you give to the national? My advice to Donald Trump is very simple, like declare victory in Iran and get the hell out of there. That is like my number one advice. You know what I mean?

Just say you won. Who says, you are Donald Trump, why do you need a deal? Your deal was, you know, whatever. Well, he could leave and say that he has a deal. Yes, all for that, 100%. So, you see this as the biggest, you know, chain around the neck, is involvement in Iran. If we're still involved in Iran by the time these elections roll around. You know, and again, as I've said for months with Iran, it's not so much that, thankfully, we haven't done, you know, 100,000 troops into Tehran or something crazy and stupid and foolish and horrible like that.

It's been this weird game of chess, you know. In the Gulf there, I am not a fan of this, never liked it. However, thankfully, it has not been as disastrous as Bush Cheney's Middle East meddlings, and there is an ability to cut your losses, say, hey, we did what we set out to do. We stopped the nuclear stuff, and trade is going on in the Strait of Hormuz, and just declare victory and get the hell out of there. Right.

You know, and then gas prices will kind of ease off, and people, as they fill up the pumps over the next three months, as they get closer to Election Day, and as numbers go down, I think Republicans' numbers will go up. Yeah. That's my thought. I think the simplest and most straightforward, because I see the creeping in of, I would call it political malpractice, where you see how bad inflation is, and you see how expensive groceries are, and gas is up.

So, to tell people that, it's like, no, it's better than ever. There was a segment on Fox yesterday, like, oh, the economy is great because the stock market hit a new high. It's not going to work. I don't think that's actually going to be the best campaign strategy. Yeah, and you've got people who are saying, oh, but wages are up 30%. Yeah, bro, groceries are up 30%. Yeah, exactly. It doesn't make it any better. You can't buy more stuff, right? You can't save more for the future.

It didn't keep pace with inflation. It's like the oldest trap of all time. I don't know why people do it. Maybe it's because you're trying to play team ball, but it was, well, you know, Biden ran on that, too, of like, technically, you're better than ever. No, and I think, I think. You know, Joel Berry of the Babylon Bee, he's a crazy guy. He's all for that same kind of strategy. I think, no, the strategy is like, look.

It's amazing how much we've been able to turn around in two years, but we've got a long way to go, and we're going to keep working for the American families and working families. That's why we cut taxes on tips, so we cut taxes for seniors, and over time, but we've still got more stuff to do. We've got to try, you know. And here's what we're going to do. Here's the positive vision, right. Yeah, but just show that you're on the right trajectory.

I think, actually, of all the, you know, Trump sometimes just wants to say, well, obviously, if I'm president, everything is hunky-dory, and I think that's just not. I think J.D. Vance actually is far more of a realist when it comes to how to assess it and talk about the good things we've done and how we need to move forward. Do you see the exchange with, was it Mark Thiessen, about the burritos?

No. Well, because that's the whole thing. Someone was complaining about a burrito costing $20. Chipotle, yeah. Chipotle can cost you like $20 now. You know, and then Joel Berry is like, well, hey, I fed my whole family of eight burritos, and it cost us only $20.

And then Mark Thiessen, what did he say about the burrito? He said, like, you're getting it as a part of your college meal plan anyway. Shut up, essentially. And then Vice President J.D. Vance is like, I don't think you've ever missed a burrito.

Come on, man. Yeah, it's just like the classic, like, Sends a missile Mark Thiessen's way, which, of course, Mark Thiessen's a neocon, and he appreciates, you know. Oh, yeah, he's been a big advisor in the war in Iran, and it's like.

Yeah, I would just say the best advice I would give is if people say they have a problem, even if there may be any truth to like. Yeah, maybe you shouldn't spend $20 on a burrito. Talking down upon the people you want to vote for you continually while you've been in office is typically not a good strategy. For example, in the 1992 election, the economy was actually very much improving in the preceding seven, eight months before the 1992 election. But the recession before, you know, that was in 1991, was still stinging for a lot of folks.

And so people are like, you know, he said, This is Bush Sr. He wasn't going to raise my taxes, but he did, and he thinks the economy is great, but it's not, and the economy actually was improving, but it's too little too late. If the election were not in November, but six months later, maybe Bush would have been reelected, but it's terrible advice to tell people, no, no, no, you are misperceiving it. Everything's great. Your life is wonderful. Right, which is precisely why the Democratic Party is in the position that it's in, because the Democratic Socialists...

And their adjacent candidates, like Al-Sayed, they're not dismissing the real pain that people are feeling. And while their solution, so they're like, we're off- Poison! The solution's a poison! Well, their solution is we burn everything down to the ground, like what Donnie's currently doing in New York. So, the solution is wrong, but the way to fight back against the DSA isn't to be like, your feelings that are attracting- You and that party are wrong, or they're incorrect, but yeah. Now, is your episode of The Deep coming out on that?

Yeah, tomorrow, I went a deep dive into democratic socialism, and yeah, it's a fascinating just snapshot of our moment in history, because again, like in 1990, the Berlin Wall came down, and everyone, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Charles Krauthammer, who I was a huge fan of, they're like, socialism is dead, and no developed nation will... Ever consider it again.

And here we are, 36 years later, and it was an amazing story. I was going to say it was 1989, but yes. Well, no, the Berlin Wall came down in 89. What I was quoting from Charles Krauthammer was 1990, Josh. You were quoting too, so that's good. Here's the thing about the DSA, though. It was one thing for a democratic socialist to elect a senator like Bernie Sanders out of Vermont. And then they nominated Graham Platner, who eventually the sex scandals dropped out.

But these are blue states. What happened yesterday in Michigan is the first time a DSA candidate won statewide in a swing state. And he'll say he's not DSA, just to be clear, but DSA has endorsed him. I know. He claims he's not a socialist, even though he's a Bernie bro who's a socialist, and he supports Medicare for All, which is socialism, but he's not a socialist. Yeah, sure. You know what? Guess what? I think you're lying. Yeah, I mean, that's what they're all going to have to do, right?

Like, you know, it's... Maybe we can get into Wisconsin here. We have Hong running. It's interesting watching this, because obviously I'm not a Democrat, but we're watching from the outside, and the internal battles and deliberations are going on. There's a popular podcast called Pod Save America. He had on Francesca Hong, and I'll just play the clip, because I think you're going to see a lot more like this coming up, and she's going to be one of the first. Yeah, Pod Save America.

He's the original Obama guy. Yes, Jon Favreau. Yep. Yeah, so here we go. It's incredibly important for Wisconsin to have a Democratic governor, but since Republicans will spend an... Ungodly amount of money to try to defeat you. I just want to make sure you have the best possible answers to what's coming. So, I want to start with your 2020 posts supporting defunding the police, quote, as a first step towards abolishing the police, which in a separate post you said, quote, exists to uphold white supremacy.

Now, I know you've said you're not running to defund the police. It's not something you can do as governor, and that people's views can evolve. I'm wondering how your views on policing have evolved since 2020. My views have only become stronger in that I'm serious about public safety, and I will not abolish the police. My views are that people are struggling right now and need basic needs met, and I want to focus on stopping violent crime and giving law enforcement the resources and the training that they need.

But in short, that we are also holding accountable law enforcement that does not follow the law. Do you still believe that police exist to uphold white supremacy? No. What has changed in your thinking since you posted that in 2020? No, I think that when you talk to people who are most justice impacted, a mother who lost a child to police violence, people who have...

Contended with injustices in historically marginalized communities. But justice also looks like making sure that we are implementing solutions and helping to change the material conditions of people's lives. So as a legislator for the last six years, I've had more conversations with people who are more directly connected to the problems and have learned that.

It is most important for a public servant like myself to make sure we're looking at sensible, practical solutions that will help keep communities safe. You said during this campaign back in May. And you know what? Honestly, credit to John there for the line of questioning I thought was actually...

Reasonable? I mean, it was all like, please don't lose this race. Yeah, it was like, please walk back. That's what's interesting to me. I'm throwing you a life preserver. Right, but Josh, and I don't know if this is interesting to you at all, but because this is the primaries. These are when you have to settle within your party what you're going to present, and so you're actually getting more. More honest or pointed questions than you would get by the time it's like, all right, we all got to rally around the flag, right, of someone that we don't really like.

Hey, I don't mind him asking those questions. I mean, he's going to have, yeah. But I feel like I have more insight into the fights and the direction of the party at this point in time than I will have come, you know, general election time.

Absolutely, because the direction of the Democratic Party, they are not moderating. They are not going center. They are going, the function of the DSA has been to drag candidates who were already far leftists, like Haley Stevens. She was, I mean, she's not a moderate. She's maybe a moderate Democrat now, because of the way the Overton window has shifted to the left there, so radically, but she's not. If you just, if you look at American politics, like Josh said, she's pro-socialized medicine.

She's pro-transing the kids. She's pro-abortion at any level. She's pro- What does National Education Association, Teachers Unions, like all of these radical outfits, she's totally in there. And what the DSA is doing is it's confirming that as the failed center of the Democratic Party. And everyone's going to have to swing left from now on to win their primaries. And I hate it. I hate it because what I would love are two functioning Parties that are not, we're both parties in the United States.

I am a two-party system girl. Josh, you have totally converted me over the last six years. I've changed my opinion because they're too old. That was the Ross Douthat interview with, I forget the Jerry and Tyrus guy. That was so funny. I got to pull that from my Twilight Zone. Anyway, we'll get there. No, I was just going to say, because I would rather have two parties where one of them doesn't hate the Constitution, but what we're going to get is a Democratic.

And now, we even have people like James Carville saying, I'm going to leave the party, and Bill Maher saying, I'm going to leave the party. Carville's been saying that for the last 20 years, to be fair, and Bill Maher is a one-issue voter, so I don't know. Alan Dershowitz is now a Republican, so it's like, you just get the loudest people there. Okay, but here's my question. So, I think we need to run the clip on Francesca Hong with regards to Thanksgiving.

I think this is an instructive. I did see, because I actually test hate every holiday. They ask, because my wife had heard about this. My wife is more of a normie, right? I'm a psychopath when it comes to politics. Confirmed. And I said, okay, so she got asked about this thing, not on, yeah, that one, okay. CNN. So, I said, what do you think she's going to do when she gets asked about this Thanksgiving? My wife goes, well, she's probably going to back out of it.

She's going to say, yeah, whatever. Because a rational person would do that. Let's see what she says. To Caitlin Collins on CNN. You know, you've talked about your past positions that he keeps highlighting and, you know, obviously likely would continue to do so before November, should you win. One thing that they brought up as well was a post from you in 2021 where you said Americans should cancel Thanksgiving, should have done this in 1621. The post has been deleted. Republicans have been highlighting it.

Do you still believe that Thanksgiving should be canceled? I'm a chef, and one of the first meals that I made that was for the community when I was 16 was a Thanksgiving meal. You know, I always think my hospitality background in owning a restaurant for seven, eight years, that bringing folks around the table to share conversation and build community is always a good thing. But Thanksgiving is also a time that's incredibly painful for many people in our communities, and so... I think there, I wanted to make sure that people understood that there are multiple views, but views can evolve, and the position that I'm running for right now, and I think my background as a chef, will actually help me become a better governor that's able to bring more people to the table.

Bro, what kind of answer is that? Also, do you have any... She said it's painful. She said it's painful. It is painful. Do you have any background on the word folks? It's like all the worst people I know use the word folks. Was that like... Like, tested somewhere in a focus group? Like, this is the least offensive way to refer to people? Obama started that, right? Like, folks got to... Who knows, but I got to say, like, you know, the whole Thanksgiving controversy, there is a man who works for the Conservative American Enterprise Institute, a conservative moderate.

Yeah, conservative is a strong word. And he now dresses up as a woman, pretends he's a girl. And even him, he's like, he said, this is too crazy, what Francesca Hong said. As I'm from Wisconsin, and we love Thanksgiving, we love watching the Packers play, and like, what are you doing? Yeah, what a brick. You could have mentioned the Packers, too. Absolute brick. The thing is, Francesca Hong, her parents came to this country. They were graduate students at the University of Wisconsin.

Francesca now has lived in the city of Madison her whole life, and Madison, Wisconsin is... Surround, you know, where the state government is, and where the state university is, it is beyond blue. It is navy. It's like Ann Arbor. It's like Burlington. It's like Ann Arbor.

It's exactly like Ann Arbor. And the fact, it's even worse, because it's the state government. Probably. Like, it is so blue. And she is, you know, she owned a business in that town. She lived there her whole life. And she hasn't touched grass outside of the rest of the state. In fact, she tweeted one time about, or Facebooked or whatever, about a time she stopped at a Culver's in the middle of Wisconsin, outside of her blue zone of Madison, and she talked about how, like, it was just weird.

There's too much, like, whiteness going on, and she had to leave the restaurant early before a kid could get the ice cream, and I'm like... In Wisconsin? In Wisconsin. Which, by the way... She is so worried about proximity to whiteness. Why does she marry a white man? She talks about this in another interview about how she has proximity to whiteness that can blind her, she thinks, because her child is half white. But I have a little thing to tell you on this one.

What is going on in the Wisconsin primary that is very different than the Michigan primary? In the Michigan primary, they were able to convince Mallory McMurrow to drop out, and it was just a two-person race. Haley Stevens had a ton of money, and she had months of preparing, and it is a two-person race, right? Well, in Wisconsin, the establishment had their candidate. And then, you know, Sarah, I keep forgetting her name, it was Rodriguez, and she dropped out because of a scandal.

Then, like, former Lieutenant Governor Barnes, but he was so weak that, like, they pushed him out, and they brought a guy who had left the race back in. So, it's been this, like, musical chairs to try to find the person who can stop Francesca Hong. And here's my little secret. Here's what I think is what's really happened when you look at the Wisconsin race, which we'll find out. If Francesca Hong wins next Tuesday, I don't think she ran for governor thinking she would win.

I honestly think she was running to increase her name ID, and then two years from now, she was going to run for Congress and unseat the liberal in that represents the Madison area and replace him with her, who's like a socialist. So, I don't even think, she was like playing with house money, as they call it. She had nothing to lose. She's just going on an attack, on the attack. She brings in, you know, all these radicals, and all of a sudden.

All her opponents, they've tripped over themselves, they've made unforced errors, scandals and stuff, and all of a sudden, she's leading now. She's at 40% of the polls. Now, these polls might be as inaccurate as Michigan's. We'll see, but she's still considered the frontrunner, and she might be the nominee, and if she is, I think that makes Tom Tiffany.

Great position to win the race for governor, but we're talking about another swing state where a socialist candidate might be nominated by the Democratic Party for a statewide office. I think Catholic voters need to understand what is at stake in Michigan and potentially here in Wisconsin, as we find out next week. We're talking about socialist candidates, not just liberals, literal socialists who are running, and what that would mean for everything we believe in. Yeah, it's kind of funny. Check out the deep tomorrow, and it's funny, I think with your script, Erika, I was pointing this out, like, it's fun to get in to see the fights intra-party, but all of the people we're talking about, regardless of who wins, are like abortion on demand, LGBTQ everything.

Trans kids. Exactly, like, it's all, they, none of them are moderated on any of those things. Abolish the police, you know, it's... So, it's funny, like, we get in these, you're like, oh, so it seems like after you talk about it, you have one of these. And not only that. No, all of these people are crazy. Yeah, and literally, like, there was a Fox News interview, or was it on Daily? Anyway, there's another interview with the head of the DSA going through their platform, and they're like, and we need to abolish the Senate, and while we're at it, the executive branch, and the Supreme Court, too.

We're just going to have, you know, one big, happy legislative branch. Yeah, although, I guess the interesting thing would be to think back to, I guess, the Trump revolution, or the MAGA revolution. You can say about. What the state of MAG is right now. You know, I got my issues. But you go back to 2016, they probably were spoken about. I don't know if the DSA is kind of enjoying that kind of status of, like, we're kind of the crazy, you know, the rogue, we're pushing it.

There's some of that, yeah. And MAGA certainly did that back in the day. They're like, immigration was, as Josh talked about all the time, like, basically an untouchable topic. Like, you couldn't derail society. No, the big difference being, like, we need to restore the Constitution instead of tear down the Constitution. Well, I think, to Tom's point, though, the MAGA movement moved the Overton window. On issues like immigration in a massive way, and that is what is going on with the DSA on their side.

It is no longer a radical position to completely call for, not just abolishing the filibuster, but abolishing the electoral college. That is what Pete Buttigieg just said yesterday, and expand the Supreme Court. It is like, hey, you want to expand the Supreme Court? Great. We can do it today.

Let us get it to 13 members. Let us just do it right now. I guess that is why I would warn. You want to wait until you have the president on the head. President, okay. Right, but I would just warn about patting people on the head there, because Trump said all the, like, MAGA said all the same stuff, and people are like, oh, they are crazy. That is never going to happen, but they wanted to play offense. I think the biggest thing I would take away from that.

There are some similarities. They wanted to play offense, and they are like, we are going to play by a different set of rules, and we are going to fight in every possible front we can. Look at the executive orders that Trump has put out here. I know, I love it. Which is great. So, you are like, you are seeing a genuine. version of that challenger on the other side now, and the answer isn't just people want fighters. You're going to get fighters and that are actually going to be trying to pull whatever lever they can to make their vision come to reality.

Now, it's good to take a step back and think about that vision, which is why I appreciate, you know, Josh and Zio, like, just going, hey, this is the vision. This is where it leads. I forgot to say one last thing about Francesca Hong and the whole Thanksgiving thing. Just watching left-wingers comment on her response to that video and that CNN interview, and so many of them are like, oh my gosh, just lie. Yeah. Just lie. Oh yeah, just, I love Thanksgiving.

It's great. Just lie. Love those totems. It just shows you, like, the left is like, all they care about is power. Like, lie, lie, lie. Suppress, bury your true feelings. You think, Thanksgiving is a celebration of this colonialist, you know, empire, and it's so evil, and we just don't say how. Her first speech at the Wisconsin legislature is, I'm on, we're on, you know, conquered Ho-Chunk land, da-da-da. I mean, she's such a radical.

So, it is just not in her nature to lie and say these. That is what Democratic candidates have done for so long. They have lied about, oh, yeah, I love the American flag. I am a patriot, blah, blah, blah. And then we had these two House Democrats. This was about a month ago. They put together a letter, and they just said, here are the principles we believe in. We actually like the United States of America. We like the free market system.

We want to fix things, but we are basic kind of patriotic, pro-market stuff, and they circulated it to all their colleagues in the House. There are 212 Democrats in the House. Eight of them signed it. Well, speaking of things that don't match or are all on board with, we have an update on the abortion pill front. I don't know, Erika, if you want to bring us through that. Yeah, this is crazy. So, you might remember there's a case that's coming up.

The Supreme Court has agreed to hear it this coming fall, and it involves the abortion pill and the Biden era lifting of the restriction on now you can get the abortion pill by mail, you don't have to have an in-person doctor visit, all that. And this woman in Louisiana, Rosalie Marquezich. She, her boyfriend, ordered abortion pills, crushed them in her drink. He got them through the mail. Obviously, no doctor checked to see if he was actually a pregnant woman, and it killed her unborn child, and she herself has suffered lasting physical harm and emotional harm, not to speak of that.

So, this case, she has sued the FDA, and the case is coming up. You'll remember back, I believe it was April. Oh, no, it was May. The Fifth Circuit courts had said, we're going to suspend the Biden-era rule while this goes through the court, meaning that we're going to go back to requiring in-person verification and saying no abortion drugs through the mail. That would have been great. Comstock Act, hello. But the Supreme Court actually said, no, we're not going to pause.

This was kind of, it was a big deal. It was a real shock, terribly frustrating. So, Again, they have asked the Fifth Circuit to pause the rule while it is going through, and this was a July 22nd Friend of the Court brief asking the Fifth Circuit to, okay, sorry, then this brief comes from the Congress, 259 Democrats. Are trying to basically sink Louisiana's continued efforts to pause this rule. And guess what, though? I got to tell you real quick. Yeah, tell us about that number, Josh.

I literally crunched the numbers. How many, if you add up all the Democrats in the House and all the Democrats in the Senate, what number do you get to? That might be 259. Bingo. 100%. Every single one. Asked the Supreme Court to just, no, no, we have to have abortion. Yeah, so this is very, very frustrating. The Department of Justice asked the appeals court to uphold a district judge's decision to pause the litigation while the FDA conducts its safety review, which again, this is what many pro-lifers who voted and campaigned for Donald Trump were asking the FDA to do, is to To reinstate the safety regulations around this drug, which is, I mean, I'm not even going to go into the science.

Everyone here knows that it is absolutely fatal to the child and damaging to women, but the Trump administration Also here, arguing that Louisiana and Marquezich, they're lacking legal standing here, and so, again, this is going on. Meanwhile, though. We get this from Acting Attorney General Todd Blanch, and Josh, you can update us on his confirmation process after this, but there was recently a private call, which I believe our own Tom McCluskey was privy to, in which Todd Blanch told this assembled group of pro-life and faith leaders that the DOJ is working to make the Supreme Court Dobbs decision overturning Roe v.

Wade, quote, permanent in every Single state. And confirming later in the call that he was speaking specifically about chemical abortion, male order abortion. And Tom McCluskey's comment, I believe, was, well, there's your Politico headline. And, in fact, Politico is now reporting that the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, would like nothing more than to end male order abortion, which is great. So, Blanche said, quote, we're working to get solutions so that the Dobbs decision becomes permanent in every single state. And he said the DOJ's efforts are focused on preventing abortion providers and officials in sanctuary states that allow abortion.

...from undermining pro-life laws enacted elsewhere. Quote, that means that if states have said, we are going to protect the unborn, and we are going to protect every life from the moment of conception, we're putting practices and policies in place, the DOJ, so that other states and organizations can't attack that, and they can't do things like mail-order drugs. He did caution that this effort is going to take a lot of time, which is why the administration does not, quote, have complete victory yet.

But he added, we will have victory, and victory will be soon, and it will be permanent. I don't know about the permanent part, but I have a feeling it's going to be, you know, soon, as in after everyone votes in the midterm election. Yeah, maybe January would be about when I would expect this to come through. That being said, Josh, what should pro-lifers who have been down on the Trump administration take away from these two stories? Well, I mean... What is good about the fact that, again, this is just another reason why it is good that Pam Bondi is out as Attorney General, and that Todd Blanch is acting Attorney General, and he is trying to get confirmed.

He doesn't want to lose the liberals, Republicans. None of the Democrats are probably going to vote for him. So, he's got to play this balancing act, but there are some pro-lifers, like Senator Josh Hawley, who are like, you know, if there was no tea leaf that he was going to continue with stuff, then he might lose votes that way. So, I think this is a good thing. I'm happy to hear that Acting Attorney Todd Blanch is trying to, you know, he's signaling that he's going to implement more of this stuff.

It just tells me. Hey, after the election is over, we plan on implementing these policies. I don't think they'll be permanent. I think a Democratic president could undo them, but they will stay so long as we have a Republican president. And that will save lives. That will save thousands and thousands of lives. Right. So, I mean, at this point, you know, like... If they did it today and we lost the elections because of it, that is the calculation that they are looking at.

They are not asking me for my advice, obviously, but it tells me that it is coming soon. I would think it will get it after the midterms. Yeah, and it is really interesting to me that both of these stories come from, we have the going through the courts option for the pro-life movement, and then we have the going through the executive branch for the pro-life. Movement, and I mean, I would love to see Congress do something which would be more permanent, but in the absence of that...

Well, I mean, if they do something in December, that could alter the facts with regards to the Supreme Court case itself. You know, like, oh, well, that changes everything. There's an executive order, so... That's true. Yeah, and here's another reason why I'm really interested in the chemical abortion stories coming out of our lawgivers and makers and executors, because another story came out in the last, it was like 10 days ago, about mifepristone, and these researchers, shout out to Elise Rose and Michael Varveris, they have demonstrated that mifepristone, the primary drug in chemical abortions, is actually in drinking water.

And this is crazy. So, they collected 36 samples from locations upstream and downstream of wastewater treatment facilities, so both before it goes through treatment and after, from municipal taps near Austin, Texas, Blacksburg, Virginia, and Carbondale, Illinois. And they reported anti-progesterone activity, which is what mifepristone does, right? It cuts off progesterone. The baby is starved to death. As concentrations equivalent to mifepristone.

And it calls for additional testing to confirm because they have found, so the levels, I believe, of safety for mifepristone are like 0.01 in water, and it's like 0.4. This was crazy, crazy numbers, super, super concerning, especially since an antiprogesterone, if a pregnant woman is drinking this water, that's going to make it that much harder for her to carry her pregnancy to term. And all kinds of other health risks.

But this was a nuts story, and do you remember back at Alex Jones, when he was like, the frogs are turning gay because we're flushing birth control in the water? He was right! Another W for Alex Jones. God bless Alex Jones.

Not always right, certainly. Just right there. Crazy. He nailed it on that one. He's been right about a few things, I'm telling you. I mean, a broken clock, all that. Bohemian Grove. Yeah. He was the first guy to get a Bohemian Grove. But this is something. This study is proving what a year ago there were hearings. Remember Patty Murray on the hill mocking this idea that there are abortions in the water? Well, it turns out there are, and we have to address this.

This is so disgusting. Yeah, but anyway, it turns out all the conspiracy theories were right, and that's pretty gross. So, is Todd Blanche going to be confirmed, Josh? Do we have hope here? Yeah, so Susan Collins, who is up in a tough re-election in Maine, announced that she is not going to vote to confirm Todd Blanche, but again, she is a team player, and so I suspect she went to John Thune and said, I am in a tough re-elect, and they probably said, go for it, Susie, do what you got to do, because we got the 53 Republicans.

You can still confirm them with 50 votes because you can bring in the vice president to break a tie. So, you lose one, you can lose up to two more. So far, some of the others that are on the fence have indicated that, yeah, we'll probably vote for Todd Blanch. So, I think it's going to come down to the wire. I think, ultimately, he gets confirmed.

You know, there might be suddenly a few extra million dollars sent to northern Alaska to make sure Murkowski moves the right way. Who knows? These kind of things kind of happen. You know, I say that somewhat in jest. It really is the swamp, isn't it? I mean, for a reason. But, again, this whole process. You know, has been good, because Pam Bondi was a disaster. Todd Blanche has done a very good job so far, and in having to try to get a full support of all the Republicans, he's made vows to strengthen, you know, the policy on pro-life stuff.

So, I consider that a win so far. Yes, I think Donald Trump could have done this in January of last year, 2025, and been just fine with it. You know, that's what we... We have all been recommending, but if it happens in November, better after the elections, better late than never.

Sounds good. Time for good news. Erika, what do you have? Yay, I have two, because I just am full of good news today. So, this was Usha Vance, the second lady of the United States. She gave her first interview post having little baby Alec, their fourth child, and I just, I love what she had to say here. Yes, I know she's not Catholic, but like, this is just the beauty of motherhood. This is a universal good. Go ahead.

It's been really lovely so far. One of the things that has just been beautiful to see is how excited my older kids are. ...for their new brother. They're always fighting over holding him. Oh, yes. When we do diaper changes or clothes changes, one of them is always there helping, you know, over the diaper table. There's this really great way in which their needs are complementary with his. So, I try to do things one-on-one with each of them and him, so they feel like they're getting their own personal time with both of us.

Now, I'm sure there are going to be hiccups here and there. But for right now, they seem to be really thriving. Yeah, and I just love this because one of my favorite parts every time God blessed us with a new baby, hands down, bringing baby home and introducing baby to the siblings, you know, people will... It's the best moment. Yeah, you know, I kind of grew up with this narrative that, like, you want to have two kids so that you can give all your attention to your kids, but, you know, most of the time, my seven kids don't really want, like, all my attention because I'm a little overwhelming, as you can imagine.

And so, they really just want to play with their siblings. Like, I'm so glad they have each other to, like, dilute the intensity of the parents. And yeah, so it's just, I love that she's discovering this and sharing the joy of having, I mean, four in America today is like a big family. So, it's the joy of having that and sharing with the sibs. It's such a wonderful moment when they meet each other. So, happy for them. Happy for the Bances.

That's pronatalism. What was your other one? Oh, yes. So, today is also one of my favorite feast days. This is the feast of Our Lady of the Snows, also known as the dedication of Mary Major, one of the major basilicas in Rome. But the story, this is August 5th, right? How is Rome in the summer? Rome's a little warm, a little warm in the summer, much like the swamp here in America. So, we celebrate Our Lady of the Snows in August because we recall that in 3.52, the Blessed Virgin Mary, she appears to this wealthy Roman couple.

Rich couple and says, I would like you to build me a church here in the city of Rome on the Esquilin Hill, one of the seven hills of Rome. And they say, oh, of course, Our Lady, as one does when Our Lady appears to you. I would think so. But how will we know where to build the church? And she says, I will let down a shower of snow on the spot where I wish to have my church. And sure enough, in the middle of August, in Rome 352.

Down comes the snow, and that is where Our Lady asked for her basilica. So, it looks like they're doing that in the video, huh? And so, yeah, in the video, so today, to remember that, in the video, you can see they shower down white petals, white flower petals, through the ceiling, and everyone remembers the miraculous event, and I just love that. So, it's whimsical, it's funny, and it's beautiful, like snow in August, Our Lady.

So, you need to go to Dairy Queen and have a blizzard. Yeah, everyone should go have... That is the Josh from Michigan celebrating Our Lady of the Snow. I think we just need more stuff where we drop things from the ceiling. I think it would be good for us. I absolutely agree. What is the one where St. John Cancius drops the roses?

Oh, is that Pentecost? A lot of churches do red petals on Pentecost. It looks just like this, but with rose petals. That, and when they swing the chasuble throughout the whole church, and it's super intense. The thurible. The thurible, yeah. The giant one that was just goes through. I think we need more of that. I think I'm pro, because the difference to me here is, this isn't like megachurch, you know, pastor flying through the air. It's still dedicated to a broader tradition.

No, no megachurch here. So, yeah, this to me is different, and it's like you take your history and your tradition and legacy seriously to make the effort to do something like this. Yep, love it. I love that. All for it.

All for it. Josh, what do you got? Well, it looks like you don't have one, so you can take- No, I was in- My good news is I was in Wyoming, and it was the sickest experience ever. I was hanging out with cowboys. I stayed in the rectory of a priest who was literally a cowboy, only in Wyoming. Shout out to Buffalo, Wyoming. Father Bryce is the man. So, we got a great episode of Time Across America coming for you. Spent a couple days filming out there.

Was at a rodeo. Was on horses. Did you learn to lariat like the last two? I did. I was taught by seven-year-olds that they had some of the most casual swagger I've ever seen on a seven-year-old, and they all got it on their first try because they all do it on horses. So, we're just doing it out back, basically, and they had like a rubber steer, and it took me probably like 12 or 13 tries, and it must have been so hard for them to watch.

It's been so painful. I mean, these people are doing this probably out of the womb. Yeah, they're just, and you know what, because they're so, they have so much swagger and so casual, they were encouraging me. They're like, oh, you got to form a little different, you know, it's all good, you'll get it. But I'd say, top five American feelings, one, riding horseback, wearing a cowboy hat, two, throwing a lasso. Like, the feeling of lassoing over your head, unbelievable. That was, I never, I grew up in the suburbs, so no 4-H, no county fair, so I got to see a lot of animals I really have not seen for the first time.

Hopefully, for the entertainment value of the audience. So, The Cowboy Way of Life, we dove into heavy, and it was incredible. I'll look forward to that. I liked your bourbon episode, so I'll look forward to that cowboy one. Speaking out west, I want to give a shout out to one of our listeners, Ryan O'Connor. He's out of Denver. He's one of our top five listeners on Spotify. He runs a really good Catholic ministry for sports called Training for Heaven, and when he's out there as a coach, competitors on the other teams have remarked that How his teams just have a greater joy, and so I think it's because they understand sports competition isn't just about winning, winning, winning.

That's important. Train for your body, all that kind of stuff, but having the right perspective is so critical as well. So, anyway, go check out highlightcatholic.org, his organization. Just wanted to give a shout out, and hey, if you think someone else deserves a good shout out. In the LOOPcast, let us know. Email us at LOOPcast at CatholicVote.org. For my good news, I'd like to just give another W for Governor Ron DeSantis. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Florida's law banning children from attending sexualized drag shows is, in fact, of course, totally 100% constitutional.

Yes. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, David French. Who said it was the price of... Oh, shots fired at David French. Funny. He defended that stuff. That was what it was all about. I'm laughing because it's true, but... Oh my gosh, I was at a party. I have to tell Josh this. I'm just going to interrupt the show. I was at a party this weekend, and everyone's like, who will replace Ross Dowsett at the New York Times? And they're like, one guy was like, well, why don't we just have David French be the conservative guy?

I was like, where's Josh? Hey, we're talking about him now. Let's move up my Twilight Zone. Basically, and listen, I'll start this by saying, you know, this guy's been making the rounds talking about gerontocracy, and I think in general, listen, even within our own chat, you know, there's been some arguments, some frustration about generational warfare from the boomers to Gen Z. We all got to put down our guns and figure something out. This guy is a law professor at Yale and had some pretty radical proposals for how we solve this gerontocracy issue, and he basically got criticized by everyone, which is pretty hilarious because...

In one way, he's criticizing the welfare state that basically made this possible, because essentially, people are living much longer lives than they did before, and they're much more capable towards the end of their lives. Right. So, that's why we see this phenomena of Mitch McConnell. Literally, no one has seen him for over a month now, and he's submitting bills somehow from his office. I don't know how that works. Yeah, he's submitted a bill over the weekend. Right. So, I mean, you can say Mitch McConnell.

You could say RBG. You could say, we just have a very old- It's bipartisan. Totally bipartisan. It is not just in government. It is also in business as well. CEOs are much older. They are waiting to relinquish power, and typically, that happens sooner, and there are benefits to that because you have... Even, for example, Erika, you brought up... J.D. Vance having kids, and that even being a news item, could you imagine most of our elected representatives having children right now? I mean, if they did, it's probably with not their wife, would be my guess.

But even Trump's like 81. Yeah, because Chuck Grassley's in his 90s. Exactly. I'd be like, what? And so, basically, and then also, if you look at a wealth split, partially because, again, they're living longer, and they have much more of a robust social welfare benefit than any generation ever. And then also, asset prices have gone up significantly. So, if you own a house, that's part of your net worth. You now make a ton of money. So, anyway, Ross has this guy on.

I saw him make the rounds. I've watched a few of his interviews, but there was one moment in particular that really, I perked up when I heard it too, and Ross did not let him slide on this one. I mean, right before you, Laurel, I mean, like the guy's identifying some problems, like, you know, even if there are some solutions to try to change the system, overwhelmingly, voters are all like anything that would be against. People 60 and older has no chance.

Right. And that's not, you know, like... We need a little bit more balance. His prescription, though, I think you're right to call this out. Right. Yeah, so yeah, this moment in particular. So, basically, the left criticizes him because if you are criticizing older people, you're basically criticizing the new deal that made them the way they are. And the new deal is kind of like a rail for the left of like, we built this, we should be proud of it. And if you criticize it in any way, shape, or form, you're criticizing us.

Great society. Yeah, you can't. Yeah. And then the other side, of course, a more traditional right-leaning critique would be. We should not have such a generous welfare state. It has actually caused a lot of the problems that we have. The vast majority of government spending now is on entitlements, and so we need to make it means-tested. We need to make it more efficient. This is actually a big drag on society. There are other ways, basically, to take care of elderly at this point.

So, I will play the clip that he stopped on. It was awesome. I've gotten in some hot water for proposing we consider overweighting the votes of younger people or assigning the youngest eligible voters proxy votes for the unrepresented children of our country. So, those are edgy. Why not assign them to those children's parents? Well, because there's a divergence of interest between parents and children, and I think it's likelier that young people, not people. Who are raising families will have the best insight into the interests of children, whereas you, if you were awarded five proxy votes.

I think that's daft. I think it's absurd to imagine that a 24-year-old recent college graduate has a better assessment of the interests of my own children than I do. And I say this with all due respect to 24-year-old recent college graduates, of whom I hope to be the parent of in nine years or so. I think parents generally confuse the interests of their family with the interests of their children, and part of our goal, I think, as parents, but also as a society, is trying to make sure that children aren't the hostages of their parents, as much as we rely on parents to raise them.

In my experience, parents are more likely to be the hostages. In my experience, the parents are more likely to be the hostages. Be the hostages of their children. That was awful. I'm going to miss the show so much. This reminded me of a former Senator Phil Graham of Texas, where he was talking about school choice, and he said, my school choice educational policies are based on the fact that I care more about my children than you do. This was an exchange that the Senator had with someone who was testifying that was against school choice, and the educator who opposed school choice replied.

No, you don't. Yeah. Let's say we get this right. This is a senator versus a bureaucrat. The senator says, my education policies are based on the fact that I care more about my children than you do. The educator opposed the choice said, no, you don't. He goes, okay.

What are their names? Exactly. You care more about my kids than I do. What are their names? But this is the reigning view of the family. I mean, I will speak for Connecticut here, where we just passed restrictive homeschool laws, where new homeschooling parents are going to be subject to unwarrantless searches by CPS and DFACS. And the thinking, though, is that This is classic liberalism, that the primary unit of society is the individual, and the basis of human society has to be maximizing autonomy for the atomized individual, and that this idea that we live and grow in the context that we're social animals, that we grow up in a family, and that we're best served subsidiarily with our families and our towns, and then the state, and then the federal government, is so foreign to them.

That, like, this Yale law professor, he looks at Ross, and he's just like, how can you even think? He's stunned that anyone would say, wait, how would a 24-year-old know what my child wants? Because they assume that between all those atomized individuals, the baseline is friction, and the baseline is your rights against my rights, and the state's job is to protect children from their parents and their families, because The natural order of things are just, it's so, it's Thomas Hobbes, just writ large, and that's why there's a direct line between liberalism, like this guy, he considers himself a classical liberal, like, you know, 1998, let's all go back to that when it was just, we were all so nice because liberalism was ascendant, or, yeah, 1798, yeah, French Revolution, we're going to guillotine the parents.

But there's a direct line between that and what we're seeing with the Democratic Socialists of America ascendancy, because it's the same idea that the state exists to be everything to you. It's the life of Julia from the Obama years. And when you confront people with that idea that perhaps parents are the best caretakers of their own children, they just look at you like you're speaking Greek. Yeah, I know. It's interesting. I feel like there's all kind of... It intersects in a way, too.

I was reading an analysis on why marijuana has kind of become the new drug of choice, and marijuana is a drug for someone who's isolated. People tend to smoke, not socially, but by themselves, and I think that I got to think about this more, but when I look around at even like what I was doing for the show, you know, I was in Wyoming, and everyone knew their neighbor, literally knew their neighbor, knew them by name, knew their job, what they were doing, and if they're in trouble, like, We were at this small-town rodeo in Johnson County, and they had this event where you would put lipstick on and kiss a pig, and they raised money for someone that had a kid that had cancer, and they couldn't make payments, and so everyone in Johnson County, the only people there were pretty much from Johnson County.

Raise that money to go right to that family who is standing there in front of the pig, and it's almost like hard to think about. I was thinking about that myself. I'm like, you know, I live in a suburban area. I don't know my neighbors, and there's probably more of them there than there would be in this Wyoming's like per capita, the smallest town, country, or state in the union, and I do think it's that type of thinking and that philosophy that has atomized us all because everyone has to be.

You know, a man unto themselves, they have to make their own money, they have to go and make their own career, so you move for that career, right? You move for the best career, you move for the best education, you leave your family because, you know, what do they know for you? What are they going to do for you? And then you get the scenario where you get these 20-somethings living in a city, which not to say it's bad, but they're all kind of like shuffling around rootless, you know, because they don't, they're not connected to their history, they're not connected to their family.

And I think the one thing that's really appealing about Catholicism to me is We have a thousand-year tradition that I belong to, I identify with. And I know that it's not just as old as, you know, the Industrial Revolution or the Organization of Cities or my given career, and then also with my family, too. Like, I know my family members personally, and we are a unit. If someone was in trouble, we'd be able to take care of each other. The more I see this advice to cut off your family, move for your job, make your own friends, not family, that's another force moving against what actually should be an insulator from the government.

Because those people in Wyoming, when they needed that payment, You know, most people here would be like, oh, you just go to your insurance company, and then, of course, it's a total battle to get that out of them. They don't think that way. They think, this is a member of our community, and we are here to help them because I know them personally, and that's actually much more powerful than this kind of, even though there may be more people in America, this kind of gets back to the immigration debate, too.

When you flood a country with people, they might be the best people ever, but you do not know them. You do not know them, and you introduce them to a community, and then you get the strife. It is not actually the fault of the people that were in the country before, and it might not even be the fault of the people there. It is just not a way for a functioning, flourishing community that takes care of themselves. And then you say, oh, how do you solve this?

You go to the government, right? So, all of these things are introduced to, at its core, funny, you know, we are getting back to the answer you gave. To break up the nuclear family, but then also the intergenerational family that understands themselves and takes themselves seriously. And you wouldn't be doing crazy things like changing your gender, you know, quote unquote, or, you know, the new crazy suggestion from whatever the monoculture is saying, because you'd go to your grandpa, and you'd be like, what are you talking about?

Like, you're not going to do that. So now we have the left is worshiping the self. You know, because anything that, as you say, in a community, in a church, that would, you know, they want to be liberated from any constraints. They want to be able to be emancipated. Justice Kennedy said, masters their own universe, create their own identity, and that is why, also, the left loves marijuana, which is you kind of getting that dope, kind of chills you out, numbs you out, whereas smoking is, I am not a big fan of smoking cigarettes, but it is at least a stimulant.

It is way more vital, and you interact with other people, and so is... Alcohol. So, what is the left promoting? They're promoting pornography. They're promoting sports gambling. They're supporting dope. So, all those things are like, you're off in your corner, you're numb, you're addicted, you're controllable. Yeah. I would say that's unfortunately becoming a left-right thing based on the money interest there. Like, I see a lot of Republicans just kind of turn the other way and be like, so maybe there's a difference between Republicans and conservatives.

I get it, but. Okay, final thing. This is the best summary of what Ross did with his show. Someone just tweeted this out and said, Ross Douthat spends 30 minutes of his podcast letting his guests build their case, even steelmanning them. Then 30 minutes in, he tries to suppress a gleeful smile and says, I have so many questions, and proceeds to ask a flurry of devastating questions that dismantles their worldview. I can't wait for his 60 minutes, yeah.

Stunned at a loss, and then he swoops in to gently offer the tender bosom of the Catholic Church, whose intellectual tradition is to salve for their wounds, perfection, a modern-day Socrates. Yeah, he's amazing, dude. That is awesome. That is my good news. I moved it up. Shout out, Ross. I enjoyed that one. Yeah, it is a good one. Okay, so now we got T-Block. We got Mass Migration. We sure do. And Sueta. Sueta. I mean, this video truly just, I mean, I can see why it is viral.

It shocks the conscience. Yeah, the videos coming out of this were crazy. So, yeah, this is Sueta, and actually, I at first thought this was the Spanish. The Spanish. The Spanish mainland. I can't speak today. I'm speaking Spanish. It's actually a little city. It's not. It's a little city off of the coast, on the coast of Morocco itself. It's an enclave, right. So, yeah, if you wanted to pull up the map there, Tom, that might be really helpful for people to see.

But the reporting is we've got, it was a range between, now it's up to 50,000 to 60,000 migrants, most of them young military-aged males. There were about... 1,100 children, so boys under the age of 18, who also made the swim. It's about a three-mile swim around this little horn on the coast of Morocco to approach Sueta, the city, which belongs to Spain and has since the 16th century.

By water, and that's important. They couldn't just walk across the mountains to get to the city, because the Spanish government had recently passed, and the Supreme Court had confirmed, and it went into effect this weekend, that those migrants arriving by water from the sea would be given automatic asylum and processed as asylum seekers, which is if you come over the mountains by land, then you can be turned away at the border.

So, this goes into effect over the weekend, and it went all over social media, apparently. So, migrants who were interviewed in Thwaita, and you could put up some of this footage here, Todd. This is Tom. Tom, I can't speak. I'm calling you Todd. That's so weird. I saw this, but the one of them climbing the shores is crazy. Yeah, there's just masses. This one's crazy. They're going through the streets of the city, and they're Muslim, so they're yelling Allahu Akbar.

Um, and... Right, and this is a city of about 30,000 people, and you get 60,000 of these young men just coming across all in one day. It was absolutely crazy. It effectively shut down the city. The Spanish prime minister, who is a socialist and very pro-mass migration, he even called out the military to help deal with this, which for him, it pushed him to action. Well, he knew.

Yeah, for sure. The response from the Catholic world in Spain was incredible. So, this one priest from Pamplona, Fr. Javier Aizpun of Pamplona. You've got to stop with the teach. Come on, angle this girl. My first Spanish teacher in high school was from Spain, and she spoke with this, and I just love it. My first Spanish teacher was from England. And she was an English woman, so it was even more hilarious. The most Anglicanized high school Spanish class. It's like when you go to a Mexican restaurant, and it's not being ran by Mexicans.

I'm like, I'm out, dude. I don't want anything to do with this. Yeah, exactly. We want authentic Mexican. Anyway, so this priest goes, Our Lady of Africa, the patroness of Sueta, may she drive the reconquest of Morocco and its conversion to Christianity. What Queen Isabella the Catholic left undone, let us know how to finish. And that just threw everything. Erika, are you familiar with the Spanish Civil War?

I have the 1930s. I am slightly familiar. Because now the debates are raging online because, of course, Francisco Franco, a very controversial figure. Because Ben Shapiro woke up and was wrong again. I wasn't going to say it, because people, you know, Ben Shapiro lumped in Francisco Franco with, who is it? I say I'm a Franco-phile, people, I have to clarify. No, it's not that one. I think the thing about the Spanish Civil War, okay, so we're going to have to parse out what's happening in Sueta first, but the thing about the Spanish Civil War is people don't...

People see Francisco Franco and they're like, oh, he kicked out certain groups, but then they don't talk about that they were literally digging up nuns and putting them on the streets, defecating on them, mass murdering priests, raping nuns. I mean, it was some of the worst, most atrocious evils done to Catholics, maybe ever. I mean, extending their treasury to the Soviet Union, economic crimes as well, what you said was obviously the worst. Yeah. But they... Everything they were doing from top to bottom was an absolute total assault on the Spanish people and their Catholic faith.

It was an absolute abomination, and so, you know, like, people can, that is what I always get mad when we talk about history, when people just go, well, standing here in 2026, I can judge and look back and say 90 years ago that they made a mistake, and I would have never done it like that, and again, I keep saying this is what it gets down to, like, You know, you can pretend, like, if you lived in pre-Civil War South, you would have been totally against slavery, but chances are, you wouldn't have been.

If you were a Spanish Catholic and people were raping nuns and killing priests? You would go with Franco. You would totally go with Franco. Franco.com, dude. I would be on the front lines, too, if that was happening. I mean, so Ben Shapiro was saying, you know, he said, you know, don't stand, which is the word for stand. Be a super fan of whatever this... What does it mean to stand with Franco? What? So, don't support... He says, don't support Hitler, don't support Stalin, don't support Mao, don't support Franco.

It's like... Hold on a second here, buddy. You threw one in there that didn't belong with the others. Yeah. Do you know why? Yes, of course. Because he expelled the Jews that were on the other side. That's why. I mean, he's a single... You understand Ben Shapiro if you understand that. And that's why people get sensitive about Francisco Franco, is because the Jews were a part of this, and so he expelled a lot of people from the country. Not to say what Franco did was perfect, either.

I mean, there was a lot of mass executions. At the same time as Hitler was rising to power and the Holocaust was going down. Yes, and it was somewhat of a proxy, I think, because the Soviets were supporting one side, and the Nazis were supporting the other side, so you get that tied in, but yeah. But every Republican president in the... 20th century was like in favor of Franco. Eisenhower next. It is not even a controversial opinion.

This is the best option. William F. Buckley was like a huge Franco guy. Yeah. If Buckley was, like, yeah, come on now. I mean, but he had, like, rational reservations about it. But, yeah, yes, they far better understood the historical context of what was actually going on on the ground in Spain in the 1930s, and it was devastating. We have so many martyrs. John Paul II, Benedict, Francis, they canonized so many martyrs from the Spanish Civil War. So, Robert Royal had a great chapter on it in his book on the 20th century martyrs, too, if you want some light summer reading for the end of this.

Whenever Erika suggests light summer reading, I take that with caution. The martyrs of the 20th century for two. One page a day, I'll get to it, that chapter. One page a day, it'll be done in a couple of years. Yeah.

So, okay, there's some interesting things on this front, Erika. We were kind of talking about it before, but basically what I saw was you get this island in Spain. Overrun, and what was curious to me is 60,000 people from Morocco, and these weren't all Moroccans. They were people from Sub-Saharan Africa. Yeah, a lot of Sudanese, Nigerian, right. And the Spanish are claiming that they found certain members of Moroccan intelligence as a part of this crowd. Not surprised. Yeah, right. And so, it seems coordinated.

Like, why would this happen now? How would you get this message out to all of these people? And if you look at the broader context of what's going on, Trump very much does not like the leader of Spain. He's a socialist. He's already put out some true social stuff saying, basically, this is what you get for the amnesty, and they're very anti-Israel, so you get a lot of jawboning from Israel of this is what you get, basically, for criticizing us on Gaza or whatever else.

And so, I've seen a lot of conspiracies swirl on what's going on here. Or is it just as simple as Supreme Court put this out? Morocco is very friendly to the Trump administration. I believe they have a road named after him. We're going to pull this off as a political move for a couple of things. One, warn the West of like, hey, we can do this to you too. We're the people standing up to this Muslim invasion, whatever you want to call it.

And then two, expose the hypocrisy of Spain enacted a really large mass amnesty program. That was even controversial within The country where basically anyone that was in, and we have Republicans proposing this, by the way. This isn't just a Spain issue, where it said, well, they got in. They can work. It's fine. We're going to give everyone amnesty, legal or illegal, so that they can start functioning as a part of the state. So, that's kind of the subtext that led to this.

I don't know. How much do you read into that, Erika? What's your read? I mean, I think a lot of things can be true at once when you have phenomena like this happening, and would the Trump... It is no surprise to me that the Trump administration, and Israel, and the head of Portugal, and Italy, and Germany, they're going to use this event to make political hay, because that's what we do, right? And the fact is... Never waste a good crisis. Never let a good crisis go to waste.

But, I mean, I'm not seeing any evidence that somehow, like, Israeli operatives were in Morocco telling the Moroccan police... To force the guys into the water. I think a lot of things probably happened. There's a massive human trafficking outfit around the Mediterranean of people wanting to get from third world countries in Africa and the Middle East to Western Europe, and I think that absolutely the fact of this legislation going through and the Supreme Court in Spain approving it gave those networks incentive to spread the word.

That this was going into effect this weekend. So, I think that's another player that I don't see people like Candace Owens or Tucker Carlson addressing right now, and that's a very real factor here as well. The Moroccan government, it seems from some of the footage, Nick Shirley was over there sharing some of this footage. It seems that they might have pushed it. He's like, I'm going to Sueta. Yeah, I'm just in Sueta at the perfect time. I'm in Sueta right now, yeah.

So, he makes it over there, and he's sharing. It looks like Moroccan police are, like, just letting guys get into the water and just start swimming. So, I think there's a lot of interested players in events like this being allowed to take place or encouraged to take place, and we just won't know. Like, we aren't going to know. But to say that it was all Israel or it was all the Trump administration trying to make a point is ridiculous. I guess, at some point, if courts are going to be this psychopathic, this suicidal, You have to start to say, and what army?

I mean, I know that Andy, President Jackson didn't necessarily say it over the best thing, the Trail of Tears, but I'm sorry. No, like, you can't allow a court that, you know, I found the president of that country at the time, I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no. This decision is not in effect, because there's no way, and I would reinforce guards everywhere.

You know, you can't allow a court just to say, oh, well, we feel like by water is okay, and therefore, anyone who rides by water, anyone who rides by water is by, given asylum, everyone. Yeah. Like, think of the incentives you're creating, and so, you know, Italian Prime Minister, Georgia Maloney, she's like, yeah, no, you have, you know, no travel from Spain.

You know, to Italy, if this is going to happen. I mean, this is absolutely insanity. Right, and remember, Spain's part of the EU, so once the migrants are in Spain, they have free travel to anywhere in the EU if Spain approves them for asylum or what have you. So, it's great on Georgia Maloney for drawing the line there, and I mean, I think the best thing that can come of this is just people being shocked into action.

Like, we cannot continue to just open the floodgates, and that's the point Trump was making, I think, at the cabinet meeting the other day. Well, it gets back to what Kelsey Reinhart, our president, said. You know, Catholic bishops, the popes, and priests in this country have emphasized the dignity of a migrant. Yes, of course.

But it feels like they're not respecting the society that they're trying to enter into, and so the good people of this city that are completely overrun, the 30,000 people, having 1,000 people come in would be, like, disordered, but you just dumped 60,000 people in? Like, that priest that said, you know, we need to reconnect, I'm with you, brother. You know, we need, so we haven't had a balance in church teaching on immigration for quite some time, and this is... A global migrant crisis, you know, and people are able to move a lot faster than they could 100, 200 years ago or whatever, and I just feel like the church needs to emphasize all facets of the church's teachings on immigration, and we just, oh, it's just welcome the stranger, welcome the stranger, welcome the stranger.

It's like, yeah. I don't mean to nitpick on that, but I'm like. I guess Pope Leo has said, nations do have the right to enforce their border laws. But then also, that you do want to treat migrants with dignity. I don't think anyone disagrees with that, and that actually does encapsulate both things. My point, though, would be that the experience of Catholics hearing this on immigration is they say that one little line, whether it's Pope Leo or bishops in our own country, and then they proceed to spend the next 90% of the time saying that, you know, we need to be nicer to migrants, we need to welcome a stranger.

So, it's not that they're saying anything wrong. It's that it's not... It's disproportionate. It's disproportionate. It's not balanced correctly, you know, and American people, like, look, what did the Catholics in this country do? They heard what the bishops had to say on migration and said...

Yeah, I understand. We do welcome the stranger. We're a very generous country, but I'm going to vote for the guy, Donald Trump. Mass deportations now, yeah. I see we have a little bit of an update on that. I think there's definitely frustration that ICE has not been posting how many deportations are happening. It seems like it's kind of slowed or lost emphasis, especially with the war going on. It feels like it sucked all the energy out of that. Do we have an update on what's going on there?

Yeah, so CBS was reporting this week that the Trump administration... The department, so ICE, has a monthly record high this past month of July, so this came out just beginning of August, and CBS News got the data directly from ICE. They're saying that it had widened its crackdown, making arrests at airports, immigration check-in offices, and also communities within the United States. So, they took into custody about 46,000 individuals who are facing deportation.

Either because of immigration violations, or overstaying their visas, other things like that. So, again, the federal government hasn't publicly disclosed these numbers, but it shows that there was some kind of summer enforcement surge by ICE, and the White House was asking for 2,000 arrests every day. And it looks like in July, they hit about 1,500 per day. So, they're not quite at the goal of the administration that Trump has set for them, but they're approaching that more. So, you can see there on the screen, the line graph is going up again.

I want to be clear, too. These are detentions, not deportations. Right. This is just detentions or arrests, right, for people facing deportations. Yeah, we have a lot of detentions. I even saw Bill Melugin. Posted this too, and I think this is maybe the bigger frustration probably for the administration is ICE records reveal that the viral Haitian illegal immigrant gang member we witnessed being arrested by ICE Boston during the first week of the Trump administration in January 2025 has still not been deported.

He remains in ICE custody in Louisiana nearly 18 months after yelling F Trump, Biden forever bro to our cameras during his ICE arrest in East Boston. He had 17 criminal convictions in just over two years on his rap sheet. I'm told by ICE sources he has a deportation order since at least January 2026. And it's been using every legal avenue to avoid removal from the U.S.

And so, it seems like the detentions are happening, but we're not able to deport. I think this guy in particular is probably getting legal help because he said, F Trump, and it's such a very public way of doing it, and so there's going to be lefties. You have to remember, the one time we tried to deport somebody, and we didn't have all the people were perfect, but, oh, well, too late, he's already in Nicaragua, and then the court's like, no, go get him, bring him back until we adjudicate this, and the administration's like, you're kidding, right?

This is absolute insanity. And everyone who calls Trump a fascist, he actually abided by this ridiculous court decision to do that, but I think it has created a chilling effect in that they're like, we really got to make sure we dot every I, get all of our P's and Q's, everything perfect, especially on a high-profile one like you mentioned. So, it's not happening at the speed I want, but at least the tensions are going up. And then I think, you know, it's going to be a bottleneck, and then we're going to get them deported as well.

It's just not going to go as fast as we want, but this is why we say we don't want another Democratic president ever again, because I just don't trust any of them to, you know, to actually safeguard the country. Like, you already believe in mutilating the genitals of children and killing the ones in the womb, and then, you know, all that stuff is horrible, and then you won't even do basic stuff like protect the border. Like, what? What is it that you do?

I mean, a government's first order of business. What is it that you do? What is it that you do here? Office space. Okay, next question. I think you had some from John Schwepp on sportsbooks. Yeah. So, Josh, I can pitch it, because Josh brought this to my attention, and this is actually really interesting to me about betting, because last week, we talked a little bit about Kalshi and the polymarkets, and does that really rise to the level of betting? And we have a few more stories coming out.

So, this is from John Schwepp. He wrote a story on the hill. Really interesting. And the hook was that the Philadelphia Phillies, the first baseman, Bryce Harper. Bryce Harper. Awesome. He's facing what they call scrutiny in the parlance after he recorded a personalized video for this FanDuel, which is an online sports betting, and it's an app as well, VIP customer, who had lost more than $1.5 million on the sports book app, making him, I guess, a VIP customer.

So, yeah, here's the picture of him with the FanDuel logo. Harper says he didn't. authorize FanDuel's logo to appear in the video and he would not have been participated if he had known he was going to be promoting gambling. But really the point of the article was that this just highlights how the online sportsbooks have been using VIP programs to reward and retain their biggest losing customers. So it's not the people who win who get to go to the parties and get flown to France.

For a dinner on the Riviera, it's the people who are losing the most money. They actually make it illegal. If you win too much, they basically ban you, but if you spend enough, you become a whale, quote-unquote, and they do all these different things to keep you coming in, the VIP treatment like Bryce Harper, whatever. They just suck you dry on purpose because they want your $1.5 million or more. So, unlike the prediction markets that we were talking about last week, the sportsbooks profit directly when customers lose.

Right. And yeah, like you said, Tom, they're going to restrict or ban people who actually win, and they're using, to get this done, they're using algorithms, personalized promotions, VIP hosts, gifts, and exclusive experiences to encourage high-loss customers to keep gambling, and so feeding the addiction. They want the addicts who lose. Yeah, this was fascinating. So, there was a study out of The UK in 2024, the top 10% of losing customers generate 80% of gambling website revenue. No wonder they want to keep them around.

Yeah. That would do it. So, it's just crazy numbers. So, John Twepe, he's arguing that Congress needs to investigate these sportsbook VIP programs, the algorithms that they use, the customer targeting practices, just like it's been examining big tobacco. And big tech. So, think of all the lawsuits against Meta the last year, but this vice economy that we have to use government to rein in. We aren't just like libertarian everyone, as long as you're not hurting anyone else, because this is hurting other people.

That whole argument just doesn't really rock with me. I'm not a big fan of the vice anyway, but if we were going to, you know, let me just say, I much prefer the prediction markets over... Gambling, especially when it comes to online. If you're talking about... Going to Vegas or Atlantic City or where there's a casino, there's in fact a casino in my rural town in northern Michigan, I don't like it, but that's one thing. You're going, physically going to a casino, you know you're going up against the house, it's another thing, but in your phone, it's like there 24-7, you know, and it can just bleed you dry, and I don't like either necessarily, but the betting markets at least, you know, I'm betting against another person, and I think the Tigers are going to win.

He thinks the... yankees are going to win or whatever the house gets five percent but that but what you're doing is gambling against other people you see what i'm saying so it's a little bit better as opposed to always going up against the house which is going to use every algorithm every incentive there's still insider trading issues with that but yeah i understand that but like broader point yeah so i think that's what john shrubby brought something really good to this discussion and uh you know he's a good pro family guy good activist i thought it was a you Helpful, you know, addition to the conversation.

Yeah, let's get on it. New York State disagrees, though. New York State hates Kalshi as well. So, did you see that Governor Hochul brought a lawsuit against Kalshi this last week for what they're estimating could be $36 billion in penalties for running an illegal gambling operation in the state of New York? And basically, Kalshi, like, refused to bow down on the tax. ...revenue customer protections that New York was asking it to hand over, and so they went ahead and sued. And yeah, they're saying that there's a...

I don't know, Josh. There's like the Dodd-Frank bill that somehow allows for these nationwide sports betting to happen. Do you know about the Dodd-Frank thing? Well, Dodd-Frank, I mean, I'm not surprised that they would have inserted that into it. Dodd-Frank was primarily to respond to the... 2008 market meltdown, and so it was regulating financial industry. So, I am not surprised that some sort of gambling thing was inserted into that to make it more palatable to some of these lawmakers. But the fact of the matter is, we do need to have a discussion about this.

The best way to do that is, as John Shreppi says, to have the House and Senate committees just do an investigation, bring these people in, talk about this kind of stuff. Because I think ultimately, We want, you know, stuff to be above board, and so when it comes to this, if they're using algorithms, if they're, you know, and you lose a ton of money, then they just bombard you with gifts, but then if you actually make money, they kick you off the program.

So, to me, that tells me this is not a fair industry, just like if they find out that, you know, they're using algorithms to do, you know, pricing. They find, oh, you really want to go on a trip, and so they crank the price up, you know, that kind of. I forget what the expression for it is, but they know that you are interested in this. Oh, you like to shop this, so we are going to target you with higher prices on this to try to milk more money out of you.

Those kind of profit schemes. I am not a fan. I think we should get rid of that stuff. Sounds good. On to Tri-Zone. All right, so can I go first? Our funniest president ever imagines himself. You know, a life as a coach in the WNBA. So, let us roll the tape and see what he has to say about that.

All right. And I will tell you what, if I were ever, I would be the greatest women's basketball coach in history. Because I do not like LeBron James. I like Michael Jordan much better. But I'd go up to LeBron James. It doesn't matter. I'd say, LeBron, did you ever have any desire to be a woman?

Because what I'd love you to do is star on my team that I'm building up. I will have the greatest team in history. They'll never lose. Nobody will come within 70 points of this team. Now, we have to change that, and we have to make it okay to talk about it. You know, the young lady I was talking about is afraid to talk about it. She's shunned, and she's canceled when she talks about it. This is crazy.

I love it. Unfortunately, he's still the funniest president probably ever. I mean, the thing is, you need humor to be fun of this stuff. Can I rip my hot take here? I'm going to rip my hot take. We talk about the WNBA way too much.

Who cares? It doesn't make any sense to me why people... No, you don't. You don't care about the WNBA. You do not care about the WNBA. That's a lie. You don't. You never watched a game. You probably know one player. Two, maybe? Two. Two? And you only care about when the president jokes about it, so why do we talk about it so much? It's like, um... I care more about live golf than I do about the WNBA. I swear. Like, my dad would text me.

He's like, look what's going on to Kaitlin Clark. I'm like, who cares? It's the WNBA. Wait, so you don't care about justice? Like, you don't care about... Yeah, no, I don't. If it's the WNBA, no justice. I actually have watched... The league is a joke. I've watched more clips of the WNBA this year than I have on baseball.

Are you being serious? Yeah, Major League Baseball, I went to one game, I guess, so that is different this year than, but in general, I think most sports leagues, I still like watching the NFL, but I have lost interest in Major League Baseball and make it too expensive to try to watch it. True. Why do I care about the WNBA? Because, as Erika says, I care about justice, and I care about talking about this because I can talk about then what is wrong with that league and what is wrong.

With? Everything's wrong with the league. It's subsidized by the NBA. That's the only reason it exists. Right, so here's the thing. You heard about Clay Travis. He's without kick sports, right? Yeah, he pays way too much attention to WNBA. Who cares? He does, and I do, and here's why I think you should. No, you don't.

You're misunderstanding it. Like, obviously, I do care. How many times have I brought this up? Like, six, seven times this show. Right, exactly. That's what I'm saying. I'm like, it's me too much. So, he does care, folks. I'm saying you shouldn't care, but go ahead. I guess I can't doubt you.

So, Clay Travis made a point that he wants to have a women's basketball team, and he wants to take the best all-stars from the WNBA. And he wants to compete them against a high school men's basketball team, and the whole point is, you put it like $10 million bet to see if the WNBA players can defeat the high school boys team, and the whole point he's trying to say is precisely because we have a lot of People in sports media who are radical feminists, even if they're men, men and women, they're radical feminists.

They believe it's systemically unfair that female athletes aren't paid as much as male athletes. And it's like, well, is it because men don't watch sports? No, it's because women don't watch women's sports. Don't blame the men. We're watching our men's sports. Well, you watch women's sports. I don't watch really much sports at all, actually. But the whole point, though, is you've got these people who are like... Pure communists, and they sort of believe that, like, equality of everything, and it's like, let's not forget, the women's national soccer team played against the 15-year-olds in Dallas, boys, and they lost.

Yeah. Like, so, when we talk about fairness, like, I'm trying to stop. The mutilation of children under the age of 18, I don't want anyone to be mutilated. I think sex change surgeries are terrible, but certainly the ones that are under 18, because we have a lot of parents, a lot of moms who are like, my kid might be trans, and they want to trans their own kid, and that is scary as hell.

Yep. And to have a conversation about this stuff, we can say, you know what? Men and women are born differently. There's something intrinsic about our biology, and we can have these discussions. We can talk about it. Can you find a woman that's stronger than me? Of course, but obviously, most men are stronger than most women. And Clay Travis is bringing this up. He goes, I could take just about any high school men's boys basketball team, and they could defeat a WNBA played team.

And the point is, it's like, treat women's sports differently than you treat men's sports, because they are different categories. Right. And that's why Trump is saying about LeBron, you walk the floor with these guys. It's not even LeBron. You could take an average kid on a college team, and you would run the floor with these people. And it is not to say that women are good at sports. It is a category difference. It is not making fun of them. That is what one news anchor from Minneapolis was popping off.

I was sexist. It is not sexist. It is a difference. The idea is, if you can't make it on your own swim team, bro, don't switch over and pretend you are a girl and then say like you are a winner. You are a loser.

I care about this as a justice issue. You care about the trans issue. Yes, but it's all woven into this whole debate about... But this is where it's being litigated, Pogo. This is where the discussion is, brother. No, it's not. Yes, it is where it's being... You're using the WNBA, which is an irrelevant, stupid league, as your vehicle to hammer on the trans issue.

No, they're using it. No, no, no. They are using it. Who's they? No, okay, so not, right, whoever they is. The pro-trans people. No one, but no one cares. The thing is, the WNBA would be irrelevant if no one talked about it. If you want to have these fights at the high school level, I get it. And if you want to use it as your vehicle to talk about trans issues, which is like obviously problematic, everyone understands. Great, but it's not that the WNBA is a league.

I don't have a problem with you using it as your vehicle to make that point about transit issues. I just think the league is a joke, and if people wouldn't talk about it, it would not be this like a cultural hotbed. We are making it a cultural hotbed, and it's irrelevant. We're fighting back on it. They're the ones who have been using the WNBA to shove it down our faces. When you go to ESPN, and they go to these other things, and they try to give equal coverage to this stuff, and it's like, what are you talking about?

The average sports fan is like… Interested in NFL, college football, NFL, college football, and then everything else is way, way down the list. Women's basketball is 99th out of 50. They just don't care. But ESPN has become rabidly ideological, and they're forcing it on. If women want to watch this league authentically, I have obviously no problem with this. I am precisely bringing this up, though, because it does tell us about what men and women and the differences we have, not just in biology, but I've mentioned before, there's the differences also.

One of the canards that feminists have always said is that men want to create all the mess in the world. Women ran everything. It would be so much better. Oh, you mean like the WNBA? Like, hello, Caitlin Clark?

All right. She gets murdered out there, practically. And I just don't get why people care about that either. So, we're making the same point, I think. ESPN is artificially pushing the WNBA because no one actually, there's no organic audience for that. If there was, they would survive on their own merits. The only reason that they survive is because the NBA artificially subsidizes them. I agree with that. We agree. So, that is what I am saying. My point is, it is artificially pushed, and you are saying by ESPN, fine, I agree with that.

No one cares about it, and so you are mad that they are making you care about it, and then pushing social justice issues through this would-be irrelevant league by demonizing Sophie Cunningham. Right, and I don't even have a problem with the NBA subsidizing, let's say. So, maybe the NBA decides it is going to subsidize it for 20 years to create a whole generation of people that like it, and then maybe it becomes profitable. Like, if they really want to do that, that's fine.

My biggest problem with that in general is that liberals do this kind of stuff as a way to inoculate themselves from criticism. That's what all the big corporations, Disney, Apple, Amazon, they give money for left-wing causes or do things like that to basically buy positive media coverage of what they're doing. So, no one talks about the suicide nets at… Fox, you know, whatever, the con thing or whatever in China, where they're, you know, jumping off the building to kill themselves because they're being slaves to Apple.

They don't talk about that because Apple pours a ton of money to left-wing causes. You know, yes. Now, in and of itself, do I, I don't care. I care a lot less about sports than they used to. But I do want to, I do care about our country and the country that we're giving to our children and our grandchildren. I care about my girls, and I care about how they're treated, and I hate the ideology that men and women are interchangeable, and men and women are completely the same.

Like, I believe man and woman are equally. By our Creator, in the image of God, we all have equal dignity, but that doesn't mean we're the same. And so, we have these discussions about the sports precisely because it's an opportunity to say, now, here, look, you know, Leo Thomas is really Will, and he's a dude, and he should be swimming. This is garbage. And, you know, he's just going to take off his clothes in the women's locker room and pretend he's a woman?

He hasn't done anything physically down there. Like, this is not okay. So, we're having to make this argument precisely because the left has gone insane. You know, I'm not propping up this league. I don't think, you know, whatever. If people hear about what I say, and they want to go watch the games, I could give a rip. Knock yourself out. If you find it entertaining, go have a great time. You know, I mean, look, Sophie Cunningham, I was talking with Kelsey about this.

Kelsey is one of the best basketball players, right? I mean, she's top. Best in the organization, for sure. I said, you like Sophie Cunningham because she's a defender of women's sports. You like Sophie Cunningham because she's... You know, a basketball player, and you're a basketball player, you know, she's Christian, she's conservative, you know, you like her for all those reasons. I probably like her for one more reason than you do.

Oh, Josh. Oh, no. She's a fox. Land of the free, Josh. Land of the free. And she's good looking. No, that is a funny thing about the WNBA, too, is, like, it's so rare. I still can't believe we're talking about this, but, like... Can I just add something? Can I please insert something, too? Yeah, go, go. As resident woman on the podcast. Right, I'd like to say something. So, like, to extend Josh's point just a little bit as well, that these...

You can say, okay, this is stupid. We're talking about the WNBA. This is stupid that we're living online. This is stupid. But those... That online controversy and blowing up on social media, it actually has real repercussions in, like, say, for example, my local Connecticut school, where they're debating, should this kid be allowed, who's born a boy, should he be allowed to play on the girls' basketball team, even though there's been injuries and all of these things? This kind of a discussion, yeah, maybe it's being litigated on a sport you don't care about.

I don't. Again, like sport, not so interested in WNBA, but it actually has a real impact. So, when somebody like Sophie Cunningham goes viral for defending XXXY, right, that actually changes the behaviors and the conversation on the ground that affects actual 12 and 13-year-old girls in our society. So, I think, like you, you are always sneering at people who dismiss and like, oh, the economy is great, you know, just. Don't buy a burrito. You can't dismiss the fact that these young girls are watching these debates being litigated, and something that maybe you don't care about, because the WNBA is stupid, but it actually affects their lives, and so I think that you should just stop sneering and sitting back, and you're like, what are you sitting in today?

You're like, like that. What are you talking about? Cash man, lean back. Yeah, like, I really don't think that... You guys, I don't understand. You're making straw man arguments of what I'm saying here. Josh got to the closest thing that I'm saying. The WNBA would be irrelevant. It's only alive off of outrage marketing right now, and you're giving them exactly what they want. They're subsidized by ESPN and all these other places. That is what annoys me. I'm like, because it's not a good product.

I'm a basketball player. Have you seen clips of the All-Star game? I can't believe someone sent it to me. I'm like, they're sending it to me because it's bad. So, that is my frustration. My frustration is that the WNBA has artificial relevancy in all the sports. As someone that enjoys sports, we all agree on that. So then, I don't understand. But then you're saying, why are we talking about it at all? And we've explained why we're talking about it. No, I understand talking about the trans issue.

The people who make decisions about my kids' friends in this neighborhood, they are what they made. I never made those. I didn't say the trans issue is irrelevant. So, we just absent ourselves from the conversation? Is that like, because we don't want to like, dirty our hands speaking of the WNBA? So, what's your beef, Tom? My beef is that the WNBA is relevant. It shouldn't be. Yeah, but your beef is not with us then. That's the point. I know, so then why are you guys mad at me?

You guys went off on this tirade as if I disagree with the trans issue. I don't, obviously. We spent how many years in this podcast talking about Riley Gaines? Here's the thing. You remind us of somebody who's frustrated that it's even been talked about at all, and you're like, you don't even care about this. Why are you talking about this? I do care about this. This is why I care about this. Right, you don't care about the WNBA. You care about the trans issue.

And I care about girls who play sports. Yeah, justice. So do I. Okay. I don't know where all this energy came from. I'm like, we're on the same team. I'm just annoyed at WNBA. I think it should not be talked about. You're upset at the WNBA, and you're upset at people who talk about it because you're saying it furthers a fake league, and I'm like, I'm going to talk about this. I am going to further it along because it's not like everyone's asking Josh Mercer whether or not we should promote the WNBA, and it's not like I have the kill switch, and I can just kill it all.

They're still going to talk about it. ESPN is going to promote it. And they're going to talk about it. So, are we going to leave this discussion empty of any other opposing conversations? Like, no, I think good for Riley Gaines to come up here and say stuff. Good for Sophie Cunningham to come up and say something. And so, don't get mad at me when we're talking about the WNBA. There's a reason we are. I just, I rip a hot take. I was like, the WNBA is talking about too much.

That's literally all I said. Good for you, Josh. My Twilight Zone is also WNBA. Because I know Tom wants to talk about it some more. Is it really? I just put it in there because I want to poke you. No way. This seems like I'm being targeted. All right, so Sophie Cunningham. I feel like Sophie Cunningham right now. She says, I got a lot of negative feedback about me hating trans, and I'm like, I never once said that. I think that I'm here to extend love, but I also think that love is truth, being honest, and I want to protect young girls in a locker room or young girls in school.

Who shouldn't have to go against biological men? And the best part about this particular story, we don't need to play Riley Gaines. We've already said everything she said and better. Love you, Riley. The good news is Sophie Cunningham's shoes have completely sold out. You cannot get her Sophie Cunningham Adidas shoes because they sold out on July 24th, the day that she made that statement.

I love it when that happens. I just love it. It happened with Harrison Butker, too, after his very controversial Benedictine College commencement address. He couldn't get his jersey for like three months. Oh, yeah, that sold out. It was completely sold out. Like a protest sale. The people have spoken. The girls love Sophie. Let's do it. That's great. And we're going to end it on that. I'm testing on the way you can respond. So much WNBA.

What should I make? Wait, can I make my Twilight Zone WNBA-themed? Yes, please. Let's continue. They just had their All-Star game, and the highlights included missed layups. So, it was like, they basically played no defense, because that's what you do in these All-Star games. And with the NBA, it's like, well, they can do windmill dunks and whatever else, and no one watches because it's stupid. I guess you get clips. In this one, you get clipped out. It's like missed layups. I think they're trying to dunk.

Air balls. Probably a lot of caddy fights, though. Yeah, I'm like, you know, I see that. Well, you know what? I'm a little bit of a hypocrite, because I made My Twilight Zone, was it two weeks ago, about the WNBA never going to succeed because Sophie Cunningham defended and did the point, and then they said you can't make money off the point because it was between players, and as everyone knows. You need a good brawl every once in a while in your sport.

Like, you know what's funny? Here's what I'll say. I think that there's been more traction on training camp fights in the NFL than there has been on any single WNBA game. Probably. Everyone loves a good training camp fight. But, yeah, I mean, it's, you know, and it's like, I could understand the WNBA, going back to your original point a couple weeks ago, where you wouldn't want them to mark it on, like, a fight, or, like, if she had landed a fist on somebody, don't promote that, but just that she pointed a finger at someone, like, in opposition to what that person was doing, like, that's just so silly.

So, let's put a point in there. I think... The WNBA is so resonating with so many people. Let's just sit back and be philosophical. Because there's such obvious injustice in such an artificially propped up league that it manages to get under people's skin in which they talk about something that they otherwise would not care about. And maybe that would be...

Hmm. Except that when you're talking about the four cardinal virtues, or any of the human virtues, In fact, you might be talking about those virtues being practiced, or attacked, or denigrated, or promoted in what you might call a fake human society, like in a game. So, like my kids play Monopoly. Nobody cares what my seven-year-old, if she wins a Monopoly or not, but I care very much if she cheats or not, because the virtues that she's practicing in that, quote, stupid little game of Monopoly that no one will remember.

five years. Or if she hits her brother. Yeah, she might. Oh, if she hits her brother, that'll be remembered for sure. Or if she hits her brother, that the wherever humans are practicing human excellence or the opposite human failure in vice, it matters. It matters deeply on not only their souls, but it redounds to the society in which they're acting. It redounds to their greater society into their future actions when it really will matter. So like when Sophie Cunningham goes out in the world and God bless her, hopefully she has her own.

She understands that the virtue of standing up and saying something courageous, even if it was just in the stupid WNBA, is forming her into a woman who could be a mother who defends those children. So, I would push back on the, you know, oh, it's just justice in the WNBA. No, no, no. Human virtue, it's a deadly serious game, no matter how stupid the game you're practicing it in may or may not be. Yeah, that is just like when I asked Coach Lombardi at Zeal for America 250, I asked him about, you know, does God really care, you know, who wins the football game, and his point was like, well, you may not actually care about the final result, but so long as people are participating in this activity, he does care about his, you know, children.

His children are playing in the sport. His children are watching the sport. You know, like all that stuff is relevant because it involves his children. Isn't there a Lombardi quote about Like, oh, do you pray to God to win or something like that? And he's like, I hope he's on my side. Well, that's Abraham Lincoln. Oh, sorry.

Easy mistake to make. I hope that God is on my side, but I must have Kentucky, you know. Oh, man. Wow. That really took a turn for the intense. I'll go find some cricket controversy that we can bring up in the next episode. Maybe there's female cricket controversies that we can talk about. Probably.

Okay. Yeah, I actually don't have a twilight zone. Mine was supposed to be Ross, but... Well, you mentioned it already. Yeah, probably covered Ross. Okay, let's end. Daily Prayer, great episode coming for you tomorrow, The Deep with Erika. It's going to be great.

And then, any other updates? I think we just roll right into prayer, right? Let's do it. Sweet. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen. Oh, glorious Saint Joseph. My love, all those who are devoted to labor, obtain from me the grace to work in a spirit of penance for the expiation of my many sins, to work conscientiously, putting the call of duty above my natural inclinations, to work with thankfulness and joy, considering it an honor to employ and develop by means of labor the gifts received from God.

To work with order, peace, moderation, and patience, never shrinking from weariness and trials, to work above all with purity of intention and detachment from self, keeping unceasingly before my eyes death and the account that I must give of time lost, talents unused, good omitted, and vain complacency and success so fatal to the work of God, all for Jesus, all through Mary, all after thy example, O patriarch St. Joseph, such shall be my watchword in life and death. Amen. Our Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, amen. St. Thomas More, St. Fidelis, Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us, and we'll catch you guys on the next episode. Peace. Peace out.