Fulton Sheen's Beatification is BUZZING, Trump at UN, And Quoting Founding Fathers

And we're live. Welcome back to the LOOPcast. It's Tom, Erika, and Josh. Happy to be back with you guys for another fantastic Wednesday show. Lots of updates here. The gang has been mobile. Erika, I believe you were speaking to the youth of America somewhere out northeast. The youth of New Haven, anyway.

Whatever that calls for. Discussing pizza tastes, I'm sure. But yeah, got some really interesting interactions you had there. I want to dig into that a little bit. Josh, you're on the road in Wisconsin, giving some talks as well, so the gang has been out and about, so excited to get some updates there. But we have, finally, I mean, I feel like it's just been forever, but Fulton Sheen beatification is upon us. It's happening tomorrow. We were not skilled enough diplomats to convince our way to be there, although it is in St.

Louis, no offense, but St. Louis, I'm sure, fantastic. We wanted to be there, we couldn't be there, but we do have team members on the ground in St. Louis. So, excited for them to be able to attend the Mass and be with a lot of excited Catholics. Going to talk a little bit about Fulanchine, legacy, some stark predictions, and...

Things that we should probably consider right now. Probably evergreen to always consider with Fulton Sheen, so got a lot there. Trump blew up the UN, as usual. It's like anytime I see Trump and UN in the same sentence, it's like always shenanigans, always fireworks. He always gives the longest speech as possible. The camera work is always hilarious. It's like The Office. There's media fights going on. He banned CNN, and then CNN was there. It's like, it's just the traveling roadshow. So, we have what he was talking about in the UN speech, application to what we got going on now.

Good news, Twilight Zone. What do we have there in C-block, Erika? Those are your speech. Oh, we have the founder of the 1619 Project might regret sending her own child into one of the New York public schools. So, yeah, interesting. I hate when that happens. I hate when that happens. Yeah, yeah. Oops. But before we get into that, it's going to be a fun show. Excited to be with you guys. We've got, of course, the OG sponsor, Charity Mobile.

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That's charitymobile.com, promo code LOOPcast. Here we go. Big week in the church. Maybe before we get to that, Josh, what were you doing in Wisconsin? You're giving some talks. Were you talking to Michigan, too? Yeah, you know, went to Milwaukee, and then also spoke in Traverse City, Michigan, so just trying to, you know, make the case why Catholics need to be involved in this election. They need to register to vote. They need to get their friends to vote. I like to vote early, lock it in, let everyone know that, so that when people are trying to get people to vote, they're like, oh, I'm not even gonna bother this guy.

They've already voted. You get, you do get actually... Fewer messages that way. So, I like to participate in early voting, absentee ballot, whatever it takes, get that ballot in, go to vote.gov, and get her done. So, yeah, spoken Milwaukee, I mean, you know, quick in and out, but on the way back, as you know, you mentioned at the last episode, I stopped by Our Lady of Champion, which is the only approved site for the Blessed Virgin Mary, and then also just, you know, spoke in Traverse City to a nice group of people.

There was a former hockey player at the event. Man, the guy, 6'8". I mean, I am a tall guy. I am like 6 feet, you know, whatever. He was 6. I come up to his kneecaps. He made me look like you, a short tank. I mean, it was crazy.

Yeah, maybe I would get a few inches on skates. Could you imagine that guy on skates, not if he was 6'8"? I mean, you start to understand why, you know, yeah, I can see why you became a professional athlete. Yeah, I think hockey players might be my favorite, vibes-wise, because they're always very humble, and they're just a great hang every time I've hung out with a hockey guy.

They're not like divas, like maybe some of the other athletes are. They love having no teeth. They fight all the time. It feels very American. Hockey feels very American. Yeah, you know, and this, I don't want to say the player's name necessarily, but he and his wife, and they're eight daughters, you know, they're just, you know, champions of the faith. They're solid on that, and she actually, you know, his wife had a really wonderful question, which is, I mean, it makes sense.

She goes, how do you not get discouraged when you're fighting against all this kind of evil stuff, you know, like, you know, the fact that they want to abort so many children, they want to trans the ones that survive, you know, they want to flood our country with people who hate our country, and then you have people in our own country that are, you know, just tying up all the efforts to try to get things done, and I said, yeah, I mean, it's...

It can be discouraging, but I mean, I just, again, I think about, you know, the times in our history, our country's history, where there have been difficulties before, you know. I mean, there's the phrase that people use a lot, like, you know, Ben Franklin walking out of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, like, you know, what have you done? You know, what have you wrought? He said, a republic, if you can, you know, if you can keep it. But I actually think more about You know, all the soldiers that were fighting for the cause, as they call it, for the revolution, and Valley Forge, and some of them not even having shoes.

You know, they're starving, they're cold. The winters were much harsher in the 1700s than they were now. We were like in a mini ice age, and man, they fought like the Dickens, and they're upset. Like, what's going on? Like, why won't the Continental Congress pay us? They weren't even paid, and they're about to go crazy, and General Washington comes into this tavern where they're all stoked up, and he pulls out his glasses, and he says, I regret that my eyes have grown weary in service to my country, and he reads this letter about why they, you know.

They should continue fighting and not give up and not rebel. And every one of these guys were about ready to storm the Capitol, go crazy. They just quietly did what they did. They understand the concept of duty and how much this man gave. How much has been sacrificed for this country? We need to fight and press on. Yes, we need to make things better. Yes, we got reform.

But let's keep going, guys. Wait, were those people in that army, were there any of them named Philosophy or Creed or Idea? No. These were flesh and blood guys. Yeah, I thought they were like secret names from people that fought in the Revolution I haven't heard, and that they were just fighting so that the entire world can say that they're American if they believe in certain ideas.

Is that what was... Maybe I missed something. Yeah, no. In fact, the people who fought in the Revolutionary War had last names, including Mercer in the Pennsylvania militia at the time. Yeah, I mean, you know, again, you know, it is nice to have a plan, but then, you know, a plan is only so good to get punched in the face, right? What did Mike Tyson say?

Yeah, Josh, you missed one of my favorite episodes in a long time when I had to explain to people the history of Texas. Yep, it was very fun. I thought you did very well, actually. Thank you, Josh. Thank you, I appreciate it. Wait, wait, wait, this is a trap. Big bro hug. Yeah, wait, this is a trap. You never say no to me. The Boat French and Indian War.

Oh, man, yeah. I got excited about stuff. We missed you, Josh. We missed you, Josh. All right. Well, Logan did a very good, great job. Thank you. Thank you. So, Erika, let us talk through a big week in the church. We have got a lot of members of our team down in St. Louis. What is going on? Yeah, very exciting, as everyone probably knows by now. Tomorrow, Fulton Sheen will be beatified at long last, seven years after his cause was actually approved for beatification.

It has been a little while. If you want to know more about the ins and outs of why it took so long, go check out my interview. Oh, it's Dr. Peter Howard from the Fulton Sheen Institute. That did really well, and a lot of people have enjoyed it, so check that out if you can. It's on the LOOPcast channel on YouTube, also on zeal.co, but we got this little message from our American Pope ahead of the beatification. I could just play this because I love hearing his voice.

I greet all the English-speaking pilgrims and visitors taking part in today's audience, particularly the groups from England, Ireland, Denmark, Norway, Malta, Tanzania, Australia, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, and the United States of America. I love how everyone cheers for the USA. Tomorrow, in St. Louis, Missouri, Venerable Fulton Sheen will be beatified. May the example and intercession of this holy bishop, known for his evangelizing work through the media, inspire many others, likewise, to find new ways of spreading the gospel message with joyful enthusiasm.

Upon all of you and your families, I invoke the peace and joy of our Lord Jesus Christ. God bless you. Amen. Just fascinating. Thank you, Holy Father. Yeah. That was the most American thing you could do, mispronounce Tanzania. Yeah. Well, I mean, I was thinking about that, of course. I think it's that he, you know, spoke Spanish as his primary language for so many decades. So, again, there's just different, it's not like it's... I know Americans that would mispronounce it today.

That's not a Spanish thing. That's just awesome. He's one of us. We know about mispronouncing words here on the LOOPcast. Oh, yeah. That's my favorite pastime. Yeah, I thought I would just share a couple of tidbits from his life to get us pumped up about Fulton Sheen, and then maybe we could share a couple of our favorite stories from his life. But he was born 1895 to a farm family out in El Paso, not El Paso, Texas. El Paso. Illinois. So, he's from the heartland of America.

His dad's name was Newt. I mean, how great is that? Like salamander, Newt. His dad's name was Newt, and his mom was Delia. So, he was actually... Yeah, not Newt Gingrich. No, no, no, Tom. No. Peter, he was baptized Peter, but fun note on his name, he came to prefer the name Fulton, which was actually his mom's maiden name, was Fulton. And according to some accounts, his mom's dad...

He formally reported the name Fulton when he enrolled him in the first grade at the local Catholic school. And it just kind of stuck. So, when we call him Blessed Fulton, we're actually, like, naming his mom, too. So, shout out to the moms out there. Kind of, I liked that little, that little twist. I'm hearing more Fultons, by the way. Yeah. I feel like Fulton's low-key back. Yeah. That's like a hipster, hipster young Catholic families have a couple of Fulton options.

Or, big fan of the Mighty Ducks franchise. I remember the Mighty Ducks. I never watched it, but one of my classmates was in one of those movies. Yeah, I remember you told me that. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, Fulton was the enforcer. Shout out to Fulton the Enforcer. Yeah, Fulton was kind of an enforcer. So, he was ordained a priest in 1919, and then he taught for 23 years at my alma mater, Catholic University of America, including in the School of Philosophy, where I did my undergraduate.

So, shout out to CUA today. Almost makes up for Charles Curran. I think it might. I think good triumphs over... Erika, that's sick. Did they make a point of saying that at CUA? Like that Fulton Sheen was a part of the CUA? Well, so when I was there in the late 90s, early 2000s, he wasn't actually like talked about a lot. I think he was still kind of a sore point for some. I was there during the sort of exodus of the more liberal leftist contingent and the turnover as it were.

So I think Sheen might have still been not as They weren't as excited about him back then, but now they sure are, because he's a blessed. So, this is great. He was consecrated a bishop in 1951, and he was named the director for the Society of the Propagation of the Faith, which was based out of New York. So, he's a bishop there. He's involved in the world missions. In 1951, he kicked off Life is Worth Living, which was his television series.

We're going to play a couple of clips from that in a minute. And eventually, it became the most watched television show in history. With about 30 million viewers each week. So, something to aspire to for you there, Pogo. Yeah, so even in those days, right, and all you had were like the three channels. Well, didn't he beat out, well, your personal favorite, Frank Sinatra. Yeah, oh.

I actually have been reading a book on Sinatra. Let us just say some tough associations and not a great married, wasn't super committed to his marriage. Let us put it that way. Hey, I like his music. I don't care. Music is great. Yeah, music is great. But anyway, the reason I brought that up was because wasn't he in like a ratings competition with that prime slot on the other channel, and it was Frank Sinatra, I believe, right? Was it? Frank Sinatra.

I actually am not familiar with this guy. I thought it was someone in the Rat Pack. It was him or... I don't think it would be Frank. I don't think Frank would want to go up against a Catholic.

Yeah. That's a good point. He was the Rat Pack. Yeah. I'd have to look that up, but he basically beat him out. Dean Martin? It might have been Dean Martin. He was up against... Or who was the one in White Christmas?

Oh, Bing Crosby. He would not have gone up against Bing. No way. I don't think so, but I bet Dean Martin would have also. Yeah, kind of a crazy life there, but anyway, he was super popular. He made a big difference in people's lives. Many celebrities converted as a result of his influence. There's a lot of articles out about that right now, obviously, in celebration, but what was really interesting to me was sort of the story of his rise through the ranks in the church.

Which really petered out when he was named titular archbishop. He never got the red cardinal's hat, and in his own autobiography, he mentions this as a sort of a source of disappointment and almost embarrassment for him later on in life. One of the big reasons that that happened was because when he was in New York for the Society of the Propagation of the Faith, he had a lot of clashes with Archbishop and then Cardinal Spellman, who was another founder of Catholic University, actually.

They... There you had disagreements over authority, the public attention, and financial. There are a lot of transactions that the Pope actually ended up adjudicating and went on the side of Fulton Sheen, and so a lot of the, when Sheen got sent out to Rochester, he was suddenly taken out of the society. His television show had to come to an end. He's sent to Rochester, New York, which is like the backwater of New York State. No offense to Rochester.

We're taking shots. And the consensus is very much that it's because he wouldn't play the game. He wouldn't play the Climb the ecclesial, professional ecclesial ladder game, which... A source, perhaps, of even more admiration for him. He said this in interviews later on in his life. He dedicated the rest of his life to preaching retreats, and recordings of those retreats are still available. As you probably know, two of his biggest, one of the greatest contributions was reviving and encouraging devotion to the daily holy hour.

Everyone who ever worked with him, everyone who knew him, all the testimonies say he never He never missed his daily holy hour, no matter how busy he got with television celebrity, with the world missions traveling all over the world to spread the gospel. He always made a holy hour before the blessed sacrament. I know priests today in our diocese who mention him and say, I know I'm dedicating my life to doing what he did. So, praise God. And of course, the blessed mother.

I brought my show and tell my favorite thing he ever wrote. There go my lights. Um, it's not three to get married. No, no, that's not my favorite. This is my favorite. The world's first love. It was his meditations on the blessed mother, and I highly recommend. I've had this since 1999. I bought it my freshman year of college. Has he written like 50? He was like a prolific writer. Oh, so prolific. Yeah, there's so many books, like Phil Schell. Also, fact check, it was the Frank Sinatra show.

It was, okay. On CBS. Milton Berle also had one on NBC, but The Frank Sinatra show was the one on CBS, and he actually beat the ratings on Frank Sinatra, which is so crazy. Well, part of the reason why, because all the, you go to Catholic school, and all the nuns and synagogues watch Fulton Sheen.

He had, the classic line was, he won an Emmy, so imagine that. Like, you know what the Emmys are today, like a Catholic priest winning an Emmy, and then accepting it. I feel it is time I pay tribute to my four writers, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Nice. Yep. It's the best. Yeah, super scripture-based, just awesome. But yeah, I have a couple of clips here. I did have one fun story that was from his time. He was leading a pilgrimage at Lourdes in France, and Fulton Sheen, he was getting ready to go back to the hotel, grab his bags to get to the train station to leave. Lourdes, and he sort of, in a fit of devotion, he said, I made a very dangerous prayer to Our Lady, and I said, Mother, send me suffering or a trial to save a soul, and then he just kind of like didn't think about it, like runs back to the hotel, so he's running back to the hotel to grab the bag, up the flights of stairs, down the hall, to the door, and the whole time, he feels like there's someone following him, and sure enough, so he turns around at the door, and there's a young woman there.

And she admitted that she was following him, but she didn't really know why she was following him. She just was like, I saw you in a procession, and I felt like I should talk to you. And so, she starts following him. It turns out that she's an atheist, and she was actually traveling through this part of France with a group of 60 other atheists, and they'd all gone to tour the mountains, which are very near to Lourdes. It is kind of a stop off.

You can get into the mountains. But she had decided to stay back because she had seen this procession. She saw Fulton Sheen and was like, I should talk to this guy. So, she followed the gut instinct. Later on that day, she and Father Sheen, at the time, discovered that the bus carrying her tour group actually went over the edge of one of the cliffs in the Alps, and everyone on the bus died. So, she alone was the survivor of this tour group.

Whoa. So, Fulton Sheen, but that was like later on. That's just a little detail later on. Just a little detail? That's crazy. So, at this point, Sheen's like, I'm going to miss my train anyway. So, he told her, I think... I think you are my trouble and my suffering, and you're the soul, and so he stays in Lourdes with her for three or four days. Talking to her, and finally, she's baptized. She converts to the Catholic faith. He's the one who does the baptism, gives her the sacraments, and he makes his way home.

His suffering continued. Trying to get back to Paris, every train ticket he bought was turned down. It took him an entire week to get from Lourdes to Paris, as all of the tickets were inexplicably no good, and he had to be let off at the next station without food or water, and then he had to find money to buy tickets, and he said later on, That was the price I had to pay for her soul. So, the Blessed Mother pays my bills, she converts the atheists.

I just love that story so much. And you know, he's going to be the first U.S. bishop to be beatified, and just telling that story, I can't help but, one of my favorite quotes he had, who's going to save our church? It's not our bishops. It's not our priests.

It is not the religious. It is up to you, the people. You have the minds, the eyes, and the ears to save the church. Your mission is to see that the priests act like priests, bishops act like bishops, and the religious act like religious.

Mission received. Yeah, I mean, I can imagine that may have rubbed some people the wrong way in church hierarchy at the time. Yeah. Well, I always think that the hierarchy talks a good game of being against clericalism, and then when the ladies say, well, why don't you do this instead? Oh, well, you can go ahead and shut up, as they lightly say, Max. Well, I thought I read a little bit about his later years, too, where I know it was a disappointment to him, but he also had a lot of tremendous personal challenges at the time.

And I think, I can't remember if this was in his own words or this was an assessment, that he was a great televangelist. He was obviously, just in terms of speaking, super captivating, but struggled in more of a managerial role that is potentially required as a bishop, and so it could unfortunately be a case of, you know, you take someone out of... Yeah, so bureaucratic. Yeah, he actually resigned from being the diocesan bishop up in Rochester after just three, a little over three years, because, yeah, and he said that.

He was like, this is not what I was built to do. Yeah, right. The analogy would be, you know, Bishop Barron, who was an auxiliary bishop. And then he gets to be appointed Bishop of Rochester, Minnesota. And so far, it looks like he's doing a good job shepherding that diocese. But it's, you know, the gift for media and, you know, reaching people and evangelizing people, like we've seen Bishop, I think Bishop Barron is the closest example of Fulton Sheen in our time.

Like, he gets on Theo Vaughn, and he just podcasts, he just talks in a very relatable way that people, that's accessible to people. And so. You know, okay. This is going to be one of my swings here. So, what I hear from, I was talking to Erika about this, and it's frustrating. The USCCB releases some long-winded thing about how Catholics shouldn't really care about Yom Kippur. And I actually was not as angry about it as some other people were. But it's like, oh, herein lies the opportunity for Catholics to deepen their understanding of Jews and the Jewish faith and the Jewish holidays and whatever.

And I'm like, I do understand that there's a scriptural basis that Jesus Christ fulfills eventually that is somewhat signified by Yom Kippur. However, in the same way that I criticize when the bishops do this about Muslims, too, they're like, oh, Ramadan. I remember, like, was it... Oh, gosh, Catholic Lent. Who was it?

It was the New York bishop. It was Cardinal Dolan. Cardinal Dolan. Cardinal Dolan's like, oh, it's... Every year. It's basically Catholic Lent. Like, we should really, like, you know, we should be as fervent as they are, whatever. And I'm like, okay, great.

Can we just step aside here and be like, you don't have any feast days you could be highlighting here. You don't have any Catholic spirituality you could be highlighting. Like, if we catechized Catholics and took ourselves as serious as the Muslims take themselves and as the Jews take themselves, we would have kind of a dangerous church. And it feels like between that and then the USCCB, and again, all due respect, you know, they're my bishops, but I'm frustrated at times. They put out this long-winded statement on like National Migration Week or something like that.

Where they're saying, you know, we're a church of migrants, yada, yada, yada. Of course, not reading the room at all. It's like, Is what people found kind of inspiring and at the same time objectionable about Fulton Sheen actually the same frustrations we have today with most of the USCCB and our church leadership, where it's like, we have these real material foundational concerns on the ground and spiritual concerns as a lay Catholic, that we actually would like leadership and dangerous leadership in certain cases.

I mean, look how much Fulton Sheen spoke up on communism. He did not mince words when it came to... Communists and atheists and Muslims and everything going on, but always returned to that foundation of the holy hour, the deposit of faith that we have, this power that we have to go and change our world as Catholics. Am I taking too large of a swing here? No, I guess the way I would look at it is, for me, learning more about Yom Kippur and the different traditions of the Jewish faith will help me understand.

Jesus better. So, I have no real strong objections, per se. And then again, Cardinal Dolan on that swing and a miss, well-intentioned probably, talking about Ramadan. I think the good thing about that is the attempt to try to understand that there is something about Human nature, where fasting really does help you spiritually. So, that would be a way you could say that, or you could say, you know, Muslims take their faith so seriously, they pray five times a day. We need to step up our game.

That, you know, to encourage us to do better, I think that would be a great thing to do. But again, part of that frustration is that the kind of... For better or for worse, the default for the last few decades in the Catholic Church has been sort of like a almost universalist kind of relativist thing, like, well, you know, there's different religions that are... It's like, no, no, no, no, no. I didn't sign up for that. I signed up for the Catholic Church.

I believe that this is the... Primary way to get your soul saved and to get into heaven. This is the means of salvation. Christ created this church. So, this idea that, oh, well, no. Anything, when we start talking about other faiths, other traditions, other kind of stuff like that, it should always be grounded in the sense of like the best, fullest expression of, you know. Our revelation and our existence as humans is in the church. And I feel like that part has been lacking when we try to talk about the other stuff.

Because that was left out of the statement, by the way, from the USCCB. It's like, great, we can learn more. I think I have the exact text in front of me. Catholics and Jews in the United States have built decades of dialogue and friendship-routinated shared scriptural heritage. The relationship carries a responsibility to reject anti-Semitism in all its forms, to deepen our understanding of Judaism and the Jewish people, and to work so Jewish communities can live and worship free from hatred and fear.

Like, okay, on the surface, all fine, but... I don't, again, not ask from the Jews, like, hey, maybe understand Catholicism a little bit better, or like, maybe I missed it, but has a rabbi said, hey, should you, we should all respect Jesus Christ more, and like, his church, obviously not. And so, the end of this should be with the bishops. We pray for the conversion of all the Jews, as we've had in our liturgy for thousands of years, because we want their salvation, because we're a serious church.

Same thing with the Muslims, right? Like, yes, we respect their piety. However, we would like the veil to be lifted so that they can convert to Catholicism, the one true church in which you find salvation. It's that last sentence I think you correctly identified that's missing that would make all these statements, you know, totally palatable and maybe in some ways even more inspiring because it's like, we care so much. We believe this is true that we want you to believe it too, and we feel like all Catholics should take it that seriously.

It's just, it feels kind of wishy-washy. Right, and I think like a hundred years ago, you could kind of get away with it because it would kind of... That we believe the Catholic Church is the one true church. But it no longer goes without saying. And it's, in fact, the opposite goes without saying that all religions are equal. And that's missing the mark. And I think when we want a prophetic voice from our bishops, but to take a page from Fulton Sheen, maybe it has to be the laity at this season of the church, that the prophetic voice right now.

The revolution, like the actual revolutionary countercultural voice right now is to say that there is one true God, therefore there is one true religion, and that religion is the Catholic by God himself in the person of Jesus Christ. And I think when it comes to the Jewish, some of the greatest books, if you, someone who can articulate this really well, Dr. Brandon Peet, P-I-T-R-E, wrote a series of books on Jesus and the Jewish roots of the Eucharist. The Jewish roots of Mary, he's talked about, I think he has one on the papacy as well, but this idea that understanding the practices and beliefs of Judaism enriches our understanding of the Eucharist, because that's where Christ, you know, chose to be born into this chosen people.

So, I think that, like, if we want to get a truer understanding of what the relationship should be when we're talking about, let's celebrate Yom Kippur or come to know Yom Kippur, I think Dr. Pete's is probably, bar none, the best you can get, without making that syncretism kind of conclusion that the social media makes.

People are just so frustrated right now because it feels like the church's response lacks... A confidence in, we basically just described it here, but there are forces that are attempting to co-opt that relationship for political ends in a foreign country, Israel. I mean, it's just obvious to everyone on the ground that this is what's going. Paul Singer's funding all these different things, and so that complicates this conversation. There's also just, in general, like Eric was getting at, like a cultural dominance of, you know, all religions have a share of the truth.

I mean, again, I think... We got to be careful about how we talk about things. If we're being serious, we really think that the Catholic Church is the best step forward to get into heaven. Is it possible that Christ could save you outside of the church? Hey, look, I guess anything's possible, but I'm not taking my risks. I'm going into the philosophical. Come on, man. Jesus said otherwise. What was the mass reading from last Sunday? It was about... The owner and the tenant, or the...

Yeah, the tenants who worked all day, the tenants who worked two hours, the tenants who worked one hour. Someone got paid a ton of money at the end, and everyone was mad about that, and it's just like, ah, been there before, buddy.

I think it's really interesting. So, I'm doing research for a deep episode on Islam and sort of Islamification in America, and like, have we ever seen this before historically? Answer, yes. And it's been really interesting because... The more you study...

With Islam and the way that it has sort of like been enculturated around the world, the more you realize the uniqueness of the Christian approach to other religions, that there's this attitude of wanting to understand where others are coming from, because we know that true conversion comes from freedom and persuasion, and in order to persuade, you have to, you know, be able to steal man the way Aquinas did, the opposite understanding or a different understanding. And also this confidence that God's truth is, that human nature is not completely devoid of being able to find God in different ways, but the difference being that other traditions around the world don't share that.

You're not going to get, to your point, Tom, someone like the local imam being like, we really need to understand and appreciate where all these Catholics are coming from. That's a Eurocentric belief, by the way. I mean, that's something we inherited in Western civilization, that we take other arguments in good faith and seek to understand to then have this enlightenment conversation. It's a Western thing. Yeah, it sounds like Euro. It's more like Greek plus the Christian confidence. It's super foreign. I just want to totally underscore your point here.

Many parts of the world do not share that understanding. It is absolutely unique. And so, it's good to know that when you're going into these conversations, and also to not lose that kind of like, that's a really beautiful thing in the right context, but you can't go in naive. ...to people that don't share that same conception. Right, which is what, like, the blue hairs do. However, this goes back to my entire thesis on mass migration being literally destroying different parts of the world.

The United States happening now is when you import people from cultures that don't share that, it's actually counterproductive to engage in that type of dialogue with people that operate in ethnic blocs. It doesn't matter what arguments you make or whatever, they're just going to... Fight for their own, within their own country, and have no desire to assimilate, or no ability to, because they don't have enough time. And what did Aquinas say? Three generations, I think it takes for you to actually properly assimilate.

And so, it's just a proposition that's bad for everyone involved. It's bad for the people not from the culture. It's bad for the people at home. And it's a real problem that, for the first time in a long time, credit to Trump, we've sought to address as a country, because it's the first time. We are addressing, yeah. That alone is why I'm voting. Yes. Oh, into the chat. Yes, I misspoke. It is Brant Peet. It is not Brandon Peet.

Sweet. And it is P-I-T-R-E, right? P-I-T-R-E. It is very hard to say. It just calls it Peet, huh? Sorry. Yeah, but I brought it up, and maybe we have this clip on patriotism. Maybe we can just Yeah, this is beautiful. When you listen to him speak, there is few Priests that had this gift of being able to speak so sincerely in a captivating way on just about any topic. While writing on a chalkboard. While writing on a chalkboard. So, we'll round it out here with this one.

You know one of the most unused words that we have in our vocabulary is the word patriotism? Hardly ever hear it anymore. Patriotism is a virtue that was allied to the, to the old virtue of the Greeks and Latin called pietas. Pietas meant love of God, love of neighbor, love of country. And when one goes out, all go out. And we no longer have love of God. We have a love of. No longer have love of country. You know what are the most unused?

There is, man. Men have forgotten God. Yeah, you have to consider that he was saying that patriotism was in a low. This is in the 50s. That's when we added, you know, the words under God to the Pledge of Allegiance. I mean, and he's still saying it was low. Like, bro.

I can imagine how we are 70 years later. Unification Mass tomorrow. Yeah, let's do it. Pray for us. Very happy about that one. Someone for everyone to look up to, for sure. Okay. Moving on to personalities. Moving on to personalities. Listen, we are going to give a wrap of this. I got to give Zeal a shout out here.

Did a great job. Wide-ranging UN speech is one way of putting it. What was the time on it? Not that I'm a couchy guy. 37 minutes. 37 minutes. I did watch it. Ready to go. Erika, great job. So, I'll just give you a little bit of the clips here. He spent much of his time on Iran. I would say just first off, it was kind of a media frenzy before this, and the camera operators understood the assignment. I'll play this clip or his basic thoughts of where we're at now.

That lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before, maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East or even the world. Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again?

Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope? But I believe we will make a deal right after the election, because it does not make sense for them not to. They are waiting to see how I do in the midterm election. What they do not realize is that I am not running. I did that already and won in a landslide. We won in a giant landslide, and I will be here for two and a half years.

The Republican Party is running, and I'll be helping them, but I am not running. I gave absolutely no credence and will not give credence to the election when it comes to Iran. It doesn't even enter my mind. The only thing that does is that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon.

Yeah, the reason I laughed about that is the camera cut right after he said, I believe, I annihilate the Islamic Republic of Iran right to the delegate and the UN. Bone-faced. Yes. Just, what else are you going to do?

So, yeah, but Erika, before I get your two cents, just quick facts. As of today, I believe, it was 20, yeah, 23rd as of today. The two sides have began talking again, so they haven't been talking in months. Clearly, the biggest issue is the Strait of Hormuz. Just for context, before conflict, roughly 125 commercial vessels are moving through the Strait each day. Last weekend, Reuters counted only 17 commodity vessels, and that's even down from the 37 the week before. Iran has tied the normalizing of traffic to U.S.

concessions, including reduced military pressure, sanctions relief, etc. We have Brent crude around 105 a barrel. Josh, I know that is your favorite metric, mid-September. And then prices briefly approached 110 as the attacks and threats intensified. It's not to say that there has not been punishment inflicted upon the Iranians. There absolutely has been. The sticking point remains, we just don't have access to the Strait of Hormuz. It's been successfully gatekept by the Iranians, whether it's the threat of getting hit or getting hit themselves.

That is the big sticking point. It looks like the two places have come to the table. I think that's absolutely the right answer by Trump to say. Yeah, this midterm election is not going to influence my decision-making. I'm not surprised they said that. U.S. diesel prices has become a real issue for Americans at this point. Prices above $6 a gallon, and it's kind of a mix of mostly Middle Eastern disruption, but also, I'll get to the Russian-Ukraine war. There's some on that that's a little bit more Euro problematic, but not as much here.

What do we have? Did you add in the diesel export ban? Yeah, I mean, so, you know, some lawmakers have said, let us put a ban on diesel exports. The United States creates a lot of diesel, and it is like, well, why export it when prices are going up here at home?

Well, Trump floated that. Yeah, and I'm actually very thankful that Energy Secretary Chris Wright said, yeah, no, no, no, no, no, we don't want to do that. Because the fact is, we're producing more than we can kind of consume. The reason why the price is going up is because the demand is high.

You can only consume so much, so you definitely want to export it so you can sell this stuff. Not selling it, there's no place to really warehouse it. It would actually be not good. Just basic economics of it. So, I am glad that Chris Wright spoke up and said that is not the answer to this.

What I would think, if I were a lawmaker, the thing I would suggest with regards to taxes, I would call for not just like a 90-day suspension of federal taxes, but you should kind of come up with a system where When the price of oil goes down towards like $60 a barrel again, then crank up, maybe make the gas tax double then, so that when it gets like about $100, the tax is zero, so that when the price comes back down to earth, yeah, you end up paying more taxes, you replenish the highway fund for building of the roads.

That is the But then when it's really high, when it's four or five bucks a gallon, get that federal tax off of it so that you get a little relief at the pump. That would be my recommendation. Of course, Democrats are using this to try to get elections, and they drive me crazy because when oil was super, super cheap, Trump was like, let's fill up. The nation's reserves, and the Democrats opposed it. They said, oh, it's a buyout to big oil.

You idiots. And, of course, if you want Democrats' policies on, like, I consider this to be a very frustrating. Pain at the pump. No question about it. Precisely because of the straight-o-home use and what we did in Iran. I get it. You can say whether or not it was necessary or not. The price sucks paying this much, right? But if you're Democrats, this is what you love, right? California is all the policies you have on petroleum. You make it, you know, extreme regulations on it.

It has to be super, super, super clean. You know, all these regulations on production of oil, and so, therefore, The price that we're paying now in the United States for gas is still cheaper than the normal price in California. This is what Democrats like, but they're riding the frustration that Americans have to try to get them to vote for candidates who are going to do even worse.

It's just crazy to me. Yeah, it's a successful attack line. I mean, Trump, to be fair, did deplete the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. He did this with full knowledge that he would have to go to war. I mean, this to me in the UN speech was kind of like, I know why he said what he said. He had to say it. It's still a frustrating position for Americans that elected you on the promise of unleashing American energy, low gas prices. It clearly is, you know, the life.

The blood of a successful economy is to have cheap and plentiful energy. This was an impediment to it. So, it's like... The war, you mean. The war was an impediment. The impediment, yeah. And so, the frustration was, it seems like you mortgaged midterm elections for this war. Now, we weren't in the Situation Room. You know, we only know reporting this and that. It would have felt better, I think, to Americans to mortgage the midterm on mass deportations. Not to say they're not happening.

We're not getting mass deportations now. We're directionally correct, but we have not mass deported people. They're sitting in detention. And then, you know, so anyway, I think that's the general... We're tied up in lawsuits and stuff like that, but the number that, you know, it's not a bad number.

Directionally correct, I would absolutely grant. And then... Kind of on that note, too, the Russian-Ukraine war was another promise to end. We're kind of at that point. Here's his statement on that. We continue to seek and end the disastrous war between Russia and Ukraine, which is killing, as I said, thousands and thousands of people every month.

Last week, in honor of Senator Lindsey Graham, I signed a powerful new law passed by Congress providing me with enormous new tariff authorities, and if necessary, I will have to use them. It's time to stop the killing. I also want to recognize the extraordinary work of our great First Lady. Who has secured the safe return of many displaced Ukrainian and Russian children back home to their families. So many. Thank you very much, First Lady.

Yeah. Go, Melania. I think he finds her in the crowd and then points her out again. Again, the camera work hysterical, like right over to Zelensky and then right over to the Russian Federation. It's like this whole thing is a show. But then, yeah, quick facts on that. So, you may have seen the headlines, too. There's a deep strike. Ukraine struck Russia in their refinery. It was, what is it, Yaroslav Refinery. This was especially frustrating because Trump said stop. Don't do this.

Don't hit the refineries. Diesel is going to be a problem. They did it anyway. So, that was kind of on people's minds. He mentioned the Lindsey Graham thing. It basically is trying to target... Russia makes a lot of its money exporting oil and diesel. And so, as a way to... ...hurt them and their ability to finance the war. He wants new sanctions. Now, he's actually going to meet... Xi Jinping is coming to town, I believe, for a meeting precisely about this because they export a lot of their oil to China, and so it could be based on the conversations he has there.

Maybe he could punish them a little bit for that, but trying to ramp it up. Again, the oil is not... That is not as much what's hurting the United States right now. That's more Europe, but Europe has actually kind of made themselves a little bit more energy-fortified, taking less of their oil from... Russia. And so, it seems like, again, we're at a little bit of a stalemate here. I know he's promising to end. I know why I said what he had to say.

Frustrating to Americans to see, you know, we're still kind of financing a war that we thought would be over, but, you know, understand what we got to do what we got to do, I guess. Any thoughts? Well, and again, that's why that's had an effect on diesel and also petroleum because And you mentioned the refineries. I mean, Russia is actually now importing gasoline because the number of refineries are low.

Right. Their exports on diesel are way, way down. So, I mean, these are having effects on the economy, the price. My brother works in energy, and he goes, if you have a massive change in the price of oil or diesel or gas, it affects other markets, because people are going to be ships, they'll go wherever the money is.

Yeah. So, it has a domino effect, and what we need to do is increase. Thank goodness we have had a massive increase in oil production and gas production in the United States, but let us go more and more and more of that.

Yeah, I was going to say that Trump did, I mean, we did campaign, and we know we need, he did campaign on. Increasing energy production, and that has happened. Of course, the confounding factors being these foreign wars that have maybe dug into that, but I think that we have become a net exporter. That is not something that was happening under the Biden administration.

We clearly need to build our own refineries over here. I was listening to a couple of Podcasts who are trying to analyze the high prices, given the fact that our production has gone up so greatly, and we are exporting, and a big thing seems to be the backlog in refining the oil that we're pulling up. So, we do need more refineries.

I think that what the Ukraine-Russia war and the Iranian war show is that we are still highly dependent on global markets and making it work with other countries. We're not energy self-sufficient yet. I mean, can we produce enough to use here? Yes, but we are still vulnerable to global markets fluctuating, and I think part of the hope of the America First movement was that we would Getting farther and farther away from that. It's hard to tell if we are, like, is it, as you like to say, Tom, directionally good?

And I think, yes, I'm not like an economics expert, but we're definitely not there yet. And move away from the petrodollar, which I know a lot of people would be frustrated with. It's seen as like a big moneymaker for the United States and a means of control. I mean, these wars have moved us far away from the petrodollar. So, does that mean we become a lot more domestic? Well, we'd have to retract quite a bit. I guess I don't think I'd be against that in principle.

We're doing it in a very chaotic way. Yeah, so he also brought up Venezuela during the speech, and he mentioned that. They anticipate that once the Venezuelan oil production is back to where it should be at this point, remember, Venezuela's communist government had let all of the oil refineries and everything go to pot since the 1970s, once it's back up to 21st century level production, they're going to be giving the United States, basically, $72 billion a year in Venezuelan oil. I think that, yes, chaotic the way we did it, but not without long-term plan, like not without a structure.

Yeah, the one thing on that, too, he brought up Greenland, too. The one thing I actually thrilled about, this was, again, the means in which he goes about it, you know, listen, I'm not in a seat. I can't say, you know, whether posting AI images, right, AI images, taking over Greenland and making the 51st state, yeah. And then coming back, but yeah, it is a familiar playbook, but yeah, the United States intends to build two major military bases.

The agreement is interesting. Greenland retains their sovereignty as, what is it, like a Denmark territory? Denmark retains its sovereign control, and you are like, what does that mean? But if Denmark is happy, I am happy, and apparently they are. It allows a couple of good things. One, I mean, it is a huge site for missile detection, so if something were to go over Greenland, we would get the heads up. It is being told to... They will be a part of the Golden Dome system that's promised, and then the other thing is that there can be no China and Russian permanent military presence or military installation on Greenland, unless all parties agree.

This is aimed at preventing future Russian military fold. Or even investment. Exactly, foreign investment. No drilling, yeah. Including critical infrastructure and natural resource extraction from foreign investment, so they have to screen all of that. So, I think that's actually great news for the United States. Seems like everyone's happy. Greenlee gets their defense. They become much more productive because we're going to be able to send in a lot more productive units to get the very hard-to-mine natural resources there.

Win-win on that one. Yeah, I mean, everyone was pulling that year. It was a year ago in November, right, that we started talking about Trump's going to invade Greenland, and we're going to annex Greenland, and he like, they would put out all the maps of like a North America that's just all the United States map, and everyone's like, oh my gosh, he's a colonialist. He's going to destroy our relationship with Europe. We have these long-standing relationships, and they'll never, well, the Denmark, Denmark's prime minister got up and made this very Flattering speech.

It was so easy to work with the Trump administration. This is going to be a win-win for all three countries that Denmark gets to. It's kind of like the monarchy in England, right? Like King Charles. What does he actually do? Well, he just keeps his titles, and he's very happy with that. Well, Denmark gets to keep its title as the sovereign state in Greenland. Greenland gets to not be a state, but still enjoy all the benefits. Of having American patronage. We're also going to basically foot Denmark's bills that they had when it came to Greenland, which they can't afford because it's tending toward a third world country.

And so, it is, it's wonderful. And so, everyone who was like, this is the end of our relationship with Europe, like, they look kind of silly right now. I have to say. Well, and even if Greenland declares independence, this treaty is in perpetuity. It doesn't end. The old treaty was only so long as everyone was a part of NATO. It's like, no, no, this is a much improved... It outlives NATO, right? What was that, 1954? NATO has outlived its own self, I think.

1951, yeah, the agreement they had. Okay, yeah, I had to go do my research on Greenland. I never think about Greenland until that all got brought up, but yeah, I was happy about that. And then, yeah, we get a... Was the banger on Christian persecution and then banger on illegal immigration?

Actually, I will follow this with a question, a domestic question for you, Josh, but I will play this first. It is deeply ironic that the United Nations has an entire institution that you Nesco group of people and countries devoted to protecting cultural heritage, yet with their ceaseless promotion of mass migration, these globalists are actively destroying the greatest cultures and most extraordinary heritage in all of history.

There is no human right to illegal immigration, but there is a right to remain a sovereign nation. Not an international migrant's week. And so should you. The United States also totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control for the artificial intelligence being spoken of so much now, here and after officially called by the United States. Super intelligence changing the name. It is deeply ironic that the United States is so cringe. That is so cringe. Why not American intelligence?

American intelligence. Let's just go straight there, yeah. Okay, so let me skip a little bit. So, Josh, there's a couple things I've seen floating around. One would be, is it Maria Salazar from Florida? No, she's terrible. Okay, wait. Now, hear me out. This is a little bit of the Greenland conversation. So, here's the ad that she played. Mr. President, some of your immigration enforcement efforts have gone too far. In July, 50% of the 50,000 people that were detained had no criminal record.

Be careful what your advisors are telling you about immigration policy. The same Hispanics who helped you get to the White House in 2024 feel betrayed today. You can be for immigration, but Lincoln was for slavery, and Reagan was for communism. I'm not talking about giving them amnesty. I'm talking about giving them a dignified life in this promised land. All right, so if you recognize this background, this is indeed the White House, and someone, I mean, she's from Florida. She's from what was previously a very Democratic district.

She won this past election cycle, and now she got endorsed by Trump, and then went in front of the White House, did this ad, and I actually want you to listen to the response here, Josh, and see if you're picking up anything. Here's the response from Trump when asked about this ad, obviously critical of the man that endorsed her.

I do, and I have. I disagree with her. Look, I have a strong, a very strong, it's a movement, my movement. It probably, at least partially, won the election. When I got elected at the beginning and, you know, previous to my coming in, we had the most unsafe border maybe anywhere in the world, maybe in history. 25 million people poured in from prisons.

Mental institutions, drug dealers, murderers, 11,888 murderers came in, all documented. They allowed them into our country. I have a very strong, she obviously doesn't have a very strong feeling for the border, but I do, and I understand what she's saying, but I have a very strong, I want, because of my... Now, nobody thinks about it anymore. Look, they just announced the numbers. Over the last 16 months, nobody, zero, I even find that hard to believe, but it's done by a group of people that seem to sort of lean Democrat, you know, they're not going to give me anything for nothing.

And they say over the last 16 months, not one person came in through the southern border, Ellie. Okay, so can I play Joshua for a second? I think this is a little bit of a show, okay? The Hispanics in that area of Florida that previously voted Democrat forever and were legacy Democrats, probably not super thrilled about ICE detentions and deportations.

Therefore, Trump coordinates with her to go do this ad. I don't know if there's coordination, but she does this ad. She gets to be all tough talk to her Hispanic constituents, and then Trump gets asked about it, and he says, You know, I disagree with her, but I've been stronger than ever before, touted all the accomplishments on the border, therefore, he gets to talk about all the success on the border, she gets to look like she's tough to President Trump, and she now appeals to all the Hispanics in the district, therefore, keeping a Democrat out of the seat.

Have I graduated? Yes. This is for sure gamesmanship behind the scenes. Okay, this is what we call, my friend and I call it the one. The rock policy, okay? Okay. Because of your district or your state, for whatever reason, if you need to pick up a rock and throw it at Trump for one reason or another, you got, okay, fine. You got to do it. You got to show your independence. You got to do it one, one time.

The problem with someone like Elisa Murkowski, she throws rocks all day long, four, five, six rocks a week, and it's like, yeah, okay, now I just don't like you. So, in other words, this was her rock. She threw a rock at Trump, like, how dare you? Your immigration policy is terrible. And he's like, okay, all right, this is what you got to do. I get it.

So, Tom Tiffany, I like him. He's running for governor of Wisconsin. He's like, we got to stop the war in Iran. Even Mike Rogers cut a new commercial. He is the neocon from decades past. He says, we got to end the war in Iran. So, that memo went out this week. So, we had Mike Rogers, Tom Tiffany, Ashley Hinson, Iowa, all the Senate and gubernatorial candidates all saying, it is time for the war in Iran to end. Time for the war in Iran.

So, in other words, you are allowed to show your defiance or independence of the president on one issue. Well, if you just, all you do all day is crap on them. So, that tells you, why is it, why does Donald Trump treat, let's say, very liberal Republican Susan Collins different than Lisa Murkowski? Because Susan Collins, she's very strategic, and she says, well, I disagreed with the president on this, and she has to go her own way because Maine is full of a lot of Democratic independent voters.

But Lisa Murkowski, she's just like. She just hates the president, and just like throwing rocks all the day. So, that is not cool. So, yes, I think Salazar did this on purpose. You know how I know it wasn't on purpose? Because if Trump was truly upset. And this wasn't telegrammed. He would have just said, I'm withdrawing my endorsement and allow her to lose. And have some 3 a.m. true socials.

AI pictures of Porter being overrun or something. I think I've seen when Trump is in AI images. Yeah, it involves a lot of it, heavy use of AI. Speaking of Trump being mad, Josh, can you explain to me, let's go to my early Twilight Zone. While he was in town for the UN, he stopped by to see what seems to be kind of like an old friend, show me pal, Mayor Mondani of New York City. Explain this one to me. I'll play it.

Do you have any remarks? Well, thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. I've been at Gracie Mansion. We were discussing quite a few times over the years, a lot, and it sort of feels like a home, and it's a special place, a very special... A beautiful place when you go inside, and I have seen it with numerous different mayors, and I said some great ones and some not so great ones, so hopefully you are going to be a great one. I will be able to say you are going to be a great one, and you are off to a start.

So, I just want to thank the mayor for the invitation. I am in New York to do the United Nations tomorrow. I have a lot of meetings right now, today, very important meetings with Ed. Wasn't this guy the centerpiece of every advertisement everywhere in the country about how the radical left Islamists are taking over and ruining cities and everything? He seems pretty, where's the rock policy? Government-run grocery stores. Yeah, right. Like, what? Free busing. I saw this past the timeline. And then, hey, you know what?

Before that, let's show, maybe this is a Mamdani change, I don't know. Here he is at the U-20 Mayor's Summit, making a lot of sense. ...have taken on ideological associations. One of them, or certain phrases, one of them is quality of life. Over the last few decades, quality of life has come to be seen as somehow a right-wing concern.

Efficiency, especially in the age of Doge, efficiency has been taken on as a right-wing concern, rooting out fraud and waste, a right-wing concern. And there has been a sense that if you are to admit to an interest in those, then you are assisting the right-wing, when in fact, what I think the truth is, is that If you ignore these things, that is what the assistance is. These are, in and of themselves, incredibly important things that we have to deliver on and not allow there to be some kind of an ideological monopoly on who cares and who can deliver on them.

And frankly, to me, quality of life, which is used to describe potholes, speed bumps, a tree on your block, If politics cannot deliver on the block where you live, why would you trust it to deliver anywhere in your city? And so, frankly, the smallest concerns are oftentimes the most important concerns, because that is where you can build the early blocks of trust and faith with a constituent that this government could somehow be a bit different than those which have preceded them.

A lot of truth there, but you didn't mention one thing in particular. If he was really brave, he would have talked about crime. Yeah, what is going on here? He doesn't have an answer for that. We'll see, because there's a Senate race in Minnesota. If that becomes competitive, Minnesota is a very blue state. It's where I was born. The Republicans haven't won there in 16 years or so.

A Senate race. But if Michelle Tafoya, former Sunday Night Football anchor, she is running for the Senate race there. If she can actually make a dent on this, if people in Minnesota are upset about all the Somali fraud, and Tim Walz, who was so damaged from that scandal, he decided not to even run for governor anymore, and they had to bring in Senator Klobuchar to run for governor.

If this issue is really sticking, that might make some headway. Again, so many of these concerns about all this kind of fraud, it really upsets a lot of people. It helps answer the reason why our costs are going up. It is because people are pilfering us. They are sucking onto the welfare state, and they are robbing us blind, and you are a dope in the middle class who are just paying your taxes and just expected to go along with all this stuff.

Yeah, there is a lot. I mean, I keep trying to remind people, you think Donald Trump is some sort of crazy guy, super, you know. Aggressive, and it's like, do you have no idea? He's the moderate. You keep pulling this kind of stuff and fleecing taxpayers blind, there's going to be a rude awakening from either the left or the right. People want someone to go in and smash things. Yeah, can I add on that real quick, Josh? I think you brought up a great point, and it kind of relates to what Mamdani was saying there of like, it's the small issues.

It's actually, it's more important in some ways that you fix the smallest issues close to you because it restores your faith to engage in a broader system. And the fraud... There was another Somali fraud ring daycare that just got busted up in Minnesota. What is this, the fifth or sixth now? It feels like everyone has one going except me.

It's kind of back to that point. If you feel as though the system is not fair, and there's people around you gaming it, and there's no political will to actually solve that problem, it's just kind of the grift that keeps on giving, it goes and goes and goes, why should I engage broadly at all? Why should I even, you just know everyone's going to get theirs. It restores your faith and fairness, and then once you solve those issues or you start moving towards that, I saw Erika, you have in here, J.D.

Vance's task force doing this, it restores faith that, oh, there actually is someone there. Trying to be an arbiter of fairness and allow me to re-engage in a system that should actually benefit me as a taxpayer. Like, nothing's more frustrating than watching, like, I think the funny thing that got revealed, Travis Kelsey got scammed by some Indian guy who went to University of Texas. Hilarious twist of fate there. Good thing his wife could bail him out.

Big time on that. But yeah, it goes back to that, like, I am a taxpayer, and I see that my taxes not only are going to bad uses, it makes me look like an idiot and feel like an idiot for even just engaging as you should as a citizen, patriotic citizen, because you just see the uses going to super demoralizing. The more you solve that, I think the more you get people engaged. Well, I got to tell you, and I understand that there is a lot of people who are very frustrated with the rate of change, the way things are going, but I have to say, just looking over my adult life, You know, I got so frustrated at this because we elect, you know, a Republican president, George W.

Bush, two terms, and what do we have to show for it? I mean, I'm Alito on the court. That's about it. You know? No Defense of Marriage Act, no defense of human life, no right to life. Like on the marriage fight, it was an immediate surrender. Yeah, I mean, he campaigned on it, and then literally weeks later, he's like, oh yeah, I don't care about that. Yeah, the ballooning. And so, I look at the frustration, and then what Trump did by bringing in Musk and trying to do the Doge thing, he goes, here we go, and then Congress says, oh yeah, no, we're not touching that at all.

So, I'm not blaming Trump. Like, that was gift-wrapped for Congress to do something about it, and they should have just held their nose and said, yeah, we better do this, and they refused, and so what I see from a Congress, you know, is just, there's a lot of missed opportunities. They're swinging to miss, and, you know, again.

I look to President Donald Trump. He has delivered decisively on two massive things, two very important things, just since his election in 2024. Obviously, the first term, we got Roe v. Wade overturned because of his appointments to the court, but what he did by winning an election, I've never felt so proud about this vote because he did make a difference on the transition. Just another hospital system in New York just came through and said they're going to stop doing that, surgeries on kids.

And then also, with immigration, is it going as fast as I'd like? No, not necessarily, but like, yes, it's still directionally going. Directionally correct is going to become the phrase. Making a difference. Making a difference. And the thing is, you have to understand something, like, Democrats use the whole vote by mail as a way of scam. I think they just, you know, they fill the... You know, the mailbox with ballots are a bunch of baloney. So, just by Trump trying to put the rules in place on the Postal Service stuff, and eventually the courts said no, but just by doing that, it made a lot of Democrats go, oh my gosh, we can't rely on this.

Yeah, and we are going to try to make it tougher for you guys to cheat, dang it. So, I'm very proud of what's going on with President Trump. I do feel like We are eventually getting changes, like your state of Indiana, right? I'm so much happier with Jim Banks as a senator than some of the Republicans we've had out of Indiana for a long time. We're making improvements. We are. It is much slower than I would like, but I'll tell you one thing.

I'm not going to vote for communists or let communists win just because gas is too damn expensive. There you have it. I don't know if I have even time for the news blackout, Josh, the CNN. The CNN banning from the newsroom, or not, they can't be on White House grounds. They can't be in the White House, right. It kicked out three news outlets off the White House grounds, and so all of them are not doing it now as solidarity or whatever.

Fox isn't, yeah. Yeah, I mean, you know, again, like, oh, no. I mean, these are the same media companies that turned a blind eye when our own, you know, federal law enforcement agencies were corroborating with social media outlets to prevent users from sharing news. Like, I'm sorry, like.

I don't think anything... It's hard to take seriously. I mean, they're the biggest prima donnas in the world. I hate the media. You don't hate them at all. No, I mean, do you see the news headline? Which one? It just came out. The Associated Press was talking about this black woman who was... She was hung by a tree. She died. This is horrible. And the way the AP and so many of these news media outlets made it seem like, they said reminiscent of the lynchings of the US South.

A black man has been arrested for killing this woman. Yeah. And you're just going to leave that conveniently out of all your news coverage so that people can foment this kind of stuff. You don't hate the media enough. That's why, like, people are like, well, what are you going to do about it? We created our own media, folks. That's why we did this, because these guys are absolute vultures. If a Biden figure kicked CatholicVote out of the White House grounds, would you be as frustrated?

I mean, I'd be like, well, that's, again, I'm not surprised, but I mean, you have to remember, like the Obama White House would hand out, here, here's the photos to use, and the media would say, okay, we'll print that. And then they would have, again, the independent press. There's that photo of President Biden where he's holding the card, and it's got the lady's name for the L.A. Times. He was seen on it. And the pre-screened question that she's going to ask him.

So, these guys are all actors. Yeah, okay, that's kind of my thing on this is I feel like it's all kind of kabuki anyway. It's all theater. Yes, totally. They're all theater kids. People getting mad about the theater, like, they moved troops, or they moved to a new theater, like, the whole thing's theater to begin with, no one actually says anything really of value at those times anyway, and Trump has his media organizations that he passes off what he wants them to say anyway, so it's like, when people complain about this, I just, I'm sorry, it's just like hard to get me out of bed on this, like, the whole thing is just kind of theater.

You don't actually learn stuff there. Yeah, and I think that the administration's done a good job. J.D. Vance did a really good job on reporters coming after him, like, isn't this an attack on the First Amendment? And now these news outlets are suing the Trump administration, saying that it's an attack on the First Amendment right to report and to say what you want to say. And they're just like, look, no one's telling them they can't report on stuff. No one's telling them they can't say what they want to say.

We're just saying you can't come into the White House and use your time there to badger the president for something you're going to write, whatever you want. Anyway, and I don't think anyone's under any illusions that if like Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg or Gavin Newsom, heaven forbid, end up in the White House in 2028, that like Mary Margaret Olihan is still going to have a press pass. No, they're going to kick her out of there. They're not going to have all these independent news outlets there anymore.

And will we hear about it from Dana Bash? I don't think so. She won't even notice because they already resent so much. That the Trump White House has allowed in a new pool of media and a new pool of reporters, and sure, some of them are just going to print whatever Trump tells them to print, but there's also genuine, just, you know, podcasters, small media organizations who are allowed access now that they've never had before, and that will go away. Because, again, it's the norm smashing.

That's dumb, too. Trump is smashing. Oh, that is not dumb. Why is that dumb? Because the Pentagon changed all the rules, basically, so that you can't do any actual reporting. And then they just kind of gold-stamped anyone that showed up. Depending on what's different from the White House. Yeah, no. I guess, but it's kind of like the whole thing is just kind of performative, you know? It's like, oh, they're just going to rip off their clips anyway to answer the questions that they want to answer.

How much is having an adversarial... Press pool, like, is that really a function? Like, I guess, what is the point? They pretend it's important, but if they only do it, they're only adversarial when a Republican's in office. Right, yeah. Sure, but then I expect Democrats to be adversarial. Like, I expect Republicans to be adversarial when a Democrat's in office, and I expect the inverse.

So, if this wants to become the new norm because we just all recognize this isn't actually productive, you know, fine. Is this a crisis of the First Amendment? No. But again, it's not. Yeah, it's not. It's not. But it's also not like the Trump administration is suddenly like, we won't talk to any adversarial reporters. Like, they spent the whole weekend talking to adversarial reporters. They're like, you just can't come sit in the White House press room and do it, because, you know what, I'm not going to, like, pull my hair out of that.

Chris Ruffo got on, was it Bill Maher, this weekend, and he was like, this looks so bad, because now the opposition is going to say we're against the First Amendment. Well, I'm like, Chris, first of all, they already say that anyway. They already hate us. And second, Chris Ruffo, he was the one with... I forget what year it was during the Biden administration. He had this incredible essay on how the right needs to realize that the norms have been smashed and start fighting back in a way that is symmetrical and that is proportionate so that we can actually win things.

And now he's like, oh, we have to be above them. Sounds like you stepped in on that one. Normally, he's really good. I know. And that's why I'm calling him out, because I'm like, that's not your usual MO, Chris Rupp. He's got a few. Return to your Nixonian center. Yes, come on, back to Nixon. All right, Erika, let's run your good news now. Okay, I'm going to keep going. I got to plug in my computer real quick. Go ahead. Yeah, definitely need to plug in your computer.

That's definitely a thing. Anyway, my good news is continuing along with the fraud thing. So, the vice president gave a press briefing just yesterday that they are removing 760,000 Obamacare enrollments. That the administration has found to be fraudulent. So, he's the head of the Anti-Fraud Task Force. This is their biggest crackdown yet, and they say the move will save American taxpayers $2.2 billion, and you can roll the clip.

All right, let's pull it up. What this looks like is, in one case, we found a fraud ring that had 40 agents, 40 brokerage agents, who had funneled 50,000 people into the Obamacare system fraudulently. Now, some of those people were probably legitimate. Most of those people were not eligible. Either they didn't meet the citizenship or the income requirements. Many of those people quite literally didn't even exist. We had a system in this country that rewarded brokers, that made people rich for enrolling fake people in programs that are meant to ensure that our fellow citizens have health care.

This was a scandal, and thanks to the work of Dr. Oz, Andy Ferguson, Secretary Kennedy, and, of course, the leadership of the president, this is stopping. Yeah, and so this goes on and on, but basically, during COVID, during the Biden administration, eligibility for enrollment with Obamacare was really relaxed, and so we almost doubled the number of people enrolled in Obamacare. But at the same time that they relaxed the eligibility, no one was tasked with checking up on who was enrolling themselves or being enrolled because the person didn't actually exist to enroll themselves, and so we get this massive ballooning of fraud.

Right, and so this goes on and on, but basically, during the Biden administration, eligibility for enrollment with Obamacare was really relaxed, and so we almost doubled the number of people enrolled in Obamacare. Again, Mary Margaret Olihan, shout out. She was at the conference. She also asked about Planned Parenthood, which is being investigated for similar fraud for basically getting money from the government to do trans care on kids that they aren't actually doing, because some of the kids don't exist, and others aren't getting any quote-unquote care.

So, again, I think this is all trending in the right direction. These are great things that this is what I voted for. So, I'm excited. Directionally correct. Thank you, Tom. It is directionally correct. That's like the most Yale-coded, like, damned with faint praise kind of way. Well, I will give you directionally correct. Directionally correct. It really is, yeah. I mean, I really could put it on. I could put it on and take it off real quick. Yeah, you know what to do.

I could go real low IQ real quick. You could have gone to Yale. Yeah, no, definitely not. I certainly do not belong there. You would not have been very happy. However, in... And to re-inscore the point, because what's so funny with these conversations that come up is like, oh, well, it's just $2.2 billion.

If you take a look at, which first off, just pause, like you could just pause right there. But then the second thing is, they're like, oh, but in the grand scheme of. Government spending, you know, it's such a small, it's so small, it's almost insignificant. So, I guess, then don't pay attention to it. But again, it's not even about the number.

It's about the principle. If we all could reliably know that there's not fraud going on, and people are actually tasked to take care of that, the monetary value of that restoring of faith in government services is far beyond $2.2 billion or whatever share of the federal budget it takes on. That's the purpose of a system, though. People are like, why do these systems? Fights take place. It's like, why not focus on things that actually matter more? It's like, this is the point.

Yeah. Right, well, the Democrats don't want to fight fraud because they use fraud to, you know, to... Funnel money to their friends and back to their candidates. Yeah, it's all blue states that are blocking the fraud task force with lawsuits and whatever have you. I don't know if this is true or not, because it's Dr. Oz, and who knows, but he's claiming that this kind of fraud, just by taking the fraud out of the system in Medicare, could double the life expectancy of that trust fund.

And, I mean, I don't know if it'll double it, but it very well could. It's a colorful character, for sure. There you go. Okay, Josh. So, my good news, it sounds a little weird to say good news, but this 18-year-old Texas mother, Carla Abera, is at a bus stop with her infant son, and this other lady was just like gushing over how cute this kid was, and she's, you know, lets her hold the baby, and then just starts handing this other woman, here's his.

Birth certificate, here is the social security number. Do you want the baby? And this woman is like, wait, what? Like, what are you talking about? Like, she is like, let me, and so the older lady is like, let me help, see if I can get some help. And they go to this other person's house, and hey, this person might be able to help you, and say, okay, you know, and then the mother just jumps in an Uber without her kid and takes off.

Now, why is this good news? Okay, well. Certainly, it is not good news to abandon your children. Of course, I am not saying that. That is not good at all. She is going to be prosecuted. She has got a $7,000 bail or whatever, but it just helps, I think, highlight just three months ago, she could have just murdered this kid.

So, the kid is not murdered. That is good. That is good news. I know that's a low bar, but in our country, it matters, and we can emphasize again, Texas has a safe haven law, or they sometimes call it the Baby Moses Law, which allows parents to anonymously leave their newborn children at special designated safe locations, like a firehouse, just to remind people, you can do this. There are methods to it. If you end up with a baby, and you realize...

I'm in way too deep. The good news, that baby can be found a home. Don't just randomly do it to someone at a bus stop, though. Yeah, I was going to say, I don't think we'll do it to emergency medical personnel, but again, it's just a reminder, the dignity of life, this kid is going to have a chance at life.

And we want to just try to encourage more states to pass safe haven laws. We should have government spend money on it, like how to do it properly, okay? And if I'm the judge in this case, I would probably be a little bit more lenient on her. I'd make sure that she would have some sort of thing that if it happened again, she would get the book thrown at her. But in general, let's use this as a moment.

To try to remind people, like, there are options. Life is absolutely the best choice you have. Choose life. Amen. Curious how you're going to land the plane on that one. Yeah, it does. There's some turbulence. I was like, we're giving away a kid on a bus. This is going to be good stuff. A bus stop, not on a bus, but yes. I mean, you know, she could just, and the picture of the older lady, you know, the mom, I mean, not older, she's still younger than me, the older one, but you could just look at her, and she's, you know, she was just a woman who knew, like, I need to make sure this baby's safe.

That's good. That's a good inclination. I'm glad that we have little... There are good Samaritans out there trying to do what is right. Crazy. All right, mine, shout out to the boys over at Ave, Tom, Ani, and of course, big smiles in front of this Irish Abbey.

So, we had the first opening mass for Ave Maria University at Mount Mallory. I actually think I know some people that are over there now. In Ireland. In Ireland. Apparently, people were mad about this. The far-left political party, People Before Profit, escalated attacks on Tom Monaghan and Ave Maria, saying every single cent generated by leasing Mount Mallory Abbey to Ave Maria University should be immediately seized by the state.

And then, like, hundreds of people showed up to the opening mass. Didn't work out. I mean, come on, this is the smile of a man who is big time winning. This is awesome. I think this is actually one of the first abbeys that was open in Ireland, Catholic abbeys that were open in Ireland after. I forget what period of time, but it's really old and historic. It's going to be amazing, an amazing place to study abroad, especially with the Catholic heritage.

So, shout out to Ave, shout out to Tom Monaghan. Let's re-evangelize Ireland. We need a new St. Patrick. I mean, the people that have moved past religion are so cool if you still want to maintain the faith. Yeah, they're not, they're totally tolerant of everyone, including, my goodness, like, when you just seize every dollar, like, whoa, bro, like, and then people are boycotting. You know, Domino's like, brother, he doesn't own Domino's.

I didn't know that. That's so funny. Yeah, he hasn't. It's like, I'm not going to watch the Tigers anymore. It's like, buddy. I don't think you're going to be able to hurt Tom Monaghan unless you boycott going to Ave Maria University. God forbid, you know, maybe you won't go. Not that you would ever be there ever anyway. Well, I believe Tom Monaghan has said he wants to die without a cent, so he's a free man. You can't touch a guy like that.

He is the man. I have so many Tom. Tom Monaghan lore goes so hard. There's so many different stories about him just being the best. So, I'd say it's like him. I'd say the two Catholic Avengers of like everything good going on in the church that I can think of. There's obviously ones I don't know about. Cardinal Burke. Tom Monaghan, big two. If I had a draft. Used to work for him.

Yes, if I had to go like a draft of some kind, Tom Monaghan and Cardinal Burke would be up at the top. Okay, Erika, so you were giving a talk in New Hampshire, and you got some interesting questions. Oh, sorry.

New Haven. Fun fact, when I was in Maryland, episode coming out next week, I was this close to driving through Delaware. So, I was almost in the hometown of Joe Biden. I've never been that close to Delaware ever. I didn't actually go there, but I thought that was a cool, fun fact. He's adopted town of, you know, because he's from Pennsylvania, right? He's the son of Scranton. He's still born in Philadelphia. Son of Scranton. Moved over.

Or Scranton, yeah, sorry. But it is just crazy how small states are over there. Is it not? It's true. No, it's very small. It's crazy. I was like, this is like a town. Like, this is like a town in Indiana or Michigan.

No, it's actually all of Delaware, and I just missed it. I was like, it's so hard to get to. I mean, if you sneeze, you miss Rhode Island. Yeah, it's like... Rhode Island, insanely small. Little tiny states out here.

So, Erika, what were you doing over there? What were you talking about? And let us get into some of the questions. Yeah, so this was Fersati on Tap, which is like your, I think every city has this now, which is great. So, if you have Theology on Tap, we have Drinking with Dominicans, I believe, in Cincinnati is the version. We have Fersati on Tap. So, it is where a bunch of young professionals, young people, although the expansion of young people has astonished me.

So, it used to be like 21 to 35. This was 21 to 39. Like, I'm a young person. We're getting loose on the definition of young person. We sure are, yeah. So, but it was a wonderful evening, and yeah, a group of about 20 young people, not Yalies. It was the working and the professional managerial class of New Haven, Connecticut, and just really earnest young people, really great questions, and it was so nice to get out in the wild and actually get it done, but some of the questions were so good.

I met some real characters. I did receive first-hand confirmation that this podcast has been played multiple times in Rosa DeLauro's office in New Haven. What? Mercer, your voice rings out in the halls of Rosa DeLauro from time to time. Your congresswoman. Once was mine. Yep, very interesting. So, like I said, it was a great crowd and very earnest questions, but I wanted to pose a few to you guys. Because the whole time I was there, I was thinking, oh my gosh, Tom would love this.

Josh would love this so much. So, I brought to you some of the questions. What was the topic of your talk before? Yeah, so it was, can Catholics sit out political life? It's a lot like Josh's talk. We have an election year here. Interestingly enough, I was supposed to give this talk back in the winter, but we had a blizzard, as we do in New England from time to time. And so, I'd written it centered around the Charlie Kirk assassination and the fallout from that, which was still very fresh.

Yeah. But I made the case that, obviously, Catholics, because of our faith, religion and politics cannot be separated, and that we didn't fight a revolution to scrub the public square of religion, but so that religion could be freed in the public square to be expressed and to shape our country, and that, as Kelsey likes to say, I quoted Kelsey Reinhart, if Catholics are not at the table, we are on the menu.

I might have made a quip about how we might get our first Catholic president in 2028, and that one didn't go. That was a lead balloon. Did not read the room on that one. So, I should not have said that. You know, you live and learn. They love Kennedy and New Haven. It's New Haven. Yeah, it's New Haven. Come on. Even the Gen Zers.

You've got a kind of research, a New Deal Steakhouse. Wasn't that in Hamden? I think so. New Deal Steakhouse. This was Trinity Bar. This goes back to like Father McGivney times. Very old bar. Very cool. Very cool. Okay, so here's a couple of the questions. Josh, I just want to like... Pitch these to you. So, we got, this was from my friend, the Rosa DeLauro, so shout out, Charles. It was great to meet you. And his question was that, you know, Coming back to the Catholic faith, having been raised in a really left-leaning environment, most of his friends and family are still in that party, he's had to really struggle with some political views, especially when it comes to gay marriage, which a lot of my talk was about that fight, especially on gay marriage, abortion, obviously, and this growing desire to submit to the Catholic Church's teaching and recognizing the importance of the faith.

But having to really come 180 in these policies. So, his question was, are there any beliefs or political beliefs that you've had to change over the course of your life because of, as your understanding of the Catholic faith has deepened?

And I had my answer, but I wanted to hear Josh respond to this young man. I mean. You know, that is a tough question. I just have always tried to think about political issues in light of the church. I think one of the best things that it has helped me, guide me on is probably war. You know, I remember, you know, I mean, I was in Washington when The city was attacked by Islamic extremists, and so I was probably a little bit more neoconning back then because of that.

When the general came across the street and said, you should probably leave the building, we're abandoning our building, that's kind of a wake-up call. But John Paul II was right. The war in Iraq was a foolish idea. I had supported it then, and I'm I don't have any problem saying that was a catastrophic mistake. Not that my influence was massive in 2003, per se, but I've learned a lot from that. My tendency has been to be more along the lines of Pope John Paul II, which I think Pat Buchanan.

You know, understood as well. Like, you know, like, this is foreign wars, you know, it's a distraction from the real reform that needs to be done domestically in your church, certainly, but also in your country. That's one massive change I've had. Most of the other issues, it's wishing that bishops were more, you know, like, they're right on paper.

You know, like, I mean, again, like, they say the right things on abortion, they say the right things, you know, on life, human life, but then they, you know, they scream the loudest when Beau French tweets something like, oh, this is kind of weird, like, you know, and then Bishop Olson loses his mind. It's like, really? Like, you get that upset about this, but then, like, Babies are just slaughtered left and right, and you've got a guy running for the Senate, Tallarico, who believes there are six genders, and all of a sudden, he doesn't.

God is non-binary, right? Yeah, I mean, like, really? I mean, like, this is what you're going to, but again, so, that's been my biggest problem, is the shepherds in the church. I think it's just disproportionate. That's the whole thing, like the migrant week. Like, in their minds, like, they just.

That was the focus of my talk, actually, in Traverse City. In many ways, the Catholics who fill the pews on a regular basis, maybe a little bit different than New Haven, but overall, in the United States, the people who show up to Mass on a regular basis every Sunday overwhelmingly are pro-life and pro-marriage.

The only real political issue where there is a massive divide between the bishops and the Catholics who fill the pews on a regular basis would be immigration. And that is one where we have really tried, in non-bombastic ways, we try to, in a very measured, understandable way, walk the bishops and the priests through. You need to be looking at this in a more full... Picture, and I thought our CAP report on that was really good, that we published a CatholicVote, Immigration and the Christian Conscience, and also Kelsey Reinhart's article in First Things, saying, you know, isn't it maybe time for the bishops to kind of re-examine, you know, because our thought is, you keep emphasizing the dignity of the migrant, their inherent dignity, and it's like, No one is out there denying it.

It is not like we are saying, let us just have a bunch of drones, just shoot them down. That is not happening. Everyone understands that they have inherent dignity as human beings. The question is, isn't there a fullness of Christian teaching on this? Do we have nothing else to say about how?

Having 20 million people in our country illegally might undermine laws, and the fact that vast majorities of them are on public assistance. People are struggling to get by, and 70% of Haitians are on welfare, 70% of Mexicans are on welfare. What?

We're being taken advantage of, too. Not just the fraud, just in general. Why are you on public assistance? I just, I, it just, and, you know, the tactic in the last 20 years is anytime you have any objection to something seemingly common sense frustration. You're a xenophobe, you're sexist, you're bigoted, and after a while, I've got to tell you, my skin has gotten really thin, and my patience has grown thin. My skin is thick, my patience is thin. I'm sick and tired of you guys saying that I'm evil for not wanting to be robbed blind.

Yeah, yeah. You know, yeah, I think along... I can't remember what I was going to say here, just like my Catholic faith. I think that kind of similar to those is that just really diving in, the more I'm there, it just makes me realize that we'll never get a utopia.

So, when I look at politics, and I almost think that kind of makes me like fundamentally right-wing in a way, as I'm like, I kind of see things as they are, and I don't have aspirations for this life, or my world, or this country to become like a perfect utopia that will be the end fulfillment of man.

Not to be directionally correct, but I would like to move in more of a Christian direction, and one that protects the fundamental rights of Americans in general, but certainly Christians and Catholics, to have the freedom to worship. But the reason I'm engaged is not for the end product of a utopia. And I think that engaging in politics, I just realized that, and there's people on the right that I think believe that, but... Specifically on the left, you look at leftist politics or you dig into Karl Marx, there's a real utopian element as this is the end fulfillment of man that erects.

You see it with abortion, too. Abortion is kind of like God to a lot of feminists who are engaged in the political process. And so, I think engaging in politics, it's really helped me. To take a step back when I need to take a step back and just have humility, I think just engaging in the sacrament sincerely really does that for you, like being Catholic. But then to look at some of these other political movements, right, left, center, et cetera, and when I see these real kind of utopian aspects coming out, I really take pause and I'm like, well, I want to move in the right direction, but in the end, I'm going to die and I have to answer to someone bigger than this, and we're never going to get perfection here.

And even when we are moving in, say, the right direction, there's still problems that Need to be addressed with moving in the right direction, because it's not that, like, I view the Trump administration or Democrats or whatever as, like, perfect or imperfect in, like, a very manichean way. I think that the new challenge, I think, going into This new era, post-peak, woke, whatever, Trump now is like, finding ways to sincerely voice disagreements, while also, you know, playing team ball with people that don't want to kill me.

That's a, everyone on the left wants to kill me. Did you see the new survey that came out just a few days ago? I did see that, and I would like to dispute that, but you can say it. Well, I mean, they polled a bunch of Democrats. They said, you know, if Trump died in his sleep, would you be happy? Oh my gosh, yeah, we love that. 60% of Democrats in the survey, and it's actually a pretty decent survey. Almost 60% said they would, in favor of a military coup, remove Trump from power.

Like, what? From the Democrats? It was a text survey, Josh. Those who believe in the Constitution and democracy. It was a text survey to like 800 people. I get text surveys about my thoughts on Israel, and it's a running joke with me and all my friends as to what our responses are. Like, I don't know. I just don't take it super seriously. Like, you think you wouldn't text that to Republicans when Biden was in office? Be like, yeah, I hope he dies.

Or... Whatever. That's why I'm like, okay, I get it, because I understand the principle, and I actually agree there's more time. I'm not sure how many Republicans would favor a military coup, and I think the percentage of Republicans who would be happy if a Democrat were assassinated is not going to be nearly as high as it is amongst the Democrats. Oh, I would agree. I would agree with that, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the violence thing is just... Yeah.

That stuff gets scary, because you look at the spots, Mangione, whatever. There is a lot of talk about polls. I mean, you just talk about that, like a survey, you know, like 800 people, like how can that be a good survey?

Polls are as good, you know, they can be as good. You don't have to poll 10,000 people for it to be a good poll. You can do like 800 to 1,200 if you've got a good sample, you know. That's the problem with polling over the last few cycles, is that a lot of conservatives just say, I'm not answering, hang up. And so then you just get like, you know, the liberals who answer the phone, and so it gets skewed a little bit more towards Democrats.

But when you're polling Democrats, you're like. Do you think it would be good if the president were to die in his sleep? Like, oh, my gosh, yeah, that would be great. Would it be great if the cabinet, you know, voted to remove him from office? Oh, yeah, we love that. Like, what if he, you know, the military coup? Like, yes, yes, 60%, yes. And only, it is still a third were totally okay with him being assassinated. They would love that. They would consider that very positive.

Yeah. Erika, let us go next question, because I want to make sure we hit all these. Oh, you want to hit all of them? Awesome. Okay. Then we had a great question from Sam that I think Josh is also going to love. So, shout out to Sam. Love you, guy. So, he asked, what about third parties? So, we were talking about how we have two political parties that are more and more polarized, although I think there is a horseshoe effect. I digress.

But we've got kind of a couple of political parties, one of which is completely off the rails in terms of Catholics. So, he asked, what about the third party? And he specifically said American Solidarity Party and Peter Sonsky. So, if there really is such a large voting bloc of Catholics, and we all were to get behind something like that, could that party make a difference? So, can Catholics in good conscience throw their support and their political energies behind a third party like the Solidarity Party?

And I know some people in the chat have asked this question as well, so I think it is worth engaging. Yeah, I mean, you know, again, I would say... I have long been a champion of the two-party system, actually. There have been many times in our American history where political parties completely change over time.

You know, and I do feel, so like, to me, it's like, it's much easier to try to make the Republican Party be more Catholic than, you know, and in some ways, it has definitely improved on that. Like, other ways, there's still a long way to go. We are in a, again, you know, like, there's no, like, to have a political party, let's say, I don't really know, I'm not going to say this about the American Solidarity Party, but let's say that was considered 100% perfectly Catholic.

So what? Like, I mean, why would I vote? There's nothing wrong with your conscience, though. I don't think, no one needs to be worried about their conscience when they vote third party. Like, yeah, you can do that. No, I don't have any problem.

So, I've never used, you know, like to me, I want every Catholic to vote. I think participation in politics and voting is a moral obligation. That's what our U.S. bishops have said, because we are the people. We are the ones who rule, and so we have to elect our representatives. So, we do have an obligation to become informed citizens. That's why we create a CatholicVote. That's why we do the loop. We have all these things to provide resources. Transformation helps guide people in their decisions, but again, I think there is nothing wrong with third parties.

I mean, obviously, they try to emphasize things, and the more popularity that they gain, what it will do is the parties will adjust, and they will try to win back those voters towards their side, and so sometimes that is the only thing you can do to try to win things over, but the most successful ways to transform a party.

Is actually through a very successful takeover, and Donald Trump did do a takeover of the Republican Party. When he came to the Republican Party, coming down that escalator in 2015, the Republican Party had defined itself by being pro-amnesty, and they were in favor of tax cuts for the wealthiest and trying to restrict spending on Social Security and Medicare. Now, we do need a main, you know.

Our entitlements are out of whack, but it is really hard to convince voters, I am going to cut your Social Security and Medicare, and trust me that I am cool giving tax breaks to the rich. It is tone deaf.

So, it is not the way to reform it. And again, amnesty, mass amnesty. 2006, George W. Bush wanted mass amnesty. So, this is horrible. So, Donald Trump created a major change in the Republican Party. And again, moving away from the Wall Street Journal, libertarian, like America is just like a parking lot, bizarre, shopping mall. No, we are people. We are a people, and we have to have solidarity for each other. We have to have solidarity for the workers, the farmers, and everyone else.

We are in this together. We have sacrificed over many generations, fought and toiled for this country, bled and died for this country. So, just doing that has been a major sea change in the Republican Party. So, I mean, to me, it is like I would rather… I'd rather support that effort, that reform effort. Does it need to be purified and made better? More perfect union? Yeah, of course. But to me, I would not waste time on that one. I think there's so much more good effort can be done to making the existing Republican Party be that much more Catholic.

Let's roll that next question, because I want to sneak it in, the reconcile Catholics can save America. Yeah, yeah. This is another great question. So, I got, how do you reconcile this whole excitement about Catholics can save America? You know, the Catholics are on the ascendancy. It is a Catholic moment, with the fact that, this is an assumption, America was founded by anti-Catholics like Masons and Deists, and that Catholics have been persecuted and marginalized for most of American history. So, where is the excitement?

It kind of frustrates me. I mean, like, yes, were there persecutions against Catholics in colonial... You know, America, as well as even institutionally in some of these states, of course, and that's a bad thing, but I do recall. Of course, you know, when we used to, you know, some of the revolutionary troops were burning the Pope in effigy, you know, and Guy Fawkes there, you know, and General Washington looked at them with absolute disgust and said, no one in this army is ever going to do that ever again.

Are you kidding me? I'm paraphrasing him, of course, but he's like, you're insulting, like, guys like Lafayette are coming over here, and they're fighting for us, and you're going to insult their religion by doing this kind of stuff? And George Washington just gave him the Riot Act, and he put an end to that right then and there, and it petered out. No one did that really anymore in the United States, even though we had that history from England, okay? And again, I would just say, like, you know, in the late 1800s, we had the Blaine Amendments.

Blaine was a successful politician, Speaker of the House, ran for president. He almost got a Blaine Amendment passed in the U.S. Constitution. You couldn't get it done. This was an amendment that would prevent any money going to church organizations, schools, nursing homes, anything, and adoption agencies, anything like that.

But he was able to get, basically, every state that wanted to go and add it to the union had to adopt one of these Blaine Amendments, and so something like 20, 30 states have this. We just signed off, we're about to sign off on another amicus brief in a court case involving California. California was saying, hey, we're going to provide homeschooling families with help to get the curriculum that they need.

However, if there's 1% religion in it, you don't get any money. You know, the anti-Catholics of today are not like the anti-Catholics of the 18th century. People need to realize this. I much prefer the anti-Catholics of the 1800s, who are just like, you worshiped the whore of Babylon, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, enslaved our own.

The anti-Catholics of today are like the Gavin Newsoms, who was baptized Catholic, and he absolutely hates everything we stand for. Why? He hates Christianity. He hates standing up for the unborn. He hates marriage between man or woman. That is what they got a problem with today. So, to me, it is like, you know, I look at, yes, there are some obnoxious people, like the guys who run the Babylon Bee, who absolutely detest Catholics. Dude, they have been on a heater of being terrible as a dude.

I mean, it is horrible on immigration. They are not even funny anymore. Oh, my gosh. Yeah, I know, but like, to me, it is like, um. I consider it a triumph that we have. Yeah. You know, most conservatives, if you say, who's like the best conservative in the land, like Clarence Thomas. Clarence Thomas. Josh, can I toss something to you? The Holy Roman Empire.

At one point, not a huge fan of Christians. This is true. May or may not have ended up killing Jesus. Yeah, in my response. The Roman Empire. But the Roman Empire became the Holy Roman Empire. That is all I got to say. I did pull up. So, we are worried about obstacles. Exactly. I pulled out the blood of the martyrs as the seed of the church, and the suffering of Catholics will be the salvation of America. Come on now. If it can be saved, I believe it can.

I am not giving up yet. Yeah, like St. Helen and Constantine. Can I give you a shout out? I would like to give a shout out, too, to Lord Baltimore. I was posted up in Maryland, the Maryland state flag. That is why they have the unique state flag. It is two medieval crests or flags combined together, and then Lord Baltimore converted to Catholicism and was basically given Maryland to be a safe haven for Catholics in the new colonies, which is super sick, and he sacrificed a ton to be able to do that, so shout out Lord Baltimore.

Second, I kind of wish that the Catholic Church was as dangerous and conspiratorial. As we make out Freemasons to be, because I was, I shot a, it was not the mass. The mass was normal. I was at a church, it's a cathedral, awesome. But the reception was at a Scottish Rite Cathedral, and I've never, and Scottish Rite is basically like an advanced form. Listen, I'm not an expert in Freemasons, but it's like an advanced form of Freemasonry. Really like stark building, you know, it's right in the middle of a city.

And I'm in there, and you see, like, the G with the carpenter ruler, because they believe in, like, the grand architect. So, I literally was in the building during dinner researching masonry stuff, and... Catholics can't become Masons because you have to take secret oaths, and they kind of believe in this universalist garbage, which is like, no, you all can be a part of the Masons. You just have to believe in the grand architecture. We're all working towards kind of the same thing.

Many of my same frustrations with the current approach as Catholics to this kind of ecumenical. Nonsense, I think, like not being confident enough, and that was actually explicitly why you could not become a Mason was because, obviously, the secrecy of oaths, but because the general belief system of Masons was towards this kind of universalist understanding. At the top, they're very antagonistic against Catholics. Right, but it was funny thinking, like, we don't understand it as much as time, and you mentioned the 1800s.

Like, there was a time where your dentist or your, you know, accountant down the road or whatever, they were all Masons. Like, they... ...belong to a Masonic lodge, and they were registered, and it's kind of like a civic thing, and it is shocking. I guess we see the same problems with Catholic churches, too, where it's not just that Masons kind of have lost relevance and that their members are much older now. I think there's like 800,000 registered in America. That's down from a million as of a couple of years ago, but just institutions in general have dropped.

The Catholic church tense has dropped as well, just being a part of civic organizations that would have been seen as totally normal. Now, like, there's many people who are just nuns. They have their dogs, and they got their phones. Yeah, so I thought that was all very interesting. But yes, the way that we speak of Masons, I would like people to speak of Catholics. They do every once in a while when they bring up Opus Dei, which is hysterical to me because I know Opus Dei people, and I'm like, I wish that you were half as powerful as media makes you out to be.

So, what you're saying is you love the Da Vinci Code and Dan Brown? Yeah, like, I kind of wish that. I kind of wish that we had the same, like, if people were scared that we were that powerful, that must mean that we're actually, we're making good enemies, because we're doing cool things.

A conspiracy is just a group of people getting together and conspiring, as in coming up with a plan and working towards an objective, okay? So, that's what I, listen, call me what you want. I want to conspire. I want to get things done. And then, finally, and maybe we could just do a quick hitter twad zone, but final question from John Errico.

Yeah, so then John was saying, and this is to you, Tom. I felt like Tom was sitting there talking to me. You know, we're pretty discouraged by the Trump administration's decisions. You know, you start to get demoralized because your side won, and then it feels like it's not what you voted for. So, how do you even stay interested in politics or engaged when it feels like no matter who wins, we just get the same thing? Yeah, it's a tough question. I wrestle with this all the time, almost on a daily basis.

It does feel like, no matter who you vote for, we're going to get worse in the Middle East. It's incredibly frustrating. I imagine this might be how people felt in Bush term, too. Not that I'm comparing... Not so much worse back then. Yeah, right. Not that I'm comparing a full-scale ground invasion.

But strategically speaking, you look around the world, and there's chaos, and it's just... It is directly opposed to what was promised by President Trump on the campaign trail. A lot of people thought he meant it, and maybe he did, and maybe there is, you know, I just allow the space to, like, maybe he just knew something that we don't and had to do it, but, you know, warned by everyone, Charlie Kirk on down, this is going to be a quagmire, don't do it, and then he did it.

Epstein rollout, absolute disaster. Whatever you think about how big a conspiracy it is, how specific the crimes were, whatever, total disaster how that was rolled out. Doge failing, the tariffs being rolled out in kind of a dumb way, in my opinion. I am not even against tariffs in principle, but the way that it happened and then immediately getting repealed, even when it comes down to the voter mail-in. thing that is getting rejected because it's being done too late was the rationale.

It's not that it's even unconstitutional. It's just being done too close to the election. It's like, well, why weren't we thinking about this? Seemingly, you know, back down on immigration enforcement. I mean, I'm just kind of levying a lot of my grievances here. I'm sure John is probably in my age bracket, although I guess the young.

Is extended now, according to Erika. No, no, he's right in your lane. Yeah, so I've just been trying to find a good way to... Um, it's frustrating when you feel like you're taken for granted, especially when you've taken a lot of personal heat for supporting Trump in times where it's not been super popular. And you were a part of, you know, electing him in this popular mandate to get these things done. It's not going either as fast as you were hoping it is, or it's gone in the complete opposite direction.

It's been detrimental to those stated goals. That all being said, in terms of having a seat at the table, And that's why it frustrates me the most when, like, the Texas thing blows up, and there's people in the movement who are calling you names reserved for Trying to get you killed, like calling you a Nazi, calling you, you know, insane things that they wouldn't even call people on the left, and they criticize people on the left for using. Trump's ire over people that were against the Iran war, like just alienating people out of the movement that were like there before and have gotten so frustrated, they just sound delusional on their podcast now.

It's like they're so fixated on something. It's like, can't move the ball forward. So, I'm trying to find a way to like. Voice my opinions in a way that is constructive, and I don't have a personal back channel to the Trump administration, which would be sick if I did, but just pretty firmly point out where this is a problem and we should reverse, but then also praise on the things that are praiseworthy, and maybe just squaring this is kind of what it takes to be involved in politics.

Some people just don't have the fortitude necessary. To deal with frustrations and hopefully move the ball, or when things are going really well, it's like you can ride it when it's going really well, and that's easy, right? I remember what it was like in 2024, when it's like, we're going to get these shackles off our back of peak woke and discrimination policies and whatever.

I think the new challenge is having really intense good faith debates with people that don't hate me because of my skin color. or my religion uh and then try to move the ball where we can move the ball and have it out very publicly with those people but still sit back and be like well we can help each other move in the right direction and like i'm just saying a positive note Like, CatholicVote has been very strong in supporting, like I said, Tom Tiffany running for governor of Wisconsin, and Mike Rogers for the Senate seat in Michigan, and both of those candidates in this last few days have come out strongly, you know, encouraging the end of the war, you know, in Iran.

I mean, which for Mike Rogers is It's a surprise. So, again, we're seeing some positive movements there. Let's think about this. Let's try to wrap things up. Let's get back on to, as Tom Tiffany said, take care of the problems we have here at home. Right. Yeah, and it seems like we're the future, too. So, like, people that are talking to John here individually.

It's, these frustrations are, the reason I'm frustrated, one, I think on some moral basis, but really, if I look at like the responsibility of the United States, is to protect and provide for the interests of Americans, period, American citizens. And if I look at the future of what a young man is dealing with right now, sky-high inflation, lack of job opportunities, family formation harder than ever, a tax code that doesn't benefit them, rampant fraud, all of these are impediment, housing crisis.

Healthcare being expensive? The main reason I'm involved in politics is to not get potshots off of strategic decisions in Iran, outside of some really egregious moral examples. And I'm like, that just shouldn't have happened. We should have apologized for it. I'm involved because I care about my family and the future of the country. And so, as much as I can get those issues addressed, that is what I'm interested in being a part of this for. And so, critique when I got to critique, but really push the ball and praise when it's like, You made housing more affordable for a young man trying to start a family.

You got the shackles off of government when you were discriminated on because you're white or because you're black or whatever. You now have access to loans. Or you're Catholic, for sure, spying on your churches. I'm just trying to get real micro with that and make it more personal. Exactly, and I really encouraged all the young guys. It was a lot of young men, which was great, who were there, and they brought up all those issues as well. We don't have time to get into all their questions, but really trying to emphasize, like you said, to have a measure to be informed, because it's easy to have this feeling like the Trump administration is betraying everyone, and it's easy to have these feelings that Iran is going to sink everything, but when you actually step back and you inform yourself, You can find those wins and have a more measured view of what is actually going on and making changes on the ground, and then, too, just like having more of a historical awareness, and I think that it is analogous to when the sex abuse crisis was breaking in the church, that so many Catholics had been cut off from our knowledge of our history, that we felt like this was the first time in the church there had ever been a crisis of leadership, and like, oh my gosh, it is the first time a bishop has sinned.

And you're like, no, no, no. We need to have this kind of perspective, and I think having a deeper understanding of history, and American history in particular, also helps you to have a more measured view of the time that you've been given, and the role that you can take in it, and you should take in it actively. So, those two things there. So, I really plugged Zeal Media, plugged The Loop, and that's why we do this. That's why we try to just come to the table with good information, the best we can get.

It's not always perfect. But just stay engaged in it and holding ourselves accountable to that. I think, too, there's a great event. Not to speak to John, because I guess I don't know the situation, but I've dealt with this myself, too. I think there's actually a real spiritual problem with blackpilling. Uh, so, you, it almost becomes a, uh, self-fulfilling prophecy. Like, it's all over, so therefore, nothing I do matters, and now you see everything through the lens of Black Bill. Right, and you change your behavior so that now you're reinforcing the failures that you- Exactly, and then there's opportunities to see the more failure, and then you get to stick it in, stick it in, and then you get to kind of be there at the end being like, see, I told you so.

It is almost like you get some type of gain or praise for being right on a prophecy. I struggle with that because I get frustrated with things that I obviously see are bad, or they're not going well, or it's the wrong decision, in my opinion.

I don't want that to become the lens in which I see an entire movement or an entire administration. I want to be specific and measured in my critiques, and I'm not always good at that. People in the podcast, I'm sure, are ripping off the comments. I get real frustrated. I get emotional.

But then come back to, like, oh, you do have the joyful warrior spirit, and there are positives here. And also, to not let that blackpilling and frustration color your lens in looking at the other side more rosy than you probably should, because the frustrating thing is I see things that, say, Al-Said is doing or Mamdani is doing, and I'm like, that's a really smart political move. I'm like, I wish that we would steal from that. I wish Republicans were running on this, especially the affordability, the corruption, those kind of thing.

That's why that messaging was effective in 2024. That being said, okay, pause. I just watched that clip. Let's go to their campaign website and see what they're in support of. And you're like, oh my gosh, there's 10 bullet points of everything diametrically opposed to everything I believe in, but I just saw this ad. So, I'm like...

There's one thing of why am I saying this? I'm saying this because I think that the side that actually, if you look at their policies, is closer to how aligned I want to live my life and want my community to be. So, therefore, I'm saying it because I want you to take it or because that's an effective line. You need an answer for that, but not let that be, okay, now I'm all aboard the LSE train because he made one good clip or he plays football or whatever, and it's like, well, no, I got to take a step back and be like, policy-wise, no, that's not.

That's not good. Lots of self-reflection. I'd love to talk to John. Yeah, this is good. You would have loved this event so much. Yes, because this is the, you know what, this event is kind of the anecdote to all this too, because if you go online.

It's like the thing that I said about blackmailing is true with your algorithm as well. So, if you're seeing things critical of the Trump administration, for example, or you're seeing things of the Iran war going poorly, for example, you're just going to get fed more and more and more and more and more and more, and it's going to reinforce even your algorithm, if not your head. And then you get out and have conversations with people, and you get a feel for how they're feeling, and then you can kind of feel your way around.

There's a great article I read, like Boomer Valhalla, about the midterm. Whatever the heck that was, midterm rally. It just included a lot of older people, no slight, but older people have been insulated because they bought their homes when they were cheap, and the S&P has been doing great, and they're living retired lives, and they can get excited about these kind of fringe issues that Republicans think are effective. But then after that event, there's a group of young, serious men that are getting together and discussing what's next, what's the future.

And that is exciting to me. Those are conversations I am actually engaged with right now with a lot of people that I am friends with that are young men that share the same belief system and faith that I do that need to see a path forward, and I think that the solution is going to come from that. We are clearly at the end of something here, and I do not know what comes next, but I will be a part of, hopefully, the people trying to solve it.

All right. Beautiful. Shout out. How about a palate-cleansing Twilight Zone story? Let's do it. Yeah, let's do it. What do you got? So, this lesbian bar in Western Massachusetts... Oh, I was going to do it. You guys have converged. This is why I love this show. I've required those...

KN-95 masks in order to go into the bar, right? And they decided to finally, like the Japanese soldiers on a remote island fighting World War II 10 years after the war was over, they finally decided to relax their rules on this, and they sent out a message, and people were frustrated that the message wasn't, you know, easy for people who are blind to see the message, and they got all mad about the message being ableist.

Yeah. Here is the funny thing about this. So, they decide they are going to get rid of the mask mandate. Just one night a week, too. Only one night a week. More and more visitors come to the bar. They said they could not pay the cover fee. The bar let them in anyway.

The owners fell behind on their bills. They could not pay themselves. They could not pay the people who work there. So, this last-ditch effort to try to attract more business. They decided to ease the practice a little bit on the masks. Only one of the founders of the bar is still involved. The other two stepped away from daily operations. One of the owners of the bar is now, yes, enrolled in a clown school. Oh. Correct.

Can I play the hits here? I'll play the hits. Quote, it is with love we inform our immunocompromised disabled divas we will be opening Saturday nights as mass optional. The new policy is not received with love. Just say you're being complicit in mass disabling event and get over with it. People like you kill disabled people in the name of your own leisure and convenience. Oh my gosh.

So much love. Love wins every time. Oh, my God. Oh, and they apologize, though. We are sorry for our passive and dismissive tone of our change to norms and schedule impacting the most intersectional of us. We understand everyone faces different intersections, and we are always working to consider all needs fully. Oh, my goodness. But the apology made things worse. It posted an Instagram card without providing alt text for the usually impaired. This sat out a fresh round of accusations of ableism.

This is not an accessible post. It indicates the lack of care or interest in disability intersectionality. Oh, my goodness. Remember when the whole government was this? I do. I do remember that. Yeah. Don't go back. Which also came up multiple times during our event at the bar. Oh, my God. Yeah, happy that that's gone. And then my quick hitter is, I don't know, there's this like AI insurrection Barbie. I have no idea who it is. They're kind of tied in with all the same groups of like.

People that were infuriated that Republicans were making normal observations about Texas being less like Texas, let's put it that way. And so, there's just been this great campaign of people quoting the founding fathers, and then Insurrection Barbie responding to them, saying, oh, so your problem is the Constitution, then, not Republicans or neocons or the establishment. Hey, Barbie, all I did was quote Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence. Instead, I agree with him on immigration. This is what he wrote on notes of the state of Virginia.

Do you believe that agreeing with Thomas Jefferson means I hate the Constitution? And she just kept getting God about this. Someone said, then our naturalization and immigration laws will be amended. There's no doubt that we can grant a foreigner some of our rights and privileges, dot, dot, dot. So, you can't amend the naturalization and immigration laws to retroactively strip away people's citizenship based on label foreigner. Congress may prospectively make changes about who can be naturalized, but once a person obtains their citizenship, you can't just retroactively take it away.

And then the quote, everything I said is almost a direct quote from John Jay. Do we want to create a blood and soil nationalist system? Is he woke right post-liberal? Oh my gosh. She kept getting got, and then someone got him with John Locke. It's like, oh my gosh. It's just, it's crazy. You'll love to see it. I love to see the educated Twitter people. Like, I'm here for bringing back, quoting the founding fathers as we sling insults at each other.

This is good. This is a good thing. Yeah, the founding fathers would be like, Trump is a moderate. Yeah. How have you guys not had a revolution yet? Somalia is fleecing you blind, and you let them stay? Also, come on. Someone in the, okay, are we going through this right now? Someone said that my comment about being insulated, older people have been insulated, is offensive and judgmental. All I'm saying is that people that were at Boomer Valhalla, aka the midterm convention, had a lot of money to be there.

It was very expensive. They've made a lot of money off of real estate in a way that younger people do not have the same set of circumstances we're dealing with today, many of which are. Frustrating and actually take away from the ability for family formation as we wish. I mean, we talk a lot about this on the podcast. All the time. I'm like, of course, were there challenges for people that are older that are in the boomer generation? Of course. Of course, there were.

And am I saying every boomer is like this? No. This is obviously the state of play we're dealing with right now. It's not a judgment on your personal situation. It's like crazy. I keep having to say this. Well, it's like my parents were boomers. They had an 18%. You know, interest rate on their mortgage, they had tough times, and I guess my point with that is that the hope would be that they would appreciate that the fact that the tough times now are probably tougher, because we've allowed Millions upon millions of people illegally into this country, and then also, on top of that, tens of millions of people through H-1B visas, which is just competing against, you're getting hit both ways.

This is dumb. This is bad. Yeah, and on the cultural front, too, I would just say, the boomers grew up with the privilege of still living off the fumes of Christian morality, and the comfort, most of them came from intact homes, and Gen Z, they've grown up in a therapeutic, deistic culture. Many of them come from broken homes, a loss of tradition and roots. It's all dried up at this point. Wash and porn. Yeah, and so to face economic challenges is that much more disorienting and disheartening when that's what you've grown up with, which was enabled in large part by the boomers having their 60s and 70s revolution youth culture.

Which, of course. A large chunk of the boomers, it might even actually be a functional majority of boomers alive today, were against this. I get it. I get it. But the fact is, the media, the cultural elites promoted the liberal boomer viewpoint. Yeah, it's tough. But again, part of this is that- It's right when Josh says it, but I don't, because I'm 28. What are we talking about here? It's so frustrating. I'm like, of course- Well, and again, I would just say that we had a tradition in this country over the last few generations, not just the boomers, but several generations.

You're not supposed to talk about politics and religion and society, and maybe that's why we have so much misinformation and ignorance on politics and in religion these days, because people don't talk about it. They don't talk it through. And now, social media is like the first opportunity for people to... You know, open up on this, and it just looks like a pop zit. It's like, whoa. Wow, that was a very useful analogy. Yeah, and if it's any comfort to you, Tom, your youth is a handicap that you will very soon overcome, if my own experience is.

I'm like, wait, I'm what? I'm 45, huh? So, don't worry about it. Don't worry. With young kids, I'm like, I blink, and they're running around all of a sudden. It's crazy. The agent. Do I get to do mine? Is it my turn? Yes. Yes, you do. Yeah, okay. We rolled out today. Oh, everyone, bated breath waiting for Greta Gerwig, the Lady Bird director, Barbie director. Greta Gerwig is going to give us her version of Narnia in The Magician's Nephew, and everyone lost their hair when she announced this past week that Meryl Streep will voice Aslan, the lion.

And I'm just going to sit there for a minute. We're going to sit with that for a minute. She said, quote, I wanted someone who was profound, but not pretentious, who had gravitas, but not morose self-seriousness, someone who could communicate depth and pathos, as well as joy and delight.

The party of joy. I wanted someone who was older than 70, so there was wisdom of experience, but who also had the capacity of fresh wonder like a child, and also be one of the greatest actors ever to do it. That list is not a long one. So, I had to go with Meryl Streep. Now, understandably, conservative Christian cultural observers were upset about this, because Aslan, as most of you know, Hopefully, all of you know, is the figure, is the Jesus figure in the Narnia series.

C.S. Lewis said it. It's painfully obvious. In fact, C.S. Lewis was criticized for being too on the nose, and like, this is the most obvious allegory to which he wrote it for small children, but it is. It's co-opting this. It's like, we'll make her female, and then we get this op-ed over the Daily Wire from this guy, Tim Rice. Who writes for them culturally?

And he's like, no, you can't get mad, quote, unquote, this is just quoting him. We can't get mad that Greta Gerwig's riff on Narnia is a David Bowie-inspired, which it is, gender-bent, which it is, kaleidoscope. That's just what happens when you write fiction that enters the public domain, or as is the case here, is licensed to directors by the corporation that manages your estate. And I'm like, Tim, no, we can absolutely get upset. When the most beloved cultural symbols, the most beautiful allegories perhaps written in the 20th century for our own faith, are just co-opted by Greta Gerwig to make some point, because somehow there are no male actors over 70 who could do this.

And I just, I loved this response. So, Brandon Lansdowne, he decided to take to Twitter and respond to this. With a version of the screw tape letters saying, this is what she wrote in response, my dear Wormwood. You still think in terms of churches and arguments, and that is why you fail. The churches can be left standing. What must be spoiled is the literature that taught the young to love the enemy before they could define him. Narnia is one of the more irritating of those books.

Children meet Aslan first as an adventure, and only later discover that they have been handling Christ. That is dangerous. Direct attack only makes the stories more precious, so we do not ban them. We adapt them. We interpret them. Give the voice to a so-called celebrated actress. Leave the name, leave the main, leave the pronouns. Then the thing that was a male Christ supposition becomes a prestige performance. The story remains famous. The meaning. Becomes negotiable. In a generation, the story will still be beloved, but the beloved thing will no longer be Lewis's lion.

It will no longer be Christ. It will be the version that flatters the age. And I think he got it right, because the truth is, children are not reading Narnia anymore, except in our little bubbles. This is the only Narnia many of the next generation will ever see, and so, yes, we should be upset, and we should speak up when Meryl Streep gets to voice Aslan.

So, anyway, I'm not looking forward to it. I have criticized movies before, and... Before I've seen them, and sometimes it's gone well, sometimes it hasn't, but I can pretty fairly say Meryl Streep as Aslan is a no-go. Do you want me to read the description of where Tim Rice went to college?

Where did Tim Rice go to college? This is the official Twitter account of the College of Holy Cross, a highly selective Jesuit liberal arts institution. Jesuit as educated. Looks like the controversy there. Every time. When Kristen Hawkins of Students for Life was talking about this, this is a Catholic school, how could you be in, you know, for abortion, like, Jesuit!

Yeah. You do know that Jesuit actually is technically still Catholic, right? Yeah. They tell us. They didn't realize it, like, no, it's not Catholic, it's Jesuit. Does that make Aslan then like a lioness? Have we thought that deep down?

I think that's just really mind-blowing to think about. But you can obviously just kind of take off and put down your gender as you wish. That's just what we do now. You know, that's actually funny. When you were reading that description out loud, I'm like, this actually sounds like similar arguments. Did Meryl Streep write that? That was Greta Gerwig, the director. That was like the same argument people make for women priests. Yeah. Seriously, copy-paste. What they desire out of their heart, they desire for priests is like basically what they're desiring for Aslan here.

So, take that to the bank. All right. Daily prayer, you know, covered a lot of ground here today. We have daily prayer for America 250. Shout out, Colonel Burke. In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

O Sacred Heart of Jesus, King of Heaven and Earth, I place today my nation, the United States of America, into your heart pierced for love of us. On the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, I acknowledge that true liberty is your gift, and that our lasting homeland is the eternal kingdom of God. Under the mantle of Our Lady of Guadalupe, patroness of Americas, and through the intercession of her Immaculate Heart, bless my homeland anew, purify her from sin, and guide her leaders in truth, justice, and peace, so that she may safeguard all human life, respect the integrity of marriage and the family, and honor the practice of religion.

Reign in my home and in my nation, draw every heart into communion with you, that your truth, love, justice, mercy, and peace may triumph in America and throughout the world. Amen. Same time this morning, St. Fidelis, our leg, Guadalupe. Pray for us. Great show, gang. Episode of The Deep coming for you tomorrow. Check it out, tomorrow. And, uh, St. Michael, pray for us. See you guys in the next one. Peace.