Samuel Sey Detained by ICE, Midterms Enter the Final Stretch, and Bishops in the Oval Office

We're live. Welcome back to the LOOPcast. This is Tom, Erika, and Josh. Good morning, and God bless. It's going to be a great show today. We're going to be covering the immigration front in particular. There was a Samuel Say. He's like a pro-life influencer that was living in Ohio, had an immigration.

I don't even know how to describe it. We'll just wait until we get to this section. Issue, yeah. It's an issue. And, of course, it lit everything on fire, and then 60 Minutes had an interesting interview with the Department of Homeland Security talking about immigration to third places. So, I was tasked with doing the deep dive on those things, which I was happy to oblige. Second, we have the race to the midterms. The next time you see us live, it'll probably be for a midterm livestream.

Yes. We're here. Less than a week, people. Less than a week, people. I can't say it better than Josh. So, we've got the Oracle's thoughts. Where are we right now? I mean, I'm sure a lot of people are probably ready to stop seeing crazy midterm ads with AI, but there will be results, and those results will determine a lot in terms of the future direction where we're going.

Also, I was hit with a bunch of things that we got a promo on top, which I'm excited about all of them. One, I just released the latest episode of Time Across America. It was in Wisconsin. The Dairyland, America's Dairyland is just a fantastic, fun episode. So, if you need a little bit of relief from politics, although there's elections going on in Wisconsin that we were involved in, fantastic episode. I really loved all the people that I got to talk with.

Really interesting history of New Glarus. New Glarus, Wisconsin, a Swiss town, contributed to the cheese and beer that you enjoy here in the country. You actually have to smuggle New Glarus across the border, and I was happy to get to meet Dan Carey, one of the founders. Brewmaster over there. So, it is just a great episode. If you guys want some relief, it is over there. Second, I am actually talking to, I believe he refers to himself as Arch Patriot, John Doyle.

Actually, right after this live stream, I will be recording an interview with him. He is taking a controversial stance to vote straight ticket Republican. I plan on pressing him on that stance to try to get into the mind of... Who I've kind of seen as one of the most focused influencers, if you will. He kind of came on my radar again when he did this MAGA versus America first divide debate, and what struck me was not actually what he said, but how little he actually talked.

And I think I wasn't the only one to be like, wow, this kind of seems like he didn't indulge in a lot of the... The crazies or the excesses? He seemed very focused and calm, and so I want to ask him some questions on how he sees, say, the movement going forward, what he sees his role in the ecosystem as, and he's also, I think he's around the same age. I think we might have even grown up in the same area, you know, young Catholic, conservative American.

You're recording it today, but it's not right after this LOOPcast, you're saying? No. Yeah, so I'm recording it today. I'm going to get it to you before the midterms. Obviously, it would be like a little bit. Well, I'm just making sure our listeners and viewers are keyed up on that. Okay, I got you. I got you. Appreciate on that. And then, Erika, you have an episode of The Deep and Champions webinar coming up as well. Yeah, so this one's going to be really interesting, especially going to the holiday season with Thanksgiving, but I interviewed Noelle Mearing, who has a book out, No Contact, which is looking at the phenomenon of political divides, especially in families.

And kids who have decided to just not talk to their parents anymore. So, we're going to run the interview tomorrow as the deep episode this week, and then watch for a special webinar where you can actually do Q&A with Nicole. So, if this is an issue that's touched your life personally, I think this episode tomorrow, coupled with the webinar, with the live Q&A with Nicole, just going to be a great way to understand what's going on. In terms of our family dynamics.

The gang's busy, so lots of extra content if you want it. It'll be available on those channels, and then before we get into today's episode, of course, I mean, come on. You're going to know what I'm going to talk about here. Charity Mobile. I mean, if you haven't switched to this point, it's time to do business with companies that stand with you and your beliefs. Charity Mobile is a pro-life phone company that serves pro-life customers and supports pro-life pro-family causes. They send 5% of your monthly plan price to your favorite charity, and they have sent millions of dollars to charities over the past 30 years.

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Visit CharityMobile.com and use promo code LOOPcast. That's CharityMobile.com, promo code LOOPcast. Thank you, Charity Mobile, for sponsoring today's episode. So, I have two stories here that I took the liberty of digging into a little bit deeper. The first was a little bit more flashier. The second was a CBS cut-up of an interview. So, I'm going to start off with the first one. I think we teased the title here. So, Samuel will say, I'll share my screen, give a little bit of background here.

He's a Christian blogger. He was arrested by ICE and will be deported, as this Religion News headline says. A little bit of background. Samuel Say, 39, is a Ghanaian-born Christian conservative commentator, pro-life advocate, and founder of Slow to Write. He grew up in Canada before moving to the United States in 2022.

He lives in Ohio with his American wife Annie and their three young children. He has publicly defended ICE and the Trump administration's deportation policies, actually on a Christian basis. And, of course, that's attracted, yeah, imagine that. Of course, that's attracted a lot of news headlines from left-wing aligned media groups kind of saying, you know what, you deserved it, you know, the leopard eating its own face type thing.

However, what's more interesting is he was actually on his way to Jeremy Boring's podcast in Ohio. That's where he actually was detained in this Columbus airport. And he has a lot of friends on the evangelical right within America.

And so, I'll get into that a little bit more, but the exact arrest details, October 21st, ICE arrest, say, at Columbus International Airport in Ohio. He was then transferred to Butler County Jail, where records listed him as being held for ICE without criminal charges.

And then on October 25th, DHS confirmed that he had overstayed his authorized admission and would be removed from the United States. So, I have Meg Basham, I believe, is just friends with him or professional colleagues with him. It's like her and Joel Berry online, former managing editor of the Babylon Bee, have been posting a lot on this. So, here's the statement that the DHS provided regarding...

Regarding the situation. So, quote, from the DHS, on October 21st, ICE arrested Samuel Say, an illegal alien from Ghana, at the Columbus International Airport. Say entered the United States legally in 2022, but overstayed his length of admission by four years. In violation of our nation's laws, Say has no pending applications and accepted voluntary departure. He will remain in ICE custody until he is removed from the United States. We do not pick and choose which laws to enforce or where to enforce them.

We encourage all illegal aliens to take control of their departure. With the CBP Home app, the United States is offering illegal aliens $3,000 and a free flight to Southport now. We encourage every person here illegally to take advantage of this offer and reserve the chance to come back. To the United States, the right legal way to live the American dream. If not, you will be arrested and deported without a chance to return. That is from DHS spokesperson.

Now, I'll round it out before I get into some reactions here. So, Joel Berry, it was actually on his way to record the podcast that I believe he produces, wrote this post on X. Earlier this week, our dear brother Samuel Say was en route to appear on our podcast when he got detained by ICE. Samuel is from Canada, and he has been living here as a legal resident of the United States. We are confident this clerical mistake will be fixed, but this has been a terrible experience for his family.

Please consider supporting his lovely wife, Annie, and their children. Now, what's interesting about the GoFundMe, and a lot of people are pointing out, is on the GoFundMe, it says that it was like a clerical era that he was living here, and then later it comes out that the DHS says, no, he actually has been four years overstaying his visa. This wasn't a clerical error, so until we get more information on it, they're conflicting accounts, and Joel Berry has raised, I believe, like $20,000-plus for this effort, and then, of course, gets in his digs at the end of, like, we want to stick it to all the...

Nazi, Christian, right, woke, whatever, Nazis who, you know, are making this horrible. And, like, I don't doubt that online, you know, people are being nasty, but I think a lot of people are pointing out, well, you know, if he did overstay his visa, he broke the law. It shouldn't just be, oh, we want the law for everyone but our friends.

Yeah. That seems to be the summary. Yeah, it's interesting that the language there that he's like, he's been a legal resident, but if he, in fact, overstayed by four years, by definition, he was not here legally any longer. And yeah, it's interesting to see people like Megan Basham, Allie Beth Stuckey came out swinging on behalf of Say This Week as well, and they're all saying, well, he's our Christian brother, and he has a wife here, and isn't this family so lovely and how terrible this is?

And... Yeah, it's tragic when families get split up, but you have to ask yourself, who is the one putting this family at risk? Well, it would be the father who actually decided to stay here four years past his visa expiration, and it's difficult to listen to a Megan Basham or an Allie Beth who have been so pro-ICE and immigration. And then immediately it flips around, and they're playing the same card that you get from leftists who hate ICE, everything that ICE does, which is, well, but what about this emotional, sad story here?

And again, you have to go back to the facts. Who put the family at risk? The dad put the family at risk. Well, and it's the case that the Trump administration actually comes out looking well. It's not like they're protecting. You know, giving this guy a break and looking the other way because he happened to write in favor of the deportation policies. You know what I mean? Like, it's like, they're not playing favorites. Like, no, literally, I'm sorry, you broke the law.

We're going to take care of this. And again, This means he stayed not only for four years, but at least, what, it's now been a year and a half since Donald Trump has been in office, and there have been a large number of deportations. At any time, you could have just, like, I don't know, got up off your ass. And filled out some paperwork and started the process, because you're actually married, this guy's married to a U.S. citizen, so his ability to get citizenship is increased.

Like, there's no reason why he shouldn't have at least got the ball rolling, but because you don't have the ball rolling, then you risk this deportation, and you risk the ability not to be able to get back in. This has been something that the Trump administration has warned people about. Like, you can self-deport or at least begin the process. Do something to get in proper legal status. And again, I'm sick of the bleeding heart response on this, especially from the conservatives.

It's like, It is not good for a country to have millions of people in this country that don't have proper legal status. It allows them to be exploited, and it also creates a large number of people that don't have roots in the country. And so, it's not a long-term solution, and I credit the Trump administration for... Again, not playing favorites and saying, no, I'm sorry. The law is the law. You got to obey the law.

Yeah, and I think kind of tying into that, because that's, say, like, this is a small example of a larger phenomenon. So, CBS News did a 60 Minutes report, and it was condensed into about a 13-minute segment, and I'll show the article here.

So, the story goes, Texas dad, deported by ICE to Ghana, was then forced to go to Mali, a country that is unsafe for him, he says, is the headline. This is now another one? Another different immigrant? Yes. So, there is two, I would say, major immigration-related stories that were circulating on Twitter.

Samuel Say being one of them, and this man from Ghana. So, a little bit of background. This was Moussa Diawara. He's 57. He's a Malian national who entered the United States on a tourist visa roughly 25 years ago and overstayed.

Mali, got it. Right, and then according to CBS, he married, had two American citizen children, owned a home in Texas, and worked as an Uber driver, had no criminal record other than overstaying his visa. So, the timeline of this is actually important.

Approximately 2001, he enters the United States and overstays his visa. In 2012, an immigration judge ordered his removal, but granted protection against deportation to Mali based on the risk of persecution. This protection did not give him permanent legal status or cancel his removal order. In 2026, on July 11th, ICE detained Diwara outside his Texas home. July 30th, he's transported to Ghana on a deportation flight that also stopped in Sierra Leone and the Central African Republic. And then early August, according to Diawara, Ghanaian authorities forcibly deported him to Mali within five days.

Later August, he said he fled Mali to another African country with help from truckers. So, this was a part of this broader five-month study that CBS was doing on what they call third-country immigration. I think the DHS spokesperson, I believe he's like general counsel for DHS, did a good job explaining this. But essentially, we have many cases in the United States where... Home countries for foreign nationals won't accept them back. And so, in many cases, this happens with people that are violent criminals.

For example, sexual assaults, robbery, any number. And of course, violent criminals actually doesn't include a lot of other crimes that are part of something like child pornography is not considered a part of that, that you would not want to take back. So, there's many countries that won't take their citizens back. So, what the United States has done historically, well beyond the Trump administration, Is they have partnerships with third countries that they deport these people to those third countries, and for taking these immigrants, they receive some type of diplomatic aid, compensation, so that these people are not just on the streets.

Because what's been the status quo for the Biden administration is A judge signed a removal order. They have committed a crime of some kind, or even if they haven't, a judge has already signed off. Yes, this person can be deported. However, they're just let back out into the community, and then, of course, you see many instances of violent crime or reoffense. And so, this is a way to keep those people out of the country.

You start to understand why the British Empire put all their criminals in Australia. I mean, totally. We need an Australian. What a, um... I think it just goes to show how... There's a reason why we haven't had net negative migration in 50 years, because of how hard it is logistically to actually remove people from the country that are not citizens, and how much easier it would be just to let them loose into the system of lawyers that would help work on your behalf or whatever, even if you...

Okay, so I'll get to the story here, of course, the kicker. So, it's, of course, set up that he... He didn't do anything violent. He has a wife and two children, and now he's in an African country that he didn't want to be in, felt unsafe in, and that was how they kind of set up the story. They interviewed the mom, they interviewed the kids, and of course, providing justice in this case, this is where... It's tough because, obviously, that is heartbreaking, but at the same time, to deliver justice, you need to do things that are uneasy, including deporting people that are ideologically your friends, if you want to maintain some semblance of order for the polity, and that's just the reality.

A lot of people don't have the spine for this kind of work, and I'm grateful that it's being done. However, it gets revealed after this case comes out that CBS left a lot on the cutting room floor. Shocker. A little bit. They pulled a camera. Dude, one of the main things, which is so crazy, I'll share the report that was obtained by Fox, was that he lied. He committed immigration fraud.

So, this Malian National, they obtained his asylum application, said he was seeking asylum in the U.S. because he was gay and feared being killed if he was sent back. In his own words, although I was born a boy, but things appeared differently for me as I was already having female behaviors and feelings. I was more comfortable being intimate with boys rather than girls. All of this is after he had a wife and two children.

Which, to be fair, on the left would say, yeah, no problem there. People, he was repressing it. Let's have taxpayers pay for this. But yeah, oh my gosh. Right, so the whole reason that he said, I can't go back to this area was fraudulent at best, because he clearly is not. And it makes sense that someone would try to pull out all of the stops possible to not be sent back to the country that they should be in. And this was basically, it basically, if you watch the full CBS report, it's alluded to that the Trump administration is sending people back to places where they're being tortured.

And one of the clips that got cut out on this was actually shared by, his name is James Percival. Here's the clip here. This got cut out of the interview, I think, obviously, you'll see. I guess one thing I would point out, I mean. Are you suggesting that when these people went to their home countries, that they were persecuted or tortured?

I'm not suggesting that. A U.S. judge said that. A federal judge said that. Said that they were persecuted or tortured when they went to their home country? That they were more than likely to be tortured or persecuted if they were returned to their home country, and then they were sent to Ghana and returned to their home country, regardless. And then when they got to their home country, are you suggesting that they were persecuted or tortured? Some have faced violence. But that is not what I am alleging, no.

Well, but again, so you are suggesting that Ghana is not accurately adjudicating whether they fear persecution or torture in their home country. If that were true, you would expect those people to return to their home country and then face persecution or torture because Ghana would be getting it wrong. And if they are going to their home country and you are not hearing claims that they are being persecuted or tortured, then that suggests that Ghana's procedures are adequate. Now, again, I work for the U.S.

government. Ghana has got its own procedures. But to me, the ultimate question is... Are they actually sending someone somewhere where they're going to be persecuted? Yes, that's the question. I'm not saying that I have cases that I'm going to show you where this is happening.

So, I mean, the whole thing is basically an emotional hit job. And the funny thing, and I don't know if I'm doing a good enough job of explaining this. Basically. The argument is, for third countries, we have these diplomatic relationships with certain countries. Mexico, I think, is the biggest one, where you take on these people that shouldn't be in the United States, that are foreign nationals, that their home countries will not take back. Those countries then adjudicate, are these people actually at risk of some type of harm based on immutable characteristics or whatever?

And if the answer determined is no, then they can send them back to that country. That they were at before, and of course, like, that just kind of makes a lot of sense, but I think the funny thing watching this, to me, was I quickly was like, I did a quick Google, and of course, he brings this up many times in the email. I mean, here's a video of a mom. This is like, I think this is emblematic of maybe how Americans broader feel about all this.

This is a mom that lost her son. And Ice was transferring this guy, Kumar, to state custody in Oregon earlier this month to face charges of two counts of first-degree manslaughter for recklessly endangering another person as a result of a crash. And then ICE gave the mom a chance to talk to this guy, Kumar, before the transfer. Basically, he killed her child and newlywed in a car crash, and here is her response. Hello, Mr. Kumar. My name is Elizabeth Carter. I'm one of Michael Carter's mothers, and I wanted you to know that I'm praying for you and your family.

I know you didn't get up that morning planning, and I know your family is going through something important too. And there he goes. He finally gets removed. But I guess the reason why I think that this response really sums up where Americans are, you see it in both stories.

It's so unjust what has been subjected upon Americans that, for the most part, are people of goodwill, genuinely care about their neighbors, and have normal human emotions and sentimentality about Potentially separating a father from their family or sending people to a place they don't want to go, and that prevailing sentiment, because there wasn't an adult in the room or a father figure type to actually protect the people's goodwill and sentiment, they've been subjected to this, and therefore, they- And I think the most egregious example is, I went back on the footage, and it truly is hard to believe this is real, but I remember checking my phone like- 2021, 2022, and every day, you see a new caravan of thousands of people heading to the southern border, and you knew all of them were going to get in.

Right. And the problem that we were subjected to was so large, the magnitude is so large, that... It truly was wrong what was done to the American people, and it's going to be uncomfortable to administer justice, and I think the fact that Trump won a massive majority of people on immigration being central to that claim speaks volumes about people in small towns in Texas that were overrun by this, or someone that lost their child in a car crash to an illegal that got a CDL.

It takes an adult in a room to have to calmly adjudicate, you know, dispassionately, justice in these cases, and it's going to require some suffering. And unfortunately, I don't think most Americans have the spine for that kind of work, and so it does require. You know, proper authority in this case to take action. I think what it amounts to, it's like the force of the trees thing. So, you can take one isolated incident, one story, and make it very sympathetic, and you highlight it, and you say all the terrible things, and you're just left feeling, oh my gosh, yeah, I really feel sorry for this one person in this one particular situation.

It's just so tough. And then the left's like, great, times it by 10 million now. And you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That doesn't work. It doesn't work that way. So, they set it up, and so then Republicans or conservatives look like we're monsters because we're so callous, we don't care. And at some point, it's like... It is precisely because we do care that we are callous to your kind of manipulations on this stuff. That is what is going on here, because we actually bleed, our hearts bleed for our fellow citizens, and the difficulty and the devastation that is wracked on so many different communities, and you guys completely turn a blind eye on this.

It drives me up the wall. It drives me so frustrated, and it is like, yeah, we do need that person. It is just going to be like, I am sorry. That sounds like a rough situation, but we cannot say yes 10 million times, so you have to go. Yep, and I think, so this, the reporter here on the 60 Minutes is Gianna Taboni, and she was brought over by Barry Weiss, or whoever's in charge of 60 Minutes, for, from, she came from Vice Media, right?

And the thing that drove me crazy about this, this story, appropriately named, in particular, was that she, once we got the full interview, so she interviewed the guy from DHS who you just heard, that they talked for, I believe, over an hour. She did this with Harmeet. They did this with Harmeet Dhillon last week, too. There was a story where they interviewed Harmeet Dhillon for 90 minutes, and they ended up with 90 seconds clip of what she said. And it is so clear.

That Gianna Taboni, the journalist, had access to a vast account of what was going on from a conservative point of view, and she deliberately chose to just black it out because it did not fit the narrative of evil Trump administration hurting small Black children whose dad is now in Mali and being, you know, tortured, even though I have no evidence from anyone that he is actually being tortured and imprisoned in Mali right now. He's on 60 Minutes. I know, he's on 60 Minutes.

But the mendacity that's going on here for the sake of partisan politics is just so disgusting. And it's said that, you know, Satan's the great deceiver. He peddles in lies. Well, one of the most insidious lies is a half-truth, and that is literally what 60 Minutes is doing here. It's just one, and not even a half, it's like 10% truth. And instead of... It's the bread and butter. Yeah, it's the bread and butter. Too much butter on the buttery bread for 60 Minutes.

Yeah, I really appreciate it. His name's James Percival. If you want to go look up the full interview, I'd recommend it. It's... To know that you have to do something for the sake of justice that is going to make people uncomfortable, it's tough to strike the right tone and balance in how you present, and clearly, the Trump administration has struggled with finding a spokesperson for that.

However, I really appreciated that he just continued to go back, like, we are executing the law that Congress passed. This is the law that has not been adjudicated by previous administrations, if anything, actually exacerbated by previous administrations. We are following the law. And sometimes that requires doing something that is going to be uncomfortable. Especially when the law has been disregarded for so long. Then it is harder to get back and to right the ship. Yeah. So, I think, I just saw that, and I was like, it is so outrageous, I just had to kind of get in there.

But the next thing, and this is what is... Continues to frustrate me as well. There's a deep wound in particular for Americans on how not only was the law not followed, but it felt weaponized against ordinary American citizens, and the tone deafness in which the church continues to approach this kind of shocks me. The U.S. bishops, here's a headline, U.S. bishops are opposing proposed Census Bureau rule changes for the 2030 census, arguing that excluding non-citizens without lawful permanent resident status from the apportionment.

count would effectively deny them recognition as persons i i have a few thoughts on this yeah go for Yeah, so I crammed the document this morning. It's very legalese. It's very intricately put together, and the headline that you just read talking about denying that they're persons, I think the key confusion here that the... Whoever wrote this for the bishops is guilty of is equivocating the term person to make it sound, deliberately to make it sound like the Trump administration is calling illegal aliens less than human, right?

So, this is the key quote from the document. In 2019, following a previous effort to exclude non-citizens from the census count, the USCCB underscored the need for every person to be included, stemming from our belief in equal dignity of all, regardless of immigration. Status. So, you see there, they're already equivocating the idea of person as this ontological category, where you have innate dignity as a child of God, which no one's disputing here, and the idea of person as a particular legal status with rights and responsibilities and duties to the country in which you are a resident.

So, that equivocation then blossoms into this. It goes, excluding from the census non-citizens without LPR status, legal permanent resident status, including but not limited to members of the undocumented population, is effectively to deny they are persons. This denial of personhood recalls the, quote, overly sinful and gravely unjust three-fifths compromise, which the Bureau itself acknowledges as rightly rejected by the 14th Amendment. This is insane. And then it goes on to point out that That since 1790, The census has always included non-citizens when you're talking about congressional apportionment.

However, it does not acknowledge the fact that in 1790, and until very recently, we weren't dealing with the reality of tens of millions of illegal, or quote, undocumented aliens. And what the Census Bureau is trying to do now is address a new historical phenomenon that is the result of years of open border policy. On the part of some administration. So, there are a lot of issues here with the way that it's characterizing both personhood and historically what's going on. Oh, yes.

First of all... Like, this idea that you somehow deny their dignity by not including them in a political census is hogwash. Like, that's basically saying, hey, wait a minute, I haven't been included in the College of Cardinals as a layperson. I'm being discriminated against. My dignity as a person is like, yeah, no, no, I'm sorry. That's just not the way it works. Which they might say. And let's talk about the three-fifths compromise, actually. The whole point of that was what? The South wanted to count Blacks, but they didn't want to give them voting rights.

They wanted to count them as a full person so that they would get more representation in Congress, and the Northern states were like, hold the phone, buddy. You don't want to give them the right to vote, but you want to be able to count them for the census? That's not fair. The Northern states were trying to make the Southern states...

A huge adhere to their own principles. Yep. It's not that northern people were trying to exclude blacks from voting. They were like, you don't get to count them and then exclude them from voting, and they had to come up with this compromise, otherwise the republic would have come apart. So, actually, it is the U.S. bishops who are similar to the southerners who want to give. Count these immigrants in the census, but they don't have rights. They're the ones that are actually coming off as sounding more like the racists of the South.

It's absolutely asinine. Yeah, and speaking of the slave economy of the 1850s and 60s that's going on, that's what we are saying our current illegal immigration system, or lack thereof, is treating these immigrants as. So, actually. It is a greater assault to their dignity to treat them as a slave population that can come over here. They don't have the rights of American workers. They get paid less than American workers, and now it's like, oh, and we want to count them in our census.

And they can't vote. And they can't vote, and we're going to count them so that we, the citizen class, can have more power. They want to make them all citizens. They want amnesty, so they're not the hypocrites. This is what drives me crazy now, when the U.S. Bishops Conference...

Submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court, urging the court to hold on to birthright citizenship, despite the fact that there have been so many abuses of it over the last 30 years. And I rolled my eyes, and I got frustrated. I'm like, of course, the bishops are going to not want the end of birthright citizenship, because, like, hello, things have changed since the 1880s, okay? We are a very different world, and the ability to jump on a plane and fly and then give birth, boom.

Things are different. We should change this. First of all, Congress should change the law. But I was not surprised, of course, that the U.S. bishops would file such an amicus brief. Okay, but this. This is a, what's going on right now is the Census Bureau, the Department of Commerce, is considering changing this rule. So, it's like, let's tighten it up. Let's make sure we actually count citizens for the census, and not just everybody. Like, if someone gets a layover flight at LaGuardia, we're just going to make them a citizen?

No! Just because they happen to be inside, on foot, U.S. soil? I'm sorry. This is crazy. So, CatholicVote supports the Commerce Department's A proposed federal rule. You can go to CatholicVote, go to our Action Center, and sign up and post a public comment. I did already, saying we support this. This is common sense reform. That the U.S. bishops would have a problem with this frustrates me. I'm not even going to give... You know what? It's time the U.S. bishops find a better lawyer.

William Quinn, this general counsel for the U.S. ECB, is giving the bishops bad advice. And I have to give credit. Kelsey Reinhart wrote an article for First Things back in April saying, it's time for the bishops to deal with the new reality. We had a wave of 10 million people come into our country during the Biden administration. That changes things, people.

And it is time for the bishops, who are to the left of liberal Dick Durbin of Illinois, to maybe right-size the ship again. And I think part of it is, everyone is like, oh, the bishops, the money, and they are all liberal.

Look, they need to change some of their personnel. Yes, 100%. This is William Quinn. He needs to be shown the door. The bishops are being given horrible advice from people, these liberal holdovers that have been part of the USCCB bureaucracy for decades. Kick them out.

Yep, 100%. William Quinn also signed when the, again, when we say the bishops did this, it is, it's their Office of General Counsel, which is actually run by Lehman, and then, of course, the Director of Policy, Immigration, Migration, I think it's David Spicer, and they are absolutely giving them bad advice. So, these are the same people who signed the comment on the rule when HHS was trying to get a handle on how un... Unaccompanied minor children, migrant children, were coming into the country and being released after a few days and no vetting, and we lost, what, 375,000 children?

That's insane. We lost hundreds of thousands of children. In comes William Quinn and says, in the name of the bishops, this is such a bad idea, because now the government's going to hold custody of these children for longer while they're trying to find... Better release them into the wind! We should just release them within... It was insane. That's another... This guy should not be speaking for our bishops. So, the funny thing about that is I didn't even get to that in the Ghana story.

Part of the reason why third countries need to be used is because there's laws against holding illegal immigrants in detention for too long a period of time. Right. And so, we literally can't do that, and it wouldn't actually be best for them to basically live in prison. So, you get the opportunity to accept voluntarily being removed from the country and actually getting a $3,000 payment, or you don't do it voluntarily and you get sent to the third country. So, again, like logistically… What a nightmare.

Like, again, the more that I dig into this, I can just, I think the principle is so strong, and it's so hard to argue against on principle for someone that believes in, like, Self-government, essentially, like a real citizenship. And also, we are the total minority in terms of the Western world at this point. Just about every country in Europe has moved against birthright citizenship and has moved in favor of restriction on who qualifies, what qualifies, etc., etc. The United States, for some reason, continues to be this holdout.

You literally can never become a citizen in places like China, in places like India. To me, they actually have more common sense. Citizenship laws. You can go there and work if you want, but you can't just show up and become a citizen. That's just the frustrating thing about looking at our politics right now.

The core issue in all of this is we're basically presented with two sides. One side is saying, we need to get this under control. If we don't get this under control, this is a forever issue because immigration law is going to change, and whoever embraces the immigration side is going to win. And if you embrace the immigration side, of course, your culture changes, your law changes, your style of government changes, your economy changes, everything changes. And it was just like an ultimate race to see who can bring on the most immigrants and convert them to your side until 2016.

When someone stood up and said, hey, this is crazy. Like, we need to stop this. And so now, what you're looking at in 2022 is, like, I'm seeing videos of Mamdani, I'm seeing videos in Minneapolis of people speaking a foreign country, people speaking a foreign language to encourage people to come out and vote. Yeah. And nothing about that seems weird to you?

Right. One thing we should do right from the start is every single ballot. In America, it should be in English only. And then you say, well, wait a minute, that will disenfranchise people who haven't learned the language. Yes. Yes. That's what I want to do. If you don't know how to speak the English language, I don't want to be governed by you. I don't want you electing people that I will have to... It's total bullcrap. Yes, yes. Learn the language of this country before you try to elect leaders.

That is absolutely basic, and we have to be able to say it without shame. Turn the shame table around. No, I don't want to be governed by people that get votes from people that don't even know English. Are you kidding me? This is the United States.

Like, how do you drive down the road if you don't know English? Oh, I'm sorry, you live in Dearborn, and the Home Depot's got all the Arabic signs. That's how. Okay, great. Did you see the Mamdani ad from this week, where he's walking around? That's what I was referring to. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's crazy. It's just insane. You don't have to show any papers to vote in New York, and then it ends, our elections are secure. You're like, I don't believe you.

I don't believe you. And all it would take is one conservative activist to go into New York and... And to vote illegally, and then they catch him like, ah, see! They allow tentatively people to do it illegally, but... Like, lock him up on Rikers for the rest of his life or something. Yeah, there was one. I saw one commercial. Again, AI is just nuts. You see all these crazy commercials, but one was, like, kind of an old, gross, fat man came in and claimed to be Sidney Sweeney.

Yeah. Like, I'm Sidney Sweeney, and I'm voting. They're like, no, you're not. He's like, yes, I am, and you can't discriminate against me. I don't have to show you proof. Like, dang. There goes the ballot. Yeah, there you go. Okay, Josh, I want to get your two cents now. We are going into midterms on Tuesday. Just what are you seeing? What should we be looking at? What is under the surface? You know, cut through the noise. What is going on? Well, you are going to get more than two cents, obviously, but just first a cautionary tale.

Too often, the media coverage of betting markets are as if they are actually polls, right? And so, there was an election that just happened over the weekend in Israel, and everyone thought Netanyahu's party was going to not do well, and that the opposition party would do very well, right? And so, the betting markets had it like it's like 90% that the opposition party was going to win the majority in the parliament. But then, what happens? I mean, Netanyahu doesn't have an outright majority.

He has a polarity, but like all the early polls were all off, they were all wrong, and he did far better than suspected. Let that be a cautionary tale. You just don't know. And in fact, if you remember from the 2024 election, there was so much noise on the polls, right? And then Ann Seltzer, the famous pollster from Iowa, put out a poll saying Kamala Harris was like up by four points in Iowa, which is a state that Trump had won by eight to ten, twelve points, right?

And so everyone's like, oh my gosh, Kamala's going to win. She's going to sweep. It's going to be like 350 electoral votes or whatever. And then, you know, people actually voted. And what happened? Not only did she not win Iowa, she got thumped in Iowa, and Donald Trump was elected president, right? So, there's a new poll that came out from the New York Times in my native state of Minnesota showing Peggy Flanagan. She's the moonbat communist lieutenant governor. The poll showed her up 54 to 40, a 14-point lead over Michelle Tafoya, who's the famous NBC sports broadcaster.

Uh, 14 points? You know what? This poll is so bad, the pollster himself doesn't believe it. New York Times pollster Nate Cohen actually referenced Ann Seltzer's poll from 2024, and he said, yeah, uh, this might be like the canary in the coal mine. This might be the poll that shows that we're getting it wrong. He said, if the polls...

Or our polls wind up underestimating Republican strength this year. We may look back and say this was the canary in the coal mine, something like the 2026 equivalent of the Seltzer poll. In hindsight, and even at the time, that result was clearly a warning sign that pollsters were struggling to reach white, working-class voters, rather than an indication of Democratic strength. Right. And so, what this amounts to is, some states, it's harder than others. Like, in Minnesota, you don't actually register by political party, you just register to vote.

And so, it's much harder. You don't have, like... And even in Michigan, there's less of that. So, you have to kind of go county by county, and you're trying to figure out who's a Republican. You try to figure out who they voted for last time, and the polls can be wildly off. Now, I would say, I still think... Peggy Flanagan is the favorite to win the Senate race. It's a blue state. It's going to be probably a good year for Democrats in the election next week.

So, all things being equal, Peggy Flanagan should probably win, but she might win by three points, okay? Not 14. And the bigger shock would be that she would win by 14 points. The more likely scenario that it would be more likely that she would lose than she would win by 14. Now, I don't think she's actually going to win, but anyway. All right, I think she is going to win. I'm sorry. All right, so other things. Nevada, the early vote is very blue right now in Nevada.

Republicans can make it up by coming out in a large way on Election Day, Tuesday, but they need to rally. They need to work their butts off. The moderate Republican governor, Lombardo, there, I do think he can edge out a win, nonetheless, because there's a lot of independents who vote for him. Again, this is a reminder. Nevada is a very purple state, so when you're talking about, like, it's, you know.

In a purple state, you might have 40% who are Democrat, 40% are Republican, and another 20% are independents, and half those independents lean towards one party or the other. The number of completely undecideds is relatively small, but this year, I would suspect that independents would be breaking for Democrats. So, I think Democrats will do well in Nevada. I do think the Republican governor will squeak out a narrow win. Looking at North Carolina, everyone has said North Carolina looks very bad for the Republicans.

Democrats are super excited and juiced to vote. The Republicans have made back some ground in North Carolina. They're still the underdog. Very likely that this Senate seat in North Carolina will flip to the Democrats. If the Republicans manage to win this one, that would be an absolute shock, because literally nobody thinks it's going to happen.

Kind of an underwhelming candidate. He's not terrible, but he's kind of boring. There's another race in Kansas. Republicans have not lost a Senate race in Kansas since 1932, but Roger Marshall is an underwhelming Republican incumbent candidate. He's, like, flat-footed. He hasn't really had a campaign. The senator from Kansas, you just figure you don't really have to do anything, and he's having to relearn how to actually campaign, and they brought in some skilled guys. I think if the election had been two weeks ago, he would have actually lost.

I do think he's going to gain background. I think he wins, but, you know, you got to run through the tape. You got to keep going. So, over in Ohio, the early vote actually looks pretty darn good for Republicans. The period of time in which they allow mail-in ballots in one of their bigger counties, Cuyahoga, which is home to Cleveland, is closed. It's over.

They had 149,000 ballots there in 2022 that they processed. It was only 119 this year, so it's down 30,000 votes. From the previous midterm election. So, that's a very good sign for Republicans. I think John Houston is re-elected Senator of Ohio. It's going to be down to the wire for governor, but I still think Vivek probably wins. I'm not really the biggest fan of him, but just give me my analysis. Can everyone lose in that race? Can they just not have a governor?

I was very similar. I suspect Ashley Hinson is probably the best. Republican Senate candidate in the cycle. I think she's doing phenomenal. I think she wins the early vote in Iowa. I think it also looks very good. The governor's race will be very tight and very narrow. I hope, you know, Zaglan pulls it off. He's a good guy. I'd like to see him elect the governor of Iowa, but that's a case where just the fact that there's just more Republicans in both Ohio and Iowa makes it that the Republican candidates are doing pretty well.

Let us talk about, okay, by the way, that New York Times poll I told you about earlier, they had the Senate race in Minnesota, 14-point lead for the Democrat. Yeah. Bonkers. They actually only had a six-point lead for the Republican candidate for the Senate race in Florida. Like, hello? Like, the Senator, Ashley Moody, is going to win by a much greater margin than Flanagan is. So, again, an early vote looks very good for Republicans in Florida. That is a state that has got a long history of early voting.

Republicans are looking in good shape. They'll elect their first Black governor, and the media, of course, will celebrate that. Oh, wait, no, they won't, because you're a Republican. Never mind. And then Michigan. I think Michigan is going to be very close.

I suspect, unfortunately, that the Democrat will win Governor of Michigan. I live here in Michigan. I want nothing more than Jocelyn Benson to be defeated and John James to win, but I think, unfortunately, that the Democrat looks favored. It is a good year for Democrats, unfortunately, but Al-Sayed is vulnerable. The Democratic Senate candidate, Abdu'l-Sayed, is losing Black support in Detroit, and certainly a lot of Jewish Democrats don't like him, and so they... Now, here's the interesting thing. We've talked about this in the past, where you can do a poll and ask people, who are you going to vote for?

And people say, well, I'm going to vote for this guy, I'm going to vote for that guy. And they say, okay, okay, now tell me... Now, who you vote for, or who you want to win, tell me what you think your neighbors are going to do. How are they going to vote? And that has been very instructive. That is only something that has been done in the last 10 years or so, and it is amazing how predictive that has been, because people are a little bit more open and candor about how they think, oh, yeah, gosh, they are going to vote for the other guy.

People in my state are terrible. So, you look at Kelshi, the prediction market, where people are betting their own money. And people outside of the state of Michigan, 65% of people think, yeah, Abdullah Sayyed is going to win. He is going to win that Senate race. But you look at people in Michigan, and it is under 50%. Only 49% of people... Sorry, sorry. To drill into that, because we just talked about how don't over-rely on prediction markets, you are saying people that are actually putting up their own money, more people are putting up their money outside of Michigan that LCA is going to win.

Within Michigan, people putting up money, more of them are saying that Rodgers is going to win. Because they don't think their neighbors are going to go for it, right? Yeah, yeah. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah, I wonder, too. And just look at the data, too. I mean, of course, again, I agree 100% with you, Tom. Grain of salt with prediction market stuff, grain of salt, absolutely. It can inform, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it. But I would say this. Now, you don't register by party in Michigan.

However, you can make some indicators on how the early vote is going, and we just started doing permanent absentee ballots voting within the last four years, so the number of people who are returning ballots now, it's going up and up every cycle, and you can't just tell, like, okay, are these ballots coming from people who registered Republicans or registered Democrats?

You know, register as a part of Michigan, but what you can do is say, okay, this county here is, you know, 90% blue, you know, Wayne County or whatever, not 90%, maybe 75, whatever. And you say, okay, is the early vote and absentee vote higher in that state, in that county than normal? And then you compare it with like rural Republican counties where it's like, you know, it's practically illegal to be a Democrat, so 90% Republican, whatever.

And the early vote in Michigan is up across the state, but it's growing faster in stronger Republican areas, so that would seem to indicate, and again, I think Rogers is going to pull more support amongst Democrats than previous Republican candidates, so I think Rogers has a good chance to squeak out. A narrow win he lost by, remember, just a sliver when he ran for the Senate two years ago. I think Rogers is in good shape to win this race.

That's really good news. Let me ask you, because I remember sitting in 2022 after two disastrous years of Biden. And you're just like, there's no way this is not going to be a huge red sweep. And I got caught up in it, and it's like, this is going to be huge. I remember sitting at a... You and I were at the party together. Yeah, we were taking... I was taking pictures at... J.D. Vance was the only one to really win out of anyone.

J.D. Vance in Florida, I think, were the big two. Everyone else was just in a big puddle. J.D. Vance actually was, you know, underperformed, too. Underperformed, yeah. Exactly. So, like, and then I kind of sat afterwards, like, what did we miss here? Like, it seems... And so, I guess I'll just present, maybe I'm more active on the online right, so I'm just going to caveat that. I'm not as aware of what's going on on the left. Erika's going to follow up with that.

There's a very unpopular and divisive war going on that people felt they didn't sign up for. We're not promised. Gas prices are higher. Mortgages are higher. Inflation was up as of recent. These just seem to be very obvious indicators that there's going to be some correction for this. Boys are going to choose the other way. And in 2022, I kind of felt a little bit similar in that we're all on the same page. Spying thing's terrible, right? Things are not going well, and then it didn't deliver.

Is there any similarities here that you... Or are the dynamics different? Well, actually, you know, 2022 is instructive, precisely because that is, as you said, a midterm election where Republicans were out of power, and the Democrat in office was very unpopular, and the thought was we'd have a big red wave in 2022. And it was a big red wave in only Florida. In the rest of the country, it was a purple puddle, as we called it. And, in fact, there's at least, I would say, a 40% chance that Democrats will have the same.

They're expecting a big blue wave. And they might do better than expected in some places, but they might end up with a purple puddle as well. It is at least possible. What happened in 2022, the reason why Republicans did not do as well as they had hoped they would, is because there was a backlash in 2022 about the Dobbs decision, and it did juice out turnout for feminists, and also even Republican women. Some of which... Now, look, I'm not... To our eternal shame.

I'm not trying to... Yeah, I mean, look. Josh is starting it up. Don't get mad at me. I'm looking at the numbers here. This is analysis. Analysis. All right. That a chunk, not a majority, but a chunk of Republican women were upset at Dobbs, and they voted Democrat that cycle as a way of showing their displeasure. So, that is not a perfect analogy, so I would not say it is necessarily going to be the same, but I do think that tales of a big blue wave are a little overdone.

You know, I do think that they will do well. The fact that, I mean, just look. Look where campaigns are spending their time. Look at where campaigns are spending money, right? So, they're having to spend, Republicans are having to spend money in Kansas to try to shore up that Senate seat. Well, that is not a good sign.

It's not a good sign. Now, we'll probably still win that Senate race by, let's say, four points or something like that, but that's kind of embarrassing, dude. But it should have been a walkover. Yeah, it should not have had to. So, I do think, ultimately, Republicans will win Ohio. They'll win Kansas. They'll win, you know, Iowa.

The question is, I do not know about Alaska, because it is ranked choice voting, and that is a total scheme. The New York Times just busted the story showing that staffers for Mary Peltola were responsible for trying to do this fake scheme. I think that is the evidence you need to go to court and fight this, because it is a scam. Actually, you are trying to deprive the rights of people by confusing them who they are voting for. But ultimately, I do suspect, as I have long felt in my bones all year, I could be wrong.

But I think Republicans will maintain the Senate. They might lose a seat or two, but I still think they hold the Senate. I do think Democrats will take the House. They only have like a five-seat majority, and a lot of these seats will fall. Will they have a big, big super majority in the House? I doubt it. Will they have a comfortable majority? Maybe. It could be actually kind of a squeaker.

You know, it might be a small majority, and then Hakeem Jeffries will have to try to figure out what to do. But the thing is, I don't want them to have a majority, okay? I'm just telling you, I'm calling it as I see it, and I do think Republicans got to get out there, and they got to vote. Conservatives, people who support pro-family policies, we need to hold on to the Senate. You never know what could happen to a Supreme Court vacancy.

You know, if we want any hope of getting decent legislation passed over the next two years, I would love for the House and the Senate to remain in Republican hands. I'm very happy with what Republicans were able to do with the one big, beautiful bill, because we've got that beautiful federal tax credit. They can't take it away. I love it. I would love to see more reforms done, but those reforms come to a stop.

Republicans lose the House, and then it's just like we're in stasis for two months, or two years, but we have the foresight that President Trump and the congressional Republicans are making sure that we fully funded ICE for the entire four-year administration, and therefore, we're not going to surrender the border, that they can't do anything. They can try to repeal that funding. Trump will say no, so that's good.

But, yeah, I mean, I do suspect Democrats will have a good night. I don't think it's going to be a great night, and we can make it a puddle if we get out there and we vote early. Amen. Preach it. But here's something for you, Tom. Yeah.

I think this is an ad that kind of... Again, I think it gives a lot of credit to where we are. Look, we're sending out a lot of text messages. We're doing a lot of ads. We're working our tail off, sending out postcards, all that kind of stuff, and I get it. As citizens of the republic, you get a lot of these messages. It can be kind of frustrating. Why don't you roll this ad by John James? I hope he ends up winning governor in Michigan, but this is just an honest ad.

I think it's pretty funny. All right, great news, Michigan. This campaign is almost over. No more stupid commercials. Vote against this man. He kills puppies. This lady secretly lives in a data center. Look, politics sucks. Politics is about power, but service is about people. God tells us to love thy neighbor as thyself. I love our state. I love our people, and I've got a plan to turn Michigan around. Do you believe in Michigan? I do. I'm John James. It's time for a change.

Does this one work on you? That was pretty good. I mean, yeah, I'm going with that. It doesn't mean I like what happened in Iran, and it doesn't mean I like the gas prices. I'm just saying it's a creative ad. It was pretty smart. Yeah.

Yeah, you're running up against some challenges. Erika, you went into the mind of... I did. I did. Where'd you go? Yeah, so I went into the leftist mind, y'all. I watched Pod Save America, so you don't have to. It was great. But I do think that they're definitely shoring up for a sort of like, stop the steal mania. It has come for the left, and it has certainly come for the right. We've been living in it for a while. So, it was really interesting to kind of dig into how are people actually feeling who live in that silo over on the left, and I mean, it is astonishing the narrative that they are shoring up right now in case of the purple puddle or even a blue loss in, say, the Senate, for example.

So, we're getting influencers, we're getting media on the left, basically setting up America. To be like, Trump is going to overturn the election. Trump is going to, they're going to interfere in the polls. So, we've got Eric Holder, one of Josh's old favorites there on Pod Save America, warning that we're going to have to stop the steal. Donald Trump, crystal ball, nothing is off the table for this man. Abdul Sayyed, we've got to win by massive numbers. Donald Trump has already threatened to do what he did in 2020, which is deny the out...

What comes of an election? And right now, he's the president of the United States. You guys, I watched on XX Speed an hour-long No Kings protester training how to protect your polls, and these are true believers. They are training the grannies how to make sure that if ICE shows up in its masks with its tear gas, you know how to protect your ballot box. So, it's interesting to kind of watch this.

Narrative play out in the mind of the left, and claims like, this is our last election. If Republicans win, this is the last election, because Donald Trump will never leave. I've been reliably informed that it's been the last election for the last... It's either the last or the most important. Yeah, right. Every election cycle I've ever been a part of. It's so true. I don't think it's the most important election. I think it's very important, and you should vote, but I don't think it's the most important one.

Yeah. What is the most important one, Josh? Well, in my lifetime, it might be 2008. I mean, the election of Barack Obama was a fundamental transformation, as he promised. As he promised. Yeah, speaking. And 2016 was the first real attempt to try to... Yeah, really interesting. So, obviously, concerns over election integrity have been a talking point of the Trump administration for a long time. We had the Save America Act never actually got to his desk in any kind of meaningful form.

Dude, insane. Insane. Yeah, we didn't do that. We didn't get there. I wanted one thing out of you. That's one thing. That was it. That was it, and we didn't get it. But the Trump administration, Josh already alluded to Alaska, they are making efforts to shore up election integrity in other ways. So, the stop the steel mania coming for the left, but certainly valid concerns about election integrity from the Trump administration. So, the DOJ did file a lawsuit in Alaska over what I'll call the fighting Sullivans.

We have the Dan Sullivan one and Dan Sullivan two. And Todd Blanch arguing that they have a very solid case there, but lawyers from within the administration also thinking we have like a 1% chance of winning this lawsuit. Although, I will say this about if there's anyone in Alaska.

That's listening to this and it's voting. And if you forget, I mean, it does say registered Republican next to the one who's the actual Senator, so that's the one you should vote for. But anyway, vote for both Sullivan's. Vote for anyone. Just don't vote for Mary Petrola. That's how these stupid ranked choice voting. And it's on the ballot, actually, in Alaska to get rid of it once and for all. We need to do. And it was all put there as a scheme to help Lisa Murkowski.

Get re-elected. She's a Republican and name-only senator from Alaska. She's terrible. She just endorsed the Democrat running for governor, but she at least endorsed her Republican. Senator, she's just such a piece of work. Yeah, so we've got the DOJ in Alaska, and then we also have the DOJ, there's a lawsuit against the state of California to expunge 20,000 non-citizens who are registered to vote in that state.

So, another effort there. Trump just promised a million-dollar bounty if you can prove election fraud. So, he's getting out the investigative journalist. He's like, I'll pay you a million bucks. You can be a journalist. You can be a citizen. You could be a millionaire. If you help us find election fraud. And then, of course, just in the loop this morning, we had the story on the DOJ planning to deploy about 1,000 election monitors for the November 3rd midterm. So, and again, not people who are there helping non-citizens or Somali-speaking only citizens, supposedly, to vote.

I got something for you. Observing. Go for it. In the state you were born, New Hampshire. Live free or die. Yeah, they got a change there. They said that student IDs are no longer an acceptable form to prove you're a resident of the state in order to vote. Like, no, no. I'm sorry, your little Dartmouth or University of New Hampshire ID ain't going to work. You actually have to get a driver's license or a state-issued ID in order to vote. Which makes so much sense.

Why does this matter? Because there were 30,000 votes last time by people who used a student ID as their proof of identification. And if those 32,000 are students at one of the many universities in the state of New Hampshire, and they're not going to be able to vote this time, hello, we actually might get Sununu elected as a senator. I mean, it could happen. It's true. That's a lot of votes in a small state like New Hampshire, so. It is, yeah.

Yeah, and I think from the left's point of view, I was looking at reactions and coverage in mainstream media, quote-unquote, and like leftist media, like the Young Turks. Of these measures by the Trump administration, and the way that they're characterizing them to the country is, this is federal interference in elections, and this is a sign that democracy is dead, whereas the argument from our point of view, obviously, is the opposite, that, in fact, these states have been totally derelict in their duty to protect the election integrity and citizens.

So, it's a fascinating thing to take an assay into. The leftist world, and to get inside the minds there. Let's just understand this, Erika. You're saying Democrats who want complete federal control over health care, Medicare for all, but they become total confederates when it comes to voting. They want cities like Chicago and states like California to do whatever the heck they want. Yeah, it's really interesting. States' rights, man. Very interesting. Speaking of fixing health care, Obama was out on the campaign trail this past week for Al-Said.

And he's just telling us, okay, all of these racist, Islamophobic, right-wing conservatives, LOL, talking about jihadis, when all we want to do is fix your healthcare. Can we just run that clip? Sure. You want the police that will come arrest you and force feed you tofu instead of hamburgers? I mean, if the shoe fits, brother. You're not going to fall for that okie doke. You're not going to be that Muslim like that. We are about to choice in this election.

What does it say about Obama that he's getting involved here? Oh, my gosh. And then he hasn't changed his script since 2012. Right, it's been a while. What it says is that Abdul Al-Sayed is having a problem winning black voters in Detroit, and they need Barack Obama to come in and tell them, well, you've got to do what you're supposed to do.

I mean, here is what I don't understand about his argument. It is Islamophobes that are against, I will say, well, I assume. Anyone who is Islamophobic wouldn't be voting for Democrats anyway, according to his own logic. The problem is that there are blacks in Detroit that don't particularly care for Abdul El-Sayed. What does that say about blacks in Detroit? I think you're pointing the finger at the wrong person, but yeah, some hillbilly in the rural area is going to vote for...

Well, basically, he's presenting the straw man of, yes, I'm sure that there's some racist out there that has made this all about whatever. But his whole thing is, we just want to give you health insurance. I'm like, did you check what happened to the premiums after we enacted the affordable? Like, it actually didn't work. You broke the health insurance. It did work.

Well, the purpose of the system is what it does. I haven't heard that one in a while. He smashes the health care system so that guys like Abdul Al-Sayed and Bernie Sanders later can come along and say, that's the time for Medicaid for all.

This is all the whole point. This is what we warned about when the fight over Obamacare was going to be enacted. It's like, it's going to break everything down, and then the guys who broke it will come by and say, socialism will fix this. No! No.

Yeah, when he says we want to finish the job, believe him. Oh my gosh, we need to reverse that job. Yeah, and then we also get Trump on the right-hand side. We get Trump is out on the campaign trail going hard, and this one's making the rounds. Go ahead, just play it. Dude, he has been wild on the trail.

Is they say that Trump does great when he's on the ballot, but when he's not on the ballot, his people don't come and they don't vote for senators, congressmen, and other Republicans, and that these people, they're running, they're great, but if Trump isn't actually on the ballot. So, what I really want you to do is pretend, please, that I'm on the ballot. Just come and vote. It's so important. So, just say that I'm on the ballot one more time. You've got to say it, and you've got to come out and vote, because if we lose, you're going to lose your border.

You're going to lose your tax cuts. You're going to lose everything that we've done. We've gotten the biggest tax cuts in history. Think about no tax on tips, no tax on Social Security for our seniors, no tax on overtime.

All of that is going to be gone. Your taxes are going to go up. Your pay is going to go down. Your jobs are going to be lost. They are going to end up closing up. Your businesses are going to flee, just like they did years ago. They are going to flee our country.

I'm going to be impeached. They're going to impeach me. They have no idea why. I saw today a... Yeah, I don't know. He's back in the campaign trail. I saw a clip of him talking about... Who's the guy from Ohio? Husted's butt?

Yes. I'm getting some of the craziest Trump clips imaginable. It's like, it's starting to feel a little bit like when he was on the campaign trail back in those years. It's just, yeah, I don't know. It's funny. I haven't gotten... Yeah, that was goofy, because, you know, the Ohio Senator was a former football star, University of Dayton, and he was talking about how... The Nicki Minaj thing is crazy, too. And then that was R-rated, and let's not go into that. That's not stupid.

One thing I think he struggles with is focus at times. Well, it's part of the Trump experience. It's part of the, yeah. I mean, it's what gets people to pay attention, I suppose, right? People remember it. True. Although, like, yeah, I just think the hard thing watching this, especially if you've been frustrated with the direction, is like... I agree with you on a base sense, but the stuff isn't as cute anymore.

That's just personally how it feels. So, it used to be, oh, this is so funny. And I'll just say anecdotally, like people send it to me now, it's like, ha-ha, Trump did something funny. It was all fun and games in 2024, and now you're just like, well, you got us in this position in 2026. The Nicki Minaj stuff doesn't have as much weight. Yeah, I got you. Yeah, I got you. But, I mean, if it helps him. Get his party across the line, and then they, you know, like, get their act together with regards to Gas prices in Iran and getting this country moving, that would be great.

Yeah, if you get us out of war, we're back in business. So, okay, good news. Erika, what do you got? Yeah, so this was a fun study from the Institute for Family Studies. Shout out to Brad Wilcox, an alum of the LOOPcast. So, Brad Wilcox, he came out with Maria Baer with these numbers. So, everyone talks about the sex. How people just aren't getting together anymore, but it turns out that the sex recession and intimacy recession has been limited to only certain populations, and in fact, other populations are either holding steady or actually increasing.

And so, the first one was, obviously, so married couples tend to have more sex than those who are singled or divorced, widowed, or separated. And so, it seems like the surest path to a healthy intimacy life. By the way, that's not what popular culture would have told you over the last 30 years. No, I'm going to get into Hugh Hefner in just a second. So, the good news is, still runs through the altar.

But not only that, it actually gets better. Here's the stereotype busting twist. The decline was entirely missed by married religious couples. So, couples who go to church once a week, who are married, have, in fact, the best or the most satisfying sex life. They also tend to be the happiest human beings on the planet. So, this is really good, and as Josh just pointed out, it is totally contrary. To the narrative that we got all through the 60s, 70s, 80s. I was just watching, Michael Knowles was highlighting a clip of Hugh Hefner debating William F.

Buckley. Back in the 1980s, and the argument from the sexual revolution side of things was, well, the only way for people to stop having deviant sexual behaviors like doing pornography or being gay or homosexual behaviors, the only way to do that is to stop repressing sex with all these things like rules about when you can sleep with someone, like, oh, marriage, for example. So, if we get rid of all the rules and inhibitions around sex, We're all going to have really satisfying sex lives, and we seem to have tried that, but the data is in, and in fact, it's the opposite.

The rules work. When people are able to sublimate their sexual desires to a life of self-sacrifice and service for another human person, then you actually start enjoying being intimate with that person more. Who would have guessed? So, once again, science confirms what the Catholic Church has taught. Taught us all along, which is, yes, our sexual desire, desire for pleasure, has to be sublimated to a greater good outside of ourselves if we want to enjoy that pleasure at all.

So, I'm here for it. Here's to the Catholic Church. Here's to the Holy Sacrament of Matrimony, and I just, I love it when we turn the cultural narrative on its head like this. It is almost like God had a design for men and women. It is kind of like that, and we can know it, too, by revelation and reason. How Catholic is that? Yep. Love. Love. Josh, what have we got? Well, hey, good news. I got a Democrat. Hey, a Democrat is against political asylum for a refugee from Latin America.

This is such great, this is amazing news. Like, what a confirmation. See, there's a catch. Yeah. Congressman Joaquin Castro is against political asylum for Flavio Bolsano, who lost the election for president in Brazil. Of course, Bolsano actually won. Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro. I don't even know. It's Bolsonaro. Okay, but I know that he's getting his bail.

So, he fled Brazil. I'm confused. And the ruling dictator of Brazil ordered his passports to be seized and don't let him free the country, but apparently he has secretly left the country and apparently is in the United States. I'm not sure if that's true. I don't know. There's lots of rumors and reports. But what King Castro said is, losing an election is not ground for asylum.

Yet the Trump administration is giving, how do you say his name? Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro. A safe haven in the United States. In Brazil, he is under investigation for alleged corruption, money laundering, and currency evasion, in order to defend his passports. So, we found the one person that the House Democrat is against granting asylum to, so we have done it. We have proven that they can be against granting political asylum to people. Wonderful. Let us build on that. I just think it is so cute.

Did you look into the Brazilian elections at all? I was kind of confused with all of them. Yeah, I mean, so basically what happened is, like, they have an election. systems where once you turn it off, you cannot just turn it back on, okay? So, whatever the time, I forget if it is 8 p.m. or whatever, that the election was over, a bunch of districts all across the country, they turn off their ballots, and then the current left-wing communist president of Brazil got his former advisor, legal advisor, who is on the Supreme Court in Brazil, to allow areas in, I think it is down in the...

Brazil goes down towards the bottom tip there, and those regions, to allow them to stay open for several hours longer, and there was no ability for the other regions to be like, oh, well, we want to do it too. It is like, no, the machinery is such that you cannot. So, these guys must have had advanced knowledge to not turn off their election systems and to keep it going. It would be like if the United States allowed whole regions to continue.

Counting for weeks and weeks like we do in California. But it just goes to show, there's a lesson to be learned here in Brazil that I think California should listen to. Like, look, you can steal an election in one day. You don't have to wait weeks to do it, okay? So, come on, guys. Be more efficient. I saw that the judge that was ordering to seize the passports, too, himself, has kind of an insane backstory.

I haven't seen that, but I'm not surprised. Oh, yeah. I was trying to dig in to be like, is this... So, what is the accusation that they were collaborating with America somehow to boost his candidacy in Brazil, and so this is like a sovereignty act, but then if you go into the history of the guy that is executing taking the passports, he himself was kind of an insane case, so it doesn't seem super clear. It just seems like a very dysfunctional...

Power grab type system. I do think that the President of the United States and Secretary of State Marco Rubio should exert some soft power here, because it does seem like there are electoral shenanigans, and say we're not going to recognize this election, and basically tell Brazil that they need to get their act together and have another election, and there'll be a clean election, because this wreaks the high hell.

So, if we have, you would suggest that the U.S. should intervene in elections outside of our country to make sure that we've done it? I think I have a concern more in, like, Latin America than I would, let's say, Ukraine or something like that. The Donro Doctrine. Donro Doctrine. Oh, so South American elections, you'd be like, we need to actually... Yeah, I mean, I am worried about, like, a communist holding onto power in a, it's not like it's a little tiny country.

Brazil is massive. Yeah. You know, and a communist holding onto power there and turning that country into a complete, you know, hellhole would be very bad for all the Western Hemisphere. Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, again... Yeah, I know there's, like, basically real politics of all this. Like... Even if via NGO for the last however many years, like USAID, we were totally messing with everyone's elections down there. No, I know. Even if it wasn't a state policy. Brazil has enough of an economy that they can steal elections even without having lost the USAID funding.

Yeah, like either through soft power or direct power, we're doing it. Yeah. You can argue on principle if that's good or bad. Other countries are trying to mess with our elections all the time. Yeah, I mean, it's perfectly honorable to say you want to do a clean slate and not interfere anymore. Again, I get that, but I do feel like in this case, yeah, I would actually like to right the ship. Yeah, and the other lesson here being that it is very easy to vote in socialist, communist governments, and it is nearly impossible to vote them out without some kind of machination.

Yeah, they get ballots to get in, they need bullets to get them out. Yeah, and we forget that to our own peril, for sure. So, do not forget that. Word. All right, my good news, I am taking this way out. I just get happy whenever I see the National Dominicans in public. This is actually the Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist. Oh, sorry. Thank you for... Because these are the Domino's Farms. Yeah, this is Domino's. It's the Domino's nuns. They're the best.

I'm sorry, sisters. Not nuns, but sisters, but that's fine. Here they are at the Lions game. ...sisters from Ann Arbor, Michigan, and if you remember, these two went viral... Jared Goff was a junior, and he's currently a quarterback.

Right here in Detroit. What has it been like to just see how that clip has now brought you here to this field and being able to reconnect with Jared? It's actually, it's amazing. Sister and I were just talking the last time we saw him play was when he was in the state championship in L.A. as a senior in high school, and it's just overwhelming to see him now at the Lions Stadium, so we're so excited. We're very proud of him. Jared in high school was already being such a great and example of excellence, not only in athletics, but also in sports.

But his conduct on the field, that he always had great self-control, he had great prudence on the field, he would give it his all, perseverance, he worked so hard, and those were the virtues that set him apart, and now, to be able to celebrate with him at this game, it's been so beautiful, such a blessing, and we're so, so, so proud. And to celebrate as well with some of your sisters. What's it like to be here on the field? Oh, it's so exciting.

Yeah, it's been 30 years I've been in Ann Arbor and haven't been here, so it's really great. Yeah, really exciting. I grew up watching the Lions, so it's really a blessing to be here. I'm totally excited to see the Lions play today. It'll be so fun. All right, I have to ask you, too, since you saw Jared back then, do you remember the moment that led you to believe he would be able to play in the NFL?

His leadership. I mean, he was a leader. He was so calm under pressure. And he led that team. He led the team to so... Oh, my gosh. So... Bringing the sisters on the field like that was a good luck charm. The Lions beat the Packers that weekend, but it doesn't go on forever, and next week, they better lose to my Vikings. Hey, you better marshal up some sisters, all right? We're beating you in the sister count. And I think that that might be more important than your vaunted defense.

Two suggestions. If you ever need to just chill out, like you just need to calm down, political cycle too crazy, just listen to a podcast hosted by nuns or sisters. So true. So calm. Just the best. Sisters of Life podcast is the best, and I say that as a podcaster. Like, that is... Don't listen to me. Listen to the Sisters of Life. Just ASMR for the soul, man. And then I love, like, none post-game interviews. Just like, how do you feel about this experience?

And it's always the cutest, most gracious thing you've ever heard, and just, like, unbelievable. Shout out to the sisters over there. I had two of those Dominican sisters up in northern Michigan for my... The Marriott Conference that we had up there, and they were just so joyful, and they both were from the South, and even when they were play-fighting with each other, it was like the sweetest thing ever. Oh, you got me here. You got me on the phone.

Yeah. Dude, amazing. Yeah, class act out of Jared for bringing him out. I remember seeing that clip. I think he shared it on Instagram, their interview about teaching him at, I think it was Don Bosco Prep or something like that. I think it was Sanchez, I think. Oh, the one in California. Okay, yeah. Yeah, the one in California. And how they got restationed. Like, oh, he's always such a leader. That's awesome. That's the best. Just get you some Nas to gas you up.

How do you do in math, though? We don't know about that. Hey, listen, I won't ask. He's killing right now. The record looks good. The record looks great. No interceptions. We're rolling. So, okay, let's go church corner now. Let's cut through the noise here. Much to do about nothing, I think. So much hubbub. So much hubbub. Yeah, so the big story over the weekend was that 12 Catholic archbishops and bishops, they met with the White House Faith Office to discuss immigration and religious visas and all a number of things.

And then after the meeting, which was about 90 minutes, this group of bishops was invited into the Oval Office, where the The president greeted them, gave them little memorable tokens, and then they said a prayer over him, led by Denver Archbishop James Golka, who we discussed last week in relation to Father Ripperger. But they asked, and I love Kelsey Reinhart, our dear president here at CatholicVote, she pointed out that they asked the exorcist to say the prayer, which was probably for a reason.

But they prayed over him, and then the White House posted it, and it went viral, and people's heads exploded. Probably, most prominently, Chris Hale, who is a Democratic operative who acts as a Catholic commentator. They're like, this was totally politicized. It's 12 days before an election. The bishops had no business praying over this man, blah, blah, blah. And then, to make matters even worse, several of the bishops come out and apologize for this act of praying over the president, saying that, well, we never knew that it would be recorded and publicized, so we're really sorry we got...

So, Archbishop Jeffrey Grob of Milwaukee, he issued the first apology saying, Please know I heard these concerns. I understand how I caused them, and I apologize for any damage my actions have done. Then we get, praying for him. Then we get Bishop William Johnson from Des Moines. He's saying, I wish I'd been more shrewd and less simple, like those exploited, and like those who exploited our meeting for partisan political. So, they were shrewd. And then, this one killed me. He wasn't even there, but Archbishop Sean McKnight.

Apologizing for not even being there? Come on, man. No, so he wasn't there. No, he's apologizing to the people of Kansas City Diocese, or Archdiocese, saying that his predecessor's participation, his predecessor being Archbishop Joseph Nauman, who is a hero among American bishops. He was there, and he was with the bishops praying over Trump, saying that... His actions, Nauman's actions in presence at that event, were not representative of myself or the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas. Like, what a low-down, dirty thing to do to your brother bishop, to apologize for his actions.

May I present the most steel-man version of this argument? Please do. If these bishops were in President Biden, former President Biden's office, 12 days before a midterm election, We're there, prayed over him. Would there be justified outrage similarly from the other side of the aisle saying, look at this picture, it's being used to promote someone who's pro-abortion, a politician we disagree with is partisan? How would you respond to that?

I think it would depend on the prayer. Because here's the thing. If you listen to Archbishop Golka's prayer there, there is nothing in there about, like, oh, this president is such a great, you know, emblem of Catholic values. Thank you, Lord, for Trump and for being such a great Catholic president, blah, blah, blah. Now, there have been bishops who prayed with Biden. There are bishops who have prayed with... Obama prayed over these presidents. The problem with Joseph Biden is that he purported to be a devout Catholic and ended up presiding over the most anti-Catholic administration, arguably, since the know-nothings, right?

And possibly in the presidency ever, and the most pro-abortion, pro-gay marriage, pro-LGBTQ administration ever. Now, if Archbishop Golka had gone in there before the 2024 election... Prayed over Biden and asked for the same graces that he just prayed over for Trump, I think we would have been like, yes, someone needs to— I mean, we pray for our president and our governor all the time. I don't understand what would be the problem. I mean— You know, I do have, let's say, a problem with Cardinal Blaise Cupich doing a prayer at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

I do, because that's a confab. That's a political rally, and they're dedicated to, I don't know, the promulgation of death. You know, through abortion on an industrial scale. So, that would be a scandal to me, but I guess this plays soupage, so scandal is kind of par for the course, right? I thought you were going to bring up the award that he gave to Notorious. Oh, that's right!

It's amazing! Notorious abortion supporter, and then pulling the anti-Semitism card. It's like, despicable. Oh, perfect. This is the second year in a row. Wait, but I really want to... I really want to nail you, because this is like, I could see why people would be like, if this was done in Biden's office or a Democrat's office or whatever, like, this feels akin to me to, um... You know, like, whenever someone wins the Super Bowl, and then there's always the deliberation over whether or not you go to the Oval Office because you disagree with the policies of the president or whatever.

Yeah. And it is different because they're laymen and not clergy. And then people choose to approach it differently. They don't go, or they go, and, like, you know, like, I think Harrison Bucker went and wore, like, a pro-life pin or tie or something like that. And, like, I think similar to this.

Uh, there's nothing inherently wrong with religious leaders, in particular clergy, or anyone in general, going to the offices of the president and praying with them. Even if you disagree with them, or you have policies or whatever, like, I think that just as the principle is not an issue at all. Now, if you were to go and, like, endorse and say, yes, we're fully on board with his vision and policies when it comes to abortion, yada, yada, yada, but that wasn't what they did for Trump.

And that wouldn't be what they would do for Biden either, and so, to me, this just amounts to... Yeah. Especially the apologies afterwards are like, you are so not confident in your own, like, what is the mission here? The mission should be continual conversion. And how do you continue to convert if you're so embarrassed of yourself, of appearing improper or whatever, that you can't even come out and explain why you did what you did, why you felt like it was important?

There's Catholics in every part of the world. There's clergy in every part of the world, including countries where they murder Catholics, or you can't actually be Catholic. And they continue to go, and they continue to evangelize. Evangelization is a key part of the mission, and so I would not be mad if someone went with the right intentions to a former President Biden or to an administration that I disagree with and actually tries to engage sincerely on a level of prayer and faith.

That, to me, just seems like trying to remove Catholicism from the public square. To use the best argument against, I do think there is probably a chance that Trump was going to use this as if it were a blessing of him. I do not doubt that he was trying to paint it in that light, and I just think the bishops would be like, Yeah, no, we just came to pray with you. We would do that with any president, and just to have the self-confidence to do it right, and not to get so worried that the leftist Catholic communists like Christopher Hale are going to lose their lunch over this, and just set their hair on fire.

They're so freaking out about this. And again, I would say, if the roles were reversed, yes, there would be some cranky traditionalists or whatever. I'm not trying to make aspersions, but they'd be like, how dare you pray with Biden? I just wouldn't care. I'm like, good. He needs prayer. My goodness. Right, 100%. But the reaction by the Catholic left is just like, they just think Trump is the personification of all evil, and you would pray with him, make it seem like he's good.

They lose their stuff over it. It's like, you guys, come on. Yeah. Yeah, I was thinking, too. I was thinking about, so, for example, Archbishop Wilton Gregory in D.C. there. At the time, he was the Archbishop during Biden's administration, and he, like, he distributed ashes to the Biden family, and he appeared at several, like, Migration Day things, and a big difference. And so, I am glad that the Archbishop of D.C. was praying with Joseph Biden on Ash Wednesday. I am glad that he was, too.

But the issue was that It was what he didn't say as well. It's that there was never any kind of engagement with serious concerns about the scandal that Biden, as a quote-unquote devout Catholic, was causing as the most pro-abortion president in American history. There was no engagement with that. And with the bishops here, with Trump, it cannot be said that American bishops have been just pushovers refusing to engage with the Trump administration on things on which they disagree. It's a completely different kind of public presentation here going on as well than with, say, a Gregory Biden sort of interaction.

Yeah, I think the dynamics are definitely different. Yeah, slightly. Do you even want to get into the Cupich thing? I mean, Cupich is stupid. This is ridiculous. I can't even. This happened last year with Dick Durbin. I'll set it up for you, Josh, and then we're just going to let you rip on this. So, for those of you who have not been paying attention, God bless you. Cardinal Blaze Cupich, who last year wanted to award Senator Dick Durbin with a big honor, this year, and then Dick Durbin ends up declining it after the public outcry.

Cupich doesn't even root. Revoke it. He's just like, oh, Durbin won't accept it after all. So, this year, he follows up with, having not learned his lesson, tomorrow night, Thursday, he is going to honor the Chicago businessman named Michael Sachs with the Archdiocese Nostra Aetate Award, which is a brand new award just made up this year, and this is going to happen tomorrow at the Catholic Seminary Fundraiser to support new priests in formation, despite the fact. That Illinois Right to Life has proven that Michael Sachs has given $500,000 from his family foundation to Planned Parenthood since 2022, and another $600,000 to expand abortion access in the state of Illinois.

That is $1.1 million in just the last four years that the Sachses have put towards abortion and abortion access. In Illinois. This is insane, but when he is confronted with this, Cupich doubles down, and I will just read for you some of the eloquence that we got from the Archdiocese of Chicago. He said, quote, Some have voiced criticism that a Catholic group, actually the Archbishop, the Cardinal, the Cardinal, not a Catholic group, as in the Cardinal, as when I would honor a person who does not hold to core beliefs of the Catholic Church, primarily among them being the divinity of Jesus Christ.

No, that's not what people are objecting to. We don't care that Michael Sachs doesn't believe Jesus was the Son of God. It's the abortion. But never mind, I will continue. In fact, Nostra Aetate... The document offers a clear theological and ethical framework that supports honoring, respecting, and building constructive relationships with non-Christians, even when those individuals express theological, moral, or political positions at odds with core Catholic teaching. While the document does not promote... What is the point? So what is the point of that?

I mean, the whole point is he's trying to distract. He's saying a problem here. No, I understand his response, but even the award itself sounds so stupid to me. So, the whole point of the award is to engage with people, even though they don't live in accordance with Catholic teaching at all, but maybe they do something kind of nice that we like? Yeah.

So, then what's the problem with even that? Sorry, continue, but the whole thing is so... The problem is that this guy supports killing babies, and again, this is just one of those tactics. Not only is he evading, but he's smearing pro-lifers who object to honoring someone who supports killing babies. The problem is the killing of babies. The reason why we have objected to you two years in a row, the last guy wasn't Jewish. Dick Durbin is an Irish Catholic. Give me a beret.

We also didn't like that one. Why do we continue this? Yeah, I love the closing. Hit the closer, Josh. Here's the closing line. The closing line is, and this is obviously aimed at Illinois Right to Life and all the Catholics, refusing to honor or engage with Jews solely because they hold conflicting religious or political positions can risk mimicking historic patterns of anti-Semitism through exclusion and bigotry, which, frighteningly, Is on the rise. This is base and mendacious.

Okay, what I would say of this Michael Sachs, I don't know about his fidelity, but if I hear about a Jewish person who's given half a million dollars to help support killing babies, I actually, out of an abundance of charity, assume he's not an observant Jewish.

Remember, I assume he's fallen away from his faith, much in the way that I assume Dick Durbin has fallen away from his faith. You see what I'm saying? It's precisely because I would not—it is Dick Durbin—I mean, I'm sorry, it is, in this case, Cardinal Cupich. Who is being repugnant? He is saying, oh, you are ascribing, you are attacking him because he is Jewish. No, I am attacking him because he kills babies. You are the one that is saying it has got to do with his Jewish faith.

I did not know he was Jewish until he told me. I had a problem with him supporting killing babies. Well, you are just against him because he is Jewish. Judaism is not for killing babies, brother. Stop equating those two. That is not what it is about. Okay? The most famous Jew in the world.

Jesus does not believe in killing babies. Maybe you should listen to him, Cardinal Cupich, and maybe Pope Leo, fellow Chicagoan, maybe it's time you retire this man. He's two years past his retirement age. Maybe you're going to wait a few months.

We're going to have, let's avoid a problem for three years in a row. Let's get ahead of this, huh? What time of the spring are you going to give it to next? Yeah, I mean, what is going to happen? I mean, he'd give an award to Hugh Hefner if he's still alive, right?

He disagrees on certain things, but he's done some nice stuff for the community. Hugh Hefner might have been a pornographer, and he might even be dead right now, but boy, he loved immigration. Dude, it's like the mob tactic, you know? It's like, oh, but he's charitable, like this notorious gangster. You know, but he gave a lot of money to charity. Al Capone did a lot for his Italian neighborhood there. What are we doing here? This whole thing is so stupid. It's literally a Mad Lib if you want to piss everyone off at the same time.

Like, all of the groups fighting right now, you've managed to make a grand one. But, I mean, Blaise Cupich's response in this is particularly repugnant and despicable and disgusting. And if he had any shame, he should feel ashamed, but I don't think he does. You know, he did the Durbin thing. That was one thing. You're doing it. Two years in a row, it is a pattern. It is on purpose.

Yeah, pray for those seminarians who have to sit through this dinner tomorrow, because it is a fundraiser for them. Pray for priests in formation in Chicago. Pray for their fidelity. No wonder they have so few. Word, all right. Let us roll to Wild Zone, Josh.

Well, hey, look, I am not just going to criticize the Christian church as well. In a Protestant church... In Cleveland, a female pastor announced that her co-pastor and husband has taken a second wife, and now the three of them are living in a polygamous relationship. What?

What are we doing? Is that the Noahide Law? Is that what we're doing? Oh, no. Erika brought up the Noahide Law. I had to. Oh, no. What? There's a scholar and researcher, Aaron Wren, who knows a lot about, you know, evangelical world, Protestant world, and he actually thinks that this is going to become a little bit more common because of like a hyper-literal biblicalism or something like that, you know, where there's people in the past, you know, scriptures we can refer to have more than one wife.

He doesn't think it's going to be mainstream, but it's going to get some traction. Listen. Catholic, I'm not as brushed up on the Bible. Is there a lot of polygamy in the Bible I'm unaware of? Yeah, Old Testament, man. We got Abraham, Sarah. Hey, Sarah, we got Leah and Rebecca, right? And then what does Jesus come along and say?

One wife, too much dip on your chip. I got to come down here and smack you around a little bit. Too much dip on your chip. That is crazy. It's too much dip on your chip. Oh, awesome. And it's complete with Kingdom Marriage AI-generated image in the background, too, on the TVs. Awesome. Kingdom marriage. That is crazy.

I mean, somebody posted this slogan online or whatever, and it is a funny way of poking fun at a lot of people who claim to be prophets. Oh, you are a prophet. Oh, God told you something. Well, let me guess. You get to sleep with more than one woman. Is that what it is? Is that what it is? Oh, dude, every time. It always happens.

It is like the, what was the exception of people like, you know, the Subaru, you know, like it is. What was the church in Texas, the church in Texas that burned down? It was the big, like, ATF scandal. Oh, the Waco, the Waco. Yes. They have a crush. And that guy was like, listen, I got a vision. I had a vision. I got a vision. I got to sleep with everyone. I get to sleep with all the wives.

Every time. It's crazy. Every time. And people fall for it. They go for it, man. Yeah, crazy. Yeah. Red flag. As opposed to visionaries like, you know, Padre Pio. Where they get, like, you know, actually a lifetime of actual pain and suffering when they get visions from Christ, you know? Yeah. That sounds a little bit more authentic. Not saying that we don't have problems in the Catholic Church on this stuff. I'm not saying we're blameless, but yeah. I think that it just so happens that God told you you get to have sex with more than one woman.

Yeah. Very convenient. Isn't that low-key something in the African church that they struggle with, is priests that aren't celibate? Yeah, so actually, they'll talk about, so Cardinal Serra was talking about this phenomenon in the African church that when you have converts, one of the most difficult things for them to accept is monogamous marriage. I don't know if that's true anymore. He was speaking about a phenomenon back in the 80s and 90s. Okay.

But yeah, that's still a leftover thing from, you know, tribal religions that this is, now you have to be monogamous? What? Let's say. Yeah, it turns out the bedroom issues are often a cultural hurdle that must be overcome on wherever you are, right? I think it was St. Jerome who said, it is amazing how, you know, like, when it comes to profits, like...

Our heretics, he said, heretics have a, he said, I'm paraphrasing this, but they have a distaste towards chastity. You know, so you look at heretics, it's amazing. Very few of them are purely on, let's say, ideological grounds, let's say, on this doctrine or that doctrine. Usually, the root of what Jerome was getting at is a distaste for the Christian virtue of chastity. It is amazing, actually.

Like I said, married couples who go to church weekly. If you really want to enjoy that. All right. Is it my turn? Okay, so I was going to do this as my good news, but it is so weird that we even had to do this good. Anyway, here's what's happening. DHS is cracking down on birth tourism. That was the good part of the news, but then I started reading more into the stories. This was covered by Zeal News. Shout out to, wait, who did this?

Oh, the news team. We don't know who did this, but Department of Homeland Security announced just yesterday. To the Federal Register that it's closing a loophole, which had allowed Chinese nationals to exploit birthright citizenship. Because they're suspending this travel authorization that was used by Chinese citizens to travel to the commonwealth of the northern Mariana Islands. I had to look them up. This is a U.S. territory. Give birth there and obtain U.S. citizenship for their children. So, this was bizarre. Chinese nationals were allowed, if they were pre-screened, to travel to the Mariana Islands with a visa for temporary visits.

Under specified conditions, meaning that they didn't even have to have, there was a visa waiver program just for the Mariana Islands, and Chinese nationals were flying there to give birth and then have their anchor baby. This was insane to me that this loophole even existed in the first place. Like, who thought this was going to be a great idea? The good news is it's closed. But I'm like, how many other loopholes are there that we have here that need to be closed?

You could make a sweet series like discovering a new bizarre loophole to the American immigration system day one, and you would never run out of ideas. Yeah, this was crazy. And not only were they going to the Mariana Islands in order to have anchor babies, but they were also using it as sort of a temporary stopping point. You can get to this U.S. territory without a visa, and from there, you can get into Guam, which would normally require a visa. But since you're coming from a U.S.

territory, you don't actually have to show a visa. And Guam, of course, has military installations. It's a massive national security threat. Hello. And all because of the Mariana Islands, which most Americans, I would say. Probably 95% of Americans are not even aware it's still a U.S. territory.

Or even have heard of it. Or even heard of it. Like, I had to do a refresher and look them up. This is nuts. Thank you to the many Republican senators and congressmen, including Tom Tiffany, who is running for governor of Wisconsin. You live in Wisconsin. Vote for Tom Tiffany. Vote Tom Tiffany. He flagged this for the Department of Homeland Security, and the Trump administration fixed it. And they got it done. You can actually just do things. It turns out. So, this is Twilight Zone wrapped up with some good news to finish the show.

One more thing before you go, Tom. So, speaking of the Wisconsin governor's race, we are going to be live on election night, me, Tom, and Josh, and it is Josh's favorite. It is like Christmas Eve for Josh. We are going to listen to his wisdom. We are going to have some special guests on. We are going to be talking about the returns as they come in, learn who is the governor of what state, et cetera, where we are going to have recounts unending.

But it's going to be a fun night. I have a bottle of 1776 bourbon I'm going to be working my way through as I try to stay awake till 11. You're going to get Erika's real thoughts on the topic. So, please join us on election night. You can look in the loop for announcements about the time, the place, who, what, when, where, what to wear, what not to wear.

Nice. Okay, so listen, it's Twilight Zone now. I get to have a little bit of fun. Trump does have these very, from the public, strange hills to die on. One of them, and that continues to pop up, and Matt Walsh is kind of like the everyman voice of reason on such matters. So we have the truth from Trump is, when will the Wall Street Journal start calling artificial intelligence, AI, a very bad and inaccurate name? SI, super intelligence, the name which virtually everyone else will be using, or soon will be, in short order, will be officially banning the term AI, artificial intelligence, in all relevant documents and everything else due to its inaccuracy.

Thank you for your attention to this matter, President Donald J. Trump. And we get from Matt, which, like, I was thinking the same thing. I have no idea why renaming AI is so bizarrely important to Trump. No one cares about the name he chose. Nobody is using it or will use it, and it is not even a technically accurate term because superintelligence already had an agreed-upon, widely-adopted definition.

This is the weirdest political hill to die on. It gains you nothing. Not a single ordinary American in the country, anywhere, cares deeply about making sure people say SI instead of AI. We are just days away from a major election, and this BS is the focus. Just baffling.

Listen, man. I mean... Matt said it, and I mean, I keep saying him say this. I'm like, you're like an AI to the, you're an enemy to the state, I think, if you use AI. I'm like, there's a lot of enemies in the state walking among us.

Is this like the Gulf of America thing all over again? I think it's my theory that he does this, one, because he likes saying Gulf of America better and super intelligent, but also as a sort of mockery of the way that the left rewrote our vocabulary and syntax for the last 25 years, so that now we call things like physician-assisted suicide as euthanasia, and chopping off healthy genitals of minor children as gender-affirming care, and all of this, like, Language actually matters, but I think Trump is more just like a little tongue-in-cheek about it, so.

Interesting. That's my fear, because he's mocking it. Yeah, maybe. Maybe. I think it's also just trying to lower the negatives of AI amongst, you know, his own base. Mm-hmm. That's true, too. By calling it super? Yeah, I mean, like... Is this kind of like naming bills? Like, how could you possibly be against the... Artificial makes it seem, you know, like it's alien, like a negative, right? Like, everyone loves things to be natural, right? That you want natural ingredients, you want natural things.

Artificial sweetener, no, I don't want that. So, artificial intelligence, like, it sounds like it's... You know, askew. It's not natural. It's not normal. So, he's wanting to assign a different thing to it. Oh, it's a supercomputer. It's superintelligence. He's trying to increase the positives on it. That makes sense. Yeah. Like I said, language matters. So, will you be referring to it going forward as superintelligence? No, because it's not.

I don't. I think it's artificial, but I don't have a negative thing about it. I've never really had super negative on it. Like, to me, it's just pattern recognition. I'm not convinced that it's somehow going to... Remember this? Okay, I have a question.

It seems like about the last 15 months, AI is going to completely revolutionize the economy within 18 months. Yeah, okay. I mean, it's any day now, right? Yeah, Project 2027 is now like Project 2032. It's going to be like that. But here's my question. So, when you interact with your LLM, when you talk into your chatbot, as one does, do you say, please, thank you, or I would like, or it would be great if you could? Do you address it as a you, and do you use?

Courtesy, courtesy terms. I've caught myself on occasion accidentally doing it. Yeah. However, typically, I actually think pretty hard about the prompts that I put in, because if you're not specific, it will give you, this isn't rock science, but it will give you very general results. So, it's like, if I'm looking for a specific... Angle as if I'm like, hypothetically, you're occupying this role. This is the information. Give a neutral facts-based account of what's going on. It tends to help to be more specific.

So, no. But I also like, because we had this larger conversation about, is it a natural drive to want to name technologies? Uh, after animate, like, like, give them personhood, essentially, so. Yeah, Claude. Yeah, exactly, Claude, or chat, like, you just refer to it as chat. That's the newest iteration, but there was, like, Siri before that, there was, uh, the personal assistant, and, like, Iron Man, to use a fictional example. Yeah. Um, and then even, like, early computers, I think, went by kind of, like, was it QWERTY?

They, they kind of had, like, names for them, almost, so. QWERTY is actually the, on the upper left-hand thing on the keyboard. Right, but I'm like, there's names. That might be a bad example, but typically a piece of technology. Or even like naming cars. Like, people will give names to their cars. It just feels like it's this instinct within us to want to kind of humanize. Well, I think the naming of cars is a little bit different. Naming of cars is more like how we name boats, and we have to identify boats, because you've got lots of boats.

So, there's the USS Indianapolis, there's the, you know what I mean? And you refer to boats as female as well. Yeah, like she. Right, right, right, right. So, like, if someone names their car, I think it's just sort of a joking thing. I don't think they're assigning necessarily personality to it, although it's a little bit more, humans do that with the AI, I think, much more. Like, when they actually. Assume it has some sort of an identity. It's like, it's just pattern recognition, you know?

Sorry. Yeah, I think I was just more talking about, like, the instinct. Like, where does the instinct want to do that? Well, because LLMs are designed to mimic human conversation, and so I think they're much more seductive in that way than, say, like wanting to name your boat after your mother or something like that, right? So, people are, and it's been demonstrated that people are treating them as if they are sentient and human and rational. Because they're responding to them in the same method.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. I'm like, yeah, I think, again, it changes on the day, but... What do you name your chat? Oh, no, like, no, sorry. Not the name changes on the day, Josh. I mean, in general, like you were talking about the 2027 was going to be the end date or whatever, and you're just starting to see... Like, I was even talking to Erika about this, like China, I guess, had a huge AI bubble pop in very similar proportion to... Like, how much of the U.S.

economy is tied up currently in the success of AI as well, and it just feels to me that there's kind of like a, it's a fear tactic to raise. IPO prices or valuations. I agree with that. I've been a long time. You're right on that. Yeah. And so, I think at first, I was kind of freaked out about all of it, but then you start seeing how much money is moving hands and how it's all very circular. It's kind of dependent upon what you're seeing about China.

You have a large amount of capital, and it just pops. It's like the whole point is that it was basically fake. You don't know it's fake until you know, but just like the housing market, it expanded way higher. Pets.com or like the dot-com bubble. Yeah, well, that's not the real value of it, and when it pops, it causes disruption, it causes pain, it causes losses, but... A healthy economy adapts and reprioritizes the, you know, the resources in a meaningful way. It shouldn't be, like, you know, it might cause, like, a dip or a tiny recession or whatever, but it shouldn't, you know, completely, you know, tip-size an economy.

I don't think it will. Yeah, and funny, I didn't use this for my good news, but I could have, basically. So, new technology, people are having to reconcile with how to use it and where its place is, and the most popular class in terms of increase of enrollment was actually a humanities class at Harvard. The headline is, the brutal Harvard class that suddenly everyone wants to take. An ungodly amount of reading and no easy A. Why are freshmen lining up to get into humanities 10?

It's the only class I took at Harvard where people would call each other out for not having done the reading. Yeah. Applications, essays required. Which is not saying a lot about Harvard. No, no, no, no, but this is like every college, or even like personally, people are going through this, of you see how little friction there is to generating information on a subject, and I still think there's that desire within.

Some people, hopefully, to really deeply grapple with ideas and text, and this is a small leading indicator that My hot take on all this is I think it's actually been really good to expose a lot of the bloat and complacency of education at just about every level, because you realize how much of this is just kind of a monkey game, where you're like, okay, you spit back this, and that's good enough for a grade. And because it's easy for the teacher, it's easy for the student, and then it's easy to kind of rubber stamp and keep you moving, but rarely does it actually require a serious education.

And so now it's like, oh, because it's so transactional, the only thing, basically, at this point, is to just ban all of it from a classroom and to just have physical paper again. I'm like, I think that's actually a big positive that we'll hopefully see more of.

Or maybe it's completely the opposite. I'm completely wrong. I don't know. I saw these things. I'm like, dude, I send this stuff out there. I'm like, who knows? Real education is a luxury good. Totally. Yeah, not a given at all. So, okay, we end now with a prayer. Thank you for joining the show today. Again, we'll get that interview with John Doyle up before Monday. I got to talk to Selene about when we can get that up, but I'm really looking forward to getting into the mind of the young right-wing Zoomer.

So, we'll end with, it's the Feast of St. Simon and Jude. In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Most holy apostle, St. Jude, faithful servant and friend of Jesus, the church honors and invokes you universally as the patron of difficult cases, of things most despaired of. Pray for me. I am so helpless and alone.

Intercede with God for me that he may bring visible and speedy help where help is almost despaired of. Come to my assistance in my great need that I may receive the consolation and help of heaven and all my necessities, tribulations, and sufferings. May I praise God with you and all the saints forever. I promise, O blessed St. Jude, to be mindful of this great favor granted for me by God and to always honor you as my special and powerful patron and to universally encourage devotion to you.

Amen. St. Thomas, St. Fidelis, Our Lady of Guadalupe, pray for us. If I can encourage, you know, it feels heavy right now. I think there's a lot of spiritual warfare going on right now. Say some extra prayers. Lock in, and we'll see you all for our extra content. Catch an episode of The Deke tomorrow. Go watch an episode about cheese if you need to be cheered up, and we'll see you guys ready to rock on Tuesday, live. Peace.