Tim Pool reports President Trump announced a ceasefire with Iran after Pakistani leaders secured the Strait of Hormuz, while Pentagon officials claim Iranian capabilities were decimated. The episode critiques mainstream media fabrications regarding regime change and covers Anthropic withholding the "Claude Mythos" AI model due to security risks. It details a California Senate hearing where survivor Johnny Skinner testified against conversion therapy following puberty blocker use, alongside Timothy Gordon's argument that historical popes were flawed figures, challenging modern Catholic narratives. Ultimately, the show suggests geopolitical shifts and cultural debates are reshaping global stability and societal norms. [Automatically generated summary]
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Look, when they first reached out, I was like, yeah, sure.
So I know we were all expecting all hell to break loose across Iran last night at 8 p.m., but it did not happen.
Around what was it, maybe 6 30.
Yeah, 6 32.
That's right.
At 6 32, President Trump released a truth social post, which is, of course, his primary way of communicating with all of us out here in television land or whatever.
But he said, based on conversations with Prime Minister Shahbaz Sharif and Field Marshal Amin Asim Munir of Pakistan, and wherein they requested that I hold off the destructive force being sent tonight to Iran and subject the Islamic Republic of Iran, agreeing to the complete, immediate, and safe opening of the Strait of Hormuz.
I agree to suspend the bombing and attack of Iran for a period of two weeks.
Two weeks, everyone, until perhaps there is further destruction.
We will have to see what happens.
But this was very exciting.
And it made me realize that when President Trump is saying things like, you know, open the effing straight, you crazy bastards, he's really not talking to us.
He's not talking to the American people.
He's not talking to the American media.
He is talking to our adversaries overseas.
He's talking to the leaders in Iran, what's left of them.
And that is what he is doing.
It was really wild yesterday, if you tuned into any of the lamestream media, as Trump would say, to see what the Democrats were saying, to see what the New York Times and everybody else was saying.
They were all demanding that he get removed, 25th Amendment.
They were all saying, you know, get him out of office.
He's totally deranged.
He's out of control.
This is not the way you speak to anybody.
You can't launch nukes.
Everyone went nuts, hair on fire.
And what was great about that is that they were all proved wrong.
And then last night, as soon as Trump says, okay, ceasefire, right?
He says, this will be a double sided ceasefire.
The reason for doing so is that we have already met and exceeded all military objectives and are very far along with a definitive agreement concerning long term peace with Iran and peace in the Middle East.
As soon as he said all this stuff, they started saying that he reneged, that he chickened out.
You know, they did that taco thing.
Trump always chickens out.
And that's not, that's really not what happened here at all.
This was a lot of diplomacy.
This was a lot of the way that Trump deals with adversaries, enemies of the United States.
He handled it in the way that he always handles it, which is in a way that surprises everyone.
I was surprised and glad, you know, yesterday we were looking around the post millennial and we were all sort of looking, what is the blast radius of a nuclear bomb if it hits DC or New York City or Los Angeles, you know, checking out to see if we would be in the fallout?
Because that's what you do when you start seeing.
Potential nuclear holocaust going back and forth, but yeah, it's not happening.
Um, Pete Hegseth was out this morning, he gave a press conference at 8 a.m. from the Pentagon, along with Secretary of the Joint or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Dan Kane.
And they had a lot to say about what went on here, and we can get into some of that for sure.
But in the meantime, President Trump had said that there was a 10 point plan that he'd agreed to with Iran, and CNN went ahead and released what they believed was a plan.
And it turned out to be fake news.
So this was really fun.
I always like when CNN gets a little tripped up because they're so cocky about everything, you know?
He said the alleged statement put out by CNN World News is a fraud.
As CNN well knows, the false statement was linked to a fake news site from Nigeria.
And of course, immediately picked up by CNN and blared out as a legitimate headline.
The official statement by Iran was just released and posted on Truth.
Authorities are looking to determine whether or not a crime was committed on the issuance of the fake CNN World statement.
Or was it a sick rogue player?
CNN is ordered to immediately withdraw this statement with full apologies for their, as usual, terrible reporting.
Results of the investigation will be announced in the near future.
No one can believe that fake news CNN put out a knowingly false and dangerous statement, pretending it came from upper levels of the Iranian government.
It was totally made up and posted as a headline for purposes of perhaps inflaming a very delicate situation.
It was a new and troubling, troublemaking site.
From Nigeria and CNN just got cheating.
And then we can see their apology.
It's not really an apology.
They sort of more defended their sources and their reporting.
The statement in question was obtained by CNN from Iranian officials and reported on multiple Iranian state media outlets.
We received the statement from specific official Iranian spokespeople who are known to us.
But that is not, it wasn't the statement.
So here's the statement from the, The Iranian Republic of Iran.
On behalf, and this comes from Aragachi, the Minister, Aragachi, he's not Japanese.
Aragachi, Minister of Foreign Affairs, who's also made headlines since the war began.
He said some other things.
On behalf of the Islamic Republic of Iran, I express gratitude and appreciation for my dear brothers, the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Sharif H.E. What is that?
Anyways, Field Marshal Menlier for their tireless efforts to end the war in the region.
In response to the brotherly request of PM Sharif in his tweet, and considering the request by the U.S. for negotiations based on its 15 point proposal, as well as announcement by the President of the United States about acceptance of the general framework of Iran's 10 point proposal as a basis for negotiations, I hereby declare on behalf of Iran's Supreme National Security Council if attacks against Iran are halted, our powerful armed forces will cease their defensive operations.
For a period of two weeks, safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz will be possible via coordination with Iran's armed forces and with due consideration of technical limitations.
So we'll see what happens.
You know, is Iran going to pay the price?
Is Trump going to sue them like he's sued so many other mainstream media outlets?
You know, we'll see.
Who knows?
Who has time, you know, when you're in the middle of a two week ceasefire waiting to see what happens?
But over at the Postmillennial, we did watch the press conference this morning.
Command, CENTCOM, using less than 10% of America's total combat power.
Dismantled one of the world's largest militaries.
The world's leading state sponsor of terrorism proved utterly incapable of defending itself, its people, or its territory.
We untied just a fraction of our strength, and Iran suffered a devastating military defeat.
Together with our Israeli partners, America's military achieved every single objective on plan, on schedule, exactly as laid out from day one.
Iran's Navy.
Is at the bottom of the sea, whether it's the Soleimani class, their frigate class, their prized drone aircraft carriers, submarines, mine layers, sunk.
Iran's Air Force has been wiped out.
Iran no longer has an air defense, any sort of a comprehensive air defense system.
We own their skies.
Their missile program is functionally destroyed.
Launchers, production facilities, and existing stockpiles depleted and decimated.
So what you also had this morning were outlets like the New York Times saying that the president's objectives and the Pentagon's objectives were not actually achieved in Iran because they have pegged those objectives to regime change in the nation.
And they say that the regime has not changed.
The IRGC is still in power, which it's been in power since, what, like the late 70s, since the Iranian revolution.
So they're saying that because of that, that means that the regime change war was not successful.
But if you recall, the original four points.
Were no nukes for Iran, eradicating their ability to have political power outside of their own borders.
And there were two others, guys, neither of which was regime change.
One of them was destruction of their navy, and the other one was preventing their missile programs from going forward.
I believe those were the four.
Now, you've heard Rubio and others say at different times, you know, various things, but at no point have they indicated specifically that regime change was one of the objectives.
Early on, you did have Trump say, Hey, Iranian people, get out into the streets.
This is your best chance to overthrow the government.
But that was more a message to the people of Iran as opposed to an indication of exactly what the objective was.
Perhaps, you know, the New York Times would disagree with me on that.
I'm sure they would.
And I'm sure they think they're very smart.
But that's not what Trump said.
And we also have this next video from this morning about the factories, if we can listen to this one as well.
What little they have left buried in bunkers is all they will have.
They can still shoot, we know that.
Their command and control is so decimated they can't really talk and coordinate, so they still may shoot here and there, but that would be very, very unwise.
But they can no longer build missiles, build rockets, build launchers, or build UAVs.
Their factories have been razed to the ground, set back in historic fashion.
You see, had Iran refused our terms, the next targets would have been their power plants, their bridges, and oil and energy infrastructure.
Targets they could not defend and could not realistically rebuild.
It would have taken them decades, and we were locked and loaded.
They couldn't defend against it.
President Trump had the power to cripple Iran's entire economy in minutes, but he chose mercy.
So that is essentially what Trump had been threatening when he said, Open the effing straight, you crazy bastards, which that's got to be in a film someday at some point because it was really pretty wild.
But that's what he was threatening the destruction of their power plants, bridges, infrastructure, all things like that.
And that is what was spared of Iran.
If we remember, wasn't it just yesterday Trump said, We're going to completely end Iran, we're going to send them back.
To the Stone Age, destroy their entire civilization.
That's, I think, what has been avoided here with this two week ceasefire.
There was an interesting question as well that I think we should check out.
If we can play this as well, Pete Hegseth says, We're sticking around.
We're going to make sure Iran complies with this ceasefire and then ultimately comes to the table and makes a deal.
So we'll stay put, stay ready, stay vigilant, as the chairman laid out.
Our troops are prepared to defend, prepared to go on offense, prepared to restart at a moment's notice with whatever target package would be needed in order to ensure that Iran complies.
As far as the Strait, you saw the initial agreement that was struck, which is Iran's letting ships go through.
So that will be happening.
They will be sailing.
And ultimately, as the President, we've done an incredible job militarily inside the Strait of Hormuz.
I failed to mention Admiral Cooper's name.
He's done a phenomenal job along with everybody at AFSENT and AFSENT and ARSENT and all the components down there laying the groundwork for Iran.
Iran doesn't have the same ability to defend it the way they did before.
And so as the president has pointed out to the rest of the world, we barely get any of our energy out of the street, just a tiny fraction.
It's time for the rest of the world to step up and ensure that that stays open after President Trump and the War Department brought Iran to the place where they are voluntarily opening it right now.
I'm going to put on my glasses, guys, and see if I can read from the big screen over there.
Late last month, apparent leaks revealed that an as yet unreleased product from Anthropic called Mythos was by far the most powerful AI model we've ever developed.
And it was hard to ignore the fact that this whole situation plays right into the classic AI company playbook of talking up the dangers of a model to highlight how powerful and capable it is.
So, this was pretty interesting.
And I think what happened is they decided to not release it, the Claude Mythos preview.
They decided not to release it to the public.
But I think what they said was, if I'm recalling, because I didn't, I was listening to a podcast about it.
So I didn't see exactly if this was in this article.
Claude Mythos preview will soon be accessible to one degree or another, but only to a group of partner companies like Amazon Web Services, Apple, Google. JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, and Nvidia, who are meant to use the model to locate security vulnerabilities in software and design patches.
So that's kind of fascinating, right?
They developed this thing that they can't release, but they're giving it to massive companies so that those companies can try and protect themselves against it.
One wonders if once those companies have protected themselves against this massively overly powerful AI tool, the rest of us with websites will just be subject to the whims of Claude Mythos Preview or to, you know, getting.
Our security vulnerabilities exploited.
We'll have to see what happens there.
But these things are being developed and they're being developed quicker and more powerfully than even the AI companies are aware, I think, of what they're doing.
And that's something that is worrying to me.
And I know it's worrying to a lot of people.
There was another thing a victim's attorney claims ChatGPT aided accused Florida state gunmen in planning a shooting.
Attorneys for Robert Morales plan to file a lawsuit against the AI chatbot and allege that the Leon County Sheriff's Office may also be liable for Phoenix Ickner's actions.
This was coming out of Tallahassee, Florida.
One of the victims killed on Florida State University's campus nearly a year ago plans to file the lawsuit claiming the suspected gunman had constant communication with the AI chatbot before the shooting.
Morales was one of two victims who died in that shooting.
And another man lost his life as well.
A statement sent to WCTV Monday morning said from the attorneys representing the victim's family said that ChatGPT may have advised the shooter on how to commit these heinous crimes.
We've been advised that the shooter was in constant communication with ChatGPT leading up to the shooting.
We also have reason to believe that ChatGPT may have advised the shooter how to commit these heinous crimes.
We will therefore file suit against ChatGPT and its ownership structure very soon and will seek to hold them accountable for the untimely and senseless death.
Of our client, Ryan, Mr. Morales.
So, what's interesting about that is we've seen a number of lawsuits come out against AI companies for those companies' involvement in people choosing to in their own lives.
Tragically, parents have brought these suits saying, Hey, you encouraged my kid to do this horrifying thing.
There's no turning around from this.
What are you going to do about it?
And we've seen also lawsuits against Meta and Google and YouTube in California and New Mexico.
So, All of these companies are starting to be held accountable for these massively powerful tools that they have created that have huge impacts on our lives and have, you know, the power over people who don't have very strong minds, I guess.
I mean, how do you let an AI tell you what to do?
I find that sort of odd that that can happen, but I think it can happen.
I think it has happened.
And I guess we'll see what happens with this lawsuit.
There are other lawsuits that are still.
Moving through the courts.
And I think it's really important to keep an eye on this.
And you start to wonder what these companies are going to do, and if perhaps these lawsuits are part of the reason that Anthropic decided not to release its giantly powerful AI model at this time.
There's also been fallout in other directions with the AI infrastructure that's going in.
There was a data center that was being proposed to be built in Indiana.
An Indianapolis city councilor voted.
For the data center to go in, a lot of people think, Great, this is jobs.
Most of the jobs, though, are really just up front in creating the data center, and then they don't really need that many people to run it.
It's just a huge suck on power.
So that's something.
But Indianapolis City Councilor, City County Councilor Ron Gibson said that a note reading No Data Centers was left at his door when his home was shot up over a dozen times on Monday with a sign reading No Data Centers being left behind at the scene.
This is from Hannah Nightingale over at the Post Millennial.
Indianapolis Metropolitan Police said that officers were called to the East 41st Street home of Indianapolis City County Counselor Ron Gibson at 9 a.m. on Monday for reports of shots fired.
The shooting had occurred at about 12 45 a.m.
So, whether the AI companies are exploiting massive security vulnerabilities or inciting people to cause violence to themselves or others, or simply creating data centers that get people's homes shot up, There's a lot going on in that space.
Over in California, this is something that is really important to watch.
So, Senator Scott Weiner is a state senator in California.
He's from Northern California.
He's running, I think, for Nancy Pelosi's seat right now in Congress.
He's a huge proponent of trans stuff, transing minors, anti conversion bill.
And also, he often takes part in the Folsom Street Fair.
Where they have pee pools where grown men can pee on each other in public.
So that's Scott Weiner.
Anyways, he held this hearing yesterday in a committee of the California State Senate where he was saying to his colleagues that there should definitely continue to be a ban on so called conversion therapy in California.
The Supreme Court just ruled against a ban on conversion therapy that came out of Colorado, saying that it violates the First Amendment rights of a therapist who is saying, hey, maybe.
You're not actually a lady, Nathaniel.
You know, it's okay.
You could grow up.
It's all right.
So Scott Weiner heard from a man who was transitioned as a young person.
And you can look at him squirm.
And I think we also have the video of Johnny Skinner, who was representing Genspect.
But I'd like to see the one where Scott Weiner looked incredibly uncomfortable.
So let's play that.
unidentified
When I was young, I was a feminine child and I discovered trans influencers online.
They said, change your body and your life gets better.
Don't and it gets worse.
Or, as my doctors told my mom, I would commit suicide.
The medical and mental health providers didn't bother to ask why I felt the way I did.
They poisoned my body with blockers and hormones, arresting my puberty and messing with my development.
The result I'm a 23 year old gay man who's never had an orgasm and may never experience one.
Let that sink in.
I was rendered an orgasmic because once you say you could be trans, that's it.
Full stop, no exploration as to why is allowed, even if you are a struggling kid.
The former president of WPath, Dr. Marcy Bowers, a California surgeon who had performed the surgery for Jazz Jennings at 17, admitted on video that puberty blockers followed by cross sex hormones result in no orgasms and stunted genitals.
SB 934 guarantees that more people will end up like me, the walking but wounded.
I could have been spared all of this if any of my therapists would have explored why I felt dysphoric, but they never did.
They only led me to hate my body more.
The Supreme Court just ruled in a rare bipartisan decision that laws like this are unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.
This bill is an attempted workaround that will be used to silence therapists who could have helped me avoid the irreversible harms to my body and the loss of my sexual function, as is the same for many others.
So today I ask you to extend some empathy to survivors like me and vote no for this bill.
So Johnny Skinner testified, as we saw right there, and his testimony was so excruciating.
For the other members of the committee, that they started asking Scott Wiener questions after what he said about never having had an orgasm and never being able to have an orgasm, which is really quite a wild thing.
Now, Scott Wiener then tried to obfuscate and said, No, what I'm saying is that if you come into the office saying you're a woman, then a therapist can't tell you that she's going to turn you into a man.
That's what he said.
He obfuscated all of the details.
He really managed to.
Confuse these older women, these state senators who've probably been in office for a very long time and don't really understand what they're dealing with.
So I hope that if you're in California, you keep pressure on your state senators to make sure that kids aren't forcibly trans, essentially, because therapists can't tell them that it's okay to just grow up how they are.
I went back into the archives.
I found the tape of Marcy Bowers saying that, you know, saying that.
If you go on puberty blockers at Tanner stage two of development and then on to cross sex hormones, you will never orgasm.
So we can check that out.
This is from, I think, the first one.
unidentified
That was an observation that I had that every single child or adolescent who was truly blocked at Tanner stage two has never experienced orgasm.
I mean, it's really about zero.
These are the, of course, these are just assigned male at birth, so trans feminine.
And it's because they never in their lives are exposed to testosterone.
So, this is Marcy Bowers, who is trans, who headed up the World Professional Association of Transgender Health, saying outright that boys who do this never have an orgasm.
They never have a functioning sex life.
We know that a functioning sex life is important for things like, I don't know, romantic relationships, having children, being happy in your life.
So, they've known this for a long time and they've let this go on anyway.
And they let boys like Johnny Skinner be.
Mutilated, he's certainly not the only one.
And if Scott Weiner has his way, he definitely won't be the last one either.
You can check out my Twitter.
I don't want to take all the time for it right now, but I have a bunch of videos showing exactly what went down in the state Senate and how confused these older ladies are as to what is actually being proposed.
They thought they knew what this bill was about.
They thought they knew, okay, you know, it's fine to be gay.
So if you go to your therapist, your therapist can't tell you, hey, don't be gay.
Right?
Like, and we're going to punish you if you're gay.
That's what they figured they were voting for.
They don't understand that trans and homosexuality have been so inextricably linked that they are perceived as the same thing.
They are legislated the same way.
It's kind of like how abortion and trans are legislated the same way because the progressives really try and put these two things together so that if you vote for one, you're voting for the other.
But yeah, you could go to Libby, L I B B Y Emmons on Twitter and check out all of those videos.
This was an interesting story that we had out.
The Department of Education rescinds Title IV agreements and federal enforcement of gender identity policies.
So, this was from Ari Hoffman over at the Post Millennial.
The U.S. Department of Education announced that its Office for Civil Rights have rescinded part of six Title IV resolution agreements negotiated under previous administrations, saying the changes remove what it described as unlawful and burdensome requirements on schools regarding gender ideology.
So, under the Obama and Biden administrations, the Education Department interpreted Title for the 1972 law prohibiting sex based discrimination in federally funded education programs to include discrimination based on gender identity.
So, this meant that anywhere you saw, you know, sex in the Civil Rights Act, what the Biden and Obama administrations interpreted that as is gender identity as well.
So, that is gone.
That is great.
I hope it never comes back.
I hope the Department of Education manages to keep that.
Intact.
The move at the department said it will no longer play any role in enforcing the agreements and it has rescinded portions of those agreements previously overseen by the Office for Civil Rights, which we know is headed up.
We have civil rights attorney Harmeet Dillon on the case.
And just real quickly, the defense is trying to delay the preliminary hearing.
The Utah County Prosecutor's Office has fired back, saying, We actually gave you everything in terms of discovery months and months ago.
So you have that.
Go ahead and get on it.
And now it turns out that the Tyler Robinson's defense team looks to be bringing in an expert witness who is one of the Who is an expert in changing venues?
So it looks like their next move will be to try and get this case moved out of Utah County, even after they tried to get the entire Utah County prosecutor's office dismissed from the case.
So, with that in mind, and I encourage you to go check out those stories, we're following that very closely.
We have a guest, Tim Gordon, who I'm very happy to welcome to the show.
Well, I'm a YouTuber, I'm an author, Catholic philosopher, and I'm really, really excited to be named in this new article that Thomas Reese SJ, SJ, it's a Jesuit named in this article.
Tweet this morning that's making a big wave.
He says a wave of new Catholics is coming this Easter, not all for the right reasons.
And he cites a religionnews.com article that everyone's talking about, saying basically that myself and Nick Fuentes and my friend Mike Pantile are getting straight men to come back into the Roman Catholic Church.
So I'm very proud about what's going on in my church and whatever humble contributions I've made toward it.
About 125 years ago, the SJs were one of the noblest institutions, actually, immediately after the Protestant Reformation.
With all due respect, they were some of the shrewdest Protestant fighters and were a really, really sharp intellectual blade for the Roman Catholic Church for 250 years.
And then they fell in and out of being censured by the Pope.
And about 125 years ago, right around the turn of the century, they got infiltrated.
And they've been a force for liberalizing Christianity ever since then.
And so, when there's a mass ingress into the church, which I guess I represent along with Nick Fuentes and my friend Mike Pentile, of straight white young men that take things quite seriously, we're known as Western civilization builders for taking things quite seriously.
When there's a huge influx of straight men who aren't the biggest fans of people like the SJs.
Then, perspectively, that's a bad thing for them.
But for everybody else, it's a big win for the church and for young straight women in the church who have been kind of alone populating the pews.
So, I also saw something in the Washington Post recently, and they were saying that people were flocking back to the Catholic Church, but really it was because they were in search of truth, beauty, and girlfriends.
And my first thought was, what's.
What's wrong with that?
Like the girls at church need boyfriends for sure.
I mean, they want to get married, they want to have kids.
And we've definitely got a lock on truth and beauty.
What is this pushback about against having young people come back to church?
Is it really about church or is there something bigger at play?
That these threatened left cats who don't really believe the faith, they've just used this their own personal fun boys club for the last 60 years since the Second Vatican Council.
They don't want all the straights filtering back in, like we just talked about.
And so they're saying essentially that all of these straight converts in particularly America, but also other countries in Western Europe.
They're doing it by placing second things first, like just getting a girlfriend.
And of course, they make this passing reference to truth, beauty, and goodness, the three transcendentals in Plato and then Aristotle and the Catholic patristics and scholastics.
And they substituted the G girlfriends for goodness.
Not that clever, bit of alliteration.
But yeah, as long as you're putting second things second, and first things first would be you know, you're there for truth, beauty, goodness.
But you also want to get a high quality girlfriend of your same faith, you know, you're univocal with your future wife, you want to have the same faith, then there's nothing wrong with it.
So you're absolutely correct there.
But they're clutching at straws because remember, these are old dinosaur boomers that said that, assumed that around the Second Vatican Council that young people wanted monkeys' music with tambourines and they wanted beer and pizza masses, which are.
Obviously, not the proper species for our Lord's body, blood, soul, divinity.
And they thought that it would be really groovy and people would go for it because young people in the 60s and 70s, evidently judging by the boomers, were the biggest dumb shits ever to populate a few anywhere in or out of a church.
And they're just wrong.
Young people now are like, bro, like GTFL, we're here.
For church, we're not trying to listen to the Beatles music inside or outside of the church, and we're just here to listen to some Latin chant and mainly to receive our Lord's body, blood, soul, divinity in the Eucharist.
And that makes them really mad.
So, when people like me are bringing other young people into the church, I guess I'm not really young anymore, but bringing younger people into the church, they get really offended actually that people are coming into the church for the right reason.
And of course, they project these left caps.
And they accuse the incomers and maybe the influencers who influence the incomers of precisely what they, the left caths, are doing, which is placing second things first, you know, using the church for a private meet and greet for your gay fun boys club.
Uh, that's not what they're saying everyone's doing, they're just saying it's the straight version, okay?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting, but um, I remember when I was a kid, it was definitely much more of the hippie vibes at church, there was this uh.
There was the acoustic little band, and there was all of that kind of stuff.
And the music was just, it wasn't great music.
And now, the church I go to, the music is in Latin.
It's not all Latin, which is good for me because I don't speak Latin.
So I appreciate the vernacular.
But you have old church music, the classic stuff, big stained glass windows, glorious arches, all of the accoutrements.
You have the, what is it?
There's incense, there's bells, there's all the things that were missing.
From other churches that I have been to over the years.
And it's the kind of church where it does do the thing.
It lifts your spirit closer to God, which is, I think, one of the things that Catholic churches do so well.
Catholic churches say, you know, being at Mass, once we dispense with the readings and the homily, which is great, but then it says essentially be done with your reason for a little bit.
You know, focus on faith, focus on being closer to God, focus on prayer.
And that's one of the things that I. Really like about this resurgence in faith that we've seen, and it does seem to be part of a broader movement toward bringing Christianity back into the forefront of a lot of our lives.
Why do you think young people are flocking to church?
We saw a big increase what was it, 38% over Easter weekend of coming back to church at my church.
There were people who had gone through the whole, you know, when you do the adult confirmation and you can do it like you could fast track it over Lent.
There were people doing that over Lent.
There were people, lots of people getting baptized for the first time, really coming to embrace this faith.
Other generations seem to be square with what Aristotle called the function argument.
The function argument is the best version of a thing is the thing that does its Ergon or its job the most fully.
So you can use a hammer as a wrench or a wrench as a hammer, but a hammer wants to be a hammer and a wrench wants to be a wrench, and they maximize efficiency when they do what they were created to do.
And that's precisely what everyone seems to get, aside from the boomer generation, you know, the baby boomers and the little generation everyone forgets to shit on enough, which is actually what I call the boomer babies, the Gen X, then little generation immediately after them, who basically just followed.
The boomers and all of their asinine, topsy turvy presuppositions about the world.
And everyone else wants the body, blood, soul, divinity of Jesus in this 2,000 plus year old patrimony, you know, the church, to look as much and sound and feel as much as it did when it was new.
You know, when, you know, the Last Supper, Holy Thursday, when our Lord broke bread.
And consummated wine and consecrated the entire meal to all of humanity and posterity as himself, his body, blood, soul, divinity.
Everybody else wants to actually recapture that and to go to church, which is a, you know, go to mass, that is to say, as a bloodless sacrifice every Sunday and every Ember Day and every Holy Day of Obligation in as authentic a way as early Christians did.
And the only people that thought that that would be cool is the boomers.
And again, it makes sense that folks want to be a thing the most authentically what it is.
And that's really all this is.
When Christianity, start there a little more generically, is being scientifically proven.
I mean, there's, I don't know if you're on Twitter, but there's everywhere scientists say breakthrough light experiment proves Jesus' resurrection.
For the first time ever, probably in human history, you have scientists saying that this light experiment proves not only that the Shroud of Turin was not a fake, which Jewish scientists in 1988 kind of falsified that it was fake, but now they're saying the resurrection's real.
Then people go, okay, well, I need Christianity.
And consistent with what I'm saying about the argument by design, The function argument.
People want the truest, oldest, most authentic version of Christianity.
And you can chat GPT this.
You could say, well, what's the oldest church, Christian church, that goes all the way back to Jesus?
And even chat GPT knows it's Roman Catholicism.
It's the one that goes all the way back.
Each bishop today stands in the shoes of one of the 12 original apostles.
So everyone but Boomers and Gen X got that.
And it makes a lot of sense that they do and that they would.
Millennials are about half half, kind of divided partly that way.
I mean, I'm a millennial, divided partly that way and partly north of the line, partly south of the line.
But millennials were the generation that started.
Bringing this all back.
Millennials were the ones that really got, you know, a little self hat tip, got, helped to get the resurgence in traditional faith in Roman Catholicism, preconciliar worship, preconciliar liturgy, preconciliar chant, popularized again over the last eight years.
And that's really the way back to Rome, is to Rome's truest self, her preconciliar liturgy, you know, the Mass of the Ages.
That really went great.
You got NFL players appearing in documentaries about the mass of the ages.
That's what really got all of this started.
So I would just say, yeah, sorry for those two generations.
I know lots of good denizens of Gen X, and I won't say lots, but a few good denizens of the boomers.
But other than that, everyone else is sort of just flocking back to the truth because life is very short and people just, People want the truth, especially when the truth is a person who actually can save them through the seven sacraments in particular.
I fell away from the faith in like fourth grade because of, I was in Catholic school.
My parents were not hippies by any means.
My dad came into the church when I was in fourth grade, but it was around the time I fell away.
I just saw the conciliar mass.
The conciliar paucity of austerity, complete lack of reverence for the Eucharist.
And I was like, look, if the adults in the room aren't even taking this seriously, you got all these church dames like handling it and kind of handling it like it's if it's a turd or something and passing it out.
And supposedly only the priest has consecrated hands for this.
I just don't believe.
And then half the time you go into confession and the priest would tell you you're being too literalist and that we don't do this anymore if you tried to confess any grave sins.
And I just remember by my confirmation, well before my confirmation, not really believing until I learned about the traditions of the church.
I learned about Fatima that always kept me sort of hanging on at the red and came back in my late 20s.
I think it's good to do it anyway, honestly, because then when you come back to faith, It's not quite so foreign.
You don't have to jump through quite so many hoops to get there, to get back to mass.
You know, interestingly, so you were talking about how the boomers and the Gen X basically had fallen away from faith.
I think it's, you know, I give a lot of thought to the notion that prior to, I want to say, you know, prior to like the 80s or the 90s, even, Christianity was the water that we were swimming in in America, right?
You could not look at our culture and say, Oh, you know, these are not Christian values.
Our entire culture was founded on Christian values.
The way that we interacted with each other in a civil setting was primarily Christian values.
And then that really all started to fall away.
So it's almost like, and you even see now, you'll see like, I forget the guy's name.
I think it's a British guy, and his name is Tom Holland.
But he was talking about how he's essentially an atheist, but a Christian atheist.
I think I'm thinking of the right guy.
And he was saying that a society founded on Christian values and a life founded on Christian values is the appropriate way to live, whether or not you accept Jesus Christ and whether or not you have, you know, faith in the Holy Trinity.
Something happened where we lost our foundational values as a society, meaning that if you wanted access to those values at all, you had to go find it yourself.
You know, like kids aren't given.
A lot of times kids aren't.
I grew up in the church.
I, you know, my stepmother raised me as a Catholic once I turned seven.
And she was like, What?
You've never been baptized?
That's crazy.
Like, we have to get on this.
So, but kids grow up without religion entirely and they don't even know about it.
I remember talking to a member of my family who asked me, We were, this was ages ago.
This was like in the, I don't know, 90s or 2000s or something.
But he said, What does this song mean?
And it was an Alonis Morissette song where she sings, That's my cross to bear.
And I was like, what does what mean?
He's like, my cross to bear, what does that mean?
And I was like, oh, well, I have to explain to you the entirety of Jesus Christ and Christianity.
And he goes, oh, that's who Jesus is?
And I was like, yeah, yeah, that's Jesus.
And this was a millennial, you know, who was raised completely without any understanding even of what religion was, other than sort of the, you know, notion that it's not intellectual and it's not worth our time.
But Do you think that the people who are coming back to faith are specifically interested in having a foundational, a life that is founded in these kinds of actual values?
And I would be real careful about distinctions, contradistinctions, like faith and reason, because part of the rich, perennial philosophy that constitutes Roman Catholicism is.
Fides et ratio, they go together.
It's not faith versus reason, it's fides et ratio.
And this is such a rich fabric in the wider textile of our tradition, if you will, because our faith was Hellenized.
And what Hellenized means is basically Greek, especially Aristotelianized, Greek philosophized.
Lots of moral theologians and Catholic philosophers now basically believe that Aristotle, the pagan Greek, was through providence.
In place, basically, you know, three to four centuries before Christ, because he was readying the way for those Gentiles that later St. Paul would evangelize in place of the Jews.
When the Jews said no to Jesus and then St. Paul, the Gentiles would be brought in, and it was really the Greeks who had that Aristotelian tradition that it would mean so much to them, and they would really go on and Catholicize the world.
So, when you ask, well, how was this undone?
Pope Benedict XVI, who was maybe ultimately not as brave a traditionalist fighter as we'd hoped, but he was a great scholar, he says in a short document called the Regensburg Address that what's happened to the West, the de Christianization of it, happened in three waves of de Hellenization, specifically three waves.
And it was the first de Aristotelianization of the faith.
And it was the first wave was.
The Protestant Reformation.
Luther famously said Aristotle's the buffoon who ruined Christianity.
Just as Aristotle was before Christ.
Second wave was liberal Protestant theology.
There's a guy that he cites called Adolf von Harnack who says, We shouldn't accept Christ as the God man, but I call myself a Christian because Christ had the best manners.
So much like Tom Holland would repeat that later.
That's the second wave of de-Hellenization.
And the third wave was cultural pluralism, where you use that idiotic line.
There are 10,000 world religions.
How do you know you have the correct one?
It's a one in 10,000.
That's what cultural pluralism does to a young mind.
It rots it out.
Those were the three waves of de-Hellenization.
And they achieve, if it's not a shrewd mind, a number of things at once.
But basically, they make less plausible the claim that Christianity has to being 100% just the only correct faith.
First off, there are only really three monotheisms.
Two of them are patently false or stymied.
Judaism got stymied.
Islam was false.
So there's only one fully true Christian religion that carried on into the present, you know, and in 70 AD, the Second Temple fell.
So that kind of rules out Judaism.
And so it's not one out of 10,000, your odds of being raised correctly if you're raised Catholic.
It's more like one out of one.
There's really only one plausible monotheism, and it's Christianity.
But once people no longer believe that, You know, because the faith was de-hellenized and faith was uncoupled from reason, then all of a sudden, during the 90s and the early aughts, folks had a really hard time because they were buying into the brainwash that faith and reason were, in fact, opposed to each other, which is the main mark of a de-hellenized version of Christianity and a de-hellenized world.
No, in a properly intellectually loaded up Roman Catholicism.
What do you say to critics of, what do you say to people who say it's not right to criticize the Pope?
There was certainly among conservative Catholics, there was a lot of pushback against Francis, and now there's pushback against Leo to a certain extent.
And you've seen that article we were talking about earlier talks about how, you know, it's a problem to go around criticizing the Pope.
And what do you make of that?
Do you think that there's a place for critique of the Papal Father, or is that somehow a problem?
On the interweb on Catholic commentary, was with Dr. Taylor Marshall.
We were critiquing Pope Francis and we were recalling for everybody who's out there, Catholic and non Catholic, Canon 212, which encourages the faithful and even says it's a duty laying upon them at times to critique the prelates when the prelates are doing things that are way out of whack.
And number two, there was a long-ranning plot to overthrow the church from within.
As warned by the popes of the late 19th century, one of those popes, Gregory XVI, had intercepted this P2 document, Masonic document called the Permanent Instruction of the Alta Vendita.
And they said, look, this is what's coming.
Basically, Masonic cardinals are going to overrun the church and to give us a pope, basically, brainwash a pope that'll look a lot like Pope Francis.
And it's a totally ordinary part of Catholic history, it turns out.
So papal minimalism is the way you won't blackpill if you understand the Pope is very holy office.
40 of the first 49 guys lived up to the office, but more often than not, the man doesn't live up to the office and it's a mediocre or even a very bad man, and that does nothing to shake the faith.