Tate Brown and Wade Stotz dissect Pentagon plans for a Cuba operation, framing it as a strategic move to deter Russia and China while boosting midterm morale. They critique the conflict between Trump and Pope Francis over migrant contracts, alleging NGO trafficking ties, before analyzing how social media algorithms fuel "demoralization porn." The duo argues that political discourse has devolved into performative outrage, where audiences demand constant betrayal rather than recognizing legislative wins like the SAVE Act. Ultimately, they warn against becoming "beautiful losers" who prioritize emotional validation over tangible problem-solving, urging a shift from reactive rage to constructive engagement. [Automatically generated summary]
This is Tate Brown here holding it down, and I am back with you on this beautiful Thursday.
It's getting really nice, the weather around here.
I don't know what's going on.
The switch has been flipped.
Summer is here.
We've just blasted past spring.
It was like 90 degrees yesterday.
Actually, I had to take a phone call, and all the different spots around our campus were being utilized by different members of staff.
So I had to dip into the old, I don't know if you remember, like three or four months ago, I was streaming out of the old trailer that we used to film IRL out of.
And so I went in there to take a phone call.
And it was easily 110 degrees.
Like you just instantly start sweating, that sort of thing.
It was snowing like not that long ago.
So I don't know what's going on.
You know, is it DARPA?
Is that what it is where they, you know, control the weather?
Something's going on with the weather.
Someone is tampering with it.
I can, on good authority, you know, sources close to the situation have told me that the weather is being tampered with.
You know, I think all fingers, you know, clearly all signs point back to the state of Israel as they're engaged with their war with the Islamic State in Iran.
All things considered, we have some big stories for you today.
Massive.
I mean, you probably saw in the thumbnail the lead, obviously, a report came out at USA Today, I believe, was the ones that broke the story that the Pentagon is planning for a military operation in Cuba.
Now, we pointed out on IRL yesterday that the headline was a bit ambiguous, right?
It's saying the Pentagon is preparing for a potential military operation in Cuba.
And if you know anything about how the Pentagon works, they are planning for a potential operation in every country on planet Earth.
They have contingency plans for Any sort of military situation that may come their way.
But I'll get into it.
It's kind of obvious that Cuba's up next.
I think it's very clear.
I mean, if you read the NSS, the National Security Strategy, they clearly view the Trump administration clearly views the Western Hemisphere as just completely off limits for our global adversaries, right?
And Cuba is aligned with, again, our global adversaries.
So it makes total sense that they'd be next up on the chopping block.
I mean, they're literally right off our coast.
They're in our backyard.
So it makes total sense.
Trump, I think Trump is looking for a massive victory here, right?
He's looking for ways to cement his legacy in perpetuity.
And look, taking Cuba off the table, you know, being the president who finally sort of solves the Cuba dilemma, I think would, you know, easily, among all the other reasons that he cemented in the history books, I think that easily, you know, rests his case, so to speak.
So we have that story, obviously a big one.
We have a few other stories.
I'm going to try and get through that story fairly quickly because, you know, a couple people have been criticizing the show, saying I'm drilling down on the lead topic and I'm failing to.
Present an array of stories.
So, I have a few other stories that I'll get into.
There was this headline out of Britain where it was a poll and they pulled the British people on where they thought that the UK would rank in the list of states based off of income, right?
So, like, a Brit earning however many dollars, where do you think you would fall in the 50 states like we're on the list?
And I believe the headline was The British public guessed seventh place.
Turns out it's 51st place.
So, we're going to get into that story.
There's not too much to drill down on, but it's a little fun ribbing for our friends across the pond.
We also have the Pope just calling out again.
I don't know what's going on with that guy.
Actually, I do know.
I mean, it's been a pretty consistent trend for this Pope and the previous two.
Basically, just counter signal the Trump administration at any possible given opportunity.
And Trump is pushing back.
I mean, obviously, he went on Truth Social and ripped the Pope.
But beyond that, he's taking actually, he's putting his money where his mouth is.
He's saying, okay, well, the Pope's open borders, globalist, da We know.
I think even most Catholics would agree with that.
He's actually putting his money where his mouth is.
He went after a Catholic NGO.
It's just a racket.
We're providing care for migrant children in Florida.
I mean, we all know.
I mean, look, unless you're new here, I think we all know what that means.
So we're going to get into that story.
And we will be joined at halftime by the great Wade Stotz.
Now, if you're unfamiliar with Wade Stotz, you might recognize him because he's all over the timeline.
He's doing great work with Cannon Press, Doug Wilson's organization up in Idaho.
I think he was a former.
Former Crowder guy.
And he's been doing some insane monologues, some fantastic monologues, must watch content.
Tim has referenced him on the show multiple times.
We're hoping to get him out for IRL soon.
I think they'll be really cool.
But we're going to bring him in because I wanted to discuss a topic that he's hit on, that everyone's kind of hitting on, is that the Twitter algorithm is really just completely out of control.
No one is using Twitter, and very rarely are they actually sort of obtaining information, right?
Rarely are they obtaining useful, tangible information.
Information.
Typically, what's going on when people go on the timeline is they are just getting hit with an onslaught of demoralization porn.
They're getting hit with an onslaught of rage.
And I'm not pearl clutching over this.
That's not what I'm saying here.
And I'm not even saying that it's a particular thing, because I think every sort of wing, every sort of school of thought within the right wing, the online right right right now, is participating in the same racket.
I mean, you know me on the show, like I'm an immigration hawk.
Immigration is my primary issue.
Even within the immigration demographics discourse, It's just constant demoralization.
There's this one account, Radio Genoa.
He's kind of disappeared a little bit recently.
It seems like I don't know.
Maybe I muted him.
I don't remember.
But he will literally post these tweets, and it'll just be like a white woman walking around in an area with a lot of migrants.
And he just like, it's almost like he has a fetish of like, I don't want to get into it.
But I think you can put two together of what I'm trying to say there.
So, all across the board, all across Twitter, it's just gotten completely rancid.
And it's just the apps becoming very rapidly unusable.
And so I wanted to bring on Wade to see if he's seeing the same things that I am.
I know he's kind of talked about it at length previously, but we'll kind of break down what's going on.
We'll get to the bottom of that.
So we'll bring him in at halftime.
So before we get into everything, let's get into our first story for today.
It is the Cuba crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis 2.0, except there's no missiles this time.
It's just up for grabs.
We can just go and take it whenever we want.
This was from USA Today exclusive Pentagon ramps up planning for possible military operation in Cuba.
I'll read here again.
This is from USA Today.
Military planning for a possible Pentagon led operation in Cuba is quietly ramping up in case President Donald Trump gives an order to intervene there.
USA Today has learned.
Two sources familiar with the order spoke to USA Today on condition of anonymity because they're not authorized to speak to media.
So, Before we get into all of that, we got to break down what's going on here.
What's going on at this specific line here?
Okay, this immediately rings an alarm bell for me.
Because if you've been keeping up with the happenings at the Pentagon, there's two things that are simultaneously going on a lot of the Pentagon apparatchiks, guys that have worked in the Pentagon for a very long time, are being ejected, right?
We're seeing a clearing of house in the Department of War.
A lot of leaks have been plugged.
I think Pete Hexmeth has done a good job.
At plugging holes in the Pentagon as far as intel goes.
And the evidence for this was the Venezuela operation.
I mean, if you remember the Venezuela operation, no leaks, no nothing.
Everyone just woke up one day and we had toppled Maduro.
There wasn't a single outlet that caught wind of that and published something.
Now, I know, like, I think it was the New York Times or maybe the Washington Post came out and they were like, actually, we did receive intel, but, you know, it was our patriotic duty to stay quiet.
Does that track with anything we know about legacy media?
Do you really think the legacy media would pass up an opportunity to?
Exclaim a finding that they've uncovered on the Trump administration.
No, that's completely ridiculous.
And this piece right here is proof that no, legacy media will report the inkling.
If they get an inkling that the Trump administration is about to conduct any sort of operation, they will immediately print what their findings are, what they've heard, and they will let the entire world know.
So that was just ridiculous on the face.
The Venezuela operation was conducted, zero leaks, zero intel, nothing.
The American public had no idea what was about to happen.
You know, intel reforms, you know, media reforms in the Pentagon were succeeding.
I mean, it was just case in point.
I mean, he booted out all the legacy media because, for, you know, a myriad of reasons, they were causing problems for the Pentagon, among which is they would just kind of walk the halls of the Pentagon and try to extrapolate information to the Pentagon staffers, basically just fishing for whatever they could find.
You know, the whole point is they get a tip here.
Maybe they hear some hearsay, some discussions happening around the Pentagon.
No, they were like effectively interrogating Pentagon employees.
This is what I had heard from various people that.
You know, we're in and around that situation.
Completely ridiculous.
And so, okay, Hegseth naturally just says, okay, sorry, you lose, you're going to timeout, right?
You're going to timeout, you lose, you lose Pentagon privileges.
And so he brought in the new media suite, you know, a new suite of Pentagon press.
This was all new media for the most part.
I mean, I have a Pentagon press credential.
You know, there was a lot of different, you know, Cam Higbee's there, Laura Loomer, You know, a bunch of different people that are big names in the new media, right?
Like kind of the online right media sphere.
And so the whole point of that, again, was to say, all right, next man up.
You know, we're still going to need to syndicate messaging, right?
We're still going to need to have press conferences.
You know, we still have to answer for what we've been up to.
Let's get some, maybe some slightly more honest actors in there.
That was kind of the theory.
And yeah, it seems like that has so far been the case is that the Pentagon is a lot more airtight.
You know, they're not seeing as many ridiculous leaks that would honestly.
I'm not even, again, not trying to parole clutch here.
They will quite literally put servicemen at risk.
There's really no question about what you're tipping off our enemy, about what our plans are.
It's an utterly ridiculous proposition that the legacy media was positing as to why they should remain in the Pentagon, why they should keep their inheritance that their predecessors obviously built up all that goodwill with the United States government, fair reporting for the most part, or at least somewhat useful for the American public, et cetera.
And they completely squandered it because this new batch of journalists that have come in over the last two decades are just effectively activists.
They're just activists.
Primarily, and that's just very obvious.
So, when I saw this line in the article, immediately that jumps out to me that says one of two things, which is one that the Pentagon is purposely leaking this.
You know, I can't remember the specific term Tim used, I think like a weather balloon or something like that.
Effectively, they're floating this story out there to kind of gauge what the interest would be among the American people.
Are people excited about this?
Potentially, you know, is this, you know, maybe to gauge support among the Intel community?
Like, who knows?
Who knows why?
But they're kind of floating this story out there on purpose.
To kind of gauge where everyone is at on this, you know, where is everyone at?
You know, now we'll see senators and Congress, you know, and House members sort of come out and kind of give their take on this story.
That is one possibility.
The other possibility, again, is that it was purposely leaked.
Again, they just said, okay, you're going to go tell this staffer, and then the staffer is going to go anonymously speak to a journalist, you know, off the record, and you tell them, you know, we're planning, you know, a potential operation in Cuba.
The second reason that may be happening is for geopolitical reasons, is that this could be a signal to our global adversaries to stay out of Cuba.
We can take it whenever we want, which would indicate that we're not actually planning.
It's not imminent.
The invasion of Cuba is not imminent, but we're signaling to Russia, to China, even to Iran that, hey, Cuba is off the table.
Don't try and bolster it.
Don't try to turn this into a thing.
We can take it whenever we want.
Cuba's existence is purely out of a decision.
It's true.
Cuba's continued existence.
Is only possible because the Americans have decided not to take Cuba.
That's primarily what's going on there.
And in addition to that, potentially signaling to Cuba, hey, it's time to negotiate.
Hey, it's time to soften your regime's relationship with the United States.
It's time to defrost, right?
It's time to come into our sphere, as have many countries in Latin America.
They kind of realize, okay, time to play ball.
Trump is clearly dead set on imposing American hegemony, specifically over the Western Hemisphere.
So it is in Cuba's interest, as I would see it.
Right now, that they fall into line.
So I think that could.
I kind of lean towards the second part.
Again, the first part.
The Trump administration doesn't seem too concerned with popular support for the war in Iran.
So I don't know why Cuba would be any different.
I think they're more concerned about.
Sorry.
I think they're more sort of postulating that, okay, we need to sort of send a message to all the players that would be involved in a Cuba geopolitical situation.
So I think that's what's going on here.
And the USA Today goes and kind of just.
Kind of rambles on about what they've heard.
The directive appears to be an escalation of the recent tensions between the United States and Cuba that began in January when the Trump administration curbed oil shipments to Cuba as part of a broader campaign to force sweeping political changes on the communist run island.
This is why, okay, to steel man what people are saying, this is a pointless article because they're saying Pentagon ramps up planning for possible military operation in Cuba, aka the United States may take Cuba at some point.
Thanks.
Anyone could have told you that.
Anyone could have told you that.
Anyone that's kept an eye on the news.
Again, this was an Axios.
I believe this was like last week, maybe.
Not last week, sorry, last month.
The U.S. suggests Cuba is complicit in helping Russia fight Ukraine.
So, obviously, like they're setting the table already for a geopolitical standoff.
The Trump administration has informed Congress that Cuba has contributed up to 5,000 fighters for Russia's war in Ukraine, while also providing, quote, diplomatic and political support for Moscow, according to an official transmission from the State Department.
So, okay, clearly, if you've been keeping an eye on the news, the U.S. already has the justification to move.
If they really wanted to, the U.S. already has the justification to go into Cuba.
Not that we wouldn't have it, not that we need it per se.
It's our backyard.
We can kind of do whatever we want and no one's going to stop us.
But, you know, okay, for what it's worth, you know, they're sort of setting the table, right, for a move on Cuba.
They're just saying, okay, well, Cuba's clearly participating in geopolitical plays that work against American interests.
Therefore, we have the right to intervene and put an end to that.
That's what's the whole point of this whole situation.
So, this is like why, okay, yeah, kind of to everyone's point, you could have written this headline and written this article just by reading the news, right?
You could have extrapolated all of this by simply reading.
The news that's just very obvious, of course.
The United States has their auspices on Cuba, it's in the NSS, like they've made it very clear that, uh, again, there's not going to be any dissent in the Western Hemisphere, there's not going to be anybody making any anti American moves, it's just not going to happen.
Okay, if it happens in the old world, right?
Okay, that's a different conversation, but it's not going to happen in the Western Hemisphere, full stop.
So, again, this is like obvious that Cuba would be next up, uh, for a variety of reasons.
I mean, I talked about it last night on IRL.
Marco Rubio, Secretary of State, his parents are Cuban refugees.
I mean, that's all you really need to know.
But even to further sort of exemplify why Cuba would be the most obvious, you know, play, a military play, is Susie Wiles.
Susie Wiles is the chief of staff for the President Trump, the Trump administration.
She's from Florida, and she's primarily leaned on Florida.
She's a very, the Trump administration is a very Florida heavy administration, primarily because of Wiles, where Wiles, deeply connected in Florida politics, she knows who all the players are, she knows who the Trump allies would be, et cetera.
So, she's tapped her Florida network quite extensively to fill in a lot of positions, to make a lot of appointments.
So, if you know anything about Florida politics, you know that it's obviously the Cuban Americans are kind of a big, really, they're kind of in the driver's seat of the GOP.
Like the GOP and Florida, the state GOP knows that they have to keep the Cuban American population happy in order to keep them within the Republican coalition.
And that's, again, just another example of, again, why the Trump administration in Cuba would be an extremely obvious play.
I mean, the AP, this is what they hit on the USA Today article.
The AP reported in January, and everyone was reporting it Trump threatens tariffs on any country selling oil to Cuba, backing Mexico into a corner.
So, again, it's just obvious what's going on here.
USA Today didn't provide any timelines.
They didn't say when, how, why, et cetera.
They just said they're planning for it.
Great.
I think they should.
I mean, I think they should probably wrap Iran up first.
That would be my assessment, you know, just based off of previous American engagements.
You know, we're not the best at multi front wars.
You know, Vietnam comes to mind.
We were trying to mop up other situations around the world while we were conducting the Vietnam operation.
You know, I think Iran, I was explaining on the show yesterday, I think the off ramp is nearby anyway.
So, I mean, I think that Cuba could happen in the year.
I think it could happen.
I don't know if maybe even happens for the midterms to give a.
That would be a way to pop because, you know, everyone is commenting, and I think it's true, is everyone is sort of commenting that voter morale is down a little bit.
You take Cuba quickly, like you did with Venezuela, that gives the voters a huge pop, right?
That would.
Be a huge boost to voter morale right before the midterm.
So, with that, we're going to get into our next story here.
This is the latest on the Pope, you know, Trump v. the Pope.
This is a really wild situation here.
So, okay, you know, Trump, the Pope, they exchange, you know, the Pope's kind of more discreetly kind of counter signaling, right?
He's subtweeting, I guess would be the correct verb to use here.
You know, the Pope comes out and he says, like, well, you know, war is wrong no matter what, like, et cetera.
And he's basically saying this is Iran operation specifically, but he said this about Venezuela.
He says, okay, the Americans are acting like an imperial power, and we should have wholesome chungus post liberalism.
That's primarily his argument.
Trump pushes back.
He rips him on Truth Social.
And now Trump has moved again.
The Trump administration has abruptly canceled an $11 million contract with Catholic charities to shelter and care for migrant children who enter the U.S. alone.
Now, you see that headline from the Miami Herald, and you say, wow.
That seems pretty harsh.
You know, if you don't know anything about the situation, if you have zero context, you might look back and you go, or you might look at this and go, that seems really brutal from President Trump.
What, he just wants migrant children to die?
And you gotta, you gotta like run everything through a filter, right?
When you're consuming information from mainstream media, you have to run it through a filter of like, if it's making Trump sound like a supervillain, then there's probably some context being obfuscated in the article, to say the least.
And that's exactly what's going on here.
So you read that headline, you go, wow, Trump is literally behaving like a supervillain.
I mean, you're seeing, In the comments, you know, a few people obviously celebrating, but a lot of people are just like, this is horrible.
But I mean, look, you see posts like this.
This gentleman, Chris Hinkle, I'm a retired FBI supervisory special agent.
I ran the FBI civil rights program in Mississippi.
Catholic charities were one of the biggest impediments to our investigations of human trafficking.
Again, this has been known.
This has been known for a while.
I mean, this is reporting from the Daily Caller.
The House committee has already launched an investigation to dig into organizations, to NGOs that, quote, turbocharged Biden's border crisis.
We've known for a long time that these NGOs, specifically these Christian NGOs, and I'm not picking on the Catholics here.
The Catholics are the biggest one, the biggest NGO as far as resources allocated to effectively trafficking people in the United States across the border.
But also, there's Lutheran.
The second biggest one is a Lutheran charity.
The Baptists, the SBC, they're involved.
This is why I made this point on Twitter and I got some flack for it every single Christian institution, whether it's Catholic or Protestant or evangelical, whatever, they're all.
Involved in this, whether you like it or not.
And I made the point, I said this very carefully, is that Christians in 2026, this wasn't previously the case, but Christians in 2026, again, whether you're Catholic or Protestant, are faithful, devoted Christians in spite of their institutions, not because of it.
As in, they are devout and they are, in this case, conservative, which falls in line with sort of Christian principle, in spite of their institutions.
Their institutions hate that.
Their institutions hate seeing any sort of traditional, you know, Christian, you know, these sorts of things.
They despise that.
And I think it's very obvious on the Catholic front, I can speak to.
Is, I mean, ask any Catholic if you want to find a traditional Latin mass, you have to jump through so many hoops, you got to drive like 45 minutes to go to one because the Catholic Church specifically really wants to shut down any traditional sort of celebration, any sort of traditional manifestation of the faith.
They want to shut that down.
They want to push Catholics specifically into the arms of sort of the post liberal consensus.
And they'd probably shut down the traditional Latin mass entirely, but there would be a bit of a revolt, I would imagine.
But they just view it as frustrating and annoying.
I mean, I have friends that are Catholic and, you know, the traditional.
Sort of, you know, the traditional position, the trad position in Catholicism when you're, you know, taking communion is to receive it on the tongue.
So, you know, the priest lays the wafer directly on the tongue.
Now there's a whole theological reason why that's the more traditional thing.
You know, you don't want to take it into your hand and then put it in your mouth because, in theory, that kind of breaks that, you know, the act of communion, the act of the Eucharist.
That you know, theology aside, that is sort of the traditional way of consuming the Eucharist.
And what my friends tell me all that this happens all the time in DC.
You know, I have a lot of I say the majority of my friends are Catholic.
Um, they say that you know, when if they kneel down and kind of signal that they want to receive the Eucharist directly, um, they've some of them have told me they've gotten slapped.
Some of them have told me they've gotten slapped.
Uh, they what typically happens is they get shamed or they say, Stand up, like, what are you doing?
Because again, all of these institutions, and I'm again, I'm saying Catholic here's a specific example because this is what the story is.
Predicated on, but this is the case across all Christian traditions, across all manifestations of Christianity.
I'm even hearing this happen out of Orthodox communities.
I mean, and Orthodox communities are completely diaspora driven, you know, Greeks, you know, Egyptians, et cetera.
So, you know, the fact that, you know, no one is really safe here kind of indicates that, you know, maybe we should be LARPing a little bit less.
Again, as I said, you know, just now, is again, Christians, regardless of what flavor, what brand, What sect, et cetera, are faithful and devout in spite of their institutions.
Their institutions really don't want that to be happening.
They want them to participate in the wholesome, chungus, post liberal, blank slate Christianity, the John Lennon's imagined Christianity.
That's what they want.
They don't want you kind of reverting.
That's what they see it as.
They see it as reverting, they see it as regression.
All this progress we made in the 20th century, and you just want to upend it all and take us back to the Middle Ages.
I think a lot of Christians would be like, yeah, I kind of do.
I kind of do want to take everything back to the Middle Ages.
Billy Graham, you know, I know there's a lot of discourse around Billy Graham, but he had a funny quote, which I think is really salient.
And I think everyone that's, you know, a Christian that sort of pushes more traditional would agree with is someone went up to him after something he had done.
I can't remember what it was specifically.
And they said, You just set Christianity back a hundred years.
And he said, I was trying to set it back a thousand years.
So, you know, that's kind of, I think, the mentality of a lot of Christians.
And again, it's just all these institutions are just pushing hard on them to break that out of them.
They want to break that out of them.
Again, they want them to participate in John Lennon's imagines.
You know, Christianity.
So obviously, the daily caller hitting on this.
Now, the Pope himself is just responding, you know, online.
You know, if you were to see the discourse around the Pope, you would assume he's like some, you know, based right wing trad, you know, figure standing up against, you know, the woke, corrupted President Trump here.
Not what's going on on the ground.
The Pope is, everything he's been saying would fall, you know, every single person on the left would not along with what he's saying.
And you have these people coming out running cover for him.
Again, Catholic, and I'm being gratuitous here.
This is not an anti Catholic thing.
Again, like the majority of my friends, I went to a Catholic university.
Like I know it in and out.
The point I'm trying to make is they come out and they say, well, actually, the Pope is more conservative than President Trump because he has, you know, he holds to the Catholic Church's teachings on gay marriage and abortion.
Now, even if we presuppose that, let's just say Pope Leo does hold those values.
David Axelrod met with him recently.
Do you think that the Pope was dragging David Axelrod through a struggle session over abortion and gay marriage?
He does to Trump, President Trump, over immigration?
Do you really, if you're being completely honest right now, do you really think that Pope Leo will go out of his way to commentate on further liberalization in terms of marriage, further liberalization in terms of abortion?
Have we ever seen that?
I mean, did Pope Francis do that?
Not to my recollection.
Do you really think when he was meeting with David Axelrod, the discussion was Pope Leo saying, hey, you're too liberal?
What's your deal?
You're a left, you're pushing abortion, you're pushing gamers.
No.
I think we all know what's going on here.
Again, if you're being an honest actor, I'm not saying that, you know, if the Pope is a liberal, that that invalidates Catholicism.
That's not the argument I'm making here.
I'm just sort of saying, let's stop LARPing.
Let's cut the LARPing.
The Pope clearly wants to erode American sovereignty.
That's just very obvious.
It's very obvious.
A lot of my Catholic friends are saying this.
A lot of my Catholic friends who clown on me all day for being a Protestant will admit this.
They'll say, yes, the Pope.
Is effectively a globalist.
He is attempting to erode American sovereignty.
Therefore, President Trump now has the right to push back, right?
Not to mention that America is a Protestant country, just by demographics and historically speaking, President Trump himself is not a Catholic.
He at least pays lip service to being some sort of evangelically grew up Presbyterian.
They don't fall within the domain of the Catholic Church anyway.
So, what are we doing here?
Of course, he's going to push back on this.
This is ridiculous.
This is the head of the largest.
By numbers, uh, you know, church in the world, of course, he's gonna strike back if he's chirping at him.
Of course, I would expect him to.
The Pope comes out here.
Uh, this is right, you know, with the context of Trump, you know, pulling this contract from this NGO, this boomer NGO that's basically just trying to flood my country with migrants.
Woe to those who manipulate religion in the very name of God for their own military, economic, and political gain, dragging that which is sacred into darkness and filth.
Now, again, this is in the context of everything that's going on.
Does the Pope ever say this?
Did he ever say anything about Gavin Newsom, who is a Catholic, by the way?
Anything about Gavin Newsom expanding trans kids' programs?
Anything about him bussing in pregnant women so they can abort their children?
Anything like that?
No, but he goes out of his way.
And by the way, Gavin Newsom is one of the most powerful people in the world.
The state of California is the most powerful state in the United States by numbers, by population, by economic population, et cetera.
Nothing to say, nothing really.
I mean, I would expect at least this, if he was giving the same energy to Gavin Newsom as he's giving to President Trump, I would be like, okay, maybe, okay, sure.
Not to mention that Trump isn't doing anything that would be out of line with Christian teaching.
Border enforcement is very natural, right?
It's a biblical principle to look after your kin, right?
I mean, yes, you should be generous to those who are desperate.
That is true.
But you shouldn't do that while starving your family.
And that's effectively what's going on in the United States with migration, with immigration, is that, again, we are destroying our own prosperity, our own ability to, again, meet basic needs for Americans at the expense of mass migration.
We're sacrificing the sovereignty of the American people on the altar of diversity.
It's utterly ridiculous.
I'm just sick of this.
Charlie Kirk spoke about this.
Charlie Kirk spoke about this after Juanita Broderick shared this clip that was basically just exposing a lot of the racket that's been going on.
And from Amy Mech, who was the person that put this together.
Exposing this racket that's going on with this specifically, this Catholic charities.
Uh, and Charlie Kirk says to fund Catholic charities and every other NGO that cashes government checks to help foreigners game our immigration laws, direct this money to homeless Americans and veteran care.
No more big immigration graft, end it once and for all.
He said this in January of 2025, God rest his soul.
And he's absolutely right.
I mean, this is again, this is just very conventional.
And Charlie Kirk, I mean, his wife is Catholic by all accounts.
Um, you know, he's someone that respects Catholicism quite extensively.
I mean, he said he would attend Mass, you know, from time to time.
He had a great appreciation for the traditional Latin Mass.
This is someone that is not an enemy of Catholicism.
He doesn't have an axe to grind with Catholicism.
And he's pointing out what is going on here, which is, again, this is an institution that's being utilized.
The Catholic charities, these NGOs, are being utilized to erode American sovereignty.
Pope Leo, this is from Jack Posobic, devout Catholic, by the way.
Trust me, he lets me know all the time.
There's no love lost between him and Martin Luther, to say the least.
Pope Leo, quote, in Europe, fears are present, but often generated by people who are against immigration and trying to keep people out who may be from another country, another religion, another race.
I would say that we all need to work together.
So, no, the problem isn't all the migrants that have been coming to Europe and completely upending the social order, completely extracting all the European peoples of their wealth through government systems, murdering Europeans, committing terrorist acts.
That's not the problem.
The problem are the people who are against immigration.
He literally said, people who are against immigration.
There's no nuance there.
There's no like, People who maybe have racial grievances for their immigration policies, people who want a total end of no discretion, no nuance applied here.
Fears are present, but often generated by people who are against immigration.
That is who he's critiquing here, writ large.
Do you have any concern with immigration whatsoever?
Most Democrats do, in addition to pretty much all Republicans.
Well, according to the Pope, you're stoking fears.
Just utterly ridiculous.
This is what I want to get to with Wade Stotz.
We're going to bring him in here.
Is this tendency, and you're seeing the algorithm completely out of whack here.
People are just following breadcrumbs to take the most base popular positions.
MTG a year ago met Marjorie Taylor Greene.
This is via Scott Greer says Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene says Catholic bishops are, quote, controlled by Satan.
MTG appears to celebrate the death of, quote, evil Pope Francis.
And then she comes out here, and all of a sudden, she's like an ally of Catholics.
All of a sudden, she has a huge problem with President Trump's treatment of Catholics.
The same ones that, again, she said are under the guidance of demonic bishops and that the Pope was evil.
And then she turns all around, and all of a sudden, she's like an ally of Catholics, and she's bravely coming to their defense.
That just shows you what's going on here.
People are just getting completely thrown around by the algorithm.
People are just following incentive structures.
Wade Stotz, you know, a lot of people are saying, let's.
Let's team up with the left to take down Trump because of the Iran war.
Well, this is what the people on the left think.
These are the people that they're saying we could probably build a based coalition with, you know, a based anti Trump, anti Zionism coalition with, which is just like ridiculous on its face.
So I'm going to bring in Wade Stotz.
We're going to discuss this.
He obviously, Wade's commentary.
Was can't wait to team up with these people to defeat Trump, and I think that's a very salient point.
Wade, big Wade, Wade the G. Wait, I don't know, can we say that?
And I would say, you know, Shia LaBeouf sort of is, in many ways, as they're commenting on the Pope, is kind of the spiritual leader of, like, you know, swagged out, sensitive young patriots.
And I think that's just completely the case.
Well, Wade, thank you very much for joining me today.
I'm so happy to get you on here.
Before we jump in, you've been on the show previously, so a lot of people will be familiar with you and your work.
Yeah, so I do the Wade Show with Wade and I make videos.
The most recent one is a little bit of a zag, but it's usually about politics and culture.
My most recent one is a video about network TV and the sort of parallel universe that exists over there.
But yeah, I did a 25 minute breakdown of a TV show called 911, which I found out has tens of millions of viewers and nobody I know has ever heard of it.
But yeah, I tweet mostly about politics and then also do weird things like talk about network TV.
Yeah, well, what I find refreshing about your content, your commentary in general, is that you don't seem to feed into the outrage machine.
And I'm not trying to, like, you know, like, I guess for lack of a better word, like, pearl clutch over this.
Like, okay, there is reasons to be outraged.
I'm not denying that.
But people across the board, and I'm not just hitting on, you know, the so called retard right or whatever.
Everyone across the board feeds into this, like, rage machine that's not really productive.
I was pointing out, I'm an immigration hawk, right?
Like, I am, immigration is my issue.
That's my top issue.
I will vote.
Primarily along the lines of who's going to crack down on immigration.
Obviously, it's going to be the Republicans every day till Sunday.
But there's like accounts like this Radio Genoa account who's basically posting like borderline fetish content to basically tug on the heartstrings of someone that would be sort of concerned about sort of the demographic upheaval occurring in Europe.
Well, it totally makes sense at some level in terms of what an algorithm is.
So, an algorithm is designed to give you a predictable emotional experience.
Some people have talked about algorithms being this sort of way of hacking your brain chemistry or whatever, which I think is a little scientific and a little reductionistic.
But yeah, it really is about emotional responses.
And at some level, you get, if you're addicted to this high level of emotional experience, then nothing else can meet that.
And so, what it has to do is it has to escalate.
And it has to keep an algorithm has to feed you things.
It's like sometimes when you talk to people about like AI psychosis, and you're just like, you know, that this is designed to just tell you that you're awesome all the time and that you should never doubt yourself.
Like, that's basically what every algorithm is.
We're just getting it, and it feels more personal because, well, it's not a sort of disembodied machine doing it, but it is a disembodied machine handing you stuff over and over to because it's based on past behavior.
And so, what it wants is engaged users.
And so, the most engaged users of AI.
Tend to be these sort of psychotic people who think that they're in love with their things or are scientific geniuses because the AI keeps gassing them up.
It's the same thing.
The dream user of most social media companies, I'll go ahead and say all social media companies are the most brain dead, the people who are obsessed with this and cannot.
It looks like a turbo user.
These are their ideal customers.
And so when it's designed for that, you have to know okay, I'm also using this, but you have to engage with it.
Knowing what it is and knowing what it's trying to get you to do.
And again, that's not like, that's not saying that you shouldn't use it.
Again, I'm using it.
I use it today.
I'm going to use it later.
But knowing what it's trying to do to me is having some level of emotional regulation and a step outside of it and say, I'm going to engage with this in a way that is at some level against its own purpose.
And I think that that really is the need of the hour some level of emotional regulation, some sense of I am this person and this thing that I'm looking at is a thing I'm looking at, rather than just feeling absorbed into this thing and becoming part of a kind of wave of.
And, you know, I laid it, I mean, I said at the top of the show, and I want to like establish this as the undercurrent is you should be enraged by what's happening to an extent of you should be angry with what's happened to our country.
There's no question about that.
I'm not downplaying that.
I myself am, you know, pretty upset with the state of this country.
That's primarily why I am in the line of work that I am in.
But to your point, Emotion is really what's being utilized here to the point where there's almost this tendency that I'm seeing is this idea that like we need to awaken the masses, right?
The masses don't know what's going on yet.
Like, if we can just wake everyone up, then they'll rally together and then we'll like finally get rid of all these corrupt politicians that are constantly backstabbing us and betraying us.
And this keeps going on.
It's like I agree, like people should be informed, but this just keeps going on and going on and going on.
And people like lose sight of what a victory looks like.
And in addition to that, they lose sight of.
What actual avenues to power that we have, like that's going to happen in the next five years.
And they're just, I guess, expecting to be saved by someone.
They're expecting someone to finally hear their grievance and then descend from the clouds and cleanse the country of all corruption and everything.
And it's like, if you look at the situation we're in, where we've had 80 years of adversary towards the right, again, I'm speaking specifically about the people that are constantly exclaiming that President Trump has betrayed them.
It's going to take a little bit more than like, Four years to dig out of this mess.
I mean, I agree there's, you know, critique of the administration.
I agree that I'm not happy with everything, but I'm saying I'm able to take a step back and look at where we were versus where we are now.
And in addition to that, what avenues we have, what tools we have at our disposal.
I mean, the SAVE Act is a great example.
Obvious Trump administration is pushing it, he's doing everything he can.
He passed an executive order that will get held up in the courts purely to try and ram through what would be the SAVE Act's sort of outcome.
But you look over at Congress and they're just sitting on it.
So it's like, at a certain degree, You know, there's not much utility in just continuing to awake the masses.
Everyone knows what's going on.
If you ask the average Republican voter, there's like, there's a satanic pedophile cabal running the country.
Everyone knows what's going on at this point.
Everyone is kind of understands that we're in a bad situation, you know, in DC.
Then it's like, okay, you and I are engaging with the same thing.
We have the same opinion about what happened.
We want the same result.
But what we're doing is we're engaging with this in very different ways.
And again, like, I know that sports are less important than politics.
And I think that people should value those things in different ways.
However, I have about as much say in who gets put in in the ninth inning of the Mariners game as I do in a lot of the presidential decisions that get made.
What I can do is I can be interested and I can be, and yeah, Trump is a populist, but he's also a Trumpist.
He's a Trump loyalist of people to himself.
And so, like, recognizing my place in it, I think, is a helpful way of doing it.
But yeah, and I totally understand that, yeah, in the same way, like, you know, that if you're in high school, you're talking about girls with a bunch of guys.
And then one of them again starts like doing the most like violent porn brain fantasy about like some girl.
Then you go, Okay, we are both pro girl.
We both like girls.
We both like want to be with girls, but we are not talking about them in the same way.
And so being able to have some kind of healthy selfhood, emotional regulation.
And back to the algorithm thing, I mean, the algorithms are designed to sort of isolate because they're personalized.
They're just, they by nature isolate people.
And so when people go, Okay, I am worked up about this particular issue.
And it's really difficult for me to find people in real life who talk to me about this or will engage with me at all.
But when I go online, it's the only thing I see.
And so, and so, and that happens to everybody.
And so, when you interact with somebody in real life, you're interacting with somebody else who's been also interacting with a personalized algorithm all day long.
And so, they're isolated from you.
And so, your vision of the problems in the world are, your vision is contracted because of the nature of algorithms, and so is theirs.
So, recognizing, yes, like, That there is a value in having experiences out in the world, sort of on purpose, giving yourself input from different things, not just the things that are going on every day, books that were written 100 years ago, 1,000 years ago, and also like news stories even from 20 years ago.
I find like if I post stuff on Twitter that reminds people about the Obama years, it's like people don't even remember those things.
And so people go, Oh, yeah, I do remember that there was a guy named Barack Obama or like the Biden years.
Like everybody, it was people were obsessed with it at the time.
But then it just disappears.
And so, like, it actually helps your strategy on Twitter if you have a memory that's longer than five minutes.
And what it does, like, what it does for you also is allows you to see things in perspective and go, okay, this is coming up over here, that's coming up over here, and not just sort of, I've called it before discourse gooning.
I think, like, there's a different relationship that you can have to the discourse if it's not your, like, if you're not locked in a room and it's your only source of pleasure and you, like, lock out the entire world in order to enjoy it.
It's a different kind of engagement.
And I think that it, because if we're going to be of help, if we're going to actually be part of a solution to something, then we have to recognize our place in it and we have to recognize its place in us and in our life.
That really kind of is incisive at what's going on here.
I mean, kind of what this reminds me of, to use another sports ball analogy, if I will.
I mean, the audience has no choice.
They're a captive audience right now.
They have to sit through our sports ball analogies.
What the discourse right now kind of reminds me of is a team, let's just say, an NBA team, they've had eight straight losing seasons, right?
They've had eight straight losing seasons.
They've taken it on the chin for eight years.
They're not even sniffing anywhere near the playoffs, right?
If it was soccer, they would have been relegated.
But they're constantly losing season after losing season.
They get a new coach, right?
This coach comes back in and he's got them like they're 50%, right?
They're fit.
Let's just say they're 50%.
If you listen to the sports radio in that city for this basketball team, all the callers are going to be still nitpicking at every little decision that he made in the previous night's game, saying, well, he should have subbed that guy out right then.
And they're screaming and they're outraged and they're very upset.
That's kind of what the discourse reminds me of.
It's like, I don't know if you remember three seasons ago, we were getting 30 point blowouts every night.
Where now we're actually competing, like we're in playoff contention, we actually have a chance of like turning this franchise around.
But you listen to sports radio, and everyone is still, you know, furious at the coach, furious at ownership, furious at you know the general manager, and this sort of thing.
And they want everyone fired, everyone needs to get fired, we need to trade everyone, just start over.
And it's like, if you do that, you go right back to again rebuilding, like you're back into losing season.
That's kind of what the discourse reminds me of.
And it's just very frustrating to hear because, to your point, again, I'm not saying that we should be, you know, we should never be satisfied, we should always be looking to win.
That is true.
But you can look back at where we were and say, we've actually gained a lot of ground.
This political vehicle is kind of the only show in town, you know, really.
It's the only viable political vehicle we really have access to at the moment.
So maybe we shouldn't fire the coach and trade everyone and blow the whole team up because, again, we lost last night's game.
And like sometimes the solution is fire the coach, fire everybody.
Like, and that may have been the correct action three years ago.
But recognizing that we're not three years ago is actually an emotional change.
You have to be able to go, like, people are addicted to a certain emotional experience.
And politics for a lot of people is a kind of emotional thing.
I go to this thing, I go to this sort of realm in my brain, and I expect the same kind of feelings.
And then when you have to shift and you go, okay, well, I'm no longer in the sit around and complain seat.
I'm now in the course of action seat.
That changes everything.
And so I think that, like, the way that JD Vance has actually talked about this has been mostly like, yes, you are right to have questions.
You're right to talk to me about this.
I want to answer questions.
I'm happy to do this.
And if you have problems with it, like, work with us.
Like, recognize we are, we want a lot of the same things that you guys do.
But it's the, again, like, in the turning point event that Vance did, it's like the guy yelling about, like, hey, you're killing children, you're doing this stuff.
It's like, that's not how you, Get people's ear.
It's not how you like recognizing that there is an actual relational aspect of this.
There is an actual like finding a vehicle and going, you know what, this issue is really important to me.
I want to figure out how I can frame it in terms that this person will get on board with or whatever.
But it's no longer about getting it.
At that point, it's not about getting things done.
It's not about the team winning.
If you're still like recommending the same course of action that would have made sense five years ago, it's not about the team winning.
What it is about is feeling right, it's feeling justified.
And is feeling like, well, nobody is pure enough for me.
I am a good person, and people in charge are bad people.
And when that's your core, and that's the thing that you've been used to your entire life, then yes, it's not going to make sense when you get what you want.
Everybody knows what that, like, Gerard talks about this, okay?
Gerard speaks of this.
Getting what you want, usually you start to find all of the things wrong with the thing that you wanted.
And that's just the way things are.
Everybody knows, like, hey, okay, you go get this girl, and then suddenly you see all of her flaws.
Oh, you go and, yeah, you have a, like, 500 season, and all of a sudden, all of your analysis falls apart, and you're not grateful to anybody anymore.
Like, it just is the way people work, and recognizing that, again, the emotional regulation, emotional response is key and core here, and having some sense of value, some sense of where your life is, having a life outside of politics, making sure, like, I'm not my life outside of work has a lot to do with kids that are from eight to about six months old, okay?
And if I'm sitting around and I am going, like, did you see what the president said on Twitter today to my four year old?
I'm no longer sharing a planet with that guy.
And so, in order to be a person and a good dad, I have to recognize, I have to share a planet with my four year old.
I actually lay a lot of the blame for what's going on right now on the conservative commentariat.
And I know, like, you know, bear with me when I say this.
I think a lot of people will kind of know where I'm going with this.
The conservative commentariat, for probably 30, 40, really since the Reagan years, has primed their audience to have, like, ingrained contrarianism.
They've primed their audience to inherently be skeptical of anything the government does, inherently be skeptical of anyone in the GOP, inherently be skeptical of anyone that's, like, seeking to grab power.
And I think that's actually.
Probably it came from a good place, right?
It came from the reality on the ground, which was, yeah, you actually kind of are being screwed over like all the time.
That's true.
And President Trump channeled this in 2016, obviously.
But the conservative commentary primed them for this.
And that's why you're seeing now coming into this current presidency, the current administration, where we are seeing massive victories across the board.
We are seeing the football move down the field, even with the Iran war, even if like you are to declare it a complete disaster, which, you know, the jury's still out.
Still, the situation we're in compared to, yeah, the Biden years alone, even Trump won, we're in a drastically different place.
Yeah, and I wouldn't wish this on anybody, but I think that my obsession with late night TV and how terrible it is has actually helped me with this because I can see what they're freaking out about.
And, you know, we'll go from sports ball analogy to slot movie analogy.
Like, there's in inception, right?
So you've got this woman who needs to be told, hey, this the like world that you've lived in is not real.
You need to get out of your dream world into the real world.
So that gets planted, and like, so she successfully gets out of the dream world, comes into the real world, and still has that idea as the thing that defines her.
And the thing that, and so once she's out in the real world, then she kills herself because, oh, we have to kill ourselves to get out of the dream world has been her central defining aspect.
So again, I'm not a like, I'm not going to be a Christopher Nolan sort of simp here, but that is true.
People get defined by one idea, sharpened to one painful point, the clean, well lit prison of one idea, and they can't.
Move on and can't go, okay.
Now I'm going to address things after circumstances have changed and get out of a conversation and go, actually, I have a perspective that comes from somewhere else and not just news clip after news clip.
It's helpful.
It's helpful to have not just one idea, but multiple ideas.
And even if somebody accuses you, okay, you have more than one idea, you are a compromiser, you are obscuring the real issues.
Like, no, I have at least five ideas, okay?
And your pet thing is one of my five ideas that I also think is important.
And that looks like compromise to people who are obsessed.
But in reality, what it is, is a healthy, well roundedness.
And again, that's how you win.
You cannot win if you're constantly killing yourself to try to get out of the dream world.
And kind of in addition to that, to, I guess, sort of show that I'm not specifically talking about Trump here, I'm talking about this kind of problem.
I mean, I think specifically it's harming us, undercutting what the Trump administration is trying to do.
It's going to Make things worse for us if we just decide to fire the coach, right?
In this instance, he's getting us into a playoff contention.
But this happens everywhere where a good example I'll use here is, again, to your point of like, you know, prime for one pain point, sharpen for one pain point, is you see this happen like in Britain, for example, where, again, just by being outraged, they feel like they got the job done.
Okay, I saw that and I'm mad and now my job is done.
Where that's not how you win.
Like what's happening in Britain, I see this happen with all these guys who are just consistently, constantly posting demoralization porn where they're like, see, You know, this city's gone and it's under Sharia law now.
Or, like, see, London, it's over.
Like, it's over.
It's so over for you.
And it's like, are you, or anyone that sees that, they're like, oh, I know it is over.
And then they're like, fine, my work is done.
I got outraged and I solved a problem.
And none of these other idiots solved the problem, but I did.
So my job is done.
And then you ask those people, it's like, did you vote in the last election?
Oh, no.
It's like, are you registered for, you know, like reform or restore?
No, no, no.
Are you planning on participating in any political project anytime soon?
And they come up with a bunch of reasons why.
And it's like, okay, well, then you almost don't even have the right to be outraged then.
Because you're just being outraged for no reason.
And I agree, you should be outraged at those things, but that should come in conjunction with political victory.
That should come in conjunction with at least pushing to the direction of a political project that would be viable, that would deliver you sort of the resolve to the problem that you are identifying.
Yeah, I think that one of the back to America, I think that one of the worst lessons that the left interpreted the Trump victory as being because of podcasts.
And so what they did was they had Gavin Newsom make a podcast and they did all their sort of, and Michelle Obama has a podcast now.
That's their lesson that they've learned.
But what we have to recognize is that they learned the wrong lessons from everything.
And so we took on that definition of what Trump did.
Like, okay, how did Trump win?
He won because of podcasts.
Podcasts were a part of the campaign.
And the actual boots on the ground, the like Charlie Kirk getting out there and doing stuff, like turning point being there, is one of the key reasons that that actually happened.
And everybody sadly remembers Charlie Kirk as a guy who just talked on a podcast like we're doing right now.
And it's like, no, dude, that guy had a whole life.
He was an advisor, yes, to Trump, but he also put boots on the ground, made like recognize that door knocking and getting stuff done was actually how you achieved any kind of victory politically.
And so if we take the Democrats' lesson from 2024, I think that is an enormous mistake strategically, but it also is very flattering to people like you and me, where we go, actually, the center of the world is what we're doing right now.
And it's complaining about all the points.
And that is not where the center is.
What we are, we're in the stands and we are waiting, or we're on sports radio, right?
We're between games and we're just sitting around talking about what everybody should have done during those games.
And it's like, yeah, that has a place.
Sports radio has a place, political commentary has a place, and even venting your disagreements and saying those things has a place.
But if we, like, If we learn the lesson that Democrats learned from the last election and we start to flatter ourselves and think that politics are like podcasts are politics, then yes, we're going to get snowed, but we're going to feel really good while we do it.
And we just become like, we become based beautiful losers.
Like, is that what we want?
Like, no, that's like the opposite of Sam Francis's point.
Is like Sam Francis' whole point in talking about beautiful losers is you have this amazing philosophy, but you can't get it done.
Like, you can't get anybody to do it.
And once you get there, you drop it all because you have to retain power.
That, like, if you've concocted the perfect political philosophy in your little lab, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't, like, that hasn't changed the world.
And so, yes, you have to recognize that there is a strategic element, but it starts with, again, emotional self regulation and going, like, okay, I think something.
Should I say it?
How should I say it?
And what will be accomplished when I say it?
And to whom?
People just don't have that.
They just, like, it's like, I feel something and I need to vent it because, you know, and there's a reward system for that.
I vented my feelings and I get a huge rush of likes, probably from Pakistani bots, but also from like actual fed up, like angry Americans who are right in the same kind of wheelhouse with me.