On today's show, the boys discuss Alex Jones' removal from the pod, the Pope's blessing of gay couples, and a man who is ready to have his booty handed to him by the English government.
00:02:17.000Federman doesn't really like that, but let's figure out if that's actually a good or bad thing.
00:02:20.000And then Mug Club, you get to hear a little bit about Texas, where we're gonna actually be able to arrest people who are here in the country, I don't know, illegally.
00:03:48.000And look, because we're going to get a little spot, I probably, I mean, maybe there's not going to be a whole lot of opportunity for this, but maybe there is.
00:03:57.000Head on over to Rumble, make sure you get over there.
00:03:59.000And do me a favor, go to Rumble to begin with.
00:04:01.000I mean, if you want to start at YouTube for five seconds, just to mess with the algorithm and make YouTube think that we are absolutely never, ever, ever going to stop being a thorn in their side, because we won't, then go over to Rumble.
00:04:43.000Mr. Mayor, we've come to the end of what was a very eventful 2023, right?
00:04:47.000So, when you look at the totality of the year, if you had to describe it, and it's tough to do, in one word, what would that word be and tell me why?
00:08:15.000I know that Mug Club chat, you guys are going absolutely nuts with this.
00:08:21.000Be nice to Kim, I told her to put on a helmet.
00:08:24.000But I want to set this up really quickly.
00:08:27.000Anytime a church—doesn't matter what the church is—anytime a church does something that represents a large group of people, I am necessarily going to have problems one way or the other with a policy, not people, right?
00:08:42.000Sometimes it's people, a lot of times it's policy.
00:08:44.000Most of the time, almost all of the time, I don't have a problem with the people that church represents, the people that are going to the church.
00:08:50.000And so let's just make some clear distinctions like we do with the Chinese Communist Party versus the Chinese people,
00:08:56.000right? I'm not attacking Chinese people, I'm attacking the leadership of that country and
00:11:23.000I'm gonna make a couple of points here, and one of the points is sure to make people frustrated, and I don't mean it to, but I want you to think deeply about this.
00:11:34.000To receive God's love and mercy, I would say that the church can't ever get in the way, and it's not the only way to receive God's love and mercy.
00:11:43.000Throughout reading scripture, I think it's pretty clear that we can receive God's love and mercy in a lot of different ways, and it doesn't necessarily have to be through the church.
00:11:51.000So when it talks about that, and then that clip said having to go through an exhaustive moral kind of reckoning, so to speak, I don't think you have to do that either, right?
00:12:01.000I think anybody can come to God and say, God, I am a sinner.
00:12:05.000The problem is that God, Jesus, when he walked the earth, never allowed for somebody to come to him and Stay where they were.
00:12:12.000He was winsome and loving, but honest.
00:12:15.000And that is something that we have to keep in mind here.
00:12:17.000So there's two different types of blessings.
00:12:20.000I was looking this up before to make sure I didn't mess this up, but invocative and constitutive.
00:12:24.000And constitutive is the one where it's basically blessing like a person or a place or something like that, where it's like a holy purpose, right?
00:12:31.000So that's the higher form of blessing.
00:12:33.000Invocative is basically like when you bless your child, but it comes with no change in condition required.
00:12:45.000No change in condition, meaning like it's not saying, hey, you have to acknowledge this or change that to receive this blessing, right?
00:12:52.000So I'll give you a comparison, but I just want to set this up with one more thing.
00:12:56.000The Church of England actually came out and just one day ago, officially blessed, or maybe a couple of days ago now, officially blessed their first lesbian couple.
00:13:06.000The Church of England is in a new place and I'm really pleased with the decisions we've made.
00:13:11.000Once these prayers are formally commended later this year, the faithful, stable, Christian couples in a civil marriage or a civil partnership can, if they wish, come to church and that You know, their love for each other in that relationship can be acknowledged, celebrated, and the couple can receive a blessing.
00:13:32.000But at the same time, I think I need to say, I'm not standing here full of joy, because I think the debate has clearly revealed divisions in the church over these issues, and those divisions cut across, you know, we're a family, and when families disagree, it's always painful.
00:14:12.000If somebody comes in who's having an affair, and the church knows that this man has a wife, and he walks in with his weekend fling hand-in-hand, you don't think that the church should be like, whoa, whoa, whoa, brother, what's going on?
00:15:02.000But look, so I have a problem with what the Church has said here, and I have a problem with—when I say the Church, read that to the Pope.
00:17:41.000I want gay couples who are out there who believe in God to have an opportunity to find out who God really is, to understand the full counsel of God and understand what sin is and what it's not.
00:17:51.000But if you allow stuff like this to go on in your church, how far down the road is it until there's so much public pressure put on that now you have to go a little bit further and a little bit further and a little bit further and then ten years from now you look up And the church doesn't look anything like what you think it should, and that 47% view of Pope Francis being favorable among Catholics drops to 10 or 15%.
00:18:13.000This is why we have all of these things, is because one person looks out and says, hey, this is what the Bible says, you guys are doing it a little bit differently.
00:18:19.000Here's my final question for you, and then we're going to move on.
00:18:23.000Anybody out there who says that Pope Francis was doing this to try to welcome gays into the church, to make sure that the church had open arms for everyone, every sinner in the world, including people who are having premarital sex.
00:21:10.000Libertarian Javier Mele was sworn in as Argentina's new El Presidente.
00:21:16.000Por la patria, sobre estos santos evangelios, desempeñar con lealtad y patriotismo el cargo de presidente de la nación argentina y observar y hacer observar fielmente en lo que de mà depende la constitución de la nación argentina.
00:22:16.000He cut the number of ministries in half by removing livestock and agriculture, transport, public works, territorial development, I'm not even sure what that means, culture, Science.
00:25:33.000All right, so look, I love what Millet is doing down in Argentina so far.
00:25:37.000This is exactly the kind of thing that we thought he would do.
00:25:40.000And look, we've seen people campaign before and say they're going to do all these great things and then get into office and have trouble doing it or completely do an about-face and be like, ha ha, fooled you, just wanted to be a politician in power.
00:25:50.000And I would like to come back with that to the United States.
00:25:53.000Donald Trump has talked about cutting the bureaucracy, cutting debt, and he tried to do a lot of reform in the United States to give him credit.
00:26:00.000But look, again, It's not always convenient.
00:27:31.000Yeah, they want to do what they're supposed to do.
00:27:34.000I think this time around, like the bureaucrats, he kind of knows the game a little bit more.
00:27:38.000The first time around he had to learn, even though he was a businessman, even though he was brash, even though he had the ability to go in and just say what he thought and didn't care what people really thought about him.
00:27:48.000I don't think he fully understands the corruption and the rot in the system.
00:27:53.000And so to be able to take it out, he needed a little bit of experience.
00:27:55.000So I'm hopeful that this time around, and I'm predicting, of course, that this time around he'll be president.
00:28:41.000Don't make Texas have to make it a crime, like we'll talk about with Mug Club.
00:28:46.000But look, Javier Mele, he's cutting government and bureaucracy in Argentina, mostly because they're, I believe, and research, look this up for me if you can, what's the interest rate?
00:28:57.000I thought it was like 143% or some ridiculous number.
00:29:23.000I'm just saying, when you fire giant swaths of government, people can get a little pissed off that you did it, but hopefully... Well, I think it's firing lazy people.
00:29:31.000I don't think they're going to be out there trying to work hard to... In the environment?
00:29:35.000People aren't lazy that go into environmental sciences.
00:31:02.000Not have to make all of them ourselves.
00:31:04.000It seems like we love doing that, and I hope Donald Trump, when he comes into office, he fixes the problems that we have here in the United States, and he calls this out.
00:31:33.000In the United States, I think we had 7% mortgages or 8% mortgages recently, and people were freaking out about that because of what it had.
00:33:32.000Not like an hour early, so they're like, yeah, I'll go ahead and go home, but like 14 minutes early or something like that?
00:33:36.000I don't know if that's happened before.
00:33:38.000In Louisville, Kentucky last year, we were doing the countdown, and we were like, we won, we all cheered, and then someone's like, it's not even midnight!
00:33:45.000And the crowd's like, it's not midnight!
00:35:16.000By the way, when you select backgrounds to talk about industry, smokestacks right here, not the best look because we're like, we probably ought to get rid of those in the first place anyway.
00:35:26.000I know it was cold there and it was probably mostly steam, but hey, it could be killing people down the street, too.
00:36:03.000But look, to your point, unfortunately he couldn't actually find his way down afterwards so his family had to make him part of the Christmas decorations and so it just became a fixture.
00:36:31.000Nippon Steel outbid the others that were bidding for this, and it's funny to see that other people were bidding for this because when you see their bid amounts, you're like, they weren't really bidding.
00:36:41.000They outbid others with a $14.9 billion offer, which according to the stock price and the company valuations, 142% premium.
00:36:49.000Not a bad deal if you're going to buy a company, pay 142% more than it takes to buy all of their shares, but sometimes that happens.
00:38:07.000I spent some time in Cleveland, after Notre Dame, not against Catholics, not Catholics bad, we have the Hitler bad thing, we're not doing the Catholics bad thing, I'm just saying.
00:38:14.000But I lived in Cleveland, and all these steel mills and the production, a lot of that stuff was already shut down.
00:38:22.000That was a problem back then, but Donald Trump tried to change that.
00:38:27.000He put a 25% tariff on Chinese steel to try to protect industries.
00:38:32.000Now, you can argue whether you think tariffs work, whether protectionism is a thing that you want to dive into, but at the very least, you can see that it has been a problem for a while, and Donald Trump understands that problem.
00:38:46.000Pennsylvania Senator Bob Casey had this to say.
00:38:48.000I'm concerned about what this means for the steel workers and the good union jobs that have supported Pennsylvania
00:38:54.000families for generations Whatever for the long-term investment in the Commonwealth
00:38:59.000and for American industrial leadership
00:39:03.000We haven't led in industry for a while. You have to understand this
00:39:08.000For him to say the good union jobs that have supported Pennsylvania families for generations, are you going to stand in the way of progress?
00:39:27.000You can't be like, you know, Hyundai or a Honda or anybody else that's producing stuff here in the United States employing American people even though it's a foreign-owned company.
00:39:35.000I understand why there is some nervousness here.
00:39:39.000But should we really be upset about this?
00:42:23.000I think what people are saying is if we need steel in a pinch, we don't want to depend on a country we could be at war with to provide said steel.
00:42:38.000What if China takes over Taiwan and now we don't get access to the microchips?
00:42:44.000Most of our way of life changes if China shuts that off.
00:42:46.000Shouldn't that mean that you're absolutely 100% for protecting Taiwan at any cost and, like Vivek Ramaswamy proposed, even though it was kind of, you know, silly to say that we could do it in the time frame, make sure that we have those capabilities here?
00:44:07.000These are our people going out and doing what no one in the media apparently has done.
00:44:11.000We reached out to the Philansby mayor, Dave...
00:44:14.000Vologel, sorry if I get that wrong, Dave Vologel, for comment, and he had nothing but praise for the company, saying, they are a tremendous corporate citizen.
00:44:28.000Steel, I don't know who they bought it from, but Nippon Steel has been operating.
00:44:31.000He also noted that how Wheeling Nippon donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to initiatives like disaster relief, construction of local baseball fields, community function, and look, Nippon Steel sees a lucrative market here in the United States.
00:44:46.000Cheap energy costs, growing population, economy that seems like it's trying to get turned around at some point with a new person in office.
00:45:24.000But I would rather somebody come in that sees the value and sees an opportunity than to have this just shut down anyway and leave yet another town destitute because everybody depended on it on the steel mill for their work.