The selection of a brand new pope will be joined by Bishop Robert Barron to explain exactly what about the new pope we need to know. Plus, we ll be getting to President Trump s tariff war. Are we on an off-ramp, or is this all spin? And Andrew Klavan stops by to discuss his new book.
00:01:15.000When you spoil a child, so to speak, you take away from them the opportunity to develop their own competence by doing too many things for them.
00:01:23.000The consequences of his abdication of thought is that other people think for him.
00:03:04.000Join in at dailywire.com slash subscribe.
00:03:07.000Well, folks, we do have a brand new pope.
00:03:10.000We're going to get to all the details surrounding the pope in just one second.
00:03:13.000Apparently, according to the Wall Street Journal, the Roman Catholic Church has now elected the first American pope in history, placing 1.4 billion faithful in the hands of a missionary-turned-Vatican prelate who had been critical of the Trump administration's crackdown on immigration.
00:03:26.000Now, this is the way that the media are playing this, is that Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost, who's a 69-year-old native of Chicago and a White Sox fan, which is great.
00:03:35.000There are like three of us, and so I appreciate...
00:03:37.000He emerged on the balcony of St. Peter's Basilica, was introduced to the world as Pope Leo XIV.
00:03:43.000Here is what it looked like when it happened yesterday.
00:04:10.000Okay, so he said we must try together to be a missionary church, a church that builds bridges and dialogue always open like the square to receive with open arms everyone who needs our charity and our presence.
00:04:20.000There's been a widespread debate over where he is politically because for the faithful, obviously for people who are faithful Catholics, this means a different thing than for people like me.
00:04:29.000I'm Jewish, and so I have no stake in...
00:04:31.000Him spiritually in terms of him being the leader of a church, of a Catholic church.
00:04:37.000He is, however, an important world leader, a very important world leader because so many people are, in fact, Catholic.
00:04:43.000And the Catholic church has been a deeply important piece, a deeply important centerpiece of Western civilization since its foundations were laid 2,000 years ago.
00:04:51.000And so who leads the Catholic church obviously has a massive impact, not only on how people think, but how a lot of people live, because how you think impact.
00:04:59.000And so the direction of a Catholic church moving in a far more progressive direction would be quite bad for the world because a progressive Catholic church focused, as Pope Francis very often was, on, say, environmentalism or economic redistributionism or a form of amorality with regard to foreign conflict, that has an impact on how billions of people think, and that could be a problem.
00:05:20.000On the other hand, a Catholic church that is committed to the eternal biblical values to which it is wedded.
00:05:27.000That kind of church does an enormous amount of good in the world.
00:05:30.000And to pretend that the Catholic Church has nothing to do with how people live is, I think, a preserve of the fully secular.
00:05:37.000In my book, The Right Side of History, there's an awful lot on the history of the Catholic Church and the Catholic Church's contributions to everything from the beginning of the university system to the beginnings of science.
00:05:46.000And obviously it matters an awful lot to an enormous number of people across the world, Christian and non-Christian, who the Pope is.
00:05:52.000And so, what exactly does the Pope think?
00:05:55.000Well, we have some evidence of what the Pope thinks.
00:06:23.000Of the idea of an eternal church, from what I understand from my Catholic friends.
00:06:27.000So, if the church were to radically switch its positions on, say, abortion or same-sex marriage, that'd actually run up against the doctrine of the Catholic Church.
00:06:36.000And the Pope can't single-handedly do that.
00:06:38.000What the Pope can do is decide where to put his emphasis.
00:06:41.000Is he going to put it on social issues, or is he going to put it on economic issues, where there's more wiggle room in terms of doctrine?
00:06:46.000Is he going to put it on environmentalism the way the Pope Francis did, or is he going to put it on the spread of values antithetical to Christianity the way that Pope Benedict did?
00:06:56.000Well, by choosing the name Leo, according to the Washington Post, the 267th Pope is joining a group of 13 other popes who took the name.
00:07:03.000The previous Leos were reformers, including Pope Leo XIII, elected in 1878.
00:07:07.000His encyclical, Rerum Novarum, spoke of human dignity and the dignity of labor, according to Reverend Christopher Robinson.
00:07:16.000Popes have been selecting papal names for centuries.
00:07:19.000I know, obviously, my friend Michael Knowles, who is extremely Catholic.
00:07:22.000Was very happy about the choice of Pope Leo's name, suggesting that it has a lot to do with the sort of values conservatism.
00:07:34.000Beyond that, the media are running around claiming that this Pope is woke.
00:07:39.000Again, this is, I assume, linked to the fact that he was very close with Pope Francis.
00:07:46.000With that said, the evidence so far suggests that he is extremely conservative on issues, including social issues, that he is very liberal on guns, that he is very liberal on immigration.
00:07:58.000Like if you were going to gauge him as a political candidate, not as a pope, which I understand the problems with that.
00:08:03.000I'm talking about his political impact because that's one of the reasons he matters to the rest of the world who's not Catholic.
00:08:11.000If we are looking at what he has said, for example, about culture and about social issues, this is a direct quote from him, quote, Another quote from him.
00:08:31.000So there, indistinguishable from what would be rote Catholic doctrine, it was always funny to me that when Pope Francis would express support for the unborn, the media would run it as though it was a story.
00:08:45.000Nothing has changed would be the story there.
00:08:47.000Or when the Pope said, That he was not in favor of same-sex marriage.
00:08:50.000Then suddenly that was run as like a front-page story.
00:08:53.000Now, the problem with Pope Francis politically is that he would then kind of play around the edges.
00:08:58.000Pope Francis had suggested that same-sex couples could come and be blessed.
00:09:02.000It was kind of unclear whether he meant as individuals or as a couple.
00:09:08.000Obviously, he was making some sort of overtures to the LGBTQ plus minus divided by sign activists.
00:09:15.000Whether this new pope is going to do that or not is absolutely unclear.
00:09:18.000People are pretending that he is some sort of wild lib.
00:09:20.000I don't see the evidence for that at all.
00:09:22.000Apparently, he's a registered Republican because, again, he's from Chicago, so we actually know where he's registered.
00:09:27.000He's voted in some Republican primaries as well.
00:09:30.000He's also retweeted a bunch of material that is anti-J.D.
00:09:34.000Vance and President Trump with regard to immigration.
00:09:37.000So, for example, according to Mediaite, he joined Twitter in 2011.
00:09:44.000And apparently, he tweeted on April 14th a retweet of a Catholic blogger named Rocco Palmo that denounced the White House's illicit deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and quoted Bishop Evelio Menjivar, Do you not see the suffering?
00:10:02.000Other recent tweets from Pope Leo XIV take issue with J.D. Vance's comments about Ordo Amores, the Catholic theological concept on the order of charity.
00:10:11.000Vance, you'll recall, in January had suggested, That this should be interpreted as love your family, and then your neighbor, and then your community, and then your fellow citizens, and after that, prioritize the rest of the world.
00:10:21.000So, Pope Leo XIV, his predecessor, Pope Francis, actually put out a letter addressed to American bishops, chiding that particular view.
00:10:29.000And then, Prevost, who is now the Pope, said, J.D. Vance is wrong.
00:10:32.000Jesus doesn't ask us to rank our love for others.
00:10:36.000So, you know, this has been used as sort of an excuse by people on the right to reject the Pope.
00:10:42.000Meanwhile, the left is always eager to embrace a pope that it perceives to be a friend.
00:10:47.000For his part, President Trump put out a statement about how it was an honor to have an American pope.
00:12:56.000Silencer Shop makes the entire process ridiculously simple.
00:12:59.000They're the number one source for suppressors in America with the largest selection of top brands.
00:13:03.000Silencer Shop helps handle all the paperwork so you don't have to.
00:13:06.000With their nationwide dealer network and easy-to-use kiosk system, you can get started in minutes and have your suppressor faster than ever.
00:13:12.000Thanks to Silencer Shop for sponsoring this episode.
00:13:24.000Well, joining us online is Bishop Robert Barron, Bishop of the Diocese of Winona, Rochester in Minnesota, the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries, direct from Italy, where the new pope has been selected, Pope Leo XIV.
00:13:36.000Bishop, thanks so much for joining the show.
00:13:47.000There was a lot of, you know, kind of tension beforehand.
00:13:50.000It's always sort of on tenterhooks during a...
00:13:53.000Conclave period, the interregnum, and we weren't sure.
00:13:56.000A lot of names were being bandied about, including the name of Robert Prevost, though most of us didn't take it seriously.
00:14:03.000And then I think leading up to the conclave, there was just a lot of anticipation, a sense of, you know, forces jockeying against each other.
00:14:21.000And so most of us, again, thought, oh, it must be someone like Cardinal Peroline or one of the really expected candidates.
00:14:28.000No one expected Robert Prevost, and certainly not on the fourth ballot.
00:14:32.000So there was a lot of, I think, both excitement, surprise, the wonderment about it.
00:14:41.000So when we talk about the new pope, obviously a lot of political focus on the new pope because the pope speaks for 1.4 billion Catholics and is interpreting 2,000-year-old tradition.
00:14:50.000And I think that, first of all, we should discuss the distinction between how people like me would view the election of a new pope, the selection of a new pope, and how Catholics see it.
00:15:00.000Because obviously it's a very, very different thing.
00:15:01.000For me, I'm just looking at the political ramifications in sort of the secular world or even in sort of the broader spiritual.
00:15:07.000But for Catholics, it's a very different thing.
00:15:12.000Well, you know, I would look at him in terms of his name.
00:15:15.000I keep going back to his name, Leo XIV.
00:15:32.000Going back now to a figure more than a century ago, who represents...
00:15:36.000I'd call it an intelligent, creative engagement with modernity.
00:15:40.000So think of the 18th century revolutions and then the 19th century innovations in philosophy.
00:15:46.000Think of Kant, Hegel, Marx, the revolutions, etc.
00:15:49.000The church's first response to that was an emphatic no, and indeed the church was very persecuted by revolutionary France, for example.
00:15:57.000But then by the end of the 19th century, you've got a figure like Leo XIII, who represents this Intelligent engagement is both a yes and a no to modernity.
00:16:08.000I think that's what this new pope was gesturing toward in choosing that name, that he was in the tradition of Leo XIII.
00:16:18.000To this day, find a lot in Leo XIII they like.
00:16:20.000Liberal Catholics find a lot they like in him.
00:16:23.000So it was a very clever choice, actually.
00:16:25.000Even before you get to particular kind of political issues, just the general attitude toward the modern world, he was telling us a lot about that.
00:16:35.000So let's talk about the fact that he is an American pope.
00:18:05.000What should our takeaway be on the new pope politically?
00:18:08.000Because obviously on matters that the church has never wavered on, like same-sex marriage or abortion or transgenderism, he would be considered wildly right-wing by American political standards.
00:18:46.000That leads to all kinds of moral problems.
00:18:48.000That's not a xenophobic position, or that's not some jingoistic, nationalistic position.
00:18:53.000That's a considered moral point of view.
00:18:56.000So, I mean, I'm sure that New Pope would affirm that.
00:18:59.000You know, it's when you get down to brass tacks, you get down to the specifics of policy, we can disagree about, okay, how much should you regulate immigration, etc.
00:19:09.000But in terms of the great principles, I don't think he would disagree with that.
00:19:12.000The famous Ordo Amoris question, you know, as I read J.D. Vance, he was just citing both Augustine, by the way.
00:19:19.000So this new pope was an Augustinian priest.
00:19:22.000He was citing Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.
00:19:25.000I think what people tend to miss on that is they're talking about the kind of objective dimension of love, not the subjective.
00:19:32.000To say there's an order of love does not mean that...
00:19:35.000That subjectively, you know, I favor certain people and others I don't care about.
00:20:27.000Meanwhile, President Trump's big move yesterday was, of course, this U.K. trade deal.
00:20:32.000We now know the details of the UK trade deal, and there's less to the eye than it appears.
00:20:37.000And this is sort of a problem, obviously, for actual policy.
00:20:41.000So, the markets rebounded somewhat on the fact that President Trump had announced a UK trade deal.
00:20:46.000And the markets right now, as I've said before, Benjamin Graham, who is the philosophical mentor to Warren Buffett, used to say that the stock market in the short term is a voting machine, and in the long term it is a weighing machine.
00:20:55.000What he meant by that is that you're basically voting with your stock.
00:20:58.000As to where you think things are going to go.
00:21:04.000In the long term, the stock market, over time, weighs the actual value of things.
00:21:09.000Because it takes a while for prediction to become reality or unreality.
00:21:13.000Well, right now, the markets are trying to respond and taking new information in real time from President Trump.
00:21:18.000And because President Trump is spitting out so much new information...
00:21:21.000Because there are so many members of his administration who are sort of in conflict with one another over trade policy, the markets are roiling.
00:21:26.000They're going up, they're going down, they're going all around.
00:21:28.000And in the end, they're slightly lower than they were during Liberation Day.
00:21:32.000Which is to say that since Liberation Day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average over the course of, say, the last month or so, is essentially even.
00:21:43.000Just before Liberation Day, which was April 2nd, the...
00:21:58.000That is not a massive shift, obviously.
00:22:02.000That shift, however, is in fact indicative of uncertainty because the stock market was going up and to the right and then when it evens out, that's because people don't know what to do next.
00:23:21.000So the reason the stock market responded positively is because any sign of any deal means that people are voting on what they want Trump to do.
00:23:28.000What they want Trump to do is to remove all sorts of trade barriers.
00:23:31.000And so when they see a sign that the trade barriers are going to be removed, the markets get really happy.
00:23:45.000This hurricane is the global trade impact of a giant tariff regime placed on nearly every country.
00:23:52.000Mostly on China, but yes, on every other country.
00:23:54.000It turns out that when you quadruple the tariff rate on the UK, which is effectively what the United States did, that that's going to have some pretty significant supply chain effects.
00:24:01.000It takes a while for that stuff to be felt because it might take weeks for ships to leave their port and get to the United States.
00:24:08.000And that means that people have not yet made their ships arriving now that are still full because the decision was made as to whether to send the ship before Liberation Day.
00:24:18.000Well, that's all going to change in the very near future.
00:24:23.000You check the hurricane map pretty much every day of the summer to see what's going to happen over the course of the next five or seven days.
00:24:29.000And keep hoping, if you're on the east coast of Florida, the way that we are, that the hurricane is going to swing up and back into the Atlantic Ocean.
00:24:37.000But that doesn't mean that the impending hurricane has hit yet.
00:24:41.000So if you haven't actually picked up and left the east coast of Florida to move into the interior or something as the hurricane approaches, because you're betting that it's going to move, that does not mean that the hurricane won't hit.
00:25:32.000So, if for non-agricultural goods, the trade-weighted tariff rate, Was 0.5% and today it is 10%.
00:25:39.000That is, if you do your math, 20 times higher than it was just about six weeks ago.
00:25:46.000And the deal didn't do anything to change any of that.
00:25:48.000Here's Howard Lutnick yesterday saying, essentially, that nothing has actually changed.
00:25:55.000He said, he's bragging about the trade deal and he says, we were at 10% and we're still at 10%, which doesn't sound like an amazing trade deal to me.
00:26:02.000So we feel really good about the deal.
00:26:14.000And this is a perfect example of why Donald Trump produced Liberation Day.
00:26:21.000Okay, so the perfect example of why Trump produced Liberation Day is that we could go from 0.5% on most goods to 10% on most goods and then leave it at 10%.
00:26:29.000And then we get slightly lower tariff rates on our products.
00:27:49.000If these 10% tariffs are maintained on every country, there will in fact be supply line problems.
00:27:54.000If the tariff rate remains at 125 or 145%.
00:27:58.000The Treasury Secretary said it's unsustainable.
00:28:00.000If it takes months to negotiate that out with China, there will be significant supply line impact, supply chain impacts.
00:28:07.000Listen, every business person I know is being impacted by these tariffs in one way or another.
00:28:12.000And right now, the markets are hopeful because they know that President Trump likes reality and lives in the business world, that Trump is going to avert the hurricane.
00:28:18.000I don't see a lot of evidence that he's going to avert the hurricane from this particular UK deal, for example.
00:28:23.000Meanwhile, the European Union is saying it could target American cars, car parts, airplanes, and other products with tariffs if negotiations with the United States break down.
00:28:30.000The European Commission, the bloc's executive body on Thursday, released a fresh list of about ā¬95 billion worth of American products it says could face tariffs equivalent to about $107 billion.
00:28:40.000That includes American chemicals and plastics, electrical equipment, health-related products, machinery, and agricultural products.
00:30:40.000The tax regime that President Trump put into place in his first term, the Trump tax cuts, were a boon to the economy.
00:30:45.000They disproportionately benefited people who actually were middle and lower class.
00:30:50.000Revising the tax regime to pay for more kind of loopholes and tax breaks in particular areas by increasing taxes on the highest income earners, what that is going to do is sink investment capital.
00:31:02.000As somebody who has been in most tax brackets at one point in my life, I can tell you, I will invest less if I have less money to invest.
00:31:09.000And that's true for everyone who's a high net earner.
00:31:14.000Increasing the income tax on the top income tax bracket in order to pay for more useless government spending because nobody has the actual balls to say in American politics that we spend too much on our social welfare programs, which we do, particularly our means-tested social welfare programs.
00:31:27.000And those are going to break the American economy.
00:31:29.000And shifting around deck chairs in the Titanic by increasing the marginal tax rates at the top by 2% or something, that's not going to save anything.
00:31:36.000This idea that you're going to get a...
00:31:38.000If the Republican Party is now the tax-raising party and the tariff party...
00:31:42.000We will see how that works out for them at the polls.
00:31:44.000I do not think it is going to work out particularly well.
00:31:48.000First, Made in America means something to our country's private equity investors.
00:31:51.000When you invest $700 billion annually in American companies and the 13 million workers and families they support, you're investing in the success of Main Street.
00:31:59.000Over the last eight years alone, America's private equity investors have contributed $5 trillion to the American economy.
00:32:04.000That's money that powers growth in manufacturing, tech, energy, innovation.
00:32:07.000From strengthening supply chains to helping America lead in artificial intelligence, that kind of investment shapes our future.
00:32:12.000And it starts with private equity actually backing American ambition.
00:32:15.000Investing in our people, our businesses, our community.
00:32:18.000It's not just good for the economy, it's good for the country.
00:32:20.000Also, you might already own a firearm, but starting with a less lethal option to avoid financial, legal, mental repercussions of pulling the trigger?
00:32:38.000I'm about as pro Second Amendment as it gets.
00:32:40.000I own a bevy of firearms, but the thought of using lethal force is not ideal for everyone.
00:32:44.000Luckily, Berna's less lethal launchers are equipped with tear gas and kinetic ammo designed to incapacitate an attacker for up to 40 minutes without the unwanted repercussions.
00:32:52.000And Berna is excited to introduce the all-new compact launcher.
00:32:55.000Sleek, slim, it's like a sledgehammer, the same size as a smartphone, allowing you to conceal carry everywhere comfortably and with confidence.
00:33:01.000This launcher fires at 400 feet per second with 41 joules of force per square inch.
00:33:05.000It's a lot of power to stop aggressors in their tracks without having to deal with the complexities of a homicide.
00:33:09.000One thing I love about Burna, they are American.
00:33:11.000Over 80% of the components in that compact launcher are sourced in the United States.
00:33:15.000Their pistols are hand-assembled in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
00:33:18.000There's a lot to be recommended with regard to Burna.
00:33:21.000God forbid you kill somebody, that's going to be a big legal problem for you, a headache.
00:33:24.000And by the way, there are a lot of states where it's very difficult to get a firearm to defend yourself.
00:33:30.000It can be shipped directly to your door.
00:33:31.000And it's trusted by hundreds of police departments and government agencies.
00:33:36.000Thank you, Burna, for sponsoring this video.
00:33:38.000President Trump apparently is privately urging Speaker Mike Johnson to raise the top tax rate and close the so-called carried interest loophole.
00:33:44.000So what the hell is the carried interest loophole?
00:33:47.000Very often, the media will use a term and call it a loophole when it's not a loophole at all.
00:33:52.000So they'll say something like a gun show loophole, as though if you're a federally licensed firearms dealer, you can just go to a gun show and sell a gun randomly.
00:33:59.000The so-called gun show loophole means a private person who sells a gun to his friend Doesn't have to, necessarily, go through all of the federal background check kind of stuff.
00:34:09.000And some people called it the gun show loophole, when in fact, all it meant is that if you're not a federally licensed firearms dealer, and you're a private individual, that these rules don't apply to you in the same way.
00:34:18.000So the same thing is kind of true of the so-called carried interest loophole.
00:34:21.000So what exactly is the so-called carried interest loophole?
00:34:55.000But in order for it to qualify for capital gains tax as opposed to income tax, The underlying investments have to be held for more than three years.
00:35:02.000It's like you just make a quick churn and burn with regard to a stock.
00:35:05.000You sell it, you make a quick profit, you take the income, and then you paid the capital gains rate as opposed to the higher income tax rate.
00:35:11.000You actually have to be making a profit off of an investment that held for three years or more.
00:35:18.000Management fees are taxed at the regular income rate.
00:35:20.000Carried interest is taxed as the long-term capital gain at a maximum rate of 20% if the underlying investments are held for more than three years.
00:35:29.000If you have a share of the profits, isn't that more like owning a stock, right?
00:35:32.000That's the reason why it's treated as actually not a form of typical income.
00:35:36.000It's more like selling a stock because you actually are getting a share of stock that was profitable and then it was sold.
00:35:43.000So it's more like a capital gain than it is like income.
00:35:46.000Now, you can make an argument that capital gains should be taxed the same as income, but stop pretending that the carried interest loophole is actually just a form of normal income that's getting carved out for hedge fund managers.
00:36:09.000And I'm wondering what the difference is between that economic policy per se and Sherrod Brown's economic policy when he was senator from Ohio.
00:36:16.000That is not the economic policy that President Trump enacted in his first term and that was so wildly successful in increasing the earnings of everybody from the bottom part of the spectrum to the top part of the spectrum.
00:38:59.000She says you basically have to stop treating the symptoms, which very often are symptoms of specific diseases, and start treating what she calls the sort of underlying issue.
00:39:08.000And that underlying issue is supposed to be foundational metabolic cellular health.
00:39:13.000She says that government policy should focus on things like HDL cholesterol, triglycerides, blood sugar, blood pressure, and waist circumference.
00:39:19.000Here she was talking about how one of the problems is how doctors basically get paid for treating symptoms, but they don't get really paid.
00:39:28.000One of the biggest problems with the healthcare industry right now is that it's so siloed.
00:39:32.000We have over 100 different medical and surgical subspecialties.
00:39:35.000And the business model of American healthcare right now is volume.
00:39:43.000And so that has incentivized a structure of healthcare where it's most profitable to actually be seen by as many specialists as humanly possible.
00:39:50.000And that's what the average American is dealing with.
00:39:51.000They go to the primary care doctor with a list of issues and they get...
00:40:03.000And that's why I think people are frustrated.
00:40:05.000So we've got all these doctors who are incentivized to really be head down in their specialty lane and not actually step out and look at the big picture of how things are connected when in fact it's all connected.
00:40:18.000Now, that isn't actually the fault of doctors.
00:40:20.000Very often, if you're a primary care doctor, if you don't send somebody to a specialist and a disease develops, you get sued.
00:40:40.000She's correct, by the way, that most of the problems that are attributed to sort of disease, if you can treat...
00:40:46.000Far earlier, the underlying problem with good health, getting exercise, and all the rest, that is going to be a good solution to an enormous number of problems.
00:40:56.000She has suggested, for example, that you need to eat fruits and veggies, limit alcohol and drugs, get enough sleep, exercise, avoid environmental toxins.
00:41:05.000Here she was discussing fighting for life.
00:41:06.000Health is a type of the iceberg of fundamentally like a planetary issue, The planetary issue is the tip of the iceberg of what I think is really, really going on here, which is a spiritual issue.
00:41:19.000We are not fighting for life in this world anymore.
00:41:25.000And I think that's more of a consciousness issue.
00:41:27.000We talk about, why is no one covering this?
00:41:55.000you you Okay, so, she has been called out by now Laura Loomer for supposedly being kind of kooky.
00:42:02.000The reason that Laura Loomer is going after her is because she put out in her newsletter about when she was looking for romance.
00:42:08.000That she would pray to photos of her ancestors, that she would do full moon ceremonies, that she would talk literally out loud to the trees, plant medicine experience, and all the rest.
00:42:15.000But the question is, as Surgeon General, are those going to be her recommendations?
00:42:18.000Or, more likely, are her recommendations going to be things like, you know, you should probably eat well and get exercise and get sleep and all the rest.
00:42:26.000And back in June 2024, NPR, which is no right-wing outlet, published a very long interview with Casey Means, talking specifically about her thesis.
00:42:36.000And NPR said Means lays out her thesis for what is wrong in U.S. healthcare in her book Good Energy and how patients can take their health into their own hands.
00:42:43.000She and her co-author, her brother Callie Means, delineate how common diseases and symptoms that plague Americans are rooted in issues like poor nutrition, lack of movement, and problems with sleep.
00:42:52.000She says the most foundational level of health is how our cells get powered.
00:42:55.000You could have a Ferrari if it has no gas and won't run.
00:42:58.000So good energy is a term to help us understand what we're striving for when we're doing all these dietary and lifestyle investments.
00:43:03.000Okay, all of this sounds perfectly legitimate to me.
00:43:05.000Don't really see a major problem, but anything can be turned into a controversy inside the Trump administration.
00:43:10.000Meanwhile, in a piece of absolutely horrifying news to people who are bound to conspiracy theories, Kash Patel, the new head of the FBI, and somebody who is widely liked on the MAGA right, of course, he was asked about the death of Jeffrey Epstein by Congress yesterday, and he dropped the bombshell that actually Jeffrey Epstein did, in fact, kill himself.
00:43:31.000Did Jeffrey Epstein hang himself or did somebody kill him?
00:43:36.000Senator, I believe he hung himself in a cell in the Metropolitan Detention Center.
00:43:41.000Are you going to release all the information about that?
00:43:44.000Senator, we are working through that right now with the Department of Justice.
00:43:47.000When do you think you'll have it done, Cash?
00:43:54.000Okay, so, there are a lot of people out there who believe there's a bunch of conspiratorial stuff happening with the Epstein files and all the rest.
00:44:03.000The people who are in charge are the Trump administration.
00:44:05.000So if you have ire, that's the place you should be directing it.
00:44:08.000Cash Patel and company are going to have to, at some point, reveal whatever is there and then say what is not there is not there.
00:44:13.000It seems to me the best way to treat mysterious issues like the death of Jeffrey Epstein.
00:44:17.000Meanwhile, the FBI is in fact going after New York Attorney General Letitia James for her real estate and mortgage transactions.
00:44:26.000That Letitia James is the same person who declared that she had to go after Donald Trump because she was fighting corruption every step of the way.
00:44:32.000Well, now, as it turns out, James is a statewide elected official with offices in Albany, but the transactions involve her personal property, purchases and loans, processed in New York City and Virginia.
00:44:42.000One of the mortgage documents filed in connection with James' purchase of a single family residence was signed as a witness by Jennifer Levy, who was the first deputy attorney general.
00:44:51.000The second witness was Sharona Parchment, an executive assistant with the attorney general's office.
00:44:55.000So the question is why all these government officials were signing a document related to her purchase of a private residence.
00:45:02.000So, serious issues surrounding Letitia James, as so often happens, people who use their offices politically are, in fact, quite corrupt.
00:45:10.000That sort of stuff seems to happen all the time.
00:45:12.000Meanwhile, Columbia University fallout.
00:45:14.000So, as we talked about yesterday on the program, Hamas next took over the Columbia Library.
00:45:46.000Columbia unequivocally rejects anti-Semitism and all other forms of harassment and discrimination.
00:45:53.000We at Columbia value freedom of speech, robust debate, and peaceful protest.
00:45:59.000Today's disruption of Butler Library was not that.
00:46:02.000We need to recognize that when rules are violated, when a community is disrupted for the sake of a few, that is a considered choice and one with real consequences.
00:46:13.000There's a line between legitimate protest and actions that endanger others and disrupt the fundamental work of the university.
00:46:21.000Today, that line was crossed, and I have confidence the disciplinary proceedings will reflect the severity of the actions.
00:46:30.000Okay, so, again, this is a different note coming out of Colombia, and there's only one reason for that.
00:46:34.000It's because there's a different administration in charge.
00:46:37.000The White House, for its part, praised Colombia because it actually called the cops this time when people trespassed.
00:46:43.000Five hours after a group of about 100 masked protesters forced their way past security guards and pushed through turnstiles into the school's main library, they had their hands zip-tied behind their backs and were being marched out the door by police, according to the Wall Street Journal.
00:46:54.000And Claire Shipman said, violence and vandalism hijacking a library, none of that has any place on our campus.
00:46:59.000The Trump administration praised Columbia's strong and resolute response to the protesters, saying that Shipman, quote, has met the moment with fortitude and conviction.
00:47:06.000So yes, all it took was actually enforcing the law.
00:47:11.000The Bidens are out there trying to clear more sacks of cash.
00:47:14.000Apparently, they are considering a $30 million tell-all book deal that is going to include details from a diary kept by Jill Biden during her time at the White House.
00:47:23.000The joint book deal is contingent on Jill, whom experts say could be worth $15 million on her own, as according to Breitbart.
00:47:30.000But Jill would likely be required to review details surrounding the fact that Joe Biden was, you know, losing his mind, and also the terrible debate he had with Trump that basically forced him out of the race.
00:47:40.000Well, the Bidens were doing the tour yesterday.
00:47:43.000They showed up on The View, where Joe Biden explained that actually he could have won.
00:47:48.000Well, Mr. President, you had previously said that you thought that you would have won.
00:47:53.000Since then, Donald Trump won all the battleground states and made inroads with almost every major demographic, from working class voters to Hispanic men to black men.
00:48:02.000Knowing what you know now, do you think you would have beat him?
00:48:05.000Yeah, he's still got 7 million fewer votes.
00:48:24.000So he seems like he's in the best of health.
00:48:27.000He seems like things are going really, really well.
00:48:29.000He was asked why he didn't get out earlier, and here was President Biden's explanation.
00:48:34.000Well, Mr. President, some have even argued that leaving the race and endorsing your vice president, Vice President Harris, over 100 days before the election hampered her campaign.
00:49:12.000The worst part of this interview with The View, by the way, came when he was asked about all these books that are now coming out, including Jake Tapper's new book, about his cognitive decline, and Jill literally had to step in in the middle.
00:49:40.000We had a circumstance where we were in a position that we, well, the pandemic, because of the incompetence of the last outfit, end up over a million people dying.
00:49:54.000We're also in a situation where we found ourselves Unable to deal with a lot of just basic issues, which I won't go into in the interest of time.
00:50:07.000And so we went to work, and we got it done.
00:50:10.000And, you know, one of the things that...
00:50:14.000Well, and Alyssa, you know, one of the things I think is that the people who wrote those books were not in the White House with us.
00:50:23.000And they didn't see how hard Joe worked every single day.
00:50:35.000I can't imagine why the Democrats lost the last election cycle.
00:50:38.000All right, meanwhile, the Trump administration is sending an enormous number of mixed signals about its trip to the Middle East next week.
00:50:44.000I say mixed signals, I mean really, really, really mixed signals.
00:50:47.000So apparently the Trump administration is now thinking of giving away the store to the Saudis without involving Israel in an Abraham Accord.
00:50:55.000I don't really see the upside of this for the United States.
00:50:57.000I'm not sure why exactly the United States has an interest in, for example, giving civilian nuclear capacity to the Saudis without requiring anything from the Saudis in return.
00:51:30.000The United States now seems to be, under President Trump, trying to speedrun the process by basically forcing Israel to do what the Saudis want by giving the Saudis everything they want and then saying that Israel can either jump on board or not jump on board.
00:51:42.000According to Israel Hayom, Washington has now abandoned its insistence that Saudi Arabia establish diplomatic ties with Israel before nuclear cooperation talks can proceed.
00:51:51.000Reuters reported the U.S. has dropped its demand for Saudi to normalize relations with Israel as a prerequisite for advancing civil nuclear cooperation talks, according to two sources with knowledge of the So here's the question.
00:52:01.000Why exactly is it in America's interest for Saudi to have civilian nuclear capacity if we don't get anything and the region doesn't get anything in return?
00:52:11.000Okay, meanwhile, the Trump administration has now openly announced that Meanwhile, and Iran were to continue to develop nukes, Israel's not going to sit by idly while that happens.
00:52:34.000And of course, the Trump administration announced earlier this week that they were no longer going to be fighting the Houthis at all as long as the Houthis weren't attacking American shipping.
00:52:44.000the Houthis are firing missiles at Israel.
00:52:46.000It's not the United States' obligation to act on Israel's behalf in Yemen.
00:52:50.000Anymore, it's Israel's obligation to act on behalf of the United States in Yemen.
00:52:54.000However, opening daylight before you go into a fourth round of negotiations with the Iranians, in which the Iranians almost certainly will attempt to play for time, stall for time, gain quote-unquote civilian nuclear capacity that is aimed at weaponization.
00:53:12.000These are strange policy moves to be certain Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, President Trump, of course, is traveling only to the Gulf nations.
00:53:24.000He is traveling to Saudi, he is traveling to UAE, and he is traveling to Qatar as well.
00:53:30.000So, again, there are multiple reports that there is strain in the relationship between Trump and Netanyahu, presumably because Trump wants Israel to get to the end of the Hamas war as fast as humanly possible, along lines that he is laying.
00:53:46.000The Trump administration wants to divest from the Middle East as fast as possible while apparently drawing closer to Saudi Arabia.
00:53:52.000Wants to cut some sort of deal with Iran.
00:53:55.000A bad Obama 2 deal is not a win for the United States.
00:53:59.000So the sort of confusion in the region continues for sure.
00:54:03.000Meanwhile, GOP senators are saying they're not going to sign off on a treaty that basically gives Saudi civilian nuclear capacity if the United States doesn't get some sort of regional peace in return.
00:54:12.000The Senate is going to have a say on that.
00:54:16.000Senator Lindsey Graham and Senator Tom Cotton also said, if they want the most durable and lasting kind of deal, they want to bring it to the Senate, have it voted on as a treaty.
00:54:24.000One of the reasons why the Obama deal was so weak, an agreement between the American president, whoever he or she may be, and a foreign leader can be reversed by future presidents, as what President Trump did seven years ago.
00:54:34.000Harold Graham and Cotton announcing a resolution to ban Iran from enriching uranium entirely, saying, there will be no Iran nuclear deal approved by the Senate.
00:54:41.000That includes civilian nuclear capacity.
00:54:45.000Senator Cotton and I believe that the only way to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon is for them to completely dismantle their enrichment program.
00:54:57.000Without enriching uranium, you cannot make a nuclear weapon.
00:55:08.000President Trump said that this weekend.
00:55:10.000And in our resolution, we describe in granular detail what dismantlement would look like.
00:55:19.000And meanwhile, the United States is now suggesting that the U.S. will be part of distributing aid in the Gaza Strip.
00:55:27.000Mike Huckabee, who's the ambassador to Israel, he had him on the show last week, spoke about the need to transfer humanitarian aid to Gaza, saying there's a desperate need for humanitarian aid in Gaza.
00:55:35.000Hamas is not capable or willing to provide it.
00:55:38.000So, presumably, this now means that the United States or its partners are going to be providing it.
00:55:43.000I don't understand why the United States...
00:55:45.000Any more than I understand the Gaza Pier under Joe Biden.
00:55:48.000I do not understand why this is a good idea.
00:55:51.000It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, particularly.
00:55:56.000Delivering more aid into the Gaza Strip, that will...
00:55:58.000Okay, so let's say they pass it out to civilians.
00:56:00.000One minute later, Hamas is going to take all the aid from the civilians.
00:56:40.000So, let's talk about the Kingdom of Cain.
00:56:41.000You look at three murders in history, including Cain's killing of his brother Abel, in order to examine how exactly to deal with the problem of evil.
00:56:50.000So, what's sort of the thesis of the book?
00:56:52.000Well, I took these murders, these famous murders, real-life murders, that artists...
00:56:58.000Continually turned into stories, movies, novels, even works of philosophy.
00:57:03.000One murderer had his hand mummified, and after he was dead, they mummified his hand, put it in a museum.
00:57:09.000Poets would write beautiful odes to his hand.
00:57:12.000These are murders that capture the imaginations of artists.
00:57:15.000And the thing about art is that it turns life into a creative...
00:57:21.000And so I started to think, well, if you have a creative response to murder, which is undeniably evil...
00:57:26.000What are you finding that's beautiful in this that actually feeds into our life, that speaks into our lives, so that we can deal with the world?
00:57:35.000When you look around at it, honestly, right, you can get very depressed.
00:57:38.000And yet the Bible tells us to rejoice and it tells us, you know, to live in this world in rejoicing.
00:57:46.000If you can take a murder like the Ed Gein's murder of women in the 1950s in Wisconsin and turn it into a work of art like Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, which is a brilliant, brilliant movie, where is the beauty coming from?
00:57:58.000And I just take a look at the way in which creative people transform evil into something beautiful.
00:58:04.000And then ask the question in the second part of the book, how do you do that in your own life?
00:58:39.000And all of those movies, a lot of them obviously are junk.
00:58:41.000But every now and again you hit one that you think like, oh wait, this actually understood something about evil that actually makes my life better.
00:58:51.000So to go back to the original story of Cain and Abel, obviously there have been a wide variety of interpretations of what that story is supposed to mean.
00:58:59.000Every time I read it, my takeaway seems to be the reverse of many people's, which is that story is actually in the book of Genesis about the redemption of Cain.
00:59:07.000That Cain is the first character in the Bible who actually repents of sin.
00:59:11.000One of the big stories with Adam and Eve is that they don't repent of their sin.
00:59:14.000God confronts them and they blame the snake.
00:59:18.000And so they have to be cast out of the Garden of Eden.
00:59:20.000Cain, by contrast, he's told that he's essentially earned the death penalty.
00:59:24.000And then he throws himself on the mercy of the court and recognizes that he's done something deeply wrong before God.
00:59:29.000And so it's actually the first, not only murder story, but the first repentance story.
00:59:32.000What do you make of the story of Cain?
00:59:34.000Well, the interesting thing about Cain is, unlike the other stories, I didn't go directly to works of art about it because it repeats, the story repeats in the Bible, especially the Old Testament.
00:59:45.000Over and over and over again, every generation has a brother battle in it, in which the younger brother, instead of the older brother, kind of wins out.
00:59:53.000So you have the younger brothers continually triumphing over older brothers throughout the Old Testament.
00:59:59.000And I kind of took the murder of Abel by Cain as a trauma that feeds into the chosen people of God and repeats itself to...
01:00:11.000This battle, I mean, every brother battle in mythology is looked upon as a battle between a person and his other, himself, you know, because you're kind of like your brother and your brother is kind of part of you.
01:00:21.000And so I study the Cain and Abel story as a story of the inward struggle between faith and unbelief.
01:00:30.000And the idea, and a lot of the old rabbis' writings about this kind of deal with this, that the reason Cain's...
01:00:38.000Offering to God is not acceptable, and Abel's is, is not because of the nature of the offering, not because of the quality of the offering, it's because of the quality of the heart that's doing the offering.
01:00:57.000Wonderful response, what have you done?
01:01:00.000And that line, what have you done, which echoes through Dostoevsky, it echoes through all of the Christian writings, what have you done?
01:01:06.000And in Dostoevsky, the line is transformed into, what have you done to yourself?
01:01:10.000That's what, when there's a murder in Crime and Punishment, the woman who loves him says to him, what have you done to yourself?
01:01:17.000And I think that that's what God asks of Cain, and that's why that story keeps coming back until the Jewish people can kind of work this out into...
01:01:26.000Unifying the- And it's a beautiful thing,
01:01:54.000and it's a thing that we can actually live in.
01:01:57.000In that Cain and Abel relationship that's inside, I think, every one of us, we can actually live in this joy without fear once we understand what it is we're fighting inside ourselves.
01:02:09.000Drew, one of the things that I think you do so beautifully, and you do in a lot of your work, is when you're talking about themes like the theme of suffering, you do it in the form of storytelling.
01:02:49.000You know, this is what the full thesis, the full theory of the book, is that the only response to evil is beauty.
01:02:57.000And Dostoevsky said beauty will save the world.
01:03:00.000And the reason I believe that to be true is because when you get into these conversations, how can there be a good God who's all powerful and all omniscient, and yet there's evil in the world?
01:03:10.000And this keeps a lot of people from coming back.
01:03:11.000I can't tell you how many times people have said to me, oh, you believe things, but I just see so much evil in the world I can't believe.
01:03:19.000But the idea that there is an overall beauty.
01:03:55.000It's some terrible disaster that takes place in the Bible or in mythology.
01:03:59.000And yet some artist has found the beauty in it.
01:04:01.000My question, the book ends with the question, if human beings can do that with the evil that they experience, what can God not do of the entire experience of creation?
01:04:10.000And so this broken creation that we're in, this creation that's so full of things that darken us.
01:04:16.000It's actually part of a design so beautiful that when we finally see it, I think we will understand that our joy was always joy, and our joy was always the reality, and not our sorrow.
01:04:28.000And I think that that is, you're absolutely right.