Why are they going after Pete Hegseth so aggressively? It's not because he's failing, it's actually because he is succeeding. We also have Michael Knowles to walk us through what does it mean to select a new pope. For those that are not Catholic, it was a very informative discussion. And finally, I close this episode with something I think about making our churches as beautiful as possible.
00:00:55.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:03.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
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00:02:23.000We do have Michael Knowles that's going to join us in the program to discuss this and the significance of it.
00:02:28.000The College of Cardinals will assemble after, of course, the funeral of Pope Francis.
00:02:36.000Pope Francis certainly caused a lot of heartburn to Catholics in America.
00:02:40.000And so we're going to talk about the geopolitical significance of this because, remember, John Paul II was incredibly effective at fighting communism.
00:02:51.000I would love to see the next pope, whomever that is, maybe a pope from Africa or a pope from Asia or a pope from wherever, have the same sort of moral clarity that John Paul II had.
00:04:31.000First, recruiting is up after historic lows in 2022 and 2023.
00:04:37.000The Army and the Marine Corps recruiting have rebounded.
00:04:40.000In fiscal year 2024, quarter one, the Army reported a 10% increase in new enlistments year over year.
00:04:47.000The Marine Corps hit 100% of its recruiting goals.
00:04:51.000So when Joe Biden was president and Lloyd Austin was running things, military recruitment was down.
00:04:56.000But interestingly, almost no one ever attacked them.
00:04:59.000And just to be clear, Lloyd Austin did something...
00:05:02.000Infinitely more inexcusable than Pete Hegseth when he was hospitalized without telling anybody, and the chain of command of our military was largely broken because of Lloyd Austin's decision to go get, I think it was like a prostate surgery or something,
00:06:16.000Did you know that the Department of Defense's Inspector General just last month did an audit, and they noted a 12% increase in procurement efficiency and project delivery timelines?
00:07:00.000So by all objective measurements, Pete Hegsep, in his short window of time, has been a roaring success, probably the most effective Secretary of Defense since the new millennium.
00:07:12.000When you have a military that was bogged down by bureaucracy, wokeism, and low morale, and all of a sudden you see that turned around, you have to wonder.
00:07:50.000Pete Hegseth has removed this from the U.S. military and that makes him a major enemy of the entrenched permanent bureaucracy in the Pentagon.
00:07:59.000When he removes the gay poems from our battleships, it turns out that you can have a 30% increase in war games.
00:08:07.000Turns out that you could be 12% more efficient.
00:09:43.000A really good way to do that is to use inclusive language.
00:09:46.000Instead of saying something like,"Hey, guys," you can say,"Hey, everyone." Another way that we could show that we're allies and that we accept everybody is to maybe include our pronouns in our emails or, like we just did, introduce ourselves using our pronouns.
00:10:02.000This was an official military broadcast under Joe Biden.
00:10:05.000And not a single criticism from the media.
00:10:08.000Not a single criticism from the regime.
00:10:10.000No, instead we have the alpha man ascendant, the warrior ethos back into the Pentagon.
00:10:19.000But there, of course, is another thing.
00:10:21.000Despite the fact that we're more lethal and morale is up and recruiting is up and efficiency is up and that we have a real warrior leading things.
00:10:58.000So you've heard me talk about Patriot Mobile for a while now.
00:11:00.000You probably already know that for years they've stood in the gap for every American who believes that faith, family, and freedom are worth fighting for.
00:13:03.000But you also, you've got to keep Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton away because they right there and their staff, they're beating the war drums.
00:13:11.000There is an undercurrent to try to take out everyone around Pete Hegseth and eventually do an encirclement around the Pentagon so that they can have a clear shot at bombing Iran.
00:13:20.000And then, look, once you bomb Iran, that's a declaration of war.
00:14:04.000Like, literally, I cannot be more thankful to be alive now.
00:14:12.000This is a member of the military talking about the lip injections and the gender transition and how thankful that military member is to be alive, whatever rubbish that is, hair removal.
00:14:23.000That's what our military was, that Pete Hegseth inherited.
00:14:56.000But understand all of the machinery around President Trump can be very persuasive and can be incredibly powerful in how military decisions are made.
00:15:36.000You know, what a big surprise that a bunch of, a few leakers get fired and suddenly a bunch of hit pieces come out from the same media that peddled the Russia hopes won't get back their Pulitzers.
00:15:47.000They got Pulitzers for a bunch of lies.
00:19:24.000But I think when we consider his legacy, the most notable aspect of it to me is that left-right political analysis doesn't totally map onto ancient institutions.
00:19:39.000That's kind of my biggest takeaway with Pope Francis.
00:19:43.000Whenever we think we can pin him down, we say, all right, he's Argentinian.
00:19:48.000He comes from this kind of left-wing economic background.
00:19:50.000Then he'll come out and say something like, gay marriage is a machination of the father of lies to deceive and confuse the children of God.
00:19:57.000Every time we think he's going soft on some social issue, he'll say abortion is an assassination.
00:20:13.000You know, it's just been around for so long, and so we can't—our modern notions of politics, you know, they take you as far as they take you, but it would be a disservice to the man, really, to try to just minimize him in that way.
00:21:08.000It's kind of a good old boys' network, is what I'm told.
00:21:10.000Did Pope Francis put a lot of his allies in there?
00:21:15.000Just walk us through the technical details of what we can expect for the selection of a new pope, because it gets a little rusty here, because we've only seen it a couple times in our lifetime.
00:21:25.000And this, what we're doing right now, has been happening for about 2,000 years, which is immediately when the seat is vacant, they call it sede pacante, when a pope dies, immediately everyone starts talking about who's the next one going to be, how does it happen?
00:22:14.000There are about, I think, about 180 of them right now who are eligible to vote.
00:22:19.000They're going to go into the Sistine Chapel, and then you're not going to hear anything else.
00:22:22.000The way that you're going to know that they picked a pope is through smoke coming out of the Vatican.
00:22:27.000So, you know, classically, you're looking for the white smoke or the black smoke.
00:22:32.000And then when the white smoke comes up, then they're going to say, So who's it going to be?
00:22:37.000Because, again, not to sugarcoat some of the questions that have come up under the Francis pontificate, a lot of people are saying, is the next pope going to be really liberal?
00:22:46.000Is he going to be, is he going to, I don't know, try to undermine the Catholic tradition or something like that?
00:22:51.000And again, it's really hard to predict these things, but just because Pope Francis has appointed now so many cardinals does not necessarily mean that the cardinals are politically liberal or,
00:23:06.000I don't know, side with Pope Francis on this issue or that issue.
00:23:13.000A lot of these popes are in the developing world.
00:23:16.000A lot of them are socially very, very conservative.
00:23:20.000And so the ones who are up for it right now, one who's been talked about is Cardinal Pizzaballa.
00:23:25.000He's the Latin patriarch of Jerusalem.
00:23:27.000That would be quite interesting given what a touchpoint Jerusalem has been in the Israel-Gaza conflict.
00:23:34.000Another one who's up for it would be Peter Erdo.
00:23:37.000He's in Hungary, also considered moderate to conservative.
00:23:41.000There are a few who seem to be a little bit more liberal.
00:23:45.000That would be Cardinal Zupi, Matteo Zupi, or Peraline, Cardinal Peraline.
00:24:09.000I mean, just use the example of John Paul II, whom everyone loves.
00:24:14.000Don't forget, John Paul II was a child of Vatican II, of this major ecumenical council, which resulted in all sorts of reforms.
00:24:23.000Some of the reforms that followed the Second Vatican Council, some of us, I think, had some problems with them, especially those of us who love the traditional Latin mass, the traditional liturgy.
00:24:34.000Pope John Paul II, and Pope Benedict for that matter, considered perhaps even more conservative.
00:24:39.000Both of these guys come out of the Vatican Council, and yet they become some of the most stalwart, conservative-seeming figures of our lifetime.
00:24:47.000So I guess getting back to the top, that's what I mean when I say you can't totally map this stuff onto left-right politics.
00:24:52.000And also, you might think you've got to slam dunk with whichever cardinal is going to be the next pope.
00:25:52.000He made no mystery or no mistake with that.
00:25:57.000What would you like to see in the next Pope?
00:26:00.000And let's talk less regionally or less biographically, but from a positional, let's just say, from the position of the Pope, what would you like to see?
00:26:13.000You know, not that anyone's called to ask me, however, but you have called to ask me, so I'm happy to answer, and maybe people in the Curia could listen.
00:26:20.000I think what would be really helpful to the Church in the next Pope is to have a Pope who is not hostile to tradition.
00:26:29.000To the traditional liturgy, you know, what we call the Mass of the Ages, the traditional Latin Mass.
00:26:34.000A lot of people think the traditional Latin Mass is just the new Mass that we have, but in Latin.
00:27:17.000And yet now Catholics are outnumbering Anglicans.
00:27:20.000I mean, it's this unthinkable, I don't know what you want to call it, springtime for the church.
00:27:24.000A lot of the people who are converting are converting not because of innovations or electric guitars or something, but because of the old smells and bells.
00:30:23.000Kind of piggybacking on what we were talking about with Michael Knowles, as an evangelical Christian, I want to talk about this story here from the New York Post.
00:30:30.000I think it's very interesting and instructive in a variety of ways.
00:30:35.000Young people are converting to Catholicism en masse, driven by pandemic internet and lax alternatives.
00:30:41.000First of all, I see this happening on the ground.
00:30:43.000In fact, I'm in a group chat with some amazing Protestant evangelical pastors.
00:30:47.000I said, guys, this is a trend that's happening.
00:30:50.000They all agreed that young men in particular are joining the Catholic Church, even more so than the evangelical-type churches in the local area.
00:30:58.000Some pastors had some theories, including my friend Pastor James Cadiz, which I think he was spot on with saying that young people like the liturgy and that they're very disappointed in the wokeism and the liberalism of a lot of the evangelical churches.
00:31:10.000But let me go a little step further and build this out.
00:31:13.000There is so little tradition today that people seek it out.
00:31:27.000We used to be a country that even the local convenience store was built with the intent that it wanted to lift up the people that would shop there.
00:31:36.000The town hall or the town center, for example, get a picture of Prescott, Arizona's town center.
00:31:54.000Now when we build a city council, if you guys could get Arlington Heights City Hall, Illinois, and contrast that with the Prescott, Arizona City Hall.