As we wrap up the strangest year in recent political history, a new poll asks young Americans whether or not they think the assassination of a U.S. CEO was justified, and more people said yes than said no. Plus, a woman was arrested in Ohio for eating a cat. That s the lie of the year.
00:05:35.760I don't think it's just my partisanship.
00:05:37.720In fact, I think it's probably PolitiFact's partisanship.
00:05:40.860Now, there's another big story coming out.
00:05:45.260Another big whopper, actually, I guess.
00:05:46.900This was a story out of Aurora, Colorado.
00:05:51.540Police have arrested 14 people in an apartment complex that is run by the Trende Aragua Venezuelan gang.
00:05:57.820And if you want to go through the lies of the year, you might go back a little bit to when Martha Raddatz on ABC News was interviewing then-vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance.
00:06:07.340J.D. Vance pointed out that this Venezuelan gang had taken over a town in Colorado.
00:06:12.520Martha Raddatz said, hey, cut it out, fact check, 10 billion Pinocchios, no big deal.
00:06:19.280How dare you suggest that, J.D. Vance?
00:06:21.980What we're hearing, of course, Martha, is that people are terrified by what has happened with some of these Venezuelan gangs.
00:06:28.220Senator Vance, I'm going to stop you because I know exactly what happened.
00:06:49.840Only a handful of apartment complexes in America were taken over by Venezuelan gangs, and Donald Trump is the problem and not Kamala Harris's open border.
00:06:58.940Americans are so fed up with what's going on, and they have every right to be.
00:07:21.860Then, yesterday, police arrested 14 people in one of the apartment complexes that had reports of armed Venezuelan gangsters marauding through the hallways.
00:07:34.500They were responding to an armed home invasion in one of the apartments in which the victims were kidnapped and then held hostage, and one of them was stabbed by, allegedly, the Venezuelan gangsters.
00:07:48.100So, I don't think that's the top lie of the year, Martha Raddatz and the libs denying that Kamala Harris' open border had allowed a Venezuelan gang to take over a town.
00:08:22.060That can be effective if your lies are plausible.
00:08:26.920That is not effective when your lies become implausible.
00:08:31.020When you go out there and you say, my policy is going to help the American economy, and even if it doesn't, even if inflation goes up or even if GDP goes down a little bit, you could at least still maybe make the argument and say, no, it's actually working to help fix the deficit.
00:08:45.480Or, I don't know, this tax credit helped you in this particular way.
00:08:48.820There are ways to spin it where you can convince the American people that something is true, even if it isn't.
00:08:53.620But when you go up to the American people and you say, hey, the guy who can't speak, who's drooling, who's about 150 years old, oh, he's as sharp as ever.
00:09:02.660This is intellectually the best version of this politician we've ever seen.
00:09:23.580That's how you know the Democrats are responsible for the lie of the year.
00:09:26.240They're really responsible for the lie of the year because they got clobbered, okay?
00:09:33.660The people were sick of those lies, all the way down to the basic lie of a man can become a woman, which was a culture war issue that really played in Republicans' favor this year.
00:09:43.160It was all just evidence that the Dems had lost the common sense.
00:10:24.460When it comes to animated content for a younger audience, we recognize that many parents would prefer to discuss certain subjects with their children on their own terms and timeline.
00:11:14.420And then in November, there were a whole lot of reasons that Republicans won unified government in a landslide.
00:11:20.220But one of them, and a lot of people didn't believe me, I said, one of the big reasons is the transgender ideology issue.
00:11:27.500An issue that I've been paying attention to for quite a while, and I've pointed out must be eradicated from public life entirely, the whole ideology at every level.
00:11:33.420The reason for that is that the trans issue smuggles in so many premises.
00:11:40.440The trans issue is such a political nuclear bomb that if we accept the transgender ideology, then we totally blow up the foundation of our politics.
00:11:52.140Our perceptions can no longer be trusted.
00:12:04.280That's why the libs are so gung-ho about it, is it allows them to toss reason out of politics altogether and turn politics into a manner of sheer interest and the tyranny of one's will, kind of voluntarist politics.
00:12:18.640That's why they like it so much, but they lost.
00:12:22.520Okay, the American people broadly rejected that, and now even Disney, as its stock prices has cratered in recent years, even Disney has to say, okay, you know what?
00:13:16.220PragerU is building on this hard-fought momentum and educated millions of Americans on founding principles, Christian values, especially young people like no one else can.
00:14:02.740Speaking of the culture, Fartcoin now has an $800 million market cap.
00:14:09.760The value of a new cryptocurrency, which is a meme coin, which is called, and I'm displeased that I have to even say it, but it's the name of this supposed asset.
00:14:25.100NBC News points out an $800 million market cap is about equal to Office Depot, to Guess Jeanswear, Guess Jeans that you would buy at the shopping mall.
00:14:39.720It's about equal to the parent company of Steak and Shake, a major long-standing food company.
00:14:47.320Now among those mighty companies, we have Fartcoin.
00:15:15.360Well, it's jumped in part because Bitcoin, the most established cryptocurrency, I don't even know that it's exactly a currency, but it's certainly a type of a digital asset.
00:15:28.240More importantly, Bitcoin has jumped 50% in value, in price, I should say, since Trump was elected.
00:15:39.000The Trump election alone saw Bitcoin shoot up 50%.
00:15:43.980There's another coin in addition to Bitcoin and all that.
00:15:48.240I don't really invest in these things all that much, but I was persuaded to buy some LGB coin years ago.
00:15:55.220Still waiting for that return to come in.
00:15:57.060Then I put a relatively modest amount of money into Let's Go Brandon coin.
00:16:01.740I guess LGB could stand for a number of things, but it was Let's Go Brandon, and I was about to become a trillionaire on that, and I put a small amount of money in, and I seem to have lost all of it.
00:16:19.200It refers to Hawk Tua, that girl, Hayley Welch, who went viral for making a lewd comment.
00:16:23.680Over the course of 24 hours, the Hawk Tua coin market cap hit $500 million, but then it cratered down to $28 million, and people lost basically all their money.
00:16:36.660And the girl, Hayley Welch, is now being accused of insider trading, although she's denied it.
00:16:50.240Maybe I'm going a little too soft on her.
00:16:51.800But in any case, the coin was a pump and dump.
00:16:55.020Whether she knew about it or not, it was a pump and dump.
00:16:57.240The SEC is right to look into this thing.
00:16:58.920It raises questions about all sorts of meme coins and crypto broadly.
00:17:04.460Regardless, though, let's say you've made a ton of money on Bitcoin.
00:17:07.180There are plenty of people listening to this show who've made an insane amount of money on Bitcoin.
00:17:10.640I wish I'd made a little bit of that money on Bitcoin.
00:17:13.400But I'm not losing sleep over it because a lot of the crypto investing, it just feels like gambling.
00:17:21.140The fact that Bitcoin jumped 50% after Trump's election, to me, is not a great sign about the health of crypto, about the health of the economy, and about the health of the American political order.
00:17:37.020That's the sort of thing that happens in kleptocracies.
00:17:39.480That's the sort of thing that happens in banana republics, where the supposed value of assets, of companies, of investments, jumps or collapses based on jokes, based on memes, and based on elections.
00:17:55.860That's not how things are supposed to work.
00:17:57.500The way it's supposed to work is the price, the market cap, is increased because there is an actual increase in the value of the underlying asset.
00:18:10.440The widget company stock price goes up because the widget company is making and selling more widgets.
00:18:16.940And there's a long-term strategy for it to make and sell even more widgets.
00:18:22.680And it employs real people, and it produces real products, and it has real effects in the world.
00:18:30.040HawkToa coin, Fartcoin, all these other little meme assets, supposed assets, don't have any underlying value.
00:18:53.360As some friends of mine have pointed out for years now, luck is not a business model.
00:18:57.840And right now, it seems to me, with our country, we've gone from sober, deep strategic planning in our law, in our political order, in our economy.
00:19:09.020We've gone from that kind of long-term, sober, serious thinking into just kind of random gambling and making it all up as we go.
00:19:16.820So that's probably not a good sign for the health of the country.
00:20:21.220Some are going to say it's this problem or that problem.
00:20:23.320They're going to point to all sorts of hobby horses.
00:20:26.260It seems to me, as a mackerel-snapping papist myself, there is a strange tension right now.
00:20:32.140It has been for some years between certain elder prelates in the church who are often radical and iconoclastic and even innovative.
00:20:42.840The kind of people who really celebrated the degradation of the liturgy and the intrusion of electric guitars and maracas and, I don't know, whatever, balloons into the holy liturgy.
00:20:56.120And the laity, the laity which is younger, at least the really tuned-in laity, younger, which wants orthodoxy and tradition and reverence.
00:21:08.220I go around to churches all around the country.
00:21:10.180Sometimes I'm traveling on a Sunday or a holy day, and I go in, and I go to traditional Latin mass churches.
00:21:16.280I go to churches that have the new mass, the mass of Pope Paul VI, but in a more reverent way, ad orientum with chanting, with some more Latin, fewer electric guitars, fewer jokes and vaudeville shows.
00:21:30.180So I go into those, and then I sometimes go to parishes that are really kind of modern and casual and engage in all sorts of liturgical abuses.
00:21:40.800And I can't help but notice, the more traditional reverent parishes, they're full of young people, and they're full of really young people, meaning the young people who attend have a lot of kids.
00:21:52.040You know, if a church isn't crying, it's dying.
00:21:53.680And I go into the more innovative, modern, hippy-dippy ones, the median age is about 106, and they aren't having kids.
00:22:01.980And so there's a financial issue here that is raising a broader and inevitable political point.
00:22:11.120The future of the church, seems to me, will be traditional.
00:22:15.460One, because the church has the deposit of faith that is sacred scripture with sacred tradition, as St. Paul tells us.
00:22:21.820But also because the more traditional people, the people who want orthodoxy and truth and beauty and reverence, they're the ones having the kids.
00:22:32.080So I'm not even just wishcasting here.
00:22:33.760I'm just saying the future of the church is going to be that, because the other people are not producing the future of the church.
00:22:42.480So I guess there are two ways it could go.
00:22:43.620The churches will either become more reverent, more orthodox, more traditional, more beautiful, more of what they are over the course of two millennia, or those churches are going to become mosques or coffee shops, because there aren't going to be Christians to go into them.
00:23:02.640First, though, go to strongholdrescue.org.
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00:24:23.120Speaking of deeply held beliefs, there is a new platform, a new tech platform, for real estate that will show you the political leanings of neighborhoods.
00:24:35.920And this is going to be really helpful to a lot of people.
00:24:47.760I'm not saying I don't want any Democrats on my street, but I want to live in a place where people want to live the way that I want to live.
00:24:57.300Isn't that why we move to a neighborhood?
00:24:59.140Isn't that the very essence of community?
00:25:02.060It's people living in common, having something to do with each other.
00:25:06.980Well, you better make sure you're living in the right village.
00:25:09.440It really does take a village to raise a child.
00:25:11.320So make sure you're not living in a village that is totally opposed to your beliefs, that is totally opposed to what you want for your children.
00:25:17.120Because your kids are not going to turn out the way you hope that they will.
00:28:04.720And it tells us something about what we believe, about how we view ourselves, our relation to the world, our relation to maybe beyond the world, that today the most important thing to people is electoral politics.
00:28:19.380Now, speaking of shifting political attitudes, there's a poll out from Emerson College, a little bit disturbing.
00:28:26.500More young Americans believe that the UnitedHealthcare CEO who was assassinated, more young Americans believe that his assassination was justified, then believe it wasn't justified.
00:28:37.660They polled 18 to 29-year-olds, 41% of them say the murder was either somewhat or completely acceptable.
00:28:46.260A full 24% of them say it was somewhat acceptable.
00:28:50.640And then 17% say it was completely acceptable.
00:28:53.660One in six, almost one in five, young people polled, say that the murder of the healthcare CEO was completely acceptable, simply because, this is a husband and a father, simply because he was the CEO of a healthcare company.
00:29:12.460I don't even think he was a rich kid growing up.
00:29:14.000I think he was, in many ways, a self-made man.
00:29:17.32040% say that the murder was completely or somewhat unacceptable.
00:29:36.100It should not be surprising, certainly on the left.
00:29:38.720Shouldn't even really be surprising on the right.
00:29:41.500Especially that we're talking about young people here, shouldn't be surprising at all.
00:29:44.820If you are educated on Karl Marx, if you're educated on Friedrich Nietzsche,
00:29:51.720if you're educated just on plain old liberalism,
00:29:54.940then how would you have the moral and ethical architecture to understand why it's wrong to murder this guy just because he runs a company you don't like?
00:30:06.100Those are the kinds of people that young people are educated on today.
00:30:10.300They're educated on Marx and his heirs.
00:30:14.780They're educated on Nietzsche and his heirs.
00:30:26.300And then just plain old liberalism, which is all about me, me, me, me, me.
00:30:31.300It's all about my rights and my entitlements and the social compact that I've entered into because I'm fundamentally an individual and it's all about me.
00:30:41.320All right, if that's what you're raised on, why is this wrong?
00:30:45.840This has been mainstream thinking since the French Revolution, which we are taught today was a great event.
00:30:52.260The French Revolution is one of the most evil events in the history of the world.
00:30:55.800The French Revolution, when these nasty revolutionaries came in, murdered their king and queen, overturned the whole society, spilled zillions of gallons of blood, ultimately ate their own, killed the revolutionaries too, destroyed so much beauty, so much tradition, harassed and murdered so many innocent people.
00:31:22.980Well, because they were after revolution.
00:31:27.000They had a good end in sight and the good end justified the immoral means.
00:31:32.240That is universally the moral teaching that we get today in the mainstream culture.
00:31:39.000Okay, well, if that's all true, if you can behead the queen of France because you think she said something that you don't like, she didn't even say it, you know, let them eat bread or let them eat cake rather.
00:31:53.400If you can behead the queen of France purely because of envy and recklessness and wrath and pride and all of the deadly sins.
00:32:03.900If that's justified, surely killing the CEO of a health insurance company would be justified.
00:32:08.760Sure, if there's no morality and we're beyond good and evil and we're going to become the Superman and everything we think about the transcendent moral order is just a bunch of bunk and illusions and fairy tales that we tell kids so they're not afraid of the dark.
00:32:20.940Then why wouldn't you kill the health care CEO if you don't like him?