PLANE CRASHES In Philly, FAA BANS Helicopters Near DC Airport w/ Inspiring Philosophy

Summary

Timcast IRL Episode Summary: "PLANE CRASHES In Philly, FAA BANS Helicopters Near DC Airport w/ Inspiring Philosophy"

Release Date: February 1, 2025

---

Introduction

In this episode of Timcast IRL, host Tim Pool delves into a tragic plane crash in Philadelphia, subsequent FAA actions, and broader societal issues such as government overreach, DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) policies, and the decline of religiosity leading to increased political tribalism. Featuring insightful discussions with guests Michael Jones and Brett Dasovic, the episode intertwines hard-hitting news with philosophical debates.

---

Breaking News: Philadelphia Plane Crash and FAA Helicopter Ban

At [00:36], Phil Labonte reports a devastating plane crash involving a small Cessna jet in northwest Philadelphia near Cotman Avenue and Roosevelt Boulevard. The crash, occurring just after 6 PM on a Friday, resulted in multiple fatalities, explosions, and fires engulfing several houses. Labonte highlights the significant fuel load as a contributing factor to the extensive fire damage.

Brett Dasovic adds at [07:20], "Well, it's right after takeoff, right?" emphasizing the suddenness of the incident. The discussion touches on potential miscommunications between air traffic controllers and helicopter pilots, leading to the tragic collision.

Following the crash, the FAA announced a temporary ban on helicopter traffic around Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA) until the NTSB completes its investigation. Labonte questions the effectiveness of this measure, suggesting it may be more about quelling public fear rather than addressing systemic issues [29:00].

Quote:

"We are not in a situation where planes are going to start falling out of the sky all the time. These policies do have ramifications, but it's still the safest way to fly." — Phil Labonte [31:50]

---

J6 Prosecutors Dismissed in D.C.

Timcast shifts focus to the political ramifications of the plane crash, discussing the firing of over two dozen January 6th (J6) prosecutors in Washington D.C. at [30:03]. The dismissals, made by Interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin, targeted federal prosecutors who handled Capitol riot cases. Labonte criticizes the move, suggesting it undermines justice and accountability.

Quote:

"The prosecutors were kept on in a probationary phase. That's why they're allowed to be fired without any sort of recourse under Justice Department policy." — Phil Labonte [30:03]

---

Federal Reserve Adviser Indicted for Economic Espionage

The episode covers the indictment of John Harold Rogers, a former senior advisor to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, accused of leaking sensitive information to the Chinese government [83:59]. This case raises concerns about Chinese infiltration within U.S. government agencies.

Quote:

"Every layer of our government, I think, is connected to the Chinese in some way." — Ian Crossland [84:55]

---

DEI Policies and Government Websites

Labonte discusses the ongoing removal of DEI-related content from federal government websites, citing instances where government buildings have logos and slogans about diversity and inclusion painted over [25:25]. He critiques DEI policies, questioning their impact on staffing and operational efficiency.

Quote:

"I think that as DEI has been declining, unfortunately, politics moves in to fill that gap. Everyone gets more tribal, less trustworthy." — Michael Jones [19:33]

---

The Rise of Conspiracy Theories in the Internet Age

Guests explore how constant connectivity and information overload contribute to the proliferation of conspiracy theories. Brett Dasovic remarks on the public's increasing tendency to link unrelated events, reflecting a broader societal shift towards distrust in institutions [09:15].

Quote:

"Humans evolved to see patterns because you're more likely to survive if you go back to you're the ancient hunter gatherer and you hear a ruffle in the weeds. It's better to think there's a predator there." — Michael Jones [10:09]

---

Decline of Religiosity and Political Tribalism

A significant portion of the episode delves into the decline of traditional religiosity and its impact on political identities. Michael Jones argues that as Christianity wanes, politics fills the void, leading to heightened tribalism and polarization [19:33]. The discussion references historical contexts, including Nietzsche's proclamation of "God is dead" and its implications for modern society.

Quote:

"Christianity has really added something into the mix that has really calmed a step down and given us a far better view of ethics." — Michael Jones [73:53]

---

Historical Context: Christianity’s Role in Shaping Ethics

The conversation extends into the historical influence of Christianity on Western civilization, emphasizing its role in abolishing practices like slavery and fostering human rights [69:28]. Guests highlight how Christian ethics have been pivotal in advancing societal morals and combating inherent human depravity.

Quote:

"Slavery was just the norm in the ancient world until the Christians came on the scene and they really pushed ethics forward." — Michael Jones [70:33]

---

Audience Interaction and Super Chats

Throughout the episode, Timcast engages with audience super chats, addressing personal stories, movie recommendations, and viewers' opinions. Notable interactions include congratulations to listeners overcoming cancer and discussions on media biases.

Quote:

"The best way to combat Christian nationalism is to go to church. Studies show Christian nationalism arises among the least churched individuals." — Michael Jones [122:34]

---

Conclusion

The episode concludes by reinforcing the interconnectedness of current events with deeper philosophical and historical themes. Tim Pool emphasizes the importance of maintaining a sober perspective on tragedies like the Philadelphia plane crash, advocating for rational analysis over conspiracy thinking.

Final Takeaway:

"We are not in a situation where planes are going to start falling out of the sky all the time. Stay informed, stay rational, and engage with the community." — Phil Labonte [31:50]

---

This episode intricately weaves immediate news events with overarching societal issues, providing listeners with a comprehensive analysis of both specific incidents and their broader implications. Through expert guests and interactive discussions, Timcast IRL offers a nuanced perspective on the challenges facing modern America.

Transcript

[Phil Labonte]

This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Upgrade your business with Shopify, home of the number one checkout on the planet. Shop pay boosts conversions up to 50%, meaning fewer carts going abandoned and more.

[Michael Jones]

Sales going cha ching.

[Phil Labonte]

So if you're into growing your business.

[Michael Jones]

Get a commerce platform that's ready to sell wherever your customers are. Visit shopify.com to upgrade your selling today.

[Brett Dasovic]

Foreign.

[Phil Labonte]

We have breaking news out of Philadelphia. There is has been a plane crash a small Cessna plane I believe jet jet just after 6pm Friday. It had happened in the north in northwest Philadelphia near Cotman Avenue and Roosevelt Roosevelt boulevard just after 6pm there are I believe there are multiple fatalities that have been reported and we're going to get a little bit into that today. It leaves multiple houses on fire caused an explosion. So it's it was a good sized plane. It looks like there was there was a fuel involved. You know there was a decent amount of fuel on the plane. So we're going to talk about that. There is some information about the transportation security announcing the new FFA action to ensure safety in airspace that comes on the heels of the accident in in D.C. at DCA where the Blackhawk and the American Airlines commuter plane crashed. We've got some information about the the J6 protesters about the the prosecutors Interim U S Attorney fires more than two dozen January 6th prosecutors in D.C. we had some of the J6 defendants and and people that were pardoned and had their sentences commuted this morning on the culture war. We had a great conversation about that. So we're going to talk about that a little bit. Let's see. We've got some information about the the Federal Reserve advisor that's been charged with economic espionage. Apparently he has been giving trade secrets or information to the Chinese Communist party which is obviously a big problem for the United States. The age the CBS news is reporting agencies are asked to scrub federal federal government website to remove diversity Related content I've seen some posts on X where there are people there was guys painting over the walls. The walls had like diversity, inclusion and all kinds of slogans and they've been painting those over with the standard government gray which as much as the government gray is not really aesthetically pleasing. I think that it's a better option than diversity, equity and inclusion. And then we've also got the information about the Joe Ellis the trans woman that was alleged to be on the black cop helicopter but that is not the case. But before we get into that head on over to cast brew.com and buy yourself Some coffee. Normally this is the time where we talk about how. How many bags of Ian's graphene dream have been solen. But they're gone. Sold there. But they're all. They're all gone. Just sold them all. Ian, how do you feel about that?

[Ian Crossland]

That's bittersweet.

[Phil Labonte]

You will it. You know it is. It's low. It was low acidity coffee. So, so you might want to get the, get the bitter part out of there. But you can head on over there. You can get Appalachian Nights, you can get Alex Stein's primetime Grind, which is the closest thing to co Cocaine coffee as you can get. You can get two weeks till Christmas which has got a cool picture of myself dressed up like Santa Claus. So head on over to Caspar and get your coffee. Head on over to boonies HQ and you can get the newest release from boonies, the 28th Amendment Board. It says the 28th Amendment chickens being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep, bear and breed chickens shall not be infringed. Whereas that does seem like a, a little quip and a play on the second amendment. It speaks to a greater, a greater caus. The idea is that you're free to take care of yourself whether it be using the second amendment to protect your right to defend yourself or the 28th Amendment to protect your right to grow food and, and, and be a homesteader or to take care of your family. These are all things that are, are part of your humanity. So and then we want you to head over to timcast.com and join us. Join us. Become a member. Join the Discord. You can come hang out to at the after show part. After show and call in. There's a bunch of different shows that they do. They do pre shows, they do after shows. The community is great. Something like 20,000 like minded individuals. We've got. I've heard there are people that have gotten married because of the Discord already. So it's a great community. Go ahead and join us and you can call into the after show. We'll take your call. You can talk to us. So. Yeah, but so smash the like button. Share the show with your friends and go and join Tim cast. We're going to talk about all these stories and much more. Joining us tonight we have philosophy. What is it now?

[Michael Jones]

Inspiring.

[Phil Labonte]

Inspiring philosophy. Yes. I'm sorry Once you tell people what your name, where and where they can find you and stuff.

[Michael Jones]

Yeah. My name is Michael Jones. I'm a Christian YouTuber. I make videos defending Christianity, arguing for the evidence that supports it, arguing for the truth of it. God exists. That kind of stuff. You can find me at Inspiring Philosophy on YouTube, Twitter or X I guess it's called, as well as Instagram.

[Phil Labonte]

Trying to dead name it, right?

[Michael Jones]

Yeah. Oh, yeah. Same name just everywhere on those platforms. Yeah.

[Phil Labonte]

And on you on Exit's Inspiring Floss.

[Michael Jones]

Inspiring Floss, Yeah. So if you start typing it in, you'll see the symbol and I'll just.

[Phil Labonte]

Come up, you know, Ian's here, everybody.

[Ian Crossland]

Ian Crossland up in the house. Come check me out at Ian Crossland anytime, anywhere. But we also have Brett Dasavik here. Let's get going, guys.

[Brett Dasovic]

Yes, let's get right into it. Let's just go for it.

[Phil Labonte]

Oh, you're not even going to talk who you are.

[Brett Dasovic]

My name is Brett. I normally host Pop Culture Crisis Monday through Friday right here on YouTube. But let's just get started, shall we?

[Phil Labonte]

All right, so we're going to get started right now. We have some, some local coverage of the plane crash in Philadelphia. Leaves multiple houses on fire, causes explosion. CBS News is reporting emergency crews are responding to an explosion in northeast Philadelphia after a small medical jet crash in the area of Roosevelt Boulevard and Cotman Ave. Philadelphia police confirmed to CBS News Philadelphia the plane, a Learj was going from Philadelphia to Springfield, Missouri leaving the Northeast Philadelphia airport when tragedy struck. The plane crashed into a neighborhood outside the Roosevelt Mall just moments after leaving the airstrip. I don't know if, if you've seen any of the video, but the video of the actual. So this is from, this is actually from someone where the crash has crashed into some of the a neighborhood, the debris field. I, I've been hearing reports that it's about the size of a football field, so about 100 yards by 50 yards or something like that. It was a good sized plane, had a, a significant load of fuel, which is why there's all this fire and stuff.

[Brett Dasovic]

Well, it's right after takeoff, right?

[Phil Labonte]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, and if it's heading to Missouri, I mean, that's a decent, decent hike. I, this is not the picture or not the video of the falling one. Hey, Serge, do we have the one with that? Can you pull up the one that where the, the, you could actually see the plane falling. But, and the reason I, that is because it's not. It didn't look like there was a, it didn't look like they were in control and they were trying to land.

[Brett Dasovic]

It or anything like there was no descent. It was straight down.

[Phil Labonte]

It Was it, was something happened, they lost control and it went nose down into the. Thank you very much. Wrong one.

[Ian Crossland]

Yeah. After this you'll see this video of the plane coming down. I mean it's like full speed angling 50 degree angle towards the ground.

[Brett Dasovic]

The one from the ring camera, right? Yeah, right here.

[Ian Crossland]

And okay, after you see this, Ashton Forbes posted on Twitter it was a missile. So I don't know.

[Phil Labonte]

That was a little, so there you can see it.

[Ian Crossland]

Let's play that a couple more times. I, I, the idea is just straight down.

[Phil Labonte]

Yeah, I mean I, I do take issue with, with people that are going to talk, say it was a missile. Maybe they were being, maybe they were describing the, the way that it looked. But it, it wasn't a missile attack. It was actually a plan.

[Brett Dasovic]

No, but the, the nature of the political discourse and everything that happened in the last couple of days. So when we were right, when this happened, we were watching live on some of the, I think it was like one of the Fox affiliates here and they had live chat while they were, you know, on the ground reporting in a whole bunch of the discussion from the people who were watching or the people who are following along in the live chat were simultaneous discussions about whether it was some type of an attack or whether this was something related. Which really more than anything just gives you an idea of where the public barometer is for how people feel about these types of events in the culture right now.

[Phil Labonte]

Do you feel like there's like conspiracy brain now? Especially because I feel like it's because of the Internet. Like I go ahead, I'm sorry.

[Brett Dasovic]

The point is, is like when, when these things happen.

[Phil Labonte]

Right.

[Brett Dasovic]

So I think it said like 1500 plane crashes a year or something. But the idea here is that you are now connected on the Internet and connected to the news 24 7. So before when you only check the news maybe once a day when you got work, maybe you read the newspaper when you were getting ready for your day. Now because you are constantly connected to digital communication, you are seeing these things every single day and not just in your area. Whereas usually you'd be watching local news. Maybe they would have stories on an international level, but most of it was local news unless you were watching cable news like Fox or CNN or like that. So you are seeing far more things which makes you prime to think that there's connected events when there may be, there may not.

[Phil Labonte]

How do you guys feel? I have, I have thoughts, but I want to know what you guys are thinking.

[Michael Jones]

Well, this is, this is human N. Yeah. I mean, this is. If you go back to how humans evolved, we were sort of evolved to see patterns because you're more likely to survive if you go back and you're the ancient hunter gatherer and you hear a ruffle in the weeds. It's better to think there's a predator there than it just being the wind, because you're more likely to survive for the one out of a million chance that there's actually a predator there. And that that evolutionary thinking just carried over into our modern thinking. So we see patterns everywhere now. Two plane crashes happen within a couple of days. They've got to be connected. And humans hate coincidences. They hate it. So we always got to try to connect them. We got to think there's some bigger plan. And the truth of the matter is sometimes just things happen and we just need to accept that we live in a chaotic world. And instead of trying to rush like people do now, to start blaming everyone, trying to draw connections, trying to assume there's some bigger picture, and that's not helpful for anyone. And we got to get control of our basic instincts, I guess you could say, and just have a more rational take on this kind of stuff.

[Ian Crossland]

And people have been gaslit for God knows how long, but it's really come out over the last decade, you know, with COVID where they said, don't wear masks, they don't do anything. And then a couple months later, it's like, actually masks do do something. We just lied to you because we need to do first responders to get the masks. You know, the vaccine prevents transmission. Oh, actually it doesn't prevent transmission. They found.

[Phil Labonte]

And it was a bat, but it turns out that it was actually the lab where it was grown.

[Ian Crossland]

Yeah. So people are hypersensitive to being lied to and they're will think overcompensating and saying, so the opposite must be true then of what I'm being told. But then there's also that you can make a living by being. By being a conspiracy theorist. Literally online, if you. If you see something happen and you say, I'm going to say that it's this. This crazy, it's a missile and not an airplane. And you get 10,000 likes and all these comments on your Twitter post, then you get a check for 500 bucks. Yeah, I. I find no punishment.

[Phil Labonte]

I think that, like, I mean, both of your. Both your points, I think are very solid. My instinct was. Was to. Was going to be. To say what Ian said, because I think that the. The fact that the Institutions that even normies like trusted. Right. Everybody that was a normal person, they always figured, well, the government is here to take care of us, particularly people on the right. Right. The right believed in the government. It wasn't, it wasn't supposed to be the big government, but they believed that the institutions were reliable. They didn't have the same suspicion for CIA the way they didn't have the same suspicion for the police the way the left did. They didn't have the same suspicion for government overall the way that the left did. And after the way that, the way that Covid was treated and possibly Donald Trump as well, but the way that, and I think it probably actually is the way that Donald Trump was treated because again, Republicans had been the ones that thought they were the ones that were the side that did things the right way. They, they presented Mitt Romney, who was the most Boy Scout of Boy Scouts. He was as clean and polished, prim and proper and unoffensive as a politician could possibly get. And he still was considered a misogynist. He was called all the names in the books. He's a Nazi, he's a misogynist. And the Republic and the Republicans finally got to the point where they were like, well, we're just going to give you Donald Trump then, you know, if, if everybody's a bad guy, we'll just give you the guy that will win.

[Brett Dasovic]

They were.

[Phil Labonte]

And I think. Hold on. And I think that the, the right has now realized that the centers of power are, are not good or bad, depending on their opinion. They're good or bad, depending on who's actually in control of them and who's the person making the judgment about good or bad. Because the left will say, oh, it's okay that, you know, it was perfectly fine that Joe Biden pardoned his son. You know, he was, It's a father doing all the things for doing what he can for his, his kid. He loves it. The left will make this, the excuses that at one point the right would make. The right say, well, you know, if a kid get, you know, if, if a black kid gets roughed up by the cops, well, what was he doing? You know, the right automatically sided with the, with the police nowadays. I think the right will be like, well, was the cop a good guy? Why, you know, why were they roughing the kid? I think that, that everybody's more suspicious of, you know, the institutions now. And I think Covid and, and the way that the left has behaved in, in positions of power lately. So I'm sorry, I Didn't cut you off.

[Michael Jones]

Well, I mean, this is more aligned with how humans have been throughout history. Just suspicious of powers, suspicious of people in authority. And if you go back to the ancient times, if there was a whole bunch of calamities happening, like, they would be like, well, the gods must be mad at the king. That could be a common excuse. I mean, if you go back even to the founding of this nation, you read a lot of the papers in the 1800s, very hostile towards their political opponents. I mean, like, the idea that like the right for a short time was like pro government. Yeah, I see that, but I think it's just going back to the way more aligning with how humans tend to be. We're just suspicious of anyone outside of our tribe. Everyone in our tribe is good. Everyone outside of the tribe is bad. And so we're going to see more of that. And we had this brief moment, I think, where there was a little less of that. It'd be nice to sort of get back to that. But I don't think we're going to be there.

[Phil Labonte]

When you say brief.

[Brett Dasovic]

Sorry, I was going to ask that question. Say, when you say brief moment, when did you think that was?

[Michael Jones]

Well, I think like. Like the 50s is really the abnormal time in American history.

[Brett Dasovic]

So like the Red Scare, are we talking like.

[Michael Jones]

Well, I mean, yeah, that's a good point because the Red Scare caused people to start trusting the government more. They're going to protect us from the communists very easily. All we have to do is hide under our desks and the nuclear bomb will miss us. Nonsense, you know, that kind of stuff. And so, I mean, like, that definitely sort of moved people in the direction. But I think the more we just saw corruption, I think it started with.

[Brett Dasovic]

Like Watergate, So just blissful ignorance for a period of time where not so much that it's.

[Michael Jones]

Yeah, I guess that might be what I put it. But it was like there was a bigger enemy out there. And I think a lot of what the US government does in a lot of ways is try to make boogeymen so they trust people will trust them. You know, like, you know, terrorists. You guys got to trust us. We'll keep terrorists away now is the thing. It's not working.

[Brett Dasovic]

I think that's actually why the Internet has played such an important role now. So we've had that discussion. I think me and you have even probably talked about this for like, even if there was, you know, God, you know, Nobody wants another 9, 11, but even if there was the way information is disseminated now. I don't think there would be the same type of coalescing around a nation the way that there was after 9, 11. I don't think that that's possible one, because things like this, because people will automatically be suspicious whether it involves our government, foreign governments, but there isn't going to be the rah rah nationalism that united more people from both sides of the aisle back in, say, 2001, what, at the latest. And even that didn't last for all that long.

[Phil Labonte]

I mean, I agree that you're. It didn't last for all that long.

[Brett Dasovic]

I just don't think we'll ever see something like that again in the age of the Internet.

[Phil Labonte]

I feel like that the charity that was given was really wasted by the Bush administration. You know, I mean, I was a guy that was, was, you know, very, very much a, you know, Republican kind of dude. You know, after, well, I mean, in the, in the late 90s and early aughts, I was very much a Republican. And then when George Bush squandered all of my, my trust and, and I was like, okay, well there's no good guys in D.C. and then I was, you know, I started looking into people like Ron Paul and, and the libertarians, and I started looking at the government as, you know, always, you know, you should always be at least to some degree suspicious. And I do think that, I think, you know, Brett's got a point. I don't know that we would have, have the same kind of coalesce around the government, especially considering the way that the American people, you know, younger generations, they haven't been taught that America is a good place. They've been taught that America is a bad place. We, we've been taught that all of the, the fundamental principles that our, our country is supposed to have been founded on, we've been taught that they' now, whether or not that's true, I think that there's, there's probably a kernel of truth to it that, that, and that's only because human beings are fallible. But generally, I think the ideals that the country is founded on and the, the, the aspirations that we have for our country are good. And I think that the United States has been a force for good in the world. But I still think that there's multiple, I think millennials and Gen Z feel less that way than I do. What do you.

[Michael Jones]

I think a lot of it actually has to do with the declining religiosity rates. You go Back to the 90s, most people, whether Blue or red were Christian, but that was the core of their identity. I remember being in church and my parents like, oh, they're voting for that person. But we were all Christians. That's the declining religiosity is, especially on the left. They've moved away from that. So now their core identity then moves to politics. And this is what sociologists have talked about. When you get rid of traditional religiosity, it makes room for political religiosity to move in and that becomes the new God, the new religion, and everything starts to revolve around that. So when left and right people are now fighting, it's not so much, hey, we'll see you on Sunday. Even though we disagree now, it's, you're attacking our God, you're attacking our religion. It's going to create more polarization. So this, as religiosity has been declining, unfortunately, politics moves in to fill that gap. Everyone gets more tribal, less trustworthy. And of course, sociological research does show Christianity correlates with less tribalism, less prejudice. I mean like, so, I mean like, what do you expect is going to happen?

[Brett Dasovic]

So you would see blue dog Democrats next to maybe a Republican at church on a Sunday, for sure, in the, and it's so weird. So I had a boss that I worked with who was, she wasn't very active politically, but she did at least pay attention a little bit. And they were, they were very big, they loved guns, they owned guns, they went to church on Sunday and they were pro union. And I was trying to, I had to try to explain her, said, your son, they don't support this anymore. Just the fact that you like firearms is something that if you were to try to be involved deeper within the party, you will be expelled for because it is one of their main selling points when they are trying to fundraise whether it's anti nra, anything anti weapon, especially with school shootings and things like that. And they hadn't yet realized because they weren't as politically active as some of us were, just how easy it was to be expelled from the group because the tribalism was so heavy. Now.

[Phil Labonte]

Yeah, I, you know, you, you mentioned the, the, the fact that we're less Christian, less religious, and I mean, I, I, as a, a novice person who has limited experience to philosophy, it still makes me think of Nietzsche saying that God is dead. And, and the, the average kind of angsty teenager thinks that that was some kind of triumphant statement. And Nietzsche was like, this is going to be a horrible thing for human humanity. And then we Saw the horrors of the first half. Well the, the horse of the 20th century where it was, you know, first it was, it was communism and Nazism and the fight for which of those two. I mean I want to call them theologies because they both had a, had a, a significant spiritual element. Even if, you know, the communists said that they weren't religious. They said they were atheist, they were state atheists. They weren't at all, they didn't behave that way and neither did the Nazis. So.

[Michael Jones]

Well, I mean historians kind of talk about them. There's a whole debate about it, about. But I mean a lot of them tend to say these are political religions. And like, as research shows, I mean look at like things like Christian nationalism. People are like, this is Christianity's fault. Well like the 2021 STROOP study shows that Christian nationalism actually manifests among the least churched individuals. And what happens? I mean it makes sense if you're on the right and you start moving away from traditional. This episode is brought to you by me Undies. While meundies can't totally help your love.

[Phil Labonte]

Life, this Valentine's Day they can offer.

[Michael Jones]

You insanely comfy undies and loungewear to buy or gift. Meundies has so many awesome Valentine's Day prints and styles. Plus you can match with your partner, friends or even your pets.

[Phil Labonte]

This Valentine's Day give the gift that'll.

[Michael Jones]

Keep them thinking of you and score huge site wide [e-mail] Spotify that's meundies.com Spotify Meundies comfort from the outside in religiosity. They keep a lot of the Christian symbols, but they reinterpret them into political ways. Now Christianity becomes a civilization we have to defend, not an actual religion. And Nazism has been described as a political religion in a lot of ways. We start moving away from traditional, we start worshiping the state or as in terms of the Nazis, the Aryan race and that thing. And what happens, everything now starts to become more materialistic, more focused on this is our territory, this is our race we have to defend. Tribalism will come up. Whereas if you have traditional Christianity, you have Paul saying there's neither Jew nor Greek, free nor slave, male nor female, you're all one in Christ. Like, yeah, that's going to be more actually inclusive or drawing more people in. But when we move away from that, you take the foundation away, chaos results. And you know, GK Chesterton called it Christian ethics gone mad. Because you take some of the ethics you like, you detach it from its foundation. And it goes off into some wild extremes that just result in horrible.

[Phil Labonte]

I've heard someone describe communism and socialism as that. Exactly. That the ideas, then the, and the morality that's laid out in Christianity. I think it was. I forget the guy's name. He's. He's a British guy that does. He's a historian. That's. I think he's a young guy too. Either way, he, he was describing that if you take the, the morality that's laid out in Christianity, but take Christ away and take God away, you end up with something like communism.

[Michael Jones]

Was it Tom Holland?

[Phil Labonte]

Yes, I think it was Tom Holland.

[Michael Jones]

He's not a young guy, but is he not. Maybe you're thinking of the spider actor.

[Phil Labonte]

Oh, yes. Okay.

[Michael Jones]

I feel so bad for him. I interviewed him on my channel one time. He's a great, great guy. Wrote a great book called Dominion, where his book is basically arguing Christianity is saturated the world.

[Phil Labonte]

Yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about. I, I didn't know the name of the book, but I. And I think I might heard Ben Shapiro talking about it or something. But, but it, it does, it makes sense to me that the. Because when you hear people on the left, they talk about morality and, and, and stuff, but without any kind of, of if you're an atheist, I, I find Nietzsche's argument that if, if there is no God, then man has to make his own morality. Right.

[Michael Jones]

Like the uber mesh mentality.

[Phil Labonte]

Yeah. That, that without, without God to tell you what's right or wrong, and if we're all only, you know, here for an instant in a. In the grand scheme of things, in, in the, the, the, the universal time scale, if you're only a flash in the pan and, and you're gonna die and your kids are gonna die and, and no one's gonna remember you, then it doesn't, it doesn't matter really. And it leads to nihilism and truly. But I don't see why being quote unquote, good would matter to someone that didn't have any kind of religion. Like, they'll, they'll say that they do. They think that good matters, that they say, oh, I don't need a God to tell me what's good. And it's like, well, why. And, and, and that's what you see with, with the whole, you know, the communism. It's like, well, you know, you want to be good to people and you want to take care of people. And it's like, well, if we're all going to Die and you're only your, your life is spark in history of you know, for of in eternal history. Why does it matter like to steel.

[Michael Jones]

Man them a little bit? I mean they're not, they're not going to say like it's just great to be evil. I mean they would argue that being good is its own reward. Like it's good to take care of your family, it's good to have loved ones around you.

[Phil Labonte]

But they, but it makes, it makes it, it makes it very easy for them to do some of the most evil things in history.

[Michael Jones]

True. And then, but then you need to ask is like why are they doing those good things? Will they want to provide for their family? But I mean ultimately what the Christian would argue is that's going to go back down to power. And this is also kind of what Nietzsche was going there eventually all that's left is trying to obtain power for you and your tribe or your family at that point. And that's what we see slowly come out. I mean if you are a traditional religious person like a Christian, God has all the power, you can't have it. And so the basis now becomes love for him and what he did for us and that kind of stuff. So, so love then becomes the central Christian message. God died for us, we love him, he loves us. But if you take that away, what is left? Well, love is only useful as long as it brings me power or pleasure in some sense. Helping my family is only good if it brings me power or pleasure in some sense. So you get through the layers of what they're talking about. Yeah, they could argue with I don't want to go out and rob banks. I want to be a good person, I want to provide for my family. But then you just go one meta level lower like why? Well what is the driving force? And it's going to be something like power, pleasure or safety. CS Lewis would have said yeah I.

[Phil Labonte]

Could, I could go on with this conversation all night long and I, I, I, I think that we'll probably come back to these kind of try to.

[Michael Jones]

Make sure we do well these topics.

[Phil Labonte]

Considering, considering you here but I do want to jump to the story that is in relation to the the plane crash. The U. S. Transportation Transportation Security secretary announces new FAA action to ensure safety in airspace. This comes on the heels of the crash in Washington D.C. so it's the Department of Transportation is saying Washington with the support of President Trump and in consultation with the Secretary of Defense, effective today, the Federal Aviation Administration will restrict helicopter traffic in the area over the Potomac river, around Ronald Reagan, Washington National Airport, DCA and stretching to the Wilson Bridge. These areas includes Memorial Bridge to South Capitol Street Bridge excluding the Tidal Basin, Haynes Point to Wilson Bridge over the top of dca. The restriction exempt exempt helicopter helicopters entering this airspace for life saving medical support, active law enforcement, active air defense or presidential transport helicopter missions that must operate in this restricted area. Any helicopter operations outside these exemptions will be prohibited. These restrictions will remain in place until the NTSB completes its preliminary investigation of the air carrier incident, at which point it will be reviewed based on NTSB's report. Now, I don't if you've ever been to that area and I'm assuming you know there, there are a lot of people that are listeners that have never been to dca. I've flown in and out of the DCA multiple times. I go down there to pick up my girlfriend when she flies in or out. Her family's in Florida so she goes in and out of there a lot. If you look, you can see in this actual picture. I think the, the Pentagon is very close to DCA and the Pentagon itself has regular FL lights of Blackhawks flying around all the time. I assume that that's, you know, generals flying from other air bases or from other, from other, you know, military bases. Fort means not too far away. That's up in where the NSA is, is housed. Maybe there are people from the, from Langley, from the CIA headquarters flying to the, the, the Pentagon. So it's a very, very busy area and it's not really a surprise that they're making these kind of limitations. I guess what I am do find a little surprising is that with it being such a busy area and because they had, they're supposed to have two people on staff, one person for aircraft at regular planes and then one for helicopters. What do you guys think, you know, what do you think of the fact that they didn't have people on? Now I know there's a lot of talk, you know, DEI and stuff and I know that the more that I, I hear about this after the accident that they were having significant problems actually staffing the people and they were, if I, if I understand correctly, they were turning people away based on their race. Do you think that, that this kind of action is actually going to solve the problem? And furthermore, do you think that the Trump administration with their efforts to, to undo the DEI mess that we have in the government, do you think that's going to prevent further accidents and further negative consequences from dei, DEI policies in general?

[Ian Crossland]

This, you have some. Go ahead. This looks more like they're trying to quell the fears of the public. Like, look, we're getting, we're going to get rid of some helicopters. So it's still safe. Because after this, I was like, I'm not flying out DCA for a while. That was. Freaked me out. I'm like, I didn't know there were that many helicopters. So this, that's maybe what they're doing also maybe general safety, dude, with the whole helicopter hitting the airplane. And they said that it was supposed to be two people watching that and there was only one. I was like, is this because Trump just fired a bunch of people and they were short staffed?

[Phil Labonte]

I do, I want, I do want to point out, just because I wanted, I, I don't want people to lose their minds. The last time there was an accident of this magnitude was 2009. And that airspace has been this busy for every single day since then. And I don't know. And the last time there was an accident, it wasn't this airspace. It was the last time there was an accident in the United States. So this is terrible, this tragedy is horrible. But I want people to, to have a sober look or sober, sober thought process when it comes to air travel and when it comes to this stuff. We are not in a situation where planes are going to start falling out of the sky all the time. And these policies do have ramifications, but it's still the safest way to fly. And you really don't need to be on edge just because you have to get into an airplane. I just wanted to say, I know that I'm, I'm the. Throwing the wet blanket on the, on the, the conspiracy theory people here and stuff, but, but it is important to remember this is an accident. And there have been no accidents since 2009. This is exceedingly rare. When there are accidents, it is almost always multiple human failures. Planes don't just fall out of the sky. I say that as, as you know, that plane looked like it fell out of the sky in Philadelphia. So maybe I'm eating, I'm gonna eat crow about that.

[Ian Crossland]

One of the things that really shocked me was they showed video of the actual. What, the screens that the air traffic controllers are watching. And it looks like Atari 2600 8. No, no, not even 8 bit graphics. Like 2600k graphics. I don't know what they were. Crappy little an X and an L indicating an airplane or it was an F. I think in a, in a, in a triangle. Come on. Like you have people looking at these things. They, they update every second and it shows it appearing in a new position. Like dude, we need some, some top like high tech monitoring systems that give you a warning if it shows that if a craft is approaching another craft ahead of time they're looking at like 30 year old technology.

[Phil Labonte]

I think that I saw the same screen that you're talking about and above the two planes they had red CA collision alarm. Right. And I, I think and, and tell me what you think of this. I think the reason why they go with very simple looking graphics is because the less information because there are so many planes, right there's so much stuff going on. I think that they go with, with simplified graphics like that because it's to keep the actual only the most important information go being fed to the, the people that are watching because if there's too much stuff you can get overwhelmed. Now granted I, I, I, I would absolutely agree that you have to be well trained and, and maybe that is a training issue. But what do you think of that Ian?

[Ian Crossland]

This is probably true. Like the whole it's a triangle to indicate an airplane and I think it was an L or an F. An F to indicate the helicopter. You can see that, that's easy. I play Caves of coot. It's a 2600 bit game where I. You get familiar with the symbols and what they mean but like give us a warning like an audio audible.

[Michael Jones]

They have the. So I worked in a rap.

[Phil Labonte]

Look out.

[Ian Crossland]

You've worked where?

[Michael Jones]

In a rapcon. So when I was in the Air Force Many moons ago, 2004 was when I joined I was assigned to be an air traffic controller and I did horrible at it. So I didn't continue it. But yeah, the reason why the technology is so old is because keep it simple. Stupid is the not you but you get the idea. It's you know complicated computers can fail or crash easier. This stuff has been working, it's analog, it's going to last. So it's been working for so long they're going to, to keep it. And so there are things that start to warn when planes get close. Like it does come up on the screen. I remember that it did say that.

[Brett Dasovic]

There were multiple indications that there was.

[Michael Jones]

There'S going to be indications on the plane. There's going to be indications of the controllers and the controllers can only warn at the end of the day.

[Brett Dasovic]

Like I heard that they said I thought the helicopter was flying too high.

[Michael Jones]

From what I saw.

[Brett Dasovic]

That's what I saw. The Helicopter. I mean specifically to keep it out of the flight path of a, of a plane.

[Michael Jones]

Yeah.

[Ian Crossland]

Well, the traffic controllers have a two dimensional screen they're looking at. They don't see how high or low the things are, indicate elevation. So they've got to, they've got to look away from the plane on the map to see a number up top to indicate its altitude. Like you'll give me a three dimensional imagery thing to look at, have.

[Michael Jones]

They should have a screen where it actually shows that the elevation with the symbol. Because I remember again when I was in the Rapcon, you would see the planes and it would indicate 5,000ft or 6,000 and you would say things like descent and maintain 5,000.

[Phil Labonte]

And also the elevation or the altitude indicates direction. Right. If you're, if you're at certain altitudes you are for east, west, west. Certain altitudes are for north. And I'm, I'm just like throwing it out there. It's not exactly. But if you're at one altitude, that altitude means you're supposed to be heading on one, one direction. If you're at a lower altitude or a higher altitude, that altitude is for a different direction. So they actually, they're stacking the alt. The altitude not only is telling you how high you are, but if you're properly, if you're paying attention and flying properly, the altitude will also indicate what direction you should be going, going.

[Ian Crossland]

So this thing was at the wrong altitude. So it indicated to the controller they.

[Phil Labonte]

Were flying in a different direction it was coming in. So as, as it, what you. I think when they say they're on approach, that means that they're going to be going through. But when you know how it takes like 20 minutes to get out of. Like when you're at altitude and they're like they're going to start descending, they don't just go down, they go down, down, down. They, it's like they're taking steps down and then once they get close enough then they say there. I think on approach means you can actually begin descending and heading towards the Runway. And I'm a layman, I don't know, I'm just telling you like the things that I've heard. But you would probably be to tell better than I would so many.

[Michael Jones]

It's like 20 years ago. But yeah, you would, they would slowly descend and you would see the elevation going down. But again if, if there's only one guy in there working and he's looking at multiple screens, he's got multiple planes. What I remember from seeing on X is that he did send a warning like, hey, do you see those? And that's all he can do at that point is, hey, I warn you. And then he probably was looking at something else. And then bam.

[Brett Dasovic]

They also said even when there's multiple people scheduled, a lot of times if somebody goes on break, they go down to just one. And that this has been going on. It's like you said, this has been going on for a long time without anything happening. And you know, it may be today is just. Yeah. And the problem is to me is like, especially given how close this is to the inauguration and all of the Trumps that Paul, all of the policies that Trump is now implementing through executive orders is that di is a very big discussion that's going on right now. And this is not new to just this incident. I mean, over the last year, depending on how often you are on X or anything like that, there is a discussion where people talk about DEI specifically as it relates to flights and plane crashes. So in something, you know, whether it's like people getting on airplanes and stuff like this. So this is unlocked a lot of fear that people have regarding those things. So like I said, we were watching that crash earlier in a lot of the discussion that was going on in the live chat when whether it was Fox News covering this is people asking if this is something related to policy that hindered good hiring practices. And that's not an unreasonable thing for people to be afraid of, even if they haven't really looked for evidence of it in a particular case. What it does is it indicates that when somebody has that the first thing on their mind. Mind, it means that that's something that's in the consciousness of the public.

[Phil Labonte]

Yeah. And to Brett's point about this being an ongoing conversation, even though these are the, the first actual accidents that have happened in a long time, if you watch like these kind of like, watch like air traffic controller X accounts and stuff like that, you would see that there are a lot of near misses. That kind of thing happens fairly frequently. And I don't know how much that is because of, of, you know, errors in the tower, errors with the pilots. You know, I, and I don't know that we can quantify it either. You know, how do you guys feel.

[Ian Crossland]

About integrating artificial intelligence into the, into the control itself? So. Well, I mean, machine saying, look out, like, maybe there's still a dude sitting there, but on top of that, you have different. If a guy has to get up and go take a piss, there's still an artificial Intelligence or like nine of them all watching the monitor. All warning crews and pilots, that's prepare, look, you know, incoming, look out this, that and like fail.

[Phil Labonte]

Yeah. And you might be more of an expert on this than I am, but isn't. Isn't like, isn't autopilot kind of what that does?

[Michael Jones]

Most planes have instruments that they can see the radar on the plane and they'll see, oh yeah, there's one coming this way. This is just a extremely rare occurrence. So the pilots can see their own radar. They also can, you know, so they have IFR and vfr. They can. And visual flight rules versus instrumental flight roles. So they have their own instruments and they have air traffic controllers also telling them about stuff. So there's all sorts of. And you know, if they do get close, something does start to beep.

[Ian Crossland]

So remember that the Blackhawk was dark. That meaning it wasn't showing up on radar, no transponder.

[Brett Dasovic]

Right.

[Ian Crossland]

So this is all on the government. This is fully to blame. Department of Defense. I mean, we, they owe the families a lifetime of servitude. They need to repay these people. Like this is a government basically assault, an unintentional assault on, on the civilianry.

[Phil Labonte]

I don't know if that I would go that far because the, the way that I've heard some of it described is the. They were talking to the pilot of the Blackhawk and they were saying stay behind the regional jet. But there was a regional jet that was taking off as well as one coming in. And so if I understand correctly, the, the pilot and the helicopter. I'm sorry, the tower and the helicopter pilot were communicating and he said stay. They were telling him stay behind the regional jet. And it seems like, again, I'm not, I'm not saying that I have inside knowledge or whatever, but it seems like he, the pilot of the, of the Blackhawk thought he was talking about the plane that was taking off and he was behind it. And actually the tower was talking about the plane that was coming in because they were both small, the same type or a similar type of regional jet. They were both not big jumbo jets. It wasn't like a 747 coming in or 737. They were both smaller jets. And the pilot of the Blackhawk thought that he was talking about another one. Again, this is just what I heard. I didn't actually look into it and stuff. So I don't think that. I guess what I'm saying is this, that, that kind of strong language about an attack and stuff. This is this is people making mistakes and I don't. And Whereas I, I'm 100 on board the government. I mean, the government can just print money out of nowhere. So yeah, pay the, pay all the families. Absolutely. There's no, there's no problem in my opinion with, with that. But I do think that, I don't think that this was a, there was any malice involved and I don't think that it was any kind of. I think it was just, you know, human error and stuff like this does happen. As tragic as.

[Ian Crossland]

Yeah, unintentional assault. I use the word unintentional for sure. But like, if a soldier unintentionally drops a grenade into a foxhole and kills nine other soldiers, you still court martial the guy. I mean, it doesn't matter if he intended to do it or not.

[Phil Labonte]

No, the pilot's dead, so.

[Ian Crossland]

But who, who? The, the controller that told him to stay behind begged jet number one.

[Phil Labonte]

The controller's not in the military. Military and air traffic controller.

[Michael Jones]

Controller, from what I can see, did his job. He did warn. If it wasn't understood properly, it's not on him. I mean, it would be on him if he did not give any warnings. But from what I can see from the audio, yeah, he did give warnings. It just may have just not been understood properly.

[Ian Crossland]

Yeah, I guess it's just the, the, the, this, this like primal urge to lash out and blame someone is still, is still resonating inside of me.

[Michael Jones]

I mean that's. Again, it goes back to human nature. Yeah, it's just, you know, why is. What go back to the ancient times. Why is, why is it not rained? Well, we need to probably kill this Steve because Steve forgot to make a sacrifice to the temple the other day. We just want to blame someone to fix the solution. And what you're feeling is perfectly natural.

[Brett Dasovic]

And that's actually why, like you asked at the beginning, you said you listed what they're, what the government plans to do. And you asked like, is that even necessary in this case? And that's because people have the primal urge to blame someone. So the government has to be seen doing something when something like, like this happens, even if there isn't necessarily known whether it's going to actually be effective or not.

[Phil Labonte]

Yeah, yeah. You know, I mean, you know, you can crucify the, the person that's the air traffic controller, but it doesn't mean that it's going to. And I mean figuratively, but it doesn't mean that it's going to prevent the net. You know, the next issue, I think that sober approach to figuring out why it happened and doing more to staff these places, maybe you take the government out, maybe they should be all privatized. This is an argument that can be made. But, but yeah, I don't think that that an emotional, emotional attack on the, on the guy that's running the, or the person running the, the air traffic, the air traffic controller is a good idea. But we're going to jump to this next story here. Intern U.S. attorney fires more than two dozen January six prosecutors in D.C. the Trump administration dismisses former Capital Riot prosecutors recently hired to permanent positions and still under probation. Probationary period. This, in my opinion, is good, but we're going to go ahead and read on. The Washington Post is reporting. Interim U.S. attorney Ed Martin on Friday announced the dismissal of roughly 30 federal prosecutors who worked on Capitol riot cases in the Washington in the Washington, D.C. office over the past four years, two people familiar with the matter said Friday the employees were hired to permanent career positions after serving under special or short term status. As the office surged to manage nearly 1600 prosecutions after the January 6, 2020 attack on the Capitol, the prosecutors remained under probationary status, which allowed the firings without recourse under Justice Department policy, the people said. So today on the culture war, we had four people that were three people that were pardoned and one person whose sentence was commuted. It was the, the Q QAnon Shaman. I forget the guys. I don't, I don't want to, to, to misrepr or I don't want to get the name shout out to Jacob.

[Ian Crossland]

Chansley, the QAnon Shaman. I love the man.

[Phil Labonte]

Jacob was great. We had Nick, Nick Ox, who was a pro boy, Stuart Rhodes, Jay Johnson and Jacob Chansley. So Jay Johnson was actually, he was on Bob's Burgers for a while and he basically comes from Hollywood and he got wrapped up and he to me, it seems like he was the one that was most likely to have been just in the wrong place at the wrong time. The, the, it was Stuart was the guy from Oath Keepers and he was.

[Ian Crossland]

There, the leader of the Oath Keepers.

[Phil Labonte]

Yeah. And he was there. He's the one who had his scent, his sentence commuted, but he's still still considered guilty of, of the crimes. He, I think he was, he was going to get like 20 years or a long, long time. But they were all saying, look, you know, the prosecutors essentially were doing things that were illegal. They were not it was not a fair none of them felt like they had a fair trial The. The entire jury was all out of D.C. they felt like if those trials were done, held anywhere other than D.C. they would have gotten a fair trial. The judge was. Was biased. This judge was. The judges were all biased. You know, Jacob Chansley, he. If I understand correctly, he didn't do anything violent, right? And there's plenty of video jig. You can't miss the guy on January 6th, you know, I mean, the QAnon Shaman went on to. You know, people were actually. Jay had worn a QAnon Shaman Halloween costume after it happened the year, like, you know, that. The following Halloween. And that part of the reason why he got such a. A bad job, bad outcome with the, with the court. They were like, you can't be sorry if you're dressed like that. You think it's a joke. I mean, never mind. The guy's a comedian, right? He's. He's. He's voicing. He's a voice actor and a comedian for. In Bob's Burgers and stuff. But, you know, I mean, I understand why. Not that I agree, but I understand why the Oath keepers got looked at the way they did, why the Proud Boys boys got looked at the way they did, and the way. Why. Why Jacob was looked at the way he did. But when it comes to Jay, I mean, he was. He was treated really, really badly for, like, no reason. And that's my. My understanding is out of all of the people that were arrested, now, all these guys did some time in. Or. No, Jay didn't, but all the other guys did some time in solitary confinement. You know, some of them did long stints in. In solitary confinement, which is like torture torture. You know, I mean, solitary confinement is. Is where the worst of the worst go. The. The people that are violent to other inmates, people that are a threat to other inmates, people that are a threat to themselves. And none of these guys were that. You know, even. Even. Even if you have a distaste for the proud boys, you know, Nick was not that guy. He was. He was there literally doing. He was just being a journalist, right? He was. I think it was. I forget the name of his group. It was. Was something. Something about some. The w. Like, I don't know, might have been murder, the media or something like that. So it was. It was. It was. It wasn't helping his case. The name wasn't helping his case. Yeah, but. But he was there. He was. He wasn't involved in any of the. The fights with police or anything. It's just that he was a proud boy and the government was intent on making the proud boys out to be an example. The same thing with the Oath Keepers.

[Brett Dasovic]

So most of these people had their due process. Like they were not given due process most of the time anyways. Right?

[Phil Labonte]

Yeah.

[Brett Dasovic]

So these prosecutors were hired specifically to handle these cases and were kept on in a probationary phase. That's why they're not, that's why they're allowed to be fired without any sort of, if I understand or anything.

[Phil Labonte]

Yeah.

[Brett Dasovic]

Okay.

[Phil Labonte]

And, you know, I don't know what their, you know, what their history was leading up to this, but, you know, if, if these guys were hired specifically to prosecute J6 people, I imagine that the, the, the, the argument that they get or the, the directive that they got was, look, these people are guilty. We all know these people are guilty. And essentially the court cases, the, the actual trials are kind of just for show. That's the way. Yeah, it, essentially, that's the way that it sounds like, especially when, when, you know, when, when they articulate it. And again, I, I, I understand there are people that were here this morning that a person that is not sympathetic to the J6ers at all, they wouldn't be sympathetic to their play lights. Except for, like I said, you know, Jay Johnson, he was, he was, you know, he was there, he felt like it was a boring day. He felt, he said that he felt like there wasn't much going on. It was mostly people just milling about until the, the tear gas started and then he was trying to get out of there. But I, I'm, I, I don't remember if, I don't recall if he actually went into the, the, the Capitol or not, but the way they described the people that were in the capital Capitol, you know, there was, there was no violence in the Capitol. And upon hearing that, it did make me think, you know, I really didn't see any of the closed caption footage where there was fighting inside. All of the fighting that I saw with police was outside.

[Ian Crossland]

There's that Ashley Babbitt situation inside.

[Phil Labonte]

Yes.

[Ian Crossland]

They're trying to climb over a window to get into the inner, inner sanctum or whatever. Yeah. Broke a window and then the cops opened fire. Broken a window.

[Phil Labonte]

That was one shot and that wasn't know, that wasn't attacking police. She was trying to climb through a window. Now, granted, she was trying to go somewhere she shouldn't have been.

[Ian Crossland]

She, I think she, Somebody broke the window before they tried to climb through.

[Phil Labonte]

Well, yeah, I mean, it was, it was a broken window that she was trying to Climb through. And on the other side, there were still Congress people. So that's the, that was the justification for, for opening fire. I think that he, he shouldn't have, but, but that's what the story would be. But there was no fighting with police inside, you know, like, so, I mean, I do think that it's, it's, it's a good thing that these people are fired. Yes.

[Brett Dasovic]

You know, less government is never going to be. Less people employed by the government will never be a bad thing, ever.

[Ian Crossland]

I mean, they're air traffic controllers.

[Phil Labonte]

Air traffic controls could be done by private, could be done privately. I think that that's probably less lawyers.

[Brett Dasovic]

Never a bad thing.

[Phil Labonte]

Yeah, I mean, do you have, do you have a take on it, Mike?

[Michael Jones]

I mean, I, I will admit I am very, very behind on a lot of this stuff here. I just really just. I'd be more interested in the actual symptoms of this. This is just us. I think a lot of people on the left wanted this to happen to the J6ers. They were angry. They feel like they won the 2020 election. And then when they saw this, the way the media blew out of proportion, they wanted what, they wanted justice and they wanted these people to pay because they keep calling it an insurrection. Insurrection. They were trying to destroy democracy. And so it just enabled the people in power to really just throw the books at them in every way they can. Because again, it's as I was talking about earlier. This tribalism stuff just comes up. And with declining religiosity, your political side becomes the new God. These insurrectionists in the eyes of people on the left were going after heretics.

[Phil Labonte]

Blasphemers.

[Michael Jones]

They're heretics. They're blasphemers. They were going after their victory in their religious, their political religiosity, and that was considered sacrilegious.

[Phil Labonte]

Do you remember where you were and the, the, your, your own personal context on January 6th? What, like, what, what were you doing? Do you remember hearing about it?

[Michael Jones]

Reading a book in my home in Tucson, just minding my own business. And then I saw the news. I was like, you know, what made me think of is like, well, yeah, a lot of leftists were rioting in cities around the country. Now the right is just doing it. Okay, well, yeah, they're angry that Trump didn't win. I mean, this is what they're going to do. And then I just sort of went back to reading and then I just, I saw it constantly getting blown out of proportion. Now, again, I'm a layman in this, this is really not an area I've studied a lot, but it just seemed like I was like, does this really need to be dragged on and on? We're going back to J6 like it's Pearl harbor, for crying out loud. And it didn't really seem like it was that big a deal. And it's just an average American who's more interested in other topics. I was like, can we just move on? I'd much rather talk about inflation or if Biden is really there and what's going to happen in the midterms terms. But no, everyone's going back to J6. And I feel like a lot of average Americans were just over it in a few months and they were sort of mad at a lot of. I mean, I heard from people on the left and said, can we just move on?

[Brett Dasovic]

But only the most politically indoctrinated were the ones that were the most affected by the story.

[Phil Labonte]

I want, I'm interested in actually hearing both of your takes on that. Like, where were you guys? Did you work here? Were you.

[Brett Dasovic]

It was before I worked here.

[Phil Labonte]

Okay, what about you?

[Ian Crossland]

Yeah, I worked. We had actually talked about maybe going down on like the fourth. We were like, should we go down and do a show from D.C. on the 6th? And then we were like, no, no. Sounds like a bad idea. Just doesn't seem like a good vibe right now. So we, we ended up, we were just home.

[Brett Dasovic]

It was funny. So for me, look, even doing this show, I'm not the most political person. Certainly most of my social media, you wouldn't see that. And I had friends or what used to be friends who reached out to me and wrote very long messages about the evils of this event, even though I had not said anything about it, nor did I really care about it in any way, shape or form. I was out skating when this happened and had no idea what was going on until I got home that day and lost friends over this event where I had to read like 12 page diatribes about why I was a bad person because I did not, I guess, call this out despite the fact that I had nothing to do with it, nor talk to them at all about my political beliefs. If they said I voted for someone, they certainly didn't hear that from me, so they wouldn't have noted anyways. But for the people who are the most politically indoctrinated, the lack of speaking is sometimes worse because they believe that silence is violence and they will take anything you don't say as a crime as well. And that was probably one of the bigger awakenings for me at that moment, that it's not just going to affect other people, it's also possibly going to affect you as well. And it was shocking to me because, look, this is also one of those cases where you have to do a ton of research if you want to refute them and talk about it as well. Like if I have to talk to them now and point them out to say when you talk about how many places police officers died on January 6th and you don't acknowledge that they were suicides after the fact and one of them was zero. I said that there was zero on January 6th. I said, I don't have any interest in debating this with you. I don't care. To me, whatever my friends believe politically never mattered to me. It's never been an issue for me to have friends on all sides of the aisle. I still consider myself for the most part a fairly liberal person. And it just, it never mattered to me. And to see people who probably agree with me on a fair amount of things still end 20 year friendships over something like this that had neither. Nothing to do with them. They weren't there, had nothing to do with me. I wasn't there. This was, I guess maybe post Covid as another, you know, issue for, you know, there was, there was Covid, there was George Floyd, and then there was this, and there was all of these events that primed the American people to just start hating each other. And certainly, I guess maybe it's like a game of whack a mole. Eventually one of them was going to get, get to me, despite the fact that I didn't have anything to say about any of it. And that's sad. It really is.

[Michael Jones]

It goes back to that religious fervor thing. Silence is violence.

[Phil Labonte]

Yeah.

[Michael Jones]

You don't participate in ancients. If you don't participate in the rain dance, the gods are going to be mad and they're not going to send rain. It's, it's a similar psychological phenomenon where you had to participate. I mean, when St. Augustine was around, a lot of the pagans were blaming the collapse of the Western Roman Empire on Christianity because the gods are now mad. And he wrote City of God to refute that and say that's just not the way the world works. So the same, same kind of stuff is happening. It's just carried on into new modern fervor.

[Brett Dasovic]

I guess I had to point out. I said, look, do you, did you care when people entered the chambers when Brett Kavanaugh was being confirmed. You don't know about that here. Let me tell you about what was going on when Brett Kavanaugh was going to be confirmed, because there was plenty of people. And this happens in local governments all the time. Especially when local leftists and leftist groups dislike something that's going on in the government. They feel emboldened to be able to protest because they understand that the legacy media will never frame them in the way that the legacy media framed the, you know, Donald Trump's supporters when this happens. So it emboldens them to go out and continue to act that way because they know they're not going to face any repercussions for it.

[Phil Labonte]

Yeah, we were talking about that this morning. And that was kind of everyone's sense that, like, like, especially again, I. I keep referring to Jay because Jay was the kind of the most normie guy that kind of got swept up in it like everyone else was, you know, politically active. I mean, even the Qanon shaman, he. Jacob, he was. He's very politically active, very politically aware, shares a lot of the sentiments about, you know, about what the left is doing in the United States and stuff. And, And Jay was, you know, very much an la nor normie. And when this stuff happened, he was kind of shocked because he went from being a dude that would get parts and get jobs and. And after that, all of his work dried up. He lost his job, his agent fired him, you know, or, you know, quit on him and stuff. And that as someone that comes from the music industry, I didn't experience that same thing because I was already Persona non grata, you know, almost seven, eight years prior to this, because I was one of the people that would say, no, it's important that we. We have free speech, that it's important that we. We are able to, you know, we should listen to people like Milo Yiannopoulos and Ben Shapiro talk, because even if you don't like them, you know, that what they say might, you know, inspire a good dialogue. And the response from people in the music industry was like, no, we should punch Nazis. And it's like, I'm these guys, people that were friend that I was friends with that I would have assumed were liberals, right? They would have probably called me a libertarian, maybe a conservative libertarian. And I would have called them liberals. And then these people were saying, saying, no, we should punch Nazis like Milo and punch Nazis like Ben Shapiro. And I'm like, Ben Shapiro is Jewish. Like, this, this is not. This doesn't make sense to me. And so I, I Outed myself very early when woke came around that as someone that wasn't going to play along. And so that there was a lot of that. I started losing friends long before, you know, the. The January 6th stuff. But I understood what he was going through because he was just like, oh, this all was dropped in my lap map. And for some reason, now everyone looks at me like I'm Persona non grata. And I was even getting. As someone that everyone knew, you know, I've been. I was on Twitter just memeing the whole thing. All day long. I was sharing what's the. The Mars attacks meme, where the old lady stands up her. They blew up the Capitol, you know, and I'm sending that meme out and laughing about it and making jokes about the. The riot because was. It was also my sense that we had just gone through a year of violence night after night after night after night protests and Kenosha. And, you know, there was all the stuff that happened in D.C. and the. The May 29th attack on the White House and all that stuff. And so for. For my estimation, it was like, oh, just another. Another riot that happens. You know, when Donald Trump was elected, there was riots. They burnt that guy's limo. You know, they. They were smashing up D.C. and so I didn't get the sense that this was some big deal, but some of the people that I knew that. I'm not gonna name them, but they were, you know, sending very accusatory tweets. Where were you, Phil? I'm like, I was in New Hampshire. Like, I'm tweeting from my office, and they're like, well, do you think it was okay? And I'm like, well, I mean, it wasn't. It wasn't okay. But neither was all the other riots. Like, this was. It was. It was just a riot. Like. And as far as I was concerned, there was never a time where. Where. Where Pence was actually going to do what. What the. The few Trump supporters that were hoping he would not certify. There was never a time that was going to happen. It was absolutely ridiculous. From as soon as the idea was. Was presented that maybe it was an insurrection, that maybe Donald Trump was trying to take the presidency. I was like, like, there is no way on earth that any other outcome is going to happen aside from Joe Biden will be the president he will get. You know, they will. They will confirm that all the votes are there. There is no world in which that doesn't happen. And to even present the idea is so ridiculous that I Can't take you serious. And then that's what the Democrats did with the whole, like, it. First it was. I was thinking it was a riot, it's like an insurrection and blah, blah, blah, blah.

[Michael Jones]

Again, I thought the same thing. It was a riot. And yeah, they definitely went way overboard. But then I think the response was, you know, it definitely seemed, from my layman perspective, it went overboard in response. It just g. Everyone was throwing gasoline on this situation. They just made it worse. And it's. It's like we're well past the days when we can sort of come together. You know, you look at how the Civil War ended. I mean, the north had the south defeated, and they were like, we need to work on unity. We need to work on getting past this. Why can't we return to those days where, yeah, we're humans, we make mistakes, we've done bad things on both sides, but we need to work on unity and try to forgive. I've just seen none of that from either the left or the right over the past four, eight years even. I mean, it's just everyone's just throwing gasoline on it instead of trying to look for national unity.

[Brett Dasovic]

I mean, isn't a big part of that because the majority of the fighting that's happening is being done digitally. And it's very easy to other a person when you're arguing with an avatar. The actual humanity of a person right in front of you.

[Michael Jones]

Oh, absolutely. You're behind a screen, you're safe in your room. You probably don't even have any pants on. And you can say whatever you want, but that's just. I mean, honestly, social media is. Is proving one of the. The main Christian doctrines called total depravity. True, we tend. We put on these nice face when we're in front of people. But I mean, when you're behind that screen, the real, the real you does come out in a lot of ways. And it is, it is horrifying. I mean, I remember Michael Roos, who's an atheist, said like, yeah, total depravity. That's the one thing the Christians definitely got right. You just look at human nature.

[Brett Dasovic]

The social contract is what actually keeps society together in a lot of ways.

[Michael Jones]

Yeah, and it's, you know, facial. When we see each other's faces, we do have more empathy for each other because, you know, we, we are a tribal species. We have to work together. And when you see someone else making facial expressions, you do relate better. When you're behind a screen, you don't see that you know that's when the dark selfish nature does start to come out. Out.

[Phil Labonte]

I've been pretty good at holding that real quick, Ian. That's, that's exactly why Tim has people come to the studio and we don't do like zoom calls and stuff. Sorry, go ahead.

[Ian Crossland]

Oh, with. I've been good about holding back the vitriol via text. Firstly because there's no tone you don't get. If I'm being slightly sarcastic, you may not see why I'm. I'm saying it. So I haven't been deriding people in text anymore for the last 10 years. Kind maybe on video, maybe I'll go on. But even then it's beyond. But when I'm gaming, if I'm playing an online game game sometimes anger if, if the guy. It's a pickup game. It's like a five on five and one of my teammates just is terrible. I'll find myself seeing some pretty horrible stuff to him. And then I think later like that was. Could have been a 9 year old, 12 year old. I just ruined his. The next 20 years of his life because I made him question his own humanity. And like, is he really a good person? Does he have a good. Does he not have a father in the house? Like. And I'll just like go with these sometimes. And I'm like, I got to stop that, that hate from coming out of me in. At those moments when it's the easiest. You gotta. I don't know, man. I don't know. But it's in me. It's obviously in me. If it comes out like that.

[Michael Jones]

Yeah, it's, it's us humans. I mean like it's. You go back, you study human history like before the rise of Christianity. I mean we are evil. I mean like you would attack a town and you'd set the soldiers. You're not paying them, they're getting plunder. So when you attack a city and you actually win, the women, the children, they become your slaves. You can do what you want with them. Yes, the children too. You get to plunder. That's how you paid your soldiers. And that was human nature for the longest time. Until I mean like as Tom Holland and others have talked about, you know, like for example, if you read like the book like Christian Virtue Ethics or When Children Became People by Om Bakke. I mean like Christianity has really added something into the mix that has really calmed a step down and given us a far better view of ethics. Human rights comes out of the Christian tradition. Abolition comes out and this idea that if we're going to attack like Iraq, we're not going to send our soldiers into plunder. The Romans would have looked at us like we were stupid. Why would you not plunder Iraq? But yeah, there's, it's, we don't know how far we've come and it's really unfortunate. We, we still got a long way to go. But I mean like you said of the ancient world, it will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.

[Phil Labonte]

Why don't you expand on that a little bit? Because I think that people, people are especially young people today. Again, I, I think we, we touched on it a little bit earlier. Young people today really look at the United States and, and Western society. They look at it as this total evil because, because it engaged in slavery. Right. And, and it might be. And part of me thinks that it's just like I'm mad at D. But yeah, like the, the idea that, you know, Western society is unique and this time of peace that we're living in is anomalous.

[Michael Jones]

It is.

[Phil Labonte]

And, and I think that it would do well to teach kids how reality is. And reality is brutal and life is full of pain, it's short, death is imminent for everybody. And the fact that you have any peace at all, all in your entire life is actually the rare, wonderful, fortunate thing that Western society in particular has provided for the world.

[Michael Jones]

Well, if you go back to the ancient world, just look at how they treated children. I mean infanticide was rampant. There's like a letter from one Egyptian father, husband to his wife said by the way, if it's a girl, just kill it. Because that was normal in the ancient world to just commit infanticide through exposure, especially deformed infants or weak children. Like Seneca talks about that. And so like, yeah, we can look back at like surveys of like ancient families and like only like a 6 out of like 600. Owen Baki talks about this in his book When Children became people. Only six out of 600 had more than one girl in the family. Well, why? Well, because infanticide was rampant and boys were more prized because they could take care of the family. They would be, you know, they're, they're first class citizens and girls were second class citizens. And so, so they did that. And there they leave kids out on the countryside to have them exposed. Now a lot of them survived so they could be raised as slaves or in brothels. I mean children to the ancient Greeks and Romans were used for sexual purposes. What happens, the Christians come on the scene and John Martins talks about this in his chapter Children in late or Children in Late Ancient Christianity. Christians invented a whole new word to describe it because they refused to use the term child love. They invented a new word called child corruptor as a rhetorical to say, like, you can't be doing this. And so they really pushed ethics forward. Children need to be protected. They invented.

[Phil Labonte]

When did that idea. Like what. What was the spawn of that idea? Because here again, we grew up steeped in Christianity and, and to us, the idea of, of, you know, of abusing a child like that, we think of it as abuse. And it's, it's. It makes a. A gut reaction in most people. And the people that don't have that gut reaction action, they are looked at and they are treated as some of the most horrible monsters that, that, you know. I mean, you put a pedophile into. Into prison and word gets out and they're gonna end up dead, you know, and. And that's in a prison with some of the worst, most violent people, you know, our society, you know, produces. So what. How did that. That. What was the genesis of that Judeo.

[Michael Jones]

Christian tradition, especially Jesus saying, you know, let the little ones come to me. Anyone who causes one of these little ones to sin, let a millstone be tied around their neck and cast into the. See that kind of language. I mean, really, the Jews prior to the Christians were preaching to protect children. Then the Christians come on and they really expanded it, working on what Jesus and Paul taught. We know that the early Christians were including children and they were baptizing them, including them in communion. They were full members of the community. The Romans and the Greek looked at them as, like, becoming adults. Like they weren't full adults yet or they weren't full people yet. You know, Aristotle talks about them being, like, less rational. Along with barbarians, women and slaves, there was a hierarchy. And Christians come on the scene, they go, no, everyone here is the image of God and they should have specific rights. That's something that also develops out of the Christian tradition. And they slowly start to change the culture. It took a while, for sure. I mean, you still had infanticide in the Middle Ages because even though the church was condemning it, it took a while to saturate the culture that Tom Holland talks about. But the reason why we think these kinds of things, that slavery is wrong, that human rights exist, that humanity has intrinsic value, and that children should be cared for. This comes out of the Christian tradition. In the ancient world, they were beat routinely. They were turned into sex slaves as children Boys and girls. It's, again, horrifying to read. And again, slavery was just the norm. No one ever questioned the idea that slavery should be abolished until the Christians came on the scene. The first one to say slavery should be abolished was Gregory of Nyssa working on what he was learning in the Scriptures and reading Paul in Genesis. And that slowly began to change that. What was that?

[Phil Labonte]

When was that?

[Michael Jones]

I believe it was in the three hundreds, as Gregory of Nyssa was around.

[Phil Labonte]

Yeah, okay.

[Michael Jones]

And the wider culture did ignore him for a while. But you start to see throughout the Christian tradition, them slowly moving to end slavery, that by the time you get this, like, Saint Anselm, like, it's sort of getting abolished from Europe in a lot of places. And so then the Europeans later on going, well, we're not allowed to enslave Christians. We know that's wrong. Let's go elsewhere. Elsewhere to enslave people. And that's how you get the transatlantic slave trade. And then the funny thing is, is if you, you know, you read about the transatlantic slave trade, a lot of the plantation owners were trying to keep their slaves away from missionaries. Because of the missionaries come in, they're going to evangelize these slaves and turn them in to Christians, and then we'll have to free them. And so there was like, you know, the. A lot of the. The Quakers were, like, being, like, oppressed in the Sugar Islands because they were trying to evangelize. And like, no, you can't do that, because we need slaves. Human nature has always been butting up against the Christian tradition, and Christian tradition is trying to move humanity slowly but surely in a much better direction. You can read about that in Kathryn Gerbner's book Christian Slavery. It's a very interesting history of the Sugar island stuff.

[Ian Crossland]

Did the Jews take slaves in the early days?

[Michael Jones]

They did. And then early in, sometime in the first millennium, a lot of the popes started to outlaw Jews owning Christians as slaves. And then they started outlawing Muslims or Christians being sold to Muslims. Muslims. And then you saw slow reforms happening, like, slowly. They're like, okay, no more slavery here, but we'll allow it here still. So, yeah, you saw, I think one of the popes in one of the six or seven hundreds said, no more Jews owning slaves and no more owning. And then one pope came along and he checked, attacked the Venetian slave trade. He said, no more selling slaves, by the way. He bought all the slaves and then freed them. And then, you know, even Isabella of Spain did some horrible things, but she also outlawed enslaving Native Americans unless they were hostile or cannibals. So again, we saw slow reforms moving us by the time the abolitionist movement comes along. Yeah, it was deep in this Christian tradition that there's something wrong here. And you can see it in the scriptures, like go to like Ephesians 6 where Paul says everyone quotes that slave masters or, you know, slaves obey your masters. But no one quotes right after that in Ephesians 6 where Paul says, and masters do likewise to your slave. So he doesn't outright say slavery should be wrong, but he undercuts any sort of like reason for slavery to exist. If masters need to, you know, do exactly to their slaves as slaves doing. There's no, there's no institution of slavery at that point. So the Christian values slowly start to undercut it. And this is why Tom Holland says Christianity was like a depth charge. It took a while for these, these explosions to go off and spread.

[Ian Crossland]

At the end of the 1800s, we had what was called these, the men who made America, the robber barons, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Rockefeller. And they basically, I don't know if they particularly, but they would have like, underpaid workers and they would pay them in script sometimes like company currency, and they could only buy products. They basically created a slave class of workers. They weren't called slaves because they were getting paid something. Right, but what, like, what was that kind of like. Because that was like post slavery slavery had already become illegal. But is it now? Like, do people just kind of justify slavery? Like, if we're going to pay them something, like the guys digging cobalt out of the sub Saharan African mines or wherever they're with their bare hands, like breathing in the toxic fumes and we're like, that's fine because they're getting paid something.

[Michael Jones]

Yeah, we try to justify it like that. I mean, but Robert Fogel wrote a great book called like the Fourth Great Awakening, where he just talks about how in America there's been not one, two, but four awakenings. And the Third Great Awakening was addressing what you were talking about, this idea that it's kind of like slavery, but we're not calling it. And we need more social reform to fix this kind of stuff. So there was a lot of push in the Third Great Awakening for the social gospel to go out and try to fight that kind of stuff, end child labor and that kind of stuff. Because we as humans just tend to try to act in selfish ways where it's all about us. What sort of money can I get? What sort of greed can I get? For me And I don't really care who I press, and I'll justify it in whatever way I can. That's unfortunately human nature that once again is constantly fighting with the gospel.

[Phil Labonte]

So I want to jump back to one of some of the stuff that we're talking about earlier when it comes to the way the, the, the left has been, had been behaving leading up to January 6th. Benny Johnson has this tweet breaking. Hakeem Jeffries just called for violence against the president, against President Trump's agenda, pushing for fighting in the streets. We are going to fight legislatively or we're going to fight it in the courts and we're going to fight it in the streets. Let's listen.

[E]

We are going to fight it legislatively, we are going to fight it in the courts, and we're going to fight.

[Phil Labonte]

It in the streets.

[E]

We are going to fight it.

[Phil Labonte]

So I don't think that there's any ambiguity in that. Like, there's, there's nothing ambiguous about that. And if it were, again, this is the, the intended double standard. But if it were any Republican saying that the, the reaction would be, you know, absolute, you know, they would be apoplectic.

[Brett Dasovic]

They criticized fight, fight, fight after he was almost assassinated.

[Phil Labonte]

Yeah. Trying to make it as if Trump wasn't the victim.

[Brett Dasovic]

Yeah.

[Phil Labonte]

Of the attack.

[Ian Crossland]

Yeah.

[Phil Labonte]

But the victim. Trump was looking to victimize people. And yet here's the Democrats, you know, Hakeem Jeffries, who. I don't think he's the, the, the leader of the House Democrats. I'm not sure.

[Brett Dasovic]

Was it, was it you that were saying you think he's considered the future of the party?

[Phil Labonte]

No, that's Ricky Torres.

[Brett Dasovic]

Okay.

[Phil Labonte]

Torres, who's, who's, who's significantly more moderate than at least when, at least in, like, he gets away from the whole woke stuff.

[Brett Dasovic]

I mean, we see this, like, how often does Maxine Waters speak where she says something that's inflammatory? Every time, literally every time she opens her mouth. And that's, that's the back and forth you have to be willing to have with people, whenever they want to call out what they consider to be political violence or political posturing is that they consider it to be political violence from one side, but from the other side, it's to be taken as some type of avant garde, off the cuff response that doesn't actually mean what you think it means. They're telling you to not believe what you see with your own line.

[Michael Jones]

Yeah.

[Phil Labonte]

And Hakeem Jeffries is the leader of the, of the, he's the minority leader of the House of Representatives. So, you know, he's in a position of authority.

[Brett Dasovic]

Was he taking questions there?

[Phil Labonte]

I don't know.

[Brett Dasovic]

It would be interesting to know if somebody there, you know, if there was a journalist who actually wanted to ask a question like, sir, could you quantify what you mean by, like, I get what you say legislatively, I get what you're saying. What do you mean by fight it in the streets?

[Phil Labonte]

Yeah, I honestly, I mean, I wish that, you know, I were influential enough where I could make phone calls to other outlets and be other news outlets and be like, like, hey, hold these Democrats feet to the fire. You know, this is, this kind of rhetoric. If, if the, the right doesn't push on it, right. And doesn't try to try to bring the same kind of consequences on the left as would be brought on the right, and if we don't make us think about it, then it's going to continue. I mean, I, I would love to see, I would love to hear Donald Trump, you know, make a statement about this.

[Brett Dasovic]

What did you mean by this?

[Phil Labonte]

Yeah, what exactly do you mean by this? Because, you know, as the minority leader of the House of Representatives, like, you're the, the top dog for the Democrats in the House. Like, and granted, the House is kind of where the clown show happens.

[Michael Jones]

Right.

[Phil Labonte]

The Senate's kind of the ser. Is more the serious body. And, and the House, you get people doing a little more wacky stuff.

[Michael Jones]

Hey, they're both clown shows.

[Brett Dasovic]

Let's, it's the government, okay.

[Phil Labonte]

The, the, the Senate thinks of themselves as the serious ones, whereas the Cl. The, the House doesn't think of themselves.

[Michael Jones]

As so serious because they're like circus ole.

[Phil Labonte]

Fair enough.

[Michael Jones]

Like a sophisticated clown.

[Phil Labonte]

Yeah, right. Yeah. But I mean, I do think that it, you know, it's worth, it would be worth, you know, having the right push on these things because until it's made clear that this is unacceptable, you're only going to get more of it.

[Michael Jones]

I, I would, I would say at some point, though, someone needs to take the high road. And like, I totally call out the double standard here, like, because, you know, Trump definitely said fight, fight, fight at after. And people in the media tried to misinterpret that. I, I just really think at some point it'd be really good to see one side go. You're. This is, this is. We don't want to play the game you're playing. So this is obviously just rhetoric. What, can you do the same for us?

[Brett Dasovic]

I, Republicans do that all the time. And it never works.

[Phil Labonte]

I think that not, you know, not, not looking to the DOJ to bring charges is, is actually taking the high road. Because that's the kind of response that you get from the, from the Democrats. Like they, they look for, they go straight to lawfare. Like anything, honestly at this point, anything that the Republicans do that is short of actually using the levers of government power to attack their political opponents is the measure.

[Michael Jones]

There's someone who's, again, just not really talk about politics that live. If I would see like Republicans going on about this in my home, I just start rolling my eyes, like, get to work. I don't care what they say said, like, just get back to getting stuff done. Because at the end of the day, the Republicans and the Democrats are trying to earn the vote of the American people. So I hope the Republicans just sort of look at this and go, okay, clowns, whatever. That's how we think of them. But let's get back to working. And that will impress average Americans for more.

[Phil Labonte]

I think that speaks to the difference, the, the, the difference between people on the right and people on the left in the US Today, the conservatives and progressives. And I think I said this earlier, but I don't believe in the blank nicely right. I don't believe that people are only created by the conditions that they. I completely reject that idea. I believe that people have a temperament, people have emotional reactions that are going to be different from one person to another. I think that your political bent is largely a result of, of your, your, you know, your temperament and stuff. And I think that Jonathan Heights work, the, the, I think it's called the Righteous Mind is the book.

[Michael Jones]

Righteous Mind.

[Phil Labonte]

Righteous Mind is the book that he did. And the, the, the, the different personality traits that he, that he sees in the left. Care versus Harm, you know, justice versus care. I forget what they were. But, but the point that I'm making is the people that are conservatives, they're going to have the, they're going to agree with you and they're going to say get to work. And that's why, or part of why Republicans and conservatives don't do that kind of stuff and attack this stuff so viciously because it would actually turn off their base. Whereas when it comes to Democrats and the progressives, they really do they actually believe these things. Like, I, I do think a good percentage of the Democrats believe Trump's a fascist. Even you could show them evidence. You can show them all the evidence you want, but in their heart, they believe that he would do the Things that Hitler would do if he was given the chance. They believe it totally. And I, I, you, I see it, you see it regularly with the, the Democrat kind of operatives on X. There are some that obviously are doing it just for money, but there's, there are a handful that they're buying it, they believe everything they're saying. And there's a couple that come to mind that I'm not going to name them because I don't want to promote them.

[Brett Dasovic]

But also ignore the politicians for a second. If the media was doing its job, like we don't like people who are politically motivated, people who are either in government or the ones that are already politically partisan, meaning those who are already considered a Republican or a Democrat, sure, fine. Maybe the Republicans shouldn't be, you know, in the eyes of some Republicans, they shouldn't be wasting their time going after something that they believe to be just a miss, something that was misspoken. Right. But it's the media's job and unbiased media should be doing their job to at least ask this guy, what did you mean by that? And one thing this country could do if they wanted to actually heal the divide a little bit is if both sides of the aisle, if we were in a world where there wasn't as politically partisan of a new of news networks as we have now, is if MSNBC was willing to ask him a question, what did you mean by that? And then print his answer, Or CNN ask him a question like that and print his answer. And if both sides did that to their own parties and held them accountable, it is possible that you wouldn't see the divide in the way where now anytime somebody cites an article for something in the news, whether it's, if it's pro Trump to say, well, that was just from Fox News, that was from Newsmax, I disregard it because your news is biased and it doesn't mean matter. Right. If CNN asked a couple of questions of people that were Democrats, it might engage people to start asking those questions from both sides and get people a little bit more in the middle. But they're not going to do that.

[Phil Labonte]

Yeah, I think, I think that there's, there's a lot of substance to what you're saying. And I think that I wish that you could see or you would see, you know, outlets like MSNBC and cnn. I think it's possible with cnn. I don't think it's possible with, with msnbc. MSNBC has picked their lane too far gone. Yeah, well, they pick their lane like they have a they, they may not have a huge viewership, but they have a viewership that they have to cater to. And I don't think they're going to change that.

[Brett Dasovic]

I have seen plenty of, like, far left people on X who'd call CNN a pro Trump network. Yeah, that's not, that's an actual. And it's because it's, they actually, it's, well, it's, it's owned by, it's run by David Zaslav right over there at Warner Brothers, Warner Brothers Discovery. And they really hate him. He's kind of the Trump of the media, media world. They really, really despise him. So there are definitely people that actually believe that CNN is somehow a pro Trump network.

[Phil Labonte]

All right, we got, I'm going to jump to this story here. Ex Federal Reserve adviser, the Washington Post reports. Ex Federal Reserve adviser indicted on charge of economic espionage. A former senior advisor to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors was arrested Friday and accused of leaking inside information from the Fed to the Chinese government over a period of several years, at one point receiving a $450,000 payment, then lying about it to investigators. Economist John Harold Rogers, 63, of Vienna, Virginia, worked in the Division of International Finance of the Fed from 2010 until 2021, according to an indictment unsealed Friday in federal court in the District. Last year, he told the podcaster that he'd retired from the Fed in May 2021, approximately a year after he had been questioned by investigators for the Fed's Inspector General and allegedly lied about how he accessed and transmitted sensitive information to two unnamed Chinese co. Conspirators. Do you guys think that there is any level or bureaucracy in our government that is not infiltrated by China?

[Brett Dasovic]

What was the name of the, the organ, what was it the name of.

[Phil Labonte]

The Federal Reserve advisor?

[Brett Dasovic]

Yeah. What was the name of his position?

[Phil Labonte]

He was, he was a senior advisor to the Federal Reserve Board of Governors.

[Brett Dasovic]

For what, like it was, it was the Department of what, let's see, worked.

[Phil Labonte]

In the Division of International Finance.

[Brett Dasovic]

I, I just imagine that there's so much, much dark money and in bad stuff going on there.

[Ian Crossland]

Yeah. To answer your question, Phil, you'd have to define the word infiltrated exactly, because if, if they, maybe they just talk to some Chinese guy on the phone, I think they've all been connected to the Chinese in some way. Every, every layer of our government, I think is connected to the Chinese in some way. But it's just such a vague. Like the thing is, if a guy has a private company in China, he's a Chinese government. Government agent. Because the way the CCP is, their tentacles in every private company in the country. So like any business at all with any Chinese company, you're. You're connected to the ccp.

[Phil Labonte]

Yeah.

[Brett Dasovic]

Has anybody, anybody asked Eric Swalwell what.

[Phil Labonte]

He thinks of this Zing?

[Ian Crossland]

I don't know, but it's a real heavy assumption to think that every government agency has some sort of infiltration.

[Phil Labonte]

I don't think that it's all that heavy. I. I think it's. It's a. A big. It's a. It would be too much to say everybody. Right. But I think that at least the. The organ, the. The bureaucracies that. That have an. Will have an effect on US China relations. I think it's reasonable to say that China has, you know, has at least some kind of relationship with people, whether knowing or unknowing, because there are people that. That end up doing spy stuff for other countries without realizing they're doing it. When, you know, you can get. If you talk to, like, Swalwell talking to the Chinese spy, he didn't know that he was talking to a Chinese. Yeah, but Fang Fang just, you know, she. She was giving him, you know, telling the things that he wanted to hear, you know, and I'm sure that that happens plenty, you know, whether, you know, some guy that. That likes Chinese women and some Chinese woman is like, oh, you know, blah, blah, blah, talking to him and pillow talk will. Will end up, you know, exposing a lot of information. And I think that that kind of stuff, that kind of espionage is probably more common than, hey, here's a bunch of money. Get me information. But I do think that it's probably very common, and I think that the United States. It's possible that. That, you know, previous administrations had looked. Looked the other way or not, not hunted down leads and stuff. I mean, there's. There was plenty of evidence that Joe Biden and Hunter Biden had dealings with Chinese companies. And there's. There's no reason to think that. That they weren't, you know, giving information to the Chinese government again, knowingly or unknowingly, because who knows what. What. What Hunter Biden was. If Hunter Biden goes to China, you know, they're loading him up with coke and hookers and he's running his face and, you know, that they're. They're filming and recording everything. You know, it. You know, so, like, how. I don't think that it's a ridiculous thing to say. Hey, there's every level of our Government on, to some degree is, has been compromised. And, you know, I think that I'm not sure how you would clean it out and make sure, you know, how the Trump administration, administration would come in and make sure, sure that it's cleaned up to the best of their ability. But I do think that it's reasonable to say, hey, we need to take care of this.

[Ian Crossland]

If I'm, I'm still. Sometimes I'll be dating, and if I meet a girl that's Chinese from China, that goes through my mind, I'm like, dude, she's got connections to the ccp. I can't date this girl. Which is horrific.

[Brett Dasovic]

Crushing hearts for Chinese women everywhere.

[Michael Jones]

I'm so glad I got married years ago. I don't have to worry about any of that.

[Ian Crossland]

Was she Chinese?

[Michael Jones]

No, no, I think you'd be okay. Okay. No, I think China is trying to grab a lot of power before it's too late, because they got a huge population crisis. I mean, they. Infanticide was rampant for years and they sent a lot of girls into the wilderness, and now they've got an aging population of a lot of boys that can't find women. And I think they see the writing on the wall, so I think they're just trying to grab as much power as they can right now before it's too late.

[Phil Labonte]

What do you think the chances of some kind of political upheaval in China? How realistic are that? Because. Or is that because. I mean, it's a, you know, an old saying that a young male pop. Too big of a young male population with nothing to do is a recipe for a disaster for a society. Like how, what kind, how bad do you think the situation is in China? Obviously, China has significant controls over, over the population and the information that gets out. But do you have a sense of what, what kind of situation is going on in China, or is it just kind of your, your gut instinct because of stuff that you've read in the news?

[Michael Jones]

It's going to be a lot of my gut instinct. I'll just, I'm not like an expert on this, but first of all, let's remember Trump's in the White House. So it's pronounced China. Okay? That's how it's pronounced. It's a huge nation over there. So, I mean, I think you can never really predict because a lot of, like, East Far Eastern people are going to have a far different culture where a lot of people in the west, we want to stand out, we want to be unique. It's the exact opposite mentality over there. Like, like they want to sort of just blend into the crowd. There's a lot more collectivist thinking than individualist thinking in the West. So I think a lot of the assumptions or intuitions we would have are just completely wrong on how they're going to react. I think they would rebel if they're not, if they're running low on food, if they come sort of under some economic pressure. But until that kind of thing happens, I think they're just going to try to continue with their cultural norm of trying to stay in the crowd, not create too much fuss, because that's very much the mindset of collectivist cultures. Whereas we in the west, we're very individualistic, we want to stand out, we want to cause a riot. I don't think a lot of them are thinking that. I think they're just sort of thinking is how can I go along with what everything's happening and not get too much attention to myself. So I, I, you know, it's hard to say what's going to happen. I would never have predicted Trump's first term or second term. So I mean, like this, who knows what's going to happen over the last 20 years, next 20, 20 years, it could be anything. I think my gut tells me they will, they will take those young men and try to get Taiwan because you got to look at from their perspective, they're going to, they have this aging population that they're not having the birth rates up, they need to replace people. So they're going to have a declining economy over the next 100 years regardless. So might as well try for once because either way they're going to decline a little bit somehow. So I think they're thinking of that. So I guess we'll see though.

[E]

I always hear that and I think about the fact that like, and I agree with you, a lot of people don't realize the real situation on the ground in China. They have no idea, they don't understand like the, like, the reality of being from a collectivist culture and how you view the world as being fundamentally different from like a Westerner or an individualistic standpoint. But I also, and I, and you're right that it would be a last chance to effort to like make this last, last ditch attempt to take Taiwan. But the problem that I see with it is that the only thing they really want for Taiwan would be like a propaganda victory. The people, they don't really need, that's more milestone feed for China. You're not really getting much. You're just getting what TSMC's factories and fabrications that you can essentially build in a couple years time, which is there is some stopgap time period, some lead time to build these things up and have them. But I personally, I lived in Singapore in high school, so I'm not speaking from a little bit of an understanding of the region here. I don't know if they're really going to do it because it's just, it doesn't seem like, like a point. Yeah, I mean like you could say like maybe for the legacy of Xi, because his zero Covid, you know, zero COVID policy didn't really go anywhere, just caused China to slip years into the past but, or into essentially into like a real economic problem for him right now on top of like the one child policy that it caused. But I just don't see it happening. I think there's just too much that's would that they would see that they would lose from going to war. Maybe that's a different value point, but I don't, I don't know what to make of that.

[Michael Jones]

That's a good point. And yeah, I, again, I, I, as I said, I have no clue what's going to happen. But I mean like I, they may just sort of roll the dice on it. I mean, but yeah, again they're, they're the collectivist culture. They don't want to make too much of a fuss. But I do think they're trying to grab as much power as they can right now in hopes that somehow they can deal with their, their declining population. I think that's probably what they're trying to do right now. And infiltrating the US Government, government would be one of those aspects. I don't know how deep it is though. Who knows?

[Ian Crossland]

If the Americans were to take the Panama Canal, I think the Chinese would seize Taiwan and just be like, there you go. Even now we're even. And also, not only is it what they get, but it's what is being removed from the table, which would be basically a liberal economic imperial stronghold right off their coast, which they don't want. It's like a, you know, British colony essentially. It's not really, but, but with Hong.

[E]

Kong the same way, which was exactly the same thing.

[Ian Crossland]

And what happened with Hong Kong after those riots, what, five years ago, it's just like radio silence on Hong Kong. What's the situation?

[E]

Well, it's, it's China. They just, they just sped up the agreement. They like, they decided that we're not going to wait the whole 50 years we agreed to. We're going to make it China tomorrow.

[Ian Crossland]

Seems like after the Tiananmen Square riot massacre where the Chinese just shut down a potential revolt. It was like what happened if the American Revolution revolution failed. Would there ever have been another one? Or would the British have just seized and clamped down and then like, like how long after 1776 would there have been the second American attempt at independence?

[Phil Labonte]

Considering, considering the fact that the, that Canada became its own country, Australia became its own country, New Zealand became its own country and India like the, the British stopped the, the colonial rule of India, I do think the United States would have become its own country.

[Ian Crossland]

It might have become its own kingdom because Canada is a kingdom of British Britain. Australia and New Zealand are all kingdoms.

[Phil Labonte]

King Charles is the monarch, India is not.

[Ian Crossland]

India's not different.

[Phil Labonte]

Where how it would have panned out, I don't know. And also because of the, even if they'd have lost the revolution, right? The founders lost the revolution. I think that the spirit in the United States of that kind of looking for independence was something that was in the, the in the colonies and I don't think that would have burnt out. And I think that had there been a revolution that the, that the Americans lost. I think if whenever they actually did did achieve their own independence, I think they would be looking back and saying remember what the King did. Remember what the King. We want to break ties with the King.

[Ian Crossland]

So now that you mention it, I wouldn't have been surprised if they had made the United States, it wouldn't be called that, but made this the whatever its own kingdom just like Canada. And they're like now you have your own Prime Minister and your own, you know, autonomy under the reign of our King.

[Phil Labonte]

Remember it was, it was 150, 150, 160 years between or 100, 140 or maybe years between when the United States was formed and you actually got fast passage across the Atlantic, right? Because even, even boats it took a couple weeks to get across right now the Titanic and, and those, those class of liners would, it wasn't like you could get across. So the logistics of keeping a, A, a colony under control the way that the, the England had like that was a tall order. And and so I think that the, the, the revolution, even if the, the revolution had failed, I think that the sec. There would have been a quickly would have been some kind of second revolution and and so on and so forth because this, the sense of, of indignation towards the King Wouldn't have changed. Changed. They would have. They. Maybe maybe the, the. Maybe instead of, you know, being a couple years, it would have been a longer war. But I think if the. I think it was. Was kind of inevitable that the United States was going to become its own country.

[Ian Crossland]

I don't know what sparked the Tiananmen Square riots exactly. If it was dissatisfaction with the. Not the emperor, the Chinese of no longer an emperor, but with the ccp basically there was dissatisfaction with the, the totalitarian government. I don't know what. Do you know what sparked the Tiananmen Square riots by any chance?

[E]

I mean that's essentially it just the students were. Were saying that like this is ridiculous.

[Phil Labonte]

And it was 1989. Correct.

[E]

It's June 4, 1989.

[Ian Crossland]

And then they, the Chinese government. Well the CCP should say because there's also the Republic of China.

[E]

That's the government they peacefully repressed. The students peacefully reorganized.

[Ian Crossland]

Meaning they slaughtered them all and put it the lawn.

[Phil Labonte]

Yeah, indoctrination. There was a lot of people that, that, that you know, paid a heavy toll.

[Ian Crossland]

So whether or not that country will see another attempted revolt like that were they all. Was that ideology erased?

[E]

If you know anything about China right now and you start seeing the stuff that they're doing now, a lot of Chinese people are freaking out about it. But the problem is like there are also an equal number of people that have been. So they've, they've. You have people always struggle with this. It's hard to understand what it looks like from another man's shoes or from another man's perspective. Like they've lived their entire life within the bubble of China and they've been there. I idea that Junguo, like the center of the universe for them is this. They're like an American. They think of their country as the best. They're like China number one, you know, like they literally think that. So like the problem is there are going to be some people that say they see the injustice in it. But some people don't view justice in the same Western mentality that we view justice. They don't. They don't see it the same way that you or I do. And that's just.

[Michael Jones]

It's about the collective. If you upset the collective, I mean this is, this is why in Islam.

[Phil Labonte]

That'S a laws, right?

[Michael Jones]

You leave Islam, you don't have freedom of religion. They want you dead because you cannot apostate from Islam. Because the, the collective overrules the individual in these collectivist cultures. So they'll have that kind of mentality.

[Phil Labonte]

And the, you know, the, the, the English had 500 years before the, the revolution in the United states or about 500 years, they'd sign, they made the king sign the Magna Carta. And the Magna Carta, it was a big, big deal, like, right. It established the rule of law, limited the king's power, guaranteed rights to barons, protected the rights of property and bear of barons and stuff, established that all free citizens could own and inherit property. These were all innovations, these were all brand new ideas. And so this tradition that the American, that the, the Englishmen in the colonies, because they all considered themselves Englishmen, right? They, even though they were Virginians and, and Massachusettsians and New York, New Yorkers, they considered themselves English. They all had that strong tradition of we're free men, that we have a king, but the king is not actually the totalitarian king that everyone thinks. You know, other societies had and other kings and other monarchies had the, the rights of the men of England. They, they had a lot of rights and because of the Magna Carta, that kind of, kind of self, self. Id self, you know, awareness of themselves, that was something that was expressed west in the, the revolution here in the United States. So to, to compare the United States or the, the U.S. revolution and, and what came before it in, in England and, and English common law to China, it's really, really, really, really different stuff, you know, because there's 500 years, 500 years of, of believing as Englishmen they had rights.

[Ian Crossland]

Magna Carta's great. It was King John. I believe it was King John.

[Michael Jones]

Yeah.

[Ian Crossland]

Richard's brother. King. King Richard's brother.

[Michael Jones]

Richard the Lionheart was on crusade.

[Ian Crossland]

Yeah, he died. He drowned in a river. So his brother King John, the alcoholic, was in charge. And that was the guy, the king from Robin Hood. That Robin Hood was, you know, the sheriff.

[Michael Jones]

The funny thing about him is he's portrayed in Robin as this great king, but like at one point, like on his way back from Crusade, like, he gets captured by someone and they try to like, say, like, we got your king. No. Yeah, Richard iii. And the, the English nobles hated him so much they didn't, they didn't even want to pay the ransom. They're like, no thanks. You, you keep them until someone convince them. All right, fine, we'll pay the ransom.

[Ian Crossland]

I love Chinese history. There's a book called the romance of the Three Kingdoms that was written in like the 1400s by Luo Gang Xiao. And it's a, basically a historical fiction about like the year 200 AD. Where they're. The China split into these three kingdoms. There's this revolt called the Yellow Turban Revolt. And then all these local governors formed armies to fight this revolt. And one of the governors seized the emperor and took control and was like, I'm the emperor. I'm ruling through the, the, the eight year old emperor now. And it's, it's a really great story. They made Dynasty warriors based off of it. So I learned a lot about just. But the, the whole obsession and love of the emperor which has been throughout that country for, for thousands of years is something different than what England. England didn't even exist till 900 AD.

[Michael Jones]

Or whatever 166 is technically when they go back to William the.

[Ian Crossland]

William the Conqueror.

[Phil Labonte]

Yeah, we're, we're going to go to super chats now. We've, we've been running our faces a little long, but that's okay. Shane H. Wilder says, I want to shout out my homie, Chris Burtman and his wife. They're about to have their baby. Let's effing go. The cult of Bert will live on, man. Congratulations, Bert.

[Ian Crossland]

Hey, buddy.

[Phil Labonte]

He's a wonderful, wonderful guy. And here's to hoping that everything is smooth and they have a, a easy or she has an easy birth and, and we welcome the child into the Tim Cast world. World here. Kelly says it's clear that any GOP senator who votes against Bobby Tulsi or Cash will face a huge primary election challenge. Nicole Shanahan, Scott pressler and Angela McGardell all have pledged to oust them. I mean, I, I don't know if they're going to face a primary if they get confirmed. Right. But if whoever, if they don't. If one of them, they don't, one of them don't. Doesn't get confirmed because of, you know, dissent from, from one of the Republicans, then you might. But when it comes to people like Collins or Murkowski, those districts are very, you know, they're, they're not reliably red, right? They're, they're very purple districts. So it would probably have to be someone that, you know, was like, hey, I, you know, I'm, I'm dissenting because I don't think I personally, I think it's most likely that it would be Tulsi and it would be someone from overall red district that would say, oh, I think that she's actually, you know, actually somehow a, a spy, which is on its face ridiculous. She's been a major in the national guard for 20 years. She's had five different background checks and she's had a clearance the entire time. If there was anything nefarious in her past that that show was there, it would have been found in the background checks. She wouldn't be an officer, especially a major like. That's a pretty high level officer. Officer. Oh yeah, she did. She picked up lieutenant Colonel. You're right. My bad. Lieutenant Colonel. So, yes, thank you. Yeah, that's a, that's a pretty high level officer. So I don't, I don't think that there's anything there. So I, it's my opinion she should be confirmed. But I do think that if, if it's, if, if it ends up being someone like Murkowski or like Collins, probably not. I don't, if it's McConnell, I don't think that there would be a primary challenge challenger as well, but I don't. Do you guys have thoughts on, on.

[Ian Crossland]

Well, all three of those. Kennedy, Tulsi Gabbard and Cash Patel. I feel like if they don't get in, there could be someone that's put in that's way more partisan, way more dangerous. Like those guys are balanced, obsessed with constitutional law and doing things by the book. You're not going to get much better than that across the board. Like they might, they might be like, like flashy personalities, but like, you don't want some sycophant getting in there.

[Phil Labonte]

I think Cash Patel is going to get it probably pretty easily. I think that he'll get the votes. I think that it'll be the Democrats that don't like him. And I think that, that the Democrats are going to, a lot of Democrats are going to vote against these people and I think that, that, that is a problem because anyone that's not a swamp monster, the Democrats are just against like Marco Rubio, he was a senator, so they like their own people. So he got in smooth sailing nine to one. Yeah, he got in with smooth sailing, but that was largely because he's a senator and they don't like to, they don't like to insult their own. Like it's a very small club. There's only a 100 of them, you know, at any one time. So they, they are very much like, you know, our people are cool. Other people aren't. So I think that was a lot of why Marco Ruby, and honestly he is, he is extremely qualified to do the job job. And he's not particularly maga. They don't, they don't conceptualize him as a MAGA guy. Even though I do think that he's going to do the job that the President wants. I think that he's going to be on President Trump's team. He's not going to be like some of the, the previous Trump administration people. But my, my sense is that it's going to be like Cash Patel will get through. I don't know if I have, have. I don't think that Bobby's gonna have a lot of problem. I think he'll get through as well. But I think Tulsi might have problem and I think that's a terrible development because I think that Tulsi, of all of them, Tulsi is, is the one that I think, you know, deserves it the most.

[Ian Crossland]

She should.

[Phil Labonte]

They, you know, they put her under, under surveillance, you know, so. But all right, Perpetual Jonathan says finally IP makes it. I came across your work via the Drizzle Drizzle David Wood years ago and your series the Dizzle. The Dizzle David woods years ago. And your series have been very thorough and informative. Convert Phil Well, I'm, I'm, I'm, I follow you on on X now and I, I do a lot of listening to podcasts. I have a long drive that I'm going to be, I'm driving to New Hampshire tonight, so I will be listening to your, your work.

[Ian Crossland]

What's the Dizzle? David woods, the Dizzle.

[Michael Jones]

That's David Wood. He is the Islam's number one opponent. He, I've been on his channel, he's been on mine and we, we go after Islam when he comes on and he's, he's a fun guy. You guys should talk to him. But yeah, I do. Thank you for the, the super chat. I do a lot of stuff. I just uploaded a, a six hour super cut of all my videos on gospel reliability. Just showing the Gospels are extremely reliable documents.

[Ian Crossland]

You think that Islam could benefit from a Reformation? It's never had one before.

[Phil Labonte]

No.

[Michael Jones]

Here's why. Because if you go back and you just look at what the Prophet Muhammad was saying, I mean like you read the Hadiths, their violence. I mean you read like Sunnah Abu Dhab. I mean like there's one story that I was just talking with David Wood about today. Like there was a slave girl that was attacking Muhammad and they, they killed her and then they went to the Prophet and he said, yeah, that's fine because she was insulting me. So I mean like a lot of, like there, there have been reformation attempts in Islam. It's called the, it's called, they're Called Salafis. And a lot of them actually get a little bit more radical and traditional. Traditional. It didn't, Islam didn't start like Christianity. Christianity started with, with a guy, Jesus Christ, who was God incarnate. He died for our sins. He died the death of a criminal, lived the life, life of a pauper. And then his followers were called to go out and be persecuted to spread the gospel. And they were for hundreds of years until Constantine helped them. But Islam started basically with a warlord for the most part. He comes out of Arabia, he, Islam spreads. They take over this area, they turn the Christians and Jews into dinosaurs, enemies, you know, forced them to pay this tax. It started off completely different in how Christianity started. And there's great books like Tom Holland actually wrote a book called the Shadow of the Sword. He goes into that in details. There's another great book called In God's Path where they just talk about how Islam spread. It was a lot of violence involved far more than the foundations of Christianity.

[Ian Crossland]

He was, Muhammad was a, Muhammad was a, like an orphan basically in a Bedouin tribe. And he lived the life of a warrior because they were being persecuted. They had no other option at that time. Fight or die. So he led an army to fight and then decided instead of killing you all in Mecca, I'm going to unify everyone under this concept of a God. And so he sort of spread monotheism. But I feel like if he had been born in a time of bounty like we have now on earth, that God would have spoke to him in different ways and ordered him to do different things and because it, it gives you different wisdom and, and, and direction depending on the situation.

[Phil Labonte]

Hey, let's, let's go on to read some more super chats.

[Michael Jones]

Sorry.

[Phil Labonte]

No, no, it's fine, it's fine. It's just that we got a bunch of super chats and, and, and I, I, this conversation is not a small conversation.

[Michael Jones]

I could go on for hours.

[Phil Labonte]

So no offense, no offense. I apologize, Ian. Let's see. Justin Royer says congrats on the album, Phil. I've been jamming it all morning and it's absolutely killer. It's about time we make guitar solos great again. I tell you what, no one can guitar solo like Jason Richardson.

[Ian Crossland]

So by the way people, to get the new album, where is it? Where did they get it?

[Phil Labonte]

You can get it on Spotify, you can get it on Apple Music. And if you want to order a physical copy, you can go to all that remainsonline.com there's, there's actual albums and stuff.

[Ian Crossland]

What's the name of the new album?

[Phil Labonte]

The album is called Anti Fragile.

[Ian Crossland]

Antifragile. On Spotify.

[Phil Labonte]

On Spotify, yes. I'm not. Your buddy guy says, is America under Attack? No, it's not. You can chill out. Let's see. Wyatt Clayenberg says, Phil, I think the anti government right believes government is unnecessary because people are basically good, while the pro government right, like me, believes we need government because people are basically bad. My take, my take is I do think, I, I, I think that I'm in agreement with you, but that doesn't mean. But because people are bad, you can't allow a strong, strong, big powerful government. So I agree. People are, you know, they're going to, they're incentivized to take care of themselves and their tribe, their family and their tribe first. But because of that, that's actually an argument against big government as, as much as it is an argument for big government. So I agree with you in principle, but I don't think the solution is big government. I think the solution is localized government. It. So let's see. General Kale says if they were willing to use a virus last time, imagine what's in store this time around.

[Ian Crossland]

They, who are they, though?

[Michael Jones]

They're the guys in the black cloaks that hang out in the basement in Europe somewhere.

[Phil Labonte]

Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, look, historically there's been a lot of, of things like famine and food restrictions and that was what was being proposed in England. So I mean, I think that we can actually imagine what would be on the table if governments are allowed to run rampant. So let's see here. John Sola says new ATR album is Fire. Feels like an early aughts New England metal and hardcore fest. I'm glad Jay Rich is carrying the torch for Ollie. Ripped to a guitar legend in metal. I tell you what it is. Jason's great.

[Ian Crossland]

He's awesome in person too.

[Phil Labonte]

He's a great guy. It's a bittersweet to think about Ollie. This is the first record that we put out since Ollie passed away. The last time we put out a record was 2018 and all that was our, that was the last record we did with Ollie. And so this is, you know, it's, it's kind of tough, but we're very proud of the record and I think we did a, we, we did Ollie proud. So that's the, that's the sweet part of the bit. Bittersweet. So let's see. I'm not your buddy guy says, I hope everyone Watches the Piers Morgan interview of Tucker Carlson. I agree that the one word which can sum up Western civilization is Christianity. As Christianity declines, so too does the West. I am very sympathetic to that idea.

[Michael Jones]

I mean, I'm, I'm planning a bunch of videos this summer, like how Christianity Ended Slavery, how Christianity Created Human Rights, How Christianity Created Science. I did a video last year called How Christianity Changed the World. And I found all these studies that missionaries have just went out. They increased literacy rates, they build hospitals, they actually created economic progress places like India and China. I mean, like, it's, it's, it's the lifeblood of the world and we just don't realize it. But, yeah, but here's, here's, here's the silver lining and all that. I think as Christianity declines, we go to secularism. But seculars have abysmally bad birth rates. And so, like, you know, sociologists like Eric Kaufman, who wrote Shallow Relations, Religious Inherit the Earth says in about 100 years, we're gonna be right where we were because who's having all the kids? Conservative Christians, and they're just going to just come back. But now they're more polarized, so they're protecting their children more than they were in, like, the 90s.

[Phil Labonte]

That's the, that's the argument that Tim actually makes a lot, that because the left is, you know, the left is embracing what some people would call debauchery and, and, and, and aborting their kids and not having kids and looking at themselves and saying we're not gonna have kids because we want to spend our money on us and looking at kids as a problem and, and such, that eventually there's going to be a revival of, of religious, you know, of religion here in the US and that the right is going, is ascendant because of that.

[Michael Jones]

I mean, G.K. chesterton said, I mean, Christianity has died many times. Favorite has a God that knows its way out of the, the grave. So we'll be back, don't you worry.

[Phil Labonte]

Awesome. Let's see. John Eddie says read about my recovery from lymphoma and chemotherapy and share my story on Give Send. Go. John Eddie. Well, congratulations. That is great to hear. I love to hear people that beat cancer. I lost my dad to cancer 25 years ago now. So anyone that can beat that terrible, terrible disease, you know, kudos to you. And here's a long life in a parallel road.

[Ian Crossland]

I, I just was having swelling lymph nodes the last few days, and I went in the sauna for like an hour. And when I came out.

[Phil Labonte]

It was.

[Ian Crossland]

The swelling was gone for. It was just gone. So I don't know if that has something to do with lymphoma. Your lymph nodes, your lymphatic system reducing acidity, who knows. But it was, it was pretty miraculous.

[Phil Labonte]

Congratulations, by the way, from Timothy Curran. Says Phil. I think I saw one of ATRs first shows at St. John's Gym in Clinton. Man, ass new album is excellent. Equal parts pushing and inspiring what we needed these dark days. Hope to catch you guys on tour soon. Thank you very much. It would have been one of our early shows probably back in like maybe 2000, 2001, which is pre release of our first record. Back when we had no idea what we were doing at all. We were terrible.

[E]

That's a father Timothy Curran, by the way.

[Phil Labonte]

Oh, Father Timothy Kern. Oh, father, I apologize, Father. I'm. Thank you very, very much. Let's see. Michael McHenry says long, long time. First time. Long time fan, first time. I guess super chatter found out my wife's pregnant. My third. Her first angelic woman who adopted my sons after their mother passed. See y'all in eight months. That is a beautiful story.

[Brett Dasovic]

Congratulations.

[Phil Labonte]

Round of applause, Round of applause. And kudos to your wife and, and hopefully she has an easy, easy birth and, and what a great woman to adopt your, your children and, and make a, you know, make a family out of those that lost their, their mom. Let's see. Yeah. MF Damien says, do you think the right hollering DEI all the time will have the same boy who cried wolf effect that the left achieves? Screaming racism all the time? I don't. And the reason I don't is because right now there is so much DEI in the government it is unlikely to find. We are unlikely to find out that it's not. If the, if we were to compare it to the left screaming racism all the time. The left screams racism all the time when there's no racism. Like the, the left screamed racism about the George Floyd situation. The left screamed racism and had most of your average normies thinking that, that, you know, a thousand or two thousand black men were murdered by police every year and it was like 12.

[Michael Jones]

You sound so racist right now.

[Phil Labonte]

I, I'm, I'm not. I'm. That word has no effect on me anymore. Like I was getting it today. I'm like, you run along with your magic spell. But now if you were comparing the DEI, the, the accusations of DEI with the accusations of racism in the 60s, you might, might have a point because there was a lot more racism, you know, before the Civil Rights act and, and the civil. Right there, the Civil Rights Act. There was, there was a lot of substance to the arguments being made that, hey, look, we're a racist society, we need to end Jim Crow, etc. Etc. So I think that the context today. No, but if you were to compare it to the 60s, maybe. I think that there's enough DEI going around. I don't think there's enough racism going around to actually fill all the accusations.

[Ian Crossland]

I will say Phil has about 60% magic resist, so he is very resistant to magic in general. It's pretty cool. The I am concerned about the DEI thing becoming a boy who cried wolf situation with this helicopter crash into the airplane. I've seen people on Twitter with large followings being like, dei. They're saying it. They're not. And that is to me, hold back, bro. But it's only when it appears in the government that it becomes a real boy who cried wolf. If, like, our Department of Defense was saying it's because de. Like, come on. But no, they haven't been. So I'm not, I'm not concerned like that.

[Phil Labonte]

Andre says TCAS is not active at that altitude. Blackhawk mistook the jet for another jet that was landing. Helo pilot wearing NVG2. No depth perception. I mean, yeah, I, I, I don't know, I don't know what TCAS is. But like I said, the, the, the, There was a miscommunication. I, I was under the impression there was a miscommunication with the tower. And honestly, like, if they're wearing PVS31s, like, I have 31s and I know that they have an aviation version, but, like, you can, you can. I, you can drive with PVS31s flying, though.

[Ian Crossland]

There's, Is there a lack of. Brian was saying there's a lack of depth perception.

[Phil Labonte]

There is a lack of depth perception, but there's still, like, you can tell size and especially seeing as like the wingspan, like, I don't know. I'm, I don't know. Maybe so. But thanks for the super chat. Andrew. Andrew Ho says the aircraft have t traffic collision avoidance system. Thank you very much. It's a verbal warning traffic with the distance and which direction to maneuver to. Was that not working on either aircraft? I don't know. I guess we're gonna have to wait until, until we hear more from the NTSB and all of that croag says. Brett, what are your thoughts of Stargate partnership with the Pentagon For Nucle. Considering the plot points of Terminator and.

[Brett Dasovic]

War Games, I have no thoughts on it. I do think that everybody should rewatch Terminator 1 though, because it's an underrated film. As good as Terminator 2 is, Terminator 1 is just as good.

[Phil Labonte]

You think it's underrated?

[Brett Dasovic]

I do.

[Ian Crossland]

Terminator.

[Brett Dasovic]

All of the attention comes to Terminator 2. I think Terminator 1 is a vastly different movie. It's basically a horror movie. And it's fantastic. The song, the music of that film, the score of that film gets stuck in my head. Like if I'm sick, I have fever dreams that involve that movie.

[Phil Labonte]

I, I, I am, I'm completely in agreement with you about the quality of the movie. It is, especially for its time. It was absolutely terrifying and it was a brilliant, you know, brilliant movie. I love it to death. But I, I, maybe it's because I'm, I'm older than you. I didn't get the sense that it was like underrated.

[Brett Dasovic]

I guess underrated now is because when, when it's referenced in pop culture, most people reference. Terminator 2 is one of the few movies that outdid its, you know, outdid its predecessor. You know, it's a sequel that's considered better than the original. So most of the attention goes to Terminator 2 more than Terminator 1.

[Phil Labonte]

So, I mean, I might be, you know, might be showing my age here too. But I also don't think that Terminator 2 outdid the.

[Ian Crossland]

Oh, interesting. I saw Terminator 2 first.

[Brett Dasovic]

I mean, they're hard to compare because they're not the same. They're, they're not even considerably in any way the same type of film.

[Phil Labonte]

Yeah, I mean, look, look, just the Terminator 2. When I think of Terminator 2, like, I think of mostly daytime shots and well lit shots. When I think of Terminator, all action.

[Brett Dasovic]

It's under the, it's under the, under the bridge.

[Phil Labonte]

Yeah, I think of gritty dark. Most of the movie was happening at night. Really just a great early 80s movie. It's it, you know, so, yeah, go listen to Brett. Go watch Terminator 1. It's amazing.

[Brett Dasovic]

Also, Terminator Salvation is an underrated movie and you should watch Terminator.

[Phil Labonte]

Which one is that one?

[Brett Dasovic]

That's the one with Christian Bale.

[Phil Labonte]

Yes, I agree with that.

[Michael Jones]

Not like that one.

[Brett Dasovic]

I mean, most people don't, in terms.

[Michael Jones]

Of story structure, it's just, it's not, they don't do it well.

[Brett Dasovic]

I just enjoyed that they actually looked at the, the oblique, the, the bleak future and actually spent time there rather than using it as a narrative device. And Terminator, the Sarah Connor Chronicles, which was a television show that only went to two seasons. Also awesome.

[Michael Jones]

I know. I only watch Lord of the Rings.

[Phil Labonte]

This was all right. So that one gamer says, blindsided in a good way. Seeing Iron Mike Jones here. With the rise of political tribalism, what's the best way to combat things like Christian nationalism? Would love to see you on a culture war episode. I would love to be a part of that culture.

[Michael Jones]

Yeah. The best way to combat Christian nationalism is to go to church. Because again, studies show Christian nationalism arises among the least churched individuals Christian. If we're going to define Christian nationalism simply, it's that the idea that Christianity should be in the business of protecting national borders and identities, and national governments should be protecting a specific culture and a specific identity, which is just completely antithetical to the gospel. Gospel. It's about creating a kingdom for Jesus on this earth and bringing all people in, regardless of background, so we all become one great big beautiful people at the end of the day. So the funny thing is that Christian nationalists take pains to say they're protecting Christian identity. And when they get people in church, they start moving away from Christian nationalism and towards a much better understanding of Christianity, where it's our job to go out and help people and love people, not just protect certain classes or certain ethnic groups or certain national identities. I mean, yes, I believe absolutely we should be caring for our own people, but we should also be striving to help as many people as we can. And unfortunately, a lot of Christian nationalism moves away from that. And so, yeah, I have a lot of problems with it, I think. But again, you want to combat Christian nationalism, get people in church and it will fix itself.

[Ian Crossland]

Surprisingly, I think taking the plank out of your own eye before you try to take the speck of dust out of the other makes some people people, leads them towards a Christian nationalist. Like, we need to protect and improve the United States, America first. But then at that point, once it's protected or once it's satisfactory, you can remove the dust out of your eye.

[Michael Jones]

I mean, we have to fix problems at homes. I mean, I think every Christian would agree with that. The problem is, I think when I look at Christian nationalism, it's the idea the government should be enforcing, like, a certain type of Christianity on its people. Like, you know, some people have said, well, we should stay like a white Protestant nation. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. Just go back, read Augustine, City of God. That These nations, they're going to fall and rise. What matters is the kingdom of God ultimately. I mean, his book, ironically, is great way to combat modern Christian nationalism because it's all about the kingdom of God. Nations will come and go. Focus on this last one here.

[Phil Labonte]

Young P. Chang says everybody should give Phil a round of applause for clearing six shows in a row plus a culture war episode under his belt with Lion King colors Santal. Thank you very much. That's true. So yeah, Mike, you want to go ahead and give yourself a shout out, go ahead and tell people where they can find you.

[Michael Jones]

Yeah, you can follow me on Inspiring philosophy here on YouTube patreon.com Inspiring philosophy this Sunday I'm releasing a video early for donors. Going to call it something like the Secrets of David and Goliath. Everything you've missed in that chapter. And we're going to go into some things you probably didn't see. I I'll be streaming on my channel this Monday talking about modern miracles and evidence for and Thursday I'll be streaming with a scholar talking about evidence for the resurrection of Jesus. So got a lot of good stuff coming up on the channel. You can follow me there and [e-mail] give to help us keep going and keep making more videos defending Christianity.

[Ian Crossland]

Michael Jones, ladies and gentlemen.

[Michael Jones]

Thank you.

[Ian Crossland]

Yo, Inspiring Philos on Twitter, correct. Or on X rather follow him there. And I'm at Ian Crossland. You can follow me on Twitter, follow me on YouTube, follow me all across the Internet at Ian Crossland. Happy to be here. Very deep conversation, man. That was super cool. Very cool. Glad you came. All right, let's do that again. See you, Brett.

[Brett Dasovic]

Guys, if you want to follow me, perhaps you agree or disagree with my take on Terminator, you can follow me at. At Brett Dasovic on X and on Instagram. That's where you can see all the content where I like to talk about movies and television. Also, we do pop culture crisis Monday through Friday at 3:00pm Eastern Standard Time, which is noon Pacific right here on YouTube. You should join us there. It's a lot of fun, guys. Thanks. I'm on Thursdays and Phil is on Thursdays.

[Phil Labonte]

I am Phil. That remains on Twix where you can subscribe to me there. I am Phil. It remains official on Instagram. The band is all that remains. New record just dropped today. It's called Anti Fragile. You can go and check it out on YouTube. Apple Music, Spotify, Pandora, Deezer, Amazon Music. If you want to be a part of the monthly Daily Q A that I do for subscribers. Join my. Subscribe to my Ex. Right now, it's only two bucks. And if you've got questions about the record, questions about stuff around here, whatever, go ahead. And we do the. We do the Q A the first Sunday of every month. So this Sunday, we're gonna do the Q A. Usually it's about an hour, maybe a little bit longer, but. Yeah. Go check out our new record. It's badass. Don't forget the left lane is for crime. We will. See you. What's up?

[Ian Crossland]

I was gonna ask, do you go live? Do you do Twitter spaces?

[Phil Labonte]

I do. That's what I do. Fun. Yeah. So don't forget the left lanes for crime.