The Charlie Kirk Show - Pete Hegseth vs. The Democrats, Again

Episode Date: December 2, 2025

Just days after Democrats launched their psy-op to promote insurrection in the military, a convenient Washington Post story accused Pete Hegseth of a war crime for taking out drug dealers. What is going on, and is the left's target merely the Secretary of Defense, or the entire Trump Administration? The show discusses that with Michael Knowles, along with the pros and cons of intervening in Venezuela, the first American pope after ix months, and more. Watch every episode ad-free on members.charliekirk.com!    Get new merch at charliekirkstore.com!Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

My name is Charlie Kirk. I run the largest pro-American student organization in the country fighting for the future of our republic. My call is to fight evil and to proclaim truth. If the most important thing for you is just feeling good, you're going to end up miserable. But if the most important thing is doing good, you will end up purposeful. College is a scam, everybody. You've got to stop sending your kids to college. You should get married as young as possible and have as much.

many kids as possible. Go start a turning point you would say college chapter. Go start a turning point you would say high school chapter. Go find out how your church can get involved. Sign up and become an activist. I gave my life to the Lord in fifth grade. Most important decision I ever made in my life and I encourage you to do the same. Here I am.

Lord, use me. Buckle up, everybody. Here we go. The Charlie Kirk Show is proudly sponsored by Preserve Gold. Leading gold and silver experts and the only precious metals company I recommend to my family, friends, and viewers. All right, welcome to the Charlie Kirk Show. It is Tuesday, December 2nd, joined here in studio of it. Blake Neff.

I am Andrew Colvitt, executive producer of this show. Lots of news this morning. There was a big Pentagon briefing, which I think made more news because of who was covering it. our friend Jack Posobok was in the room, James O'Keefe, many others, because of the new media, I guess, guidelines where the legacy media self-deported themselves from the Pentagon. So there was a briefing this morning. Jack Posobic notably asked if they were considering a court-martial for Senator Mark Kelly. The answer was, everything is on the table. And that is sort of linked to some of the main coverage that we're going to get into here this morning. There is news that there is a, well, it's about 10 days old. USS Ford has been in the waters in the Caribbean outside of Venezuela.

There is concern, I think, in Maduro's inner circle, that the U.S. is about to potentially oust him from power within Venezuela. Meanwhile, you have the Venezuelan cartel, narco-trafficking boats that have caused a huge controversy, namely with Pete Hegeseth. it seems as if, Blake, that there is a growing, I would say op, but they are coordinating their efforts. Democrats are to hopefully get rid of Pete Heggseth and their hope, not my hope, to get rid of Pete Heggseth. I think that effort will fail. But describe this dynamic of what's going on right now with Pete Hegset. Well, what's interesting is, so we discussed this yesterday. What happened is there in September, this was reported by the Washington Post, that in September, they've been doing these strikes on.

drug boats coming from Latin America towards the United States, I should say, alleged gunboats, or drug boats, and that in September they identified one of these, they told Hegeseth about it because he's the one who has to approve strikes, and that according to the Washington Post, he not merely approved a strike, but said basically kill them all in some way. And so they struck the boat, it sinks and breaks apart, but when they're observing it afterwards, they see that some people on the boat are alive and clinging to wreckage. And rather than leave them there or rescue them and arrest them or whatever you would do, they drop another strike on them. Yeah. And we have image 208 here. This is from the New York Times. So that original story, the double-tap story that they're alleging as a war crime was reported by the Washington Post. Now, the New York Times has issued a follow-up reporting that basically is a giant rebuttal to it. New York Times says, according to five U.S. officials who spoke separately and on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive. matters that are under investigation. Mr. Hegeseth, ahead of the September 2, attack ordered a strike that would kill the people on the boat and destroy the vessel in its purported cargo of drugs. But each official said, Mr. Hegss's directive did not specifically address what should happen if a first missile turned out not to fully accomplish all of those things.

And the officials said his order was not a response to surveillance footage, showing that at least two people on the boat survived the first blast. Admiral Bradley, the other character in this saga, ordered the initial missile strike and then several follow-up strikes that killed the initial survivors and sank the disabled boat. As that operation unfolded, they said Mr. Heggseth did not give any further orders to him. So this is a direct rebuttal to the original story, which suggested that Pete Hegeseth was sort of in the room, pulling the levers, ordering the strikes, a follow-up double tap, as you call it to kill survivors. Now, the New York Times is saying there was an initial directive that it should be a lethal strike, and then Admiral Bradley

was the one who was actually directing those. Now, Pete Hegseth has come out and said Admiral Bradley has 100% of his support, that he stands by him, that America's lucky to have somebody of his stature and ability in the position that he's in. But this is all part of a broader effort by Democrats to now go after Pete. What's interesting here is what some have speculated on, and I don't know if we'll learn more about this. But what's really crazy is this all happened just in the days after we had that very strange video they drop where they're sort of implying you might get illegal orders, not saying anything in particular. And they're very evasive when they're confronted about it. They are going on TV and saying, you know, I don't, I don't know of any specific

illegal orders, but you know, we're just, you know, hypothetically, if hypothetically anything were to occur. And they're taking that pose and suddenly this drops. And these people in this, US senators are not in lawmakers are not unaware of what is going on they have contacts with reporters especially friendly reporters and uh one of them slotkin is like a CIA veteran and such and so they it seems very possible they may have known this story was coming and they were essentially it was all a process to cede this story to talk about oh illegal orders you know possibly coming up and then bam here's this washington post story saying there's illegal orders and now they've got their preferred framing and you know you could say this is an attempt

to bring down heggseth but it's much more than that it's an attempt to bring down the administration because they don't want heggseth scalp here and just oh you slot in a new guy what they want they actually want that whole defy orders thing they want to delegitimize and break down the apparatus of government for this administration because if they can't you know if the national guard just starts defying the president that you're at a constitutional crisis point where the administration can crumble well and it's it's important to know i first of all i completely agree i believe this was coordinated this isn't orchestrated op um and it's a PR op it's also deadly serious because we'll play this clip in in just a bit but you know senator eric smit is basically saying that

this has all the hallmark uh hallmarks of a color revolution of seating the ground for that And then what was interesting as this story has played out is I kept expecting because they got caught with egg on their face. They've admitted that they're not alleging anything has been illegal thus far necessarily, but then they will allude to these drugboat strikes, right? So then I kept watching and expecting them to fall back and say, well, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. And Mark Kelly and Slotkin and some of the others have gone on a full tour of PR. I mean, they're hitting CNN, MSNBC, writing opeds, doing social media videos. And that was, I think, the tell, is that they keep diving in, drilling the story deeper and deeper and deeper. And then you have Mark Kelly yesterday who gives a whole press conference, which was just wild.

He alleges that Trump was trying, has threatened to kill him. But then when pressed was forced to admit that, you know, he wasn't actually speaking about any specific thing, 192. Based on who this president is and who this Secretary of Defense is, is. And specifically, things that the president has said in the past. and things he was talking about doing in the future. So we were looking forward to try to head something off at the past that could have been really, really bad. So it wasn't about this specific thing. It wasn't about this specific thing.

And I just want to make one other point really clear. And I tweeted about this yesterday. No one threatened to kill Senator Mark Kelly telling the military to refuse. orders is the controversy. They started it. Mark Kelly and Elisa Slotkin and all the, they are the ones that started it with their insane video. What the president was doing was simply pointing out the seriousness of seditious behavior. He was pointing to the fact that, yeah, if you are guilty of these things, one of the punishments is the death penalty. That's just a fact. And the White House even later confirmed that President Trump was not calling for him to be

killed. He was pointing out that this was a serious offense. Mark Kelly has spent years in uniform. He knows full well that calling a mass refusal of military orders is illegal. It reminds me of at the start of the first Trump administration where it would be something and they would just there was like you know the Trump administration like when Flynn was possibly you know, possibly you know, talks to the Russian ambassador and they're like oh well he he may be implied a diplomatic concession here. My gosh, the Logan Act. The Logan act that carries infinity years in prison in the maximum penalty no exactly they'll do this

the press does this all the time someone gets charged with something with a maximum of 800 years yeah and then they get like an administrative you know slap on the wrist or something but this is what drives me nuts is he is playing the victim and why simply because the chain of command is being reasserted by those who are actually in charge those who actually have power namely Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and the President of the United States, the commander-in-chief. Are you ready to drop up to 20 pounds or more by the new year? At Ph.D. Weight Loss, they've cracked the code with their metabolic reset system, a science-backed method that gets your body to burn fat first.

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So he's trying to put on a strong and a brave face. However, behind the scenes, he's terrified that President Trump is about to oust him for power, which brings up a whole larger conversation geopolitical in nature about should we be meddling in Venezuela at all. I certainly don't think Charlie would be enthusiastic about that. I think we've had, we've been through this pattern. I will admit, I suspect toppling Venezuela would be not as bad as toppling Libya or Afghanistan. Latin Americans don't have quite the same history as Middle Easterners of doing insane terrorism, suicide terrorism, you know, for the nihilistic love of it. They don't have radical Islam.

All of those are in play. There's more of a legit opposition movement in Venezuela. All of those things, I think, would make it easier and less damaging. But I think at the same time, we've just seen this Bill of Goods before of, it'll be really easy, in and out, in and out in and out in five minutes. It'll be really cheap, really easy. And how often has that really played out? Even in wars, we've won, it hasn't necessarily played out the way we expected. Yeah. Well, and you've got to imagine that there has been behind the scenes discussions. We know for a fact that President Trump and Nicholas Maduro have spoken, Maduro being the dictator of Venezuela. And the interesting part here is you've got Maria Karina Machado, who's the opposition leader. Now, remember when she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, she dedicated it to President Trump. She certainly knows how to make a sell.

Yeah. So you have to imagine that there was optics involved there. There was a strategy involved from her perspective. Now, a lot of international watchdogs suggest that she actually won the election and that Nicholas Maduro stole it, which does seem to be true. and so you do kind of wonder are there underlying realities on the ground in Venezuela that would sort of seem to your point that would seem to suggest that if Maduro was taken out of power that there would be a nucleus of power and influence within that country that could assume power in a more constructive way now here's the thing I mean I totally agree with you I think Charlie would

be against this because listen we have domestic issues that we need to need to address head on Now, here's the argument for this. Now, I think that the admin is playing a little bit of 3D chess. I do. And I don't mean to, I know that we use that expression and it's cliche, but I do think that under the President Trump's administration, we have seen a reassertion of the Monroe Doctrine, right? This Western Hemisphere-centric foreign policy where, hey, we're going to take back control the Panama Canal. We're going to strike key alliances with people like Buckele in El Salvador. We're going to reassert dominance within South America, right,

our Malay friendship that we've struck up, the leader of Argentina. So you do sort of see the makings of this. Now, the other piece I will say is that Venezuela and Cuba work hand in hand. You see this, the fact that Cuban guards are now part of the private security detail for Nicholas Maduro. see it with the sharing of intelligence. Now, people don't know this, but the Cuban intelligence is one of the most formidable in the world. Basically, they have no exports.

They have no goods besides, you know, cigars. They used to have sugar. A crazy thing. Something like 20% of Cuba's population has apparently left since about 2019. Really? It's a really messed up country more so than people realize. I think you're right. And, but one of their exports that they sell to places like Venezuela is intelligence.

So they've infiltrated in a lot of places within the. lower 48. They know stuff that Venezuela wants to pay for, right? In other places. So that's another piece of dynamic here is that if you do topple Venezuela, if you do, if you, Maduro and you put in this Maria Carina Machado, you get two regime changes, which probably will not blow up in our faces at all because we've learned our lesson. I just, I actually kind of don't think that that's what they're going for. I think President Trump is trying to do the carrot and stick. He's he's saber rattling to get Nicholas Maduro to leave on his own. I liked the idea of just give him $500 million and he can go live wherever.

And what stinks is we'd have more credibility on that if we'd stuck to our guns with Gaddafi. Yeah. Yeah. We're not a reason not to trust. Yes. There's a reason not to trust our foreign policy promises. Right now, in war-torn Ukraine, elderly Jews like Maria, face a brutal winter and a constant search for food. Maria is 85 years old and lives alone. She's nearly blind and suffers from a broken

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and impoverished people like Maria. To learn more about the great work of IFCJ, visit Urgentifcj.org. That's urgentifcj.org. Michael Knowles, host of the Michael Knowles show. Welcome back to the Charlie Kirk Show.

friend. Good to see you. It's going on, man. Good to be here. I'm not going to ask you about Catholicism. I think we should. We should have a rate. We should have him rate the Pope after six months. Oh, we can get there. That's all you ever ask me about on text. That's all I want to talk about. That's all I want to talk about. No, we can, well, okay, Blake's going to ask you to grade the Pope in, uh, in just a few minutes here, uh, after his first six months. He's been carrying baseball bats on planes. There was an ice ball fiasco. There was an ice ball fiasco. Yeah. Yes. Okay. So this is actually where we're going to start in. I want you to sort of make sense of political moment that we find ourselves in there is all this consternation about venezuela about

pete heggseth and you know were these war crimes was there a double tap the new york times seems to suggest it's not it does have this feeling of a of a messaging op sort of they they roll out this this suspicious video the seditious six is there as they're as they're being labeled and then all of a sudden we get this whole inquiry into the venezuelan cartel narco trafficking, you know, strikes. What do you make of this moment? Why are they so fixated on Pete Hegsett? They've been going after Pete Hegsett since before the guy was confirmed. I mean, let's not forget this. You know, a lot of us know Pete, not just people who are friends with Pete, but who have watched Pete every morning on Fox News. And, you know, he's been a public

figure for a long time. And more than any other member of this cabinet, the Democrats seemed absolutely devoted to torpedoing him before he came in as Secretary of War. And so to me, if I didn't know anything else about Venezuela, Iran, anything about the military, if all I knew is that this guy was the chief target in the cabinet for the Democrats, I would be defending him wholeheartedly. Now, on top of that, you've had a very, very effective military strategy under Trump, recruitment way up, getting a lot of the woke out in terms of the policy of the military itself. then obviously very, very successful military operations in the Middle East.

Now we're looking at operations in Latin America. So I think he's doing a very good job generally. But I just take it simply on a rule of thumb. If he's the guy they want to take out, he's probably the guy I'm going to be defending. Yeah, that's exactly been my posture as well. It's like we must be over the mark here with Secretary Heggseth because they want to get him out so badly. But this is part of this larger. There's two basically, at this point we diverge in a wood, right?

there's two main through lines narratives that are going on right now there is this we had the national guard attack the ambush by an afghan refugee and that brings up this whole foreign policy conversation in and of itself but then meanwhile there's all this intrigue around venezuela are we going to strike are we going to you know we're moving carriers into the region and maga and the base typically has been postured in a way that says we don't want to get involved in any more foreign entanglements we don't want blood and death overseas want to focus domestically. What would you like to see play out in the next days and weeks ahead when it comes to Venezuela specifically? And then we'll get into our own immigration debate that we're also having. Yeah, I love the way you put it, Andrew, because it's kind of a confounding issue for MAGA. If the question were about some never-ending regime change war in the Middle East or Africa or something, I think MAGA would be unified, say we don't want that at all. However, this is a little different because,

this is much closer to home. The Monroe Doctrine, which says America runs the Western Hemisphere, has been our official policy since 1823. This involves a direct threat to Americans, which is all the drugs that are coming largely from Venezuela and specifically to foreign terrorist

organizations that are associated with the regime kills over 75,000 Americans a year. It also involves hard resources. One of the funniest things about President Trump's foreign policy is how open he is. He says, you know, we didn't go to war for oil in Iraq, but we at least should have got in the oil, you know, natural resources really do matter. And, you know, this is our hemisphere.

So I think it's a little diceier on what Americans are thinking about it. Look, the ideal scenario is you completely destroy the narco terrorists. You wage a real war on drugs, meaning you blow up all the guys who are smuggling the drugs in and killing American kids. You take a hostile dictator who is partnering up with a lot of our enemies and you replace them with someone who's maybe a little friendlier to us. And maybe that also helps the energy market too. That's what everyone wants in the ideal. The question is, can they pull this kind of thing off? I think they're going to get a lot more grace from the base in terms of actions in Latin America. The only question is, does the military, CIA, whatever, the U.S. government, do we have a serious

plan in place to replace Maduro if they actually want regime change? Because there's two views of the CIA. One is James Bond, Jason Bourne. They control everything. They're super efficient. The other one is burn after reading. Like everything, the CIA. tries to do, turns to ash and gets worse. And those are, that's the debate right now. What is really going on here? All I will say on this, I favor a much more restrained foreign policy that is much closer to home, that involves much more direct American interests. All I will say with Trump is, he has the most effective foreign policy of my lifetime, probably including George H.W. Bush. And so I'm willing to give the guy a little bit more grace here because he just

hasn't bungled it all up like Clinton did, like George W. Bush did, and certainly like Obama and Biden did. What strikes me as another factor in this is, well, we've had a lot of people come from Venezuela that drove a lot of the migration pressure in all the way back to Obama's administration into the first Trump, into Biden. And I think defenders of this would justify this that if we topple this regime, it actually might help our migration issue. A lot of Venezuelans might go home. If you're correct and it took down Cuba as well, some, Cubans might go home, although Cubans have mostly integrated great, but I feel like a lot of our other interventions have done the exact opposite. 20 years in Afghanistan, we have to fight them

over there, so we don't fight them over here. And in fact, we are fighting them two blocks from the White House now. Yes. And it strikes me as a reasonable worry. Does another intervention in Latin America somehow have the side effect where we just have illegal immigrants smashing at the border again? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a, that's the key of worry that I have, actually. Are we going to spark another humanitarian disaster where we see massive flows of migrants from South America and Cuba specifically? A lot of people look at Cuba and Venezuela together. There's a New York Times story this morning, Michael, that suggests that Maduro now has augmented his private security detail with a bunch of Cubans, Cuban soldiers that have coming in, perhaps

because he doesn't trust his own Venezuelans to have his back. But, There is a very direct connection between Venezuela and Cuba. They are basically, you know, conjoined at the hip here. And so the question is, would we get a mass exodus of people from this region? I tend to not think so. I do tend to think that a lot of that migration has already happened. And we also have President Trump in office who's going to block a lot of it. You know, if we had a Democrat in the White House, we would see a lot more of that.

The question is, does it meet the standard that Knowles is talking about of the Monroe Doctrine? Is it close enough to home? Will the base react to it? Will they reject it? That's, I think, namely, we have a political question. I'll remind you, the Monroe Doctrine was not just, we dominate every country in the Western Hemisphere. It was keeping Europeans at the time. I imagine you could count Chinese today.

Russia. Russia, of course, out of the hemisphere, not influencing it. Yeah, well, you saw this in Panama, right? The Panama Canal, President Trump goes in and reasserts U.S. dominance over the canal, which was being taken over by China, actually. And so we were getting treated very poorly in the canal. So let's switch our attention here, Michael. We're kind of doing hopscotch here on topics. But the other main story is the president and now Christy Nome, Pam Bondi, coming down hard on third world migration.

Now, I made a prediction that this was going to be President Trump's most popular policy plank yet. And I mean, including the wall, including the southern border. And we had Rich Beres on yesterday, who seems. he's doing polling on this. And the initial results seem to indicate that this is in fact very, very appealing with the base. So you've got a confluence of two different stories, foreign policy, which is always a snake pit full of vipers, full of surprises, full of backlash for the president and the administration. And you've got his hardline immigration stance. Can these two coexist? Will the base be able to make sense of it? Yeah, I think so. Obviously, it's going to be

very popular because this issue has two things that really combine to make a great winning political issue. It's something that everyone agrees on and something that everyone feels like they can't say. So everyone thinks on immigration that you have to be for all of it or against all of it or make no distinctions whatsoever. And obviously that's ridiculous. You mentioned the Cubans earlier. Cubans tend to assimilate. They're quite patriotic. They play baseball. They've vote Republican. You know, when we're talking about Latin American immigration, the Cubans, they're all right. I like the Cubans, okay? Other immigrant groups, less so. In America, we used to severely restrict immigration, and we would have some immigration from, I don't know,

say England. Then we started taking German migrants in the 19th century, and, you know, it was a little harder to assimilate German migrants, but it was okay. Then we took some of the Swarthy Italians from, you know, North Africa, basically, basically worked out other than the Pelosi's of the world, but it was a little harder still to assimilate them. Now you look at third world immigration post-1965 heartseller, and you have to ask yourself, what do Somalis add to America? And that's the naughty question that nobody wants to ask. But it's a very serious question, because the point of immigration is to make our country better. And if people are unassimable, radically different cultures, different religions, different habits, different everything,

I think we have the right to say, no thanks. You know, we have an obligation to our own citizens. Everyone knows this. Everyone feels like they can't say it. And so if Trump is the one who's going to finally articulate it, it's going to be a winner. Yeah, I think you're right. I think that that point you made about it's the thing that we all feel and think and see, but we're not allowed to say it out loud. I mean, we say it out loud on this show all the time.

And you probably do as well. But like for normy Americans, this is sort of like, you know, it's uncouth. It's not polite to say these things out loud. We have to get courage. We have to get a backbone, start standing up for what we all know to be true. We want to live in an America that feels like America again, that feels like the country that we grew up in. And it's simply more and more does not. And there's a reason for that.

It's because we have had a completely catastrophic immigration platform for years. Thanksgiving holds so many memories, and I'm sure it's the same for you. Right now, there's a girl finding out she's pregnant. In the next couple of weeks, she's going to make a decision. And whatever decision she makes will become her memory of this Thanksgiving for the rest of her life. What will she be thankful for a year from now? You. She'll be thankful that you introduced her to her baby by providing a free ultrasound.

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Call 833-850-229 or click on the pre-born banner at charliekirk.com today. Michael Knowles is with us, who is, I believe you hail from the state of Tennessee. Michael now these days I would be remiss if I didn't mention Tennessee 7th the special election today which is Matt Van Epps the Republican running against Afton

Ben who's basically a raging communist feminist unhinged lady actually it seems like we had so get out and vote if you find yourselves in Michael Knowles's area of the world please please vote I don't know if you want to add anything to that Knowles but the floor is yours if you

I do. I do. One, to reiterate, you got to go out and vote. This woman has her ads blasted everywhere. She's run a pretty good campaign. She is cartoonishly on a platform of hating Nashville and the people in it and like everything that makes America great. And she might win. It is a complete dead heat race right now. The margin of error is four points and it's a two point race. This should not be a two point race. If things go south here, not only will it be bad for this district around Nashville, this could mean, a bloodbath in the midterms. Go out there, vote, vote early, vote often. You know what to do. You know what to do. Get out there and vote. Help save the Republic.

Blake, you're Catholic. Michael's Catholic. I'm not. I'm going to let you guys take this one. Yeah, I guess I was thinking we were, we thought it's been about six months since we got Pope Leo, the first American Pope.

And I feel overall we don't hear as much about that as I would have initially thought. I would have thought that there would be a lot more attention on him. And yet, it seems if anything, he's less famous than Pope Francis, even in the United States. He has popped up a few times. He's been, he certainly said stuff we find annoying on some of the migration, immigration issues. He's occasionally had some friction with Vice President Vance, of course, since the Vice President is Catholic as well. But yeah, I guess I would throw that to you, Michael.

How do you evaluate the Pope at about six months? and what's his relationship with American Catholics who are mostly on the right politically on immigration and a lot of issues? I was thrilled when I heard the name that he picked. He picked Leo. I was pulling for Leo. I actually predicted it right before they picked it.

And I didn't know anything about the guy, but I really liked the name. I thought it was a good sign, Pup Leo the 13th, probably of the Great. This is good stuff. And I think he's lived up to a lot of our hopes. Obviously, there's always something to complain about. I love the traditional Latin Mass.

I wish the bishops would stop suppressing the Latin Mass. You know, I hope that happens. But compared to the last pontificate, I think a lot of people are breathing not just a sigh of relief, but a sigh of joy. And then, I don't know if you guys caught it, you know, over just a few days ago. The Pope was in Constantinople, leading the Eastern Orthodox in the Our Father in Latin, praying for full communion for all baptized Christians, wanting to heal the Eastern and the West, bring everybody back together. he toured a mosque, refused to pray in the mosque, unlike some other popes. I feel completely vindicated. I think John Paul the second even prayed in a mosque.

He was the first one to do so. And that's weird. I have to imagine Francis probably would have also prayed in. I think they were in the blue mosque in. What's the deal with this ice ball? What was this about? The ice ball. You know, people made a big deal about it.

I agree, you know, it's kind of silly for people to focus on climate change or whatever. Now, I will point out, there's nothing unusual about a priest blessing water. You know, we call it holy water. It's not, but I think also what happens here. Yeah. You know, a lot of these events were booked before Pope Francis died. I don't know whether that was true of the global warming thing. But a lot of them are. There was even a papal encyclical that's come out because the Francis had started it and then he died and Leo finished it. So some of this stuff is a little bit of a holdover from the Francis pontificate. Obviously, there are plenty of things to rankle American political conservatives, you know, in some of the ways that the Pope has spoken about immigration. But I'll also point out, the Pope came out and he said, on immigration, nations are allowed to have borders. No one says that nations can't decide who comes in and out. You just got to be nice to people, basically. And so I think for people who want to have a problem, including especially traditional conservative American Catholics, they're always going to find something to have a problem with. But broadly speaking, I think that the Pope Leo, respecters, defenders, you know, hopers have been quite vindicated so far, which is good because Pope Leo could be Pope for like 20 years.

Blake, are you satisfied with that answer? We'll see. We'll see. It's very interesting because I got so used to, especially with Francis or Benedict, you'd always have that translation barrier where the Pope would say something and you'd have to say, oh, well, the Pope, you know, he really meant this and it didn't translate great. And now we just have a Pope who is a native English speaker and just commenting in English on things. And we're actually still get that or they still say, oh, well, the Pope actually, if you know the historical context behind this. I take a very ecumenical view of these things, as you know, Michael. I, as a cradle Catholic who ended up finding faith in college through a Protestant tradition, I love all Christians. I'm pro-Christian, pro-Catholic, and I want the Catholic Church to be healthy and vibrant. God bless you, Michael Knowles. Andrew, I don't know if I ever told you this.

It was some Protestants who helped bring me back, too. We'll see what else. See you next time, guys. For more on many of these stories and news you can trust. collicirk.com.