Behind the Shove: Is Brigitte Macron an Abusive Groomer? (Ep.211)
45:06 Share

PMS, pregnancy, menopause. Being a woman is a lot. Oli supports you and yours with expert solutions for every age and life stage. They just launched two new products exclusively at Walmart. Period Hero combats bloat, mood swings, and more during PMS. And Balance Perimeno to support hormonal balance, mood, and metabolism during perimenopause. Grab yours at Oli.com. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

Good morning. Welcome to Bongino Report Early Edition. We have a lot of stories to get to on this Monday. Monday, you guys, it's Tuesday. Just starting the week, having a day off, which was really nice. And I hope all of you had a restful Memorial Day. We're able to think about our fallen heroes. Not everybody was thinking about our fallen heroes yesterday because...

The Chicago mayor decided to use the day to celebrate Africa Day instead of Memorial Day. Libertarians slam Trump's ban on Harvard's international students as somehow anti-meritocracy. Students show college English majors, studies, I'm sorry, show college English majors, so students,

have zero reading comprehension. Emmanuel Macron is on camera being violently shoved in the face by Brigitte Macron. Gen Z are now flocking to adulting 101 classes, and young people are fomenting a revival of Catholic aesthetics. All this on Bongina Report, early edition.

Hello, I am Mayor Brandon Johnson, and I am proud to join you in recognizing and celebrating Africa Day. The continent of Africa is made up of 1.2 billion people with diverse countries full of rich traditions, cultures, and heritage.

The African diaspora can be found in cities and countries around the globe. And right here in Chicago, our proud African communities have made indelible contributions to the growth and fabric of our amazing city.

So this Africa Day, let us take a moment to celebrate the achievements of the people of Africa, the progress made by African nations and the traditions and culture they have shared with us. And let us also show them that we will embrace and support them as they continue to overcome and face their challenges head on. Thank you and happy Africa Day, everyone.

Yesterday on Memorial Day, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson decided to celebrate Africa Day. I guess a day not to celebrate Americans, not to celebrate the ultimate sacrifice that many have made, but instead to celebrate a continent on the other side of the world. Guys, I think a lot of us see this and we go, is he stupid? Is he just insensitive? Is he dumb? And I say, no, you guys, that's not what's happening here.

This is intentional. This is an intentional act of ideological subversion. It's a symbolic move that reveals a deeper hostility toward American nationalism and identity. Ask yourself, does any African nation celebrate North America Day? Of course not. This kind of gesture only happens in the United States of America.

among a political class driven by guilt, grievance, and globalist ideology that is constantly, actively trying to undermine our national story. It is part of, like I said, a broader campaign to demoralize the American public.

A slow erosion of pride, tradition, historical confidence, we're constantly fed a narrative of American national shame. Where every founding father is a villain and every patriotic instinct is suspect. Figures like Columbus and George Washington and Junipero Serra, no longer honored but demonized.

Yes, I think we should examine our history critically. We do that all the time on this show. Acknowledging, for instance, the lies of Iraq and Afghanistan, especially on Memorial Day, the failures of our leadership class. But that doesn't erase the bravery of the soldiers who fought or the exceptional legacy of a nation that has led the world in many ways. The real goal here is

is cultural disarmament, to leave us hollowed out, ashamed, and easier to control. Because the people who apologize for their own existence, they have no real future. And that's exactly what cultural Marxists like Brandon Johnson are counting on. Over the weekend, May 25th, marked the fifth anniversary of the death of George Floyd.

George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, died in police custody with a fatal level of fentanyl in his system. Following the death of George Floyd, the United States was subjected to 574 violent riots, which resulted in injuries to over 2,000 police officers, looting of businesses, over $2 billion in damage to property, over 20 deaths.

including that of a retired St. Louis police captain. And the response to the anniversary of the death of George Floyd, which, by the way, is very relevant and connected to what Brandon Johnson did on Memorial Day, the response has been nothing short of insufferable, as I'm sure many of you can imagine. Here is Minneapolis poet laureate

Janada Petrus, imagining a world of delicious mundane, this is of course from her quote from her poem, quote from her poem, where George Floyd grows old smoking his cigarettes and watching fireflies. Take a listen. - All we really know was his last living desire was for a cigarette.

In other words, a simple and neat, quick and light burn of personal tobacco. Inhale, throat heat, and exhale. For a moment, the brain pauses and buzzes. For a moment, the heart is a soft float and you belong to you.

Native homies, give the offering of tobacco. Soft hands, cupped gratitude. Put a little tobacco here. Smoke of prayer for your ancestors, their witness, their earthly nostalgia for earthly life and earthly pleasure.

Not everyone can do poetry, guys. Not everyone can do poetry. And by the way, this goes on a lot longer. I gave you just a little snippet of this poem just to save you all. I didn't play the whole thing because it gets even worse. It gets even more bizarre. And honestly, frankly, I wish that George Floyd was a regular guy. No one knew his name.

He probably, I don't know if he would live forever considering that he was a felon. He had this massive rap sheet. He had a fentanyl addiction, but at least we wouldn't know his name because if we didn't know his name, maybe then Minneapolis and Portland and New York and Kenosha and Seattle and countless other cities wouldn't have been engulfed in fiery but mostly peaceful protests all summer 2020. And again, like I said, for real, George Floyd probably was not going to grow old. The guy had a fentanyl addiction.

outrageously long rap sheet. If he wasn't going to OD, he was probably going to end up in prison. And yet here we are being subjected to crappy poems about this felon who has essentially been canonized as a saint by the political left. Five years later, we're still hearing about him. So what really is the legacy of George Floyd? The Summer of Love that burnt whole swaths of American cities to the ground is the legacy of George Floyd.

The way criminals subverted and avoided any kind of accountability or justice is the legacy of George Floyd. Because Democrat mayors and prosecutors, they totally failed to uphold the rule of law. They allowed looters and vandals to walk free in the name of social justice that summer. Kamala Harris raised money to get them bailed out of jail.

District attorneys, often backed by progressive donors like George Soros, chose not to pursue charges, effectively sanctioning the destruction. Even Republicans, Republicans and Democrats, claimed before there was any evidence, before it had been even considered in a rule of law, that George Floyd died of racism, of a racially motivated assault on his life.

And again, it had not been decided in a court of law. You had ordinary citizens and small business owners bearing the cost, never recovering. So many of these businesses, they've never reopened.

And of course, adding salt to the wound as we were living through COVID at this time, where these places were forcibly shut down anyways, forced to operate remotely, their revenue dramatically limited, and then suddenly they're getting looted and vandalized and burned to the ground. Today in places like Washington state, many rioters have received massive settlements, sometimes to the tune of millions of dollars on the taxpayer's dime.

for minor injuries inflicted by law enforcement attempting to keep the peace. So we're paying to the rioters now, five years later. What was the narrative? The narrative that persists today, that America is irredeemably racist, that our legacy is shameful,

And they didn't just vandalize City Hall or loot Walmarts. They tore down statues representing the American mythos. So I say this was deeper than just an assault on American cities, on businesses. It was an assault on the civilization itself. It's a project. And frankly, again, one that's bigger than just America. The cultural upheaval of 2020 was part of a broader assault on

on the foundational values of Western Civ itself. At its core, the American mythos is rooted in a distinctly Christian worldview. The dignity of the individual, the sanctity of human life, the value of liberty, the belief in moral truth. And these ideas didn't emerge in a vacuum. They were cultivated over centuries through a Western tradition anchored in Christianity.

That is precisely why the modern ideological coalition, comprising of cultural Marxist and technocratic globalists and progressive illiberals, seek to dismantle it. Here and also abroad. Look at what's happening in the UK, in France, anywhere you go in the West, this is a reoccurring theme. I think they detest the moral order, the reverence of objective truth, the spiritual authority of Christianity,

And I think what that history and the heritage represents is an obstacle to their vision of a post-national, post-religious world.

where human identity is fluid and morality is relative and power is, and this is key, centralized. This explains why corporate America so enthusiastically embraced the narratives of systemic guilt and national self-loathing. At first, it didn't seem to make a lot of sense. Like, why is Nike...

raising money for BLM and coming out with these racism statements? Why are all of these corporate companies coming out with these anti-America systemic racism statements and giving money to these radical left-wing organizations when clearly this is partisan and it can't foster any kind of bipartisan patronage? It doesn't make sense from a logical perspective, but then you have to think about things deeper.

Multinational corporations aligned with global capital rather than national interests view patriotism and sovereignty as threats to their bottom line. So it's actually a very easy to understand relationship. Wall Street doesn't want a populace grounded in localism and faith or national pride. It wants consumers who revere the market above all, even at the cost of their own community's prosperity and cultural cohesion.

The woke moral signaling from big business, like I said, is not accidental. It serves a purpose.

By reinforcing a narrative that deconstructs America's founding ethos, they help pave the way for a global technocratic order that is fundamentally hostile to the Western values that all of us actually believe in. And in the end, this is just something broader than the United States of America. It is about erasing a civilization rooted in faith, rooted in freedom, in the belief that truth transcends truth.

power. And it is beyond Democrat and Republican. It is beyond just America itself. It gets so much deeper than that. And it goes across all institutions. I mean, we were talking the media. I would talk corporate America. We can also talk education. And we're going to get into education today. But this is very deep. And the alignment may seem

obscure, unclear, but it actually makes a lot of sense. And we're going to dig a little deeper into all of that in this show today. But first, I have to talk about our incredible sponsors. I've told you all how GenuCell Skincare began. George, a pharmacist, created a special cream for his customer Phyllis, and that cream became the foundation for GenuCell Skincare 25 years ago. But the story doesn't end there. George didn't stop with one product. He kept refining his formula.

A proprietary antioxidant-rich base that has been the heart of every GenuCell product loved by millions of happy customers. That's the secret to their success, real lasting results. That's what sets GenuCell apart. Their one-of-a-kind base developed specifically to work with your skin,

and help maximize the effectiveness of each active ingredient. The proprietary formula helps deliver visible results fast and keeps working over time. It's a blend of powerful ingredients that nourish, repair, and protect your skin, helping make a healthier and younger looking you every day. Unlike many other skincare lines, GenuCell's approach isn't about quick

fixes it's about long-term results and right now you can try their complete skincare package including my favorites their under eye bags and eyelid lift for 50 off your first order plus it's all backed by a no questions asked money back guarantee visit jennycell.com slash news use the code news for an extra discount and enjoy free shipping don't wait order now that's jennycell.com slash news jennycell.com slash news

This episode is brought to you by LifeLock. Not everyone is careful with your personal information, which might explain why there's a victim of identity theft every five seconds in the U.S. Fortunately, there's LifeLock. LifeLock monitors hundreds of millions of data points a second for threats to your identity. If your identity is stolen, a U.S.-based restoration specialist will fix it, guaranteed, or your money back. Save up to 40% your first year by visiting LifeLock.com slash podcast. Terms apply.

Hi, this is Joe from Vanta. In today's digital world, compliance regulations are changing constantly, and earning customer trust has never mattered more. Vanta helps companies get compliant fast and stay secure with the most advanced AI, automation, and continuous monitoring out there. So whether you're a startup going for your first SOC 2 or ISO 27001, or a growing enterprise managing vendor RIST, Vanta makes it quick, easy, and scalable. And I'm not just saying that because I work here.

Get started at Vanta.com. All right, I want you all to listen to this incredible exchange, I guess it's not an exchange, this soundbite from Batia Ungar Sargon on CNN. She is discussing Trump revoking Harvard's ability to host international students. And she makes an incredible point about national sovereignty, about nationalism in general, the priorities of this country when she talks about this move from the Trump admin. Take a listen to this.

The fact that 25%, 27% of college students at our elite university are foreign students, like this is utterly unacceptable. There are hundreds of thousands of brilliant children being left behind

the table, children of color, children from inner cities, children from Appalachia who deserve those spots and deserve that education. Why are we giving it to Chinese people? I don't understand this at all. Hold on a second. I think this is an excellent point. I think it should cut across party lines, cut across. I think everybody, if you're an American, unless you're the Harvard University admin, you should agree with this sentiment from Batia. But not everyone does.

So this is a response. This is from libertarian Alex Naroste, and he's the Cato Institute's vice president for economic and social policy studies. He wrote this.

Immigration restrictions are affirmative action for Americans. I believe in meritocracy, the best and the brightest, period. Only 4% of the world is American, so we're quite overrepresented in elite institutions because of government favoritism and our awesomeness. So what's he saying here? There is no inherent value in nations, cultures, or communities. Everyone,

Is just an economic unit in this country and this country is just an economic zone. We can't prioritize American citizens because that would be anti-meritocracy. That would be unfair. It should just be whoever is the best and the brightest irrespective of that nationality gets into Harvard University. We can't have affirmative action for American citizens. This is what he's saying and

It's interesting because essentially he's arguing that really there are no Americans or foreigners or shared histories or civic bonds, just the best and the brightest competing on a global marketplace stripped entirely of identity. No rootedness, no belonging, just economic optimization. A place where people are managed by unaccountable institutions that owe allegiance to no flag, no faith, no people, just meritocracy.

By the way, a federal judge has paused Trump's order preventing Harvard from being able to enroll international students. So there's a pause on that. Again, we're dealing with these crazy judges. Surprise, surprise. Here's the thing. Universities do not have a legal right to bring in international students.

And by the way, a bunch of Chinese ones happen to be spies. But the executive branch holds the authority to issue or deny visas, including student visas, as part of its control over foreign policy and immigration. This is pretty simple stuff. The universities want to keep these students here,

Because they're cash cows. This really isn't about meritocracy. The universities don't care about meritocracy. They peddle in DEI and pick students based off of immutable qualities like race and sexuality all the time. They like these students because they pay full tuition on top of often donating a lot more money to these schools. These are rich international students wanting their kids to get into elite and American institutions, and they are paying their way there. It's a racket.

and it's a risk to national security, and it takes opportunities away from American citizens while the American taxpayer subsidizes these schools. This is the argument against this libertarian. Americans can and should prioritize the education and opportunities of Americans. This is not hard stuff. But apparently this is hard for some people, liberals, leftists, libertarians. They don't understand it.

Michael wants everybody to know, he said this before the show, that the Cato Institute does not represent his brand of libertarianism. And he rejects... The Mises libertarians are the best ones. He says he's a Mises Institute libertarian. You all can look up Mises versus Cato. I think that they're both just liberals. And I'm not impressed by either. But...

I digress. I think this is a terrible argument. I think it's equally impossible for the universities themselves to understand. Libertarians don't get it, right? They can't conceive of an idea where the American people, the American government should prioritize the education of American students.

But the universities have completely divorced themselves from their core mission that it's impossible for them to comprehend as well. UChicago professor Rachel Fulton Brown was on the podcast a while back, and she read aloud the Harvard mission statement, which, and I'm going to read it to you again just for a reminder. This is a quote.

From Harvard's mission statement, to know God and Jesus Christ, which is eternal life, and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning. Like they've completely abandoned that mission, as have most institutions of higher learning. There's no truth seeking whatsoever. I mean, the university system is centuries in the making and was created by God.

by Christians who were seeking to know the truth, which of course is religion, is Christ. Most schools don't know what they stand for at all. Over the weekend,

CBS 60 Minutes Scott Pelley delivered a completely deranged commencement address at Wake Forest. And this pretty much sums up the state. I'm sorry, last week, not this weekend. And this pretty much sums up the state of the higher education system. It really says a lot about where we're at. Take a listen. But in this moment, this moment, this morning,

Our sacred rule of law is under attack. Journalism is under attack. Universities are under attack. Freedom of speech is under attack. And insidious fear is reaching through our schools, our businesses, our homes, and into our private thoughts. The fear to speak in America

Power can rewrite history with grotesque false narratives. They can make criminals heroes and heroes criminals. Power can change the definition of the words we use to describe reality. Diversity is now described as illegal. Equity is to be shunned. Inclusion is a dirty word.

This is an old playbook, my friends. There's nothing new in this. We must defend diversity, equity, and inclusion. That was the whole point of that little spiel. There's nothing about pursuing the truth, Jesus Christ, Western Civ. Like, nope, we're completely done with that. We've dropped it. It's about preserving grievance-based identity politics. That's the goal. Making sure the schools can carry on the Marxist activism that they so love. And then he has the gall...

to stand there and scream and cry about the rule of law, journalism, universities, freedom of speech. They're all under attack. Sir, the political left weaponized the entire federal government against President Trump and half the country for the last four years. But you want to talk to me about the rule of law? Journalists lied about Kyle Rittenhouse, the Covington schoolboys, fired mostly peaceful protests, the Russia collusion hoax, Brett Kavanaugh, Hunter Biden laptop story, Joe Biden's mental acuity. Journalism is dead because they killed themselves.

The university system itself chilled free speech with political statements from the admin about George Floyd and every other political topic. They disinvited conservative speakers and fired conservative professors. There is no free speech on college campuses, and they're the ones that made it so. The elites torched their own reputations, and now they're crying to us about it.

Professor Rachel Fulton Brown just came out with a fascinating substack. It's titled "Reading Comprehension: Current Year After the Flood." And she recounts a study that took place about a decade ago, still really relevant today. I'm sure it's probably gotten worse since then with the rise of chat GPT. But two English professors tested 85 English major students who all graduated from Kansas public schools.

And all of these students thought of themselves as A, B level in their English studies. The students were asked to read aloud from a Charles Dickens novel. And they were allowed to use their phones to look up words. And they had facilitators to guide them with questions. And the sessions were recorded and analyzed using a detailed coding system. 18 codes for narration, 62 for comprehension. And the results were...

discovered that the results found that the only four students were deemed proficient. 49 students couldn't understand enough to finish the novel on their own, and 32 students had some vocabulary and figurative language skills.

but struggled with literal comprehension, meaning the majority of the college English majors could not read or understand Dickens. And these are people that will presumably go on to teach English to other students. So how can they be expected to teach what they clearly do not know? They can't even comprehend. Now, what is the concern? And this is what Fulton Brown points out. What is the concern of our government?

presumably people at the Cato Institute, the Vivek Ramaswamis of the world. Well, the concern is literacy is strongly tied to financial success, and an educated populace will derail GDP growth. So this is very bad news. What does Professor Fulton Brown say? It's that very framing that is the problem. And this is fascinating. I'm going to read to you an excerpt from this sub stack. She says,

Why should we expect our students to be able to read for scriptural allusions and figures of speech, images and cross-references and patterns of meaning for symbolism and beauty, and the resonance of phonemes when everything in their education is telling them that reading is a skill that they need to make money, and making money means filling in the right forms to get shipments from China or contracts from India?

Why should we expect our students to enjoy reading when we have reduced their education to a series of bullet points that they might as well get from SparkNotes or ChatGPT? Why should they care about reading when their souls have been rendered statistics in the calculation of our national GDP?

Truly, it is as if the waters had only just retired from the face of the earth and the dinosaurs, dragons, and unicorns had all drowned, leaving behind rotting skeletons of the joy that we once had in singing to God. And we wonder that the students cannot look up from their phones. On the one hand, we've reduced learning to job preparation and students to GDP inputs. And on the other hand, we have activists, professors, and administrators who

preoccupied with DEI rhetoric and identity politics, and the result is an academic environment where the soul of education is lost. Students aren't inspired to seek truth, beauty, or wisdom, but are instead taught to recite slogans or chase credentials with meaning stripped from both the economic and cultural ends of the spectrum

We're cultivating a generation starved of any kind of substance where all sides, unwittingly or not, are complicit in breeding stupidity.

Shout out to Professor Rachel Fulton Brown. She's always excellent. Her substacks are always excellent. This one's titled Reading Comprehension, Current Year After the Flood. You can go find her work at fencingbearatprayer.substack.com. Also check out our interview together, Rachel Fulton Brown and I. We did it right after Easter. It was an excellent interview. By the way, speaking of the liberal order, which by the way, I think it's

dismantling. I think things are starting to waver. We're going to get into that later in the show. But before we talk about that, left-wing French President Emmanuel Macron was two-handed shoved in the face by his partner Brigitte Macron over the weekend. The couple was landing in Vietnam for a state visit when this happened. Take a look. So you can see the doors of the plane slowly open. This is a slow-mo.

Two hands, she just shoves him in the face. He awkwardly waves at the crowd. He turns back into the airplane. He very uncomfortably walks out then. Brigitte follows behind. It's very awkward. And it was also very violent. I mean, this was a serious shove.

Kind of shocking. Now, we're good with that, Mikey. In a statement yesterday, the French president tried to downplay the incident, saying that he was squabbling and rather joking with Brigitte, adding that everyone needs to calm down. He also blamed his opponents for blowing the altercation out of proportion and making it into, quote, a sort of geoplanetary catastrophe, noting that people are always saying all sorts of nonsense.

I don't know guys, but this is not something that I think most couples do as a joke. Like I wouldn't put my hands on my husband's face and shove him for fun. I don't know what other people do for fun. I don't do that for fun. I wouldn't be very happy if Michael did that to me. But to me, this looks abusive. To me, this looks extremely abusive and violent.

The Babylon Bee said French President Macron claims he fell down the stairs again with an AI image of Macron with this horrific black eye. Hilarious, but also a fair point. Like, is the president of France a domestic abuse victim?

Macron's office followed up telling the media, it was a moment where the president and his wife were decompressing one last time before the start of the trip by horsing around. It's a moment of complicity. It was all that was needed to give ammunition to the conspiracy theorists. Oh yes, the conspiracy theorists. Now, of course, there are a lot of conspiracies around Brigitte Macron. Many believe, quite sincerely, they believe that

Brigitte McCrone is in fact a man. I'm not going to get into all that. We don't have the time today. You can go down that rabbit hole if you so choose. Things get very murky. What I will say, and this is a fact, there is a massive, massive age gap between Brigitte and Emmanuel. Brigitte is 72. Emmanuel is 47. There's a 25-year age gap between the two of them.

And that wouldn't be entirely unheard of. Certainly couples can have, I guess, meaningful relationships with that big of an age gap. The problem with this relationship is that Emmanuel met Brigitte when he was Brigitte's student. At the time, Brigitte was 40, a married teacher with three children, and Emmanuel was 15 years.

The pair reportedly began a relationship when Emmanuel was 16. His parents found out he was transferred to a different school, but Emmanuel and Brigitte kept in touch. Again, the details and timeline get kind of murky, but the pair officially married in 2007 when Emmanuel was 29 and Brigitte was 54. Now, this has been presented in France and here in the United States as some kind of like cute little love story.

And not as a story of grooming. But I think very clearly this is a story of grooming.

A male or female 40-year-old teacher having a romantic relationship with their 15, 16-year-old student is predatory. I don't care what gender you are. Like if this is, certainly if this was a man and a female student, we would all be like, this is clearly predatory and wrong and exploitative. I don't even, I don't care if Brigitte is female or

And her student, 15-year-old male, still predatory, still a groomer. So I am surprised to see the media sort of paint over this as, oh, this is just normal couples horsing around, especially given the context of their relationship. I think what we're looking at is Brigitte abusing Emmanuel, and their relationship began as abusive, as predatory.

Can someone explain to me why every illiberal leader in America also seems to have a weird personal background? Like, we just keep hearing these stories all the time. Like, Biden's background, Kamala's background, like, President Barack Obama's background. It's all very strange. None of these people are ever normal. All of them seem to be bizarrely compromised or insanely incompetent in the case of Kamala Harris, to the point where you wonder, like, how did you get to where you are? And I really think that there is a sickness in the West.

It's not just our leaders who are lost. Apparently, it's everyone. Apparently, Gen Z as a generation is flocking to adulting 101 crash courses. Yes, desperate to learn what previous generations might call common sense, how to do laundry, budgeting for rent, or navigating the grocery store. Gen Z is now trying to figure it all out because they have no idea what to do with themselves. Pour a report from the New York Post.

Canadian colleges like the University of Waterloo are stepping in to teach the basics with online toolkits like Adulting 101, which covers everything from healthy relationships to how to not set your kitchen on fire. According to Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University and author of Generations, today's 20-somethings are hitting adulthood with empty toolboxes. Kids are growing up less independent than ever.

then they get to universities and they still don't know anything. Now, guys, I have no idea what the context is here, but this is a very accurate, very true clip. Here is NFL Hall of Famer Michael Irving talking about what is happening with this next generation. Take a listen.

We're losing recipes. And he's actually right. Like a lot of these skills that, that we're talking about, just adulting one-on-one, they're really not being passed down to the next generation. And I don't know if you guys know this, but there's like a whole

genre of YouTube videos featuring grandmas sharing their recipes because so many of these dishes are just not being passed down to the next generation. Actually, what I think it is, is it's a decline of generational living where you don't have young people staying in the community with their families. They're going off. They're living on the internet. They are separated from their homes.

going to the big city, there is a lack of generational living. So a lot of these skills are not being passed down. And so, like I said, there are all these YouTube videos where grandmas are just documenting all of their dishes, all of their recipes, because if they don't, they're going to die out. We're just not going to have them anymore. I look at my own family. My grandma sews. She's an incredible sewer. She made a lot of her own clothes growing up.

My mom has no idea how to sew, and I'm terrible at sewing. I can knit a little bit, but I'm trash at sewing. And in my mom's defense, she is an amazing cook, so she kept that. My little sister Margarita can sew, that's right. She's an amazing sewer. She made her own little skirt recently. And some people are bringing this back. There is like a wave of young people who are trying to reclaim all of these skill sets that have been lost over the generations.

But as a whole, a lot of us are losing out on just these basic life skills that I think are really necessary for human flourishing, for human society. I think somebody mentioned chores. I think chores are so important for kids, not just like as a physical skill to learn and something to know and carry on for your life, but learning.

to build self-confidence in young people. People just don't have chores anymore. It's kind of crazy. Now, when I was growing up, right, I had a lot of chores because I'm the oldest of nine kids, but you're in a house of just two kids. It's suburbia. Everybody has sports all the time and all these extracurriculars and nobody is doing basic housework. It's just not happening. No one's cooking. No one's cleaning. And so, um,

I think we're all lying to ourselves if we don't admit that there is something being lost over the generations. There really is a loss of generational wisdom. The young people are arriving in adulthood stripped of foundational skills, as well as cultural memory and a coherent worldview. And I don't think these things are separate. The fact that colleges now teach basic life skills

is not just some sort of funny little tidbit. It is tragic. It reflects a generation that's raised without rootedness, without tradition, without the transmission of inherited wisdom. We're totally disarmed, a totally disarmed generation, like spiritually, emotionally, practically, educationally. It's pretty bleak.

But I'll also remind you guys that this generation is more right-wing than their millennial counterparts. And that's across all demos, male, female, black, white, brown. Mostly it's pronounced among white men who are turning radically to the right in a very good way, I think. But across all demos, Gen Z is more right-wing than their millennial counterparts. So there's something going on here. And I wanted to draw your attention to this article from EV Magazine, Great Stories.

online magazine, and they have a physical magazine too, but it's an online publication as well. This is titled, The Revival of Catholic Aesthetics, Why Sacred Beauty is Captivating the Culture Again.

This is fascinating. In this piece, Joanna Duncan explains how the inaugural mass of Pope Leo was more than a religious event. It was a bold, unspoken statement of sacred beauty and transcendent order in a world that seems to dismiss both. We had this vivid symbolism here.

Crimson vestments cascading over marble, veiled women standing in reverence, Catholic queens and princesses dressed in white. We covered that on the show. Michelangelo's designs as a backdrop. Here is what it looked like. Sacred music too.

I think the author notes that even people who seem to be most of the time indifferent to religion couldn't look away. Secular news organizations, secular TikTokers and Instagram influencers, they were attracted to what was happening in Rome because every element of this event spoke to hierarchy, humility, something eternal, something...

with a history. I mean, it was so attractive to so many people in the secular world. And the sacred aesthetic extends beyond the church walls and into the very fabric of fashion. High fashion designers like Dolce & Gabbana and Valentino regularly incorporate Catholic iconography, veils, crucifixes, liturgical colors into their collections. If we could throw up the video of that, Michael, you can kind of see what I'm talking about in high fashion.

We had the 2018 Met Gala themed Heavenly Bodies. On this show, we've talked about the rise of modest fashion among Gen Z women and Christian veiling, an ancient tradition that it's not just Catholic, it is Christian fashion.

And then there's the rising popularity of traditional Latin mass with its incense and chants and ornate vestments. From Instagram to run ratios, Catholic beauty is resurging, not as nostalgia, but I think as a healing language for souls that really are still longing for sacred.

As Duncan writes, the Catholic Church still dresses like she believes in eternity, and people are attracted to that. There really is a rising hunger, especially among younger generations, for truth, for beauty, for meaning, reflected in the revival of Catholic aesthetics, traditional values, sacred symbolism. And as people are intent on erasing tradition through symbolic acts like

celebrating Africa Day on Memorial Day, elevating George Floyd as a martyr, dismantling Catholic, Christian classical education and Western values. They are on a slow motion campaign of demoralization for everyone all across the West. And yet,

There is a growing cultural undercurrent yearning to recover what has been lost, especially among young people, which I think is really beautiful and something to be very optimistic about. You can see it reflected in the fashion. You can see it reflected in even the numbers of how they are voting. Even the fact that young people would want to take an adulting 101 class. I mean, it may seem stupid. You might want to laugh at them, but it is a sign that they realize, hey, something's missing. I have to go back.

and figure this out and make a change. I can't keep living like this. This is a positive thing. This is something, again, to be very optimistic about despite some of the bleakness that continues in our contemporary culture.

And with that, I appreciate all of you tuning into the show on this Tuesday. I'm excited to see you all tomorrow. Hope you all have a wonderful day. Make sure to give Michael some love in the comments for putting this show together. And if you want to follow me on Instagram or X, as always, my user is EvitaDuffy underscore one.

Former U.S. Navy SEAL Sean Ryan captures real stories about sacrifice and strength. We go into this hooch searching for Christ knows what. Regardless if anybody else does it, will you do it? There's a lot of things that are hurtful and disturbing. Can't get anybody to talk about it. Uncovering truth with the heroes who live to tell it. There's a saying, there's no atheist in a foxhole. That was the hardest part for you coming home. Was. How'd you get through it? I worked hard. The Sean Ryan Show. You ready? Let's do it.

All right, let's go. Follow and listen on your favorite platform.