Local governments should vote for flags, Local governments should have opinions about stuff.
Whenever a local Republican anyway is running for a local office, and that local
Republican is uncomfortable with social issues, as so many of them are one of
the big complaints I will I will somehow here, they somehow think that I
would be a sympathetic ear to this complaint. One of the things I will
hear is, well, I'm running for the city council seat, and all
these people I'm talking to, like you know, knocking on doors and stuff,
all they want to ask is what I think about abortion and another like
a local government rate. So I don't. I won't have anything to do
with abortion. And this is the way that local policy titians get angry at
having to be dragged into the abortion question. And these people who don't really
have much of a moral compass when it comes to abortion or other social issues.
How these kinds of people get elected Republicans. They get elected Republicans at
a local level, they get elected Republicans at a city level, then at
a state level, and then all of a sudden you've got people who are
openly just members of Congress who just don't really care about social issues. For
whom social issues are were, have always been, will always be secondary to
some other thing. I think a lot of Republicans become Republicans not because of
a lot of elected Republicans, rather become elected officials, not because of the
abortion question, not because of social conservative issues. They become Republican politicians usually
because of something else, some kind of fiscal concern issue that animates them,
maybe in their business, maybe in their professional lives, that exercises them and
results in them running for office, or there's some kind of a prominent person,
and because they decide, for one reason or another to run as a
Republican, they therefore sheepishly follow along with the pro life stance without having much
conviction, and therefore always ready and always willing to compromise on it. And
we've seen this phenomenon has taken place so many times that it resulted in you
know how many times did Republican presidents have a hard time getting Supreme Court justices
confirmed because they were deemed to be too conservative, deemed to be too conservative,
And basically, Republican presidents and Republican senators just didn't care enough about the
abortion question to be sure that they got this right. Meanwhile, Democrats are
sure. Democrats are sure and certain about their stance on social issues from every
level of government. Every single person is equally committed, from the local Democrat
county dogcatcher all the way up to Joe Biden, completely utterly convicted and convinced
of the rightness of what they believe on social issues. And we see this
example of it in a piece in the Fresno Bet. I just want you
to think, let's, as you read this mentally try to replace ceasefire in
Gaza with support for Israeli military. What are the chances Fresno follows Madera in
approving a Gaza ceasefire resolution. For four months of the boy, the Fresno
Bee can't even write a story correctly. You can't use proper grammar just for
the start of the story. For four months, members of local Palestinian community,
members of the local Palestinian community have turned out at Fresno City council meetings
to cajole, demand and plea for and plead for city leaders. It's plea,
isn't it not? Plead for city leaders to adopt a resolution supporting a
ceasefire in the war between the Nation of Israel and Hamas, the Islamist organization
that governs part of the contested territory of Gaza. Supporters have renewed hope that
they're Pleas could gain traction in Fresno following the Madera City Council's unanimous vote on
Wednesday for a resolution calling for a Gaza ceasefire. The idea is that we
want the war to stop, said Yazir Amiree, a Fresno businessman and representative
of the Palestinian Liberation Group. People are dying, not just civilians, but
army people who are still young and have not lived their lives. We need
a permanent peace and we need all hostages to be released. But whether a
majority of Fresno City Council members will have any appetite for a similar measure over
a war in the Middle East on the far side of the globe is uncertain
at the very least. Miguel Aarius, who represents Southwest Fresno, said he
is open to the idea of introducing a ceasefire resolution if it's in a balanced
way that obtains support for both Jewish and Palestinian members of our community. Blah
blah blah. All right, So, for those of you who don't really
follow what goes on at the Fresno City Council, for really, since the
war started in October, there has been this constant presence at Fresno City Council
meetings of local left wing slash local Palestinian activists calling for a ceasefire in Gaza
and wanting the Fresno City Council to apply prove a resolution calling for a ceasefire
in Gaza. Movements like that, Now, this is not a particular,
a particularized Bizarro Fresno thing. This is happening literally all over America. Left
wing activists are going to city councils all over America to try to get the
city council to approve a city resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. I
remember, earlier this year I saw a video where Chicago's City council or Council
of Aldermen's whatever they have, which is much larger they Fresno only has six
city council members. Chicago has something like, I don't know, something like
twenty something or twenty or thirty something. And the vote was exactly split fifty
to fifty. You know, it was exactly fifty to fifty four and against
the resolution, and so the Mayor of Chicago casts the tie breaking vote in
favor of a resolution calling for a Gaza ceasefire, which all the left wing
activists we're calling for that were, you know, ecstatic. So this is
not just an isolated Fresno deal. This is something that is happening all over
the country at city councils all over America. People are trying to introduce ceasefire
resolutions. Now, the response that most conservatives would have to this, there's
two kinds of responses. The one response is this doesn't have anything to do
with the business of our city government. Well, how does wasting time on
this at city council meetings, How does this do anything to build a road
or fixed potholes or do any of the business that the city is supposed to
do. Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah. The other answer is the
one Gary Brettefeld has taken, where Gary Brettefeld has taken the response of no,
I am not calling for a ceasefire in Gaza because I think the attacks
on Israel were unjustified. I think the taking of hostages was unjustified, and
I think that the ceasefire is a cynical ploy. The ceasefire demands are a
cynical ploy on the part of Hamas to try to give them a breather in
order to dig themselves in so that they can enact more terrorist attacks against Israel.
And council Member Brettefeld made the point of plastering on sort of the portion
of the dais in front of his chair, So the city council sits at
this dais where all seven of them sit at sort of a big desk that's
sort of elevated up. So the portion of the front of the desk in
front of where he sits he plastered with pictures of the Palestinian hostages who had
been taken by Hamas, and he sort of tried to make the protesters look
at it so that they couldn't get around the fact of hey, like,
there can be a ceasefire when all the Israeli hostages are released and Hamas stops
engaging in terrorist violence against Israel. So I commend Brettefeld for this. I
think his response is a better kind of response. Now I'm my own thoughts
on the Israeli Palestinian conflict and Israel's activity during the conflict versus their justification and
going to war. I think they were clearly justified in going to war.
You know, we can talk about their in wartime conduct, which I think
is difficult to assess given the news sources we have, much of which is
Palestinian propaganda stuff. Regardless, also my thoughts on I've expressed skepticism on this
show of Okay, Yes, Israel was unjustly attacked on October seventh. Yes,
they have the right to defend themselves. Why does America have to pay
for it? Like all these Republicans are like, we need to fund military
aid to Israel. Oh, yes, And then the Republicans are agitating about
military aid for Israel, Democrats are agitating for military aid for Ukraine. I
would say, regardless of the rightness or wrongness of their causes, and I
think both the Ukrainians and the Israelis are right in their cause in acting in
self defense against unprovoked attacks. I don't know why we need to fund them
necessarily, or why we need to why MA America needs to be engaged in
a proxy war. That's kind of what we're ultimately saying when we give them
money, we are now in a proxy war. That's what it is,
someone else fighting a war that we don't want to dirty our hands with us
giving money so someone else can fight a war for us. I don't know
that I want to be that engaged with Russia or with more more Islamic terrorists
now. Regardless. The big difference between how council Member Brettefeld answers this question
when it's brought to the city Council and most conservatives is most conservatives take what
I think is a fairy tale view that local government is something isolated from deeper
questions of right and wrong, political right and political wrong, political truth and
political falsehood, fundamental moral questions. I think we've had generations of Republican politicians
who've graduated from the levels of local government to state government to the federal government
who have tried to skirt as best they could any sort of deeper moral concern
in favor of economic questions. He's just a fiscal conservative, no apologies.
I'm a fiscal concern I just want to get things done. I'm not going
to get and that's a constant critique of Gary Brettefeld is that he's a culture
warrior that gets drawn into these irrelevant controversies, to which I ask, if
they're so irrelevant, why do the left wing activists so fiercely agitate for them
all the time everywhere? Why year after year did the liberals on the president
City Council agitate for resolutions ton of the anniversary of Roe v. Wade.
Why year after year all over the country do liberal activists agitate for that?
Why do they agitate insist on the Pride flag being flown? Pride flag doesn't
do anything. It's a flag. It's literally a symbolic gesture. It's the
whole point of it is a symbolic gesture. And yet that is thought to
be this hugely important thing. Meanwhile, the best that and conservatives who take
this sort of functionalist view of government are completely incapable of resisting it. Case
in point, Jerry Dyer, he's constantly offering these, well, I just
don't know that this is the business of government. I just don't know.
I just don't know. I just don't know. And then in the face
of that, he doesn't really have a coherent explanation for opposing gay marriage,
because he hasn't really I don't know that he's really thought all that deeply about
these things. And he would say, yes, I have thought deeply about
I've met all these people who have felt alienated. Okay, sure, but
you haven't thought through the actual light. What are the implications of our ethical
beliefs on governance. Do you just blindly accept the premises of modern day liberalism
that that should govern No. So I think that this story about is the
Fresno City Council going to approve a resolution calling for you know, you know,
calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. On the one hand, I think
the response is, well, what on earth is the city council resolution of
Fresno, California're gonna make or break this thing? In a sense if every
city council in America is debating it, in every city council in America,
or e every major cities city council approves such a thing, Yeah, that
does influence public opinion because liberals understand symbols matter, flags matter. When we
return, I just want to talk about how I guess in my thoughts on
modernity not caring about symbols enough. That's nexcellent the John Girardi Show, It's
this hatred of symbols and this impoverishing of our lives symbolically, let me kind
of explain to what I'm talking about. And this seems to afflict conservatives almost
more than liberals in some quarters. I've talked so many times on the show
about my thoughts about flags and the two responses to the gay Pride flag being
flown at Fresno City Hall or the symbolic resolutions that the city council considers.
Right now, there's you know, Madera's City council has approved a resolution calling
for a ceasefire in Gaza. Activist cer in front of the Presno City Council
every single week calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, ceasefire and Gaza, you
know, as if a resolution by the Fresnow City Council is going to make
one whit of difference to a war that's happening on the other side of the
world. But on a certain level, yeah, I do actually think that
this kind of stuff is important, and most conservatives don't. I think a
lot of conservatives will hear about this and say, what business says it of
the city to say anything one way or another about abortion? To begin with,
what business is it of the city to say one way, say anything
one way or another about the war in Gaza to begin with? What business
is it of the city to say anything about gay marriage? To begin with?
Shouldn't the city be more focused on fixing roads and fixing potholes and blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah. Okay, those are understandable critiques, but
it's also this, symbols and symbolic gestures and resolutions matter. They are educative.
They are extremely educative, including for they are educative for the citizenry within
a polity, the citizens within a city. Every year, local governments,
I'm sure, all up and down the valley in I think it's usually in
April do commemorations for the Armenian genocide. We all do it, and we
talk about how horrible the Armenian genocide is, and that's important. It's symbolic.
It's just it doesn't have any tangible impact necessarily, but it's an important
thing to do. We acknowledge how many people are here in the San Joaquin
Valley because of the Armenian genocide in the first place, how many people lost
family members, loved ones in the Armenian Genocide, including some people who are
still alive who have family members that they know of who died there. You
know, it was one hundred plus years ago, about one hundred and ten
years ago now so. But nonetheless, if you have the older folks,
some of them have grandparents or older relatives who may have died in the genocide,
whose families came to the San Joaquin Valley because of it. We commemorate
it, even though he can't do anything about it, even though what we
say doesn't change anything about the Armenian genocide. Why because it has a formative
impact. It's an important thing. It communicates what we believe and value and
care for and whom we love as a community. Symbols matter. I even
think about this in the context of Catholicism, how in the nineteen fifties and
sixties and seventies, these movements in church architecture towards well, we need to
have something that's more simple, you know Jesus. Jesus liked simplicity. And
then they come up with some lame, you know, excuses like that,
you know, bypassed, they would completely bypass the story. It's as if
they read the story of the woman who anointed Jesus's head, and Judas was
complaining about it, and Jesus said, no, what she did was a
beautiful thing for me. She's preparing me for my burial. But people,
oh, well, you could have sold the money to the port. It's
as if liberal Catholics read that story from the Gospel and completely got the wrong
ung got the exact opposite interpretation of what you're supposed to have immediately thought,
well, we shouldn't have fancy looking churches. We should have churches that are
characterized by simplicity. And so for decades now Catholics have built ugly, dumb
looking churches, bereft of classical symbolism, bereft of representative art, going away
from any artistic styles that actually depict the human figure in a meaningful fashion.
And by the way, the churches were not any cheaper than the fancy schmancy
ones built with fancy schmancy art for the most part. Why because there's this
sense, well, you know, there's no need for all these symbolism,
there's no need for all this art and symbolism and stuff. What really matters
is love, And no, that's not how human beings work. Flags are
important. Public monuments are important. Having a statue of George Washington somewhere in
America, several statues of George Washington in high schools named after George Washington is
important. It's important for indicating the important things he did while he was President
of the United States, the critical things that George Washington did to set this
country on the road to what it has become, in spite of, yes,
fully acknowledging the fact that he owned slaves and how terrible that is and
how wrong that is, but nonetheless all the other incredible things he did do
that made America into the country it is. Human beings need symbols, and
apparently the only people who don't understand that. The only people who think that
the role of city government should just purely nope, it's just or just here
to fix potholes and fix wrote. The only people who think that are local
Republicans. Are people who want to get elected to local government as Republicans and
who are uncomfortable with the abortion issue. That's all it is, and thereby
they just want to skirt away from that kind of stuff as best they can.
And this is why the kinds of people who get elected to the right
are compromisers. They're compromisers when it comes to social conservatism time and time again.
So many people on the right, that's what they are because they don't
ultimately really care about these underlying questions. When we return, I want to
talk about parents posting stuff on social media about their kids next on the John
Girardi Show. Everyone agrees that social media is bad and bad for you,
except for this little part of social media that I like that I'm using all
the time. So my wife and I are similarly of a mind that social
media is bad and bad for you, although we do have parts of it
that we use. I think my wife's use of social media is probably the
healthiest out of anybody. She uses pretty much just Instagram and that's it,
and a little bit of Facebook just for posting pictures of the kids and posting
pictures of artistic stuff that she has made, and stuff that she knits and
sews and paints and stuff our kids do. And it's very good and pure
and wonderful and wholesome. The problem is by using such apps to post nice
good things. And I'm mostly using social media for Twitter just to talk smack
about people politically and do you know get grist for this show. That's mostly
what I'm using Twitter for. The thing that I the problem is when you
use social media for sending nice, positive things out, you are nonetheless able
to see all the crap that people send in. And one of the things
my wife and I see often are creepy ways in which parents post about their
children, creepy and non great ways about which parents post about their kids.
And I was sort of prompted to do this today by this video that sort
of went viral of this young woman who looks like she's probably in her early
twenties, who has become some sort of TikTok influencer type. She posts different
kinds of social media videos, and she posted a video talking about what is
your childhood trauma that still resonates with you? What is it? Or no,
what is a bit of childhood trauma that is actually legitimately funny? And
this is a constant, by the way gen zers on social media for those
who are older, so much of gen Z has been diagnosed with mental illnesses
or gone to therapy, or been prescribed prescription drugs for various kinds of mental
health disorders. That basically gen Z now can talk in this lingo of like
psychology. Lingo is almost like second nature for these people, and the spread
of that kind of lingo on social media has been wild to the point where
now I think half of gen Z thinks that they have some sort of mental
illness because they've just been influenced into thinking that way. It's just sort of
the concept of so contagion. Once the idea is out in the either,
people think about themselves. Oh, maybe that's the problem with me. So
she gives this post about what's the piece of childhood trauma that legitimately that makes
you laugh. And this young woman who's like in her I don't know how
old. She looks like she's I don't know, looks like she's in her
twenties, looks like she's twenty three, twenty four years old. She starts
talking about her dad and the fact that her dad divorced her mom and their
four children to pursue, in his mid to late forties, a career as
a breakdancer, his passion of breakdancing. And she's laughing by as she describes,
I'm actually on her side for this, by the way, So buckle
up, like I'm not you're thinking, probably this is the setup. John
Gerardy's gonna slam this stupid joy three year old. No, actually, I'm
gonna slam her dad. Okay, so buckle up. She describes how he
abandoned his wife and his four kids to go pursue his passion of breakdancing,
and she's laughing as she describes he actually was really good and became somewhat famous
as a result. He was on Good Morning America. He like it,
was prominently featured in all these different things. There were news articles written about
and blah blah blah blah blah. And meanwhile she's like, yeah, he
didn't like pay for my medical bills or anything, but he did send me
merch. So she's honestly, it's kind of funny what she's doing. And
then, so what then happens is the dad goes on his social media and
by the way he as he's doing it, he's wearing a like a sweater
jacket that has the bitcoin logo printed all over it, so he's himself some
kind of bitcoin influencer. And he starts like poking holes in her story and
critiquing how selfish she's being, and is slamming his daughter on social media for
being so mean to him. Now there's a portion of this where even for
the daughter, is this the best place to be trying to air dirty laundry?
And are you really telling the whole story? Is your dad really quite
the monster you make him out to be. Maybe the thing that dad never
disputes though, is that he abandoned his wife and four kids, that he
divorced his wife in four kids, and the gaping, horrible hole that divorce
inflicts on a family. And there's this kind of fundamental selfishness to the dad,
and the whole thing just makes me think of the dad, like,
did you really need to do this at all? Think about the choices you
made? Maybe that made your daughter turn out to be the sort of person
who's going to go on social media and blast her father for his life choices.
Are you then doing something? Is this some great epic own of your
daughter to go on social media and blast her back and try to rationalize what
seemingly was a pretty crappy decision to divorce the wife and leave four kids to
become a breakdancer. And I see this, I remember this. This was
a good life lesson my parents taught me. I remember I was like fourteen
or so and blogs were first becoming a thing, and I wrote some blog
Like I was very young and stupid. I wrote some kind of blog griping
about something, and my parents saw it and they got really mad at me,
and I got in trouble, and they said, no, you don't
air your dirty laundry out in public like that. That's just wrong. And
that lesson stuck with me, and ever since then, I've been much more
Since I was fourteen, I feel like every fourteen year old who uses social
media probably needs a lesson like that to be more circumspect, because this is
out in the public. Anyone can see it. This stuff lives on the
internet forever, and everyone can see it. I was fortunate to have parents
like that. Unfortunately, what I also see, and I think this afflicted
more that this was more common in conservative spaces. I would see conservative parents
in their forties with teenagers posting about something bad that their teenager did and the
punishment or penalty that they were assessing on there. My daughter went online and
was saying such and such. So as a result, here's what's gonna happen
to her. She's gonna be you know, without her phone for two months,
and here's her here's her new you know, here's her iPhone that she
just bought, and now I'm going to smash it with a sledgehammer. And
these parents would do these dramatic, intending to go viral themselves, demonstrations of
parental judgment against their parents, where they'd like, you know, destroy some
piece of property of their kids, you know, demonstratively lighting their son's xbox
on fire, you know, doing stuff like that. It's this bizarre thing
where and maybe this is my Catholic sense of this coming out. We all
have this sense of wanting to share, wanting to share flaws, share peccadillos.
We can't just bottle up what's going on that's wrong inside forever. And
social media has given us so many new and inappropriate ways to share that whatever's
going on with us, our pain, our happiness, our worries, whatever,
with the general public, so many ways to do that in an inappropriate
fashion. And I feel like social media, the constant presence of social media
in our lives, seeing so many people sharing so much, leads us to
not have a proper sense of the stuff that my parents rightly got mad at
me at when I was fourteen years old, that no, you shouldn't be
sharing everything you think with the broader society. My Catholic sense of this is
that confession, the Catholic sacrament of confession, which the Orthodox have in their
form, and you know, uh, the idea of confessing your sins,
it's actually something that we all. It's like a kind of very natural thing.
We want to get things off of our chest, we want to share
what is wrong, and I think I think the Catholic sacrament of confession is
like a healthy outlet for that. People who don't go to confession very much
have this bizarre sense of confession, as if it's this horrible like like they're
there, it's a very it's I don't know, the people who have the
most normal sense of you have to actually go to confession to understand how not
bizarre it is. That it's actually very similar to talking with your lawyer about
your problems, or talking with your doctor about your problems, or talking with
a therapist about your problem. You talk with all of them professionals about problems
you have in these various spheres, and a priest to talk with him about
the struggles you have in the spiritual life, and to ask forgiveness from God
is actually a kind of very natural thing. I would say. It's why
some of the legal privileges that exist for you know, doctor patient confidentiality is
very similar to the kinds of legal protections that exist for you know, clergy
penitent confidentiality. These are professionals who are helping you with a certain thing.
Anyway, there, I don't know that I have a big central thesis here
other than this, parents monitor what your kids are doing on social media if
you let them have social media at all as children, which I don't think
is a great idea, and you yourselves don't fall victim to this massive oversharing
mentality that social media fosters so much. To close out the show, just
a little thing, how the media hilariously gets the concept of natural law wrong.
That's next on the John Girardi Show. There's this piece in Politico criticizing
the Trump administration for this, that, and the other, and it talks
about natural law. Now, I studied natural law as part of jurisprudence quite
a bit when I was at Notre Dame, and I very firmly believe in
it, and I suspect probably deep down if you really question yourselves. A
lot of you do too. Natural law is basically the ethical theory that undergirds
a lot of Western thinkers in different degree is into different formats. You can
see this especially in Catholic authors like Saint Thomas Aquinas, but it's a very
prominent philosophical idea for how to ground ethics the study of what is right and
what is wrong, and it doesn't necessarily have to be religious. The idea
of natural law is that human beings have a certain nature, human beings have
ends towards which they are ordered, and that we can learn what is good,
what is right, and what is wrong on the basis of those goods
towards which human beings are ordered. Human beings talk. Speech is ordered towards
communicating the truth. Lying is a perversion of that. Lying twists the actual
purpose of speech. Therefore lying is wrong. Okay, you can do those
kinds of deductions. And I think natural law is very as a philosophy,
is very coherent and consistent with Christianity, and Saint Paul himself talks about the
concept that there's a law that's written on the heart that even gentiles know without
the aid of the Jewish law, or even you know, without the aid
of revelation that gentiles know. Anyone who studied this would know that natural law
theory has been around for thousands of years. But Politico rights Mike Pompeo set
up a Human Rights Commission to be based on natural law and natural rights for
looking at violations of human rights around the world. Natural law, this political
peace rights, is the belief that there are universal rules derived from God that
can't be superseded by government or judges. While it is a core of Catholicism,
in recent decades it's been used to oppose abortion, LGBTQ rights, and
contraception in recent decades, it's been around for two thousand plus years. So
basically, don't believe the media on anything because ninety percent of the time they
just don't know even remotely what they're talking about. I'll do it John Girardi
Show, See you next time, Power Talk