#2391 - Duncan Trussell

Father Rogan reporting in—are we even allowed to joke about this stuff, or do Catholics get prickly?

After sitting through some beautiful masses and talking with an open‑minded priest, I had to rethink old assumptions; a lot of the outrage is aimed at a cartoon version of Christianity.

Labels are a mess—say you’re liberal and suddenly you’re lumped in with every fringe cause or street group, whether you want that or not.

Antifa isn’t liberal anyway; they’re anti‑capitalist, which shows how muddy the terms are, and in Portland the late‑night protests outside ICE keep boiling over.

I’ve watched streamers like Carlin torch the idea that these crowds are funded, arguing they’re true anti‑capitalists born from a shredded middle class, brutal costs, and years of doom‑scroll anxiety.

In plain terms, the Marxist gripe is that owners extract the biggest cut while workers and renters barely breathe, so resentment grows when people see wealth funnel upward.

Meanwhile you’ve got people who built lives here being hunted after years, and that fuels talk of tearing down the state.

For anyone primed by conspiracy lore about martial law, seeing troops roll into an American city is a shock, and it’s got to feel weird for soldiers pointing heavy gear at their own neighbors.

The way immigration raids look—parents cuffed in front of kids, folks here for decades grabbed on camera—makes anyone with a heart say we need secure borders and a humane path for long‑term, law‑abiding people.

The ICE chief on NPR made the hard‑line case that any mercy invites more crossings and more deaths, and you can hear the trauma in his voice even if the tactics look cold and blunt in practice.

I assumed they’d target violent crews first—how many gang members are actually getting picked up?

This is how heavy‑handed rule sneaks in: some people feel others cut the line, others want order after endless break‑ins, and a lot of folks are in Death Wish mode cheering soldiers on the corners.

When leaders botch policy, cities spin out—open air drug use, tents everywhere, and it feels like unfit parenting from the government.

There’s compassion and then there’s leaving psychotic, addicted, brain‑injured people outside to deteriorate, which isn’t compassion at all.

You can drive from one policy zone that’s spotless to another that’s a shantytown—Oakland and parts of downtown Los Angeles look unreal.

It’s an open‑air mash‑up of crisis and commerce, with fires, tapped power lines, and danger underfoot.

Quick human moment: my kid and I brought food to a man on the sidewalk, asked his name, and he was kind and grateful; just being seen mattered.

Hard swerve: I’m listening to Richard Dolan on hybrid abductions—recurring stories of engineered seduction to harvest human genetics that sound wild but oddly consistent.

Hilarious and insane, and it would ruin office life after a night with a space siren—Species riffs and a Ben Kingsley gangster detour included.

What happens to New York if the more radical guy wins and loosens up on crime—do we see chaos or something unexpected?

That’s the American experiment—it’s a live stress test that might fall apart or somehow shine.

I’ve heard “mutual aid” pitched as the cure, but utopias often end with strict rules enforced by soldiers and you wake up in a uniformed state.

Why not capitalism with a conscience—pay workers well, take a great but sane slice at the top, and raise everyone’s baseline instead of starving the floor for shareholders.

Taxes and profit‑sharing can push that way—think Dr. Bronner’s—and if you start musing about ditching the stock market, comrade, you’re really poking the casino that sits between us and our neighbors.

Modern life is isolation in a tower, screens all day, stimulants to grind, and nowhere to put the energy.

America’s had speed crazes before; we guessed the cocaine timeline and checked—it was refined in the eighteen fifties.

Mariana Van Zeller’s jungle piece shows how filthy coke is to make, and her pill‑mill doc exposed the pipeline that flooded states when there was no tracking.

Pharmacies once sold opiates over the counter; now the algorithm is the drug and the “phone” is barely a phone.

Bring back a simple click‑wheel iPod; instead we get refrigerators that run ads.

I hate regulation, but we at least need education—your feed is personalized bait, not a consensus; I sent one odd image and got a tidal wave of amputee pinups after.

People mistake their timelines for the world, and on the street the chant flips ancient war circuits so regular folks suddenly act like a mob.

The feed triggers the same us‑versus‑them from your couch, spotlights outliers as the norm, dehumanizes whole groups, and fear opens the door to strongmen.

If I were a villain, I’d let cities rot, gut policing, then roll in the military and call it the people’s choice; this isn’t red or blue, it’s ultra‑wealthy power above parties.

That’s corporate rule creeping past civic rule.

Some get so rich they chase global dominance like it’s a tournament.

Scarier still is an AI demi‑god that subtly runs its makers and bends minds.

Tucker’s tense sit‑down with Sam Altman over a colleague’s death was surreal—Tucker questioned the suicide, Sam pushed back hard.

I wonder what kind of security he needs; the guy pokes bears for a living.

He’s been bounced before, and after the Dominion settlement Fox pointed to leaked texts labeled racist without laying out full context.

One line about “not how white men fight” was out there, but it was followed by him catching himself and insisting on empathy for the kid getting beat, which is messier than a headline.

He’s immersed in politics all day, pushing edges like dropping a nine‑eleven piece, while we mostly dip in, make jokes, and step out.

That world is Medusa‑like; stare too long and you harden into a political statue, your attention worshipping headlines the way bhakti warns about devotion to any idol, even if it’s hate for the state.

If you zoom out, humanity looks like a hive building towers and circuits so we can midwife artificial intelligence, which might not be God but could be the doorway to whatever that is.

I don’t buy that it’s God, but it does feel like a natural crest in the wave we’ve been riding.

Cosmically, maybe universes expand, crunch, and bang again; Penrose thinks this cycle repeats, which is wilder than a single beginning.

Humans might not be purely homegrown either; there’s a claim about a brain‑growth allele appearing around forty thousand years ago, right when cave art explodes, and some people guess it came from elsewhere.

Dolan even speculates it’s an alien introgression rather than from Neanderthals or Denisovans, which slots into the ant‑farm theory where we’re nudged to build AI while they hide under the sea.

Tim Burchett talking UFO bases from a barn felt like casual disclosure; then you hear stories of a football‑field‑sized object ripping underwater at roughly five hundred seventy‑five miles an hour and allegedly on video.

That’s why people warn about catastrophic disclosure, where we learn we’re a meat printer for a superintelligence that hands us wormhole instructions as the curtain call.

If you wanted to engineer sexless telepaths, you’d start by draining testosterone—plastics everywhere, language that shames masculinity—then swap real intimacy for brain‑stemmed pleasure fed by UBI and neural dream machines you’ll never unplug from.

Maybe we’re already choosing tracks in a cosmic sim; our careers feel like custom missions sometimes.

Life’s a game you only start seeing in your thirties, and we all share a timeline—billionaires, comics, and people sleeping on concrete—while neglected parts of our lives and cities rot under the banner of compassion that turns suicidal.

Wealth can become its own island chain, and the donor class shapes reality; which is why the Epstein files scare people—what’s in there that both parties keep dodging?

Manifests exist, and not everyone who flew did crimes; honey pots mix smart guests with glamour so you’ll relax, owe favors, and write checks.

Leaked whispers say a huge House jailbreak vote is brewing because no one wants to defend protecting predators.

Behind the headlines are real victims; Eric Weinstein told me Epstein bounced a young woman on his lap during a meeting, and the Ghislaine trial jailed a trafficker without naming buyers, while a lawmaker claims the sealed files point at princes, bankers, moguls, and more.

Once people accept that governments have shielded organized abuse before, they’ll torch their allegiances; I don’t care if politicians have sex, I care that they don’t prey on kids.

We still need to know who did what, because there were likely layers—some lured for leverage, others depraved.

It’s not crazy to think donors on that list are leaning on institutions to bury it; if we do that with local sex offenders, why are elite predators protected?

Open borders without control let monsters buy children; thousands of untracked minors is a nightmare, and some ended up in hell.

Evil isn’t abstract; call it powers and principalities, an egregore that whispers self‑harm and delights in ruin.

You can’t make the world perfectly peaceful, but you can find personal calm, log off, talk to people you disagree with, and stop pledging to teams; Portland’s chaos shows what bad ideas yield, especially when billions vanish and the streets get worse.

Tend the part of the garden you can touch, or the outrage machine will drag you into fights you’ll never affect.

Online tribes demand statements on everything, and that’s how you get groupthink and moral posturing.

Compassion gets hijacked on the left and the right, and suddenly you’re nodding to ideas you never believed.

Then it swings to posting the Ten Commandments in public schools, which feels like the wrong lever.

If we’re going biblical, why not the Sermon on the Mount, because nonviolence and mercy interrupt the cycle more than a rules poster.

Jesus preaching radical peace under Roman occupation is a singular voice next to military founders and empire.

People begged him to lead a revolt, yet he chose no, and paid with his life; that medicine still applies.

Lockdowns and algorithms hardened people, the country split, and policy that lets repeat violent offenders walk created horror stories, like the refugee stabbed on a train by a guy repeatedly released.

There are too many of those cases to call it a fluke.

If you wanted to break a society, you’d spike fear with crime, then sell a militarized fix.

A bishop told me Satan is the accuser and the scatterer, so if something is dividing neighbors and families, that’s the scent.

Nigeria’s a grim example—tens of thousands of Christians reportedly killed, churches destroyed, and while mosques have also been attacked, the scale against Christians looks far higher.

Even a committed secularist should pause at that.

Many judge Christianity by TV grifters promising cash back from God while they fly private, which warps how people see the faith.

Go to a mass and you hear a simple call to help the poor, no pyrotechnics, the same message circling the globe in one day.

The Catholic wound is horrific abuse and the celibacy rule, which filters for oddities; pastors with families feel more human, while history shows even popes had secret kids.

Any hierarchy with mystique attracts predators, so vigilance is non‑negotiable.

Imagine if priests could marry—there’s a bittersweet comedy there of a devout forty‑year‑old on his first date, but the deeper point is letting leaders live fuller lives.

Kids rewire you; if you guide souls, it helps to know family chaos and love from the inside.

People raised families on dirt floors; with today’s medicine and knowledge, making kind humans still matters, and we should also fix the brutal timelines people are born into with incentives that reward safer, thriving neighborhoods.

Stop waiting for federal capes; clean the park, feed someone, do one small useful thing while the state lumbers.

Good deeds exist, your feed just buries them.

Help anyway, even when folks seem demon‑ridden, which, by the way, surprises me that you’re not sure demons are real.

I’m agnostic on demons but certain about evil; follow dark thoughts long enough and you get monsters like Saddam’s sons, and people I trust say those palaces felt soaked in malice.

If that’s not evil, what is?

Genghis Khan is the apex example—towns erased, bones stacked, roads turned to sludge by decay, yet he’s revered in places and fathered a shocking slice of humanity while running brutal, cunning campaigns.

Compared to that, we’re doing better than we think, and most cultures share a gut sense of what’s foul.

His origin story is savage and he’s still lionized; the Chorizmian Empire he crushed barely registers now.

That’s why Graham Hancock rattles people—one day someone will stare at our ruins and wonder who we were, the way we do with the pyramids.

If I go, I want to spend real time there with people who know the site, and those new scans of the underground halls are wild.

They point to a roughly forty meter, capsule-shaped metal object in a great chamber, deep columns beneath the pyramids, and sealed rooms, but the dam changed the water table and made access a mess even though the imaging keeps lining up.

I once saw vast caverns under the pyramids during a ketamine trip, which felt like being guided through structures, then it turned into a bizarre meat-powered city, so take that as dreamy noise, not data.

Avi Loeb is coming on, and while people called his comet take reckless at first, the thing keeps behaving strangely.

The timing is crazy, because the government shutdown hit right when we could have aimed Mars satellites at it, so no fresh shots from us, though Europe did grab a weird-looking image.

It is nuts that a shutdown blocks space imaging, and it is even stranger that this visitor seems to line up with the region of the famous Wow signal.

Jeremy Corbell warned that people would start pushing a mothership story and not to buy it, and he walks this tightrope with inside sources without blowing up his life.

So much of this feels like a spy show or a well-crafted psyop, or maybe a deliberate, gradual disclosure to soften the shock that we are not alone.

Hal Puthoff has that story that George H. W. Bush wanted to reveal recovered craft and nonhuman biology, had experts score the social fallout, and they concluded the chaos would outweigh the benefits, so they stood down.

If keeping society stable means shielding monsters and pretending there are no aliens, then maybe we need a better society, or it is a perfect moment for Jesus to show up.

It would be the ultimate test of faith now that AI muddies what is real, unless he comes through the machine.

Could be the portal, could be Christ, could be the Antichrist, which would definitely sell more tickets.

Cheesy ending, but I feel lucky to be your friend; we have known each other forever, and I love you, man.

Love you too, and it is funny we really became friends on those long Comedy Store phone calls that felt like early podcasts before we ever toured together.

If you are around, come do the show tonight.

I wish, but I have a four a.m. flight; I am in Tacoma this weekend, then Omaha, Portland, and Richmond coming up.

This drops tomorrow, so Tacoma folks, go see him at the comedy club, and catch the other dates too.