7. Antifascist Father w/ David Inczauskis, S.J.

Antifascist Dad – Episode 7 Guest: Father David Inczauskis, S.J. Fascist Dad of the Week: Karoline Leavitt Host: Matthew Remski [00:00:00] Matthew Remski Okay, so: a Benedictine, a Dominican, and a Jesuit are all arrested during an ICE protest. In the holding cell, the Benedictine prays, the Dominican preaches, and the Jesuit starts a reading group on police abolition. Yeah. I am Matthew Remski, and the only thing worse than an antifascist dad joke is an antifascist, nerdy, post Catholic dad joke about Jesuits. Here we are. Welcome to episode 7, Antifascist Father, with Father David Inczauskis. He is a Jesuit priest helping to lead faith based protests at ICE detention facilities in Chicago. [00:00:45] Father David Inczauskis In liberation theology, and also in broader Catholic social teaching, we speak about social sin. It is important to talk about social sin because the problem of the United States treating migrants with inhumanity extends, sadly but very really, beyond the Trump administration. The Trump administration has attacked migrant communities in a particularly horrific and inhumane way and on a massive scale. They have also publicized and sensationalized it in a particular way. But of course we know that Biden, Obama, Bush, and generations of United States officials have also persecuted migrants. And again, I will repeat this, because it is important: many migrants have roots in Indigenous communities of the Americas. So you have a colonial power imposing its authority on people who come from a mestizaje background. There are so many layers of cruelty happening here. It is happening in the context of social sin, a structural sin that goes way back in history to the times of colonization. There is a thread that runs from that to the present moment. So we are saying: God, have mercy on us for all of that, and inspire us to change. Because when you make a good act of contrition as a Catholic, you acknowledge the wrongdoing, but you also promise not to do it again, to resist the temptation in the future. [00:02:38] Matthew Remski First, some housekeeping. You can find me on Bluesky and Instagram under my name, and on YouTube as antifascistdad. I am also on TikTok under that handle, where I try to post several mini essays a week. If you happen to be on my YouTube channel, you can check out my review of Scott Galloway’s Notes on Being a Man. I have put subtitles in, there are chapter headings, I am trying to make things really orderly, well paced, and accessible over there. My Patreon is Antifascist Dad Podcast, where all part twos, plus extras, are exclusive there for a while, and then everything eventually gets released to the wild. [00:03:33] Matthew Remski So today you can hear the first half of my interview with Father David here, and then you will be able to catch the second half on Patreon. It is up right now. And once again, in the show notes you will see a preorder link for the book that this podcast is based on and supporting. It is called Antifascist Dad: Urgent Conversations with Young People in Chaotic Times. The publication date is April 26, 2026. I am going to skip the fascist squish, antifascist news segment this week because my intro to this interview is a bit long. I want to take about ten minutes to get personally, but also ideologically, clear on my position toward religion in the context of antifascism and anticapitalism for this project. After all, my first episode in this stream featured a long conversation with Nathan Evans Fox about the impact that charismatic Christianity had on his life and politics. I had not really planned that, but that is what happened. It makes sense, because I found out about him because of Hillbilly Hymn, his viral song. Then, in episode two, I asked Sara Rasikh about the role of Muslim and Jewish ritual at the anti genocide encampments in the spring of 2024. And today I am interviewing a fully ordained Catholic priest, in his collar and the whole nine yards. Here is the personal side, greatly abbreviated. I grew up as what I might call a diversity Catholic. In my early church experience, I went to a left wing social gospel parish, and later on I went to a conservative parish. I loved the former, but it was always the minority Catholic experience in this city, I am in Toronto, and I think also in the world, especially in the global North. As I got into my teens in the 1980s, the rightward tilt of the Vatican, and of course everything else globally, meant that that left wing militant flank of Catholic religiosity was increasingly repressed and less visible to me. By my early twenties I had left Catholicism behind. There was just too much anticommunism, too many hypocrisies, too many exclusionary attitudes towards women and queer people, and also an utterly shameful role in colonization. My family had also been impacted by clerical abuse. But despite all that, I have never not been haunted by this primal image of a wild, unhoused, migrant working class prophet who comforted his comrades in a time of colonial occupation, who jolted his birth religion out of apathy, and who made love and self sacrifice the highest service. [00:07:10] Matthew Remski About five years ago, I started tuning into the figure of Pope Francis. Here is this Jesuit from the global South, familiar with and sympathetic to liberation theology. He has a science background and he wrote this astonishingly beautiful letter, Laudato Si, about our ecological responsibilities. He invited Indigenous leaders from the Amazon to Rome. He had lunch with trans sex workers. He came to Canada to give a formal apology to the descendants of the first nations people the Church had helped to colonize. His mantra was todos, todos, todos, everyone, everyone, everyone is welcome. And now his successor, Leo, is pushing this same left wing stream of the Church forward. So where does this leave me, personally. I am writing this intro on the morning of my fifty fourth birthday, and I have just gotten back from morning Mass at the local parish. I have not been in a long time, and it brought up a lot of rich and conflicting feelings. I could bore you by describing all of that, but I think it is just as private, and maybe as weird, as your own struggles are. So I will try not to get off track from why I really went, and why I might continue to go. Here is the ideological part. I do not think the religious world is structurally different from the political world. Both are groups of people gathering to administrate resources and express values. A lot of religious life serves to spiritualize the status quo of capitalism and heteropatriarchy. It is opportunistic and parasitical. Think of all those clerics who were ride or die with the colonizers. Current fascist movements make great use of these aspects. I have spent years documenting the toxic side of religious life for the Conspirituality podcast. But in every major religion I am aware of, there is a radical, mystical, often communistic flank that rises and falls according to social need, and according to how vigorously it is repressed. So for me, at this point, religion itself is a landscape of struggle. And the religion I was born into, that I know like a mother tongue, is increasingly rising up to offer resistance to capitalism. I find that very interesting and unexpected. I have a connection to one point eight billion people through this heritage. If I can participate in and help nurture the radical flank within it, I should probably try to do that. The Democratic Socialists of America have a committee that caught my eye a number of years ago. This is from their website. DSAs Religion and Socialism group is open to DSA members of all faiths whose socialism is in some way inspired by their spiritual identity. There is a long tradition of religious socialism in the United States that has been ignored or forgotten. The Religion and Socialism group of DSA refuses to cede the ground of faith to the religious right. Many in faith based communities hesitate to join a socialist movement because of what they perceive as an anti religious bias among leftists. We see ourselves as a bridge group. Our work is with and within faith communities as allies and coalition partners. Examples of such work include the New Sanctuary Movement, religion and labor coalitions, reproductive justice, and LGBTQ advocacy. I am just going to reiterate that it is no joke that the current Pope is out there speaking in Donald Trumps native tongue and telling almost two billion people that Catholicism is basically anti capitalist and that it must welcome the poor and the unhoused and the undocumented. Also, I think it would be a mistake, as the DSA suggests, to cede the ground of faith to the religious right. I sat and knelt in Catholic pews for far too many years to let J D Vance tell the world what being Catholic means. [00:13:55] Matthew Remski Two final points before we get to Father David. In part two of my interview with him, I ask whether his sense of faith is what I am hearing when I hear his upbeat and industrious tone. The leftist world is often filled with the melancholy of persistent loss, and those who are depressed will often defend themselves with irony. It can be a world haunted by betrayal and distrust because it is filled with people who are up against impossible odds. But what do people do when they are up against impossible odds. I think it is natural to imagine and fantasize seemingly impossible answers. Anarchists dream of the state withering away around new networks of mutual aid. Marxists dream of the end of capitalism. Liberation theologians dream of a Church on earth where everyone is cared for and supported. Atheist revolutionaries will say things like the future is unwritten. Catholic radicals will say in God all things are possible. You might quibble with the supposed magical thinking of the latter, but I think there can be overlap there. Each points to a space of imagination and degrees of hope that ideally let a person greet each new day, as horrible as the times might be, with a sense of security and reassurance. Some feeling that it is all worth it, or it will be, even if one cannot see it in full. Is this not the root gift of the Black spirituals composed and sung by enslaved people. [00:16:05] Matthew Remski So, wrapping up this Antifascist Dad Podcast and religion mission statement, I am reading a very somber book by the anarchist Peter Gelderloos called they Will Beat the Memory out of Forcing Nonviolence on Forgetful Movements. What strikes me most about his account of trying to find sustainability in resistance cultures is how often young people find themselves having to create culture from scratch after previous generations of activists and revolutionaries have been repressed, injured, traumatized, or jailed. All of those hardships are measures of commitment, and what I say here is no shade on that. But the thing about being fifty four and going back to Mass is that when I open my mouth to utter those prayers, I am not alone. I am reconnected with countless people around the world, of all backgrounds, and also with millennia of yearning and contemplation. We know how all of that social capital can be pulled in bad directions, but we also know how to pull back. It also has a stubborn weight to it. It does not move quickly. I think it is worth thinking closely about the places in which we find strength, because they have been cared for for generations. [00:18:25] Matthew Remski So, on to my guest for this week, Father David Inczauskis. He was born in Hinsdale, Illinois, and adopted through Catholic Charities. He was a high school valedictorian and a graduate of Wake Forest. He met the Jesuits while studying liberation theology at Oxford University in England in 2012. He has a lot of degrees. He is now a doctoral student in philosophy at Loyola University Chicago, where he focuses on Latin American liberation philosophy. Also at Loyola Chicago, he serves as chaplain to the mens volleyball team and to the Spanglish Christian Life community. I got to know about him because of his excellent liberation theology podcast, which I will link to. Then I also saw on Instagram that he is taking a leadership role in protesting the illegal detention of immigrants and migrant workers in the Chicago Broadview ICE Detention Center. They are carrying out the non violent direct action of bringing communion to ICE detainees, many of whom are Latin American Catholics. Bringing ritual bread and wine to prisoners goes way back to the origins of Christianity, to the story of the very young Saint Tarcisius, who was murdered by a mob of Roman youth for attempting to deliver communion to imprisoned Christians. I grew up with these stories of bringing the body and blood to prison or to the hospital or to the nursing home. Here is my understanding of this action. I think they are taking the Church out of the building and to the place of struggle. The Church is not the structure or the altar. It is acts of love and service. They are connecting the body of Jesus to the bodies of the incarcerated and to their own bodies. They are using a symbol of metaphysical transformation to make a direct material intervention. And they are not just carrying the communion. They are embodying it, and the life it represents, and also the death as well, because there is a non zero chance that they will be shot. So David and his friends, women and men in religious orders surrounded by laypeople, are taking a stand. And in this they join a long lineage of American religious who have stood up to fascism for over a century now. What motivates him. In our interview, he will talk through some of the implications of liberation theology. But here is the basic outline. Liberation theology is a radical recentering of Christianity around the material lives of the poor. It emerges from Latin America in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Its foundational text is Gustavo Gutierrezs A Theology of Liberation, published in 1971, which insists that spiritual salvation and social liberation are inseparable, and that poverty is not fate or divine mystery, but a product of exploitative systems for which societies are responsible. The poor are described not as objects of charity, but as subjects of history, oppressed, exploited proletariat whose suffering demands a transformed social order, not band aid reform. One core liberation theology concept is the preferential option for the poor, which becomes both a moral mandate and a structural aim. It basically says your faith, your society, and your Church are defined by how you organize life around those with the least. The theological method of liberation theology is summarized as see, judge, and act, beginning with the concrete realities of the oppressed, which are then interpreted with theological tools. Then the person organizes, along with others, for change. Liberation theology flows from observation and struggle. It does not descend from some kind of abstract doctrine. I have a big episode on liberation theology up on Conspirituality that I will link to. It is about the fact that liberation theology was such a compelling movement in the global South in the 1970s that the CIA sought to undermine it, partly by funding the expansion of evangelical missionaries in Latin America, because they were teaching obedience and the prosperity gospel. The Vatican, in low key red scare mode, helped the CIA in this effort by criticizing the liberation theologians for their reliance on Marxist analysis and their hesitance to categorically condemn revolutionary violence. But all of that is turning, slowly. Father Robert Prevo, who is now Pope Leo fourteen, is out there in the world criticizing Trump and other fascists without having to name them, because everybody knows who he is talking about. He is doing so by leaning into liberation theology with his full chest, even dedicating his first major publication to the subject of loving and serving the poor. So out in front of that, on the ground, is my guest. [00:21:23] Matthew Remski Father David Inczauskis, welcome to Antifascist Dad Podcast. [00:21:25] Father David Inczauskis Thanks so much for having me, Matthew. [00:21:29] Matthew Remski Thank you for being here. This podcast is usually about caregiving in a time of fascism from a familial angle. I am wondering if we can dub you Antifascist Father for this interview and start by understanding your vocation a little bit, and how it is similar to and dissimilar from the family life that a lot of us know. So is Antifascist Father okay for today. [00:21:52] Father David Inczauskis I certainly am an antifascist. I am against fascism, and I also am a Catholic priest, so I think that those two together make sense to me. [00:22:04] Matthew Remski Okay, so just some basic details for those who might be unfamiliar with the vocation. Straight up, do you own anything. [00:22:13] Father David Inczauskis Complicated question. I would say yes and no. I do have a private bank account that is in my name. At the same time, any money that I would earn, for example when I was a professor at Xavier University, would go into a community account, and then I would fill out a budget request that I would send to my superior, who is also attached to the account, and then that money would be deposited into my account. Right now, we are recording from my room in the Jesuit community at Ignatius House, so I do have my own bedroom as well as my own bathroom, which is great. But we share a common kitchen and common living areas. It is extraordinary, in a sense, that I live in a house with twenty five other people. So I do have that private bank account, but any money that would go in there is filtered through the superior. That is part of our vow of poverty, to have it done in that way. Any money that I receive, I do not directly receive. It goes to the community as a whole. [00:23:26] Matthew Remski Speaking of living circumstances, given the fact that you do not have a family life, as a lot of people do, do you get lonely. [00:23:38] Father David Inczauskis I think I do get lonely. But I would not say that I get especially lonely, in the sense that, as you point out, we are living in a time of great isolation. Isolation is one of the preconditions that gives rise to fascism. People crave community life. I think we are social, political beings, and part of our way of establishing meaning in this world is through community. So I consider the fact that I live in a community with twenty five other guys to be a real gift. We have Mass every day. We have a social. We have dinner together every day for about forty five minutes to an hour. Every day I am sitting at a table with four or five of my Jesuit brothers. That is extraordinary in an era that is so defined by individualism and loneliness. As a human being, I do get lonely, that is part of our experience. But I am very grateful that I live in community. Maybe that is part of the Jesuit vocation and the priestly vocation that people do not always consider. At least in the Jesuits, our way of living out the priesthood is not living in the little home next to the church where you live by yourself. In our case, we really place a strong emphasis on community life. I feel blessed in that way. [00:25:16] Matthew Remski I think that maybe it means that Jesuit community life is prefigurative of a kind of antifascist social organization. If you are saying that it reduces isolation, it is going to provide some kind of bulwark against that. [00:25:31] Father David Inczauskis I think that is right. The other part of it would be that it is an intergenerational community. Last year, I was the youngest guy in the community. This year, two guys have arrived who are even younger than I am, which is great. But it spans all the way up to priests who are in their eighties and nineties. So this is a huge blessing, I think, in a time where there are these intergenerational gaps. I feel blessed to be able to live with the wisdom of people who have much more life experience than I do. The younger guys also offer a fresh perspective. We learn a lot from each other and we have solidarity across generations, which I think is pretty rare today. [00:26:18] Matthew Remski Well, it certainly aids in cultural memory, in how we address particular problems and how we are going to go forward. That is amazing. With regard to life experiences, I just want to confess that my dad used to grumble a little bit about priests who were out of touch with family life. If they would give sermons about things that should happen domestically, he would say things like, well, they need to change a diaper or two before giving any advice or counsel. I am wondering if you have to do some kind of domestic research or community research to keep you grounded in the larger needs of the Catholic family. [00:26:57] Father David Inczauskis Yes, great question. I would have to admit that for me to give advice to parents about parenting does not really compute, as I have no life experience in that area. At the same time, I do have a family. I was adopted at birth, and I have my siblings and that family experience. My two siblings are also younger than me, and neither of them have children yet, though I will be happy, to the degree that it makes sense in our situation, to accompany them as an uncle to any nieces or nephews who may be on the way, of course. Then I think part of it is also the importance of simply having friends. It is true that if I isolate myself in the community, then I am not going to have that experience. But to the degree that a Jesuit proceeds in a more pastoral fashion and has friends outside of the Society of Jesus, lay women and men who open the doors to their family life, that changes things. This was one of my great experiences when I was in France. I worked for a group that was doing social entrepreneurship, projects that are innovative but dedicated to the common good, not enterprising for the sake of private gain, as is often the case, but for the sake of addressing some kind of community need. The director of this organization, Pauline, had me over for family vacations, and also for meals in her house. I got to know her children, and I feel like that is so important. I do not think of it as research or deliberate in that sense, but I think it is something that organically happens if a priest seeks a life that is close to the people of God. [00:28:56] Matthew Remski Here is a harder question. This is not a Catholic podcast, and there are going to be a lot of non Catholic, leftist, antifascist listeners who might have negative views of the Church, given the status of women within it, teachings on reproductive rights, policies around queerness, the handling of clerical abuse. To the extent that your vocation relates you to these views and this institution, what would you say to the non Catholic listener who is wondering what they have in common with you in the fight against ICE, for example. Or if any of these issues are a barrier for listening to what you have to say at all. [00:29:37] Father David Inczauskis I would say the Church offers a critique of capitalism that I find very powerful. Of course, I think all of this is related to the person of Jesus Christ. The Church, to the degree that it is doing what it should be doing, is going back to the person of Jesus Christ. What do we see in the person of Jesus Christ but an anti imperial critique, a critique of the domination of politics, and a certain idea of servant leadership as opposed to dominant leadership. Also obediential leadership, that leaders in the political community, to the degree that they are doing what they should be doing, should be listening and obeying the masses of the people in the political body. We also see a critique of economics. Jesus is very famous for his critique of wealth, saying that it is more likely for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to inherit the reign of God. In Jesus first major speech, what does he say. He says, blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the reign of God. I think the idea of the kingdom or reign of God has often been disaffiliated from life on earth, when actually this is precisely what Jesus Christ was all about. In the Our Father, thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. So when Jesus is saying that radical line, blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the reign of God, Jesus is offering an alternative society that not only applies to the heavenly realm. I certainly believe in the afterlife, and I believe that there will be radical changes in social life that will occur in the afterlife. But Jesus is not merely speaking about that, but also about the present. He follows that up, in Lukes gospel, with a series of woes. Woe to you who are rich. Woe to you who are filled now, you have had your fill. So we see this radical egalitarianism that is part of Jesus message. Jesus was also critical of religious authorities of his day. I think the Church, when it is at its best, preserves some of that skepticism about religious authority, because Jesus showed the way. He said that the way to lead is not as the Gentiles lead. When he says that, he means the Roman Empire. That is not the way that we do leadership. Leadership is through service. So I think laypeople in the Church should encourage their pastors to be servant leaders and listening people. This is something that Pope Francis and Pope Leo have been encouraging a lot. They have this idea that they call synodality. Synodality is the idea that the Church walks together. It is not that the priest is in a radically hierarchical relationship with the rest of the people of God, but rather that the priest has an obediential authority of service. I would also have to say that I think the Church has offered, especially in recent times, a radical critique of the climate catastrophe. We saw this in Pope Francis with the document Laudato Si, where he criticizes the relationship between capitalism, which is premised on the idea of endless growth, and our earth and its limited resources. We know that endless growth does not fit well with our finite planet, and also that increases in productivity and growth in capitalism often go along with carbon emissions and the destruction of the environment. This goes back to the simple idea that all of creation is good. The human body is good. Everything about the material world is good. When we do harm to the material world and to the ecosystem, in a way we are disrespecting the creation of God. The Catholic Church offers a critique there. So I think that the Catholic Church, in many ways, can be a partner with people who are antifascist, because we share many common goals, which have to do with equality and with a different way of relating to our environment. I believe that wherever there is conflict in society, conflict is also reproduced in the Church. There are a few different ways that people on the left can approach the Church. One way would be to totally dismiss the Church, which in a way cedes the Church to the right, and the Church becomes a Christo fascist space. Or you could say, well, I am going to not relate to or even go against what the Church is saying. But what I have been promoting, and what I think liberation theology promotes, is an idea of looking at the places where the Church and people on the left can collaborate together on common projects. Certainly one of them these days has been the struggle of migrants. I have been a little part of that movement in the defense of migrants here in Chicago who are being wrongfully detained, and wrongfully detained also on colonized land. So I think we need to see how the Catholic Church can be a partner to people on the left. In many ways today we are seeing that. [00:35:58] Matthew Remski That is a lot, Father David, and it gets us right into liberation theology. To really make this practical for listeners, let us say that you and I show up and we are active at the same ICE protest. I am sort of Catholic sympathetic, but I have strong disagreements with some of the social teachings of the Church, and I know that you represent them, but you might not have them front of mind. That might not be why you are there. After all, it is not an anti abortion protest. It is a protest against ICE. I think the real practical question is: does that come between us. And if that comes between us, do I no longer cooperate with you, and does the more rightward leaning Catholic begin to take over that space. That seems to be the crucial practical question. [00:36:59] Father David Inczauskis I think there is certainly a tendency that we see all around, which is this question of ideological purity, the idea that unless you and I agree on every issue, we are not going to be able to collaborate with each other. I do not think that this is a strong way of proceeding in terms of building power and building solidarity and building a movement. People are radically diverse in their backgrounds and their beliefs about politics and religion. So I think that, as opposed to finding ways to exclude each other, we should find ways to include each other in common struggles. That is probably a better way of approaching coalition building. We acknowledge that there are differences, but we ask: where can we find common ground in order to strategize together. I also think that, on the main issues of our day, which for me would be the struggle against capitalism and the struggle against climate change, the Catholic Church and people on the left have a large amount of common ground. We should build up power together. This is actually one of the things that is unique and important to highlight about the Latin American Church, because the Latin American Church in so many ways has shown that liberative movements in the Catholic Church can go together with broader movements, whether it is Miguel Hidalgo in the independence of Mexico from colonial powers in Europe, or the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who said that they were going to propose a humanist socialism that is also Christian. We have seen, throughout the history of Latin America, that in radical ways the Church and revolutionary movements can come together to promote the common good. I think that the United States Church can learn from that, from both sides. What does the Catholic Church have to learn and grow into to be a better partner to liberation movements. And how can liberation movements avoid excluding Catholics and Christians and people of other religions who are more than happy to join forces. [00:39:49] Matthew Remski Getting right down to how all of your background and your facility with and love for liberation theology brings you to the present moment, why has it been important for you to participate in these efforts to bring the Eucharist to detainees in that Chicago ICE facility. [00:40:09] Father David Inczauskis As the Coalition for Spiritual and Public Leadership, we have articulated three goals that we are seeking as we attempt to bring communion to detainees in Broadview. The first one would be simply that we believe in the fundamental human right for people to freely exercise their religion. Communion is, for Catholics, the source and summit of our faith. It is integral to who we are, and it brings comfort, strength, solidarity, and it unites us as one body. So I would say that for those who are detained, that simple act of communion, as people have been reminding me and our movement, really shows the solidarity and humanity of the people who are detained in that facility. It highlights that humanity and connectedness, which brings unity in the Church. So that is one, for the sake of the detainees and their fundamental right to the free exercise of religion. The other part is that we know we are living in an era in which the meaning of Christianity is very contested. It always has been contested, but I think we are seeing it in a particular way in this moment. What we want to show is that the Catholic Church is not going to be silent in the face of the oppression of our migrant sisters and brothers. So it is also a public witness, where the Church is giving witness for the whole country, and also for the Trump administration, to see that we are not going to allow this to happen without resisting. One of the first steps in resistance is to do it in a peaceful and humble manner. What we have seen is that that has not worked in this case, which demonstrates that we should potentially consider the next step, which is civil disobedience. But what it does show is that we have tried, and I think the public has seen this. The great act of humility that occurred in this moment, when my brother priests and sisters and lay people very humbly communicated with the Illinois State Police, who relayed the message to ICE, and ICE said no. Then, humbly, they turned around and entered into a moment of song and prayer. Seeing that humility also speaks volumes to the general public. It shows that something very simple and reasonable has been tried and not listened to. [00:43:14] Matthew Remski So there is something strategic about the performance of this first attempt and what it displays. The basis for wanting to come to these detainees is religious freedom and nurturance, and you are being turned away. Obviously you are not a danger to the state. Obviously you are not a danger to the facility. The strategy is in showing the public that a very reasonable and actually generous appeal is being turned away. [00:43:46] Father David Inczauskis Yes, that is right. I wish that they would have let us in. In fact, that is the primary intention. Some people, especially those who are more on the Catholic right, have said that we are using the Eucharist as a political football. I do not think this is the case. The Catholic Church, throughout the world, offers communion to detainees and prisoners every day. What was rendered political in this moment was the rejection. If ICE had simply let us into the facility to do what the Catholic Church does every day, then this would not have been a particularly political moment. But they made the decision to deny that right. What it also does is reveal something. The public asks the question, why are they being denied this. We know that the answer is that those who are inside that facility are being treated in such horrible, inhumane conditions that even the simple act of allowing a nun and a priest into that facility to see what is going on inside runs the risk of them giving a first person account to the public about what they have seen inside. Right now, the reports that we have about the conditions inside that facility are coming from people who were detained wrongfully and then released, maybe because they are United States citizens, for example, or from people who were deported and then, from Mexico or from Honduras, give a report about the conditions inside. Senator Dick Durbin, Senator Tammy Duckworth, they are not allowed inside this facility. Really the only public personality who has been allowed in this facility is Kristi Noem, whose opinion we do not trust at all, and we have seen images of her posing in front of detainees treated in horrible conditions in El Salvador. Why would we expect anything different in the suburbs of Chicago. The last reason that we are doing what we are doing is that we want to bring strength and solidarity to ourselves. We call upon grace. This is a moment of prayer and we need strength in order to persevere in this struggle. I do not know about you, but I cannot do this alone. This is a spiritual struggle, and it is a struggle in our hearts as well. Can I muster enough courage in order to resist. That is where I call upon God. We are also strengthened by gathering together. When you see two thousand fellow Catholics outside of this facility, singing and praying together, you say, I am not alone in this struggle. It gives me the courage to maybe even take the next, more radical steps that we need to take to resist. [00:47:29] Matthew Remski So that is the show, folks, except for Fascist Dad of the Week. [00:47:37] Reporter I have your statement about the new Epstein emails that have been released by House Democrats. Separate from why you believe the emails were made public, can you address their substance. Did the President ever spend hours at Jeffrey Epsteins house with a victim. [00:47:55] Karoline Leavitt These emails prove absolutely nothing other than the fact that President Trump did nothing wrong. [00:48:00] Matthew Remski Okay, gender bending this time, because fascist dad energy is not about the genitals, folks. There are lots of ways to be a fascist dad, and sometimes that means serving fascist dad superior. So yes, this is White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, lying her soul into oblivion about Trumps relationship to Jeffrey Epstein, and doing so through layers of fake dignity. I just had to put her up front this week for a little reality check on my liberation theology nerding out. Because, I mean, she is a Catholic too, and at twenty eight, she has given her whole life over to lying so that a decrepit sex criminal can continue to accumulate power. In some ways, Karoline is the most tragic type of fascist, the woman toady in a woman hating administration who will fawn and debase herself lower and lower every day until she is all used up and the leader throws her away. But I guess for Karoline there is always confession. Thanks for listening, everyone. We will see you on Patreon, or back here on the main feed.