💬 The Rubin Recap: The Sunday return to normalcy

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No adults in the room to call out the radical left?

The entire focus of this Sunday edition of the newsletter has been on how normalcy is gradually washing over American culture since Donald Trump returned to office. America is a big, complex country and it’s not like normalcy just returned in a tidal wave when Trump was sworn in to a second term on January 20, 2025.

Trump has had many successes in doing what he can do to bring back the sense of normalcy lost during the Biden era. But there are some ways in which the perversions of the Biden era are still with us, and festering. Look at what happened this week with a saga that started as one of the last gasps of Biden’s America, in December 2024.

This week, at a pre-trial hearing for Luigi Mangione, who is charged with murder in the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City a year-and-a-half ago, several of his supporters showed up at court sporting press credentials issued by the mayor’s office and spouting some of the most insane rhetoric you’ve heard this side of Hasan Piker.

These young women didn’t hold back. Here are some choice quotes:

• “I’m saying f**k Brian Thompson. I don’t give a flying f**k that he died.”

• "His children are better off without him. They need to learn not to be like their dad."

• “Enjoy the blood money, kids.”

• “Brian Thompson was a terrorist.”

Believe it or not, it actually gets worse than that. Like I said on X when I saw the video of them:

It should come as no surprise that these “Mangionistas,” as they call themselves, are also major fans of Zohran Mamdani and that, because they are, he’s refusing to revoke their press passes.

With no adults — or at best, maybe one — in the party to rein this sort of extremist behavior in, I can only imagine more political violence is in our future.

I prefer for this edition of the newsletter to have a more optimistic outlook, but in recognizing all the ways in which normalcy is returning, it’s just as important to do the inverse — and point out where our culture is stubbornly remaining abnormal. And there is nothing normal about the way some people are hailing Mangione as some sort of hero.

Bishop Robert Barron on the pope, Trump, American culture and more

This week’s sit-down interview is an interesting one in that I reunited with an old friend from my L.A. days to make an appearance on his show, and while I was there, we turned things around and I interviewed him for an hour for my show. The great Bishop Robert Barron, founder of the Catholic ministry Word on Fire, is now the bishop of the Winona-Rochester Diocese in Minnesota.

We chopped it up a range of topics, including the culture wars and icons of American culture like Johnny Carson, Phil Donahue and William F. Buckley, the abandonment of religion in America, as well as illegal immigration. What I was really interested in hearing about, since he’s one of the prominent Catholic leaders in the U.S., is the recent feud between Pope Leo and President Trump. He explained why he “took Trump to task” publicly in the middle of the feud, and how he thought both sides could’ve handled things more gracefully. Bishop Barron’s ministry is called Word on Fire, and this conversation was on 🔥