The Megyn Kelly Show - Antifa's Violent Rise and Next Move, with Andy Ngo and Shelby Talcott | Ep. 67

Episode Date: February 22, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Andy Ngo, author of the New York Times best-selling book "Unmasked," and Shelby Talcott, reporter for The Daily Caller, to talk about the history of antifa in the United States and around the world, the violent rise of antifa and clashes during 2020, how antifa communicates and what their goals are, the political affiliation of antifa, antifa's next move, the relationship between antifa and Black Lives Matter, what it was like to cover antifa and the unrest last summer, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShowFind out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Today on the program, we've got Andy Ngo and Shelby Talcott. Now, Andy is now a New York Times bestselling author of the book Unmasked. It's all about Antifa. And Shelby is a reporter, young, up-and-coming, whippersnapper reporter for the Daily Caller who has found herself right in the middle of all the melees that we've been watching over the past year, especially over the summer of unrest. And I do mean right in the middle of them and the most infamous of them.

So we're going to get into what is this group? What is Antifa? How does it operate in real life with the reporters who are actually on the ground covering it and not just the ones who swing by in the middle of the night to do a live shot and look good on CNN? These are actual reporters who have been following Antifa protest after protest, riot after riot. What is the truth? Is it as Joe Biden says, this is an idea, not an organization? Or is it actually an organization that has tactical moves, means of communicating, and rather disturbing approaches to weaponry and ideology? We're going to get into all of it and you will be a lot smarter about Antifa when we are done with this hour. But first, I have to talk about something fun,

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I'm like, who is that guy? And I started to read more about you. Then I saw you get attacked. And I was like, holy shit, I need to know who this is. So it's an honor to have you here. Thank you for doing this. Thank you. And congratulations on the success of the podcast. Thank you very much. And congrats on the success of your book. It is called Unmasked, Inside Antifa's Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy. And it's hard to find true experts on this group, Antifa. I think most of us regular folks don't totally understand it, and you're going to help us

understand it. But before we get to your book, let's just talk about you so the audience knows who you are. You're 33 years old. Your parents immigrated to America from Vietnam in 1978. And where did you grow up? I grew up primarily in Portland. And somehow, notwithstanding that, you wound up, quote, center right. That's how you describe your politics. How on earth did that happen? So I think, well, it goes back to actually when I was a student journalist,

when I was a graduate student at Portland State University. And Megan, at that time and then, I have just admired your journalism for so many years. And I think what I was motivated to do was to pursue the stories that I didn't see being told. And at that time, as a student journalist, what all my peers and editors were telling me is that Trump supporters are racist and everything that we've heard now for more than four years.

And it was much more of a nuanced picture when I actually got to interact with students who for whatever reasons were right of center and were quiet about it and eventually I think more and more I moved more to the center right rather than libertarian which is how I identified before and I got started on the Antifa beat in November of 2016 when I was on assignment to cover the protest reactions in Portland. So on that night in November, tens of thousands of Portlanders took out because they could not a faction of them that dressed head to toe in black and carrying melee weapons. And they destroyed numerous businesses, property, they started fires.

And that was the first time I came face to face with Antifa. But I didn't know who or what they were at that time. But it was quite shocking to see that level of organized violence taking place in my hometown. As you're watching it, you're thinking, all right, so there seems to be a collection of people here who are organized, who are not sort of grassroots protesters, but maybe more sophisticated than that. And at that point, you didn't know that they were part of this group called Antifa. And so how did you go about figuring that out and then getting to the bottom of what Antifa is? Great question, Megan. So the headlines that were

coming out in Portland at that time, and for the next four years, were that these were, quote unquote, anti-fascist taking to the streets to oppose white supremacy and neo-Nazism in the far right. But what I was seeing were people brandishing symbols of an organization, it said anti-fascist action. And they have this logo, the two flags, a black flag and a red flag. And I was listening to the chants and I could tell there was a coherent ideology behind what they were doing, that this wasn't just a grassroots spur of the moment anti-racist protest as we were being led to believe by the headlines. And the more I looked into them, the more their violence was becoming embedded in Portland as well as other cities. So from 2017 on to 2020,

the violence really did become routine on the streets. We were having monthly street brawls of far-left people fighting Trump supporters, and they became really bloody and lots of violence. And again, the media coverage was not informing the public on who these people actually were. And the more I looked into the ideology, I saw that I learned that these were anarchist communists who were using the label and brand of anti-fascism to hide and cover for a much more extremist political ideology and agenda. Antifa, according to your book, you describe it as a

violent extremist movement attacking all kinds of targets under the guise of anti-fascism. But what they really want, you say, is to destroy America. What do you mean by that? Yeah, that sounds like hyperbole and really dramatic. But if you look at their literature, and it's available on all their various think tanks and websites and their social media, and they also give it out at their riots and also when they create autonomous zones. The literature provides a basis for why the United States is not a legitimate state and not only that it needs to be, that it cannot be reformed, that it must be destroyed. And they call America a fascist imperialistic state, and they view free markets and freedom of expressions as vectors for fascism to spread. So they have this particular view and interpretation of

the 20th century that if Hitler and the Nazis had never been allowed to speak, had never been allowed to organize in public, that the Holocaust would have been averted. So they hold a very extreme view, as you see, and they're not just anti-freedom of expression. They believe that the response to ideas that they don't like is to respond using violence against their targets. So were they lying in wait all this time? I mean, I'm sure they existed prior to this summer of unrest, but describe what they were doing prior to that. Antifa in the United States have been around since the 80s,

and the original first Antifa started in the end four years in Germany during the Weimar Republic and capital A Antifa and it was a paramilitary group of the German Communist Party and at that time the people that they were calling fascists weren't just the brown shirts but also the social democrats the governing center-left party. So from its inception, this label of fascism has always been applied to any political opponent. And when East Germany was created as a communist state after World War II, they actually instituted some of this so-called anti-fascist ideology at the state level. And what they developed was essentially they called America in the West fascism. When they built the Berlin Wall, it was called the anti-fascist defense barrier. So there's decades going back of history of how anti-fascism quote unquote doesn't mean actually what it

sounds like how but rather to the far left it's applied not just to liberals but anybody who is a political ideological opponent to them so if you if you don't want to destroy america you're on the enemy's list so so i don't know i maybe it's just me because i don't want to destroy America, you're on the enemy's list. So so I don't know, I maybe it's just me because I don't remember hearing that much about these guys prior to this summer. And then it was like, they were everywhere. And then there was a real question about how much of the violence at these BLM riots we saw was caused by BLM protesters and how much was caused by Antifa. Do you have any any sense for that? Because I, I, I read in one of the unkind and not surprisingly, your book is not being nicely reviewed, even though it's at the

top of the bestseller list, right? Because of course, the leftist media doesn't like anything talking about Antifa. But I read a stat in one of those articles that said, the Center for Strategic and International Studies came out finding that Antifa had, quote, a minor role in the violence that did occur over the summer of unrest, most of which was driven by a local autonomous group of actors, and that the organization's threat was relatively small. Do you agree with that? No, I don't agree with that. Because so the way that Antifa is organized, one of the common misconceptions is that some people think it is a single organization, capital A, and that is structured in a traditional hierarchical way. That's not how they're organized. So when Biden last year during a debate echoed the head of the FBI by saying Antifa is an ideology, that's not incorrect, but it's just an incomplete statement. So in addition

to being an ideology, an ideology of anarchist communism, extremist anarchist communism, it's also made up of networks of groups and cells that are organized around a common ideology and they operate primarily autonomously which makes dismantling very hard their communications are done on encrypted chats like chat applications like signal so there's always plausible deniability for their involvement and usually where they have had the most success is when they embed themselves in larger demonstrations in turn protests into riots so you asked a moment ago it

seems like they kind of just come out of nowhere and I was saying that they've been around on the fringes of the far left in the United States since the 80s. But starting in 2016, they were really able to move into the mainstream left because they had the legitimacy that was given by the mainstream media, the legacy media, and journalists and politicians who are now talking about the election of Trump signal that we were on the cusp of another Holocaust, that this is American fascism that people needed to resist. They were using all these words of war, like people like AOC who sound a lot like the her messages sometimes sound very similar to those we hear from Antifa. Exactly. And I write about in the book how there are politicians in the Democrat Party, high level politicians who have at best been provided rhetoric that is encouraging to Antifa

and at worst has actually encouraged people to donate to some of these campaigns that provide legal aid to accuse rioters. And it's not just AOC who's done that for a riot that happened in Boston, but now VP Kamala Harris has infamously tweeted out support for the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which bailed out every single person who wasn't just accused of rioting in Minnesota last year, but also accused of attempted rape, attempted murder, and other really heinous crimes. Oh, no, that's crazy talk. I mean, when she did that and others, I remember Justin Timberlake also offered to bail out. It's like, do you understand what you're supporting? You're not supporting Black lives. You're supporting violence and the murder of black lives. Your book

points out that most of those who were killed in this summer of violence we experienced were black. And no one seems to want to deal with that fact. But this is not about protecting black lives. This movement, they hurt people with impunity. Now, just to jump back to AOC for a second, because you point this out in your book that she talks about how, you know, she wants to stop fascism and that's what Trump represents. And that she routinely calls for, I'm reading from your book now, the abolishment of ICE, defunding police and ending capitalism. And that's exactly what Antifa wants and some chapters of Black Lives Matter wants. Exactly. So Antifa have some longer term goals.

Abolishing the U.S. is obviously quite a grand goal. But they have certain things that they are doing in the meantime, and one of which is to completely delegitimize the rule of law, which is why they're attacking a lot of these institutions that represent like border enforcement, police, etc. And as for AOC,

it's really been shocking to see how her really radical and extreme language, such as referring to border detention centers as concentration camps. Those same words were repeated by Willem van Spronsen, which is an Antifa extremist who launched a firebomb attack in Tacoma, Washington in 2019. He came armed with a rifle and homemade incendiary devices and blew up a vehicle and tried to blow up, according to police, a 500-gallon

propane tank that was attached to the building. And he was shot dead, and he left behind a manifesto that in part quoted from AOC. But again, these politicians who are now focusing on language and incitement around Trump, they're never held accountable for their incitement to violence. And so you point out in the book that there's a relation, of course, because we saw Antifa coming out at the BLM protests over the summers, you know, that the riots were turned into riots. That's where Antifa gets involved.

And there's a quote in the book from Patrice Cullors, one of the founders of BLM, saying, our task is not only to abolish prisons, policing, and militarization, we must also demand reparations. She called the United States the most extensive purveyor of human rights atrocities at home and abroad, and called for the dismantling of the United States. Basically, this is the quote of abolition means no borders. Abolition means no border patrol. Abolition means no immigration and customs enforcement. I mean, that sounds like AOC. AOC sounds like Antifa. And these sort of the BLM, the Antifa protesters, some of these far left Democrat politicians are it's no accident that they have the same messaging and that we're hearing more and more about these mantras. And sure enough. Like legitimate politicians push for the elimination of ICE,

right, and like Joe Biden completely changing our border policy now that he's taken over and i and i just wonder whether you think they've made huge progress over the past six months they have i think um people fail to recognize how um wise some of the anti-foot thinkers actually are in some of the strategies obviously the media focuses a lot on the the street violence because it's visceral and shocking when it's called a video but the street violence is actually just one part of what they do the ideology also includes things about trying to attack from within uh using in some cases, legal democratic election process. So you have people elected to city councils in Portland, in Seattle, in Minneapolis and other cities who are echoing Antifa propaganda talking points about abolishing police, essentially

mainstreaming their ideology. That's the most important thing that they're doing in having allies who are elected officials, is this mainstreaming. Because Antifa, they're so extreme that they have to be whitewashed and legitimized in the wider left in order to be able to be palatable and to be able to introduce their ideology incrementally to people and to be palatable and to be able to introduce their ideology incrementally to people and to radicalize them. So it's been no surprise that they've been able to sort of just explode as an American phenomenon four years ago because we were being fed day in and day out that

we were now living under American fascism and that people had to resist by any means necessary. And all the political violence that was being done on the left was being incrementally tolerated. I was really disturbed initially when people were celebrating the punch a Nazi memes. I mean, at that time, I recognize that it's, you know, can be easy to sort of just turn a blind eye when like an odious figure gets punched, right? But the messaging behind that was that it was okay to inflict violence against people who are quote unquote Nazis. And you saw this label who's a fascist or a Nazi being being applied very very broadly uh which led to more violence throughout the next few years and then through 2020 in my view we had insurrections attempted

in parts of uh american urban areas and it was all excused and kind of now being i feel like we're being gaslit it's like all the focus on the 6th of January has overlooked the violence that was magnitudes larger, not just in terms of deaths and injuries, but the destruction to livelihoods and billions of dollars to the American economy. That's no accident. That's no accident. That's what the Democrats wanted. And that's what the media wanted, was to move on from the rioting and the death that we saw over the summer and move back to a place that they feel most comfortable, which is blaming Trump supporters for being racist, white supremacist, awful, terrible people. And, you know, you point

out correctly, I think, how these goals, Antifa's goals, and some of the BLM goals, um, have backfired. We've seen already, right? You had Minneapolis and its attempt to defund its police fall apart entirely. Already they're reversing it. Portland, Oregon, you point out in the book, they, they, someone thought it would be a good idea to dismantle the quote gun violence reduction team. Someone's like, get, let's get, yeah, those guys trying to reduce gun violence, get rid of them. And guess what happened when they did that? Why don't you tell the audience? Yes, we had skyrocketing shootings in Portland in unprecedented levels in recent decades for shooting homicides. And this is not a phenomenon that's unique just to Portland. It's across America.

There are really severe consequences to this implementation of the BLM Antifa agenda. And what they're trying to do is really to destabilize local areas and to create power vacuums. This wholesale demoralizing of police has had really profound effects. I think you can look in the Pacific Northwest, which is where I'm most familiar. You're having like low record levels of low number of officers, record high numbers of resignations and early retirements. And even when police want to respond to riots that are happening on the streets, which are still happening to this day in Seattle and Portland, there is just not the resources to respond. So people are really suffering.

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That's blindsgalore.com. And they're out there not just looting and burning things, which is bad enough. I mean, they're burning police headquarters, city buildings. This is not this is legit. I mean, there absolutely could be loss of life and there has been. But I was shocked to see in the book some of the tactics that they use and the the weapons that they that they use and the weapons that they work that you wouldn't know is a weapon, like the umbrellas, the water bottles. Can you just talk a little bit about the weapons that they bring with them? Yeah. So to put this into context, so people are very familiar with what happened on 6th of January in Capitol Hill. All that and worse happened

night after night after night for more than 120 days in Portland. And Portland is a major American city. It's one of the largest ones in the Pacific Northwest. And night after night, what I was seeing is that people dressed in the same black uniforms were bringing knives, homemade explosives, guns to their riots. And they were setting fires to buildings where people were inside. In July, when a lot of the parachute journalists from D.C., New York, came to Portland to cover some of the rioting, the Antifa, night after night, were trying to burn down a federal courthouse.

Like that, that's a big deal. And they were throwing these modified firework explosives to injure the federal officers. And Ken Cuccinelli last year had gave testimony to the Senate, where he was talking about the really severe injuries that the officers had to deal with, including PTSD, by the way. And the response in the press, the headlines and the response from even the governor and the senators in Oregon and other places were that they were describing the officers as Trump's secret police and occupying force, Gestapo. And the pictures that they had, this was such a fascinating window into how propaganda is made in real time. So all these people with cameras and photos,

they were photographing people holding things that looked relatively innocuous, such projectiles, such as water bottles or them holding umbrellas but as police noted in Portland some of the umbrellas were affixed with small knives at the end of the sticks at the end of their umbrellas the water bottles were frozen solid and they were using that to throw hurl it at police officers faces heads. They were buying these lasers through online websites, lasers that are capable of causing permanent eye vision damage. And they had a whole brigade set up that would target on a single victim. So eye injuries are one of the things that Ken Cuccinelli had reported.

And this was being done day in and day out. And in July, when the federal officers finally withdrew some of their numbers at the courthouse, I remember the media headlines were saying that with the police gone, that the problems are going to go away. Everything was their fault. No, what happened next was the rioters then moved to residential areas of Portland and set fires to police stations. This is gross, but the behavior on Capitol Hill the day of the riot was awful in every way. But one of the things that got coverage, just because it was so desecrating to such an important and special place,

was how people were smearing feces on the walls of the US Capitol building. That's one of the reasons why it jumped out to me in your book, what Antifa does with balloons. Can you speak to that? Yeah. So they made all these homemade projectiles in addition to the things I mentioned. But in some of the police reports that were put out locally, water balloons are being filled with a slush mixture of faces and water, and that was being hurled at officers. They were also filling water balloons with paint, and that was used to obscure the visions of police. And they were also creating sort of like mini explosive devices by using light bulbs and

throwing them filled with paint at the faces of police. So the type of violence that they were doing didn't require a high level of sophistication, but they were able to do severe damage. And on top of that, they came armed with guns. And at the end of August in Portland, one of the so-called self-styled Antifa security people ended up stalking out a Trump supporter in downtown Portland and shooting him point blank dead. And then he fled to another state before later getting killed by federal authorities. So this ideology, extremism, has produced death. And I get so frustrated whenever I keep seeing this lie repeated by politicians and in various biased publications that say Antifa has killed nobody.

Like, that's empirically false. And then you can also look at the trail of misery that they've caused. And that's significant. And it's just, it makes me so sick that this violent extremism, essentially terroristic acts, are being excused because of people doing it or saying they're doing it in the name of anti-racism and anti-fascism. So what's incredible is they're using all these tactics. I can't imagine what it's like to be a police officer in Portland. Oh, good gracious, those poor men and women having to deal with all of this. And then you point out that they they're very clever.

They use protesters who are there as human shields. They know when the cameras are running. They know how to make themselves look like they're not the aggressors. They're savvy. But in the meantime, what you refer to as the parachute journalists who just parachute in and try to, you know, I covered the riot, come back and issue reports like we saw in the Washington Post, which is, it was mostly unremarkable. And then you've got places like the Oregonian, which you point out in the book, won't even print the mugshots of the Antifa folks who have been

arrested or the BLM folks. I guess they think it's racist. So you've got a complicit media that runs cover for them. And we saw it too when Joe Biden said, right, it's just an idea. It's not an organization. And they all ran cover to say, oh, that's true. That's true. That's true. So you have a media that's really not interested in the violence that they're perpetuating or the truth about this group? Yeah, I think people don't appreciate how serious things got just months ago. I mean, BLN and Antifa extremists in Seattle, which is the largest city in the Pacific Northwest, they actually took over six blocks of city property and created a hard border with checkpoints that were manned by their security who were brandishing semi-auto rifles and pistols and other things. And he

created essentially a hostage situation for the thousands of people who lived in that area. And that was allowed to go on for three weeks by the mayor of Seattle and the governor of Washington state. And that devolved very quickly into nightly violence, shootings, attempted rape, mass vandalism, and murders. And people just seem to, I mean, the reporting at the time, I remember it was being described as a block party atmosphere. These were journalists who were from corporate media who came in with their security. And then at night they would leave and they didn't see all these other things that were happening. And one thing that I didn't see reported anywhere about or write about in the book was in CHAZ, the so-called autonomous zone that existed in Seattle last summer.

They have these literature booths set up where they were distributing booklets that they printed out. And the ideas contained within those pages are so extreme. It's like what you would find, I think, for like a jihadist group, like things that were providing sort of the ideological and theoretical justification for political violence against other people, why you should use human body shields, how to barricade yourself within a building, prevent police from getting inside, how to create homemade weapons. This was being given out, I saw, to like youth and even kids. It was being passed out like candy.

And the response from the mayor, at least well until this occupation, was to go and CNN and to say to Chris Cuomo that this could be a summer of love. Oh, good gracious. And same with the Portland mayor, Wheeler. That guy was a hot mess. He was begging for their approval. It wasn't there for the taking. And at the end of, you know, his summer on the knee, he announced he's moving, right?

Is that, do I have my facts right? Yeah. So one misconception that exists on the right is people think that Antifa are Democrat voters, that they support Democrat parties. Now, they tolerate some Democrat politicians, particularly AOC. But by and large, they don't recognize any American government. They view the entire United States as, in all its institutions, as in his city and to grow and to establish a sort of apparatus in a blueprint that was replicated in other nearby cities. And he really seemed to kind of want to appease them. And that never works. He can never appease them. They rioted outside his home. They set the condo where he was at on fire,

which, by the way, is occupied by dozens of other families. And in response, Wheeler, who's also the police commissioner, by the way, just simply announced that he was moving. And I think what this is emblematic of is all these politicians like Wheeler, Jenny Durkin's not running for re-election, and Tafel showed outside of her house. These politicians like Wheeler, Jenny Durkan is not running for reelection, and Tafel showed outside of her house. They have the resources to go on and have a nice life. But the wake of the consequences of their political decisions

and their poor leadership are really long-lasting for the people who remain in the cities where they were elected to power. Of course, of course. You know, we talked about the parachute journalists. You're not one of them. I mean, half the reason we know about this group is because of you, because you just continue to stay on it. You saw a thing. You did exactly what a good reporter is supposed to do. You saw a thing. You asked questions about the thing. You investigated the thing. You, I won't say infiltrated the thing, but you went where they went and covered the thing. This moving sort of blob that we now know as Antifa, which is growing and getting more organized and very savvy and working the media and so on.

And as a result of all this, you became, as you described yourself, their public enemy number one. And this is a dangerous group to have as one's enemy, as you've outlined. And indeed, you were attacked. You were physically attacked in June of 2019. Um, it was a, it was a proud boys event. These, I don't, I confess, I don't totally understand proud boys. I mean, the left says it's a white supremacist group and you see it's run by a black man. I don't actually understand what it is. Maybe you can enlighten me, but they showed up as like, I guess on the other side is how they would see themselves and you were attacked so before we get to the attack on you can you

explain what's proud boys exactly probably uh i think they get the reporting in the legacy press on proud boys is really inaccurate and they repeat a lot of the really inflammatory lies from those who oppose any pro-trump type of organization so proud boys is a right-wing fraternity style type fruit they do social events um and i think probably they do things that are provocative in terms of like holding pro-Trump rallies in cities that are predominantly blue, like Portland and Seattle and other urban areas. And through the years, some of their members have been involved in these brawls that would frequently happen. Antifa would come out to fight them and they'd fight back. Some of their members have been convicted or are facing current charges for alleged involvement. I know they're accused of having a role in the Capitol Hill riot.

I think there's a lot to be critical of what they do. But spreading lies about the organization, such as describing them as a neo-Nazi terrorist organization, is not only unhelpful, it actually motivates people on the left to come out and to respond in kind. So if anything, I think the poor reporting on Proud Boys has caused counter reactions that have led to growing street brawls over the past few years. Okay, so you're there to cover, you know, what promises to be a newsworthy event. And how were you attacked? Because it made national news. It was everywhere, what happened to you. So what happened?

In 2018, I started becoming a target for Antifa after I wrote a piece that was published in the Wall Street Journal about their occupation during the summer of the local ICE facility in Portland. And they had took over the exterior of the building in the early days and actually had created another hostage situation where staff inside could not actually leave because the exits were blocked. They ended up establishing this area that was an encampment that became a life safety issue. And after several weeks, the city was forced to dismantle it. And so I wrote about everything that was happening, how the residents of that community were terrorized by these people who the Antifa were doing patrols on the streets.

And they would openly brandish batons and other weapons to intimidate the public. And so that put me on their list of unfriendly media. They're targeting me, continue to escalate. And then in the summer of 2019 was when that attack happened. It was a very large Antifa and Democratic Socialists of America gathering to pose what they said was a Proud Boy event. There were about maybe 10, between 10 and 20 Proud Boys who were waving flags in another part of downtown. And I came there, as I had done many times, to document a newsworthy event that was happening in public with my cameras. And halfway through the day, I was punched repeatedly in the head suddenly and kicked.

And then when I thought that was done, I was just trying to get away. It happened right in front of the central police station, but there were no police, which by that point was pretty normal for Portland. The Antifa can just shut down traffic, assault drivers, and do it with impunity. But as I was trying to walk away, that's when they threw all these liquids on me to blind me and to humiliate me. And that's the photos and videos you see of me covered in all that stuff. Nobody's been arrested over that. It's been more than a year and a half since that happened. And the violence in Portland has continued to escalate.

My warnings to public officials about this threat that we were facing were ignored. And I mean, it gave rise to their four-month campaign of terror last year. What was in the, quote, milkshake that they threw on you? I actually don't know. So the Portland police at that time have put out a tweet based on intel they received that some of the milkshakes may have been tainted with quick drying cement, but they never collected a sample so it was never definitively confirmed. And so I had abrasions all over my face and the liquids were seeping in and it really felt like a burning sensation. And I know that quick drawing cement can be caustic, but I also

had cuts all over so I don't know which was which. I was hospitalized, I had a brain hemorrhage, but I assume that was because of the repeated punches to the head into the eyes that they cause. Can I just ask you, because one of the more infuriating things I've read recently is the LA Times review of your book, your best selling, it's number five now on the nonfiction hardcover New York Times list, despite boycotts, despite so much pushback for people who didn't want this book to see the light of day. It's risen to the top. And this LA Times book review, it will surprise no one that they didn't like the book, right? Given all the discussions we've had. But this guy, and you know what? I don't always name

the journalists. I don't always name the journalists. I don't know. It's almost like a professional courtesy. I just, when you call somebody up by name, I just, for my, for me, that's a higher bar. You have to be a real prick for me to mention you by name. His name is Alexander Nazaryan, N-A-Z-A-R-Y-A-N. And he's talking about this incident. And let me just read you part of what he writes.

Noh's fame, such as it is, stems from a June 2019 Donnybrook in Portland, in the course of which Antifa activists assailed him with a thrown milkshake. Noh claimed the milkshake contained concrete. Far more likely, it was a vegan blend heavy on cashew butter. Screw you, Alexander. I guarantee you weren't there, had nothing thrown on you and had no injuries. Instead, you sat in some wingback chair made out of leather trying

to find fault with somebody else's on the scene reporting who got attacked and was hospitalized. Okay. So that's just an aside. Then he goes on and says, no, it was punched and kicked as well. He claims to have suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. The violence was obviously criminal. What goes on mentioned is that no had a history of embedding with right-wing groups, including, according to persuasive allegations he has denied, the white supremacist outfit Patriot Prayer that provoke Antifa into the very fights no-then-films. Get it? So you're not the victim, even when you are the victim. This must somehow be something you asked for, Andy, because you've embedded with a group that, according to Alexander, has white supremacist ties. And

there are persuasive allegations that you're part of this group that provokes Antifa. So to you and your book, there's no evidence to support anything he says. There's no evidence to support his vegan butter accusation trying to diminish you. Right. And by the way, not for nothing, but you're an openly gay man. So in any other circumstance, you know, trying to like make light of your injuries and you're taking this seriously would be seen as an anti-gay attack, right? They're trying to make you seem, oh, too weak to withstand the milkshake. All the rules are different though, because you're writing about a group he wants to protect. So can I just ask you what your reaction is to Alexander Nazarian?

So Alexander is the White House correspondent for Yahoo News, and I was surprised that for somebody who works as a White House reporter that he used such inflammatory language in his writings. In addition to what you read, there's another point in the review where he says that my book would make hair gurgles proud um that type of i mean i i i just i don't think it's appropriate to make that type of uh flippant remark um just like so casually um i mean soon after he wrote that review he had a piece come out in The Atlantic where he was describing himself, comparing himself as a White House correspondent under the Trump administration on somebody who was like a World War II soldier in Europe. So, you know, these are people who think so highly of themselves and think they're so brave and diminish the works of other people that they look down on. This accusation that he said that is credible about me embedding with the far right, you know, that came from an interview that was published in a left-wing Portland paper on a blog site where the author gave anonymity to a person who made that completely baseless claim. And I have absolutely no way of confronting my

accuser. And so it's made me, to see me last year, these things were then repeated and like the Rolling Stone and and salon and all these other bigger publications and then they become what people see when they google my name they it's because these accusations are then kind of at the forefront of my wikipedia entry and it's just like it made me really like i i never liked it when trump described the press as the enemy of the people. But then when you're seeing what some of these people who work as professional journalists, what they do to really try to destroy somebody they don't even know, and they do it in such a dishonest way, it makes me understand what Trump's sentiment was when he made that statement. I don't know anything about Patriot Prayer or what they stand for. I know there are some right wing group and that they've been involved in some attacks. But what I'm objecting to is the attempt to tie you to them when, as far as I can see,

the evidence is simply that you covered them. And I read Reason magazine all the time. Robby Soev over there is really great in his reporting. And he said he watched the video repeatedly of you, like with this group. This is the evidence of your support for this group. And he says, this is quoting from him. The message coming from left of center media was clear. Patriot prayer planned this cider riot attack. No was tactically involved. And this video proves it. The problem of course, is that the video, which mostly depicts a small group of

people standing around, discusses which side of the street they should walk on when, and if they approach Antifa and conversing with the undercover reporter proves nothing of the kind he says i have watched this thing from start to finish five times and it does not even establish that the group of right-wing agitators planned an attack let alone that no was aware of such a plot indeed the portland mercury article that receives such rave reviews from the daily beast vice Matters and others makes little effort to explain what was so damning about the video. Like what? So on this, they try to diminish you.

They try to discredit you. And why? Because you've had the guts to get in there and report on this group in a way they find objectionable. I just, even when you're the subject of violence, they mock you. It's wrong. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to explain this particular smear that has been used to try to discredit me. And thanks for looking further into it, because most people don't. They just see the headlines from salon or buzzfeed or daily beast or rolling stone and then they think that it's true and um it's you know i as a as a journalist who started off as a student journalist i made many mistakes on how to issue corrections before and all that that's part of

what it means to to be a journalist and a reporter. It's so frustrating that because of these smear merchants who work in the press, they define you around mistakes that you acknowledge and correct, whereas what they do and their friends and allies, they can essentially fail upwards. And nobody bats an eye. Well, and I think to your credit, you're open in the book about how you've struggled for most of your life, as you put it, with crippling chronic depression. You're a human being. You can be hurt. You can have a brain hemorrhage when you get attacked. You can find it humiliating, whether it's vegan, whatever that asshole said, or concrete. You can be dealing with

the difficulties of life, of being a center right guy living in Portland, of cancel culture, all of it, and still find the courage to go report on very controversial groups in a way that is big and bold. And I just feel like your humanity is ignored throughout. It's ignored. And even when you're at your most vulnerable, we all saw the videotape of you and it didn't even capture the whole attack. Even then they can only look at you as awful because you're on the wrong side. I, look, I admire your courage. And one thing I definitely want to ask you about is what, what it feels like now to have written the book and have seen them try to get boycotts going of your book. And some bookstores, I guess, have either considered it or done it, but it's not

stopping the sale and the success of the book. So how has that been for you? Yeah. So a couple of weeks before the book's release, the Antifa in Portland mobilized outside one of the, uh, the largest bookstore in Portland, Powell's Books. It's one of the largest independent bookstores in the world. And we're pressuring them to ban the book and immediately the store buckled and they well they half buckled they said that they will not stock unmasked on its shelves but that it still be available on the online catalog but that wasn't good enough again you can never appease these people so they protested for six more days, intimidated the customers that were going in, forced the bookstore to shut down on two days. And on one day was

rioting outside the front where the fight broke out in the middle of the street. So I didn't write en masse to do like a commercial success. My goal was to try to inform the public about what I see as a real threat to the Republic and that, and to tell the stories of so many other people who have had to suffer in silence because of the brutality and violence of this movement. That is, um, the victims are ignored.

They're not privileged like me, like in terms of getting invited on to interviews or have a large platform on social media. So I felt like I was fighting on behalf of a lot of people as well. And the fact that it has been a commercial success has been like, it feels really surreal. And I have so much humility because it's my first book and there's so many amazing writers who who never um get that type of recognition in terms of like a bestseller on the list and i got him on my first one and so

and i don't take any of this for granted. I'm really, I mean, by and large, I feel that the present and the new future in America is bleak, but I'm also partially optimistic to see that there's this appetite within the public to really want to learn more about not just Antifa, but also BLM and the threats coming from the far left. And I wish the legacy media did a better job of informing people about America's history of dealing with left-wing terrorism. I think everybody's really aware of the 20th century and contemporary far-right terrorist groups, but people aren't aware of really the Weather Underground or

the Black Liberation Army. There's like a precedent of far left extremists who have carried out bombings and shootings and robberies and attacks on law enforcement. But their legacy has been rewritten and remade into heroes now in the mainstream left. You know, I'm thinking of people like Assata Shakur or even Angela Davis's open support for really repressive totalitarian communist regimes. She celebrated as a civil rights activist today. Well, I mean, a couple of things.

I do want to point out to the audience, you were one of the first people online during the January 6th Capitol Hill riot to say, guys, this is not Antifa. So people who think you're just this, you know, in the tank for Republicans to fit Trump defender, you wouldn't have been saying that you would have been like infiltrated. These Trump supporters would never you were like, I'm telling you, no, it's not. But to your second point about the Weather Underground and their influence in this group, because it's well documented in your book that there is a healthy presence there, unhealthy presence of influence. Bill Ayers was, of course, it was his living room from which Barack Obama in part launched his political campaign. That's partially true. He did have a cocktail party for a young Barack Obama before he decided to run for office. And Bill Ayers ran the Weather Underground. He founded the Weather Ground. And not for nothing,

but people ask me all the time, like, you know, what interview are you most proud of? It's that one. Go to YouTube, Google Megyn Kelly, Bill Ayers. Forgive my weird hair that day and enjoy that interview because it's awesome. If I do say so myself, he came into the lion's den, not knowing what the hell was about to happen to him. And I was fair, perfectly fair. I didn't confront him with any gotchas other than quotes from his own writings, his own books. At one point, he tried to deny he said something. I said, it's in your book and put the graphic on the screen. It was great stuff. And just the whole day was such a wild experience for me and my whole team.

It was like Bill Ayers in the Fox News newsroom. We had to hide him in the basement so Hannity didn't try to steal him. And listen, when you hear what he did and what he's very proud of with the Weather Underground, you realize that his influence and that of his group continues. It's disturbing stuff. Andy, I hope you're feeling well. I hope the success of the book has made you feel some joy in your life and that some of these risks you've taken were worth it. Megan, you've gone through a lot. And I just want to share a side anecdote. When I was a student journalist and I applied for a journalism scholarship and I made it to the interview process, the professor had asked me, which journalist today do you look up to the most

or find most inspiration from? And I said, Megyn Kelly. It's just I've always admired how your bravery and just being a straight shooter and despite everything that you've gone through and all the smears that you've been subjected to, that you've continued, and I'm really excited to see that you've been subjected to, that you've continued. And I'm really excited to see that you've been, that your hard work has been rewarded with the popularity of your work right now. Oh, that's sweet, Andy. Thank you so much.

I really appreciate it. And thank you for taking the risk to keep us informed. Though I must tell you, being at Portland and saying Megyn Kelly's your favorite journalist was not a good move. That was probably your first mistake. I didn't get the scholarship, but it's okay. Ah, screw them. You're better off without them. They don't have New York Times bestsellers. All right, all the best and stay on it, would you? Thank you, Megyn.

So we're going to get to Shelby Talcott in just one second. But first, let me tell you about Legacy Box. This is an ingenious mail-in service to have all of those irreplaceable moments trapped on videotapes, camcorder tapes, film reels, and pictures converted to DVD or digital. So you will actually be able to enjoy them. Home movies, let's face it, they can transport us back to unforgettable times. But when was the last time you actually watched yours? You know how it goes. You take them and then these things just sit on the shelf and unless you really are motivated, you never see them again. That is where Legacy Box comes in. I was thinking about it because I've got a bunch of stuff. First of all,

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Go to LegacyBox.com slash MK to get an incredible 40% off your first order. That's very good. That's a generous offer. Buy today to take advantage of this exclusive offer. Send them on in when you're ready in the Legacy Box. Go to LegacyBox.com slash MK and save 40% off while supplies last. And now it's time to bring you a feature we have on this show called Asked and Answered, where our listeners write in some sort of a question and we do our best to provide some

sort of an answer. And our executive producer, Steve Krakauer, has got the question today. Hey, Steve. Hey, Megan. A lot of questions coming in at questions at DevilMaycaremedia.com. This is kind of a fun one, a little different than we normally do. This is from Mally Myers and she wants to know which Real Housewives franchise is your favorite and who is your favorite housewife? I don't know. Gosh, I love Beverly Hills and I love New York. I do love them both a lot. I guess if I had to choose,

I would choose Beverly Hills because the women are just so made up all the time. And they're so decked out and they've had so many things pulled and prodded and plumped. It's fascinating just to watch from like an anthropological standpoint. My kids are always like, that's the show with the boobs. What's that show with the boobs? The boobs are everywhere. I guess if I had to spend time, like have a lunch with just one, like as a potential actual friend, I would choose Kyle. She seems like the most normal. And you know, in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king. So I guess I'd choose Kyle. But I would say the one that I would, I'd never turn away from when she's on camera is Renna.

She's just such a shit stirrer. And she's funny. I like listening to her talk about herself. She's got that rocking body. She talks about, she made me laugh out loud when she said she no longer will lie face down in the massage table, given all the stuff she's put in her face. It's fun to hear women talk about their work so openly, you know, like it's self-deprecating in a way.

And they live in a crazy town, crazy. So I love seeing all the rich surroundings and trappings. And as I said before, the show generally makes me feel like a good person, you know, by comparison. So anyway, I confess I enjoy it. I think they've brought us a lot of laughs over the years. And I'd love to have a night out. I mean, like I would never be a real housewife,

but I would love to do a cameo and spend a night or maybe go like on one of those trips with them to Italy or Vegas or the spa. Definitely don't go with the real housewives of New York because they get so hammered. It's out of control. Somebody always gets hurt or arrested. The Beverly Hills women can hold their liquor. I think I've given you a pretty good pitch for the show. If you're not already a fan, we've discovered through Clay Travis that it's like women's sports. It's like sports for women.

We feel about the housewives the way the men feel about the sports. And I know a lot of women love sports too. I don't know how many men love the housewives. Maybe my gay men friends, but not so much my husband. It's not his thing. Anywho, long answer. So I go with Rinna and Kyle. And if you haven't tried it, give it a try. Let me know what you think. Shelby Talcott, great to have you here. How are you? Good. How are you? Thanks for having me. My pleasure. All right. So you are the woman who fears nothing. I have spent the past six months watching you go right into the heart of these riots. And it's rare, let's be honest,

to see a young woman in the heart of these things. And it's crazy to see it happening domestically. Have you been fearful doing this? I would say I haven't been. There have definitely been times where I've been nervous or I've sort of realized that, you know, the situation's escalating and I definitely know the dangers behind it. But as my parents would tell anyone, I have almost a disturbing tolerance for things like this. And so you kind of turn your emotions off when you're in situations like this as well, because it's almost like a safety net. If you can't react off of your emotions, then

you're more likely to make smart decisions in these potentially volatile situations. Reminds me of when I was first learning to be a reporter and I was still a practicing lawyer and I was just shadowing one of the real reporters at the Chicago NBC affiliate out there. And, you know, you just shadow, you just, you're just like a little barnacle who watches the reporter do her job. And we approached a subway train. It was the L out in Chicago. The doors open and a bunch of police ran off of the subway train or the train car, guns drawn. And I ran to the side to give them a path and then went to get on the train. And the reporter was like, what are you doing? I'm like, something's going on.

We got to like, let's get out of here. She's like, you're a reporter. We run toward the action, not away. Like, go follow the police. Let's let's see what the story is. I'm like, oh, OK, I got to totally adjust my instincts. You seem to have come by it naturally because I see you out there with Richie McGinnis, who I had the pleasure to meet with you. You guys came to interview me.

And I don't, is he a mentor to you? Is he showing you the ropes or are you learning them together? So Richie's been in the game for a little bit longer than I have been, but we're sort of, it's me, Richie and Jorge Ventura. There's a third, third reporter who comes out on the ground with us. And we've sort of throughout the past year become just like a team essentially. Um, and we've traveled together a ton. I mean, I, I think I spent more time with Richie last year than I did with my boyfriend. Um, luckily they're best friends. So that was totally fine. But seriously, we traveled together and went through these experiences together. So we really are a team. And it's crazy how close you get to people when you have to go through these things together. Well, and they really have been

life or death situations. I mean, even potentially for you guys. And the one that stood out to me as I watched your reporting was what happened in Kenosha. It was after the Jacob Blake shooting. This is the shooting in which Kyle Rittenhouse was involved, the 17-year-old. Some describe him as a vigilante. He's been charged with multiple counts of murder. He shot and killed two people. The third was injured, but didn't die. Right.

I think. And you guys were right in the middle of that whole thing. I mean, can you just walk us through just summarize that experience for you as a reporter and whether you thought your own life was in danger? That was probably the scariest moment that I had in 2020. And it wasn't even scary in terms of, wow, there's someone shooting people. I've never been so scared before for somebody else. So what happened was Richie and I had sort of gotten separated and Richie, for somebody else, you know? So what happened was, uh, Richie and I had sort of gotten separated and Richie, it turns out had been following this crew. Um, and I was,

I was on the phone with Richie and he, he very abruptly was like, you know, I got to hang up and he hangs up on me. And naturally I'm like, well, what the hell? Why would you, you know what I mean? I was like, well, pretty rude, not knowing what was going on. And all of a sudden I'm recording because I see right across the street at the gas station, there's a crowd gathering and I'm sort of walking towards this crowd and I hear gunshots. And I don't even know if they're gunshots. Like I didn't drop to the ground. I didn't do anything because I'm from New York.

Like I am not a gunshots. Like I didn't drop to the ground. I didn't do anything because I'm from New York. Like I am not a gun person. I literally looked at the person next to me and I was like, was that were that was this gunshots? Like I had no idea. And then people start screaming and running away. And my heart just dropped because my first thought was, oh, my God, I think Richie's over there. And I start sprinting across the street towards where the guns, you know, the gunfire just, just come from. And as I'm sprinting towards the street, uh, Kyle runs past me and there's people chasing him saying he's the shooter get him. And I, my sole focus in that moment was to like, make sure that Richie wasn't lying on the ground. Yeah. And so I run up. Yeah. And so I run up and I see someone lying on the ground and I'm like, oh my God, like, am I going to have to tell his family? Like, I know his family.

Am I going to have to tell them what happened? Am I going to, you know what I mean? Like, am I going to see my friend, not even just my coworker lying on the ground here? And luckily I saw him totally fine helping the person who had been shot. Um, but I just remember for like those 30 seconds, I was, I don't think I've ever been as nervous and it wasn't even for my own safety it was just you know the thought of having to see that and having that happen of course so we did get lucky there just just take a step back I mean now we know it's it's so crazy to know and the reports were out there but refused you know the media refused to cover them

Jacob Blake was armed he He was shot by police because he resisted arrest. He, um, had a knife on him and he wasn't compliant. And the, and the police had a reasonable fear for their own bodily safety. It was a justified shooting and, um, he, he lived, but he was paralyzed. And he since has admitted that he had a weapon on him and that it was a dumb thing to do. Yes, it's so that's that's why we had protests in Kenosha, Wisconsin, that resulted in several deaths. So this is what brought you there is the riots that ensued, the shooting of Jacob Blake. And Kyle Rittenhouse was sort of this kid who saw the police standing down in city after city as they were being ordered to in some of these Democratic cities by their mayors. And he and a bunch of others decided they were going to sort of step in. And he showed up with an EMT kit. He was ready to perform, you know, life-saving work as a medical aide if necessary, which he didn't necessarily have the training for, and also with an AR-15 to protect others, protect himself, what have you. He wound up shooting three people, killing two of them. And he's been charged. His defense attorney says it's self-defense and that the tape seems to suggest it was self-defense, but the jury will

have their say. He can't tell everything based on tape. Anyway, you're in the middle of all of it. And now when you look back at that, Shelby, now when you understand the facts as I've tried to lay them out, what's your perspective on what happened in Kenosha in those weeks after Jacob Blake? on multiple levels. To be clear, a 17-year-old should never be out at a volatile riot with a gun. That alone should probably not have happened. And I don't think that many people are arguing that it should have. Absolutely not. But also, there's been this rush to decide what happened in situations like these before we actually know all of the facts. And Kenosha is just one example. There's been others. But the BLM groups, the Antifa groups, they don't necessarily wait for the facts. They just see, okay, a black person has been shot by police. You know what I mean? Let's get it started. And so I think it could have absolutely been prevented had people just waited for the facts to come out. But we've seen it time and time again. And I don't think that

this will change. No one's waiting for the facts to come out. It's a rush to judgment. And this is what happens. So how are you able to tell when you're out there covering these things, whether you're dealing with Antifa or just BLM protesters who have turned into BLM rioters? It's really hard to tell, to be fair. And that's why I sort of try not to declare that a group is Antifa when I'm reporting necessarily, unless they say it. Because at this point, all of the protesters and rioters are generally wearing black. They're all covering their faces because of COVID. And that used to be Antifa's shtick, right? They would be the ones wearing black. They would be the ones covering their faces. But now, you know, BLM is doing it too.

But generally, the BLM groups will continue to chant BLM phrases. And they do keep that sort of motto throughout, whereas the Antifa groups I've found abandon that those BLM talking points and it turns into just screw the police and destroying things with sort of no rhyme or reason. There's no there's no meaning necessarily behind it. Not that, meaning gives you the right to destroy property. What's your experience with Antifa, Ben? Are they especially dangerous? Are they just like the regular rioters, for lack of a better term? I think that they can definitely be more dangerous. So Antifa, in my experience, they are like watching you. You know, they learned our faces.

They learned where we were. They would follow us on Twitter and on social media to figure out where we were going. And then they'd send out, they're organized, you know, so they'd send out notifications to their other Antifa members and they'd be like, look out for, you know, Shelby Talcott. She's on the ground in Portland this week. And then there's a targeted effort to prevent people from filming. If you, if they catch you filming something that's bad, you know, they'll literally, it's it, you know, you can that's dangerous if they catch you filming. And BLM is a little bit like that. They definitely don't want people filming the negative stuff.

But it's not as organized, I would say, as the Antifa groups are. And so have you had any of those encounters with Antifa trying to stop you from filming? Or I know I've seen some where they want you to identify yourself. They want to know what organization you're with and why you'd be putting them on camera. And to me, it seems like it's like a protester out there at a, I don't know, an anti-Trump rally trying to figure out whether you're CNN or Fox. Exactly. There's definitely been situations where we've been confronted for filming. There's been situations that have almost escalated. There was a BLM related protest in New York City last year and Richie and I were there and someone caught me filming like one of the fights and like a small crowd surrounded me and wanted to take my phone and wanted me to delete the footage and I wouldn't um and we literally got like pushed out of the area because it became too dangerous and so you have reporters who will be like okay yeah I'll delete the footage I don't know, maybe that's the safer thing to do, but I've always felt like this is my job.

I have a legal right to be filming you on public property. Um, and I'm not going to be bullied into not doing my job as a reporter, just because you're doing something that you don't want people to see. If you're doing something that you don't want people to see. If you're doing something that people don't want you to see, maybe you shouldn't be doing it. You're the angry confrontations you've had to endure. And by the way, how old are you? I'm 28. Young. The angry confrontations. I feel old, but thank you. You've had to endure. They go on and on. So another one happened in June of this past year outside the White House. And that had video that went pretty viral. Can you tell us what happened there? Yeah. So that those are during the when, you know, that White House, the White House protests were

really at their at one of their highest points all year. And there was a big crowd who had been pushed back away from the White House. There's police lined up. And I was sort of standing on one of the barriers. There's like a big block. And I noticed that there was a group of people clad in black who had shields and they were marching towards the front where the police were. And so naturally I thought this is, this could get interesting. This is where I want to be. So I hopped down, I walked over and I started filming and all they were doing were, was standing with their shields right in front of the police. And one woman accused me of being an undercover police officer. Um, and I said, no, there was one guy who was sort of trying to diffuse the situation. I showed them my Twitter handle and the guy was like,

yeah, she's, you know, she is, she's a reporter. Um, and they were relentless. So these other, these other people, and they started shoving me. They started trying to get me out of the area. They started to grab my phone. One girl literally grabbed my phone and was on the ground as other people were pushing me, trying to grab it. And one of my coworkers, I remember seeing him literally prying each of her fingers off of my phone because my phone's my lifeline with these things. And as I just kept getting shoved, I was eventually shoved into the police line and a police officer grabbed my backpack and just yanked me through the police line. So it was pretty scary, but I was lucky that I was also,

um, handcuffed because I had breached the police line, even though they had sort of forced me to breach it. But they walked me to a different area and released me after that. Were you were you surprised, by the way? I mean, were you relieved that the police you were in sort of police custody? I was relieved, but I also didn't necessarily think that the handcuffing was necessary, especially because I felt like they were the ones who had pulled me through the police line. And so they told me that it was standard. I mean, tensions were really high. One of the police officers actually did say something that I thought was quite rude to me. He said, uh, well, it doesn't matter that you're a reporter. You're just going to give us, you know, you're going to paint this in a bad light anyway,

even though we saved, like we saved you. Um, which I thought was a little presumptuous, but also, you know, you've got to look at the coverage that a lot of these situations get. So that's right. Yeah. Maybe that's reason was accurate. Yeah. So, I mean, after that incident, the the founder and publisher of The Daily Caller, Neil Patel, came out and said, you know, you're one of the best. You've been on the ground getting the truth and not just trying to fit the facts into a preconceived narrative. And and then he said the fact that Shelby would be assaulted for doing her job and telling it straight should alarm anyone who cares about press freedom. Do you feel like the industry, the media industry, had your back in that incident or these others in which you've been in danger? Sort of.

I'm a little mixed on this. So I definitely think that there have been people in the media who you wouldn't think would come up and say, hey, this is wrong. And they have. And that's awesome. We've had people from CNN, people from MSNBC, from BuzzFeed, from HuffPost come up and been like like it but they always caveat it with it doesn't matter where she works or it doesn't matter what side she's on which is like i don't know you know it i don't love that caveat but there is something to be said for people speaking up but then you also have people who sort of have laughed it off and been like, well, she works for The Daily Caller. She deserves it.

And and that's disappointing, too, because I'm sure if they were put in the same position, they'd they'd have some very different feelings about it. My gosh. Yeah. I mean, we know she's with the devil, but still, she doesn't deserve to be hurt. I'm glad to hear they said something, though, I. So that wasn't your only dust up with police. You were also arrested in Louisville, Kentucky. You've had an interesting year, my friend. Yes. You were arrested in Louisville, Kentucky while covering the riots there. It's hard to keep track of the number of places where we've had the riots, isn't it? Yeah. And what happened there? Because you spent a night in jail. I did. I spent, I think it was 16 hours in jail. And I'm not cut out for jail. I will just

put it out there. That is not my thing. I like I'm pretty tough, but I yeah, I was not happy, obviously. What was so bad about jail, just so we know? Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, the thing that really shocked me about jail was we were in there. I was in there with, I think, 27 other girls in one small room. And the toilet was, so there was just a square room, like a block. And at the front, there were windows and that's where the actual prisoners would walk by and the guards could see you. And right next to those windows was a toilet. It was like a two-in-one toilet and sink. But there was no door. There was nothing blocking. Like if you were going to the bathroom, people like prisoners walking past could literally see you.

Oh, boy. Which I which was, you know, these are all like 40 year old men who are walking by in the orange jumpsuits. Oh, my God. And it was just like weird kind of off color question, but did they provide like sanitary products? I'm just wondering if you were at that point in your life, it would be especially painful. So there were a few girls in my cell who were in need of sanitary products and they were not provided with any. also somebody accidentally dropped a sandwich in the toilet at the beginning of the day and it remained in there so oh that wasn't fun it was just gross and the girls did come up with a sort of a way to provide a little safety so we were given a blanket and so anytime someone would need to use the bathroom,

like three or four girls would come up with their blankets and, and put them up to sort of block this little toilet area for whoever needed to use the bathroom. Oh, I think that's sweet. You had that sort of bonding with your fellow. Yeah, it was, it was definitely a bonding experience. And actually when I got out, I have two of their phone numbers now and we keep in touch occasionally. What were they in for? I never. So they were also in for the same things. I was charged with unlawful assembly and failure to disperse. And so most of the girls in there were charged with similar things or charged with curfew violations.

There were a few who definitely deserve to be in there. One girl said she broke a police officer's hand with his baton. So a few of them I was like, yeah, you know, but but a lot of them were for these smaller things that I was also arrested for. And this, it just really opened my eyes to, you know, there is validity in saying that the justice system needs some sort of reform. And I think that both sides have this issue where when they believe in something, let's take conservatives, are very pro-police typically. But a lot of them in being pro-police decide that there is no fault that police officers can ever do. And just like, you know, liberals will say, well, there's no good that police officers can ever do. And it really is

more of a nuanced issue. And I think that we'd be able to get so much further in society if both sides were willing to recognize that their views do have things that they can work on. It's just like when I played tennis, when I grew up playing sports, they'll always tell you you're only as good as your weakest shot. And so acknowledging that weakness will only help you get better. But there's sort of like a stigma right now, I think, with all sides politically. The rhetoric is so sweeping that it makes the other person retreat. Like, I can't deal with somebody who's speaking in these terms, you know, that all police are fascists or, you know, they're all brutal.

And it's like, yeah, so you're not an honest broker with whom I can have a real conversation about police reform. You know, that's why I like somebody like Coleman Hughes, who deals in facts and, you know, says, OK, let's look at what the actual data are. And then let's also consider testimonials from young black men who have had nothing but negative experiences with cops short of getting shot. Right. We got to look at the realities of what happens prior to a fatal shooting. It's not it's not all well and good just because the number of shootings has gone down. And it is true that the media has inflated, you know, individual cases, though, the representative of police, you know, as a whole. But anyway, yeah, when the rhetoric is so sweeping, you think, and I'm out, you know,

and so to your point, like there, and I would say this, too, if you've ever had a negative encounter with a cop, you're a lot more open minded to the thought that cops can be bad. Yeah, I mean, it's like, it's absurd to think that every single cop in America is good and should be a police officer. I mean, it's the same as every job, right? There are journalists who probably shouldn't be journalists. There are pilots who probably, you know, shouldn't, shouldn't be pilots. Um, but so to think that there's this one job where everyone is doing an amazing job is, is wrong. But on the flip side to think there's this one job where everyone's doing a horrendous job is also wrong. And I say this with, you know,

a lot of police officers in my family, a lot of, uh, you know, my mom is a prosecutor, so she works with police a lot. But it is nuanced. And but, you know, the media doesn't want to sort of accept that as a reality. And I think we've done a good more a sort of a, an opinion. I don't know. How do I want to put this? It's sort of like more red meat was offered up on the site all the time and sort of clickbait. And it has turned into a real and an important journalistic source. I've really admired the reporting you guys have been doing, especially over this past six to nine months when you've put your lives in danger. So what's next, do you think? Having covered the summer of unrest, been up front with Antifa and the other rioters, do you think it's done? Do you think it's over now that Trump's out? I think it's going to slow down, but I'm not quite sure it's going to end because if you look, these groups really don't like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris either. The BLM met with them beforehand and Joe Biden sort of promised these things that he has yet to deliver on. Antifa wants to completely abolish all police. And Joe Biden has already come out and said he is not going to do that. So these groups don't like this administration either. So while it's probably going to slow down a little, I wouldn't be surprised to see it pick up when it starts getting warmer. And if the administration continues to sort of ignore these groups. It doesn't take much of a spark to get that fire glowing again.

Did you come from a conservative family? Kind of. So growing up, most almost all of my family was pretty conservative. When I was probably 15 or 16, I would say that began to shift. I have a very liberal sister. I have a very liberal dad. I have a very liberal brother. One of my other brothers is a little bit more liberal. My third brother is pretty conservative.

My mom's pretty conservative. So we're very divided politically. So it makes for interesting Thanksgiving dinners. I'm sure that's true. But I think it's interesting that you went out to Iowa too, because I think spending four years in the Midwest like that, I guess it could be helpful. I mean, every university is a liberal bastion, but I would imagine Iowa may be less so. Iowa City is, I would say, pretty liberal. I think a lot of my, a fair amount of my friends who went there, more than you think, are liberal. Although I do know a lot of like the guys who played on the men's team who are from

the Midwest are pretty conservative. So it was a really big mix. But my dad is from the Midwest. So I did sort of grow up going there a little bit. But it was definitely a shock coming from New York. It's definitely different. How do you think that's affected you, like living in Iowa, having lived in New York City and having come from a big family where the politics are very diverse? I think that it is one of the best things that could have happened to me because it's forced me to be able to, A, listen and understand people's viewpoints, even if I think they're completely wrong, and B, talk through it with them. And I think that this is something that's been lacking because it's,

you know, the country is so polarized, but you can absolutely have conversations and be friends with people who don't agree with you politically. Like there's more to politics at the end of the day. And I think it makes, it has made me a better, or I like to think it has made me a better reporter by being able to have these conversations with people I don't necessarily agree with. And at the end of the day, we listen to each other's opinions and that's it. It doesn't end in this huge argument where we're never talking to each other again, but it sort of forces you to think outside of your own little box. I think it's so helpful in life. If you can find someone you love,

who's of the opposite political stripes, you know, it just helps you remember that person's humanity and that we may argue over politics and culture and so on. And a lot of these are very important fights. But we're at base, we're still humans. And for whatever reason, we've been placed on this earth at this same time together to have this same decade of looking at the Statue of Liberty and the Rocky Mountains and all of it. And and this is the collection. You know, this seven billion of us are here right now for this time. And it's so much more important than bullshit arguments over Joe Biden. You know, we're going to have them. We'll have them. But humanity and the ability to love somebody who thinks differently than than you do is really the starting point. Right. It's like the core and most important starting point. You seem like someone who lives that? I try to, for sure. I mean, I also don't really have a choice because if I didn't act that way, I would probably lose half of my family. So, you know, forced into it. But again, I think more people should start doing that. I think it's important. And having friendly disagreements with people, I mean, you know, as a lawyer, it's only going to make you better because it makes your argument stronger. It makes it you tend to you need to argue to learn the other side in order to really argue your own side, I think.

So I'd be interested in hearing. We have a fair amount of people who are on the left listening to this podcast center left, I'd say, at least according to what I read in the comments and online. And I'd be interested to hear what they think of the Daily Caller these days, because it's definitely a right leaning journalistic outfit. But it's very helpful. And it's it's fact based in a way that I have found helpful. And I'd love to know with somebody who, you know, I'm center right. So it's appealing to me in other ways. But if you're not of that ilk, maybe the listeners will let us know in the comments section what they think. But one thing we can all agree on is you're a star. Richie is a star as well.

And keep up the good work and the good fight. Thank you. Today's episode is brought to you in part by legacy box trust legacy box to digitally preserve your past go to legacybox.com slash mk to get 40 off your very first order ben shapiro's coming back he was our second guest ever and there's a lot to cover with him i love the way his mind works it's fun just to like watch it and soak love the way his mind works. It's fun just to like watch it and soak it in. And he's clever and he's funny. Doesn't get enough credit for being funny. So Ben's on Wednesday. Tulsi Gabbard is on Friday by popular demand. So don't miss out

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