The Megyn Kelly Show - Biden Attacks Half the Country, and Legacy Media Decline, with Michael Knowles and Chris Stirewalt | Ep. 384

Episode Date: September 1, 2022

Megyn Kelly is joined by Michael Knowles, host at The Daily Wire, to talk about woke shift in education, hospitals exposed for "gender confirmation" surgery on minors, Biden's absurd comments about disarming the right, Biden's desperation and casual racism, social media censorship, the Biden administration's attacks on "extremist MAGA Republicans" who are a "threat to our democracy," and more. Then Chris Stirewalt, author of "Broken News," joins to talk about the mistakes the Dems and GOP are making while running in 2022, the impact Trump and Dobbs will have on the midterms, Palin's loss in Alaska, the way the legacy media demonizes GOP candidates no matter what, what voters really care about, the problematic electoral issue of student loan forgiveness, legacy media's negative treatment of Americans, overcoming the cable news outrage diet, the changing media landscape, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find 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. We have a lot of news to get to today as President Biden prepares a primetime address tonight. He's staying up past Matlock on, quote, the continued battle for the soul of the nation. This is Biden's promised push for unity. Remember that when he entered office is looking increasingly absurd. He recently debuted the term semi-fascists. What is that? Can he be a semi-fascist to attack his political opponents. And his administration has declared half the country, quote, extreme MAGA Republicans who are a threat to democracy. In just a bit, we're going to be

joined by my old pal Chris Stierwald, who will talk about Biden's speech, the state of the 2022 midterm races and his new book. I'm looking forward to that. He he will tell us what's what on these midterms in a way you can't trust most people to tell you about, right? He's not going to spin you. He's going to tell you how it's going to go. So if you're wondering just how tight it's getting now, he's the guy to ask. So he'll be up in just a bit. But we are joined first by Michael Knowles of The Daily Wire. It was reported today that Knowles, he's in trouble again. Every time you come on this show, Michael, you're in trouble.

He had one of the accounts permanently banned by TikTok, which is news that just broke, without any option to appeal the ruling before being reinstated months later. So what was his supposed crime? We're going to ask him. Michael, welcome back to the show. Wonderful to be with you, Megan. Thank you for having me. What'd you do? What did you do?

I'm always in trouble. I'm always, I'm glad that I can still appear on this platform. Megan, I'm grateful for that. I guess I have more trouble appearing on Chinese spy apps that are mostly watched by 15 year old girls. So that audience is gone. Okay. That's the way things go. What I did to get myself banned before I was permanently banned, before I was permanently unbanned or something like that, was I made fun of Dr. Fauci. I made

fun of the public health establishment. I questioned some of the bizarre practices of American domestic and foreign policy. It was a kind of wide ranging little TikTok video, but there was nothing defamatory. There was nothing cruel. There was nothing that was not factual. And we know that this is par for the course. We know, especially over the last two and a half, three years now, you can be booted off of social media apps, not just TikTok, for saying perfectly true things because there are new censorship guidelines and there's really no way to appeal it. This is just run by a group of oligarchic censors. And it's particularly worrisome because in a self-governing republic, the way that we speak to one another is how we govern ourselves. And so if a small group of

people control the public square and they say you're not allowed to say true things and you got to toe the party line, well, then your ability to govern yourself is very much in jeopardy. Yeah, then we are China. So wait a minute. What I read was there are 11 accounts, pro-free speech accounts, that have been banned since January 2019 on TikTok. Yours is one of them. But did they then reinstate you? I mean, the permanent ban was in place, but it wasn't really permanent? It's a little unclear, actually, Megan. I logged into my TikTok app and it says, you know, you're out, you're banned, you're this, you're that. I appealed it. I said, well, what was wrong with that? And then they said, okay, you're back on. But then they kicked me off again. But then they

put it back on. And so I said, I must be doing something wrong. I handed this over to the TikTok team at Daily Wire. Is there something going on here that I'm missing? And they said, no, that basically what's going on is that TikTok is arbitrary and capricious in its suspension and banning policies. And there's really no rhyme or reason to it. They don't really have to give you any explanation. And if they want to permanently ban you, they can. And if they want to permanently unban you, they can. And I'm not joking, Megan. I legitimately don't know what the current status of my account is right now. Same. Yeah, I don't know either. But I do know that everybody on this list is a conservative or leans right. You got Lieutenant Colonel Allen West,

Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, Live Action, Media Research Center TV or MRC TV, PragerU, Students for Life, Babylon B, You, Tim Kass, Tim Pool, Young American Foundation. I mean, these are all so like what's going on? Because the Chinese, it's not exactly like they want to help Democrats in all instances politically. They don't't like criticism of COVID origins or questions about lab leaks and things like that. That'll definitely get you censored on TikTok. But do you think I mean, like, I can't imagine. I don't know. I feel like students for life, they probably don't spend a lot of time on COVID origins. So I'm a little confused. I think they also do recognize that the Democrats go softer on China.

So while they might not be 100 percent for the Democratic Party, I think they recognize that the Republicans who are running for office, the last Republican president we had, went a lot tougher on China, on China's trade policies, on China's intellectual property theft, on China's currency manipulation. And they recognize that Democrats, including Joe Biden, have been big proponents of a rising China. Joe Biden was on camera 10 years ago saying that a rising China is good for all nations and we ought to encourage China to have a larger role in the global economy. And so I think right now, if they have to choose between the Republicans and the Democrats, they see the Republicans as being led by Trump, who was pretty tough on China,

Democrats being led by Biden, who's soft on them. It's no surprise that they're going to attack the right wingers. There is the principled reason, which is that the right wingers are the most anti-communist. They're the most opposed to the Chinese system. I think a lot of Democrats probably want to institute something similar to a Chinese system in the US, but also just as a practical matter, Right now, the Dems are going to go softer on them. I wonder why you what about Ben? Why didn't they get Matt Walsh swept up in this web? What about Andrew Klavan? How come only Michael Knowles gets it at The Daily Wire? I'm just so shocked.

Me whom everybody loves. So somehow I keep getting booted off of these. It's a wonderful question, Megan. I'm sure there will be Ph. be PhD theses written about to put it mildly. And so any critiques of their forced sterilization of the Uyghurs, perhaps I could see how that might upset them. But they'd have to cast a much wider net if they wanted to get all the people criticizing China when it comes to those policies. I don't know. To me, it's just it's suspect. It's odd. And it's yet another reason not to trust TikTok. I mean, we recently launched on it because there are a lot of young people who are on it. But it's scary because you don't know how they're using that app to get at you or your information or the information of your children. Well, and you've hit the nail on the head with the problem, which is that we know that these

social media apps pose grave risks. They pose risks to people's mental health. They pose spiritual risks, I think. And they certainly pose political risks because you're allowing a small group of people to control speech. And in the case of TikTok, you're allowing the Chinese Communist Party to have a disproportionate influence on American political discourse. So that's a problem. But then on the other hand, the social media apps are where the people are. So if you want to be able to talk to people, you've got to be on them in some way. And so what's the solution here? Do we just go along with it and throw our hands in the air? No, I think that the solution has to be political. For a long time, it was the right wingers,

especially the libertarians on the right, who said, you know, we can't ever regulate Google or Twitter. Now I'm sure they would say it with TikTok. This is the free market. If you don't like it, build your own TikTok, build your own Twitter. And that is absurd. These platforms have gained market share in many cases through fraud and exploiting legal loopholes. And so, no, I don't think that we need to let Google and Facebook and Twitter and especially TikTok control American speech. I think we have the political right here as Americans to say, no, we're going to put some limits on what these people can do and we're going to put some limits on what they can censor and how they're going to control the

public square. That's a big shift on the right away from a kind of laissez-faire approach to wielding the institutions of government a little more effectively. You've seen Ron DeSantis in particular lean into a little bit more of a muscular use of the government down there in Florida. And I think that TikTok aside, social media aside, I think that is the future of the right in America. The candidates who are doing pretty well, Blake Masters right now running for Senate in Arizona, J.D. Vance in Ohio, running on these kinds of themes. I think conservatives are sick and tired of being pushed around, and we're not going to just voluntarily concede the whole culture to the left.

We're going to get a little bit more intentional and aggressive in our use of the state. Well, we definitely need to, you know, push back on big tech's censorship of one side only. I had this discussion with Glenn Beck not long ago saying, even though I like a lot of what DeSantis is doing and I'm not woke even a little, I didn't think some of what he was doing down there was going to survive a first amendment challenge because, you know, the government censoring speech, even if it's speech we don't like, is not OK. And it was actually kind of funny because Glenn said, you should read my book. And I said, I don't need to read your book to know the law. And later that day, I was proven right because DeSantis' effort got struck down on First Amendment grounds. So we have to be careful because, you know, you might like DeSantis and what he's doing, but then, you know, you get the

next guy in there. What if Charlie Crist wins? And the next thing you know, he's trying to censor it the other way. And I realize that's what's been happening. That's why you have a DeSantis trying to push back. So we have to think of smart tactics to stop our speech from being silenced. But I just, I don't know exactly what it is. Hopefully just having the better argument and getting it as many places we can before we all are censored to death. And that brings me to point two, which is remember when we all felt so joyful that Twitter was going to become a more open place where we could actually, you know, have differences of opinion and not be banned for not recognizing that somebody who says on Tuesday she's a

boy when she was a girl on Monday. Challenging, that'll get you banned. Twitter and Elon still in a massive fight. Elon filing yet another new claim against them yesterday to dissolve the deal. There was a whistleblower who came out of Twitter saying they're lying about all sorts of things and they cannot be trusted and they misstated the facts about their company and their public filings. And while he didn't know about this when he tried to break up the deal, he's using it. So, I mean, my takeaway on this for our viewers is there's just no way he's not buying Twitter. It's not happening. And there will be absolutely no big social media platform at any point in the

near future that is controlled by somebody who's even in the middle, never mind somebody who's on the right. I feared that this would happen. I knew conservatives, we all wanted to believe Elon. He's so funny. He hits the left pretty frequently. Here he is, our billionaire savior. The billionaires are not going to bail you out. There is not going to be just one knight in shining armor. Even Elon Musk, terrific as the guy is, that's not going to happen. It's going to have to be a political solution. It's going to have to require us. I mean, exactly to your point, Megan, on the First Amendment, we're going to have to really rethink how we've been making these arguments because we are arguing for a kind of neutrality

or have been arguing for a kind of neutrality that just doesn't exist. You bring up the classic example now of the pronouns. Either the man is a he or the man is a she, or I guess there is this other category now you call them they, them, zur, zim, zam or whatever, but you have to make a decision. There's no neutral decision here. Whichever thing you are going to call the person or be permitted to call the person is going to determine, or it's going to stem from a kind of moral and philosophical view. It's the same thing in education.

You bring up the hypothetical, what if the left institutes its own speech codes in schools? And then you point out, well, they've already done that. It's not a hypothetical. They're doing it. That's what they keep doing. And the problem in the Libs' defense actually on education is that education can't be neutral. You're gonna teach kids something.

You're gonna teach them something about history and what history means and something about literature and what that means and the human person and how to behave and that's what education is. So you can't be neutral about it. You've got to teach something. And right now, I think because we've been aiming for a kind of neutrality, we've just let the libs completely take over and push their own agenda, whether it's in the classrooms or it's on social media or it's through messaging, or it's through the institutions of government. I mean, now you've got the Biden administration openly endorsing transgender surgery for little kids. And we might want to pretend that there is some kind

of neutral playing ground there. There is not. One point of view is going to win over the other. We got to agree on some basic stuff. And so I think that's where a lot of the new right, the rising Republicans are at right now. And to your point, it's a little bit of a perilous journey because some of these things are going to be struck down in courts and we're going to have to adjust some of our tactics depending on the location and even the level of the government. But that's clearly the direction we're going at because otherwise we're all going to be totally silenced. Well, and some of what DeSantis has been trying

has been working. So he hasn't lost on every front. And you're right, he's almost like a guinea pig because he's casting a wide net and some of it's getting shot down and some of it isn't. But in education, there's a lot more leeway, right? The free speech rights of students are not exactly what they are

for adults roaming the free world. And so when it comes to what's in an educational curriculum, the government does have more power. And so far, it's been used at the federal level and elsewhere to shove radical wokeness down their throats. So we need more people like DeSantis saying you will not discuss your sex life with my six year old. And you can F right off if you don't like that. I mean, truly, that's basically what his law says. And most of us are like, yes, right. That makes perfect sense. Even in Connecticut, I moved to Connecticut last September. There was a vice principal who I think was just suspended because he was saying he'll he just will never hire a white person or a man or anybody who's not in one of these sort of favored. Well, that's illegal, sir. News to you, this is a public school. That's illegal. So yes, I mean, some of the laws are

in place already to protect all of us, and some of them need to be tweaked by a guy like DeSantis. There was an amazing bit in that video, Megan. I don't know if you saw it, where he focused specifically on the Catholics in this undercover video from Project Veritas. And he said, I don't hire Catholics because if you've got a really solid Catholic education, we're not going to be able to get you. You're not going to turn woke. And so that's a problem. But he said they're very clever about the way that they do it. The way they avoid hiring conservatives or Christians or whoever is they'll ask a question about transgenderism. And I think this partially explains why the left is so hyper-focused on what

seems to be a very narrow fringe issue of transgenderism, is because it tells you pretty much everything you need to know. Some of my friends and colleagues, they'll say, if someone has their pronouns in the bio, I can tell exactly everything about your politics. Because if you believe a boy can really become a girl, you're a leftist. That's it. That's just the way it goes.

I have to say, if I see that in somebody's bio, I'm like thinking about having to work at my house or whatever. I'm like, okay, I get it. And I assume they don't like me. And I'm not as right on this issue as you are or my friends at The Daily Wire are. But unless you're 100 percent on board their bizarre team, you're the enemy. So it's like, well, why would I invite such a person into my house and have them do work for me when this could go south quickly because I don't buy into their dogma? Right. Right. It's just a sort of self-preservation at that point, because you can tell it's a really easy rule of thumb. And so the left is clearly looking at politics in an us versus them kind of perspective. And I don't really like that all that much. I wish we could be a little more civil, maybe even a little bit more tolerant.

But the one thing I can promise you is that we're not going to win back any of the ground we've lost in the politics and the culture by burying our heads in the sand and refusing to admit the way that they're playing the game. These guys are playing for keeps. Well, and the difference is, I mean, somebody, let's say somebody believes the whole trans ideology and you can change your gender tomorrow and all that stuff. If I were around that person, I would treat them with respect. I would be kind to them i actually do use preferred preferred pronouns but i don't have to believe it i don't have to actually believe that they've in fact changed their gender they would think i'm a bad person if i don't believe

right like i i just feel like the one side that has questions about this isn't saying you're bad and you're evil to people who are going through it. The doctors who cut them, different story. But they're the ones looking at us saying you're evil, you're a bigot, you're a transphobe if you don't see the world exactly as I do, which is what makes me suspicious of them. Can we talk about the doctors? Because this has been all over the news over the past week or so. And more and more, you know, we're looking at you guys at the Daily Wire, Libs of TikTok, other news organizations on the right are trying to take a harder look at hospitals

that are actually performing these radical surgeries on minors. All right. That's you're an adult. Do whatever the hell you want. You want to make your ass look like, you know, the Hoover Dam. Go for it, Kim. But my point is, we stay out of it. When you're an adult, you can do weird things to yourself. When you're a child, it's a different story. It's a very different story. And there's been pushback. OK, the one hospital says, no, we didn't actually do that. No, we don't actually do it on minors. But there's this one hospital in San Francisco. I feel like you did some reporting on this. Dr. Robert Mosser is the founder of the Gender Confirmation Center. Gender confirmation, that's how they refer to it because they didn't like transition in San Francisco. Part of a presentation at the Philadelphia Trans Wellness Conference. So this is not ambiguous. It took

place a year ago, July of 2021. And here's a clip of the presentation where he talks about on whom he will do a sex change or sex change-like operations. I do not have a minimum age of any sort in my practice. There's no chronological age that says you don't get surgery. Now, having said that, I don't think I've ever done a consult on a 12-year-old yet, but we would if one came our way. We just haven't had reason to. And then we've done a number of 13-year-olds who we did consults on. I think I've done one or two 13-year-old surgeries. For the most part, it's 14 and up, that by the time everything comes together, plus insurance approval, plus everything, that surgery actually gets completed. That's horrifying. It's horrifying. If a child walked into a doctor's office and said, Doc, I want you to cut my fingers off, the doc would say, You've got some problems, kid. We need to refer you to a psychiatrist.

If the same child walks into that doctor's office and says, Doc, I want you to cut my uterus out. The doctor would say, that doctor would say, oh, well, you're a wonderful, brave person. You're so right. We do need to cut your uterus out as soon as possible. Let's get this young lady over to the operating room. Something has gone seriously, seriously wrong. And by the way, he says that he's performed these surgeries on 13 year olds. He hasn't yet on a 12 year old, but he would. He said there's no lower limit. He said there is no age limit whatsoever. And so it's no surprise some of us stodgy old social conservatives have been talking about this slippery slope for a long time. Not only do we

continue to slip down it, we're actually accelerating how quickly we are going down the slippery slope. And part of it is because this is the logical conclusion, I think, of the premise of transgenderism. If you really believe in transgenderism, the idea that a man, a guy who looks like a man, really can be a woman and vice versa, and they have to have these mutilations to make themselves look more like the opposite sex. If you really believe that that is an ontologically true statement, then it makes perfect sense that you would begin these kinds of mutilations before puberty. Because once puberty sets in, it's much harder to make these changes and your bones will harden and you'll have much

more suffering later in life, according to this premise. So of course there's going to be no lower limit. The problem here I think is not so much are they going to do it on a 13 year old or a 16 year old. The issue I think is that premise. And so the left, the pro-transgender crowd, they're asserting a view of the world and of human nature, that men can really be women. And the right, we're really unwilling to do that.

I mean, we usually retreat more toward the live your own life. We don't really want to run people's lives for them. We're generally somewhat content in our own families and communities, and we just don't want to think about it too much. But there's really, I think, no way to avoid it. I think we need to articulate a clearer view of the world. We have to enforce it. We have to put it into law. And we need pervert quack shaman doctors like this witch doctor in San Francisco. We need them to be basically imprisoned if they violate the law. Yes, this guy should lose his medical license. Yes, 100 percent. That's exactly right. You said it perfectly. This guy should not be practicing medicine. He should be nowhere near a 10 year old. Oh, parental consent would let him do a

hysterectomy on a 10 year old girl. You're right. He should go to prison if he's done that. And if he's done it on 12 year olds or 13 year olds, as he says, you what if you have some lunatic parent? I can't as a lunatic parent go in there and say, I want you to take out my child's appendix. I want it gone. And the doctor says it's not doing him any harm. You know, and I say I want it out right now. That's they wouldn't do it. It would not be considered medically sound. But I can say I want her her uterus out because this week she says she's actually a boy and they'll do that's insane. And let me just give you one story as I'm thinking about 10. So I have I have an 11 year old daughter. I have three kids and one is an 11 year old daughter. Last year, as she was going

from nine to 10, we had a conversation about anorexia. She had heard that term and she said, what is it? And I said, well, it's hard to explain, right? To a, to a kid. I said, it's, it's as if somebody looks in the mirror and they see a chicken and they're like, I'm a chicken. And everybody around them is like, no, you're not a chicken. You're not a, you're a, you're a human. You're, you're a girl. And she's like, I know I'm a chicken, you know, and I'm gonna start eating like a chicken and behaving like a chicken. Everybody's telling you you're not a chicken, but you just can't believe them. And whenever you look in that mirror, despite the fact that there's a girl looking back at you, you see a chicken. I'm like, that's what it's like for

an anorexic. Only it's with fat. They look at themselves in the mirror and they see themselves as fat, even though they can be bone thin, they can be skin and bones, but all they can see is fat. And so it's like an illusion of what you're seeing in the, in the mirror. So I was like, this is actually a pretty good, I was kind of proud of myself. I'm like, I think I nailed this. And my daughter who's smart, she, she goes, so, so is she a chicken? That's a question. If she, if she asked her teacher teacher her teacher would probably have to say yes deep michael in this bizarre in this abusive surgeon's world that 10 year old has the mental capacity to say i want my uterus removed and i want my i want a double mastectomy and presumably since he says nothing's off limits, I want the phallus

constructed where they basically cut off your forearm, leaving only the two bones so they can get all the proper skin and tissue they need to construct a phallus. OK, so this sick effort is going to do that on a 10 year old like mine, who's from a nice family where she's got engaged parents. She's at a good school where she's got engaged parents and she's at a good school and she still can misunderstand that story to think the girl might actually be a chicken. Okay. You see my point? It's sick. It's messed up. Well, and we're talking about people who are minors. When we talk about minors, we think of the age of consent. Why is there an age of consent? Because young people don't have all of their faculties developed yet and they can't make decisions for themselves. The age of consent laws in,

I think most states at least, are such that if you are 17 years old, 16 years old certainly, you cannot consent to a one night stand to have sexual activity with someone who's 17 or 18 years old in your high school, let's say. You cannot consent to that. Certainly you can't consent to it with someone who's 21, 22, 23 years old because you have not developed enough. This is a good point. Yet we are told that that very person, actually someone who's 10 years younger, a six-year-old, could consent not to one night of sexual activity but to a lifelong, permanent, irrevocable sexual decision that will affect your life and damage your health in so many other ways. It's obviously incoherent, but the problem is that

the left has adopted this view of human nature and they're just going to push it. And it's going to be a total view. There's not going to be any Megyn Kelly, middle ground, let's come to a reconciliation, maybe at a certain age or something. These guys, as I mentioned earlier, they are playing for keeps. And their view of the world is a totalizing, totalitarian view of the world. And if that means transing the two-year-olds, Megyn, I'm going to be back on your show in six months. We're not going to be talking about 13-year-olds anymore. We're going to be talking about 13 year olds anymore we're gonna be talking about six year olds and younger there's going to be no end to that slippery slope and it's even if you don't go as far as surgery we had doctors on the program not long ago talking about how some of the kids who go directly on the puberty blockers and then the cross-gender hormones

a can be rendered sterile for life um and then b, can never achieve orgasm. So you're condemning your be done to our young children here under the auspices of being supportive of our gender affirming of our young, confused children. And in California, not only do they have this guy, Dr. Rossum in San Francisco, of course, but California just this week was either pushing or passed a law that says if you're a doctor, you could lose your medical license for spreading disinformation. And what they deem disinformation is in the eye of the beholder. It's going to be who's running the government over there. This was inspired by COVID and they didn't want people out there talking about ivermectin or, you know, whatever hydroxychloroquine. But this could be used against doctors who are not gender affirming, who want to stop and say,

you might not be trans. I mean, truly, we're going to be at that point very soon in California, where you could lose your medical license for pushing back on somebody who says I'm the opposite gender. Certainly. And it's an important lesson for all of us, even to zoom out a little bit from this kind of crazy gender issue, to remember that in every age, in every generation, there are all sorts of crazy, kooky, bizarre medical scientific interventions. Now we're chopping the skin off of... We're chopping off people's forearms and legs to construct fake genitals on little kids. That's pretty insane.

Sixty years ago, we performed lobotomies. We'd put little picks into people's brains and swirl their brains around to treat certain mental illnesses. Before that, we would treat certain diseases by bleeding you or putting leeches on your body. Before, there have been all sorts of crazy sort of interventions. And I think, especially if the experience of the last two and a half years, where the so-called medical scientific authorities have

been wrong about pretty much every single thing regarding the global pandemic we all just lived through, from the origin to the masks, to the treatments, to the vaccine efficacy, to the list goes on and on and on. They've been wrong about everything. It should give us all a healthy skepticism, bring those experts down a little peg, give them maybe some humility, maybe give us a little more confidence in our gut instincts and our traditions and the way that we've lived for a long, long time and recognize that these geniuses, these self-appointed geniuses in the lab coats, in the political bullies who defend them and who silence all the opposition, these guys are in many ways no more advanced than some kind of tribal witch doctor.

I mean, frankly, at this point, Megan, if you told me, Michael, you've got to go see a doctor, you can either go see that doctor in California or you can go see an African shaman who's cooking up magic potions in a cauldron. I would totally go to the shaman. I trust his medical advice much more than the lunatic in California. So it's interesting because we end this half an hour as we began it with censorship of viewpoints that are deemed heterodox by someone who purports to know better, whether it's big tech and tick tock or the California government over people who have medical degrees and went to Stanford and Yale and so on, but don't want to go along with the party lines. Either way, it's dangerous. And by the way, your reference to the,

like the maggots, have you been watching House of the Dragon? I have not actually. Should I watch that? It's the Game of Thrones prequel. And we're two episodes into it. And they did have the guy, like he was, I think it was maggots.

He had to put his hand into like a bowl of maggots to eat off his dying flesh. Anyway, I realize it's not real, but I'm just saying to your point, they have more credibility than Fauci as far as I'm concerned. All right. Michael Knowles and I have a lot to discuss right after this, including President Biden suggesting you don't really need your gun. If you're going to fight the federal government, you better get an F-15. What? I don't feel better. Stand by. So President Biden goes to Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, and this is on August 30th, and makes a speech. Of course, Pennsylvania's got

some hot political races before this midterm that we're all watching, including Dr. Oz. And he makes a couple of bizarre remarks. And it kind of reminds you why they don't let him come out, you know, and talk too much, despite his primetime address tonight on the soul of the nation. He decides to make a comment about guns. And he's, of course, ripping on the right for being pro Second Amendment. It's right there in the Constitution. Take it up with the founders. And he says the following, which seems to mean like because the people say like, hey, we have a right to protect ourselves from criminals and to form a militia and to prevent our government from overreaching. And here was his response.

Right now, you can't go out and buy an automatic weapon. You can't go out and buy a cannon. And for those brave right wing Americans who say it's all about shaping America, keeping America's independent and safe. If you want to fight against the country, you need an F-15. You need something a little more than a gun. No, I'm not joking. Think about this. Think about the rationale we use that's used to provide this and who they're shooting at. Shooting at these guys behind me. At which point, what, all Republicans started to Google how to make a nuke? I mean, what is he saying? You know, Megan, I'm going to see if I can get this right.

What we're being told is conservatives have absolutely no power. Our AR-15s, they don't mean anything. There is no way to oppose the government. You would need a squadron of F-15s if you wanted to even have a fighting chance against the government. You'd still certainly lose, by the way. Also, a band of unarmed people, one of whom was wearing a horn hat, almost overthrew the Republic on January 6th. So I don't quite, did the horn hat guy have an F-15? Hold on. I was told that you need a squadron of fighter jets,

and yet I was also told we have to take away the AR-15, the most popular rifle in America, because it's a weapon of war. So which is it? I'm not sure. Furthermore, I was told that the American people, if the government ever, God forbid, turns so tyrannical that they're strafing the middle of the country, dropping bombs on Oklahoma or something, that we would have no way to defend ourselves. And yet, I seem to recall that a band of basically illiterate goat herders with black

powder rifle guns in Afghanistan successfully fended off the United States for about 20 years. Afghanistan is the size of Texas. So please forgive me if I'm a little skeptical of some of Joe Biden's claims. He's speaking from a point of desperation, which is that desperate regimes always try to disarm the citizens. And they don't disarm the citizens because the arms aren't significant. They disarm the citizens because they know that an armed

populace is going to be much, much harder to put the foot on the back of their necks. Yeah, again, well said. Then he made yet another racist comment. I mean, it's like if the media would actually take, you know, keep track of Joe Biden's racist comments, they would see like his he dwarfs Trump, dwarfs Trump. Trump made some comment at a rally. We're like, my black American, my like that, which they blew up into a front page story for days, right, for days. And Biden gets passed on all of it. You ain't black if you don't vote Democrat. All the stuff that he has said over the years, and we could go down the list. And the latest was about how you know where to find the best basketball in the state,

if you know what I'm saying. Listen here. If I can just interject for a moment, my deceased son, Bo, he was the attorney general of the state of Delaware. And what he used to do is go down in the east side, what's called the bucket, highest crime rate in the country. There's a place where I used to, I was the only white guy that worked as a lifeguard down in that area, to the east side. And you know where the, you can always tell where the best basketball in the state is and the best basketball in the city is it's where everybody shows up oh boy just as a refresher here are a couple of others um you cannot go into a 7-eleven or a dunkin donuts unless you have a slight indian accent i'm not joking obama when you really when you hear this quote again it's stunning he became the guy's vice president. Obama is the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice looking guy.

What the F? He said that. Poor kids are just as bright and talented as white kids. Oh my God. And now this. So, you know, you got to keep it in context as he's got a long history of these things. Collective yawn by the media. They don't care. I'm starting to think that Corn Pop was the good guy. I think when Biden was that lifeguard, he didn't tell that story right. Corn Pop, I think, was the good guy. Of course,

he gets a pass. It doesn't matter because no one actually cares about racism. Racism has basically lost all of its meaning. All it is, is a cudgel to attack Republicans. When Joe Biden comes out and he says, these Republicans are all racist. Most recently, he said, these Republicans, they're fascists. I promise you, I would, I would bet my life savings. Joe Biden not only has never read the doctrine of fascism by Mussolini, he has never even heard of the doctrine of fascism. He has no idea what it means. All fascism means, and George Orwell made this point, today is something that I don't like. All racism means is bad.

You're a bad person. And so it doesn't matter. They'll never hold Biden or any of the Democrats to this standard. Has nothing to do with race, has nothing to do with 20th century Italian political movements. What they're saying is you Republicans are bad and we are going to boot you out of the public square. So, yes, President Unity did refer to half the country as semi-fascists. And just in case we didn't fully understand what he meant, his right hand woman, Karine Jean-Pierre, takes to the White House podium lectern to explain as follows. Listen to how she put it.

The president thinks that there is an extremist threat to our democracy. The president has been clear, as he can be on that particular piece, when we talk about a democracy, when we talk about our freedoms, the way that he sees as the MAGA Republicans are the most energized part of the Republican Party, that extreme, this is an extreme threat to our democracy, to our freedom, to our rights. They just don't respect the rule of law. You heard that from the president. And, you know, they are pursuing an agenda that takes away people's rights. So which is what the president said last week on Thursday. You all heard him. This is what the president said yesterday. And that's what he's going to continue to say. prepared that, it came out exactly as she wanted it to, that MAGA Republicans are an extreme threat to our democracy, et cetera. That's the key. The key is that this was not a gaffe that she might be prone to, that Joe Biden is certainly prone to. This was written out.

This was agreed upon in the White House. She repeated it. She's calling the Republicans terrorists who pose an existential threat. You'll notice that the left doesn't refer to terrorists as terrorists. They refer to the leader of ISIS as the austere religious scholar. That's right. That was in the New York Times. That's right. But the Republicans are the terrorists. And there's such an irony too, because if you call someone an extreme threat to our democracy, you're saying their very existence is the threat. It's existential. And so the only implied solution here would be to get rid of half the country. They're saying the only way that we can protect government of the people, by the people, and for the people is to get rid of half the people. And

that's incoherent from the standpoint of democracy, but it does start to make sense when you realize, and the Harvard Law Professor Adrian Vermeule has made this point, when the left refers to democracy, they don't mean democracy. They mean liberalism. They mean leftism. They mean progressivism. That's the only way it makes sense that when the people elect Donald Trump, it's a threat to democracy. When the people elect Bolsonaro in Brazil, they elect Orban in Hungary. It could even be an overwhelming majority of people who elect these leaders.

But if the leaders are right wing, then somehow it's a threat to democracy. Even if the demos, the people is the one electing them, because for the left, democracy means absolutely nothing. It's all just to protect liberalism. Well, that's why he's giving this speech tonight about the soul of the nation. It's going to be us versus them. President unity will once again be in an us versus then mode where he's talking about one presumes the semi- semi fascists, the extreme threat to democracy and the MAGA Republicans. I mean, who is that? Because like half the country voted for President Trump, who had a MAGA agenda. The MAGA agenda lives on even and is supported by many

people who weren't diehard Trump fans, but they liked sort of his general policy and general approach. So MAGA Republicans, it's like that's everyone. That's everyone in the right half of the country. Well, this is the rhetorical key because he's trying to distinguish between the the mainstream Republicans who totally oppose Trump and the MAGA Republicans. He's saying that's the fringe. But the never Trump movement such as it is, I think all it comprises at this point is Bill Kristol and the five friends he has over for tea so that they can complain about the Donald. It just statistically doesn't exist. The MAGA Republicans are the Republican party. It's the whole Republican party. But that's always been

the point is he wants it to seem in his rhetoric like he's leaving it out for reasonable discussion, but he's really not. I mean, he's really saying half the country is evil, awful, poses an existential threat to the democracy, and their very existence is a major problem. And then you get the media on cue, picking up with that message, running with it, allowing their guests to run with it, unchallenged, including Kurt Bardella, who used to be on the right. And then Trump sort of gave him the Trump derangement syndrome situation. And now he's on the left. I think he ran like the Republican congressional. I can't remember, but he got fired from that position. In any event, here he was on MSNBC and listen to how he described Republicans.

We are watching right now a very radical and extreme Republican Party mirror what we have seen in other places like Nazi Germany, like other places like the Bolsheviks. We have seen this playbook before. We have seen a ruling party try to use things like propaganda, try to silence the free press, try to restrict what women can do. We have seen this play before, and it always ends disastrously for the majority of people that are subjected to that. That's what the warning signs are that we're seeing from the president right now. He is ringing the bell that we need to check in, pay attention, because this is a very

dangerous line that the Republican Party is under full embrace of autocratic ways and means is nothing but disastrous. Silence of free press is a great one to include in there. The Republicans are trying to do that. Go ahead. I think we need a free press before we can silence a free press. That doesn't exactly exist in America, where every institution, you know, the Washington Post and the New York Times would make Pravda blush at the height of the Soviet Union. But even beyond that, I agree with one thing that he said, which is the ruling class. He's accusing the ruling class of all of these things. What's the ruling class?

The Republicans have at this moment, practically speaking, zero institutional power, not anywhere. You can maybe make an argument that the Republicans have power on the Supreme Court, though it's a razor thin majority, but even that, and the Supreme Court is at least officially not a partisan institution, but all the rest of it. We don't have the Congress, we don't have the Senate, we don't have the executive, we don't have the bureaucracy, we don't have the media, we don't have the executive, we don't have the bureaucracy, we don't have the media, we don't have the corporations, we don't have the financial institutions, we don't have big tech. We don't have anything, okay?

We don't have a single piece of institutional power here. We have a few carve outs on talk radio and a few other places to maybe get our voices heard before we all get kicked off of TikTok or wherever else. And so as always, the Democrat accusations here are really confessions. What it is, is a sort of projection. And you hear all of the hysterical rhetoric, you know, everyone I disagree with is Hitler. That's the kind of level of sophistication that we're getting from the left now, but it has a purpose. I mean, the reason that they're calling us terrorists and they're calling us Nazis and they're calling us fascists and racists and all the worst things you can possibly be called is to discredit a group of people that, while it might be half of the country, institutionally has virtually no power and they want to ostracize us or worse, even more than they already are.

I can't end without asking you about these tweets. Every time the pumpkin spice latte comes back around, I immediately identify as a 16-year-old white girl in Uggs and a North Face. You love the pumpkin spice latte. Is it true? I would ask that you respect my identity, Megan. And it is true. It's probably the most controversial thing we've talked about today. I will never forgive Joe Biden, who through his inflation has caused the price of the PSL to rise 4%. But listen, I make no apologies. Is Starbucks a woke corporation? Probably. Is the PSL girly and sugary and not fit for a grown adult man? Possibly. I don't care, Megan. I

contain multitudes. I love my nostalgic autumnal treat and I will not give it up. Autumnal. I've never had one. Should I try it? Today might be pumpkin spice latte day, according to my team. Megan, next time you're in town, on me. You're so generous. Thank you so much, Michael Knowles, for all the insights and all the laughs. It's always great to talk to you. Great to be with you as always. Thanks for having me. And don't forget to check out the Michael Knowles show, which you will absolutely love as I do. Don't forget here, Chris Stierwald joins us next, and he's got some predictions on the midterms that you're going to want to hear. And don't forget that you can find The Megyn Kelly Show live on

Sirius XM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon east and the full video show and clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Megan Kelly. And thanks to all of you. We did it. We hit our goal of 500,000 subscribers last night. We want to do it by the end of August because we launched one year ago on YouTube. And I feel pretty good about that. I feel like 500,000 is a lot of subscribers for a year in the YouTube business. And I owe it all to you guys. So I thank you very much. And now we have

one year to get to a million. I wonder if you grow faster when you have a bigger base. Help me find that out. Spread the good word and go on over there and subscribe if you haven't already and see what all the fun is about. The unofficial end of summer means the race to control Washington is really heating up. President Biden, former President Trump and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy all making stops in Pennsylvania this week. Overnight, another key race appeared to have been decided in Alaska, where Sarah Palin lost out to her Democratic opponent in a special House election. The legacy media is so excited about this. They say it spells trouble for Republicans come November. But does it? There's like about four people who show up for these like special elections. Can we really put all this stock in how they vote? There's no one better to ask than my next guest. There are few people who know the ins and outs of Washington and elections as well as's called, I love the title, Broken News.

Get it? News that's been broken, like the news itself is broken by very good. That's a good clever. I like it. Why the media rage machine divides America and how to fight back. Oh, it does. It does indeed divide America. Chris is also co-host of the podcast Ink Stained Wretches with another friend of the show, Eliana

Johnson, who was here on Monday. Chris, welcome back. Great to have you. What a treat to be here. Happy Thursday. Is this Thursday? Happy pumpkin spice latte day. I'm already getting all sorts of incoming people saying, don't do it. It's still summer. This is bullshit. And other people saying, you've never had one. Are you insane? How could you not have had a pumpkin spice latte yet? Wait, do we get to cuss on here? Is that right? We do. Yes. That's hot. That's going to be good. I like that. We'll see what happens now.

The boy from West Virginia, the worst swear you ever said on the Kelly file was bacon, bacon. All right. So let's talk politics, because I really do want to know. Let's start with Sarah Palin went down and then this this Republican in New York's 19th went down when he'd been leading that plus a couple of others have, you know, the prognosticators at virtually every media outlet saying the Republicans are losing and they're going to lose in November or at least are a lot more likely to than we thought. What do you make of it? So the Palin race is explicable easily because the Republicans were very bitterly divided. This was just an so this is they have a new kind of voting system up there, rank choice voting,

where in this case, the son of the Democratic former senator, Mark Begich, he was running in the Republican primary. He was running as a Republican. The Republican vote split between Begich and Palin. And under the rule, your second choice, the voter's second choice, the vote rolls over to that person next. And not surprisingly, the son of a famous Democratic statewide politician in a bitterly divided Republican Party. And Sarah Palin has made a lot of enemies while she was in Republican politics in Alaska, some for good

reasons, some for not. So those votes tended to go more toward the Democrat than they did toward the Republican. So I think I think we have to be careful about reading too much into Alaska because of the personalities involved in the voting system. But it is definitely true. It is 100 million percent true that the Republican Party is not in as good a position today as it was on Memorial Day, going into Labor Day. If you look at the generic ballot on Memorial Day. Going into Labor Day, if you look at the generic ballot, if you look at the Senate races, if you look at all that stuff, but guess what happens? And this is the best part, is Democrats think that they did that, right? Democrats think they did that. They don't understand that, yes, some improving economic

indicators definitely have helped, but most of the problem for Republicans has been Republicans, right? Fighting amongst themselves, the long shadow of Donald Trump, turning off persuadable voters, all of that stuff. Now Biden is coming back out and he's really on the attack and he's doing this big speech tonight and the student loan debt forgiveness stuff. It's all, it's a mistake. This is an election where Biden should prefer to have Donald Trump be front and center in the election, not try to steal the show. He's stealing the show and he won't like the he won't like the reviews. That's a good point. I mean, I listen to a lot of politics coverage from the left and the right. And the one thing they seem to be agreeing on is that Dobbs is dry is driving a lot of this. I don't know, hobbling of the Republican poll numbers. I got to tell you, Chris, I got my doubts.. Donald Trump dominating the last month of the news cycle

has been very bad for Republicans. For sure. Whether you love him or you hate him, you should not want him to be dominating the news right now if you are a right leaning American. I think I think that is more of what's going on. Just one word on the Dobbs decision. We don't know what the consequences are. And obviously, Democrats are overstating them already. I was taken aback by the results in Kansas and the referendum they had there, not because that they won. I expected that the anti or I don't know, the pro-Roe faction would carry the day. But I did not see coming that more than 200,000 extra voters showed up who were not participating in either primary. So this is a third of the electorate in the Kansas primary shows up just to vote on this and nothing else. It's a driver. We don't

know how much of a driver it's going to be, and we don't know how long it's going to be, what the intensity level will be like over time and how Democrats, how agitated Democrats are able to keep voters on this question. But on the other point, which is if you interrupt the natural cycle of life, here's the natural cycle of political life. You win the presidency and then immediately people are like, I'm not crazy about this guy. I'm a little disappointed what he's doing. And the American preference for divided government tells us that in every first presidential midterm election, except for 2002 in the wake of 9-11, that the party in power loses seats. It's that way. Average since Ronald Reagan in 1982 is 28 seats. So what you want, if you're the out party, is for all of the attention to be on the party in power and the president of the White House.

And that's what Republicans were getting all through the spring. Inflation, inflation, inflation, still the Afghanistan debacle, all of that stuff. The focus is on Biden. Yeah, border. The focus is on Biden and competency, Biden and the economy, Biden, Biden, Biden, Biden. And then thanks in part to the January 6th committee hearings, but also now, as you said, because of the Mar-a-Lago surge and all of this other stuff. And plus, what was the biggest political story of the late winter and the spring into the summer was Republican feuds in Pennsylvania, in Ohio, across the country, in these awful, expensive, brutal primaries that were substantially litigated around the question of the former president. So instead of this year being a referendum on the current

president, we have a, we have competing referenda and Biden is definitely trying to lean into that. I think he's making a mistake, but he's he at least at least you can say for Biden that he knows what his where he should want the electorate to go. He just doesn't understand that he can't lead them there. Right. Go back to your basement. That's your best policy. Let Trump dominate the headlines talking about Mar-a-Lago and the and the boxes and so on. You know, the thing you just mentioned about the Republican infighting is interesting because I had a conversation with Rich Lowry a couple months ago after Dobbs, and I was saying, I do think it'll be it'll play a role. I don't know how I still have skepticism,

as you heard about how big but I think the media I said to him at the time is going to play up every story of a woman who can't get an abortion. And we have seen that 100%. And some of them have played out and some of them have not played out as true. But that doesn't stop the media from highlighting it and saying, oh, my God, look what they're doing. So that doesn't help the GOP. But I also think and I recognize that there are some questions about some of these Trump backed candidates and some of these Senate races. But I look at like Carrie Leak and I understand she says some provocative things. It's kind of interesting when you have a female candidate for Senate running out there talking about Trump's big dick energy. That's what I did not did not have that on my bingo card today. But there is so that is true. That is the thing someone said it happened. But I have to tell you, like, she's interesting to me. Like she says all the

things on paper that I think I'd want if I were an Arizona Republican. And she's unconventional and she's provocative. But. We I think we kind of pretend that if we just put like the straight laced Mitt Romney types in there, we're going to get good government, you know, because they're like serious and they're they're like smart and they've done. Whereas then you meet these people in real life, as you know, Chris, and like nine times out of 10, you're like, well, they're never that impressive. So is there really that big a delta between, you know, a Kerry Lake and a Mitt Romney when it comes to seriousness once they're in the office and capacity to perform? Or do you really just want to choose the best candidate who's aligned with your positions? Well, you have to, you know, there's a balancing test. You have to balance

character and ideology, basically. And there's a cumulative score for as a primary voter in either party and making a choice about who is the person and how closely do they align with my views. And you steal from column A and column B. People go back and forth to make up their minds about why they want this person versus that person. And competency and character are closely correlated. People who have a good work ethic, who are good at getting along with other people, you can be very conservative or you can be very liberal and still get a lot accomplished in Congress or certainly as a governor. But it depends on how good you are at working with other people. So that's like a that that's a everybody has to make that question, answer that question for themselves in their own party. But I can tell

you this, when it's a good electoral climate for your party, like it is for the Republicans still in 2022, when the climate is when the wind is blowing in your direction, you know what you want to do? You want to keep it simple. You want to just keep it simple. Mitt Romney is not simple. Mitt Romney is complicated. He is a complicated he's a complicated political figure. You want a person who people go, what was the name of that gal who I don't I'm voting for the Republican. You want a person who people go, what was the name of that gal who I don't remember? I'm voting for the Republican. You want- Like a Glenn Youngkin. Right. In 2010, 2014, the way that Republicans had big smash hit victories in their primary or in their midterm elections was not by saying, here is the bold difference that we offer. What they said was,

we're just some guys and gals in suits who think that the Obama administration stinks, and we don't like Obamacare, and we think that the economy is not strong enough. And guess what? The persuadable vote. Think about it this way. We had the single largest turnout in the previous quadrennial electorates. Therefore, a lot of this has to do with, yes, first base motivation. You got to get your voters to the polls. But who you're counting on are high propensity voters. You mentioned Glenn Youngkin, and this is a perfect example. The people who are voting in Virginia in 2021 in an off year election for governor in their state are the highest kind of propensity voters. And there were a lot of them. As a matter of fact, the difference makers in that election

were people who had voted for Joe Biden, mostly men who had voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and then turned around and voted for Youngkin. Those are the targets that you have and you need a candidate that won't weird them out there. Like this is where the Republicans are going wrong. Like if I were running for office and I actually was just asked recently, like, would you ever consider running? I'm like, I don't even know what I would run as. Where would I like? I've been a registered Dem. I tell you what, I would I would be there for it just for the debates. I would be there. I would sign up. I've been a registered Dem. I've been a registered Republican. I'm now a registered independent. I have been for 20 years. I lean right. But I would sign up. I've been a registered Dem. I've been a registered Republican. I'm now a registered independent.

I have been for 20 years. I lean right. But I would never put on the Republican jersey just because there's like, I'm just not going to I'm just not going to be in the same party as like Matt Gaetz and don't even get started on the other side. Like, I just I'm just not going to do this. It's not. No, that's never happening.

It's not to say they've never had positions that are reasonable. Just no. I'm like, I'm not on the same team. But I also just feel like picking reasonable candidates doesn't help the Republicans because the media will demonize them the same as if they're as controversial as a Trump. You and I went through the Romney presidential election together. They made him out to be a raging misogynist because he had the turn of phrase. I had binders full of of the woman who Carrie Lake was running against, even though I had her on my show. But they would have turned her into a Carrie League because they hate Republicans. And the media does that to anybody who's got a chance against a Dem. Well, I think let me tell you the story of the 1980 presidential election very

quickly, which is Jimmy Carter. The incumbent was way ahead and not for any reason that people were particularly satisfied with the state of the nation in 1980, but because Ronald Reagan, a former movie actor, was declared to be and by the consensus of the if you go back and read the papers, if you read the coverage from that election cycle, Reagan is a dummy. Reagan is radical. Reagan is dangerous. Reagan is bigoted. Reagan is bad news. This guy is bad news. And the Republicans have done it again, just like they did in 64 with Goldwater. They've done it again and all this stuff. Carter would only agree to one debate with Ronald Reagan. And it happened shortly before the election. And guess what? As soon as the public saw that Ronald Reagan wasn't the person who had been described, they said, okay, this guy's probably okay. The same thing happened for Donald Trump, by the way.

He had been so vilified, so like how awful, awful, awful this person is, how terrible, terrible this person is, that by the time he made his national debut as a candidate, right, people were like, well, he's mean, he's not a nice person, but he's kind of funny and he's- The fighter. Yeah, and he's not what they said he was. And the whole thing for candidates in both parties is that you have to remember, it isn't who you are. It's who you are compared to who they say you are.

It isn't who you are, right? So every Democrat that's running in 2022, what are the Republicans running against and saying? Liberal, liberal, liberal, love Joe Biden. They're the worst. They're a rubber stamp for Joe Biden. They're all of these things. So then they have to figure out a way how to bounce that back and show the differentiation. Right. They have to say why they disagree with this. You talk about the Arizona race. Mark Kelly has had to find a way to not be a Biden Democrat without fully enraging the Democratic base in Arizona. And successful candidates, Mitt Romney lived up to or down to, depending on how you want to put it, what Obama was saying about him, right? He was, Mitt Romney's gaffes, it's true. And also Mitt Romney didn't, he was not relatable, right? He was not, people did not say, because as you know, the most important question that we ask voters about determining who, how they're going to vote in the end, it ends up being some version of this, what, which is cares about people like me, cares about people like me.

That's the powerful one. And we always have to remember, this is the hard part. About a third of Americans will never vote for a Republican. About a third of Americans have never voted for a Democrat, but what I call the governing third in between, they will vote for a very liberal person. They'll vote for a very conservative person, but they're always voting for a person. They're always voting for a person that they trust or trust more than the other guy. And we saw it with George Bush versus John Kerry. We saw it with Obama twice. We saw it with Trump against Clinton. And we saw it with Biden against Trump, which is voters who aren't ideological, right? Who say, I don't care about all of this stuff

that much. Yeah. But I have to go vote. I feel like I have a duty as a citizen that I have to go vote and participate here. So I'm going to go do it. When they come in, they're voting for a person. They're not voting for a party. And what Republicans need to do for this cycle is talk less about people, right? The fight over Herschel Walker or Dr. Oz or whatever else that's going on. It's too much focus on these individuals and not enough on Joe Biden and not enough on the Democratic side. Well, and so that brings me to the second half of the point I started to make when I was talking about my own party affiliations in my life. So I was going to say, but if I were advising the Republicans, I would

say, why don't you ever freaking mention COVID? Virtually every liberal friend I have is now ready to vote for a Republican because of COVID. The Democrats abandoned that seeing what was coming their way last May when they finally let us take the masks off of our kids and so on, because they knew they knew this was coming. And the Republicans have let them get away with that. And the overreaches that they did in the vaccine mandates that are still out there, they're not reminding us of that every day. Not to mention back to Youngkin, the critical race theory or whatever term you want to use for what's happening to our children in the schools. Like, is it a culture war thing? Is it that they have short attention spans? Why would they to run gleefully to let's talk about the boxes at Mar-a-Lago? If I'm I'm a media person,

so I'll talk about that. I'll talk about what's in the news. But if I'm running for office as a Republican, I'm like COVID, Fauci, CRT, trans shit, inflation, crime, border. Boom. And yes, I would point you to Ron DeSantis' success in Florida. Ron DeSantis barely won election to the governorship of Florida. He, you know, he bumped his bottom going over the door jam. But he is, looks quite secure right now for reelection because of one issue more than any other is that on COVID, he took an aggressive stance and made it stick, right? And eventually, even his toughest critics who are trying to be fair-minded, would say that the criticisms of him were out of hand and that the death rate in Florida was not that much higher. It didn't differ from states that had much more restrictive lockdown

policies, and this is with a very elderly population. So Ron DeSantis is running on COVID in his own way, right? And Ron DeSantis is running on the culture war stuff that you mentioned about the schools and about the Disney stuff. That's all part of his package. And for successful Republicans, right? The Senate and the House races are a little trickier, but certainly in gubernatorial races, that's where you can talk about this stuff. Because again, people don't care. And Pennsylvania is a great example of this. The Republicans picked just a absolutely, it was an absolutely reckless choice for their gubernatorial candidate. Oh, okay, gubernatorial. Yeah. There's just no, there's no reason that you would need Doug Mastriano to be your nominee. He just too much baggage and it's a lot. But he's competitive in that race for number one.

It's the good climate year. But number two, the sitting attorney general Shapiro, who's running for the Democratic nomination, is being badly damaged, has been badly damaged for the way that the state dealt with coronavirus, because Pennsylvania was like the anti-Florida, right? They went all the way the other way. So that is a long shadow hanging over Shapiro. I have friends who have a child in public school in Pennsylvania who all the way through June, I haven't asked them what's happening now as we resume, but through June, their five-year-old had to be, no shit, double masked outside. Come on. To the very hand to God through the very last day of school. That is the kind of thing I would punish a politician for forevermore.

I would follow him around when he ran for dog catcher, and I would give speeches about how this person should be nowhere near power. Like that's Pennsylvania went nuts. Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania went nuts. And part of the knock on Yunkin, I'm not saying that the discussion of CRT was not helpful to Yunkin. And there's a whole palaeum sit here that we can peel back if you want and talk about what really happened versus what people said

happened. But much of the effort from Democrats was to say, well, see, Youngkin won because of frightened, bigoted white people. But education was an issue of such salience in Virginia because of the failure of the state's Democratic Party to be able to deal with the teachers union, its biggest supporter, right? The most important public employee unions on this, every state party, every state Democratic Party relies on government worker unions for not just lots of contribution, but lots of feet, right? Lots of door knocking, lots of troops. And the inability of the Democratic Party in Florida under the previous Democratic governor and McAuliffe, Terry McAuliffe, who's closely, as a former governor himself, closely wed to this,

he brought in Randy Weingarten, the head of the teachers union, for his closing argument. While parents in Virginia, families in Virginia had had two years of remote learning for their children and they had gone through this. So the, the cheap shot about Yunkin is, well, it was because of race. How about it was because of the systemic massive failure of the public schools in the Commonwealth of Virginia. The same thing is helping, uh, Mastriano in Pennsylvania. And the same thing will help in Wisconsin for Republicans. And the same thing will happen in other statewide races across the country because parents who saw it and lived it and had their lives disrupted by it, they had to go back to work, but their kids couldn't go to school and on and on and on. Democrats will continue to pay

a price for that in this cycle. That's right. And the thing that's not going to work for Democrats is the midterm elections come in during the school year. You know, we've been off for a couple of months. It's like you forget your kids are happy. They're at summer camp. You're with them. Then you go back to school. And at my schools right now, we have a vaccine mandate in place. If you hit 16. It's insane. It's ridiculous. And now I'm sure they're going to update it to say you've got to get this new one on Omicron. You know, the new vax that's got like the anti-Omicron formula in it. Meanwhile, no one's going to tell you like Vinay Prasad has been tweeting about. It was tested on eight mice.

Eight mice. But our schools are going to look at us and say the science. But now more and more parents are getting engaged. And I do think it's it works to the Republicans advantage to have the kids back at school facing mandates. You know, these places are going to bring back masks. The far lefties are going to bring back masks. I speak this as a woman who grew up in New York State, who spent 17 years in New York City and now has moved to the blue state of Connecticut. They don't care. The hardcore folks don't care about the elections. They're like, masks help. They work. And so do vaccine mandates. All right, wait, let me ask you quickly. Let's just go through your predictions, okay? Because people want to know who's going to win the House and who's going to win the Senate.

I was just doing the numbers actually before for my note at the dispatch. I would say right now I would forecast if I had to forecast now, I'd say the Republicans probably pick up something like 15 seats in the House. That would be good. Which would be- That would be good for them based on the projections that they've seen. It would be good, but it would be, so if they're in the 12 to 15 range, the problem then is you have a small majority. So the Republican majority at the end of the Obama era was 30 seats. And when

you have 30 seats, you got wiggle room for kooks, right? You can let, and you can also have wiggle room to let people who are in competitive districts off. So you don't have to make them walk the plank again and again. And again. Nancy Pelosi makes people who are in swing districts now because her majority is so small. She makes people in swing districts walk the plank a lot to say, yeah, we're going to have to have your vote on this Abigail Spanberger. What's her majority? Well, after the Palin, so after the Alaska seats in, we will still have Jackie Malorski's seat out. But Democrat, let's say it's a five seat, functionally a five seat majority, let's say. And that's really tight. And so if Republicans, so they need six plus how many more do you need so that Matt Gaetz does not get to

wake up every morning and say, you know, I think today I'm not going to vote to pass the continuing resolution to keep the government open until whatever, right? Until they sell hair gel in larger portions. So the size of the majority matters a great deal. But right now I would say Republicans win, small majority, Democrats keep the house. That's today. Question for us is, do we have one turn of the worm left or two? Because I think the Republicans' position will improve for the reasons that I laid out, because Biden coming out and doing the speech, doing the student loan forgiveness thing, when I tell you that this is electorally incompetent, when I say that this is political malpractice, I don't know who around Joe Biden told him that it would be smart to make low propensity voters, young people, happy and

infuriate high propensity voters, people with college degrees who are over 50. Those people are going to go vote no matter what. They would swim across the Mississippi River to go vote. So whoever told him that infuriating all of these people, and by the way, I'm sorry to rant about it, but this is a program that was designed for veterans. This was a program that was designed for, as we are always told, America's heroes. And we're like, actually, it's for everybody. Just take it and go. So that move-, the rich people, exactly. Rich, privileged people. That's right. Just just to go over because you said I think you misspoke there because you're saying that the Republicans will take over the House. And you said that on the Senate, you're saying the Democrats will keep the Senate.

Right now, I think the D's hold Senate races, we have to remember. So House races are pretty easy to index. There's 435 seats. And right now, Democrats lead the generic ballot by about two points on average, which I know this, I don't want to make it excessively complicated. Please pardon me, Counselor, but it goes like this. Because of where Republicans live and because of where Democrats live, five of the seven states, for example, that have just one representative in the House are strong, traditional Republican states. So for a variety of reasons, Democrats, if the generic ballot's tied, that's an edge for Republicans. Republicans have the edge there. But we can tell in the House, roughly speaking, based on the generic ballot, how it looks within, let's say, five, six seats or whatever. Senate is very tough because candidate quality matters so much more. Joe Manchin from my home state of West Virginia is a great example. There's no math by which, and Susan Collins in Maine, as an example from the other side,

there's no math by which West Virginia has a Democratic U.S. senator. It just, it cannot be true by the laws of politics because it's the second Trumpiest state in 2020. There's no way that could be true, nor can it be true that Maine has a Republican senator. But candidate qualities matter a lot more in Senate races. It doesn't have the same institutional pressures that the governorships do in other statewide races. And it doesn't have the same connection to partisanship as the House. So it ends up being weird.

And now we get to find out, do they have a basement to put Herschel Walker in? Can Joe Biden now out of his basement, can Herschel Walker borrow the basement and be in there? What, what about John? What about John Fetterman and his stroke? How, you know, he's not ready to debate and Oz is razzing him. How will that play out? How about JD Vance? Is he coming back to Ohio to run? You know, we don't know. And there's all of this. We're, we are right now in the, in the finding out phase. And when I say the worm could turn once or twice, I think there's enough time for this to turn back into a strong Republican year instead of a Republican year. But there also may be time

to screw that one up to two months. I mean, come on, we could do it all. That's an eternity. Exactly. It can turn. It could turn again. And speaking of turning, we are turning some pages from Chris's new book, Broken News. Right after this is a bunch of good stuff in there. Of course, the mainstream only wants to talk about like the two lines he has about Fox. But most of it is focused on the news at large and how messed up it is. And he knows of what he speaks. We'll pick it up there right after this quick break. Are you with News Nation? I know you joined the dispatch, but are you also joining?

Okay. Okay. Yeah. Did not know that. That's great. Good for you. I'm very pleased and it's very fun. It reminds me a lot of early days at Fox.

There's good startup energy and a lot of nice people and the great Sherry Gretsch. So I'm cool. It's cool. She's I mean, she's amazing. I love her and I miss her. She's like the best of the best. She helped run our politics unit and we spent many, many hours on the road together and very funny stories for another time. Here's something funny i read about your book from the huffington post this made me laugh out loud xbox news staffer chris direwalt makes most shocking claim yet about old employer in book i'm like oh what is it like what is it what what is it uh direwalt says the network's motive for pushing a far right agenda isn't to help the conservative cause and elect Republicans. It's about profit. It's about ratings.

I mean, like, are they dumb? Are they stupid? Like having lived in the cable news universe for 17 plus years. Hell, yes. It's about profit. I mean, anybody who's still deluding themselves that any of these news organizations are about the public service is exactly that, delusional. And we as news consumers know that, right? If you're a smart news consumer, you know that in the same way that it is in Taco Bell's interest to get you to buy as many cheesy gordita crunchwrap Supremes as possible.

It is in a news outlet. It is in their interest to keep you watching or keep you clicking. The Huffington Post interest is to keep you clicking, right? Yes. Who's he kidding? You right there like a rat in a Skinner box on the on the lever for the cocaine tablet, just clicking your way through because that's how they make money. And the idea, you know, one of the accusations that I heard about Fox when I was there and since I was there and all of that stuff was, well, it's just a branch of the Republican

Party. It's just another branch of the Republican Party. And I would remind people that their interests are not coterminous, right? Fox does better when they're covering a Democratic president, right? When there's a Democratic president in power, it gets everybody riled up and do that. Just like MSNBC and CNN didn't like having to, don't like having to cover Democrats in the same way that they like to cover Republicans because it's easier for their audiences to take, right? It's easier for their journalists to be aspirationally fair or seemingly fair when they're being tough on the person in power when it's of the other side. If it's from the same side and you're tough on the person in power, and this is why, you

know, of all of the great admiration that I have for you is you always took that job seriously. You always, you continue to take that job seriously, you is you always took that job seriously. You always, you continue to take that job seriously, which is just because you're in accord with someone on some views or on some points does not mean that you just say, oh, well, I guess we'll just ignore what you're doing. We'll ignore the things that you're doing and just talk about the bad people on the other side. No, I remember when I launched the Kelly file, which you were on every night, my very first guest was Ted Cruz, Senator Ted Cruz. And my very first question to him was,

what's it like to be the most hated person in America? Yes, exactly. To his credit, he took it well. He took it. He took it. He took it. But, you know, look, the people on the left want my book to be about Fox News. Yes, very much so. And that's OK, because I hope they buy it. I hope they buy it. And there's some there's some stuff about Fox News in there. And by the way, people on the right want it to be about Fox News, too. Some people on the right want it to be about Fox News because they're like, oh, the soured rapes.

He's come back. Oh, this terrible person. He's come back to do it. And what neither of those groups know, people in neither of those groups know, is I am so happy with my life. I've never been more professionally happy than I am right now. I've never been more myself than I am right now. And I am grateful for the years and opportunities, many, maybe most of which you were involved in, and you were a great part of making that all possible for me. So I'm very grateful for all of that time. And this isn't a book about Fox News. When you get down to it, this is a book about Americanism. This is about us as journalists, what we owe

the Constitution and what we owe the United States of America, including the million men and women who died to preserve, protect, and defend it, but also what we as news consumers owe. I'm sick and tired of people infantilizing Americans and news consumers as if they have no agency. They just can't help themselves. Well, we've got to do better. We owe each other a debt as good citizens to be well-informed, to have a variety of sources in front of us, to know what is partisan BS and to know what isn't. And that's part of our job. I love everything you said. And I agree with all of it. And I remember when I left Vox, I left because I really wanted to raise my own children. You know, that was my main reason for leaving Fox was that. But I also was so up to here with the outrage, you know, and it's not just Fox, it's cable news, cable news in general, you know, and I said, honestly, that I really wanted my audience to feel something other than outrage. There are days for outrage.

You know, there are things that are outrageous that need to be covered. But not every day, all day. You cannot subsist on this world on just red meat alone. You know, you've got to have a little glass of champagne. You've got to have a salad. You've got to have some veggies. You know, you've got to have the cake. You've got to have it all. And the cable news,

red meat all the time, outrage diet is not sustainable and it's not good for you. That's absolutely right. And the other thing is, if I may, if I may, one more, what you just described is an act of confidence, right? A confident person says, I'm willing to take a chance. I'm willing to do a segment. I'm willing to talk to somebody about something that isn't ripped right off the front page of the most clicked items on memorandum.com today. I'm willing to look beyond what Twitter tells me to program on my show today. You have courage. You have confidence that says, I can do the stuff that I want to do. By the way, I wouldn't want to be in this business if I couldn't do the stuff and talk about the stuff that I wanted to. That wouldn't make this

very fun. But let me tell you this, your confidence, and this is really one of the things I love most about you as a journalist. Your confidence includes asking questions in ways that get real responses, right? You don't tee them up, right? One of the things I always admired in you and what made you such a good debate moderator particularly was you were not afraid to go into the question and say, I don't know, why don't you explain it to me? And very often you get your best responses when you're just saying, okay, walk me through this. I need my nana to understand how this works. So walk me through the beginning here and tell me why you

feel that way and what you think. And just by letting them talk, much more is revealed than if it is performative, right? Anchors that go on and are like, either you and I both agree very much, and we're going to talk about this, it's all scripted. Or now that you're here, let me pour out vituperation and hatred on you and tell everybody that I am good and you are bad. You have confidence, lady, and it shows. Oh, thank you. I didn't expect this to turn into a compliment of me, but I'll take it. I'm not above hearing it. We made a great team. We really did at Fox. And there was a reason when I hosted the Kelly file, it was the number one show in the demo in cable news. And you were you are a lead guest every night.

I mean, literally most nights, five nights a week. And there's a reason, right? Because even back then, which was 13 to 17 that I was in that post, things were a little less partisan than they are right now. Like they've only gotten super charged in partisan, um, in their partisan nature since then in a way that's only made me say, Oh, thank God I got out when I did not never like, Oh, I wish I could go back and do more of that. Now I feel like I'm in the right, exactly the right places. I think this audience will come with me on a journey to talk about wellbeing and health and health or Alzheimer's or history or Willy

Wonka, we did a show on. You could never get away with that in cable. So there is a lot more joy in having a well-rounded diet. But what do you, because I know you prescribe prescriptions in here, you have prescriptions in here. But before we get to those, you also know everything about history. You know a lot about American history. And one of the things that was comforting in the book is you kind of say, we've been divided like this. Our media has been divided like this. This is not new. And there is a way forward.

And it's not just hopeless. So can you spend some time on that? Quite the opposite. Look, I think the best analog to our current situation, the book takes you through the story about how the media monoliths formed after the Second World War. And we grew up and were born into a world that had three major national television networks, two big national newspapers, two or three big national newspapers, a couple of wire services. But the dominant part of the whole news ecosystem was what? Your local newspaper. Your local newspaper was the number one source that you had for news because that's how it was. And the newspaper industry was really profitable. And it was sort of the glue that held it all together. From 2005 till 2010, let's say 10,

they lost about 90% of their revenue. It collapsed. The loss of classified ads, the loss of subscriptions, the loss of all that stuff, it hollowed it out. And it really left a scary vacant space here. And it came about at the same time that we started carrying these hand computers around with us everywhere we go. Yeah. In the world. And so we, we got our, our eggs scrambled here. I point out that the disruption caused by the arrival of radio,

which was totally different than anything that had been like it in all of human experience, right? Until the 19, really 1930s, but until the middle of the 1920s, it was not possible for ordinary people to hear the voices of the politicians who they voted for, right? Most people had never heard Abraham Lincoln speak, right? Most people had never heard the people before the 1920s talk. And how did radio work out when it arrived? Biggest winner, Adolf Hitler, killing it, no pun intended, with the radio, really having a lot of success because he's this passionate, charismatic lunatic, right? And he's good radio. And what happens in the United States is that people like Charles Coughlin,

the bigoted, anti-Semitic, lunatic priest from Michigan, or Huey Long, the emperor, the utterly corrupt authoritarian ruler of Louisiana, these folks had millions and millions and millions of rapt listeners as they were talking about what was basically the fall of the United States that we were done. In the summer of 1935, we got pretty close to the edge because we had a lot of problems. But one of them was we had not yet gotten good at consuming electronic media. We had not yet figured out. Remember, War of the Worlds was 15 years after when Orson Welles put on H.G. Welles' stage drama, War of the World is a radio show. All the people who thought it was real and were stuffing damp towels under their door jams to keep the Martian nerve

gas out. We still weren't very sophisticated users of radio. By then, it was almost time for the Second World War. So we have to remember these hand computers that we carry around have only been with us since 2007 or 2008, pretty early in this process. And the only way that it gets better is the same way that it got better before, which is we have to become more sophisticated users and we have to demand the kind of patriotic decency out of the news sources that we support with our eyeballs, but also our subscriptions that we demand the same of them, too. I mean, this sounds good, but I mean, look, there's little signs of hope. Brian Stelter getting fired is one of them.

I'm sure you're going to miss him. Sure. You're going to miss him a lot. Yeah. Sorry. I'm sorry. I don't get to go there on the book tour. It really tears me up.

But I don't I personally don't think CNN can be resurrected. I just think they've done too much damage to themselves. I hope I'm wrong. I think it would be great to have a CNN like we had when I first started news when I watched them, watch them all the time. But I don't have a lot of hope. I feel like what's going to happen is these organizations are probably going to die and new ones are getting developed as we speak and they'll be the future.

I think I think I think it's a both of those things are true, right? They'll always be a Fox news. They'll always be a CNN. And as we say, I don't know what's going to happen, but those brands are valuable on air or off air and they'll stick around and there'll be a different Jeff Bezos didn't buy the Washington post because he liked the, Beatle Bailey comic. He bought the Washington Post because it's if you if you say what newspaper do you most closely associate with political news? Well, the Washington Post probably would have to be number one, even if you don't like it. So these

brands will persist. But consumer habits are changing dramatically. We have lots of evidence to talk about changing consumer habits. And by the way, one of them is that young news consumers are stepping up the pace, right? We're starting to see them get into the groove that they're supposed to be, which is, look, if you're 25 and you're having a wonderful life and having fun, I'm not going to tell you that you have to subscribe to my newsletter so that we can break down the inside of the midterm election forecast. I got it. That's good. Go have fun and be beautiful. But when you get a little older and you've got kids and you're paying taxes and you're doing all that stuff, your need for news goes up. And we're seeing that that's kicking in and that we're seeing that stuff. The trend that concerns me

most of all in all of this is that according to the Pew research, that 10 years ago, there were only 3% of Americans who said they consumed no news in the previous week. Now that is 15%. And we have, and I don't blame them for dropping out. I would too. I can see why I sympathize. But what we have observed is that more and more people are just opting out and idiocracy ignoramuses who are just exiting. They're just exiting the information superhighway. And we need people. We need an informed citizenry to vote. We need them to understand that as a self protection mechanism. You know, I was talking to Melissa Francis, who she left Fox, and obviously I did as well. And there's a long period where I didn't want to touch the news. And she didn't want to touch the news. And it can be very healing to just stay away from the news for a while. But I think the way back in is to find somebody like one thing I love about you, Chris, is you're always optimistic, you know,

the news can be dark, which you always have a positive spin that makes it sound too pollyannish but just you you always find a way to laugh um and and same right like same that's what gets me through it and that's what i i know a lot about my audience is i love the fact that you know you always find a way to laugh and i never feel bad after i've listened to the show there's a way of doing it right and and they and i would recommend people stay away from the people whose show makes you feel bad all the time. That's a business model. That's not reflective of what's actually in the news. And you have to be protective of your beautiful mind because there are people looking to corrupt it. Chris Stierwald, what a pleasure, my friend. I hope I see you again soon. A real treat to be with you. Thank you for having me.

Thanks to all of you for joining us today and this week and for putting us over 500,000 on YouTube. Really do appreciate that. We're going to take a little break, my team and I, for Labor Day and hope you are as well. We will be back on Tuesday, however, with our friends from the fifth column. Love them. And we have the funniest Hillary Clinton clip that we've been saving for those guys. We'll see you then.

Enjoy your holiday. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.