The Megyn Kelly Show - Biden Begins, with Ben Domenech, Krystal Ball, Saagar Enjeti, and Ryan Grim | Ep. 53

Episode Date: January 20, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Ben Domenech, co-founder and publisher of The Federalist, Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti, hosts of TheHill TV's "Rising," and Ryan Grim, host of The Intercept's podcast "Deconstructed," to talk about tech censorship, the Biden "blitz" when it comes to immigration and the economy in the first 10 and 100 days, the future of the GOP and the Democratic party, where the media stands now and what the media does next, the future of the "Trump" wing of the GOP, the media's Tara Reade failures, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShowFind out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Joe Biden inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States today. How are we feeling about that? And what now? Ben Domenech, Crystal Ball, Sagar Anjeti, and Ryan Grimm all join me to discuss the angles. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to the Megyn Kelly show. We've got a jam packed program for you today. We're going to cover the inauguration and what to expect and Joe Biden's 10 day blitz. He's about to go on basically undoing as much as he can of the Trump administration policies. What exactly should we expect? I've got all angles covered for you. But before we get to our first guest, I want to talk to you about a new company that we're talking about here at The Megyn Kelly Show called Bambi.com. Yes, Bambi, a company that does

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right now. Schedule your free HR audit. That's Bambi.com slash MK spelled BAM to the B-E-E dot com slash MK and offload this headache to someone who cares. Joining me now, my friend Ben Dominich, who is the co-founder of the federalist and also the publisher ben so good to have you here how are you i'm doing well megan and it's great to be with you and congratulations on all your success in this new world of podcasts which the associated press informed me yesterday could be a ripe growing place for villainous conspiracies and misinformation. Oh, good. So we have our agenda. Exactly.

Well, I mean, we've talked about this, but I really have admired what you've done in sort of creating an independent media lane. And it's been very successful because there's an appetite for it. And of course, the events of the past couple of weeks, not to mention four years, have underscored why. Now more than ever, independent media is going to come under attack. Anything that's not, quote, mainstream, which is code for leftist, is going to come under attack. And you've been living this. I mean, this is not like, what people are saying now, Ben, is like, look, it's just Trump's Twitter feed. Calm down. Parler had a lot of extremist rhetoric on it. Calm down. This is not

going to expand beyond them. You are living proof, and the Federalist is over the past few years. That's not true. It's already been happening. Yeah, it's absolutely been happening. And I appreciate your kind words. I mean, one of the things that I really felt was absent when we started The Federalist Nail seven years ago is we felt that there was less of a focus happening within the broader center right media landscape on culture, pop culture, tech issues, things that were kind of outside the normal wonky policy discussions or horse race politics discussions that happened within that world. And I think that everything that's happened since then has sent more and more

of those stories to the top of America's mindset. I mean, I remember a few years ago getting into an argument with a prominent conservative commentator who was saying that all this talk about big tech, it doesn't really relate to a normal person. And I said, no, it's becoming a kitchen table issue. It's becoming something people talk about because it's not just touching the media moguls. It's not just touching the people who are in the business. It's reaching down to touch people in ways that can affect their small businesses, in ways that can lead to real

destruction for them and their families. And that makes this issue something that I think is only going to become more prominent in the coming years, sadly. I think in that way, the suppression of the Hunter Biden story by Twitter and Facebook, the New York Post's Hunter Biden story on his corruption, helped because I think most people became aware that they were doing that. And anybody who was open-minded politically, not already dug in on Joe Biden must win. Trump is the devil. Wanted to know why they couldn't access that. Why was it so hard? Why were these corporate giants, these tech giants deciding we didn't get to hear that one, which of course wound up verified later

without an apology from those, from that suppression. But the, but the other thing I think that's really underscored all of this is COVID and the suppression of anybody challenging the quote conventional wisdom on face masks and how effective they are on the number of deaths being attributed to COVID on the contagion rate on the shutdowns. Now we're seeing the same thing on vaccines. If they don't like what you're saying, they shut you down. Just ask somebody like Alex Berenson, who's been very heterodox on this. And he had a ban of his book on Amazon. I mean, one of the things that I think we saw very early on is that this is kind of revealing of the weaknesses of the arguments of the tech giants when it comes to

their decision-making processes. It's all Calvin ball. There are no permanent rules. Terms of service can be changed. And it's a situation where they can turn around and say, oh, well, we're shutting down this Hunter Biden story, even an inability to send it via direct message because we say it's hacked material, but we're not saying it's our fact-checking team. But the fact-checking team itself was actually very upset at this because none of them had fact-checked the story yet. That's not the way fact-checking works, even in a situation where fact-checking is so often used to crush opposing views. I mean, imagine a situation where you are reporting on or trying to report on the source

of this virus. One of the things that the State Department came out with in terms of their own report, talking about how much earlier there was proof that this potentially walked out of a lab in some way, shape, or form, that was something that was potentially walked out of a lab in some way, shape or form. That was something that was deemed to be misinformation, disinformation that, you know, the China focused people who are very pro China were crushing it as being a racist idea. And they continue to do so. And then lo and behold, as we dig into this and you find more and more reporting, there's more and more indications that certainly something like that could be true. And that's the way that we learn about the world that we're in, treating the news as if it's just a situation where having this opinion is itself dangerous. Having this discussion is dangerous.

It puts so much distrust in the viewer, in the consumer of news, in the American people to be intelligent and to make decisions for themselves. It makes people more conspiratorial because, you know, it's like the old Woody Allen. You're not paranoid if they really are out to get you. There were suspicions that big government is part of a cabal meant to stifle any resistance or opposing thought. Much better to let it let it out there. Let people make up their own minds. And if you if you could be in any way objective in covering the news. Hello, mainstream. That would help, too, right? So that they wouldn't have reason every time they turn on the television to once again have confirmation bias that they hate me.

I can't trust them. Have to go to the internet for information. Oh, wait, all my favorite sites have been blocked out or stories are being censored or have some warning on them from Twitter when the other side's information never gets any warnings. And I know you guys, didn't you, didn't you have a story about the Black Lives Matter riots? Something happened with the Federalists. What happened? I remember you got like comments shut down. Yes, we've tangled with them on a number of different issues. We actually tangled with, you know, this whole situation with Google demonetization, which was purportedly about comments on our site, the Discus comment section, which other than slapping

sort of a filter on language on it, we don't moderate. And basically, the powers that be at Google had that flagged to them by a tiny British, quote unquote, anti-hate group that targeted Zero Hedge and a couple of other sites. But I really do believe this. The powers that be in DC for Google, who have a greater awareness of the Federalists and what we're about, were clearly surprised by this, didn't realize this was going to happen, didn't realize that there was even a threat of it. We hadn't been informed of any threat of it from them. We have worked through for months since then to try to bring our comments back. And we are going to bring them back, but they're going to end up having to be paywalled and sectioned off so that no ads can appear there. They just put as many hurdles as possible between- Well, and obviously that's not the way that they apply it to other sites all across the

internet. I mean, heck, look at YouTube comment sections. There's some crazy stuff in there. But I think one thing that you bring up there is really interesting, which is what's the reason behind what we're seeing? And to me, it's a question of are these institutions doing this because they're brittle or because they're strong? And when I look at Washington, D.C., with 25,000 plus troops in it, National Guard troops, and the kind of reaction we've seen there, barriers thrown up willy-nilly. I think that the answer to this is kind of both, that the political scene with these octogenarian leaders like Biden and Pelosi and all of these teams that are full of people who've been around for so long, they're white-knuckling it. They

seem brittle. They seem frail. And on the flip side, I think that these big tech corporate oligarchs, they're doing what they're doing because they feel completely empowered by this, that the weakness of our political scene has made them feel like they've inherited the Godhead and that it's their job to try to make this world, make this country look the way they believe it ought to be. And that's very concerning to me, given that that's not historically been the model for success at American. Well, they're definitely looking at D.C. right now as well as the Democrats take power. And it's no accident that every time they they really start a crackdown on free speech on the Internet, it's right before the Democrats have hearings or right before the Democrats assume power. And they know what their masters want.

Their masters, the Democratic masters, want a shutdown or, you know, purging of conservative thought. Right now, it may or may not be the more sort of controversial opinions, but it spreads as all these things do. And I mean, I remember there was Sean Davis, he's with you. Is he your co-founder, right? At The Federalist. He got a totally true tweet slapped with a warning label about the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling on when one could vote, when one could submit a ballot. It was 100% accurate. There was nothing even controversial about it. And old Jack decided it needed a warning label for its potential errors or danger. There's never any accountability, Ben. It's just like,

they'll decide whether you're dangerous. Well, the other thing too, with the way that Twitter does these things is it's completely haphazard. You can have, I mean, there was that whole conversation. And I obviously listened to your interview with the founder of Parler the other day. And there was that whole conversation about the degree to which it was used to foment violence or something along those lines. There are things that you can find. I mean, if you just search for kill cops on Twitter today, you will get, you will find, you know, a depth of people calling for things like that that are completely allowed to

stand up. And yet they, the standard is different because they don different because they have the relationships and because they view Jack as being an ally in this. And to me, I think that a lot of this though has been the shiny object of talking about social media and what we're allowed to post is going to turn much more into the functional nature of a capitalist system in which a lot of the dominant forces are very much against the views of their consumers politically. And one of the big things I think we see right now, for instance, is the question about whether banks are going to stop letting particular conservative groups or people with conservative

affiliations use their services. I mean, this is something that a lot of wants to see it. Part of me wants to see it. Do it. Be as gross in your overreach as possible so that the people who are still blind will see, you know, I mean, there's not going to be a rising up. I speak obviously of nonviolent rising up, but there's not going to be a political rising up and reckoning until the country gets it. You know, I mean, I do, I do think it's one of those things like, well, they're not coming for me. So how, how concerned am I? Right. And it's like, oh no, they're going to come for you. It starts with the stuff somebody considers most controversial, but it always expands beyond that. And it's, it happens in large and obvious and also small and less obvious ways. I, here's one of my irritations. I read the Federalist all the time. I listened to your podcast, which I love, as you know, I, I have a very good gauge for what's in the mainstream. What's not in the

mainstream on conservative thought. You are as mainstream conservative as they come. Interesting, fun, provocative to read. You're not boring. Every time I read like whatever, some, let's say USA Today, write about the Federalist, far right, far, far right. According to whom, right? Rachel Maddow? Who's coming up with these descriptions? And it's just a way of delegitimizing. So it happens, you know, in even even I say when I want people to write about me, that doesn't make me controversial. I'm well within the mainstream of political thought. But this is how they do it. Small nicks, death by a thousand cuts, and then the big machete every once in a while, like parlor's gone. Yeah. I think that one of the things that we have to keep in mind too about this is that it expands in the same way outside of the world of media now, because we have nationalized so many of these discussions, if you had an experience through most of American history where we had more of diversity in terms of communities, then you had these binding institutions that prevented

you from hating the people around you to the same degree. In other words, if you have to sit in the same pew as somebody, or if you're in the same local group, or you're doing things as a community with your kids and school and things like that, it can make it more difficult to hate the person who just has a different political side in their yard. And I think that unfortunately now, as those institutions have been completely wrecked and they were, many of them, hurting already before coronavirus came along

and shut down their ability to be at the center of our lives, we get completely disaggregated. We're atomized. We have a closer relationship with the person who delivers Amazon boxes than we do with the person who runs the small business, the restaurant, the diner, or the bodega around the corner. And that don't think we've fully grasped yet how much damage this has done to the American psyche and to the ability of people to have faith in the American dream. That's a really dangerous thing. It's true. It's one of the reasons I actually,

I like living in New York. We're going to leave New York because of the schools, not because we don't like New York. But what I like living in New York. We're going to leave New York because of the schools, not because we don't like New York. But what I like living about New York is I'm surrounded by liberals. I'm not a liberal, but I like the fact that all my best friends are, for the most part, liberals. You know, they're lovely. And politics are not front and center in our relationship, nor do they have to be. Sometimes we'll talk about politics, but it's good to remind yourself that, you know, the

constant demonization of the other side may not be true. It may not be good for the country. You know, I have one of my friends who's a diehard. She hates Trump. She works so hard to get Biden elected. I was happy for her that she won an election day. You know, I mean, I respect that she's in a different place politically from probably most of my audience and me to some extent as well. We we are definitely getting away from that.

And I as I leave New York, I certainly hope I don't leave that that political diversity or actual diversity. I love the fact that my kids go to school and it's it's not even majority white. You know, it's it's the melting pot, which is good for them. That's how I think you actually learn to be an anti-racist, a true anti-racist. Surround yourself with people of color and different backgrounds and see how awesome they are just organically without having race and ethnicity shoved down your throat at every turn and division. Okay, but I want to move on to something else. Let's talk about the Biden blitz and what we're about to get, because I'd love to get your thoughts on this 10 day blitz. He's going to roll out dozens of executive orders in the first 10 days, a big stimulus plan, 1.9 trillion. And the thing that I don't hear being discussed a lot, Ben, is amnesty. I mean, hasn't been that long that I left Fox News where if, if any, if any president came out and said, I'm going to enroll amnesty, I'm going to create the pathway to citizenship for the 11 million people who are in the country unlawfully. Uh, I'm going to put more foreign aid

to central American economies. There's not going to be a single carrot for the Republicans in my proposed immigration bill. Nothing about border security. Screw you, Republicans. I don't care about your concerns. I'm going to place a moratorium on deportations by ICE. The right half of the country would have been freaking out. Right now, I don't hear that much about it. You know, the funny thing, this was a recurring question that I had during the

election about how little this was being discussed, even by President Trump himself. I mean, if you think back to what made a difference for him the first time he ran, it was putting this issue and others that were attended to it front and center in the party that had often wanted to kind of mute them for fear of being called racist or demonized or something like that. And yet it ended up being such a minor part of the conversation that really the only thing people remember about it is the confusion among journalists who didn't know what a coyote was when Trump mentioned it in the debate. It's actually a truly extreme agenda. And our political editor at The Federalist, John Davidson, who's gone and covered the border for the past several years for us, who has taken regular trips into Mexico and the like, he's

been predicting for months now that we were going to see a spike of resurgent migrants at the border driven by a number of factors, including COVID. But it's going to basically turn into a real war zone, a point of conflict that we haven't seen really in the past several years. And that's because Biden's policies are inviting this. When you hear no deportations in the first hundred days, it makes you a lot more likely to make a run for the border. And that's what we're seeing happen right now. And I think it's going to continue to happen. So if you wanted to get back to that kind of clash from the Obama years, if you had some nostalgia for that, get ready. Well, and it's like, don't, aren't they paying attention? You know, the, the, the white working class that went for Trump and not just the white

working class, the Latino working class that went for Trump, this was one of their issues. You know, I think the Democrats wrongly assumed that Latinos in the country would somehow be against Trump's border security program. And I don't think the facts bore that out. You know, if you saw the these communities down in Texas go 100 percent Trump that are mostly Latino. And as we speak, according to Fox News, they reported on Saturday, there's a migrant caravan from Honduras moving to the United States with up to a thousand migrants demanding that the Biden administration quote, honor its commitments to migrants. Then they had on the acting acting

custom and border protection commissioner saying that caravan could include actually more than 5000 migrants coming to America. This is Biden's pledging to end this thing called the migrant protection protocols, which keep migrants in Mexico as they await their hearings here in the United States. Now they're going to be in the United States. Thousands are coming. Moratorium on deportations as Biden pushes for amnesty for the 11 million plus people in the country so they can get citizenship. I just like a as a political matter, I don't see this helping the Democrats. I mean, I guess if they become voters, if they become voters, it will be. I just don't I don't understand why more Republicans aren't standing up like six, eight years ago. This would have been dominating every show in conservative media. where national Republicans in Washington, D.C.

very much have a tendency to forget the lessons politically that they find inconvenient. And a lot of them, I think, want to revert to sort of a pre-Trump GOP frame. And that's just not possible. You can't unring this bell. And that, to me, is one of the reasons why, you know, you're correct as you say, why you saw such a diverse working class support for the president this bell. And that to me is one of the reasons why, you know, you're correct as you say, why you saw such a diverse working class support for the president this cycle, support that

ultimately translated to a ton of these House seats that very few, if any, commentators expected Republicans to win. They want to hold on to that coalition. And I think holding on to it requires them to highlight a lot of these issues that, you know, really were not the bread and butter of the chamber of commerce Republican, you know, back 15 years ago. Okay. So let's talk about the chamber of commerce Republican, because I, I thought your column on Liz Cheney was really interesting, basically saying her GOP is not the future GOP. And I, you made me think about it in a different way. Cause when I, when I first saw that Jim Jordan, who again, with his sketchy, weird history at Ohio state, I got, I got issues with him. But, um, when I first saw he was pushing

to bounce her out of leadership because she voted to impeach only 10 Republicans did in the house. I was like, oh, that's bullshit. And like, calm down. She voted her conscience. That's it. She doesn't deserve to be booted out of leadership. But I did start to think about it a little differently after I read your column. And you talked about how she wanted a stampede to follow her. And I quote, but the buffalo saw that cliff and they didn't like the look of it. Can you talk about what your point was in that her GOP is not the future GOP? So let me first say that Liz Cheney has long running issues within the conference that a lot of people have ignored. You may recall that she twice gave donations in support of candidates primarying current members of her conference,

including Thomas Massey, the Republican who's quite anti-war and is someone who she has some animus for, something that you're not supposed to do when you're in leadership. And that led to kind of a whole blow up for her internally. It was a situation that I think kind of indicated that she's not exactly, you know, the kind of person to maybe lead the party in the future, just on that political ground. To me, there's also, of course, the element of what she represents. And I think that for a lot of Republicans, they've failed to wrestle with the fact that the Bush years, particularly his second term, was a massive failure of policy and politics. There were some exceptions to that.

But for the most part, it really was. I mean, there's not even a comparison, really, in terms of the math on where the GOP is today with Trump leaving office versus where they were when Bush was leaving office. And I think that, unfortunately, very few people have really ever wrestled with that. And I would include Liz Cheney in their number, that you have to learn lessons from the political ramifications of making the argument that Donald Trump did against George W. Bush, against, by extension, Dick Cheney, and against the Iraq war, something that certainly I think a large number of Americans have really tired of.

Though I think that overall, Liz Cheney is someone who represents a very small sliver of a big tent Republican coalition, someone who, you know, very much represents an old Republican party that has passed away. But what's going to replace it? We're not entirely sure yet. And the variety of leaders who could really make a big impact in determining that is quite wide. It's across the country. And it's going to include, I think, some people who we don't even really know yet out of this new incoming freshman congressional class. That's interesting that, you know, because we often talk about the factions within the Republican Party, you know, sort of the MAGA wing, the more establishment Chamber of Commerce wing. And then I don't know

what you'd call sort of McConnell. And I'm not exactly sure where he is now. But I like that idea that maybe this collection gives birth to a new kind of baby that we don't yet know about yet, that we haven't yet seen. That's got a little MAGA sprinkled in, a little establishment sprinkled in. Somebody who's more forward looking and has the finger on the pulse. I don't know. I've been I've been pushing for Daniel Cameron, the AG of Kentucky, because I just think he's I do think he's the Barack Obama of the right. I just think he's exciting. He's young. You know, he's talk about Trump running again at 78, now he realizes he's still leading. I mean, the latest morning consult poll said, you know, who would you see as the, who do you want as the Republican nominee? Right now, this is January 13th, post-riot.

He was far and away the leader. 42% want Trump. The next closest was Mike Pence at, I think, 12. But really, we're going to go there again? Do you think the country's going to do that? The problem that we really face at this moment is we learned a lot about voters from 2016 and what they represented within the Republican coalition in this electoral college-friendly way of winning the presidency. But I think right now, here we are four years later, and the only person that a lot of these voters still listen to and still trust is Trump. And

that's a failure of leadership on the part of a lot of people who, you know, tried to run and tried to beat Trump in 2016 and have still not figured it out this many years later, necessarily the way to go to those people and be trusted by them. You mentioned New Blood. We really have to appreciate how much of a warping effect the boomers have had on American politics. You know, to have three presidents in Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump, all born in the same year.

I mean, that's crazy. And now we've just gone older, the silent generation in Joe Biden, you know, with the oldest president taking office here. That's something that to me just is a huge missed opportunity. And we may end up in a situation where, I mean, wouldn't it be kind of Gen X to be like, I'm not interested in the presidency. Maybe you don't get a Gen Xer, but you have new politicians rising up who I think need to seize this moment and need to be able to figure out

how to have the language to speak to those Trump voters, but also to do so in a way that does not have you have all of the defects of the way that Trump approached politics. There has to be a way to be confrontational without being a bully. And I think that that's something that a lot of people are going to have to figure out. Yeah. Tell it to your wife's co-hosts on The View. I think they're beyond listening to my advice. Oh my God. I feel for her. If our audience doesn't know, Ben's married to Meghan McCain, but I don't really watch The View. I see the highlights, but I feel for her. She is fighting a one woman war over there and she is not dealing with people who are acting in good faith.

They're just so mean. I can't imagine being that nasty to my co-host. Can you imagine me beating up on poor Hammer like that? I think that I wouldn't have as much of a problem with the way that TV, not just The View, but TV along those lines worked. If, if it was WWE, if it was, okay, we're going to go out, we're going to have a fight at the end of it. We both work for the same company. We're not going to go. And, you know, it's, there's none of that

off air nastiness. And to me, it's the, it's the off, it's off air nastiness and, and sort of, you know, the people who really do really have, I think, unfortunately lost it. You know, I, I used to be on Chris Hayes show all the time. And I feel like, unfortunately, now it's, it's unrecognizable to me the way that he talks about conservatives and just he'll pick someone to go after and accuse them of being the cause of millions of people dying. And it's just it's not something that I think helps our discourse at all, because it leads to a point where you can't even talk to each other. Yep. And and totally oblivious. I mean, our our executive producer, Steve Krakauer, he writes a newsletter. It's called Fourth Watch that takes a look at the media every week. And it's well worth your time. I love it. I find new stories that I hadn't seen. I would have said that before I hired him. they had Ben Dominic, I'm sorry, not Ben Dominic, Ben Shapiro, my other Ben, as like guest editor,

basically, he writes an article and then provides links. There was a meltdown, 200 tears were cried by the liberals inside Politico that they would, that they would let Ben Shapiro have the pen of Politico as if it's this, you know, world renowned, you know, respected brand. It's fine, but please don't lose yourself. And then, and then Chris Hayes did it and people were like, oh, that's fine. You know, he's legitimate. He's, you know, he's not partisan. He's, you know, he's saying what's true. And Chris Hayes was like, I, I don't wish to have any role in this debate as if like, I'm above this. Don't compare me to Ben Shapiro. I'm not the Ben Shapiro of the left that he can't even understand he thinks he's just like this truth teller and shapiro's a nutcase and if you don't see that there's a problem with you and you know he actually uh in addition to chris hayes they had don lemon do it as well and and so it's it's just like these these are the news people you see. And then Ben Shapiro over here with his enormously successful podcast and media business and books and everything else, he is the fringe character.

It's a total failure to wrestle with the world as it is. And it's trying to imagine a reality in which they can just Thanos-style snap their fingers and have half the country disappear. My attitude towards that is that's even more dangerous. I want to circle back and say Steve Krakauer's newsletter is excellent. I recommend it to everyone. It is absolutely something that will give you insight and some good perspective on what's happening within the world of media without being the kind of sycoph financial stake in this. And we don't even really like that what happened on the Capitol, that riot is being it's like the fifth ring, you know, the fifth stone. He got it. It's like the Democrats. That was what they needed for all encompassing power, the ability to silence Republicans forever to say, we told you so you were wrong. You're terrible. Trump was terrible. And that's how

I was feeling the first week or two. I actually think there's been a shift now. I think already they overreacted with the big tech crackdown. I think people are calming down and getting some more perspective that the Capitol Hill riot, as awful as it was, is one of many, many riots we have seen in this country over the past, not just year, but 10 years. And you've been talking about that. You've been covering a lot of these riots. And I thought you were pretty brave early on to say not yawn. You weren't saying yawn about the Capitol Hill riot, but you were saying get some perspective, because whenever the infrequent times it's the right, we always get told like these are the Nazis. The right are all Nazis. And every time we see permissive, glowing coverage of protests on the left, and people need to remember that as they consume the news coverage about this event.

I think that's absolutely true. I also have the perspective on this, the one that I know that I share with you about the situation when it comes to the use of crises by Democrats. And Rahm Emanuel's reminder, as you referenced the other day, to never let them go to waste. This was a Damoclean sword that was hanging over the head of the center right in America. And the rioters effectively gave Democrats

and big tech a ladder and a pair of scissors to just go up and cut that rope. And to me, this was inevitably going to happen, but I didn't anticipate this being the spark. I thought that it would come in a slightly different way, I guess. But now that it has happened, I think you are right. People are much more aware of it. And frankly, I mean, I think he's been a better commentator than almost anybody on MSNBC or CNN. Bill Maher making the point again the other day that you can't use these people to say that that represents 75 million Trump supporters. And, and to me, that's something that most Americans realize.

It's the media and a small, very loud cadre of Americans who have the opposite view. I, I hate to do the Tom Friedman thing of talking about your taxi driver or your Uber driver. I had a, but I had a back to back experience last week where I had a Uber driver. But I had a back-to-back experience last week where I had an Uber driver who was an Iranian refugee who was freaking out about what the big tech was doing and talked about how he didn't want us to lose free speech and that he was worried about it and that his parents had come here to bring him away so that he would have free speech. And then the one that I had a very nice Belgian gentleman who said, well, I think that they should just take everybody who was at the Capitol and put them on an island without masks until they die. for those two people to share a country is the critical demand for our leadership today. And that's something that doesn't just mean political leadership. It means leadership in communities. It means people across the country. It means small business owners and pillars of

community that still exist. They're going to have to do the work that our politicians are clearly incapable of doing and would never be able to do even if they tried. All right. Last line of inquiry. How are you feeling about Joe Biden being the next president of the United States, Democrat control, the House and the Senate, and what the next four years are likely to bring? Well, I have to be honest, I'm very nervous about this presidency. I worry about Joe Biden's capacity to navigate this moment. I think he had a missed opportunity when it came to impeachment, actually, to sound a true note of unity. I think if he had come out against it and said, look, you know, we're moving on from this. If you want to

censor him, fine. But, you know, impeaching him after he's out of office, you know, it's not the way to go. I think that that would have really boosted him among a lot of Republicans. Instead, I think that this is going to be Obama 3.0, but people forget that Obama 2.0 was a lot more left than Obama 1.0. And so I think that this is going to be an administration that unfortunately really goes down a lot of radical roads because they feel the political allowance to do so. Now, those are going to be areas that are determined by how much they can actually get away with in a very weird time, given the pandemic. But the note I would like to hear from President Biden is, we cannot be enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. And I would like that to actually be something that is true

in terms of the way that he approaches his administration. But if it doesn't look like that, if it looks more like what Kamala Harris did in California, going after people like David Daleiden, going after journalism that she didn't like, you know, really being kind of a left authoritarian in a lot of ways, then I expect that the culture war is only going to get hotter in this country. And that concerns me greatly because I think, if anything, what we need is to lower that temperature to prevent a real crack up in our culture. Yeah. I mean, if he took it one step further and said. Stop making lists of people who support Trump. You know, that's not American. That's not what we do.

We won this election. We're going to go forward. We're going to try to remember who we are as Americans. Something to regenerate some love of country and belief in who we are fundamentally as Americans. You know, it'd be great to hear. Even Trump was terrible at that. Good God, was he a bad spokesman for the country. I mean, he just was. That was a very valid criticism I used to hear. Even Trump was terrible at that. Good God, was he a bad spokesman for the country.

I mean, he just was. That was a very valid criticism I used to hear of him from the people at like National Review who are Republicans and conservatives, but they didn't like Trump. But they were right that he just couldn't articulate what's special about this place in a way that would ever make you want to stand up and cheer or really believe it, you know. And I do think Joe Biden is a patriot. I it, you know? And I do think Joe Biden is a patriot. I think, you know, when you hear him talking about the divisiveness in the country and so on, that's he's being pulled by people. I think he loves the country. And I'd love to hear more rationale for that love being espoused by the leader of the free world. I'll

give you the last word. I think that one of the reasons that Joe Biden won the nomination as a Democrat is because unlike a lot of the other people on stage, he really wasn't one dedicated to talking down the United States of America, to viewing it as something that was thoroughly corrupted by racism and by all of these other elements that people bring forward. I think that's one of the reasons that he won, because he was that old school Democrat in his approach. But his policies, that's a different question. And I think that it remains to be seen what those actually look like, the impacts that they have, and how much, to circle back, you know, Democrats are planning to not let

this crisis go to waste. If they continue down the road that a lot of their governors have gone on, trying to use this moment to cement certain areas of policy they want to achieve, whether it be within education, healthcare, or, you know, as you mentioned earlier, on immigration policy, I think that that's going to have a real toxic effect and lead to a political backlash that is along the lines of what we saw from the Tea Party back in the day. That's the big question, and we won't know it until we've had a real sight at this new presidency. Ben, always great talking to you. So thoughtful. Really appreciate it. Great to be with you. Thank you. So Crystal and Sagar will be here in one second. But first, let's talk about Legacy Box. This is

an effortless way to digitally preserve your home movies, your photos, so that you never have to wonder where they are or whether they are safe. We went through this with Doug's mom. They used to take a family trip every year all over the world. And she has all these cute little slides, which I've never seen. Enter Legacy Box. Legacy Box transforms the slides into usable, easy to consume ways of watching your media, right? It could be a CD or DVD. It could be a disc drive that you can just put into your computer, but they make it easy for you. So you don't have to sit around and watch the overhead projector. Videotape recordings, as it turns out, were not made to stand the test of time. Neither were slides. They start diminishing after 10 to 15 years. And so the sooner you can

take care of this and digitally preserve your stuff, the better off that stuff will be. With Legacy Box, you can have all of that footage organized and preserved quickly and easily. I was saying the other day, one of the things that we did with our Legacy Box was sent in these old like training tapes I had to do when I was becoming a lawyer to learn how to argue, to be on my feet. And we had a lot of fun with my kids watching the very young MK, the pre-foxified MK, learning how to be a lawyer. If you want to have some laughs with your spouse and your kids, you can do something like that. Anyway, the service is shockingly simple. You just, you use their kit. They send it to you. You can fill it up whenever you want to safely send in the moments you want preserved. Their experienced team will create a digital collection by hand, and then it all comes back to you. Stored in the cloud, a thumb drive, a DVD, along with the

original media you sent. Even if you want to do it yourself, this would cost you hundreds of bucks. But when you visit LegacyBox.com today, you're going to save 50% off. 50. I don't think we have an offer better than that. And you can get started for as little as 39 bucks. So go to legacybox.com slash MK to take advantage of this limited time offer. Go to legacybox.com slash MK, save 50% off while supplies last. And now without further ado, Crystal Ball and Sagar and Jetty, the co-hosts of Rising on the Hill.com, HillTV.com. Hi, guys. Hey, Megan. How's it going?

Hey, Megan. It's going great. Big week. I'll start with you, Sagar, since you're more right-leaning. How are you feeling this week and about the next four years? It's a strange time, Megan. I mean, right now, D.C. is literally a fortress like occupied with 26000 troops. Crystal and I actually coming to you remotely because we can't our crew can't get to the downtown studio.

And it's interesting. I've been trying to reflect just broadly about this entire administration and more. And I tweeted this basically on the day of the election, which is that all of it being said, I think Trump's greatest victory was breaking the policy consensus in DC. I don't think he did very much in terms of following through on that, largely abandoned many of the promises that he made in 2016. But you can't put back in the bag that millions of people, 65 million, 2016, 75 million, were willing to raise a middle finger to the establishment. In Washington, I don't think it has allowed for enough introspection here. I don't think Biden is necessarily the person who's going to be asking those questions. But that was really heartening to me. It made it so that I was like, you know what? I don't have to listen to the tastemakers or

others. It turns out that there are a lot of people in this country who agree that what is going on right now in this country is not acceptable. And so I think to the extent that there are a lot of people in this country who agree that what is going on right now in this country is not acceptable. And so I think to the extent that he had a victory, that's what it was. I don't think to the extent that he had a failure is that he didn't really follow through on much of it and in many ways drived up our partisan chaos to 11 or 12. So it's a mixed bag, but it's an interesting kind of reflective time given everything that's happening right now. It is reflective. What have you been feeling, Crystal? You know, Megan, there was a new poll out this weekend, last end of last week, and it asked people what they thought the greatest threat to their way of life was.

And a majority of Americans said that their fellow citizen, not a foreign threat, not COVID, not financial elites, their fellow citizens, I think 56% said that was the greatest threat to their life, their way of life. And I think that's probably the most devastating statistic and the most telling one about the moment that we find ourselves in. Great, McConnell's going to church with Biden. Do I think that that's going to lead to any sort of amicable situation in Washington? No. And part of why is because, frankly, the business that you and I both were part of in cable news and mainstream media, they have a business model around making people

feel like their fellow citizen is not just has a different point of view or goes about their lives differently or has different priorities, but is an actual existential threat to their lives. And I'm not talking about elites, political media elites. I'm not talking about them being the threat. People turning against each other as like, this is the thing that I'm most terrified of. So that's, to me, the scariest stat that you can consider given where we are, given what we saw with people being so deluded that they thought that they could storm the Capitol and overturn the election and thought that there was some massive fraud of which there was no evidence. Political violence that we've seen throughout

the year, we also in that same poll had a majority of people saying that political violence is likely to only get worse. I don't think that's a statement on Joe Biden. I think that's a statement on how ugly and how divided this country is. And people like Trump and many others have basically used that division for their own profit and power. So to me, that is the biggest sort of existential threat that is facing the country is the way that people are viewing one another as enemies. And I hope that in the Biden era, maybe we can turn that temperature down and do some things that have broad based support. You know, the2,000 checks, one thing that has broad bipartisan support, obviously everybody wants to get a vaccine out and be able to get back to some kind of normal life. I hope that those

sort of shared goals help to heal some of those wounds. But frankly, as long as people profit off of dividing people and making them hate each other, I'm pretty pessimistic. I know it seems easy to lose the fact that the people who stormed that Capitol, not all of them, but sure, I bet some were white supremacists who have just gotten themselves into such a tizzy about this country. We're going to take it back. And then on the other side, you know, what we call the leftists, which is not to be confused with liberals who are normal. Leftists have an agenda of just shutting down speech and changing America and crapping on America at every turn. Like they're, they're in a different group. They don't represent the vast majority of us. The vast majority of us are the 80% in the middle.

Maybe it's smaller now. Maybe it's 60% in the middle. I don't know. But they get the most airtime. They gather the most attention and they make people feel really pessimistic. But I talk to you guys and I know, I know in my soul that most Americans are where we are. All three of us don't share the

exact same politics, but can talk to each other, like each other, respect each other, listen to each other, learn from each other. That I really think is where the country truly is in its heart. Either one of you can take that one. Yeah. I mean, I don't disagree with you, Megan. The problem is, like you said, is that the structures, the power structures that we have, which even enable this type of discussion, they're already coming at us. We talked about this today on our show. There's a former Facebook executive who was on Brian Stelter's show on CNN over the weekend. And he was talking about how he was like, there are people on YouTube who have larger audiences than daytime CNN and implying that that's a bad thing. And it's funny because Crystal and I do have a larger audience than daytime CNN and implying that that's a bad thing. And it's funny because

Crystal and I do have a larger audience than daytime CNN and we're on YouTube. And I think that the reason is people are craving this type of discussion and they recognize it now as a threat because it is, I think in the long run, an existential threat to their business model and to so much of what they've wrought upon this country. But I think it's vitally important that we stand up for the ability of free expression, not just online, on podcasting. That's another thing that they're coming after. They're calling it a loophole, that podcasting is an open protocol. I've never really been more afraid of the censorship regime and how far it's going than we are in right now. And Glenn Greenwald

rightfully has been warning. He's like, this is just like the post 9-11 moment, except just to Crystal's point, which is now the threat is not foreign. It's each other and using the apparatuses of the state in order to look at demonize and investigate each other, which I just think is so, so dangerous in the long run. You know, it also just smacks of such elitism, you know, with that guy like the internet, YouTube. It's like he doesn't realize that the old system is crumbling down around him. People have figured out how to find information in new ways. They're not beholden to the big NBCs or God forbid CNNs of the world anymore. And the response to that is not to shame them

and say like old school media needs to just try to force the other competitors out of business so that they can reclaim their monopoly. They need to reevaluate their information delivery and their connection. I always say Trump is untethered to the facts. He doesn't have an adult relationship with the facts. Neither does CNN. That's the truth. Only there's no navel gazing about that one, you know? Yeah. Well, Trump was a very convenient excuse because he was so terrible and outrageous and like lied all the time and, you know, incited people and all of that. So you could easily just point at him and be like,

well, he's the problem. He's the reason he's the reason that things are bad, like anything bad that happens, it could be his fault. And so that was an easy excuse for Democrats who didn't want to look at like, hey, how did we lose to this clown? How did that happen? Maybe there's something we did wrong over these years that people were also rejecting in picking this person. And it's certainly for media outlets. Trump was a meal ticket and kept them from having to look at the fact that audiences were increasingly abandoning them before he stepped into the limelight. So they never had to assess. And they've never spent a minute thinking about like, oh, hey, I wonder how and why that trust with our audience was broken. I wonder if it had anything to do with our reporting leading up to the Iraq war.

Hey, I wonder if it had anything to do with us completely failing to see the financial collapse happening. Hey, I wonder if it had to do with like blowing up this Russia gate conspiracy way out of line with anything that was ever backed up by the facts. I wonder if any of those things led to people feeling like they needed to find alternative sources. And I don't want to, I don't want to quibble with what you said about liberals versus leftists, but I consider myself to be a leftist. And what I actually think is so troubling is that it's the mainstream liberal perspective within the Democratic Party and within the media that is the most authoritarian. They're the ones who are cheering on censorship, who are saying, you know, who are like going to Twitter and saying, please ban all of these people and begging for more big tech censorship. They're the ones who are saying, hey, we need to get in there with a new domestic

terrorism law because we don't have a large enough national security state and police state. I think there are, you know, there's a lot of varieties and flavors of leftists, but a lot of people on the left see the ultimate goal of a multiracial working class movement. And that means that you have to actually like not hate people who are in the white working class and may have been Trump supporters and not just dismiss them out of hand or want to censor them and just get them out of the public square altogether. So the very fact that it actually is the quote unquote liberals who have become such sort of knee jerk authoritarians is what I find so troubling. That's an interesting point. I mean, I always sort of think about it in terms of my liberal

friends, you know, which is redundant because I live in the Upper West Side. All my friends are liberal. I think I have one who's a Trump voter and she's ashamed. She doesn't want people to know. She's not ashamed. She doesn't want people to know. But anyway, what I think about when I think about them is they're kind of like you. I don't think they're Bernie supporters. They're more Biden supporters, but they just don't buy into this crazy thing that's happening on the left of like shaming speech and deplatforming somebody who disagrees with you. I'm thinking of my friends now. They're like, for lack of a better term, normal liberals. Yeah, they're normal. I don't know how.

That's what that's called. They're just normal. Yeah. And I just feel like I know a lot of liberals. And maybe I know one who's on board that woke train. And that's just not going to fly in my life. But I'm not sure how they have such a huge microphone and how they've rested control of the magazines and online data and sports and just the messaging we're getting from so many corners seems to be in their control and not in the control of the crystal balls of the world. Well, I think it's because they benefit from that regime of

censorship because it does basically quash their competitors. I mean, that dude on CNN, who was the Facebook executive saying like, oh my God, these people have audiences larger than CNN. That gives up the game. I mean, it's, you know, it's basically like classic anti-competitive behavior. If they can really narrow the confines of what you're allowed to say and where you're allowed to say it and who's allowed to say it, then it creates less competition for themselves. Now, to your point, no one's learned any lessons. You won't be surprised to learn no one's learned a single thing. And we're already seeing the media, a huge part of the problem.

And they represent, you know, it's not just them. It's the Democrats, too, on on, you know, on on media. Doubling down on the on the condemnation of Trump supporters as a group that they are literally the Don Lemon said, you're part of the Klan, that you are supporting the man who the Klan supports if you voted for Trump. And here's just a little mashup that Gravian put together. These are great mashups that Gravian does of some examples. I think the voices will be will be obvious, except for the one who's like unity. Unity is Claire McCaskill. But take a listen. I wonder if you have thought through kind of how Republicans begin what someone on my

team earlier today called debathification. Look, I think the challenge is that the rot is from the grassroots all the way to the presidency. So the rot is at every layer. There are millions of Americans, almost all white, almost all Republicans, who somehow need to be deprogrammed. They can't even open their mouths about unity. Shut up about unity. The way that we in the media speak about this is so important. Twitter and Facebook aren't banning you because you're a conservative.

They're banning you because you suck. They're banning you because you say evil shit. I covered wars abroad. I've seen ugly things that this country now resembles, but I've never seen this country more in doubt about safety at home than right now. And the enemy is us. Oh, boy. Yeah.

Sager. I mean, the rat. Yeah. Yeah. The one that really got me was debathification. Does anyone want to tell Joy Reid what debathification, how that all worked out in Iraq? It was a total disaster and led to the collapse of the state. And this is exactly what I was alluding to earlier, which is that if you think about the war in Iraq, it took about what, nine months in order to beat the war drum and get cable on board and the media failures. We've now had 20 years of demonization of each other. So the ground is laid and all they needed to do was flip the switch. You can hear that from Chris Cuomo, from Joy Reed and others,

and you turn the organs of propaganda and then now of the state against one another, and you are going to lead yourself to a deeply, deeply troubling situation. And all I want in this world is to see less violence here in the US and less type of tension, less incidents like we saw at the Capitol. And I know having seen, you know, I'll pull this card to having having covered a lot of these things abroad, ISIS, Iraq, Afghanistan, the collapse of regimes. This is one of the central ways that authoritarian dictatorships ramp up domestic turmoil and lead to big political explosions. So that reel that you just played is just so, so troubling. But unfortunately, like you said, they haven't learned anything. Well, I have a scarier one to play for you. I really wanted to discuss this with you too,

which is, again, learning nothing. Take a listen to Hillary Clinton, which she has a podcast. I'm just going to just throw that out there. She's got a podcast because people want to hear from Hillary Clinton. Apparently they do, because this one's got a lot of views. She had on Nancy Pelosi. And this is their plan for the upcoming foreseeable future. Maybe they're going to get started right away. I don't know. Nancy Pelosi is still House Speaker. Listen to their agenda item going forward under Biden. We now know that not just him, but his enablers, his accomplices, his cult members have the same disregard for democracy. Do you think we need a 9-11 type commission to investigate and report everything that they can pull together and explain what

happened? I do. Let me, again, to your point of who is he beholden to, as I've said over and over, as I said to him in that picture with my blue suit, as I was leaving, what I was saying to him as I was pointing rudely at him, with you, Mr. President, all roads lead to Putin. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. It will never end, Megan. It will never end. I mean, just I just want you to take a step back and think about the fact here we are with thousands of people dying every day in a pandemic, economic collapse, people facing eviction, homelessness, all of these problems that the country is facing. And you want to waste time and energy and money going back over Russiagate.

What was the Mueller report? Haven't we already spent years on this thing? But again, why does Hillary Clinton, why does Nancy Pelosi, but especially Hillary Clinton, why does she want to fixate on Russia? Because it saves her from getting blamed for losing the easiest election of all time. She is the most proximate cause. If you hate Trump, she's the most proximate cause of why he's there, but she doesn't want people to talk about that. So it's got to be all roads lead to Vladimir Putin now and apparently forever. Can I just ask you a follow up on that. Like, when you have to describe your own behavior by like,

I pointed rudely in my blue suit. I mean, I'm having secondhand embarrassment. But it's all about that theater. They have to have the theatrical flourishes on because they don't actually do anything. So it's all going to be about the, you know, tearing up the speech and all of this like theatrical resistance that has become so prominent in the democratic party in this era and again to go back to the point of like if you're really afraid of authoritarianism like if you really want to take a stand against authoritarianism this type of commission is only again going to lead to this place of justifying more intrusive national security state apparatus. We've already had the lionizing of all these like spooks and national security state ghouls

within the Democratic Party. Apparently, they just are totally committed to continuing in that direction. But they're going to be they're going to point rudely at anybody who feels differently about it than they do. To me, I love it because this is like that piece, I mean, the headline obviously is that they want another Russia investigation, even though the first one proved nothing, came up with nothing. But the second piece of it is the sadness of like trying to seem tough and project toughness. I mean, four years of Trump running around calling everybody the P word

has brought Nancy Pelosi to the point where she's celebrating her pointing rudely. She did a little thing with ripping up the the State of the Union speech. She wore the same suit on impeachment both times. And I just think, can we find better leaders? Can we get anybody better than them?, Sagar? Anybody? Yeah, I know. It's amazing. You know, whenever I thought that Mitch McConnell was going to be the Senate majority leader, I was like, oh, so the president's going to be 79. He will actually be younger than Pelosi and McConnell. So Schumer, congratulations to Chuck Schumer. He's a spry young man. In his 70s, he will now be the youngest person who is one of the most important actors in Washington. But yeah, look, a sad commentary. A 70, what, 78 year old commentary. You've got a 70, what, 78-year-old president. You've got a 70-something Senate majority leader and an 80-year-old Speaker of the House. And there's nobody really in the wings to save us.

So maybe we get what we deserve. No. And by the way, I should mention that those soundbites were part of our feature that we call Sound Up here at The Megan Kelly Show, where we digest various soundbites. And those were so good. I mean, the other thing I wanted to mention on the subject of just the way folks are looking at the Trump voters right now and how incredibly unhelpful it is.

There was an op-ed in the Washington Post by a woman named Christina Beltran, who's at NYU. And her conclusion, this is the sort of the new 30,000 foot view of all the Latinos who voted for Trump and the black people who voted for Trump, that they're not really Latino and they're not really black. They are what she calls, and I quote, multiracial whites. And here's a quote from her piece. is an ideology invested in the unequal distribution of land, wealth, power, and privilege, a form of hierarchy in which the standing of one section of the population is premised on the debasement of others, is the last part. It allows citizens of every background to call Muslims terrorists, to demand that undocumented immigrants be rounded up and deported, to deride BLM as a movement of thugs and criminals and to accuse Democrats of being blood drinking pedophiles.

If you are a Latino or a black person who voted for Trump, sorry to break it to you, but you're no longer Latino or black. You became white. That was Joe Biden's line, right? You ain't black. It starts with him. I mean, listen, anytime we start painting any particular group, especially demographic groups with a broad brush, like, isn't that kind of the definition of racism? I mean, I just get really uncomfortable anytime we say, OK, here's this group of people and I'm going to say that this particular attribute describes all of them. And this is their real motivations. And this is how they're really thinking about things. And ultimately, if your goal is actually to like

win elections for Democrats or build a progressive movement or any of that, you're ultimately just ostracizing the very people who you might be able to win into your coalition or win back into your coalition. And that's really the thing with this. I think a lot of this response, the instinct to label people, to push them out of the public square, to like paint all Trump voters as uniquely evil. It's not actually about winning a political argument. It's about individuals benefiting personally from displaying their like, you know, their moral superiority online or on their shows or wherever they're doing it because they get a they get a bump from that they get either profit or clout or whatever from that display. It's not actually about

accomplishing the goals that they claim to be trying to accomplish. Well, and think about how racist that statement is, right? That that Christina Beltran thinks that there's a group of Latinos and black people thinking, how can I get away with calling BLM thugs and criminals and calling Democrats blood drinking pedophiles? How can I do it? I know, I will vote for Trump and thereby convert to multiracial white. Like if this is the purpose of voting for him is that now I can call a Muslim a terrorist with impunity. It's like I saw a headline the other day, Sagar, from TheRoot.com that that read straight black men are the white people of black people. Yeah, I see this. I'm very familiar, by the way, with white people like Christina trying to tell me exactly who is Indian and not. So this one always drives me particularly. You too are a multiracial white. Oh, yeah. I've heard it for a long time. I've even been called a white supremacist,

which is always enjoyable. I think it's it. Look again, it's fun to dunk on these people. It's ultimately they are leaning on the only lens that they know. And that is what is actually destructive, which is that when you think all of our problems in America are about race, and that's the analytical framework, which you're going to bring to all of our problems, then you are not going to be able to understand the class divide that we have in this country. You can't talk about economic inequality. You can't look at trade policy, anything, any of the myriad different things and reasons why people voted for Trump, why people supported Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary. So I think that it is largely a product of that more than anything.

So let's talk about it. I want I won't say it's the last day we're going to talk about Trump because the man has a way of collecting airtime even when he's not president, as he's done his whole life. But let's just spend a moment on whether Trump is going to be the kingmaker most of us predicted upon leaving office. His approval ratings on leaving office, 38%, 60% of the public disapproves. He's going to Mar-a-Lago. They say he's going to be building a fiefdom aimed at maintaining his influence over the Republican Party. He's raised 200 million bucks to support or oppose candidates under this Save America PAC, and is already saying he's going

to use a lot of it to oppose candidates who voted to impeach him. And I wonder how you think his ability, like what is his ability to be a kingmaker now, given everything that's happened over the past two weeks, Sagar? Yeah, it's a great question. I think he's still just as much of a kingmaker as before. And the problem that people like Liz Cheney and others who want to go back to Paul Ryanism is that the only thing more unpopular than Trump is Paul Ryan and his tax cuts. So it's like,

good luck, right? And ultimately, look, Trump, I think the latest poll I saw in NBC News got an 87% approval rating within the Republican Party. And this is, look, this is going to be a huge problem for the party in the future and why I'm actually very bearish on the GOP in the Biden era, which is that you've got two irreconcilable wings. In my view, you kind of have the elites which are embodied in Liz Cheney and with Mitt Romney and others. They are not a majority of the Republican Party, but let's say it's 15 to 20 percent. Ergo, you know, the type of suburban voter in Georgia who decided to vote for Biden, but then voted for David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler. But then you got, you know, a sizable chunk, 60, 65 percent and more who are Trump people. And of those, maybe one third who are just hardcore like Trump, the personality QAnon

and more. Those are reconcilability is going to be hard. But as I see it, the people who are going to hang on, which are the 65 percent I talked about who are very Trumpy and the QAnon folks in particular, they are going to follow Trump's lead more than anything. So I think in the future you could see a bleeding of the Cheney and Romney types into the Democratic Party, something that already happened in the last election with Joe Biden. And you're going to see Trump become even more of a kingmaker. But that being said, that kingmaking faction is going to be like 35, maybe 40 percent of the U.S. population. So overall, it's still not a good place to be. So it's a complicated situation. Yeah, it's not a big enough kingdom, Crystal. Yes. Kingmaker over a diminished kingdom is the problem. I mean, look, I think that it depends a lot on whether he's actually banned from running for president again, which I think is unlikely to happen, but you know, clearly he wanted to play this game for four years, do the reality show,

will he or won't he run? Guess that gives him a lot of power. And that basically freezes the GOP in place because he is so popular ultimately with the base. But the elites who supported and enabled and in some cases bankrolled him have really completely withdrawn their support. And I think that's likely to persist because they got everything that they wanted out of his administration. That's a major problem for him.

That's a major problem for him financially. It's a major problem for him potentially legally. You would know a lot more about that, Megan, though, than I would. And I think it's a problem for him politically. Look's a major problem for him potentially legally. You would know a lot more about that, Megan, though, than I would. And I think it's a problem for him politically. Look, he's also lazy. And frankly, his name and him endorsing in primaries hasn't been as powerful as he wants to believe. He's a unique and singular figure. Just him saying, this candidate's my candidate hasn't always worked out for him in the past. And so in terms of making picks and primaries and, you know, really using that to drive an agenda, he's never shown an appetite or a desire to do that. If he maintains the ability to run for president next time around, then, yeah, I think he keeps a pretty strong hold on the Republican Party and essentially freezes everything into place.

But Sager's absolutely right. Will the base remain loyal to him? Yes. Without that sort of upper crust elite establishment support that has long been with the GOP, if they completely withdraw, then I think they're going to have a lot of problems in terms of national elections and also in a lot of statewide elections. Is there anyone here who thinks Ivanka Trump is the answer to that problem? Talking to the perfect people. We covered it today. No, absolutely not. I mean, no, I don't think so. I don't think that if I mean, she she's essentially somebody who adopted, you know, she tried to bring mainstream liberalism into the Republican Party, worked within the White House in order to combat a lot, her and her husband in

particular, to combat many of the more populous things that Trump was even trying to do in the initial days of his presidency. And flat out, I just don't think she's very particularly talented on the baseline level. So I don't see that as somebody who could bring any sort of factions of the GOP together. I don't think it is possible currently. I have not seen a figure that might be able to do it. The only one who I've got my eye on is actually Ron DeSantis down in Florida.

Anyone with the Trump name is going to be toxic to elite America. And the fact of the matter is in this country right now, if you don't have some segment of elites on your side, you're you're pretty screwed. I mean, you see, you know, like what they did to Parler. Apple pulled them for the from the App Store. Google pulled them and then Amazon cuts the legs out from under them with their web servers. Like you literally can't operate in America without the sanctioning and support of some segment of elites. And if the Republican party doesn't have that, they're in big trouble. And no, I don't think Ivanka, I don't think elites will go along with Ivanka Trump because just simply because of the last name and she doesn't have quite the juice with the base that daddy has. So no, I don't think that's any kind of real answer for them. Yeah. And she just, she doesn't have, she's not dynamic. She's just not a dynamic, compelling personality. She never takes risks. And the entire four years of this presidency,

you could see her fingerprints all over her good press. She clearly has a good relationship with drudge. He like he put, he do a post on her and within two minutes there'd be some glamor shot replacing it. Right. She called, she emailed. I mean, it's obvious to those of us in the media how she manipulates her own image. And now they're saying she wants to run potentially for Marco connect with a crowd is not hers. And the same is true of John Jr. I think he's closer. But, you know, there's only one Trump for better or for worse. There's only one Trump. OK, I still the last word. Last last line of inquiry. Here we go. Biden. Right. This is it. He's he's 46th president of the United States, at least until Kamala Harris can get to his food. What? No, I didn't say that. But everybody's wondering, you know, whether whether he'll make it four years and what the Democrats next plan would be after him. I know, Crystal, you're more, you know, to the letter, you're more of a Bernie person politically. But are you seeing any signs that encourage you right now with respect to Joe Biden's administration or the opposite? Or do you feel discouraged based on what you've seen so far?

So let me it's a mixed bag. I would say I think the relief package that he's put forward is fairly ambitious and has a lot of things in it that that would do a lot of good. I mean, I think it was weird that he backed off from two thousand dollar checks to fourteen hundred dollar checks, but that would still be a good2,000 checks to $1,400 checks, but that would still be a good thing. $15 minimum wage, hugely popular, refundable child tax credit, something that has both Democratic and Republican support, obviously money for vaccine distribution. These things are really good and really important. What I'm probably more dismayed by is kind of his, he still has this fantasy that Republicans are going to work with him on any of this,

and they're just not. So, you know, it seems like he's committed to wasting a lot of time on bills that are likely not going to go anywhere rather than using some of the tools at his disposal to actually deliver. Ultimately, American people care about one thing. What did you do for me? Not how many Republican votes did you get? Not, you know, was it passed by regular order or through budget reconciliation? They care that it gets done and that it ultimately benefits them. So I guess on the one hand, I see some positive promises and directions with the relief bill and the vaccination plan in particular. On the other hand, I'm not sure I see like the willingness to actually fight to get it done, because if there's one thing that Democrats are really good at, get some sharp elbows for God's sake. Go in there, flip some tables over. Don't be so accommodating. Don't be conciliatory. Like we have a very short time to govern and govern the way we want. Like get it on. And I think some of the Republicans

who crossed over to vote for him are like, be quiet. We'd like to work together. Well, it's interesting because to your point, I think, look, politics is all about triangulation. And what Biden, if I were Biden, which is I just got this historic election. I had a lot of Republicans actually vote for me, mostly because they didn't like Trump and because they didn't like the handling of the vaccine and generally of the economy. So that's the number one thing I would triangulate. And I would focus on $2,000 checks, 75% issues. I mean, you saw Florida voted for a $15 minimum wage on the same day that they voted historically for Trump. There's another crossover issue. These are the things that I

would hammer home and divide the country or political lines on. But I have to say, which is, I think he's making a big mistake. He's introducing immigration as is for on the very first day of's over. And we're right back to 2015 politics in the United States of America. And you just killed any chance of making yourself seem like a politician who was going to transcend that. I legitimately think he does have a moment. Can I ask to that? Can I add to that? So the other executive orders per Ron Klain, his incoming chief of staff are just to name a few. He's going to rescind the travel ban on several predominantly Muslim countries. He's going to rejoin the Paris Climate Change Accord. He's going to issue a mask mandate for anybody on federal property or engaging in interstate travel.

And I do wonder as I look at that, just I mean, listen, I spent a lot of years at Fox News. If you wanted to rile up the Republican base, that would be the list you'd make. Yeah, no, you're exactly right. I mean, I look and I think the immigration one, though, is orders of magnitude even more than that. Because those are the ones that I mean, it's amnesty for 11 million. Exactly. I mean, I tell you guys, yeah, yeah. Passes checks.

If he gets checks in people's accounts and he does a good job with the vaccine, man, that is going to go a long way. And I am not a Joe Biden fan, not at all. But I will tell you, you know, the bar has been set so low by Trump that if he just does a competent job of getting people vaccinated and the economy recovers, I think that he's going to have very high favorability rating and Democrats are going to be very difficult to beat in the midterm elections, even though that's, you know, historically outside of the norm. I think Crystal's 100% right. Are you guys hearing a lot of maybe it's my circles? I don't know, but I'm hearing a lot of people who don't want to take that vaccine. You guys hearing that? Not in my circles, but I'm seeing the polling on it. And there are a lot of people who are who are uncomfortable. I hope that changed. I know that Biden people are planning actually a public education campaign around like people who are nervous trying to give them some comfort and support. I don't know that that's going to ultimately be effective, but it is worrisome. Look, you have a very conspiratorial public. They don't trust anybody

in some cases for really good reason. So that makes it extraordinarily hard to instill trust, trust the experts, trust the process. They've heard that before and it's bitten them. Now, in this case, I don't want to sow any doubt. All the indications are the vaccine is safe. We've seen people taking it in public. It works. We all want to get back to life, but yeah, it's, it's a bad place that we're in with so many people. So mistrustful of literally everyone. Yeah. So I can just say personally, my parents both got the vaccine. They're both completely fine. Had no, you know, side effects. I can't wait to get the vaccine. That's all I can, you know, I can really say on that matter.

I said before that I'm definitely taking the vaccine. I would take it sooner rather than later. And I actually just saw for whatever it's worth, my primary care physician who happens to specialize in infectious disease. So he knows about this stuff. And he said, number one, if you've had COVID, the latest research is showing you do not, definitely do not need the vaccine. And in fact, you might have a worse reaction if you get it. So if you've had COVID, you don't need the vaccine. And he loves the vaccines. He loves

Pfizer. He loves Moderna in particular, although either one is fine. And he thinks it'll take through December for us all to get vaccinated and achieve herd immunity. And he thinks we're going to have these masks on until then. Depends on where you live, I guess. But here in New York, it's been madness. I mean, I think we're all so pissed off about the fact that these poor restaurateurs can only do outside business. You could limit it. You could limit the capacity of these restaurants. There's a 1.4% spread rate. But government overreach is everywhere. And the truth is, at least here in New York and elsewhere, our leaders don't know what they're doing.

Anybody who thinks that Mayor de Blasio, and really this is Cuomo, know what they're doing hasn't been paying attention. So, okay, I won't require you to weigh in on that. I'll steal the last word. But it's always a pleasure. And I thank you both for being here. Thanks, Megan. Great require you to weigh in on that. I'll steal the last word, but it's always a pleasure. And I thank you both for being here. Thanks, Megan. Great to talk to you.

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You saw her situation where she was basically refused by Time's Up, allegedly because she was accusing a politician. But I mean, I call bullshit on that. And you started tweeting about it. And then as a result of you shining some light on this accusation, you became the scorn of some Biden supporters who thought you owed some obligation to bury that news. Do I have it about right? Yeah, more or less. Right. Yeah. And the first and the first article I wrote two pieces on that. The first one I wrote on that was about the thing you pointed out that this organization times up, which was, you know, built out of the me too

movement. It was, I think to this day is maybe except for that, that like scam wall funding, go fund me. It was the biggestFundMe in the site's history. And so tens of millions of dollars go to create this organization, Time's Up, that is then going to represent women who have claims against powerful men across industries. And when she came to them, they said, well, we're a 501c3. So we can't

take your case because Joe Biden is running for president. It's like, well, you know, if you can't take on a political candidate that, that cleaves off a, a huge portion of the powerful sexual harassers in this, in this country. And so just that alone, I thought was, was newsworthy. And you're right. Just, just, just for reporting that fact, I was a persona non grata for a while. Right. Because there is sort of this understanding that, you know, keep it quiet if it's bad for the Democrat in some circles. And, and frankly, you know, at other places, if it's bad for the Republican, if you're in certain sections of conservative media. Um I tip my hat to you for reporting on it.

And I do, and of course, I interview Tara Reid myself. And I want to get back to that, because I think there's more to talk about on that front. But before we do, let's talk about the inauguration and where we go from here. I think the Trump haters are saying today, our long national nightmare is over. And the Biden supporters are saying, yay, 46 president.

But I think there's a considerable faction on the Democratic side. You tell me if I'm right or wrong. That's like, it's better than Trump, but it's finding hard to get truly excited. Yeah, it's interesting. You definitely have a big section of the left that hasn't really believed that Trump was as dangerous or awful or vicious or anything else as a lot of the kind of liberals were. Yet at the same time, you did have a kind of unanimity almost that Biden would be better than Trump. Back in 2016, you had some prominent-ish figures on the left saying, you know what, maybe it actually is better for the world and for the country in the long run if Hillary Clinton doesn't win, and if Trump wins instead.

And they had a bunch of different rationales for why that might be. But very interestingly, and I think this is what did Trump in, in 2020, he didn't really have that. Even the kind of furthest left people were like, well, you know what? I don't really hate Biden as much as I hated Hillary Clinton. And so while they might not have voted for him, they didn't kind of sow the level of toxicity and animosity that really drove Hillary into the ground. Her unfavorables were higher than Trump's, and that was what decided that election. You know, 2020, 2016 was an election where most voters said they didn't like either candidate, but they have to pick somebody. In 2020, most voters didn't necessarily like either candidate, but they disliked Biden less. That's kind of the pitiful state where our politics has gotten to that. If you're

just not that dislikable, then of the two viable candidates, you're going to win. What do you think is going to happen now to Trump's been a great foil for some Democrats and certainly for the media? I mean, he's single handedly revived MSNBC and CNN. What do you think they're going to do now? It's like the Richard Nixon. You won't have me to kick around anymore. Now that they can't blame everything on Trump, what do you see happening there? Well, I do think the media, the cable media and some other subscription media might be in serious trouble because Trump isn't wrong when he said, you know, CNN is going to be screwed without me. You know, CNN and MSNBC had really become, you know, pretty much Trump coverage all the time and pretty hostile coverage towards Trump all the time.

It was fantastic. It was fantastic for ratings. You know, the, the middle of the Obama years, when you had Republicans controlling the house and you, and you still had, you know, then you still had Obama and Biden in the, in the white house, the MSNBC ratings were absolutely in the tank. I mean, you were getting, you know, 10, 15,000 people for like, you know, watching midday MSNBC, because what are you watching for? John Boehner didn't make that great of a villain. Mitch McConnell didn't even run the Senate yet. There wasn't a whole lot to root for if you were a Democrat, because there was no Obama agenda that was going to get through a Republican Congress. It was utter doldrums. Now, I think that this first year of a Biden administration,

they'll hang on to a significant amount of viewership because there are going to be interesting things to cover. First, you've got this impeachment drama, but then you've also got what can Democrats do with united government? And so they'll cling to some viewership through that. But I think a lot of people are going to, you know, want to check out. You know, a lot of people were quite explicit in saying that one of the things that they disliked most about Trump was that he always had them on edge.

And any anytime they would get some CNN alert on their phone, be like, Oh God, what did he do now? And they want to get to a place where they don't have to worry about what the president is saying. A lot of Democrats, you know, ran explicitly on that motto that when I'm president, you won't have to worry about me. And so when they're kind of explicitly demobilizing their, their people, that's bad news for cable, which, you know, which, which thrives on people being, being angry and, and tuning in for the latest outrage. Those are very interesting points because I mean, having anchored at Fox news for a long time, including in the primetime for four years.

I'll tell you, when I was there, I got the primetime seat in 2013. I left in 17. So it's Obama's second term. I would open up my ratings to get them every day at 4.17 in the afternoon. And I never even looked at CNN or MSNBC. Combined, they would not even touch me. I only looked at O'Reilly and Hannity and Greta or whoever was there in the primetime with me. It was only an internal race to see who would win. But they were totally irrelevant. Even combined, they were irrelevant. There was one month where Rachel Maddow gave me a little run for my money, and it was during Bridgegate with Chris Christie. And that brought Democrats to her show but i still beat her um but it's an

interesting point because republicans tend to have an appetite i think for for cable news they're into the culture wars too in a way the democrats didn't they they just didn't back then i don't know whether they do now and now that trump's gonna go and he's not gonna go away entirely you know the man his oxygen is attention so i don't, notwithstanding what happened to the Capitol, notwithstanding any of this, Donald Trump is going to be making news. So they'll have that, right? CNN will have that and MSNBC. But it's not going to be the same. I think the Republicans will come back to Fox.

There's been a lot of news about Fox's dismal ratings right now. And they're losing to both CNN and MSNBC. Their ratings were in the crapper back when Obama won his second term, too. Bad, bad ratings. Now they're worse now. But the Republicans came back. I think they have a, I don't know, maybe they're more prone to follow news or to consume news or the culture wars, what have you. I don't know. I look at those guys and I think, enjoy it while you can, Joy Reid, Nicole Wallace and Rachel Maddow, because you've been, and CNN, even worse, right? CNN's, he, they can't quit Trump. How could they possibly quit Trump, Ryan? Right. Right. And, you know, Fox, I think is in, you know, decent shape for the next year or two, because, because you have unified democratic control in Washington. So, you know, it's very easy to just constantly be critical. You don't have to... And I was at the Huffington Post throughout most of... Actually, I guess

throughout Obama's entire term. And we were one of the few outlets that was kind of critical from the left of Obama. But the presidential campaigns, because they're kind of critical from the left of, of Obama, but the, but the presidential campaigns, because they're kind of zero sum are, are kind of tougher for outlets with, with that, with that angle, because our kind of normal posture would be investigating the, the, the, the Democrat, but then you, but then if you're, if all you're doing is is is looking into the, you know, what the Democrats up to Hillary Clinton in this case or or Obama in 2012, it is this zero sum game because you have because you have two candidates. And it but when you're in a situation where it's just unified control like Fox has now with the Democratic Washington, they're just going to go all out. Call them socialists, call them communists. You know, they can do AOC, you know, you know, three blocks of AOC and then one on Cori Bush. And oh, my God.

And and then they can keep people excited that way. Once they get back to divided government, that's going to be a little bit more of a challenge for them. But yeah, I I'm curious to see what CNN does without Trump anymore. You use that term excited very loosely. I don't know. It's funny because I have weird feelings about AOC in that she's this young woman. She pulled herself up by the bootstraps, made it.

She doesn't have some poor background, as some people first said about her. She comes from Yorktown Heights, which is a nice, you know, upper middle class suburb in Westchester. But nonetheless, she got herself, you know, into government and managed to find a way to get a lot of attention. I thought, okay, she said a lot of stupid things about the Constitution and the way things work, but I thought she's young, right? She'll get there, she'll learn. Now she's kind of transitioning for me to like a Kardashian, you know, she's, it's all about her little selfies, her assembling her furniture, her looking into the camera, her being holier than thou, her condemning everybody on the left and the right who doesn't agree perfectly with her.

I'm not a big Nancy Pelosi fan, but I've been a little irritated by how disrespectful she is of the, you know, the most accomplished woman in her party. I think, I'm short of Hillary Clinton. I don't know, you could make the case hillary clinton i don't know you could you could make the case either way but i don't know is she is she the future because right now we're being told by joe biden it's an america united that's the theme of the day of his inauguration america united and i think yeah you don't even have a party that's united i mean i think it kind of depends on where the where the democratic party in the country kind of end up going, whether or not and kind of speak to their,

their economic anxieties about the future of this, of this country, then, then the better she's going to do. And so I think some of, some of what you see is, is toward that end is, you know, she'll go on Twitch and, you know, there'll be 400,000, you know, 19 year olds tuning in to watch her play video games with, with other, other folks, other members of Congress on, on Twitch. And she'll be kind of splicing in some political talking points here and there, um, you know, trying to reach this, this, this apolitical set. I think the more she leans into kind of the cultural wars,

then the more that is kind of going to limit the reach that she's able to have in the future. And so I think she tries, I think, to walk a pretty fine line on that, but it's not easy to do because the country is so divided. And anytime you you kind of slip, you get murdered for it. Right? What do you make of that? Because I did think as somebody who's been critical of Joe Biden, when he, I guess it was his acceptance speech. After winning, you know, he gave a speech about America united, and he's been using the sort of past tense, a nation healed, a nation united. Anyway, I've been very questioning about this long before the Capitol Hill riots,

because it's just, you know, whoever wins wants unity, right? They want everybody to get behind their agenda. Meanwhile, the Republicans are like, screw you and your unity. No, we're going to oppose you with everything we have. But I do wonder, I think like a greater calm could potentially come less incendiary rhetoric. But I don't think you're getting rid of those hardcore Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol, you know, people who feel as they do

or who are as angry as they are anytime soon, not getting rid of the far left wokesters who are scolding everybody at every turn for a misstep. And I just don't see either side as being in the mood for handshaking and hugging and I don't know, something closer to even safe to handshake and hug right now. And I think that's actually part of it. Like, I do think that some of the protests we've seen, you know, are not just an expression of the social justice values that underpin them, but also just a bubbling rage that has, a bubbling rage that has been, uh, you know, heated up by all of the isolation that people are facing and the isolation, you know, overlaid with the question of how you're going to pay your back rent, not just forget your rent, your, your back rent, um, you know, and, and whether or not you're going to be able to get back to work and when, when, and if you do get back to work, if it's even going to be safe for you. Are you putting your life at risk for minimum ways just so that you can keep falling deeper and deeper into debt? And so all of these things bubble up in this stew that kind of bursts out every now and then. So the answer to whether or

not Biden can be somewhat successful in this, I think, depends on getting the vaccine distribution and administration correct. As simple as that, like get that thing in everybody's arms, let people go back to work, let people go back to restaurants, go back to living their normal lives. And you could see an economic boom that coasts into the next midterms. And so I think there's a potential that people that could have some of this anger eased, if they can get back to their former lives, and they might not have been totally happy in their former lives. But compared to what we've gone through the last, last year, I think a lot of people would, would be would be excited for that.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, he's definitely going to benefit from the fact that we have a vaccine as as anybody would have. And but the rollout, as we've now seen, isn't as easy as they predicted. And I mean, Fauci, he says Biden can deliver on the 100 million vaccinations within the first 100 days. We'll see. Fauci has misled us before. Let's talk about the administration, because I wonder your take on, I read an article, um, by somebody who is kind of like you, a Bernie supporter. And they said this, a quote from, for the Bernie Sanders wing of the democratic party, the Joe Biden presidential transition is what losing looks like. And they, they weren't too keen on names like Neera Tanden, um, Brian Deese, and some others who are moving into the Biden cabinet in various roles. Anita Dunn, who we talked about at the top, who was with, or we should have, who was with Time's Up, the group that rejected Tara Reid's case, by the way, as she was advising Joe Biden. What a shock.

She's moving into the administration as an advisor for at least the time being. So what do you make of his cabinet? It is what losing looks like, but in a weird way, it's also what progress looks like compared to the Obama transition. That transition was literally kind of launched out of a city group. You know, the head of the transition used his city group email to kind of kick off the throwing around of names for who would be in the transition. And that original email, which is in, which thanks to Julian Assange has been published, was remarkably prescient. It nailed like almost every cabinet and deputy, you know, deputy cabinet position. And, you know, in case after case, Obama, and he talks about this in his memoir, you know, he wanted people from Wall Street because he kind of felt out of his depth when it came to confronting this financial crisis that everybody was afraid was going to lead to a second Great Depression. And so he leaned on a lot of the people who were around and responsible for a lot of decisions that led to getting into that financial crisis. And so if you compare position to position, Barack Obama to Joe Biden, on almost every case,

Biden has picked a more progressive or more populist person, even though very few of them come from the actual Sanders wing. So it's all kind of incremental movement in one direction. But even like Brian Deese, for instance, you know, his counterpart in the Obama years was Larry Summers. So, you know, that's clearly, no matter who you've got in there, that's clearly an improvement for Biden. Ron Klain, you know, swapped in for Rahm Emanuel, for instance. And just, you know, on down the line, you're seeing this small amount of progress, and you're also seeing that Biden does seem to have learned that what really cost Obama, and this is set in now finally as conventional wisdom, whether it's right or wrong, I think it's right, has set in as conventional wisdom that Obama got hammered in 2010 because unemployment was still at 10% in November, 2010, and that he would, he, he insufficiently responded to the financial crisis that he, that he didn't, that he didn't meet the moment that the, that the stimulus that, that he passed in early 2009 was just simply too small and too poorly

designed for the, for the scale of the crisis. And because you had these six years of stagnation that contributed by 2014 to losing the Senate as well. And so Joe Biden is determined not to suffer for the same reason. Maybe he's fighting the wrong war by fighting the last war, but the lesson that he's taken is that the government needs to step in, spend a lot of money, grow the economy. And that's the way you're going to overcome the traditional reaction that presidents get in the first midterm. I mean, I think even for budget hawks, it's very hard to look at an American populace whom you've told cannot work, that they may not work. You've destroyed their businesses. You've destroyed their ability to work.

And yet you haven't destroyed their rent bills, as you point out. There may be a delay, but they're still adding up. It's not abatement. It's just postponement. And then say, and you're not going to get a lot of help from the government. So are there some people gaming the system? Of course. Are there some people are going to get these checks? You shouldn't get them. Yes. But it's really tough to look at the Americans who are genuinely suffering through no fault of their own and say, you're out of luck and and i think news people once again need to be conscious of that because you know it's always somebody with a job sitting behind the microphone telling you no no so let me let me close out with richard by returning to tara reid because i interviewed her and spent a lot of time with her and i don't know whether tara's allegations are true or not i do

know she's been telling the same story for almost 30 years. I mean, she told it right away, within a week, to a longtime friend who I spoke with personally who seemed very, very credible to me. Two years later, told the exact same story to somebody else. A year after that, somebody else.

You know, you're the one who found the mother, the soundbite on Larry King, calling in and saying she had a harassment problem, suggesting that there had been a harassing problem with the center she'd been working for, and so on. But I think Tara's enduring legacy will have been putting the lie to the, quote, believe all women trope that we were being fed by some on the left, right? Like we heard that during Christine Blasey Ford, left and right. And then suddenly it was complete abandonment of the principle,

which is right to do, by the way. I didn't believe in the principle. It's a nonsensical principle. Right. Women are half the population. Thankfully she killed it. Right? I mean, it's ridiculous. You can't believe all women, depending on whether they're a Republican or a Democrat.

That's right. And it doesn't make sense to believe all women anyway. Two women say something different. Right. Yeah. Right. Exactly. We don't get a truth telling gene with our ovaries. But how do you see her story now? Because she, God, did the media go after her. I mean, they just had a thirst for unearthing anything she'd ever done in her life, allegedly or in fact. Right. There was a really kind of overzealous interrogation of her background, which I think is going to prove to have been, if not defamatory, quite close to it. The worm really turned when she was accused of having fabricated her college degree.

And so I actually recently was looking pretty closely into this and got a lot of documents from her law school and from her college. And the documents back up what Tara Reid had been saying, that she was in this kind of protected program for domestic violence victims that made it so that she couldn't link her credits with her to like four different community colleges that, and, and other colleges that she had gone to before this one. And, and that there was a, an arrangement made between the, uh, Dean of the college that she went to and the Dean of the law school. That's, that's what she had always said. Uh, and the documents, the documents bear that out. And yet, after it was reported that she didn't have this college degree, then the Monterey County District Attorney said, well, now we're going to investigate her for perjury like oh you know she's a she's a perjurer uh you know she's she's a fabulous you know nothing she has ever said could could possibly be true but you know it turns out that a closer examination of of that situation while it's quite

complicated with like most of thing the thing most of Tara Reid's life, um, it actually maps pretty closely with, with what she had been saying about her degree the whole time. And I think that, and that's, you know, and then you, you had the situation where they interviewed, you know, previous landlords of hers who were, who were, who were disgruntled and, you know, a lot of, a lot of people were coming out of the woodwork. But at the same time that brought other people out who said, Oh, Tara, Tara told me this story at this time. I remember her telling me this. So going through, if you want to go through the landlords of anybody who's poor, it's not going to end well for the poor person, you know, when you don't have money, you're not so good about

paying your bills. Believe it or not, I have been that person. I had no money. I was in the position to make future money. But when I was putting myself through law school, I was in debt, a lot of debt. And I was trying to teach aerobics to pay my bills. And I didn't have a lot of money. And I didn't pay my bills on time or at all in some cases. And it took me years to dig myself out of that hole,

even then earning the good salary that came my way when I finished school. But it's embarrassing. It's awful. It does bring a lot of conflict into your life. You feel terrible. You just it's the worst version of yourself. And so, you know, of course, if this were somebody accusing Brett Kavanaugh, they probably would have factored all that into the disputes with the landlords. But because the name being accused was Joe Biden, presidential nominee, it was very different. I just it left me with such a bad taste in my mouth for this whole thing. And I'll tell you my my takeaway and then I'll give you the last word is. I'm glad Leave All Women is done.

And I think where I landed on this is, and my experiences with Tara have been nothing but kind, and she's been incredibly sweet and wonderful character references that I've spoken to about her. But it is up to the individual to decide whether they believe or they don't. And there shouldn't be any shaming. You don't believe Tara Reid? No problem. You don't have to.

You don't believe Christine Blasey Ford? No problem. You don't have to. You don't believe Christine Blasey Ford, no problem. You don't have to. And there shouldn't be shaming or accusations of misogyny or sexism and so on, depending on whatever side you land on. I'll give you the last word. can, you can make a persuasive case that she has all of these different corroborating folks that she's spoken to. And you can, and you can make a persuasive case, um, that, that she, that she's not telling the truth. You know, you, I think somebody could come down on either side of it. I think one thing that Biden has in, in his favor is that, you know, if, you know, if this were a pattern, you, you probably would have seen more coming out. Now, there is the obvious pattern that we've all seen on video of him being kind of creepy. But that's different than what she was describing.

Right. So I think that the fact that that didn't come out lends some credence to Biden's case. And so if people want to believe Biden in that case, you know, I think that that's OK. But I also think that it's indisputable that Tara, you know, has the right to tell her story and that journalists have the obligation to, you know, look into that, look, look into that story, and, and, you know, treat it responsibly and take it seriously. Absolutely. And I think you did the nation a service by first drawing attention to it. And I think Anita Dunn should be ashamed of herself for not allowing Time's Up, an organization that, you know, bills itself as standing for women, all women, um, pulled out of that representation from a woman who didn't have two nickels to rub together. And the whole case would have been less political reasons.

Yeah. The whole situation would have been less messy that way because you'd, you'd have, you know, professional people who know how to, um, you know, who, who know how to kind of, uh, you know, deal with the media. Um, you know, just, you know, just somebody, you know, just a very normal person just out on their own. Uh, it's going to be a mess for them. Yeah. When I was reading up in preparation for our interview, I read that there was one prominent Biden supporter that called for the FBI to investigate you and other journalists for their role in reporting the Tara Reid story. I mean, that's the insanity of our world, Ryan. But I got you back.

And I appreciate your boldness and your fearlessness and hope you'll come back. Well, sure thing. Happy to. Well, that was interesting. I mean, the Tara Reid thing, I feel for her because boy, oh boy, it's like the media never sticks around for the after effects of what they do. And I know she continues to struggle as, you know, the man she says sexually assaulted her. He denies it. 100 percent denies it is now elevated to the presidency. And, you know, there's a lot of Trump supporters who I spoke to as well who felt the same as he as he took office. Going to have to do better world. We're going to have to do better. So before we go, I want to tell you that today's episode was

brought to you in part by Bambi human resources crafted for businesses of all sizes. Go to B-A-M-B-E-E dot com slash M-K now to offload this hideous practice. It's just such a hard, hard thing to manage. It's an important thing, but it's hard to manage. And somebody's willing to do it for you like 99 bucks a month. So go to B-A-M-B-E-E dot com slash M-K now for more. Before we go, Barry Weiss is coming on the program on Friday. You are going to love her. She is the woman who I see her like Daenerys Targaryen lighting fire to that hut and walking out with all the people who tried to kill her. Powerful, shoulders back as she left the New York Times saying, I'm not going to play this damn game one day longer. Going to report the truth without agenda.

If you don't like it, you're not the place for me. And she's got a new thing going on. She had a beautiful, beautiful opening piece on Substack where you can find her. And I know, trust me, you're going to love Barry Weiss. So that's Friday. Go ahead and subscribe so you don't miss it. Rate, review, five stars, the whole bit. And we'll talk to you then.

Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, five stars, the whole bit. And we'll talk to you then. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear. The Megyn Kelly Show is a Devil May Care media production in collaboration with Red Seed Ventures.