The Megyn Kelly Show - Biden Lawyers Find More Docs, Vaccine Safety Signals, and MLK's Legacy, with Rich Lowry and Charles C.W. Cooke | Ep. 472

Episode Date: January 16, 2023

Megyn Kelly is joined by Rich Lowry and Charles C.W. Cooke of National Review to talk about Biden's lawyers finding more classified documents in President Biden's home, the media spinning on behalf of Biden, Biden's team hiding the details for months, Trump's response to the Biden story, MLK's legacy and impact on America, racists who dishonor MLK in the '60s and today, an MLK statue that looks like a body part, Prince Harry's disturbing story about his mom and "todger," building a career based around humiliation, the CDC saying a vaccine safety signal was identified with increased stroke risk, media ignoring the story because it doesn't fit its COVID perspective, whether they'll ever catch the Supreme Court leaker, Charles and Rich's upbringing and what brought them to National Review and conservatism, and more.Find more about NR Plus here: https://nationalreview.com/nrplus-subscribeFollow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Happy Monday on this Martin Luther King Jr. Day. We've got a couple of MLK stories to bring you later. One, an homage, and one, the story about an attempted homage out of Boston, which I'm sorry, but if you have not seen the statue that they unveiled in Boston Common, it was meant to honor Dr. King and Coretta Scott King, and OMG, what a misfire. We'll get to it. But we begin today with the news of more classified

documents being discovered at President Biden's home over the weekend. Discovered not by the FBI, but conveniently by Mr. Biden's lawyers. It's a perfect story to kick off our first National Review Day here on The Megyn Kelly Show, where we will bring you some of the National Review regulars you know, but now appearing together today we kick it off with rich lowry editor-in-chief and charles cw cook senior writer you can find all of their work when you become a national review plus subscriber that's nr plus rich is always pushing this on the editors i went ahead and did it and he is right that it does help you avoid the annoying ads and all that. You can get right to the content, and it's actually relatively inexpensive. So check out NR Plus, become a member. You and I

can be in the same club as we take in some of the smartest writers and thoughts in America today. Welcome back, Rich and Charles. Great to see you. Hey, how you doing? Thanks for having me. So we were preparing for today and we actually did a little deep dive into some of your backgrounds, you guys, because it's kind of fun. And this is the first time, Charlie, that I found out what CW stands for. Charles Christopher William Cook. So many names to choose from. Why so many? Well, because when I first moved to America, I wrote under my name, Charlie Cook, which is what most people actually call me. And of course, there's a famous pollster called Charlie Cook.

And people were mightily confused. I kept getting emails saying, well, hang on a minute, I thought you were a pollster, right? Why are you so right wing? And the emails he got were a lot less polite than that. So I thought that it might be good for him and good for me if I made my name so different that we couldn't be confused. I like that. So do new people call you Charles and sort of people who know you well call you Charlie? Yeah. And people will say, can I call you Charlie? And I say, that's fine. And occasionally people follow it up. They push it a little further and say, can I call you Chuck? But I draw the line there. No, no, no. That's a hard pass. There's a street in Greenwich, Connecticut called Poor Chuck. And we met a guy who lived on it. And he's like, why? Why would

they name my street Poor Chuck? I used to live there. Poor? Literally poor? Like no money poor? I think it might be spelled with one O, but you pronounce it Poor Chuck, which is just not ideal. Not ideal. Just like the MLK statue. I had no idea what the CW stood for. I worked with Charlie for a year. So Megan, this is why you are the foremost journalist among us here. It never occurred to me to ask. I thought it was concealed weapon. I like that. So I, my son, my eldest child is Edward Yates because my dad was Edward and Doug's

dad, his name was Manly Yates, but he went by Yates. So as a, you know, tribute to our son's grandparents, his granddads, and, but he goes by Yates. And so it's fun to have the first letter, you know, like you can always mystify people. What does the E stand for? You know, excellent. You can have fun with that for the rest of your life. So we, maybe every time you'll come on, we'll come up with a new CW for you, Charles CW Cook. In any event, we've never interviewed Charlie Cook. So you're the only Charlie Cook we really know and love. Okay. Let's talk about documents, because there are a lot of them. It's a whack-a-mole situation now where they're coming out of the ears of everyone Biden knows, every house he's ever lived in, every office he's ever.

Despite this assurance from the normally totally reliable Corrine Jean-Pierre last Thursday. Listen to what she said. In the statement from the special counsel about the second set of documents, the lawyers have completed the ongoing review by the president's legal team last night. Does that mean there are no other locations where documents could be stored? There's no other search underway at this moment in time for documents from the vice president's side? As far as the lawyers, they look through the places where documents could have been stored, and the counsel's office released a statement on that. So we should assume that it has been completed? You should assume that it's been completed, yes.

You said that the search has been completed, but is the president confident that there are no additional documents with classified markings that remain in any other additional locations? Look, I can just refer you to what his team said. The search is complete. He is confident in this process. The search is complete. And we were supposed to be done with all this nonsense. But now we've got five more documents. First, there was his D.C. office in connection with this affiliation with the University of Pennsylvania, which conveniently gave millions of got millions of dollars from China after they forged this relationship.

The university did where his documents were apparently unprotected, though he claims locked closet. Maybe he himself said they were in a closet, a locked closet or at least a closet boxes. And then box, he said. So we're really not sure what was found there. That was number one. Then came his garage. But fear not, because it was next to his Corvette, which apparently he wants us to believe he took pains to protect like it was in a garage. Then one document from inside his home that was post assurances that they had found them all.

And now these additional five documents that they found on Saturday, none of which were found by the FBI guys, none of which were found by the it's like Bideniden's personal lawyer touching the documents searching for the documents looking at the documents now it's like a white house lawyer um who claims he has security clearance but that's not true for all these discoveries so rich where are we on uh you know document gate part two yeah well obviously it's a major embarrassment and it's funny on top of everything else. That's really what gives a political story extra resonance when it's really amusing. And the defense that, wow, these documents were in a locked garage next to my Corvette is a highly amusing thing to say. It's obviously not the standard that we've ever been used to people

having for classified documents before. And I wonder who thought initially, oh, we better look in the garage, right? And we've seen that they did that ad where he's backing up the Corvette into the garage in 2020. And you can see like a classic, you know, there's a set of drawers or something that is probably there. But how do they get there? You know, how do they get there when you're supposed to be extra special concerned with protecting classified documents, as we've heard from the White House? So is he going to get prosecuted for this? No, you can't prosecute a sitting president. Are there circumstances that make it different than what Trump did? Yes. But it's going to make it really

hard now to go after Trump. I mean, there'd just be no legitimacy to indict Trump for what he did with Biden now and is having a special counsel appointed in his own case. So it's embarrassing and then has this knock-on effect, making it harder to go after Trump. And our colleague, Andy McCarthy, former prosecutor, has very good judgment on this stuff, was up to 70% chance Trump was going to be indicted and thinks now that the odds are falling by the day. Yeah, I think there's no chance now. I said it after the disclosure of the second batch of Biden documents. It's done. And now we've had two additional disclosures after being assured that this whole thing is complete. Charlie,

the whole thing feels sketchy, doesn't it? It doesn't feel like we're being told the truth, the full truth. It feels like there's some sort of, you know, scratching of the backs between the Biden White House and potentially the Justice Department. But why is Biden still in control of this process? And the FBI is not doing the search. And we're supposed to just take the personal assurances of this guy they brought in to protect Biden. This guy, let me see. It's confusing because he calls himself special counsel to the president, Richard Sauber. But he's basically working for Biden to protect Biden. He's not the special counsel who's been hired to investigate Biden. That's Robert Herr. This other guy, Richard Sauber, why is he the one investigating all this?

Well, you're always going to get a lot of weirdness when the executive branch is investigating the executive branch, which is in effect what's happening here. We talk about the FBI and the Department of Justice and special councils as if they're independent, but they're not. There is no fourth branch of government. There is no free-floating agency within our constitutional order. So, of course, Joe Biden is nominally, at least in charge of the institutions that are now looking into him. In an ideal world, it would be Congress that was leading this investigation. I think the bigger problem is that the media has been at pains to point out why this is different, which in some ways it is. But also it pains to downplay it at every juncture and to acknowledge and internalize and repeat the idea that everything here is above board when it's not.

And the grand scheme of things, I think Biden's infractions here, which are real and which is serious, are probably the least egregious of the big three, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden. But that doesn't mean they're not extremely serious. And it certainly doesn't mean that everything here is above board, and that Biden has followed all the proper procedures. You just mentioned that the investigation here seems to be primarily being carried out by Joe Biden's lawyers. Well, Joe Biden's lawyers do not have security clearances. They're not allowed to see these documents either. The press was keen, except for, of course, Peter Doocy, to repeat the idea that this

doesn't matter so much because the garage in question was locked. But we don't keep, as the country, classified documents in garages. It doesn't matter whether there was a Corvette in there or a Ferrari in there or the treasure of the Sierra Madre in there. We do not keep classified documents in garages, especially garages that open, garages into which film crews and Jay Leno were invited, garages to which Hunter Biden, really the very definition of a security risk, had access. So what bothers me much more than the weirdness around the executive branch's investigating

itself is the total lack of interest in the press in all of the lies and smoothed edges that were being offered up from the White House podium. Yeah, that's exactly right we we don't know his lawyer goes to the penn center and just starts rummaging through a locked closet and and find these find these uh documents that's unusual what why was that happening and then of course there's the matter of not informing the public, right? This happens several days before the election. They, of course, don't make it public before the election because they realize it'll at least cause a bad news cycle, which they don't want right before the midterms. And it takes months and months for the public to know. So those are a couple threads still to pull. How did that happen? Who made the decision not to not to inform the public?

These these are these are things that remain to important matters that we need to know. Well, and following up on this guy, special counsel to the president, Richard Sauber. This is the one who now is looking. He's not the guy who found batch one, as far as I know, or batch two. But he found batch. He found the third. And he then he found the fourth. So he issues this very strange statement. He says, I have a security clearance. OK, they say. And by the way, I'm told I read in the papers they hired Richard Sauber to be, quote, special counsel to the president when they saw the likelihood that we were going to have an incoming GOP house and that he better lawyer up in connection with the investigations that were coming his way in connection with his son, China, Russia, all these dealings that they've been accused of having Ukraine. So he's there to run interference for Joe

Biden. He says, because I have a security clearance, I went to Wilmington Thursday evening to facilitate providing the document. Remember, batch three was just one inside the home. The document the president's personal counsel found on Wednesday to justice. While I was transferring it to the DOJ officials who accompanied me, five additional pages with classification markings were discovered passive voice among the material with it what like they just suddenly appeared behind the single document that was found inside the house this is intentionally vague lawyers know how to be specific in their language when they want to be and they know how not to be uh for a total of six pages the doj officials with me immediately took possession of them okay again five additional pages with classification markings were discovered among the material with the first

document by whom right that reason by whom yes right he's hiding something for a reason i don't know what it is, Rich, but again, this is fishy. Yeah, no, absolutely. And now, you know, the advantage they have to having a special counsel, which is another embarrassment, right? They're now on equal footing with the guy that they think was uniquely irresponsible, Donald Trump, who has a special counsel. Now he has his own special counsel. But the advantage is now it just gives you the ready excuse not to answer anything. So we've already seen this from the White House press secretary.

Oh, it's an ongoing investigation. You know, contact the Department of Justice. Of course, you're going to get nothing from the Department of Justice. Yeah, that's ideal. All we're going to get is Karine Jean-Pierre, who we all know doesn't know anything. And even if she did, couldn't be relied upon to say it in a way that we could understand and take to the bank.

Trump, meantime, is truthing again. Wrong verb. But he's truth socialing over at his Web site. And here's just a sample of what he's saying. I will skip you all the I did nothing wrong. That's presumed. He's been saying that he says Mar-a-Lago is a walled fortress built with unlimited money with the idea that it would one day be the Southern White House. I didn't know that. I don't know if that's true. Apparently it was built in the 1920s. I didn't actually fact check. I guess that turned out to be true. He writes, in addition to locks and strong structural setting, I have security and secret service there full time. Compare that to a flimsy garage with no security easy access for anyone also he had them for six years in many different places i arrived to

mar-a-lago with the papers as president joe as vice president uh and goes on to actually say can we just stop these ridiculous investigations this is all absurd like stop with the not we have other things to worry about as a country which i agree with with. And then goes on to say Mar-a-Lago is essentially an armed fort. It's an armed fort. It was built that way. And then goes on to rip on his special prosecutor, prosecutor Jack Smith, as a Trump hating political thug versus Joe Biden's special counsel, who is reportedly a nice guy, very friendly with Democrats and rhinos alike, and pretty much liked and known by everybody. He's like, my guy is a Trump-hating lunatic, and his guy is pretty nice. So, look, he's not wrong, Charles, that Mar-a-Lago is probably more secure than Biden's garage. I mean, Trump was down there with former Secret Service. I mean, with Secret Service, his former president. You know, but he is also right because he goes on to say here that there's a difference between a former

president, former vice president. A president can declassify and a vice president can't. Well, he's not wrong, but it's irrelevant. And it's especially irrelevant to Joe Biden's case because Joe Biden says he didn't know he had them. And if he didn't know he had them, then he couldn't have secured them. So any boasts that Joe Biden makes about how secure these documents are because they were in a garage are purely incidental. In effect, he's saying, I didn't know I had these documents. They were in a garage are purely incidental. In effect, he's saying, I didn't know I had these documents. They were in my garage. Therefore, I lucked out. But again, we don't keep classified documents in garages. The problem was that he had them

in the first place. And that's also true of Trump. Yes, it is a good thing that the documents Trump had do seem to have been in a safe inside a fairly secure building. But Trump wasn't supposed to have them. And the more hay that Trump makes, and this is true of Biden as well, out of how secure those documents happen to be, the more it's going to look as if he knew he had them. You really have to pick one. Of course, in Trump's case, he did seem to know that he had them and didn't want to give them back. If I had to guess, I think what probably happened here is that the case against Trump started to proceed internally. The decision was made to raid Mar-a-Lago, which was a real moment, whether it was deserved or not.

That was a big change in American practice. And Joe Biden and his team were probably asked repeatedly by Merrick Garland and others, are you sure that you don't have any documents? It's going to look really bad if you end up having documents. And Biden probably said, no, no, no, no, no. And then it was discovered that he did have some documents. And then the Republicans took the House and the Biden administration thought, ah, we are liable here to be embarrassed if the Republican House starts looking into, say, Hunter Biden and finds these documents, incidentally, they will make hay out of it, we would rather have control of this. And so they

dripped the truth out so that it was out of their control. And that was probably smart from a completely amoral political standpoint, that was probably smart, because the House investigation into Benghazi discovered the Hillary Clinton documents that destroyed her presidential campaign and her reputation. So in one sense, Biden has done this quite well by getting out in front of it. But in another sense, this is the byproduct most likely of the decision to go after Trump, which I have a problem with, not because I don't think Trump is guilty. I think he is. But because we don't tend to prosecute people who are guilty of these sorts of crimes, and because we didn't prosecute Hillary Clinton, even though there was a strong case against her. And so what we're probably going to see here

is nothing. We're going to see Biden skate and Trump skate and Hillary skate. And there is a poetic justice to that, in my view. Yeah, yeah, I agree. It's bizarre, though, Megan, if you think about the best things that have happened to Trump the last six months politically have had to do with his illegal possession of classified documents, won the raid itself, which was a huge boon to him. And now the discovery that Biden was guilty of essentially the same offense has elevated Trump and given him all this material, the truth social about everything else has been bad. You know, his announcement speech was a fizzle. You fell asleep during it. You know, the Kanye dinner, all that. But his possession of

classified documents has worked out for him. It's the gift that keeps on giving. You know, I agree. I agree with most of what you just said there, Charles. And the thing is, and neither one's going to be prosecuted. I totally agree with that. I think they were going to indict Trump and this has completely saved him. I mean, because just putting aside the nitty gritty of the investigation, indicting a former president is a plus plus on the scale of mega bombshells in the news world, in the political world. It's never been done before to do it to Trump after two impeachments and all the rest of it would have been extremely unsettling to the nation, which any attorney general would factor in.

Right. And it is ultimately the AG's call to do it under these circumstances where, yes, Trump went one step beyond what Joe Biden did. He he filed an affidavit through a lawyer saying we've given you everything when, in fact, it looks like they haven't. And he hasn't had the chance to fully defend that charge. But that's the allegation. That's not enough. That's not going to that's not going to win the hearts and minds to where people are like that. Well, that's an egregious step too far. Get him. When Joe Biden appears to have done pretty much everything short of that and also didn't have any power to declassify. I will say this. Trump's not wrong about his special counsel's wife. His special counsel's wife worked as a producer on Michelle Obama's

documentary Becoming. I didn't know it was a documentary. That was just a book. She twice donated to Joe Biden's 2020 presidential campaign this is from newsweek um and uh let's see there's more uh she i guess she's made very public statements about trump making clear she does not like him so not totally wrong there here's the question though i said at the beginning of this mess with trump rich that i really believed they were so excited about these documents not because they put such faith in the national archivist right who by the way needs to be going back where's the smart reporter to say did you make this request of president obama president obama president clinton president carter how far

back have you gone to make sure trump's not being singled out as the one ex president who has inappropriate documents? Who's going to ask that of KJP? Somebody better do it ASAP because that maybe they've already done that. Maybe they already collected those documents. Let's find out how many presidents have done this so we have a better perspective. OK, anyway, they started this nonsense in earnest, I believe, with so much firepower fired at Trump from the DOJ because they were interested in Jan 6. They wanted to know what was down at Mar-a-Lago on that subject, which is their favorite subject of all. And then it expanded into Trump behaving badly in a way where they got even more excited. But you guys had a piece recently about, it was called, it's by the editors,

the Biden documents mess. and you pointed out the difference between these two investigations these special counsels who are looking into trump and biden and how the one looking at trump has this wide berth of things he can look into and is in his charge with looking into not so in the biden case whereas it could be. Can you explain? Yeah. So clearly, January 6th is the crucial background to what's been going on with Trump, not just with regard to the search. Mar-a-Lago, Andy McCarthy, by the way, has the same theory you do, Megan, that it was a broad search because they're rummaging around hoping to find documents related to January 6th, but because they really want to prosecute him, indict him for January 6th.

But that's really hard. You know, he didn't incite violence. Once you get this into a prosecutorial realm, you got to look at everything with not just whether it was immoral, what Trump did, whether it was wrong, but whether it was technically illegal. Right. And just on the speech he gave that day on January 6th, he said, let's peacefully march. what Trump did, whether it was wrong, but whether it was technically illegal, right? And just on the speech he gave that day on January 6th, he said, let's peacefully march to the Capitol. That's a get out of jail card right there. Now, it doesn't mean he wasn't reckless, he wasn't wrong. But if you want to nail him to the wall for January 6th in a criminal sense, it's really hard. It's going to rely on novel theories and it's going to be an attenuated case. So then like, oh, aha, we got him on something else, which clearly is illegal. There's some aggravating factors there because it doesn't seem as though he was completely

forthcoming. He obstructed this investigation. So we'll nail them for that in order to get them for January 6th. So that's not how the system's supposed to work. You don't go hunting for an offense to try to nail someone for just because you think he did something wrong in a separate case. I mean, that's un-American. It's unfair. But I think that accounted for the attention and focus on this. they they thought they were getting there and now um you know revelations over the last week have abolished that as well and i just don't think unless he literally shoots someone on fifth avenue that you should be indicting a former president right these are you got to make the case against him uh politically you need to beat him in an election you can't short circuit that by and indicting, which is basically the fantasy they've been under, living under since the

beginning, right? This is the whole walls closing in 2017 type thinking, which they've never let go of. The reaction in the media to what the Republicans have said following the drip, drip, drip. What would you expect them to say? What would you expect them to say is predictable. We are literally seeing the Republicans pounce headline come back, guys. It's crazy. I'll give you a couple of examples. I'm sorry to even cite Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post to you, but bear with me.

She says Republicans have rushed forth to scream foul. Vanity Fair. Republicans already feasting on the documents. CNN. Poppy Harlow. Republicans now pouncing on Biden for these documents. CNN headline. See how Republicans downplayed Trump classified documents but pounced on Biden.

And that leads me to NPR's out front or up front this morning. Up first. Sorry, forgive me. I listened to it this morning and, of course, heard this. President Biden's classified document troubles are piling up. His lawyers announced they had found more files at his home in Wilmington, Delaware, and congressional Republicans pounced. Well, we don't know exactly yet whether they broke the law or not. I will accuse the Biden administration of not being transparent. Why didn't we hear about this on November 2nd when the first batch of classified documents were discovered?

That's the chair of the House Oversight Committee, Representative James Comer, pouncing. You heard him pouncing. Wasn't that a pounce, Charles? That was definitely a pounce, although I would note that NPR and others are now behind on their game because as we learned from the Washington Post this week, the new verb at the margin is thrust. Republicans thrust things now into the culture wars or the public consciousness or the news cycle. So pouncing is very much last year. Oh, wait a minute. Can I listen to the editors on Friday? And didn't you make an analogy about this, like somebody coming up your driveway?

Do you remember? You said something that really worked for me on this. Oh, yeah. Yeah, well, the way that they talk about Republican reactions is if somebody had come up my driveway with a gun and attacked me, I'd fought back. And then they said, why is Charles Cook committing violence? Well, it's also pretty much they're not aware that pounce has become a joke. Right. And they're still using it unironically.

Yes, that's exactly right. Yeah. Of course, you know, naturally, we're going to get that kind of reaction from I guess we shouldn't be particularly surprised, though. It's not just Republicans. Listen to David Gergen. You probably saw this over the weekend. Former Clinton senior adviser talking about this matter on MSNBC. How big a mess is this for the Biden administration? CNN. It's very, very big, not legally, but politically, it's a very, very big deal. You know, this is a president who was marching upward for the first time in his presidency for all sorts of reasons to believe that he could that he can now present himself the fears that people like me have about how old is he and can he govern well those fears will be dissipated if he were able to stay on that

track but i don't think sitting there hunkering down now they're just acting like it's not out there is there is a good strategy they're just gonna have gonna get cream doing there's well what do we make of that what what's going on there? Is that old Democratic guard trying to push for new blood in the party? Or is that honest analysis? Well, David Gergen, you could say it's not just Republicans, or it's not just Democrats. I mean, he's been on both sides during his long career. I mean, I believe it was Ronald Reagan was telling jokes about how long David Gergen had been in Washington and sort of established the figure in the 1980s sometime. So he's very much an old hand. And I think that's,

it's pretty good analysis, right? I mean, this is embarrassing. It hurts Biden. I don't know to what extent Biden had momentum, but certainly he was helped by the midterms. And then you have this story. It's not going to sink his presidency. It's not going to destroy his presidency unless there's something kind of unimaginably bad that we're not aware of. But it's an embarrassment, and it makes it harder to go after Trump, obviously. And it creates this sense, Trump and Biden are locked in a symbiotic relationship, right? They're both not very popular figures. They're both in their 70s. They both have special

counsels appointed to investigate them. They both mishandled classified documents. And when either makes a misstep, it's better for the other one. I would prefer to get out of the Biden-Trump embrace and find someone who doesn't have a special counsel on them and hasn't mishandled classified documents, at least not yet, and is a little younger. But they both seem, well, Trump's running again and Biden seems set on running again. And this may be what we're looking at. They both have a long list of weird and disturbing allegations made against them by a number of women. So many of whom I've interviewed on both sides. Can we do a little better than this?

Apparently not, because here we go again. Charlie and Rich, stay with us. Up next, we're going to show you this MLK statue. And oh, my God. All right. Stand by. On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, America honors one of the most impactful men in our history, whose legacy continues to inspire. Wanted to bring you some of his powerful words from a lesser known speech titled What is Your Life's Blueprint? And we've all heard the I Have a Dream speech, which can continue to inspire a lot of us, though has become weirdly controversial in some circles. But What is Your Life's Blueprint was from October 26, 1967. And he delivered the speech

to high school students in Philadelphia. This was four years after the I Have a Dream address and just a few months before his tragic death. Here are some highlights of the speech published on the Beacon Press YouTube channel. Number one in your own dignity, your own worth, and your own somebody-ness. Don't, as a basic principle, the determination to achieve excellence in your various fields of endeavor. Finally in your life's blueprint must be a commitment to the eternal principles of beauty, love, and justice. Don't allow anybody to pull you so low as to make you hate them, but we must keep moving. We must keep going. If you can't fly, run. If you can't run, walk. If you can't walk, crawl. But by all means, keep moving. My goodness. We don't have somebody like that today.

We don't have somebody who can inspire everyone. Such a powerful message. It resonates with most of us as much today as it did back in 1967. As we remember MLK's lasting legacy. There's a reason we pause once a year to remember him. Back with me now, Rich Lowry and Charles C.W. Cook of National Review. So beautiful, so inspirational, and sadly, so forgotten, right? In the way that just the so-called movement for equal rights and justice have has pursued has continued today it doesn't bear any resemblance to that i mean he he had the temerity in that speech to talk about

have a basic determination to achieve excellence you would be told you were racist if you said that to a group of children of color today to try to have the nerve to tell them to achieve excellence, as opposed to talking about how they're really going to be hampered in their effort to do that because they were born into a racist society. What do you make of it? Charles, you've written beautifully about your love for this country, how you fell in love with America. What do you make of MLK's legacy in it and what's happened to it all these years later? Well, I think one of the greatest things about the United States is that it came with an instruction manual, which most countries don't. That instruction manual is in a few places. You have the Declaration of Independence,

you have the Constitution, you have the Federalist Papers, and then you have the second edition of the instruction manual in the civil war but it's an instruction manual nevertheless it's quite difficult in a place like say sweden to ask the question are we living up to our national creed because there isn't one that's not to say the sw the Swedish aren't good people or that it's not a nice place to live, but there's nothing you can really grab onto. And Martin Luther King grabbed pretty hard and correctly onto a set of promises, he called it a promissory note, that had been limited in its application. Where I have a big problem with the American left's historical analysis and modern political output is that it insists, and it must be said much the same way as did many Confederates, that America is either built on sand or built on a lie. But I don't think it is. And if you listen

to Martin Luther King's speeches, neither did he. What he thought at root, like Frederick Douglass before him, at least in Frederick Douglass's later years, was that America was built atop a beautiful set of presuppositions, but that they had been assiduously denied to certain people. He was right. They had been. And it needed intervention to fix. But that intervention came and was made possible only because of the integrity of the underlying

ideas. And I think when people try to strip away all of that scaffolding, they're actually pushing Martin Luther King over with the rest of the edifice, because if he wanted people who were non-white, not just blacks, although blacks had obviously been very much more oppressed than everyone else, to full heir to the promises of the founding. There has to be a promise of the founding. You know, Richard, it occurs to me that back during MLK's time, the Civil Rights Act and so on, the people most ardently opposed to him were racists. And today, the people most ardently opposed to his message today are racists, but they style themselves as anti-racist. And yet their message bears a striking and disturbing resemblance to the ones we heard from King detractors.

Yeah. So when you played that clip, that voice, whoa, what resonance, right? That's a voice that changes the world. It's not just Martin Luther King's voice. It has such resonance in part because it has a foundation in this great tradition of African American Christianity in this country, which is one of the most amazing stories in this country. People who are brought over here in the most horrific circumstances possible, and the transatlantic slave trade whipped, you know, humiliated, enslaved, and they pick up Christianity. And it's an oral Christianity, right? Because no one wants them to read. Many of them are illiterate. So it's a tradition based on preaching and based on music. And Martin Luther King was very much in that

tradition. And it was a Christian advocacy. He talked in that clip about never let anyone make you hate them, right? Because that's terrible for you, not just for them. And that was the power of the civil rights movement. It basically said, under Martin Luther King's leadership, you're going to spit on us, you're going to disrespect us, you're going to jail us, and we're going to love you anyway. And that was extremely powerful. And that was the other wing of it. Charlotte hit very eloquently on going back to the Declaration of Independence and American ideals, but also that Christian element was hugely important. And then to get what you're asking about, Megan, I would say a couple of things. One, he had every reason in the mid-1960s to quit on America, right? To think America was fundamentally corrupt, right? This is an America of segregation and deep injustices.

But he believed in America and thought it could be redeemed. And today, when in terms of racial justice and all sorts of other metrics, we're in a much better place ever in the entirety of our history, perhaps in the entirety of human history, compared to any other societies, people want to quit on America because a wrong pronoun might be used or microaggression might be committed. And they don't believe in America. They don't believe in its ideals. And they've twisted themselves into being in, as you point out, in this position where they're the racialists, where they can't get over race, where they want people to be judged on the basis of race and iniquities to be committed in the name of race. And that's just perverse. Martin Luther King was a man of the left. You know, he wouldn't, I doubt very much if he was still with us today, he'd agree with Charlie and I, with Charlie and me on many political issues. But it's hard to believe he would be on board this board, uh, this kind of woke

racialism that's so pervasive now in so many of our institutions. It certainly does. His message, you heard it there so empowering and optimistic, you know, don't let them tell you you're nothing basically. Don't, don't, don't you tell yourself you're nothing. And today the messaging is so very different it's why there are so many uh black and brown families standing up to the messaging being handed down to their children in class like how dare you tell my child he's less than or he should feel less than or he can't he can't do the math or he can't do that because of some imagined social inequity that we we deny he's suffering from. Right. It's not to say it's not in any case, but to paint with such a broad brush. He was the opposite of that. And that's why Charles, so many as part of this woke movement are moving on from him.

They're rejecting the of the you know, my dream is to see the two children who and they would be judged not by the content of their or not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. They don't believe in that. They don't believe in the color blindness. They want to go back in a way to before King, and they're doing it at their and at the country's peril. Yeah, I think there's a couple of problems with it. The first is, as Rich noted, that there is far less reason to criticize or dislike or even give up on the United States now than there was in the 1960s. And yet you see people doing it in a way that Martin a fashionable cynicism, a self-aware fatalism. And you see this from people such as Ta-Nehisi Coates, who essentially said in his book and many of his other writings that the United States had an original sin, which I think is true, but that there was no redemption for it. Not what Martin Luther King said, which is this original sin exists, but that it can be forgiven or overcome, but that nothing has changed and nothing can change.

And in the case of Ta-Nehisi Coates, he wrote this in a book that was nominally addressed to his son. I think this is one of the worst things you could possibly tell a child, and I think it's a preposterous thing to tell a child when it was written, which was in the 2010s. This is a backsliding of sorts, and it's different in intensity, and it's different in intent. But it is no less pernicious than backslidings that we have seen in the past from white supremacists, who believed that there was something intrinsically wrong with people who were not white, and they could never escape from it. Whatever they did, it didn't matter. The content of their

character didn't matter. Their work ethic didn't matter. That they were different and always would be. And this is a philosophy that should be rejected by absolutely everyone, partly because it is grotesque in and of itself, but mostly because it's not true. Shifting gears, Rich, they decided to do an honor, create this statue to honor Dr. Martin Luther King and his wife, Coretta Scott King. And it's from a moment. I'll show you the photo. This is the photo for the YouTube audience that you for the listening audience. It's it's Dr. King and his wife embracing.

He's got his arms around her and she has hers around him. They unveiled. This is right after he learned he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. So they wanted to do a statue. They hired Hank Willis Thomas to sculpt this sculpture that would wind up in Boston Common, sitting on the 1965 Freedom Plaza, which honors 69 local civil rights leaders who had come through. Okay, this is what they came up with. It was meant to be just be the arms and the hands of the hub. What it looks like, I'm just going to say it is a giant penis by held by two hands. Look at this. YouTubers, I'm sorry,

but that looks like a giant penis right there. I'm sorry. It does. Guys, it does. Does that, I mean, you tell me what that looks like. Look at this one. Look at over there on the screen left, on the bottom of the screen left. Okay. You see it as well as I. This is why you need to run stuff by people close to you and your spouse. What do you think of the design, honey? It looks like a schlong, dear. No, it doesn't. Yeah, it does. It looks like a schlong. And then you take that on board and you change the design. But the deeper story here is we've lost the capacity to create public beauty. There's no piece of public art in the last 50 years that has been beautiful or uplifting. I mean, it's just amazing. Michelangelo could do the David 500 years ago, and now 500 years on with

all sorts of technical advance and what have you. That's all we can do. And there's one unveiled in DC, the National Monument, that's less vulgar, but is also equally ugly of MLK. So it's amazing. We just can't create a finely crafted, uplifting statue of this man. Didn't they walk around to the back of it? I see maybe the front. Apparently, at the unveiling a there's a lot of like confused faces it's like an enormous penis how are we and i love this tweet from steven f

hayward which i retweeted uh who tweeted this picture out and said um i am calling for a complete and total shutdown of modern art until we can figure out what the hell is going on you know on the drum thing charles what do you make of it that well i think to rich's point there is a strange idea and i can remember first hearing this and just thinking this is not true that beauty is entirely subjective and it's not i grew up in cam, England, which has a lot of really old, beautiful buildings, especially around the university. And some of them have these 1960s concrete add-ons. And people come from all over the world, all different cultures, not just Europe, but they come from South America, they come from Asia, and they love the old building,

and they hate the concrete appendage. And I think the average person looks at this sculpture and says, that's horrible. I don't think it is true that every single person sees it differently. And I don't think it's true that this is somehow informed by the world in which we lived in or pressure. I think it's horrible. I think we can all see it's horrible. I think most people are going to assume it's horrible. And there will just be a handful of people pretending it isn't real. Just a handful. Nicely done.

Coretta Scott King's cousin has spoken out. Seneca Scott saying, this is a masturbatory homage to my family that looks more like a pair of hands hugging a beefy penis than a special moment shared by the iconic couple he says this is insulting it's 10 million dollars wasted to create a masturbatory homage and he says um this is sort of wokeness gone wrong now boston has a big bronze penis statue that's supposed to represent black love at its purest and most

devotional and goes on from there j Jesse Kelly, hat tip to him. He had the best reaction of all, which he says in all seriousness, I don't mean to mock the MLK sculpture. Every man wants to be remembered this way. We'll be right back with some cleaner content in one second. I promised a cleaner version when we got back, but I need five minutes that's unclean before we get to that. There's no way this segment's going to have as much penis in it.

At least I hope not. Oh, Rich, look how you underestimate me. Charles, I've been dying to ask you about the Harry and Meghan media tour, the controversy with the royal family, and in particular, since you are a Brit, I needed you to explain what the hell we are listening to here in this excerpt from Prince Harry's book, Spare. Hello. My penis was oscillating between extremely sensitive and borderline traumatized. The last place I wanted to be was Frost-Nickelstown.

I'd been trying some home remedies, including one recommended by a friend. She'd urged me to apply Elizabeth Arden cream. My mom used that on her lips. You want me to put that on my todger? It works, Harry. Trust me. I found a tube, and the minute Iger it works harry trust me i found a tube and the minute i opened it the smell transported me through time i felt as if my mother was right there in the room

and i took a smidge and applied it down there wow i think you should be asking dr fre Freud instead of me about that segment. I don't know how that got through editing without them asking him, are you sure this is the series of associations you wish to make? I will say I had forgotten this having lived in America for 10 years, but todger really is one of the great words in the English language. It's one of those words you only get in England. I actually am starting to wonder, joking aside, whether he needs help.

Yeah. I'm not a fan. I don't think they've behaved well. But the excerpts that I'm hearing from this book, I mean, we've all heard that one because it's so egregious, but the excerpts including him suggesting that he was born to become a organ donor for his older brother, if the case need arise. Someone asked why, if that were the case, he hadn't been forced to donate his hair to Prince William. I think he is damaged. And one of the problems that many celebrities seem to have,

especially nowadays, is that they work out these issues in public. And they're often encouraged to do so. We saw this recently with Kanye West, who's clearly damaged or going through something. And the same is true of Harry, but the business model he's chosen for himself, if I can call it that, is one that rewards anything that is salacious or aggressive or a bit unusual. So for the foreseeable future, the incentives are all going to be to produce more content like that, not less.

It's crazy, Rich. He's come out now and said, I have enough of me for another book easily, that my original manuscript was 800 pages. And this book is only 400 pages. And all of it was stories about my brother, some about my father, but mostly about my brother,

the future King of England. He clearly wants to take down the royal family, though he denies it. And this example of the todger is so interesting to me because it reveals a complete lack of dignity and shows to me, it's one of the many examples, though, that shows we so many of us had been blaming Meghan Markle for sort of tearing him out of the royal family and woke-ifying him. Harry is an unwell man. No normal person, never mind man, would read a passage that way, the way he, you know, the intonation on it, write about it in the first place. You want to do a tell-all, okay. What kind of a man would share a story like that? That's about his intimate parts. So, so openly and with detail and with the word cream associated, I'm just sorry, but most men would have every instinct, which is correct to say there are some things that are too personal

and not for public consumption. Yeah. I mean, writing it as one thing, then reading it, how, how could he do that? And you know, he needs help. How? How could he do that? And, you know, he needs help. He's supposedly getting help, right? He's in therapy. I think one of these stories, I haven't followed the Harry and Meghan drama extremely closely, but I think one of them isn't, you know, there's some leak against him supposedly from the royal family. He went and talked to his therapist about it.

So he's in therapy. But this is just an industry now of self-exposure, and the more titillating and embarrassing, the better, right? There's only one reason we're talking about it, right? Because it's humiliating to him. It's perversely funny, right? But we're giving it publicity, and people have talked about it, and they'll watch the documentary and they'll buy the book because of this this kind of material. And further to your point, you know, we have tended to blame her. But, you know, he's an adult. He's a troubled adult.

But he could say no. He could go away with some dignity, but he doesn't want to do it. Because there's a mint in this, you know, there's fame and riches in this kind of self abasement. And that's something new under the sun, right? You wouldn't have been able to publish this 50 years ago. If you had, you would have been, you know, laughed out of the building, and that would have been the end of it. But now it's, it's, it's a key to a kind of startup. Yeah, I would just add one thing. Where is his dignity? Go ahead, Charles.

No, I just said, yeah, I think in another sense, this represents an overcorrection as well. And if you go back and read accounts written by the royal family 70, 80 years ago, they wouldn't have admitted in public that they were upset about the death of a child. If you had said, how do you feel to a member of the royal family who had just suffered a genuine tragedy, they would have said, I'm fine. Now, I'm not endorsing that. I don't think that's a particularly healthy way to live. But whatever objections you might have to the classic British stiff upper lip or suppression of emotion that you would see in the royal family, and this is one of Harry's themes,

implicit and explicit, that is too far the other way. That's not how you correct that flaw. And in fact, if you are a member of the royal family who still has a sense of duty, you're probably more likely to go in the other direction and say, well, to offset what Prince Harry is doing, we're going to have to stay quiet. But Charlie, an important point here, right, was the death of Diana, where you had this

kind of overly sentimental part of our culture represented in her death and the outpouring of grief, almost toppling the whole affect of the institution of the monarchy, right? Because they weren't willing to play ball in that way. But they they eventually got their equilibrium. But that that was that sort of the the right. That was the side of kind of the new the new way of thinking and feeling in our culture. Right. Yeah. Well, and then and then they, too, didn't handle it well. Right. Because they were under such criticism at the time. The queen was for not saying anything or doing anything or lowering the flag on buckingham palace which he addresses

in in this book um saying they never that was the stiff upper lip yeah but then they overcorrected because the queen actually was coming under some fair criticism at the time and what do they do they parade the boys or the grieving sons around in front of us which was wrong i mean now we see that with in retrospect that was wrong that was a lot to put these young kids through. One good point he had in his memoir was there was, you see the video of the well-wishers handing the boys flowers. He was only 12. And then he took the flowers and then he would have to put the flowers with the collection of flowers that was accumulating on the gate by Buckingham Palace, almost as if he was there to help others in their expression of grief. Like he would be the deliverer of the flowers to his mother's memorial.

And that was a good point. You know, I mean, they weren't used correctly. They should have been behind closed doors. We shouldn't have been able to see those boys for a long time after that. In any event, I will say this. That was say this that was a legit complaint 99 of all the others are not and here is what it's come to i retweeted this over the weekend because i thought it was so funny and uh it captures his his actual complaints in his book so perfectly like i didn't get the right parking spot my brother's room was bigger and my dad and my brother can't ride on the same plane together but me i can ride on whatever plane i want my god shut up. And if there's somebody, it looks like it was made by a group called Belfast Media tweets out a picture of him. And it reads, when I was a child, my father grabbed at my nose, then pulled away with his thumb between his fingers saying, I've got your nose.

I thought I had been badly disfigured. The torment I suffered taunts me to I suffered torments me to this day. And he's become so absurd. People believed this was real. They thought this was a real excerpt from his book. Yeah, I can almost hear him reading it. Now that you say it. Right?

This Todger didn't get touched when they took that nose. Okay, moving on. So, see, we did penis and todger in that segment i did not underestimate you megan see let's talk about actual medical dangers unlike the one expressed in that meme and that brings me to the vaccine so there was relatively big news on friday evening on the pfizer vaccine and the boosters in particular the latest bivalent booster, the CDC actually acknowledging a problem with the vaccine, which is rare for them, saying a safety signal had been identified showing an increased risk of ischemic stroke, which is basically that accounts for virtually all

strokes. It's the most common form. It's a blockage of the blood to the brain, and they're usually caused by clots. But in any event, an increased risk of stroke in people 65 or older. And now they go on to say, blah, blah, blah. Let's see. The risk is in the 21 days following vaccination. This preliminary signal has not been identified with the Moderna vaccine. Then they go on to say, furthermore, it's important to note that to date, no other safety symptoms have shown a similar signal and multiple subsequent analyses have not validated this signal and go on to say, nonetheless, we believe we don't think this represents a true clinical risk, but we believe it's important to share this information with the public. And they recommend no change in vaccination practice.

OK, OK. CNN reporting actual numbers, which were not in the CDC's statement of the 550,000 seniors who got the Pfizer bivalent booster and were tracked, 130 had strokes in the three weeks after the shot. Now, my instincts in the covid are probably the same as yours. If they say it's 130 out of 550,000, it's probably more. Not everybody reports or gets tracked or gets marked down. But in any event, those are disturbing numbers.

And here is the headline from New York Times. New York Times, their headline on Friday. Did they make it the headline? No. On Saturday morning, the vaccine was not even on their homepage, that story. All right. It winds up in the coronavirus pandemic section of the online paper. We look there. No, no, no. We look there and it wasn't there. What was there was it's time to wear a mask again. Okay. That's what the New York Times wants you to know. Then if you go way, way down, way, way down, they cover the news with the following headline. No increased stroke risk linked to Pfizer's COVID boosters. What? That's

exactly the opposite of what the CDC says. The CDC says there's an increased stroke risk with the boosters. And the New York Times, by Apoorva Mandevelli, she's the one who made the mistake on the number of kids who had allegedly been hospitalized by COVID. She said it was 900,000. And in fact, it at best had been 63,000. She's saying no increase. Anyway, you get the gist. A pretty significant stroke risk has been identified and it's being buried by and advocacy and what journalists think is good for us and what should happen. So I'm a fan of the vaccines. I think they've saved a lot of lives, obviously, but doesn't mean that they're not downsides. And we should just have factual reporting on these things and a reasonable debate about them. But that's what the other side on these questions opposed yourself that no other advanced society had the equivalent of the CDC saying that young kids should be masked the way they were in the United States.

We were a bizarre outlier. But right before the fever broke on masks, you know, you had Youngkin's Glenn Youngkin in Virginia saying, well, it should be the choice of parents. And, you know, you had the White House saying he's putting kids lives at risk, you know, based on zero science whatsoever, just based on a distorted view of what the facts were that they then piled this moral panic on top of. And it's happened again and again. I find this whole like the sequence of events here is right on brand, Charles. You know, we find out there's a safety concern with one of the vaccines boosters, Pfizer vaccine booster. And the New York Times immediately rushes to both bury the story and to the extent they

cover it, to cover it wrongly. And of course, always in the direction of downplaying the concerns. Again, it was not on the homepage. We went to the coronavirus pandemic section. The headline there was, it's time to wear a mask again. And then buried down below in the section that addresses the vaccines, the headline appears, but it is, there is no increased stroke risk associated with the Pfizer booster. Exactly the opposite of what the CDC had said. Yeah. So I'm not particularly alarmed by the statistic that you noted, 550,130. I'd need to see if there was even a causal link there. I am alarmed by the New York Times. Right. But, you know, people have strokes. There's a difference between coincidence and causation. And I need to see the study. What I am alarmed by,

though, is the headline that you read, because it's indicative of everything that's been wrong with our conversation about this right from the beginning. And I'm afraid this is true on both sides, in that the New York Times is clearly unwilling ever to put out any information that could dissuade people from either masking in the early days, or now getting the vaccine or the boosters, because it believes that the American public is full of children who need to be led to the right decision. And that, broadly speaking, is how the CDC has behaved as well. The CDC has managed us from the beginning. Instead of saying, here are the facts, here is our take on them, or here are the facts, make up your own mind. The CDC has put out misinformation at times in an attempt to nudge

people into the behavior that it thought would be best. And as a result, it and the New York Times have lost a great deal of trust. There has been a similar mistake made on the right. Now, what I think should have happened in the early days is that we should have acknowledged that we do not normally live in circumstances such as we did in early 2020. Pandemics like this seem to come along every hundred years or so.

We should have recognized that this was not just the flu, that it was serious, but it was also not zombie-inspiring, flesh-eating bacteria, and that we were going to get a mitigating factor, probably a vaccine, that would by definition be untested, and that we should make allowances for that. Now, the vaccine has been really effective. It is not an accident that the number of people dying of COVID dropped in the way that

it did when the vaccine came along. That's not a coincidence. But the vaccine is also not equivalent to, say, the polio vaccine. You get these people who say, well, what are you going to come after next? The polio vaccine? You're going to come to the flu jab? No, the difference here is that this was an experimental vaccine, and it may well be the case, and we should have acknowledged this from the start, it may well be the case that it has some side effects, and a few of them lethal, but we didn't. And so when Conservatives correctly said that we should go easy on the mandates, because you don't want to mandate that people take experimental vaccines, make them available, subsidise them if you want to, but don't mandate them. The left pushed back. But the right also

made a mistake here in concert, which was in order to attack the mandates to underplay the efficacy of the vaccine. And so you've had this weird push pull between some people on the right who have said, you know what, the vaccine doesn't work. It doesn't help. It's dangerous. It's killing athletes all over the place. Look at all these young people who are suddenly dying. Not really true. And people on the left who have said the vaccine is perfect. Not only will it save your life, it will stop you getting COVID. It will stop you transmitting COVID. It will make you better looking and taller as well. And this is all nonsense. What we're dealing with is an imperfect world in the midst of a completely unprecedented in our lifetimes circumstance, and a vaccine that did pretty well

at what it was supposed to do, but is going to have some unfortunate side effects over time. And we can't talk about it, because the loudest voices on the left and the right, and it's more complicated than that, there's a lot of anti-vax sentiment on the left as well and pro-vax sentiment on the right. I've just decided not to have that conversation in the way adults should. And the result has been this mess. I have to say, I am more skeptical

of the vaccines now than you are. And certainly than I was at the beginning, in part because of my lack of trust in any of these public health officials. You know, and I would say that Vinay Prasad, who I do trust online, he's a doctor who's been neck deep in all of this from the beginning and been a real straight shooter. He's pro vaccine. But he raised some of the concerns in in response to this announcement that reminded me of why I'm having this feeling of distrust and questioning. First of all, Marty McCary of Johns Hopkins comes out and says CDC should make the should make public the raw data set. Exactly right. How many? Exactly. Why did you conclude this? It must have been pretty significant for the CDC to issue this warning.

Then Vinay Prasad, he's a hematologist, an oncologist and professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California, Sam Fram, says the following. This administration's vaccine policy has been horrible. They always err on the side of pushing doses. They initially decide the safety signal of myocarditis. They delayed pulling J&J in young women. They never banned Moderna in young men. And they rubber-stamped kids' vaccines with inadequate efficacy data. Most recently, long after the emergency phase of the pandemic ended, the administration granted emergency use authorization to the bivalent booster down to five-year-olds based initially on mouse data. And let's not forget, it was only eight mice.

And to this day, supported only by confounded observational studies. Right? Not exactly the gold standard. Arguably, this is an illegal action. There is no emergency to justify boosting 20-year-old men who had three doses. He goes on to say, we know very little, but it appears a safety signal of stroke may be identified. He means safety signal, like a problem, complication. Of course, there's nothing magic about 65. So it may also occur at younger ages. What's the absolute risk? Where is the press conference? Sadly, no further information followed. A sensible FDA commissioner would have is the press conference sadly no further information followed

a sensible fda commissioner would have held a press conference and stated what was known instead of that you know what our fda commissioner is doing well he tweeted out a picture of himself here and i guess i don't know what it is a grow house it's a grow house uh it's fda commissioner dr robert calif calif who is talking about um yay new controlled environment growing facility in davis and learning how this new technology can boost the resiliency of our of our food supply off message buddy off message like venae prasad's exactly right rich and we're not going to get any of that we're not going to get it because the media won't demand it and And with the media is not demanding it, we'll never get answers. So more transparency, more facts are better. And, you know, that's true across the board,

especially on this. But they've been so motivated by, I think, you know, an understandable goal, getting people vaccinated. I agree with Charlie. I think the vaccines have been a huge benefit in terms of reducing deaths, but they never wanted to let anything interfere with that goal, right? It never made any sense, for instance, that you couldn't, having had COVID, wouldn't relieve you from these various vaccine mandates, various places, right? I mean, having gotten it gave you a high level of immunity. So why didn't that count? For the longest time, in some places, even today, it's presumed that being unvaccinated makes you a threat to everyone around you, including

vaccinated people, right? If you're unvaccinated and you have other health risks, you're a threat to yourself being unvaccinated. You're not a threat to anyone else. But so all of it has been this grinding wheel just in one direction, and it has created skepticism and distrust among rational actors, including yourself. But we should have an upfront, transparent debate about it. Give people the data and let them argue about it and draw their own conclusions. They won't do it. And there's no sign that they're going to. It's very disheartening. And people are left wondering what's real. OK, let's shift gears because I have something exciting to tell you. Don't know if you saw this over the weekend in The Wall Street Journal, but here's the headline. Supreme Court investigators have narrowed leak inquiry to small number of suspects. Oh, OK. I'm excited to see that. I do not have faith in the Supreme Court marshal. I hope one day she makes me eat those words. I really do. I hope she's capable of doing

more than yelling, oh, yeah, oh, yeah, and introducing the high court. But she's been on this case for quite some time now. That leak was in May, month five. We are now in month one of the following year and we don't have the perpetrator. But the Wall Street Journal reports, per people familiar with the matter, investigators have narrowed their inquiry to a small number of suspects, including law clerks, but officials have yet to conclusively identify the alleged culprit. Does that mean they've preliminarily identified an alleged culprit? We don't know. They say, reminding us here that Chief Justice Roberts did not call in the FBI. Heices law clerks sit for interviews and surrender their cell phones. Not a lot has happened. By the way, that demand prompted several of the three dozen law clerks to seek legal counsel. I'm sorry, but if they wanted my cell phone and I was working for a Supreme Court justice and I were not the legal leaker, I would fork it over immediately.

This is not one that I would need legal counsel on. So I do find that a little suspicious. They say Gail's interviews were sometimes short and superficial. I don't know if she did it personally, but they were under her authority. Said a person familiar with the matter consisting of a handful of questions such as. Did you do it? Do you know anyone who had a reason to do? Go, go,ail, go! Go! Is that a natural question to ask, Megan,

in such an investigation? Did you do it? Do you have faith in Gail, guys? What do you think, Charles? I just think it's really unfair that it's taken this long for the investigation to come close to finding out who did it because it's delayed the culprit's inevitable MSNBC contract.

Think about how much money they could have made in the interim. So true. I do think this is sensitive and difficult. I also think that it has to be resolved. We cannot have an inconclusive at the end of this, because this was a flagrant attack on one branch of government. And I use that word advisedly, it was an attack on the authority of the Supreme Court, it was an attempt to intimidate them, whether or not the intended result was to have somebody fly from California and whether you want to say

attempt or pull out of an attempt to kill a Supreme Court justice, I don't know. But that was the result nevertheless. And if we just get a shrug of the shoulders and a while this happens, then the incentives are going to be pretty clear next time that there is a big case that people really care about. And we have them coming up. We have a big affirmative action case coming up this year. You're going to see people saying, well, why not me? And that is the beginning of the end of the role of the judiciary. I mean, there is a reason we give Supreme Court justices lifetime tenures. And that reason is that they're supposed to be insulated from political pressure. They can't be removed except in exceptional cases for impeachment. Well, if they worry that their drafts and their deliberations and their early votes and their internal discussions are going to leak, then they will behave differently. And you may as well at

that point actually not have the independent judiciary we've relied on for nearly a quarter of a millennium. You know, Rich, the thing is, Chief Justice John Roberts is the one who farmed this out to the to the marshal instead of the FBI. And I realize he's the chief justice of the United States, but it's not his court. He doesn't own it. He doesn't, you know, he maybe he's kind of like the acting CEO, but it's not he doesn't own it. We do. It's our court. And we, the American people, are entitled to an answer as to who did this. He cannot in any world keep this secret or choose somebody who's going to run this investigation into the ground so that it's mysteriously never known who did it because he thinks that's what's in the best interest.

What can be done? Already the house, the GOP house, is talking about how we're going to do our own investigation, which would be great. I'd love to see somebody who genuinely has a will of getting to the bottom of this take charge. Yeah, they should. I don't know how optimistic we should be that they could get anywhere. If you wanted an answer,

clearly you should have gone to the FBI. I don't know the legal in and outs of referring it to the FBI, but John Roberts is supposed to be an institutionalist. And this was an attack, as Charlie said, on the court as an institution, on the court as such. I think it was Alito at the Heritage Foundation not too long ago who said that the leak was basically a public advertisement to say, you go and kill one of the conservative justices and you'll block this decision. And lo and behold, you know, a troubled young man who, you know, you can we can learn more about how serious he was. But he certainly had the materials to carry out an assassination at Kavanaugh's house house shows up on his street where he lives. So this is literally a deadly serious matter. And once you're relying on the court itself to try to

track it down, relying on a force that basically what it does is provide security at the court itself and doesn't really have the wherewithal or the experience for a complex investigation like this. You're setting the investigation up for failure. So if it's true that they've actually narrowed it down, that would be great. But I'd unfortunately be shocked if they actually nailed a perpetrator here. I agree. It's eight months later. Get to work, Gail, or farm it off to somebody who can.

Give it to the cops in Idaho. They know how to solve things. I'm so disappointed in the job being done here, and it does make me think they're running cover. I don't think it would be that hard. I really don't. I think you'd get a qualified interrogator in front of these Supreme Court law folks.

So do you think, Megan, that Roberts is thinking it's better for the institution just if we don't know and it goes away? Yeah, I really am starting to believe that. And I don't know what that means. Does that mean it links to a justice? Gail is in the unfortunate position of sort of investigating her bosses. Gail is not above the Supreme Court justices. They walk around over there like gods. And what if it led to Chief Justice John Roberts? I don't think he did it. But what if it did? You know, is Gail going to be able to point the finger? It should have been given to an outside group like the FBI, somebody with law enforcement experience and who knows how to ask questions that get to the bottom.

I mean, this is not Gail's bailiwick. There's a I'm trying to look up her. I had her background in front of me, but it's not that impressive when it comes to investigating a ton of crimes. That's how she wound up in the job. She did. And Alito, you mentioned those heritage remarks. You're not wrong. He came out. This is in October at this event and said this leak made those of us who are thought to be in the majority in support of overruling Roe targets for assassination because it gave people a rational reason to think they could prevent that from happening by killing one of us. That's why the leak like coming out before the decision was final. It's like one thing. Of course, he's going to put his name to the decision as he did when it's final. But that was different because at that point he can't be manipulated out of it.

He can't be killed out of casting his vote. That's why what the leaker did, one of the many reasons, it was so egregious. And for them to just treat this as like, oh, somebody may have leaked a little thing to the media.

You know, no, this is this is top level betrayal. I use the term treason loosely, not legally. But what a betrayal by somebody who now could potentially be entering the legal profession and asking whole hordes of people to trust them. Yeah. And, you know, I tend to minimize the extent to which we we have civil conflict in this country. And people say, you know, we're on the cusp of the Civil War. All that, I think, is hyperbolic and way overblown.

But God forbid, if that guy showed up at Kavanaugh's house and succeeded in going in there and harming him and his family, that would have been an inflection point in our society and legitimacy of our institutions and, and the kind of conflict we've, we're, we're experiencing, it really would have been a horrible event in every single sense. And the leaker, whether it was his or her intention to do that, and it very well may have been made that possible, kind of opened up that door. So it's extremely important that this person be found. But, you know, as we've been saying, Roberts chose to go down a path that makes that unlikely. Yeah, I'm really starting to doubt his commitment to getting to the bottom of this. It's been too long and he doesn't have the right team in place.

I hope I'm proven wrong. Stand by, guys. Much, much more with Rich and Charlie. After this, we're going to get personal. We're going to talk about them. You don't hear them talk about that much in the editors. Little vignettes here and there, but we're going to talk turkey next. Today, President Biden was at this worship service at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta to join in a celebration of Martin Luther King Jr.'s life and had a thought about our newest associate Supreme Court justice who he nominated. And here's how that went. Those are the words of Kajan Kajan Kajanji Drown Jackson. Oh, my God. Our Supreme Court justice. Rich. I can't.

Yeah. Yeah. This is why I'll make you know, I never say what's her name, the White House press secretary's name, because I know I might mess it up. But I guess if you're president of the United States and this is the text in front of you, you got to try to read it. We need to hear it again. Let's hear it again. Let's hear it again. Inevitable results.

Those are the words of Ketanji Brown Jackson, our Supreme Court Justice. Ketanji Brown Jackson. It's actually not that hard. Ketanji Brown Jackson. It kind of flows. If you would just practice it, he clearly doesn't know her at all. Chris Buckley told the story about George H.W. Bush. Buckley was a speechwriter for him, and he wrote into a speech a reference to Aristophanes, the Greek playwright. And, you know, Bush, having been around the block once or twice, knew he wasn't going to risk trying to say Aristophanes. So he edited it and just wrote in Plato. Yeah, I have to say, if that had been Donald Trump, we'd be getting a think quote unquote

think piece tonight on MSNBC about what a racist he is. You get to be. Yeah, it's Katanji, right? Like, no way would they let him get away with that you know i have made embarrassing mistakes in my life in front of audiences mispronouncing words i read awry as ori once i didn't know how to say huawei the chinese technology firm i once stood in front of my school and congratulated a girl on winning the reading prize and asked her what her favorite character was, and then announced it as Hermione instead of Hermione, which was odd because I did know the name Hermione. I just couldn't process

it. But the thing is, as you say, this White House has repeatedly screwed up that name. It's not just Biden. Ron Klain kept writing it wrong during the nomination hearings. The press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, pronounced it wrong. She also tweeted it wrong over and over again. I think they kept saying Kajanti. And that happens. The problem is, is that when you make a mistake like that in modern America, people ascribe all of these insane reasons for it, one of which is racism or insensitivity or white supremacy or what you will.

And I think it's worth laughing a great deal at Biden for this, knowing that had it happened the other way around, we would have had a week-long news cycle about it saying so much about the other side. There's nothing wrong with it per se, of course. We all screw up. It's not like he just found her. She's on the Supreme Court. There's only nine.

It's not that hard. I would say Neil Gorsuch's name is much tougher. I don't understand it to this day. I get afraid as I get to the end of it. Is it Gorsuch? Is it Gorsuch? It's Gorsuch, but it's a tough one. Okay, somebody who's very good with the word things is Rich Lowry.

I think Charles C.W. Cook would agree with me. And now I have had the opportunity to look a little bit into your background, Rich, some of which I did not know. Born and raised in Arlington, Virginia, son of a social worker mother and an English professor father. Okay, this is how we bonded. My dad was an education professor, went to UVA, where you studied English and history. And then after graduating work for Charles Krauthammer as a research assistant before the great William F. Buckley came into your life. So you were sort of born to do what you are doing right now. Am I right? Or were you thinking about a career in baseball? I was until I realized in high school I couldn't hit a curveball or a fastball. So that ended my baseball dreams. from the first time I discovered Bill Buckley through his show, Firing Line.

Just incredibly compelling, witty, unusual figure. I hadn't heard of National Review yet until I saw him on TV and heard a reference to National Review. And then I ran down the local drugstore to try to find a copy as soon as I could. Were you conservative? Were you like an Alex P. Keaton? Yeah, but not yet. I mean, I was inclined that way, but I hadn't thought any of it through. And National Review helped me think it through. But as a young person then, and obviously even more so now, if you're going to be a conservative, you have a contrarian reflex in you somewhere. And you need to be able to defend what you think and what you believe because the tide is flowing the other way.

And National Review helped me, helped Army that way. And in high school, they, at some point they they did some sort of a employment survey or something and they asked you know where do you want to what city do you want to be in 10 years and what do you want to be doing and i i wrote uh new york city i want to be working for nashville you know as a high school student so it's been a great blessing to actually be able to do it i can't imagine what it would have been like to actually work for Buckley. My team pulled a couple of fun quotes from him,

such as an interview he gave in 2004 with New York Magazine, two New York Magazine interviewers, Deborah Solomon, who asked, must you be so clever at all times? In response to which he answered, I haven't practiced the alternative. It's perfect. I was blessed to work for two giants, Bill Buckley and Charles Krauthammer, both of whom I was terrified around for a lot of the time.

Bill, because he might give you some important instruction that you literally didn't understand, right? Because you didn't know the words he was using. And Charles was just this, obviously, this formidable intellect, and this kind of, there's an inherent dignity to Charles. There's something big about Charles. And if you're a 21-year-old working for him, you know, fetching his soup for lunch and proofreading his columns, it was a daunting prospect just being around him. You can still get his book, Things That Matter, which is a collection of his best columns, and it's so well worth your time and the read. Charles, how about you? You mentioned you were raised in Cambridge, but you went to Oxford and you fell in love with America from afar. I love your writings on America. You're now a US citizen as of 2018. You fell in love with this girl, America,

before you fell in love with your girl, your wife, and created a beautiful family. But what about your conservative leanings? Because the UK is kind of like America in that there's a very large leftist presence that would certainly be trying to get its grips into a young CW, Charles CW Cook. Yeah, so I always loved America. I loved America in an entirely pre-political sense. We first went to America when I was three to come to Florida, Disney World, Sea World, and the rest. And I said at the time, I want to live in America when I grow up. I'm not quite sure then what it was, maybe the palm trees and the sunshine

and the warmth and probably the the idea that everywhere was full of roller coasters which i love but as i grew up we visited america a lot more we had some family friends in newport beach california and in phoenix arizona and we would visit them and i just loved the place in in a way that I can describe in a way that I can't describe. It wasn't political. I didn't have any politics until September 11th. I didn't know a great deal about the world and I didn't want to. I was born in the mid 80s and everything was fine. The economy during my childhood was fantastic. The prospect of Britain being dragged into a war seemed remote. The only wars I'd heard about, the first Gulf War and then

Kosovo, we won. I suppose I was an unknowing, unwitting, end of history sort of kid. But 9-11 changed that and I started to be interested in the world and in ideas and then that really went into full flow when I was at Oxford and I did a whole module on British colonial America and then I chose to do the revolutionary era and then I actually wrote my thesis at Oxford on the passage of the Second Amendment. And at that point, I was sold. I remember reading the founders and thinking, well, that's my politics. That classical liberalism is my politics.

And really, it still is. So there's an answer that is more informed and comprehensible and then there was a gut level love of america that i still have and i've written before that a lot of it is is sounds irrational like if i see a mountain range and you tell me that's in america i like it more i'd be moderately disappointed if you said that's in canada I can't quite explain why, you know, Patsy Cline or Ray Charles have quite the effect they do on me, but it matters that they're American. And I followed it. You guys did a great 4th of July podcast this year. And forgive me, what is the name of the older British guy who comes on from time to time on the editors? Andrew Suddiford. Yeah, Andrew. So Andrew made the mistake of saying

he thought that the American flag was kind of messy. It was like mean girls at National Review. That just seems so wrong. It's the most beautiful flag in the world, just objectively. I don't know how anyone can have any different view. But in fairness, Rich, Andrew did design the new Martin Luther King Memorial in Boston. Don't get me restarted. All right, a couple of

quick questions. We only have like two minutes left, but quick answers. Rich, you're married. How many kids do you have? Sexes? How old? We have three kids, older girl, in-between boy, and younger daughter, seven, five, and 20 months. Man, that is like, that's heavy lifting. Godspeed. Charles, you have younger kids, so you're married and you live in Florida, in Fort Lauderdale?

No, not Fort Lauderdale. I'm in North Florida. I mean, the further north you go, the further south you get, right? So I would say I live in the south near Jacksonville. Okay. You're constantly down at the neighborhood pub and you have two kids with your wife. And how old are they and what are the genders? They're both boys, six and five.

Oh, my gosh. I mean, one would wonder because you're both so well read. So do you spend your entire day reading and just a little bit writing? Because you make so many book references on the show. I'm like, when do these guys have the time to do all this reading, Rich? Well, I just do it whenever there's some in-between time. You know, 10 at night when things are settled down, I'll be sitting at the dining room table with a book and a beer.

You're not passed out by 10 like most parents of those age children? I wish I were passed out, but the kids take a very long time to get to sleep. And that's really the only me time, for lack of a better phrase, you know, 10 or 11 at night. You got to fight for it. What about you, Charlie? When do you find the time to read all these books

and everything you do? I actually read a lot less than I would like at the moment because of my kids. But I did read an enormous amount before I had kids and I'm blessed to have a really good memory. I absorb books. So I do read during the day, but a lot of the references I make are to books I read quite a long time ago. Well, you're lucky. That's like Spencer Clavin. I had a great conversation with him. He was

saying that's his best gift is that he has a great memory. And so he's read a lot, but he remembers it unlike the rest of us. Rich and Charlie, so fun. Looking forward to our new National Review Day and to everybody signing up for NR Plus. It's well worth it.

Thank you. In honor of this day. Yeah. I know exactly what it will be. We'll review it beforehand, okay? We'll get Jesse Kelly to design it. Bye, guys. See you.

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