The Megyn Kelly Show - Biden's Incoherence and Corruption, and Leaning on Faith, with Victor Davis Hanson and Alexa and Carlos PenaVega | Ep. 617

Episode Date: August 29, 2023

Megyn Kelly is joined by Victor Davis Hanson, author of "The Dying Citizen," to talk about President Biden’s incoherent response to the Jacksonville shooting, Biden getting more facts wrong, the question of whether Biden can finish his term as president and the pressures the Democratic party faces while he's running again, Biden's obvious ongoing cognitive decline, the potential for VP Kamala Harris taking over as the presidential candidate, the push to blame DeSantis for Florida, Biden’s history of racist remarks, new information showing potential Biden corruption related to Ukraine and Burisma, explosive reporting about Biden's personal interest in firing Viktor Shokin, handicapping the GOP race and debate fallout, the inside story of the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, New York and Los Angeles seeing consequences of illegal immigration influx, the rise in crime in California, and more. Then Alexa and Carlos PenaVega, authors of "Love is the Point," join to discuss serving God and others over self-focus, the devastation from the wildfires in Lahaina, their disappointment about Biden’s remarks and visit, the importance of community and giving back to those affected in Hawaii, leaning on faith in times of hardship, secrets to a successful relationship and marriage, and more.VDH: https://victorhanson.comPenaVega: http://loveisthepointdevo.com/ 

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, live from Sirius XM HQ in New York City today. A little later in the show, I'm going to be joined by a couple we first had on and absolutely loved last year. In the world of Hollywood, these guys are a breath of fresh air. But we begin with politics. President Biden is back from his month-long vacation. It's okay. He's only president. I'm sure you all take a month-long vacation too. And it's going exactly as you would expect, as he and his top spokesperson fumbled their way through various media events, getting key facts wrong and flat out refusing to answer simple questions about Hunter Biden. Plus, crime and environmentalist chaos

on the West Coast as we see increasing examples of people having had enough of the environmentalist nonsense on the streets, blockades of the traffic. We've got a couple of great examples, which we'll show you as people say we've had enough of this ridiculousness. Joining me now to discuss it all, VDH Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of The Dying Citizen. Victor, welcome back to the show. Thanks for having me, Megan. Great to see you. All right. So let's just start with President Biden, who I mean, truly, he's been on vacation for a month between his time at Rehoboth Beach in Delaware to the trip out west to Lake Tahoe.

One little stint to Maui under pressure to actually show some sort of heart for those whose lives were destroyed by this fire. It's been vacation after vacation. So now he comes back and he is asked about the Jacksonville, Florida shooting. Right. This is Sat 1. You tell me whether you can understand even just maybe 10 words together of what he says here, what just happened just as a reminder for our audience. Three people were shot and killed in Jacksonville. They were black. The shooter was white.

He then killed himself. It was obviously a disturbed young man. I think he was 22 years old. In any event, he was asked about it. Here's what he said. And so we have to act against this hate fuel violence. And so it's happening. By the way, almost five years to the day that five young blacks were killed in Jacksonville. I did it earlier at a gun and a gun shop store.

They're doing kids' toys. And we have to speak out that there's a whole group of extreme people trying to erase history, trying to walk away from it. I mean, the idea that we're sitting here, I never thought that I'd be president, let alone be president, and having a discussion on why books are being banned in American schools. And, you know, as an administration, we're going to continue to march forward. It's a job and a freedom that we work so hard for. What? What?

I mean, as Archie Bunker used to say, ha ha. Victor. So we actually tried to translate it. And my team thinks he's referring with that muddled statement to something that did happen back in August of 2018. There was a shooting at the Jacksonville Landing, a gunman opened fire at a video game tournament at the Chicago Pizza restaurant targeting rival gamers. Not at a gun shop, not at a store, nothing to do with kids' toys. Two were killed, not five, which is what he seems to be suggesting there. Eleven were hurt. One victim was black, one was white, not five young blacks, as he says there. We could keep going. So what I did manage to discern was 100% counterfactual, to be charitable in my own terminology, and the rest of it I couldn't make heads or tails of.

Yeah. Well, you know what? He's failing at a geometric, not arithmetic rate. And I think what I mean by that is each week, it's not just seven days worse. It's 21 days worse. And there's three things going on with him. One is, I don't know if it's congestive heart. I'm not a doctor, obviously. I shouldn't even be speculating. But he slurs his words, so his delivery is incomprehensible. And that's separate from the cognitive problems where he rambles or he can't read off a teleprompter or he goes into a wild thing. But the third is even more disturbing, and that is he has lost all of the veneer or the brakes that most people have

that when they have an impulse to speak, then they don't speak because they have some social awareness. So whether it was, you ain't black or you're a junkie or a stupid question, or they out and out lies, you know, when he tells people who've lost children or sons in Afghanistan that his son died in Iraq. But just in that context, he said also, as I remember, because I watched the clip, that he talked Strom Thurmond into voting for the Civil Rights Act. Well, that has to refer to 1964, or maybe the Fair Housing Act of 65. And Strom Thurmond voted against it. And Joe Biden was, I think, 21 or 22. So he just makes things out of whole cloth. And he assumes, or his wife does, or his handlers do, that the media is so invested in the alternative to Trump or whoever the Republicans have that they will make up the necessary adjustments.

But he can't tell the truth. He never could, but now he cannot tell a scintilla of the truth. He can't deliver a speech. And he's cognitively challenged, So he rambles his grammar syntax. Right. But the result of it is a complete mess. It's very bizarre to listen to try. You know, you're reminded this is the leader of the free world. This is the United States president who cannot speak, nor can he walk. He's constantly in a shuffle. We've seen him fall down. I mean, I don't want the Republicans to get overconfident because I think to some extent they're banking on

people seeing this and just saying he can't do it. He's not going to win, but he can't do it. He's not doing it right now. This is why Nikki Haley, and I'm going to get to why I'm raising this. She just tweeted out. The truth is a vote for Joe Biden is a vote for President Kamala Harris. That's what she tweeted out. And I think we all understand what she's saying. Like the odds of Joe Biden actually making it if he gets reelected through a second term are extremely slim. So she tweets that out. And then you promptly get people like Jamel Hill, this very racist commentator, tweeting out part of the reason racism is such a terrible sickness in this country is because politicians like this know they can rally a certain base with the fear of, oh, my God, a black woman might be

president if you don't vote for me. Then we want to act all surprised when the most hateful part of the base decides they need to act out on their feelings of hatred. You see, so Nikki Haley is herself a racist because she's saying, if you vote for Joe Biden, reminder, Kamala Harris is going to be the president. Yeah. Well, the funny thing is that Kamala Harris would not be in the position she was in because she ran for president in 2016 and she was a dismal failure. She failed to get one delegate. She had a lot of Silicon Valley money. And so she was appointed because he had announced pro forma that he was going to select a woman. And then the Black Caucus said, that has to be a Black woman. And he nodded. So that's why she's there. And she had a perfect opportunity. She had a favorable press.

She had a president that wasn't really cognitively engaged. She could have freelanced and done wonderful things. She's been an utter failure. And it's not you or I saying that, Megan. It's the Democratic insiders. And their biggest fear right now is they don't want Joe Biden to not finish this term because that means she is going to be president. And they think she'll destroy the party. I think she probably will. So they're going to do whatever it takes to get him

across sort of like Woodrow Wilson and Edith Wilson in 1919 when he was non-complimentas and she finished out his term. But what they're looking at in the next four years, I don't think he's going to be able to run. And I think that they're going to be pressure on him because he's going to get so embarrassing in the next 18 months that sometime in March or February, they'll do like LBJ in 68, just he's not going to run. But that also solves the Kamala Harris problem, because then they just say, well, have an open primary and they know that she won't get another delegate, just like in the past. We've been here before, too. And, you know, in 1944, it was pretty clear that FDR around June or July, even maybe March, he had blood pressure about 220 over 180. He may have had melanoma.

He had chronic bladder and sinus infection. He was just, unfortunately, a wreck, and he was not going to live much longer. Probably, they thought, not even a year. But they wanted that fourth term, and they needed that Democratic White House. So they ran him. But his vice president was kind of like Kamala Harris. It was Henry Wallace, who was a nice guy, but a valid socialist. So they got together and they said, we got to get him off the ticket. And we've got to get somebody who's conservative and won't rival FDR. And FDR will think he's not very important or well known, so he won't overshadow him. So they picked Harry Truman. And of course, on April 1st, just a few months after the

inauguration, he died. And we had Truman instead of Henry Wallace. And I think they're looking at something like that. And they're trying to figure out how that you will not be president. And their biggest problem right now is, and I think you and I would agree that there is a real question whether he can finish the next 18 months. What you just saw is, if you and I had this conversation, I think we did about three months ago. Back then, he was much more cognitively alert than he is now.

He's declined enormously. It's very tragic. And so that's their problem. And that's why they don't, they just talk about Trump 24-7, because not only can they not talk about the Biden record at the border or crime or energy or foreign policy, and especially the economy, and they can't talk about what they would call the walls are closing in on Joe Biden with the IRS whistleblowers or Victor Shokin or the oligarchs that have evidence or the laptop evidence or Jim Jordan's subpoenaing tax document. They don't want to talk about that, but they also can't talk about his cognitive or physical health, which means if you can't talk

about those three things that everybody's worried about, then you can't talk at all about anything relating to Biden. So it's 24-7, 360 degrees Donald Trump. There was just a piece this morning in Axios referencing back to a survey of what words come to mind when you think of Joe Biden or Donald Trump. This is a survey of 1,100 adults in America just this month. And the number one cluster of words for Joe Biden by 26 percent was old, outdated, aging and elderly. The next most popular at 15 percent was slow, confused, bumbling, old, outdated, aging, elderly, slow, confused, bumbling on Trump. The number one cluster of words was corrupt, criminal and crooked. Now we all know why they're saying that. But the Democrats have a problem. Even the people who think Trump is, quote, criminal or crooked or corrupt. That's only 15 percent of all Americans. You got 26 percent on the Joe Biden old, outdated, aging elderly. This is a real problem. Even Morning Joe was lamenting this reality this morning. And so this is very interesting. You're suggesting they may have to keep him on until the spring and that that's when they'll say he's not running.

Because something interesting happened in the past few days. Bernie Sanders went to New Hampshire to give a speech. Now, why was Bernie Sanders going to New Hampshire to give a speech? Bernie Sanders, unlike Kamala Harris, actually did win a couple of the primaries last time around until the party decided he he had to be stopped and made sure he didn't get any further. But it does seem like the Democratic Party is starting to realize they have a serious problem of their own. Yeah, I think they feel that they have a serious problem and they have the solution to. And Bernie's heard that and they think it's Gavin Newsom. And he's saying basically to America, hey, I was here first. Don't let this guy cut ahead of me. So I'm going to,

if that's what you guys in the Democratic backroom want, that you want an open primary, quote unquote, open to get rid of Kamala, then you got to pick me because I'm ahead of the line. I've done it twice and it's my turn. So he wouldn't do that. And you know that better than I do, unless he was getting pretty good information that Joe Biden is not going to run again. But to make the next 16 months viable, they can't tell anybody that. He'd be the lamest of all lame ducks in our presidential history if we know that he's not going to run, because then all the attention would say, well, even finish his term. I really do. I'm not just trying to be partisan, but I do think there's 50 percent chance he won't finish his term. I really do, but I'm not just trying to be partisan,

but I do think there's 50% chance he won't finish his term. He's one trip away from oblivion. He really is. If he was to trip again off a bicycle or fall or a stairway or a stage, people with those health challenges, they deteriorate very quickly when they break their hip or knee. And then he's one remark. He's one crazy remark about beyond caricature. Or he could take a young, poor, innocent girl and hug her as he did on the Finland tarmac and start, I don't know what he was doing, nibbling her at her neck or something, or blowing her hair. If he does it again, I think any of those things would pretty much convince people that he can't be the president of the United States. And this is so ironic,

Megan, because remember when Donald Trump said, I have a bigger button than yours? We got Bandy Yee, the Yale psychiatrist, and she testified before the Democratic Senate and said that we needed an intervention with a straitjacket with Trump. And then we had the pressure for the they needed to get proof that Donald Trump was in, you know, non-complimentous. He wasn't insane or he wasn't well. And given all of that, we saw Mark Milley was so worried he had to call his Chinese counterpart, warn him that Trump was crazy in case there was a nuclear tension arising. But you don't, all those people who did that, they're silent. They don't, I mean, they're so hypocritical. Look at this, Victor, you mentioned his weirdness with the young women and the girls. This is a picture of him at the Elliot Hine Middle School in Washington, where he was pictured. What's he doing? He's touching this girl's face. I mean,

this girl looks, I don't know, like a young teenager. And he's leaning over. Like, there's one every month of him behaving inappropriately with a young female. Right? Like, or sometimes an older female. You know, we had Betsy DeVos on the show. I know. Right?

Talking about how he put his sweaty forehead against her forehead when she was in a wheelchair after an injury. And she felt me too by the guy. It doesn't matter, young or old, he's inappropriate with women. And I do think. He is. Remember Scott Brown, the Senate senator from Massachusetts, that he had to, I guess, level an implied threat to Biden that not to touch his wife so intimately. And I guess what we're saying is that he always did that, but now he has lost that cognitive self-control that he shouldn't do it. And he's liberated in a very sick way. There it is. There it is. So that's,

I predict within the next 18 months, we're going to see a book from a former Biden aide talking about the nightmare that was trying to manage this story as incident after incident happened. And I think Hawaii will be 100 percent in there because what happened out there really was dreadful with the, you know, not being able to pronounce any or say anybody's names properly, actually comparing his house fire and the potential loss of a cat in a Corvette to people's dead children. I mean, that's a nightmare. That's a nightmare for those sitting there. It's a nightmare for his aides.

They see it. There's no way they don't see it, even though they wouldn't publicly right now come out and say it. So they must be in a scramble behind the scenes to figure out what the hell to do about this guy. Yeah. And it's a burden on the Republicans. So McCarthy's got a real problem as House Speaker, because by any fair measure, you would either be invoking the 25th Amendment or starting serious impeachment. But they don't want Kamala Harris. Half of them want Kamala Harris because it would destroy the Democratic Party. And the other half said,

we can't go that far. It'll destroy the country. And yet they want to punish the Democrats for all the things they've done, and especially Biden's incapability. And they don't know what. So they've kind of got this new word, impeachment inquiry. And I guess that's sort of loading, I don't want to use that metaphor, but loading the gun and they don't know whether to actually go through with it depending on how he acts in the next 18 months. But I don't know what I would do if I were the Republican leadership because if you impeach him and he's the Democrats might convict him and cut him looser.

Then you've got Kamala Harris as the incumbent candidate. Oh, boy. And so I don't know what they're going to do. I think they kind of like it right now that he's hemorrhaging as long as he finishes this term. And then maybe they can. I don't know what they're going to do, but they don't know either. And that's why they have this weird term impeachment inquiry. I love the notion. Everything's fast breaking, I guess. I love the notion by Jamel Hill and others that this that the objective objection to Kamala Harris is race. That's the problem. That's why Nikki Haley decided to tweet out. Just remember, a vote for Biden is a vote for Kamala Harris, as if the Republican Party doesn't fear Michelle Obama, that they fear her because she

would be a politically formidable opponent there. They don't they're not fearing Kamala Harris or not fearing Kamala Harris because of skin color. They think she's terrible. She's a terrible politician. And Nikki Haley is reminding people you're going to get that nincompoop in there if Joe Biden doesn't make it to the end of his term or if he gets reelected and doesn't make it to the end of the second term. She she's saying you're going to get a doofus elected president. If we had this conversation 35 years ago, Republicans were very fond of Barbara Jordan. She was kind of the voice of sanity on the border, that Democratic congressman. She had beautiful diction, enormous vocabulary, very capable. Everybody respected her,

not because of her race, but because she was intellectually a giant. And the same thing, to a lesser degree, was Shirley Chisholm when she ran for president. She had a different take on the Vietnam War. Everybody thought, wow, this is really good. We have these black women that are more articulate and they're sharper than a lot of white males. So that was decades ago. So this is all just nonsense.

And I think a lot of this, when you have all of these elite left-wing black hosts that say this, I think a lot of it's projection that they themselves have real problems with race, that they do judge people by their superficial appearance, and they believe that your skin color is essential, not incidental to who you are. And I think that explains a lot of it. Other than that, and careerism, because the longer you scream racism, the more you inflate this leaking balloon of diversity, equity, inclusion. We're getting to a point, just to get off topic, I think everybody's pretty much had it with diversity, equity, inclusion, czars, and what they've been doing, and the war on meritocracy. I think there's a lot of paranoia in the elite, so-called marginalized community

that have been beneficiaries of this. You speak about the Democrats and sort of projecting their own racism on the other party. We skipped past what Joe Biden tried to do in that incoherent answer at the top, where he said, speaking about the Jacksonville shooting, right, where you've got this 22 year old crazed young man who apparently had racist manifestos, one or more, back at home, but was said to have severe mental health issues and had been locked up for his mental health issues at least once in the past five, six years. He says about this young man's act, we have to act against this hate-fueled violence, okay, and this all that's happening. Then he goes into the pivot about what happened five years ago where he claims five young blacks were killed. Not true. One black person, one white person. And it was at a gun shop. No, that's not true either. Oh, is it was a store doing kids toys? That's also wrong. And then he goes on to say there's a whole group of extreme people trying

to erase history and then says, I never thought I'd be president talking about book bans. He launches into an attack on Ron DeSantis. Now, this is one thing for the morons on Twitter to try to blame the shooting by this crazed lunatic at 22 who then took his own life on DeSantis. That's Twitter for you. But this is the president of the United States trying clearly to tie what happened there, that racist and madman violence to Ron DeSantis, despite the fact that there is zero proof that this kid had read a single thing that Ron DeSantis had ever said in any news article, etc. It's quite a leap. It's irresponsible, and there he goes again. Yeah, I mean, the whole book banning thing is very interesting because what Ron DeSantis was trying to do, along with Glenn Youngkin and others in Virginia, was just simply not have a pornographic, graphic novel type of literature that portrays transgender or gay sex for minors have that accessible.

And then not teach critical race theory, which says that all things can be explained by racial bias. And the people who are trying to ban books, that was the irony again. I mean, nobody on the right said let's ban To Kill a Mockingbird. There's a lot of school districts that ban that. They ban the irony again. I mean, nobody on the right said, let's ban To Kill a Mockingbird. There's a lot of school districts that ban that. They ban Tom Sawyer. They ban a lot of Mark Twain's work because of the N-word, which is not used pejoratively, but just part of the dialogue of the time. So again, it's that projection. And Joe Biden, you know, I don't understand, Megan. I understand it, but it's so baffling that here we have Joe Biden, you know, I don't understand, Megan. I understand it, but it's so baffling that here we have Joe Biden, who made a career as a senator, pretty much demagoguing race when he said it was a jungle and against busing.

That was fine, but he really demagogued it. And then he had the donut comment, then put you all back in chains where he addressed a group of black professionals as if they were helpless and they needed him to keep them out of slavery. And then he said, you ain't black. And then he said about black Barack Obama, he's the first clean, articulate black candidate for presidency, which actually wasn't true. Shirley Chisholm ran. It was very impressive. And he just goes at it again and again. He's called, and during his presidency, he's called two aides, one guy in Louisiana, another one. I have a boy down here and we've got a good boy here. So if there's anybody who's used racist or insensitive language, it's Joe Biden. And you can cite chapter and verse,

but again- We actually have some of that, Victor. We have a montage of some of the Joe Biden examples, which he gets a complete pass on as he sits there attempting to lecture us about book bans and how the curriculum needs to be in Florida. Here is a bit of that in Southport. It's awful hard as well to get Latinx vaccinated as well. Why? They're worried that they'll be vaccinated and deported. You have a problem figuring out whether you're for me or Trump and you ain't black. Unlike the African-American community with notable exceptions,

the Latino community is an incredibly diverse community. Poor kids are just as bright and just as talented as white kids. You cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent. I mean, you got the first sort of mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean. Oh, my God. I mean, just to hear it that way, right out of the horse's mouth. It's stunning. The examples, we could go on. That was not all of them, as you pointed out in your preamble.

Gets a complete pass. And now he has the nerve to try to sit there and lecture us. I know. He's really upset about the DEI curriculum down in Florida. I'm sure. Yeah, I mean, it's crazy. I was going to a car lot, look at cars the other night, pretty middle class person was the salesman.

One of them said to me just out of the blue, he didn't know who I was or anything, didn't know me. I was a stranger. And he just said, can I ask you a question? And I said, yeah. He said, you teach? I said, yeah. And he said, did we impeach a president of the United States for threatening to delay

something and investigate the Bidens? But we didn't impeach Biden. So did we impeach the wrong guy for the same crimes that Biden has committed? I said, that's brilliant. I said, that is absolutely brilliant. Joe Biden didn't threaten to delay. He threatened to cancel unless they fired Victor Shokin. And he changed US foreign policy against the directives of a State Department memo for his own, I think, lucre. And then he went after his likely,

or at least the leading opponent in the next election. That's exactly what we impeached Donald Trump for. And I don't think Trump was guilty of either charge, but Biden surely would be if we would apply the same standard. That's exactly right. And this whole thing that's happening, yes, with Hunter, but also with Joe and their overseas business dealings is getting more and more interesting. And you're exactly right. So John Solomon's been doing great reporting on what's happening with Hunter and Joe overseas and the firing of that Ukrainian prosecutor. The allegation being that and, you know, we've heard Joe Biden on camera bragging

that he's the one who got Victor Shokin, the Ukrainian prosecutor, fired. Son of a bitch, they did it right. They did it. He threatened to withhold a billion dollars in aid unless they fired him and they fired him. Son of a bitch, They did. Well, his defense to that, because his critics say you did that because Hunter was on the board of Burisma. Shoken was investigating Burisma. Burisma went to Hunter to say, help us out, get the old man off our back, get the old man to get this prosecutor off our back. And that in December of 15, there was a phone call exactly about that, according to Devin Archer. But even prior to that, it seems clear that the Bidens knew Burisma would like Shokin and the Ukrainian corruption sniffing around them to go away. Well, all along,

it's been like, well, you know, the Europeans wanted Shokin gone. They didn't think he was doing a good enough job of investigating corruption. And, you know, the Europeans wanted Shokin gone. They didn't think he was doing a good enough job of investigating corruption. And, you know, our State Department wanted it, too. Well, that's actually not true. Now we see this new information that the State Department was actually advocating that it was actually saying that they were doing a good job, that Shokin was doing a good job. Shokin was doing a good job over there in Ukraine as early as September, like the summer leading up to the guys firing by Joe Biden, which is why you just said Joe Biden did it against the recommendations and desires of his own State Department at the time. And while all this goes down, Victor Shokin, the fired prosecutor, sits down with Brian Kilmeade. This is a great interview at Fox News. This is via translator. You can hear personal conviction is that yes, this was the case. They were being bribed. The fact that Joe Biden gave away $1 billion in US money in exchange for my dismissal, my firing, isn't that alone a case of corruption?

So what do we have to make of corruption? department had seen that he was corrupt and Joe was just carrying out a government directive. I think the paranoia though was, we have high crimes and misdemeanors spelled out in the constitution, but we only have really two specificities and one is bribery and one is treason. And when you look at a classical definition of treason, it is warping your national interest for your personal benefit, whether it are the benefit of a foreign power. And if he's impeached and they can prove that, of all people, Joe Biden went against the national interest of the United States as reified by a State Department official policy for his own benefit or the benefit of Hunter or the protection of his family, which was against the interest of the United States, and bribery

would be part of that, then you have the two things outlined in the Constitution he violated. And I think that's one reason why they got together with the Europeans and created this false narrative that this poor guy was utterly corrupt. And Joe Biden was just kind of formalizing what was official US policy. And that lie, nobody that had any empirical sense believed, but we were always shot. I think I wrote that four years ago, along with a lot of other people. And you would get violently attacked. Oh, you don't, you're not up on it. Victor Shokin was a crook. You don't know the Europeans wanted him gone. And that was all a lie. So just to go through some of John Solomon's reporting at Just the News, and I'm trying to get the timeline correct. He says in June of 2015, there was a letter from

Victoria Nuland, who was the state's lead, State Department's lead on Ukraine. She sent a letter to Victor Shokin, this prosecutor, on behalf of then Secretary of State John Kerry, congratulating Victor Shokin, suggesting they were impressed with the job he was doing on corruption reform. That's June of 2015. Then September of 2015, the Interagency Policy Committee, which is a federal task force advising the White House on Ukraine, affirmed that Shokin's reform effort, this prosecutor, was advancing enough to warrant of 2015 and a task force made up of state treasury and justice, uh, had decided Ukraine and Shokin had made enough progress on anti-corruption reforms for Ukraine to receive a new $1 billion U.S. loan guarantee. Things are going swimmingly. That's between June and October, 2015.

You're doing a great job on all the anti-corruption. Good for you. Keep going. And within one month, this is Solomon reporting about a month later, Joe Biden and his top advisers did an about face, a sudden about face on Shokin, contradictory to what the career staff had been recommending. And within a few months, demanded that he be fired. Now, they have not uncovered specific evidence that Hunter Biden specifically asked his father to take that action. They don't, of course, have a tape recording of Hunter saying, Dad, get this guy off of our backs. I'm on the board of this company. We can't have him breathing down our necks like this. But we do know, again, thanks to Devin Archer, that they did that there was a conversation in December 2015, just days before Vice President Joe Biden traveled to Ukraine to ask the Obama administration to help get Shokin fired. Then Joe Biden went to Ukraine, made his threat.

And by I think it was March or June of the following year, 16, he was on camera bragging about getting Shokin fired. The plot thickens. It's getting very uncomfortable. And they are like a hair away from actually having the smoking gun on this, Victor. Yeah, they were. And I think if you look at the political landscape at that time, Hillary Clinton had shoved Biden to the side and she was going to be the nominee. And from all practical considerations, she was going to, you know, have win on the landslide over Donald Trump. And Joe Biden was thinking, I don't have a career to protect anymore, but I do have influence right now as vice president. And I better maximize it while I have my tenure because, but he wasn't thinking, I have to be

very careful because I'm going to announce that I'm going to be a candidate for the presidency. And this stuff could come back to haunt me. So I think he was getting very reckless at this time. He was kind of bitter that Hillary was acclaimed as the nominee before he had even had a chance to consider it. People were already at that time saying he was too old or he had cognitive challenges. So I think he was really taking a lot of risk and being pretty explicit. And I think that's going to come back to haunt him. I don't know what we do with all this. So Megan, when we've talked about the cognitive problems

of Joe Biden in a historical sense, and then you look at this massive, this is the most corrupt presidential family in history. And when you look at the actual record of what he's done to the United States on the economy, and as I said, the border on crime, on energy, Afghanistan pullout, saying that he wouldn't react to Ukraine if it was a minor offensive, or he wanted to get Zelensky out the first week, or if you're going to hack US targets, would Putin please put some off limits? You put all that together, it is an utter catastrophe. And yet there's no reaction from the media.

There's no reaction from the Democratic Party. There's just Trump, Trump, Trump. And I've never seen anything like it. I really haven't seen such damage done to the country without any pushback. If there's an actual impeachment against Joe Biden, they'll have no choice but to cover it. And honestly, given the parallels between the impeachment number one of Trump and what we're seeing here, the impeachment number one of Trump told us that it is an impeachable offense for a U.S. president to condition assistance to Ukraine on his belief that they need to further investigate corruption,

which might in the Trump case have a political benefit to him. What the Biden story is, is that he allegedly conditioned assistance to Ukraine on them getting rid of a prosecutor and that getting rid of that prosecutor would have provided a personal benefit to the Bidens. I mean, yes, it's worse than what Trump is accused of. Much, much worse, because even then, when you go back and look at the transcript of that call, Trump threatened to delay it. Biden said he was going to cancel it outright and they weren't going to get anything. And then when you look at the reality, Trump greenlighted the offensive weapons in terms of javelins that were really important the first week of that war that Biden and Obama had not approved. And so if it hadn't been for

Trump, they wouldn't have had any javelins at the siege of Kiev. And so it's a lot worse what Biden did. They can't avoid it. If an impeachment. This is, of course, for acts he allegedly took as vice president, not as president. There's a question about whether you can impeach somebody. I mean, I don't think there's nothing specifically saying the bad acts or the high crimes and misdemeanors must be done while the sitting president, while an elected official in this particular role. I'm going to have to go back and look at it. But that is a twist that it happened while he was the sitting president. But you got to remember, they've destroyed, as you pointed out, they've destroyed all precedents because when they impeached Donald Trump, they broke with

custom and tradition of the Bill Clinton sense and the possible impeachment of Richard Nixon in the sense that they didn't have any special counsel specifically to go after. They just said, we're not going to investigate them. They didn't bring in witnesses. They didn't have a hearing. They took that thing in December and they just rushed it right through. And the idea was, well, we didn't work with Mueller, so we're going to work now and we're not going to have a special counsel. We're not going to have cross-examination of witnesses. We're not going to invest. We're just going to impeach him. The second thing they did with the second impeachment, they said, we don't really care that there's no legal precedent. We don't

know what the law is, but we're going to try him after he's impeached as a private citizen, even though he's out of office in the Senate. And it's what they always do. They create these new precedents with this arrogance and yubas that's never going to come back and bite them. And it does. And so whether it's getting rid of the Senate filibuster and then whining about it, or the blue wall is so important and we thank God for the electoral college, now it's a racist hangover from the Jim Crow era. Whatever they find useful, then they institutionalize it. And then when other people say, OK, you set the precedent, we're going to use it. Then they, like teenagers, they start weeping.

And they've really destroyed the idea that impeachment was supposed to be pretty rare and not really directed. If you read the fellows papers at a first term president, the moment he loses the majority in the House. And that's what we've done now. I think we're going to institutionalize that. If you're a president and you're controversial and you lose your majority or you don't have it your first term, you're probably going to be impeached. Yeah, you better watch it. And here, you know, the timeline that's being laid out is very damning.

I mean, we'll hear what he has to say about it at some point, I imagine. But, you know, we've already gone through how the summer of 2015, they're doing a great job over there. The Ukrainian prosecutor's office is investigating corruption just fine. As recently as September, October, he's doing just fine. Shokin. Yeah, good. Good on him. You know, from Victoria Nuland and others at state. He's going after it. And then you've got these details that then November 15 is when it seemed to change. A Ukrainian a Ukraine desk officer at the State Department forwards Joe Biden's talking points for meetings with his upcoming meetings with Ukrainian leaders. Suddenly they see a new condition to fire. Victor Shokin has been added to the requirements. This surprised the State Department. They had not seen that. Joe Biden goes to Ukraine in December of 15 and his talking points memo includes a requirement that Shokin must be fired. I refer you back to December 15 as when Devin Archer says Burisma executives and Hunter called D.C. to try to get Shokin off the back of Burisma.

So now by December, his Talking Points memo, to the surprise of the State Department, has a condition that they have to fire Shokin. And even by January of 16, the White House seniors were not in the loop on Joe Biden's plan. Again, citing John Solomon's reporting and just the news, January 2016, Obama White House circulates a document on the loan guarantee to Ukraine that's identical to a previous conditions memo, and it makes no demand for Shokin's removal. They weren't pushing for it. Obama wasn't pushing for it. His senior executives and officials weren't. Joe Biden was pushing for it. And then he did it. And it was March 29th, 2016, that Shokin was fired. Two years later, Joe Biden's on camera saying this.

I said, I'm telling you, you're not getting a billion dollars. I said, you're not getting a billion. I'm going to be leaving here. I think it was what, six hours. I look, I said, I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor's not fired, you're not getting the money. Oh, son of a bitch. Got fired. Yeah, we're really lucky that Joe Biden has a sense of pseudo machismo because he's very insecure. So he always confesses to his crimes. It's kind of that comment that he's the big he-man and he went over and he did this and he was son of a bitch and all that stuff. You remember he said, I think on two occasions, he said he was going to take Trump behind the gym and beat him up. And then there was the corn pop saga about he got some chains sawed off and he was going to meet them. And then there was the story that somebody had insulted his

sister. So he went to a lunch counter and slammed the guy's head on the thing. It's that whole narrative that he's Joe Biden from Scranton, tough guy. And this time it really did him in because it's in his own words, because he can't refrain from magnifying or exaggerating his his sense of self. And it really hurt him. Peter Schweitzer, I think, might have been the first person to really tell us about that clip when he was really on that story very early. Well, I was shocked when I saw you've got the news sort of closing on Hunter Biden, on Joe Biden, the corruption scandal. I mean, you can just see it's it's getting tighter and tighter and it's getting more and more uncomfortable for them. Meanwhile, Hunter Biden continues to behave like he's some sort of a mob boss. He's reportedly out there in Malibu at some gazillion dollar mansion. Where's he getting the money from? Hunter Biden, as far as I know, hasn't really been gainfully employed in a decade other than these monies.

It was one of the subjects that was raised at the White House press briefing as Karine Jean-Pierre is finally back. Peter Doocy got into it on that and a couple of other subjects. But watch her trying to handle the Hunter Biden inquiries. The Secret Service is paying $16,000 a month now to stage near Hunter Biden in Malibu. Who's paying for that? That's a question for the Secret Service. Okay. Hunter Biden is reportedly selling art to pay for his $15,800 a month rent in Malibu. How can you guarantee that people are not going to be buying this art to gain favor with the president? That is a question for Hunter Biden and his representatives.

I know, I hear, I hear, I hear your question. We know that one of the art buyers got a job from the Biden administration. Can you guarantee that there is no quid pro quo? I hear your question. I'm not going to get involved in this. But we know that from a Hunter Biden associate now that he sold the appearance of access to then Vice President Biden. Are you confident that he has stopped doing that? That is a question for Hunter Biden. If somebody is selling the appearance of access to the White House, that is a question for the White House. No, that is, that is your, um, your, I don't know, how you're perceiving that.

Okay. Everything for Hunter has nothing to do with Joe. Yeah. I mean, what Corinne Jean-Pierre is saying to us is that, how do you know that Hunter's not Picasso or Van Gogh and he has all this talent? How do you know that these people are not so impressed that they're willing to pay half a million dollars for this beautiful art?

And how do you know that it's just incidental, if at all, that they talked or had access to the White House? You're making that up, Peter. That's perfectly rational. He's got great talent. He's on the market. He's beating out all these professional artists. And everybody rents

fifteen thousand dollar a month places at Malibu just like everybody like is a senator and has only been in private life four years out of his entire life and Joe Biden he's got a big rental in Georgia I think the Virginia is over fifteen thousand a month himself he's got a beach house and he's got a Wilmington mansion three of them and if we need some forensic tax accountants to just look at the amount of money that was spent or would have likely been spent, because it's probably not very hard to, there's not a lot of paper trail, then see where the income that he reported justified that. Where did the money come from? And don't tell me that people want the art.

I mean, Abby, my assistant, her daughter Lillian started kindergarten today. Lillian, I put her art up against Hunter Biden any day, Abs. Yes, am I right? Yes. Yes. Nobody's offering Lillian half a million dollars for her art. He only had one talent, and that's that he could paint with his mouth. That was all he could do.

And that was even a cruel joke given his cocaine habit. I'm going to go back on the YouTube show and lay in Hunter Biden's art on one half and Lillian's art on the other half. And the audience, that'd be a great idea. They can make up their own minds. All right. And they can buy,

you can buy it for 500,000. If you'd like. All right. Stand by. Victor Davis Hanson stays with us for the full next hour. And remember, you can find Megan Kelly show live on Sirius XM triumph channel one 11, every weekday at noon East and the full video show and clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly. So, Victor, I didn't get your take. I've heard you

say it on your show, but I didn't get your take yet today with us on the GOP presidential debate. We talked about the possibility of a Bernie Sanders throwing his hat in on the Dem side, maybe Gavin Newsom if Joe Biden withdraws more and more. I'm starting to hear the name Glenn Youngkin on the Republican side as a possible white knight to come in and save the party. He's the guy who managed to get elected in what is now a blue Virginia. The suburban moms loved him. Big parental rights and education guy who somehow manages to bridge the divide between the hardcore MAGA and the suburban soccer moms. So what do you make of that possibility? And what did you think? Is it necessary based on what you saw with respect to this debate and then Trump's separate?

Yeah, I think it all hinges on the perception of Ron DeSantis. He's still the most viable alternative for those who want an alternative Donald Trump. And I think in the first debate. He did pretty well, actually, when you actually look at the transcript and what he said, I think that there was a lot of criticisms when he hesitated and looked sideways. And I don't know what the question really was. It was whether do you think Donald Trump, if convicted, should be the nominee? And I don't know whether all of them looked confused. They thought, well, we're all here because we said we were going to endorse the nominees. So what's the question?

Do we get an out if he's, I don't know. It wasn't really, the moderation wasn't good in that aspect. But I think he did a workmanlike and he's still very viable. But there's no doubt about it that the donor class feels that Glenn Youngkin is a happy warrior in the Reagan-esque tradition. He smiles, He's funny. And yet he's not sort of stereotyped in the Bob Dole, Mitt Romney, John McCain, Bush, Rhino mold, if I could use that term. It's kind of unfair. But in the sense that he's evangelical and he's a cultural conservative. So they're anxious to put their money on somebody like that,

but they don't know what Juan DeSantis is going to do. And it looks like he's incrementally getting a little bit stronger, but at some point I think his team probably feels that he's got to accelerate the performance and up it a little bit. As far as the other, I was really shocked. I don't know if you were, but I always thought that Mike Pence was maybe, you know, a very conservative, traditional guy, very polite. But I think that he had been advised, and maybe it was good advice

because he got the most airtime, but he came across as really abrupt, interrupting. He was the only person that had to be advised by the moderators to tone it down and let other people speak. He kept fixating on himself, January 6th, what I did, what I did. And so I wasn't impressed with him. I wasn't impressed with Chris Christie. Everybody knew, my only surprise about Chris Christie,

I thought he'd go after DeSantis more. And he didn't. I think for a variety of reasons, they feel that Raswami is a better target right now, and that if they eliminate him, maybe they can consolidate a little bit around DeSantis. And then if DeSantis were to get the nomination, some of these candidates who were soft on him, I think think might feel that they were up for appointments. That's just speculation. But Raswami, I know that he's the heartthrob of the younger generation, but some of the stuff he said that everybody here has bought off. And I've always been tough on China. That's not true. He had some investments in China. He's very well spoken. He's a rhetorician. He's got a wonderful presentation. But I don't think by his own words, I think he said on one occasion that you shouldn't vote for someone without experience. He was probably right about that. I don't know why Asa Hutchinson is in there. I don't know why Bergen is, it just clutters up

the field. Their problem is they need to get down each debate. They need to start eliminating one or two candidates so we can really see in a one-to-one head-off between candidates that there isn't an alternative to Trump. The only thing that I think is important, I don't see, I can see why Donald Trump stayed out of this. It made sense, but there is some polling that suggests, I thinkate silver has some that he lost a little bit of support because i don't know what the alternative venue maybe you do megan but i don't think you can keep giving tucker like interviews 10 or 12 times at the night of the debate maybe you can substitute a rally or another interviewer but at some point you've got to get

back in the arena and he's a very good debater. So I'm not sure that that has a very long shelf life staying away. And then when he does get back, if he chooses to, he's going to have to endorse the nominee. I mean, that's going to really hurt him if he says, well, I'm going to go back, but I'm not going to endorse the nominee. But I was very angry in 2016 that nobody endorsed me on the stage when I won the nomination after we had all pledged to endorse the winner. So there's a couple of speed bumps they need to address. What is he going to do if he's not going to debate? And if he does debate, is he going to endorse the potential nominee or the actual nominee? But otherwise, I thought Nikki Haley, whose politics I think are a little

bit 1990s, did very well. She was very well spoken. She was fiery. She was tough. She battled it out. I don't agree with her on some things on foreign policy, but I thought otherwise she was pretty impressive. So she did very well. And I thought DeSantis did as well as he needed to do. I think he helped himself somewhat, but if he keeps doing that, he's going to help himself somewhat, somewhat, somewhat, but at some point he needs to help himself a lot. And so that's pretty much my take. That's right. You can't have a single, a single, at some point you got to score the run. You do. You got to hit a home run. You really do. In his position in particular. I do

think that if Trump's numbers begin to fall after the next debate, I think is September 27th with Fox Business. Then there's a third in, I think it's Alabama in October. If his numbers fall in any meaningful way after those debates, he'll get in. He'll get back into the debates. He's not dumb. I don't think he feels the need right now. But and plus, he's dealing with all these criminal things. So it's like he's got he's got stuff to focus on. I just we'll see. I do want to show this. This has been making the rounds online. And if you're not super online, good for you. You stay what you do. Keep doing what you're doing. But this was one benefit of being super online. And that is a young Vivek Ramaswamy, who I believe he must have been. I think it's 18. They said it's 20 years ago. He's 38. At some sort of town hall questioning then presidential candidate Al Sharpton about why he deserves Vivek's or anybody else's vote. Look and listen to this. Of all the Democratic candidates out there, why should I vote for the one with the least political experience? Well, years old, and I've been involved in social policy for the last 30 years.

So don't confuse people that have a job with political experience. Well, there you go. So that's that's him expressing doubts about why one should vote for for somebody with the least political experience. Of course, Vivek sees it differently now. Perot or it's Donald Trump, they've carved out a pretty big presence in whatever particular field they were that transcended business or union organizing or something like that. But in the case of, or if they've been a candidate without political experience, they have something going for them. Ralph Nader, for example. But in the case of Ross Whammy, I never had heard of him until he had started this campaign. And I have a deep suspicion, perhaps it's presidential, about the whole Silicon Valley nexus, the finance, the banking, the tech, and these young people that make enormous amounts of money.

He's probably worth a half a billion dollars, mostly, but not always exclusively overseas with Chinese connections. So that makes it a little bit hard for me to see him as an experienced politico that is master of all the issues. And he's going to take on China, and he's going to take on Silicon Valley, the type of things like Mark Zuckerberg putting $419 million into the 2020 campaign. But he sounds great and he's combative and he livens things up. And it's just a question of whether that's a distraction because I don't think he or Christie are going to get the nomination. And when they battle it out between each other, it just sort of sucks all the oxygen out. It's fireworks. And Tim Scott, he didn't have the ability or the desire to break in to really help himself. So if

you're going to look at somebody from South Carolina, Nikki Haley was more expert. I think Tim Scott's problem is that he has a very impressive inspirational story, but he has to translate his personal successes over endemic racism in the South of that generation into particular political positions that only he can advance. And he hasn't done that yet. And he wasn't a stalwart in the Senate. He hasn't been the Senate that long. He was asleep at the debate. It was like, the reason Mike Pence got the most airtime is because he kept injecting himself into the discussions, which could could border on annoying, but did get him the microphone. And, you know, there's there's something to be learned from that if you're Tim Scott, who people just completely forgot about, including yours truly.

Let me turn the page because I want to get back to this one particular thing on Joe Biden. Here's the reason why. Today, there's an excerpt in Politico of a book that's about to come out from a former Biden aide called The Last Politician. It's called The Last Politician, Inside Joe Biden's White House and the Struggle for America's Future. Sorry, by the Atlantic staff writer, Franklin Foer. And there's a bit of a, you know, write up on what to expect an excerpt from these books. Yeah. And so the excerpt is in The Atlantic, but Politico is reporting that Biden aides have been scrambling to secure a copy. So if you want to read the excerpt, go to The Atlantic. In any event, it's all about the excerpt, the Afghanistan withdrawal, the disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal. And they write things like this, Victor, for a man vaunted for his empathy, Biden could be detached,

even icy when confronted with the prospect of human suffering. I think we've seen plenty of that. Yeah, I don't understand what he means, a man known for his empathy. I can't think of anything in his career that was empathetic. It's always been. It was on Saturday, the two-year mark. And this says, this points out that during the withdrawal, which was chaotic and so poorly managed, that Trump's ambassador to Afghanistan, John Bass, got a call begging him to go back to Afghanistan to take over the lead of the evacuation and to do it immediately because the current ambassador under Joe Biden, someone named Ross Wilson, was, quote, shattered by the experience of the past week and was not able to function at the level that was necessary to complete the job on his own. They go on to talk about how when the deputy secretary of state went to check in with members of a task force working on the evacuation, she found grizzled

diplomats in tears. These State Department employees who had been dealing with some of these Afghan translators and so on over many, many years felt shame and anger that came with the inability to help them. They couldn't deal with the trauma. They needed therapy dogs that might ease the staff's pain. All of this because of Joe Biden's orders and the way that this was handled. And yet, as you pointed out in a great piece dated August 21st at American Greatness, as you pointed out, here's Joe Biden talking about his history, our history, and how it's completely unblemished when it comes to our accomplishments. Listen.

Name me a single objective we've ever set out to accomplish that we've failed on. Name me one in all of our history, not one. Wow. Yeah, I can't think of one thing Afghanistan, the border, his handling early on in the Ukraine war, prime, as I said, energy, that he had any success. If he means name one thing we didn't fulfill our objective, I don't think he really meant that,

meaning did you give me a chance to screw things up? Yes, he did have a chance. So he screwed up, the energy was draining the strategic petroleum reserve right before the election. He hasn't refilled it, et cetera, et cetera. So he's been a disaster. And that thing about Afghanistan, I thought it was, it ranked with the 1975 evacuation, the Saigon embassy, when you saw those helicopters and they landed out on aircraft carriers and they were pushing planes, you know, brand new fighter jets off into the ocean to get room for these refugees and the boat people. I'm not sure that this was this is the worst thing since Pearl Harbor, if you think about it. Here we were with variously reported $30 to $50 billion of equipment, weapons, munitions, guns, support. And we just left it there at a time when we don't have a lot of stocks anyway, because we're draining them for everything from shells to javelins for Ukraine.

And that stuff is not inert. It's ending up in the international terrorist market. We know that the Taliban is trying to fob it off or sell it on the international market. And then we had not just these 13 people killed, then we lied about the retaliatory strike that killed innocent civilians. Mark Milley said it was a just justified or just attack. It wasn't. And then in addition to that, there was rumors that Joe Biden wanted to get them out in this timeframe because the 20th anniversary of 9-11 was coming up and maybe the 20th anniversary in October of being there. And he was going to claim that after 20 years of this slugfest, I got us out on the anniversary. And then in addition to that,

the weirdest thing about it was, you know, at least the British imperialists, when they stopped sute or some type of practice in the Raj about, you know, the widow has to get on the funeral pyre, and they stopped that, or they stopped slavery, or they tried to stop the caste system, they had the power to do that. But here we were at this moment of crisis, and we had a, I think it was $400 million we'd invested in a gender studies program over 20 years at the University of Kabul. And then we had the pride flag that day flying from the U.S. Embassy. There were George Floyd murals. So we were trying to force down the throat of a traditional Islamist society, this woke narrative, but we were weak. And so we ended up with the worst of both worlds, arrogance and weakness. And it was just, I can't think of anything that's

been more disastrous to the United States. And it had an absolute effect on the latest, the later February invasion the next year into Afghanistan. Putin would have never gone in there had we not embarrassed ourselves in Afghanistan. He was just convinced after the things that Joe Biden had said about Ukraine, you know, minor invasion, no response. And what we did, he thought, you know what, the United States, even if they wanted to, they couldn't. Look what they did in Afghanistan. We got out of Afghanistan. We understood that. But look how we got out. These people have humiliated themselves. They're just a paper tiger. And so he has, and Victor Shokin really, he also said that in a different way when he also in that interview, it said that Joe Biden being compromised in the 2014 invasion of Crimea and the Donbass had been very influential and no response whatsoever.

And that had empowered, he said, Putin later on to take additional risk. And of course, we remember the hot mic in Seoul where Barack Obama said if this was his last election and if Putin would give him space, then he would negotiate on missile defense. Of course, we forget that they both fulfilled the bargain. Putin then behaved until after Obama was elected in 2012. Then he went in 2014 and we did dismantle all of the missile defense initiatives in Poland and the Czech Republic, which would have been pretty handy now as a deterrent for Eastern Europe. It was a disaster. You mentioned the southern border, speaking of disasters, and there's been some updates on it, which it's getting interesting. This whole plan of busing the migrants north and west is getting

really interesting because, I mean, I think it's brilliant. DeSantis participated in it to some extent, but it's mostly been Greg Abbott, governor of Texas. And he's doing a great job. You know, these sanctuary cities up north and in California who say, oh, what do you mean? California is a sanctuary state. Now, Los Angeles has voted to make itself a sanctuary city, New York City, sanctuary city. And now they are reaping what they sow because no sooner did Los Angeles declare itself a sanctuary city than they had to come out. The L.A. mayor, Karen Bass, had to come out and say, well, you know, we're not we're not extending an invitation for people to come here because they're overwhelmed. They're overwhelmed with the number of people coming in from Texas in New York, just this past Sunday, there was a clash

outside of Gracie Mansion. That's where the mayor lives. Over the migrant situation in New York, where I am right now, more than 100 demonstrators here screaming, throwing punches at each other over these issues. And New York is overwhelmed. They've had about 100,000 migrants from the southern border flooding the five boroughs, forcing Mayor Adams, whose message, just like Karen Bass's of L.A., was very different before this happened. Now he has to come up with at least 200 emergency shelters to house these people. We don't have the room. And New York City is now threatening to sue schools who put up any sort of a roadblock to these illegal migrant children because they're flooding the schools. They don't speak English.

And so some of these districts who don't even have the desks, they don't have any place to put these kids. No, no ability to teach them. You're just supposed to suddenly speak Spanish, I guess, have decided to start asking parents for proof of residence, right? Proof of taxpayer status. And New York State is saying you're better now. I live in a community that has thousands of illegal aliens that have been bused here. And welcome to the club. I had to go to the local emergency room about two months ago. And when you have people who you have no background knowledge of them, you don't have no health records. This is from a country that's forcing people to wear masks and social

distance. And it's now talking about implementing that again with vaccinations. And they let 8 million people come in and they bus them to communities like mine. And then you go in the emergency room and what do you do with people who have no medical records? As I was talking to some of the staff, they have no medical records. They do not speak English. Some of them don't speak Spanish. They speak a mix of tech Baja dialect. And then your grandmother is in, you know, kidney dialysis. She has regular appointments.

Suddenly that swarm. If I walk on my farm or I talk to country people, they see people that they have no idea who they are. They're out shooting things. They're out parked in your orchard, injecting drugs or whatever. But the point is, if we let in 8 million people and just 1% of them were criminal, and I think there's more than that. You're talking about 80,000 people that have no background checks. And this was all fine and dandy for Joe Biden's world, you know, in his beach house or Hunter in Malibu or Nancy Pelosi in Napa Valley or Dianne Stein on Lake Tahoe shores, where Biden is now staying with Tom Steyer. But it was okay. It was fine for them.

But who cared about Bakersfield or Fresno or Modesto? That was just those people. And they had to deal with it. And they were racist if they objected. So finally, people got smart and said, you know, the whole key to the liberal project is that the architects are never subject to the consequences of their own politics or ideology.

And now we're going to make them subject to that. And once they feel what they're doing to other people, they squeal. And that's the only thing they understand. It's really kind of Neanderthal tactic, but they're Neanderthals. And that's what gets their attention. I mean, California is finding out the hard way the consequences of these bizarre policies, New York, too. But on the subject of California, not only are we seeing the influx of these illegal migrants and the second guessing about the sanctuary city status of places like L.A.

No sooner do they vote for it than they realize it's a mistake. But you've got the crime. You've got the soft on crime prosecutors in places like L.A. and Oakland and elsewhere. And now we're seeing the smash and grabs increase where they are in USA Today just a couple days ago. They're reporting on how flash mob robberies are all over Los Angeles right now. Twelve thirty in the afternoon last Thursday, nine mass suspects ransacked a fragrance counter at Macy's right in the middle of the day in the Sherman Oaks neighborhood. People are just standing by and watching this happen. This happens right after four other incidents at a Nordstrom just 12 miles away on August 12th.

You had 30 people entering Nordstrom at four o'clock again, middle of the day, stealing high-end handbags, clothing, and other easily resold items. Over $300,000 stolen. August 8th, at least 30 suspects flooded a Yves Saint Laurent store in Glendale, stealing clothing, other merchandise worth approximately $300,000 before fleeing on foot. And then another targeted a Macy's store in Arcadia. Perfumes were stolen. I mean, it's anarchy, Victor. and we're told that they have a need, but they don't. They're hired. They want the most high-priced items and they feel there's no deterrence. And if you were to arrest them, it would be some type of illiberal crime,

racism or something. And then what's even stranger about it, it affects everybody. When you go to a California drugstore now, it looks like a prison infirmary, Megan. You have this screen, like a metal grate. It used to be just antihistamines. That's everything from razor blades to toothbrushes. And then when you go to get a new car in California, they give you the price on the

sticker, but then they add $2,000 to $2,800. And that's for low jack or some type of thing that they've had to install on their cars in the car lot, because people are going into the car lot, stealing the catalytic converters, taking the car without consequences. So the dealers then put all of these anti-theft devices, and they pass it on to the consumer. You have no choice. You have to pay that fee. And so it affects everybody in California. And now where car insurance is going up, home insurance is going up, it really is rippling through and destroying the state. And what's the final irony is in San Francisco, particularly the smash and grab and the carjacking statistically, to the degree they'll release information, tends to be a lot overrepresented as black, young black males. And they represent the black community in California is about 3% of the population.

They probably represent 1% of the entire demographic. And they may be, at least FBI crime statistics suggest they may be responsible for 50% of the violent crime. I only mentioned that because we're also witnessing simultaneously in San Francisco, this reparations committee that is demanding from a state that was never a slave state, never had Jim Crow, $1 million plus from all California taxpayers facing almost a $45 billion deficit, it looks like. And yet there's no leadership among... I don't like the idea of a collective community that we're all Black or all white or Latino. But if you go down that path and you say we're all Black and we all need something, then you've taken by your own volition the reins of

leadership collectively. So then you should at least say, and if I'm going to represent this community, then I'm going to talk about the inordinate demographic that's committing violence against other communities and itself. But they have nothing. They don't say a word about that. And that's what's driving people really angry in California. And this is well aside from the idea that we have 13.3 income tax, highest in the nation, some of the highest sales taxes, our property assessments are so high. I think we're number six in property taxes, highest gas tax. And what do we get? 45th in school test scores, 48th in infrastructure. We're blowing up four dams on the Klamath River,

and we're going to lose clean hydroelectric power for 80,000 residents. Recreation, flood control, drought insurance, we're blowing them up because we feel indigenous people should try to reinduce salmon in a state that has no water, basically, storage for 40 million people. I don't think they could do a better job if somebody started out and said, I want to destroy California and I need to do it in five years. What would I do?

And what you would do is the last few years of Jerry Brown and the first years of the Gavin Newsom governorships. Yeah. Well, I've got to end on this. Speaking of anarchy and people being fed up. Finally, we're seeing some pushback both by the citizenry and by law enforcement to these environmental nutcases who continue to disrupt whether it's an art show or a beautiful museum spilling God knows what over beautiful art to stopping traffic. A couple of examples that just happened to happen within the same few days.

First, Burning Man out in Nevada. This group of environmentalists lined up along the road to get there. They had their signs. They had their bodies. They wouldn't let any cars get through. So 150 cars at least lined up. And the Nevada Rangers got there and said, it's a no. So they just no one got hurt.

Now the environmentalists are I'm shocked. Can't believe what I saw. This is horrifying. We're just trying to protect Mother Earth. But you know what? F.A. and F.O., as they say, the rangers got there and said, yeah, you got to move on. As these people are chanting, abolish capitalism. And guess what happened? The traffic picked right up. Then in Washington, D.C., similar situation where people are trying to go to work or come home from, get to their kids. And the furious commuters got stopped

by environmentalist activists and had a few things to say to them as they tried to stop them from going to their jobs. Listen to this. I want to walk. I want to walk. I want to go to work. We're on the top three.

I want to go to work. I want to go to work. I got kids to feed! I got kids to feed! I got kids to feed! I got kids to feed! I got kids to feed! I got kids to feed! I got kids to feed! I got kids to feed! I got kids to feed!

I got kids to feed! I got kids to feed! I got kids to feed! I got kids to feed! I got kids to feed! Yes. Tell him, sister. That's how we all feel. Most of us do work. And we don't sit in the middle of roads trying to cause chaos for the people who are productive.

Very wealthy, elite liberals warring on the middle class and marginalized communities. That's what it's all about. And those clips, all these wealthy, spoiled brat environmental protesters that don't have to work every day. And then finally, we get a revolt of working class people. And the left is always

on this side of the elite now. It's very ironic. Isn't it wonderful? I feel empowered. We ended on an empowered note. I do too. I think it's going to increase too. Good. Between the private citizens just getting up and saying, no, move along. We're the ones who pay for everything, unlike you losers.

Yeah, I'm going to try to write a sequel to that dying citizen, the alive citizen, the breathing citizen, because maybe they're coming back. Resuscitated. Do it. Victor Davis Hanson, always a pleasure. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me, Megan. And when we come back, Alexa and Carlos Penavega are back. Big hit with the audience last time, and I'm sure they will be again. Stand by. Joining us now, two names with which you may be very familiar alexa and carlos pennevega join me back on episode 357 in july of last year carlos is best known as a member of the band

big time rush and star of the nickelodeon hit series of the same name alexa has been an actress since the age of five and got her big break as the star of the Spy Kids films. Despite a life in Hollywood, they managed to keep faith at the center of their lives. And their new book is Love is the Point. Love is the Point. 100 days of God's love for you and how to share it with those around you. It's a 100 day challenge to help everyone. Welcome back to the show, Alexa and Carlos. Great to have you.

Hey, hey, hey. Thank you for having us back. Yeah, thank you. Oh, my pleasure. I love this idea. This time of year, you always get the 100 days to a fitter, skinnier you. This is something that actually is nurturing the whole you, reminding people not just of the importance of faith, but also connection in one's marriage with one's friends, with one's community, the values of forgiveness, all this stuff that you guys live every day. So what was your inspo for this? Um, well, I think for us, what we, what we're seeing in the world is how self-focused everyone is. Um, and while some of that is

important, obviously making sure that you're, you know, living the best that you can, but we're so self-focused and we we've stopped serving. And I feel like the point of all of us being on this earth is to work together, to communicate with each other, to be a community. So we just really wanted to show people that serving each other doesn't just mean like sending money to people when they're in need, but it's actually showing up for them and being there for them and not just for people, you know, but for complete strangers. So we just really wanted to challenge people and give them unique ways, biblical ways to serve each other. You well said, babe. Come on. This is why I love you because you're the opposite. Forgive me of Kim Kardashian. You're the opposite. We just did a story about her going with her glam team to the DMV because her picture had to be absolutely perfect and well lit. You're the opposite of that. People need to get back to service of others. It's not all about you, yourself, how you look, your vanity. Yeah. Yeah. Look, we all want to look good. Let's be real. It feels

good when you look good. However, I think when you're so self-focused, that's a lot of times why people fall into depression. We have a close friend, Andrew, which we talk about a lot in this book and in our last book. And he used to be really, really depressed. And one of the things that he said to us was when I stopped being self-focused and really focused on just serving other people, my life became purposeful. I actually had meaning. And it's because you're not looking in so much. You're just like, I'm just going to serve. I'm going to God just use me how you want.

You guys have been thinking about this, I'm sure, lately because you split your time right between Florida and Maui. And I mean, obviously, Maui has been suffering mightily over the past month. I mean, how has that affected you guys? Man, well, we actually live in Lahaina. Our house was thankfully spared. But we went like two or three days after the fire. I had just finished tour. And Alexa and I left the kids with a friend.

And we raced to race like everything out and see and it's wild because we always see these things happen on the news or on social media and we're on the outside of it right we're just watching it we're like wow this is crazy oh my gosh look at this you know twitter post whatever it is or x uh and um this time you know it really hit home to go there and all the places that we fell in love with Maui for you know that they're just gone and a lot of our friends lost their homes um a lot of their this was our community yeah you know we live in Lahaina this is and I think the craziest part is you know having our kids ask us about certain places and it just no longer being there. And, and again, seeing it in person,

it's horrific. I know, I know there are some people kind of covering it, but no one's even coming close to what's actually happening there. No, I mean, they're, they're talking about, you know, potentially hundreds of children. Yeah. Yeah. The answer is yeah. And they're keeping it hush hush. And it's so disappointing. Oh, my gosh. Can I ask you, I don't want you to get political, but I I do wonder what your reaction was to seeing the president's remarks when he was out there. I think it was the same as everybody's. It was disgusted, really beyond disappointed. Not shocking, but beyond disappointed um not shocking but beyond disappointed yeah i mean you have to have to remember like these people lahaina is a historic town so you have generations after generations

after generations of people who've lived there so some of our friends inherited this house from their dad's dad's dad's dad's dad so it's like you know like their heart their soul their history is in this town so to come and just brush it off like it's oh you know it's like another house fire you know it's like no man this this is their life it's like is like if your life just caught on fire and just went away so you guys are safe now right you're in florida now but of course now we're looking at another natural disaster hitting florida but it's on. No, it's nowhere near you. but all the more reason that if anything, we're just like, man, we just got to serve because community is so important. And to go back to Lahaina, watching the community who has literally been stripped of everything, still show up for one another, still serve each other to come from all different walks of life and really just be put in the same position and

just be like, you know what? I'm just going to show up however I can. Like it has been beautiful to watch. Absolutely heartbreaking. But in a way, like I wish more people could really see that firsthand because I think it would really change the way people live their lives. Yeah. I mean, it got to a place where they were like, we don't need more supplies right now. Like, please stop. I've never, I've never seen that in, in, in any type of

disaster like that, where it's like, please, we were good for the moment. Like take a break, but that's, that's how the people of Maui are just kind of all. Yeah. No more supplies, but they definitely are going to need help rebuilding and getting their lives back in order. And listen, just a little, a little plug for something that we got working, uh, you know, going right now. So Alexa and I have been trying to figure out how to help the people of maui so many people contacting us um and again it's not about us it's all about them so we set up a website uh it's called love is the point.org and we just we're literally going uh with people on the ground and they're verifying all of these families who have different gofundmes and venmos uh and we're you know putting their story and you

can literally just scroll. And it just keeps on going and going. So if you're curious, like what these families are going through, loveisthepoint.org, and you can literally help them directly with Venmo or GoFundMe. And then we also have a nonprofit on there

that is literally just going directly to all these people. So if you want to make a big contribution and want to tax benefits, you could totally do that. But literally our whole goal is how do we serve these people? You know, they lost everything. And, you know, one thing that I'm trying to get is, is cars for a lot of these people because they don't have a way to get around the island. So I'm like, man, how do we, how do we get some money so we can get them nothing fancy, but just, just so they can get

from one side of the island to the other, because hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of cars got burnt up and destroyed. You know, so you guys are about servicing others and helping others think about that. Obviously, we talked about the faith both last time and in the intro, I mentioned it. I will say, if God forbid something like this happened to any of us, the first place you'd go is your faith. I mean, that would be like to get you through it. The loss of a child. My God. You know, your home, all your possessions, the things you you love and that you've built around your family to make your house a home, all those things. And it did. Recently we looked it up and it was, I think, only 13 percent. Is that what it is? Only 13 percent of people are now attending religious services regularly or once a week.

God is being pushed out of the public sphere time and day after day after day. All the emphasis is on removing faith from people's lives. Right. Just at the time when they need it most. Right. Given what's happening in our politics and our in our world. Well, I just think how much easier is a world to control if they don't have faith? How much easier is it to mold people if they don't have anything that's giving them a solid foundation? And so I just feel like, of course, media and people are going to be pushing no more faith in schools or just taking faith wherever they can, taking it

out because people are just way more moldable without it. Gosh, it's so true. It's like when I sit in church on Sundays, I think about how they're giving me an assist on imprinting the moral code I want imprinted on my children, right? It's like, you're not alone. You got this other, you got an authority figure there at the front, behind the pulpit, reinforcing all the things ideally you've been saying at home. And that's helpful. It's helpful. Like, I wish I had a teacher who was doing that too. I guess if I went to Catholic school. Yeah. It's that constant reminder. You know, one thing that's really cool. And, you know, people always say that you can learn from kids and we have. Something

that we like to do is we just pray in front of them all the time. That way, they really understand, man, you can go to God for anything and for, you know, just for whatever reason. I love it because I'll walk into the room and I'll hear my kids just talking to God, whether they got a boo-boo or whether they're just asking him for, you know, something even kind of silly, but I just love that they feel that connection to be able to talk to him whenever they want. And, you know, when all this stuff was going on with the fires, I had a moment where I was just, you know, crying, sitting on the floor and crying in my sweet little Kingston. He's only four. He just came up and he goes, mommy, may I pray for you?

And he just started praying over me. And this is my four-year-old so it's really beautiful and you really get to live it out as a family and they teach you as much as you teach them and they're they are that constant reminder that god is right there i know but what about what's your advice carlos you know there are some guys out there right now who they have not found their alexa they feel lonely they don't have a family you know and they're they may be wondering how do they make this connection? Love is the point. How do they find this person, right? I'm thinking of a friend of mine who watches the show a lot, who I know is not married and might like to be, but feels alone a lot, feels lonely. How does that person factor in love is the point into his life?

All right. This is going to be terrible. Alexa's going to look at me and go, what? So I recently had a little binge of some really trashy, terrible TV on Netflix. It's called Too Hot to Handle. I don't know how I got turned on to it, but I was like, I'm going to watch this. And I was on tours. I was just kind of binging it. And it's all about these couples who are these, you know, single people who just crave that sexual, you know, sexual desire. Yeah. And they, it's kind of hoping to kind of show them that there's way more than sex. And I feel like when you are trying to court someone,

which I hope people are still courting people because it's beautiful. You really got to get to know them, like to know their heart not i mean this is amazing and you're beautiful and awesome but what i really really love about her is her heart and i and i think i think we we had so much time to just like like she played really hard to get so we had so much time of just like emotionally really connecting emotionally and it changes things for you. So just take the time. Take the time to actually like to like learn who this person is, you know, whether whether it's just having a conversation and asking stupid questions like, you know, have you ever changed your favorite color? Was it blue?

And now it's pink. Why is it pink now? You know, like find out those little quirky details. Like love is in the details. Oh, I love that. When we first met, the biggest thing I felt like for you was you just, you gave up control. You were like, you know what, God, I want you to use me. I no longer, again, like, I don't want it to be about me. I just want to serve. And then it was literally that week that we met at Bible study. And it was like that week that your entire life transformed. I love that. That love is in the details, babe. I literally was just saying the other day for the first time after 15 years of marriage, 17 years of my relationship with my husband,

I noticed, I like actually observed and, you know, took note of his morning routine. Guys, it is literally three things. He brushes his teeth, he puts on deodorant, and he splashes water on his hair. He doesn't have a brush. Nothing. That's it. The three steps. I'm sorry, Alexa, but this is clearly not a woman. This is a man. It took me 17 years to notice, but it is the, the love is in the details. It's true. I respect. Yeah. All right. So that reminds me of something I read, Alexa, you say, and the time we have left, I'll just go to the sex life question, where you were saying, and this is a very good point. And as the mother of three Catholic kids, I wanted to ask you, Christian, Catholic, same business.

You were making the point that we raise these kids with like, well, sex, you know, kind of the messaging can be it's bad. And then you get into a marriage and suddenly it's good. And you admitted that you wrestled with that in your own marriage. And I think that's a great admission. So what, how have you resolved that? And what's your advice for other parents who are trying to message to their kids on this? Um, there is this incredible podcast called heaven, heaven in your home. It's by Francie Winslow. And she went through the same struggles. And for me, it's understanding that marriage is holy and sex is holy. God made it for

us to enjoy and to love and to cherish. And our bodies are beautiful. And when I really understood that, I felt so much freedom. And that's something that I want to instill in my kids in time, obviously, when the age is appropriate for them to understand that this is a godly thing. It's not something to be ashamed of. It's hard because you want to say like, not yet, right? You're little. Once you grow up and you fall in love, and then you want to sort of say, and then get after it. But then that's inappropriate. Everyone feels uncomfortable.

Right, right, right. Right. In the right setting, it is absolutely everything it's supposed to be. And that's why I always tell people, I'm like, for friends who are in a relationship, but not yet married, they're like, we don't need to get married. You don't understand. Once you get married, you unlock something so special that you didn't even read that you were missing. Marriage is holy and you will enter into like this beautiful spiritual place once you do

get married. Yes. And that doesn't mean that every single act between you and the bedroom is necessarily holy, but I got to go. You guys are the best. I want to remind people the name of the book is love is the point and they need to support you. The messaging is awesome. What a 100 day program that we could all use. Lots of love you too. Thank you.

Thank you so much. I hope we do it again soon. Okay. And thanks to all of you for joining us today. Steven Rinella is going to be here tomorrow. Now he's got some great advice for raising outdoor kids in an indoor world and toughening your kids up in this crazy world that we're living in. I'm looking forward, I've never interviewed him, so I am looking forward to meeting him and continuing to broadcast

from Sirius XM headquarters. I'm here today. I'm here tomorrow getting ready for school, right? You guys know I had to come back from the beach because reality is coming. Thankfully, our kids don't start until the day after Labor Day. I know a lot of you have your kids back already, and that's rough. But you know how it is. Got to get the pencil cases going, and I'm sure you're all going through it as well. All right.

In the meantime, see you tomorrow. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.