The Megyn Kelly Show - Biden's Inflation Blame Game, and Elites' Empire of Lies, with Tyler Cowen and Victor Davis Hanson | Ep. 319

Episode Date: May 11, 2022

Megyn Kelly is joined by Tyler Cowen, author of "Talent: How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World," and Victor Davis Hanson, author of "The Dying Citizen," to talk about Biden's inflation speech yesterday, Biden's attempts to blame Putin and COVID for inflation, the massive effect of inflation on food, shelter and gas prices, the economic impact of relieving student loan debt, Biden's "ultra MAGA" focus, the success of Trump-backed 2022 candidates, the truth about rising crime in America, who is really driving the culture war, the "empire of lies" of America's elites, the hypocrisy of those elites, absurd disinformation focus of Hillary Clinton, the latest SCOTUS leaks, the best interviewing questions, how to find top talent, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest and provocative conversations. Hey, everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. President Biden trying out a new smear against the GOP to hide from another day of grim economic headlines. New inflation numbers for April showing showing tiny improvement over a disastrous March. We're still in terrible territory. But the headlines, of course, will be getting better. Things are getting solved because the numbers are still up way more than Wall Street was expecting. OK, it's just the numbers are not good. They're not good. Uh, gas prices hitting another new all time record high record high. The average price for a gallon

of gas. This is non-diesel is now $4 and 37 cents a gallon. It's so much worse. Aren't you so glad you don't get diesel. If you don't get diesel right now. And my heart goes out to those of you who do it's your only consolation when you go to the pump. And I understand that's not the position that a lot of Americans are in right now, but it's awful. It's all bad news up and down the gas tank. It's up $2 right now on the non-diesel gas, up $2 a gallon since President Biden took office. Later in the show, I'm going to be joined by Victor Davis Hanson about whether Biden's new attack line, calling everything ultra-MAGA, is going to be enough to hide the economic hardships that are hitting Americans. But we're going to start today with Tyler Cowen, who is considered one of the most influential economists of the last decade. He says the 2008

recession reflected a deeper truth that America is not as rich as we once thought. He's written several bestsellers, and his new book is titled Talent, How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World. He's also a distinguished senior fellow and professor of economics at George Mason PhD in economics from Harvard and on and on his credentials go. Welcome to the show, Tyler. How are you? Hello, Megan. I'm fine. I wish the economy were doing as well. Yeah, exactly. So when you listen to President Biden yesterday talking about, you know, where we are and, you know, inflation and what got us here, you would think that his policies had absolutely nothing to do with it. In fact, if anything, his policies are making things better for us. We'll get to some of that sound.

But what is your reaction to that claim? We did too much stimulus in the early months of the Biden administration. We spent basically $2 trillion that should not have spent, according to best estimates, that has raised inflation rates by about three percentage points. So if right now we're doing around 8%, we actually could have been at around 5%. Things are never perfect coming out of a pandemic, but they're much worse than they had to be. You know, he sort of laid out what he thinks caused it. And it's definitely not his policies, as I say. And here's how he explained what brought us here.

This is soundbite two. I want every American to know that I'm taking inflation very seriously and it's my top domestic priority. But first, I want us to be crystal clear about the problem. There are two leading causes of inflation we're seeing today. The first cause of inflation is a once in a century pandemic. These supply challenges have been further hampered by the onset of Delta and Omicron virus. This year, we have a second cause, a second cause, Mr. Putin's war in Ukraine. So the pandemic, including Omicron and Delta, and Putin, the pandemic and Putin, that's what got us to 8%.

I mean, you say that his own policies and his spending added three of at least three percentage points of that eight. What of the claim that the pandemic and Putin jacked up these numbers? Well, the Biden administration is still pushing policies that actually would make inflation somewhat higher. So they've kept on the tariffs on goods and services from China. That's been a mistake. There's finally talk of getting rid of them. And they want to forgive student loans on some basis. That's going to fuel spending in the economy. It's a transfer from poorer people to wealthier college educated people. It's a terrible policy. Even most democratic economists don't support it. So they say inflation is the number one priority. But when

you look at the actual actions, it's pleasing their own interest groups. And what about gas hikes? Because that's always been an issue that drives votes. People care about what's happening at the pump. And the numbers are just dreadful. As I said, you know, a record high yesterday. And he's blaming those two on Putin. Here's soundbite 11. Let me start. Let me start with the Putin price hike, high gas prices and energy prices. I led the world and other countries to join with us to coordinate the largest release of oil from our stockpiles of all the countries in history.

240 million barrels to boost global supply. U.S. oil and gas production is approaching record levels. Under the Republican plan, they'd be allowed to continue to sit on this land without producing while shipping record profits back to their investors. Republicans would offer plenty of blame, but not a single solution to actually bring down the energy prices. Because he's now saying, I'm going to press these oil producers to actually use all the leases and so on. Meanwhile, that at best will provide relief in years. That's not something you can just turn the spigot on overnight. And this is a reversal because he's really been threatening most

of these oil and gas producers that he wants to cut off their energy supply. He doesn't believe in it as a source. So, I mean, putting that piece of it to the side, because what he's saying is, I've basically released a million barrels of oil, but we consume 20 million a day. And that maybe shifted the gas price down by a few pennies in April. But we're still here we are May 11th and we're at record numbers. And it just feels like no one's leveling with us about why those numbers are as big as they are and when and what might make them come down. That's all bad news, but I actually have a much bigger worry, and that's the prices of food and shelter, which in the latest inflation report

show inflation rates much higher than what we had been expecting. And prices for shelter tend to be quite sticky. The good thing about gas prices is they can fall very quickly, just as they can go up very quickly. And the U.S. has enough fossil fuels. I feel within six months we'll more or less have solved that problem. But the actual longer-term burden facing voters, consumers, is paying for food, paying rent. That's not going to get better anytime soon. Why? Over the last year, the Federal Reserve increased M2, that's a measure of the money supply, by about 40%. The money supply fuels inflationary pressures. Our government spent like crazy. The message given to people was spend, spend, spend, stimulus like there's no tomorrow. Inflationary expectations

went up. There's been more money to spend. And we had 8.3% inflation in the report released this morning. Right down from 8.6, which is already dreadfully high. The Biden administration continues to change in its explanations of what brought us here. As you heard there today, he says it was the pandemic and it was Putin. But for months now, we've been watching the inflationary numbers tick up bit by bit. And even before they did, you had a lot of Republicans, I have to say, warning, it's going to go up. You cannot spend like this, like we did with all the stimulus spending during the pandemic. And then President Biden and his infrastructure plan with still more spending.

And then he wanted to spend another two trillion in addition to this, which got shut down, thanks to Joe Manchin, between one and two trillion. You cannot spend like this and not see it come back in the form of inflation. And I wanted to play some of his changing messages on inflation, his and his administration for you to get your finger on the pulse of it. Like what was any of it true when it was said in your view? Listen here. I really doubt that we're going to see an inflationary cycle. Overwhelming consensus is going to pop up a little bit and then go back down. One of the steps that we've taken as an administration is to provide a range of assistance to the American people.

As our economy has come roaring back, we've seen some price increases. When people go to the grocery store and a pound of meat is more expensive than it should be. We agree that's less related to supply chain issues. The inflation has everything to do with the supply chain. The first cause of inflation is a once in a century pandemic. This year, we have a second cause, a second cause, Mr. Putin's war in Ukraine. So that's quite the evolution, right? It's not going to happen.

The sky's not falling. Don't worry. And then some time spent blaming the GOP, right? And then blaming the supply chain and then blaming Putin. And now it's the pandemic and it's Putin, but it's definitely not a single policy that Joe Biden has put has passed. Do you believe when when the Republicans were saying we are heading for inflation, and it wasn't just Republicans, some more fair minded Democratic

economists were saying the same. Do you believe he knew he knew that was true, but he just didn't care because he wanted to get popular spending programs through? I have known some of the Biden people. I think the economists were fully sincere in what they said. I think the problem is a lot of them spent too much time on Twitter. And since 2008, there's been this incorrect view that the government can simply print as much money as it wants and nothing bad will happen. It's as if the laws of economics had been repealed and people started believing that. So the kinds of inflation we did in 2008, 2009, were very different than what the Trump and Biden administrations have done more recently. But people just thought it was all the same. You can't have inflation. There won't be a problem. They were fooled. I don't think they were lying to us. How did they stave it off back then? Because I remember I was on the news every night back then, and we saw this crazy spending. And that was, you know, during the height of the Tea Party, which was so angry in 2010 about

Obamacare, but they were very angry about spending to they were very angry and upset about spending and worried about spending. That's how the Tea Party was originally formed. And, and people would say, we're going to hit an inflationary wall, it's going to be a disaster, but it didn't really happen. And that's sort of what led Democrats in my layperson's view to start saying, yes, this is our new monetary theory, you can just spend, you can just spend, spend, spend, spend, spend, and it never comes back to haunt you. And the Tea Party is therefore dead. And now here we are. So what explains it? Three differences. First, we spent much more this time. Second, in 2009, we spent while the economy

was declining. This time around, we spent into a resurgent economy. But third, what we did in 2008, 2009 was pump a lot of money into the banking system and then pay banks interest to hold on to that money. So the money supply numbers went up a lot, but the money just sat there. So that wasn't inflationary. But when you send people money and tell them to spend it and send them more than you'd been sending them, you're going to get higher price inflation. And that's exactly what we see. So now we have the feds raising interest rates. So it's going to cost you a little bit more if you want to finance a home than it would have a couple months ago. And I've had people like Peter Schiff on the program saying, you know, they'd have to raise the interest rates huge, like it has to be basically over

the inflationary rate, the real inflationary rate, he says, which is probably double what they're telling us. If you look at that CPI index. Anyway, on the other side, I hear some more conservative economists saying, don't raise the interest rates. That's not the solution. I don't know exactly what they think the solution is. But if you were advising Joe Biden on how to get us out of this 8.3 inflation, what would you tell him to do? I think we have to raise inflation rates. I do worry this is creating maybe a 50% chance of a recession.

But the other thing I would tell them is you need to make your other policies consistent with a lower cost of living for Americans. And that's not what they're doing. They're pursuing a lot of other policies for political reasons that will raise the cost of living, such as discouraging fracking or keeping on tariffs from goods overseas. And the markets know they just don't quite really mean it the way they need to. Just today, the feds are having some auction on acreage for wind farms. It's like, okay, I mean, terrific. I guess we can get some more wind farms going. But we have a lot of natural energy supplies that the truth is he hasn't been devoted to exploiting. And in fact, he stated

during his presidential debates, he was committed to eliminating altogether fossil fuels, oil and gas. He doesn't like fracking, doesn't like shale, doesn't like natural gas. So, I mean, you say in the next six months, we can drive those gas prices down, but wouldn't that require a significant change in his policies? Well, here's another example. On average, it takes about seven years to get a wind farm approved in this country. That's insane. So there's talk, well, green energy is the number one priority. Well, I'm all for green energy. But then why are you letting it take seven years? You have regulations, environmental reviews, local homeowners who don't want development. That's another case where we actually need to

take our priorities seriously. What about the student loan issue? Because that's been resurrected. He hasn't abandoned it. The White House hasn't laid out a plan, but they say one may be coming soon. Originally, he was talking about releasing people. Forgiving is the lie. That's how they place it. They're going to forgive the debt. That doesn't just evaporate the debt. From $50,000 per person to 10, now it's down to 10,000 according to reports. And you have to be making less than $125,000 a year, which is a lot of money. You could be a doctor making $124,000 a year and you could still potentially get this money, quote, forgiven. So what do you make of it? Is

it a good policy? He argued yesterday that actually he believes it will help the economy. I don't think we should forgive a dime. So keep in mind, somewhat below 40% of Americans finish college, right? So those are the people who have higher incomes. If you want our government to do something to help people, on average, look at the people who didn't even go to college at all. It's well known that people who went to college vote Democratic at a higher rate. This is an effort to give them some kind of benefit to ensure their loyalty. This, I do view, is fairly cynical. It is simply one of the worst policies we have considered in the last 10 to 20 years. There is no good reason for doing this. The president thinks, I guess, more money in people's pockets is going to somehow help the economy. That's more inflation. It's not what we need. It's the opposite of what we need. It's more spending, is what you're saying. People, if you put more money in their pockets, they're going to spend more. Correct. And again, if anyone should be spending more, it's people who don't have much money, not the college educated.

How much does the deficit affect this? Because President Biden was focused yesterday very much on the deficit, saying he's brought it down. And that's why, despite record spending during a pandemic or once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, he's not to be blamed for this. This is how he put it. I'll let him explain it for himself. Soundbite three. I think our policies help not hurt. Think about what they say.

The vast majority of the economists think that this is going to be a real tough problem to solve, but it's not because of spending. We've brought down the deficit. The bottom line is, how much does America owe? How much in the hole are we going? We're reducing that. What do you make of it? Look, I would agree the pandemic has been the major problem, but coming out of a pandemic, you need to decide, are you going to signal fiscal responsibility and that you will put the reins on forthcoming steep increases in Medicare, Social Security expenditures as this nation ages? Or are you in a position where you just keep on promising goodies to your own interest groups? very bad on this issue. But what I see is the Democratic Party, under its current president and congressional majorities, is simply having the attitude, just as we could have printed all the money we wanted to, now that the debt, the deficit, they can be as high as we want them to, and everything will be fine. And that's a very dangerous philosophy.

He is obviously concerned about the midterms. He's any sitting president is worried about his political fortunes next, next time around if they're a first term or as Biden is. And he's trying to draw a line between his own policies and those that one can expect if the Republicans are placed back in control. To me, this is actually very interesting to listen to him talk about the GOP. To me, it sounded very much like the GOP of 10,

15 years ago. Not sure it captures the GOP of 2022. Love your sounded very much like the GOP of 10, 15 years ago. Not sure it captures the GOP of 2022. Love your thoughts. This is soundbite four. They don't want to solve inflation by lowering their costs. They want to solve it by raising your taxes and lowering your income. I happen to think it's a good thing when American families have a little more money in their pockets at the end of the month. But the Republicans in Congress don't seem to think so. Their plan is actually made working families, going to make working families poor. What's your reaction to that?

I think he's confusing a lot of different concepts. But look, this is an important point. The Republican Party, when it gets in power, also does not do a good job on spending. They spend like drunken sailors. We saw this under the Bush administration. We saw it under Trump. So the problem very often is the voters, that both parties are willing to pander to the voters. Biden is keeping us on that same track. So I wouldn't at all think he's fixing the problem. But I'm not looking forward to the next president either. What we need is actually a change in our national culture. How so? What do you mean? Expand on that.

Americans love the notion of a free lunch, that we can consume more and more. We never have to pay the bill. We have high levels of consumer debt for a nation of our wealth. And we tend to think, well, we're America, the high and mighty, we just don't face constraints. We've had this problem in our foreign policy too. So we need to wake up and realize there are always trade-offs, there's scarcity. And if you want to spend more money on something, well, consider that, but it's going to mean you spend less money on something else. And that attitude is not taught to us by our politicians, and it's not learned by most people on their media, present company excluded. It seems to me that, you know, the American people have been fed a bill of goods, right? It's like we've made them all sorts of promises, whether you mentioned

Social Security, that we aren't really in a position to fulfill. And in the meantime, our politicians love to dole out little goodies, especially in election years to make people feel like, oh, yeah, I like this guy. Yeah, this guy's looking out for me. And they aren't looking out for the overall health of the economy, which, if it were robust, would help everyone. Right. I mean, even Trump was such a huge spender. He got the economy going in a way that was a lot more helpful than what we're seeing right now. But he was a huge spender, just like Barack Obama before him and Joe Biden after him. And it just seems like there's no serious adult willing to say, look, it's going to hurt, but this is what

we have to do. The comeuppance will be quite unpleasant. So what do we do about that? Because we had such a person, George H.W. Bush, at one point, who, despite his promises, said, I'm going to have to raise your taxes and I'm going to have to raise interest rates and we're going to have to get ourselves out of this recession. And that they killed him. I mean, he was, you know, he was a one term president for a reason. So politicians watch that and they learn and they understand not to make those promises and in fact, not to do those things, not to do anything that that short term would hurt because it'll the populace will make them pay long term. So, I mean, what do we do?

Do we have term limits? Do we have to get only one term presidents in there from now on? What is the solution? I fear we won't address the problem until the very last minute. Look at the history of the pandemic. In January 2020, we knew it was coming, right? We knew that for sure. And Americans were going to die. And

that was basically a month away, a little more than a month away. We didn't spend enough money. We didn't prepare enough. We didn't do enough to get our hospitals ready. And that was something that might kill you in a few weeks' time. And we still didn't act decisively. So when it's something that appears vaguer, harder to wrap your arms around, fiscal crisis, maybe 13 years from now, I think we're just going to let it ride and encounter a very big ouch down the road. What does all this do to the value of the dollar and its role in the international markets? Well, here's the good news and the bad news.

Other countries are in at least as bad shape as we are. So, right now, the dollar is relatively high. If you look at Eurozone inflation, they have their own problems. They grow at 1% a year on average. They're much more overregulated than we are. They have neighbor problems, obviously, with Russia, the war in Ukraine. So I'm actually bullish on the dollar, but not because I think we're doing the right thing. We are, in a sense, a giant amongst pygmies, if you're on a fixed income and you rely on market trends or a pension, you're worried. What do you make of it? I mean, my understanding is they fell precipitously because of the Fed's hiking this interest rate, but what's your understanding? I think there's more to it than that. The fundamental development is a revaluation of how much tech stocks are worth. So if you think of a company

like Shopify or really all of them, and this started even November of the year before, people have just realized that the entire future is not just tech, tech, tech. This may even have some healthy sides. So meta, Facebook was down quite a bit at first. Now crypto is down. A Peloton, not really a tech stock, but it's something you do at home when you can't go out. They're at, I think, a tenth of their peak value. So I think it's just the world waking up and realizing a lot of big changes that we thought were coming are going to be more modest than we'd been expecting. It's not great news, but I don't actually think it's the ruin of the republic. I think it's people focusing more on the real economy.

Do you think it's a bad harbinger for Elon Musk? I mean, it seems like maybe that's in the wake of what you just said. Maybe it's not a great time to buy Twitter. I think he will enjoy running Twitter. I'm not sure how much money Twitter will make him. He can afford to take some losses on Twitter. In that sense, I believe it is fine. But really, tech stocks have been hammered so consistently. That's the big development of

the last few months. And Bitcoin is way down, right? I mean, Bitcoin was down at like 30,000 and it was trading. How high was it trading? It was definitely over 50 when it was recommended to me and I did not buy it. But I'm like, maybe $1.30, maybe I should buy it. I don't know. You tell me. Some of the surrounding infrastructure in crypto is actually doing much worse. So these things called stable coins, a number of them are unraveling really as we speak and just plummeting in value.

So I think a kind of crypto winter is coming. I'm still hopeful for crypto and its long-term prospects. But there's going to be a huge shakeout, just like we had the dot-com bubble. We had a real estate bubble burst. But look, Americans still live in homes. Tech stocks did come back. I think crypto will come back. But the losing ventures, the frauds, the bubbles, right now is the moment of their comeuppance. And I hope the solid crypto projects can still proceed. On the subject of housing, it seems like everybody's always in the housing market And I hope the solid crypto projects can still proceed. properties and so on over the past year plus, despite the pandemic. Where's that going to go now that the Fed's raising these interest rates, which will affect mortgages and so on? So where do you see this going? And are we in some sort of a housing bubble that's about to burst?

Homes are a good hedge against inflation. They're just fun to live in. Some of the attractions of living in a densely populated city now don't seem as fun as they ought to. Many people have rediscovered the outdoors. So I think the current level of home prices is stable. In fact, a lot of quality real estate is probably still undervalued. You're going to see a lot of parts of the country, such as the better cities in the American South, just become quite expensive the way parts of the Northeast and the West Coast did some while ago. Wait, why? Explain that. Let's say you live in Atlanta. Let's say you live in Charlotte.

Let's say you move to Bentonville or Nashville. Those are great cities, wonderful places to live. They're not that crazy. I like the warm weather. I like the sun. They have much better food. Socially, they're more tolerant than they used to be. So say you're a gay couple, you want to move to a city like that, they're more tolerant than they used to be. So say you're

a gay couple, you want to move to a city like that. It's now a perfectly fine thing to do. They have new and better companies. That land's going to be worth a lot more. I'm very optimistic about the U.S. Southeast and Texas and Florida, for that matter. Well, you're not the only one. We hear from a lot of our viewers who are very enthusiastic about those states as well, and for maybe different reasons, but they all sort of flow together when you're deciding where you belong. Listen, Tyler Cowen, much more to discuss with him, including his amazing book talking about hiring and getting great talent and what the signs are.

I mean, have you ever struggled with this? Either you are the talent, you're trying to impress somebody, or you're trying to hire great talent for a company that you run or are a part of. And he's got some great insider tips on the questions you need to be asking yourself and the person across the table from you. We'll get into that next. Our guest today is Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University and author of the new book, Talent, How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the Globe, which comes out tomorrow. You should place your order today. So, Tyler, let's talk about it. Why talent matters is chapter one.

And I mean, it seems like, well, duh, you don't want to get somebody who's not talented working for you, but you get into it a little bit more than that. And you talk about in particular, you know, what, what do people understand talent to be? Because for a long time it was, well, definitely it has to include a college degree. And that seems to have been changing. I thankfully, I would say, but what, what talent are you talking about? People who have the ability to come up with new ideas, run indirect projects, and motivate other people. In so many ventures, that is what is truly scarce. It's typically not money. If you have the talent, you can raise the money

or earn the money through revenue. So how is it that we as Americans can do a better job finding and mobilizing our talent? That's the key theme of this book. Mm-hmm. And you talk about the interview. It definitely does matter. And talk about sort of the areas of inquiry and sort of giving information and getting information and the balance between the two. What you want to do in an interview is get people off script. So there's plenty of questions

you can ask them. For all your testing is really, did they prepare at all? So there's very predictable questions like, what mistakes did you make on your last job? And that's fine. But almost everyone is ready for that kind of question. What you want to do is get people talking about things they care about. So you develop a sense of how they actually live their lives, make decisions, and relate to other people. Like what? What are some of your very

favorite interview questions? It's going to depend on the candidate, but once I was interviewing a young person who said he loved science fiction and Star Wars. So I said, well, in Star Wars, was Yoda a good decision maker? Was he a good judge of talent? Did he give good advice? That's not a question they can prepare for, but you see how they think on their feet, how they understand interpersonal relationships, just how they respond to a bit of surprise. So again, getting people off script, I think is the key. One of the ones that you recommend in the book is what are the open tabs on your browser right now? I love that. So I actually went and I looked at my phone's browser just

before we started the interview, just to see what it says about me. I'm not sure it says good things. I got to be honest, Tyler. Number one, the first thing that comes up is square root explained. My second grade. He came in this morning to ask me questions. I was like, I don't want to give you the wrong information. So let me look it up. There's some Marie Antoinette. I was interested in her because Douglas Murray mentioned her. News Archives, articles by John Cass. He was on the program. Something about Tucker Carlson calling Jen Psaki shallow.

2020, a true crime story. The Supreme Court leaker and their obstruction of justice. Can dogs eat broccoli? Because my Stradwick, my puppy, ate some a lot and I didn't know. Wisconsin Democrats and what happened in Wisconsin. Poison control. How to induce vomiting in a dog. broccoli because my strudwick my puppy ate some a lot and i didn't know wisconsin democrats and what happened wisconsin poison control how to induce vomiting in a dog real clear politics.com dog ate easter i easter egg die what to do it's all about my dog they're a plus browser tabs they show you are at work solving problems right okay my co-author and I, we have a favorite saying, personality is revealed on weekends. When you just have time, what do you do with that time?

Are you solving problems or are you wasting time? Your tabs show you are solving problems. Oh, that's actually very true. That's very true. If anything, I don't make enough time for leisure and the influx of things from which you would generate creative ideas. That's a self-criticism I have that I'd like to work on, you know, because that's important, too. Though there has to be balance, right? The person can't be all about the leisure. I had a friend who went skiing for like four months and then we recommended him for a job interview because he's a really talented guy. And the people who interviewed the guy were like, you sent you sent us somebody who'd been skiing for four months.

This person doesn't have a work ethic. I'm like, well, it's complicated. My open tabs, they're mostly about writing. You sent us somebody who'd been skiing for four months. This person doesn't have a work ethic. I'm like, well, it's complicated. My open tabs, they're mostly about writing. So I write a blog. I write on Twitter. I write columns for Bloomberg and I have a whole bunch of open tabs that help me write essentially. I have an RSS feed that's an open tab. I have my email. I have my Gmail. I have my WhatsApp. So it's all about communicating, sending information back and forth. Those are my open browser tabs. And what are you not looking for? What would be something you'd see on the open tabs that would make you say, and no? Well, I think some of the worst answers are just, well, I don't know what my open tabs are, or I don't really have any,

or just the person is befuddled because the open tabs don't have meaning to them. So most definite answers are actually good answers. So you had answers about a dog, about square roots. I'm not judging what do I think of dogs. It could be about a cat. The point is you had clear answers directed at solving problems. And that's what you're looking for in those answers. What do you mean by, this is from the book, we see that the quality called grit matters, but when you look at the numbers, perseverance is a personality feature that matters much more than passion taken alone. What do you mean by that? Perseverance is when you stick with a project for a very long period of time,

and it can be years or even decades. That predicts success in many areas. But if simply the person shows up for work all bursting with energy, it's better than the alternative. But a lot of people do that, and then they bang their head against the wall, and they don't improve. It's people who experience compound returns to learning over many years who become the true very high achievers, people who every compound returns to learning over many years, who become the true very high achievers, people who every year work on somehow trying to be better or more influential. What about you say intelligence is usually overrated, most of all by people who are smart? Love that. But there are some cases where it really does matter. So how do you figure out how smart do my employees need to be?

For most jobs, the person has to be smart above some particular level, and that will depend what the job is. But above that level, there's remarkably little correlation between smarts and actual achievement. So people who are smart and articulate, they tend to look for that in others. Again, you have to look for people smart enough to do the job at all. But after that margin, the fact that they're impressing you with their smarts, you should discount somewhat, not be too impressed.

Just look at how long will they stick with improvement? What are their open browser tabs? How well can they in a company or institution perceive the relevant hierarchies and learn how to climb the right ones. Those are often all more important than smarts. I'd much rather have somebody who is medium smart and a gunner than somebody who's super smart and lazy. Laziness is abhorrent, right? And it employs the last thing you want to see. And in today's day and age where half of us work via Zoom, you don't even see your staff. How do you know? How do you know if you're about to hire somebody who's lazy?

Well, if the person has an established track record, you look at that record, you call references. But obviously, very often you're hiring very young people. And then I think you just want to ask some questions. What were the earliest attempts you made to do something that mattered to you? And just see what the earliest attempts you made to do something that mattered to you? And just see what the answer is. Don't look for importance in the answers. Look for the fact that they tried something at all, say when they were 14, that they set out on some venture and stuck with it. And those people will tend to be the gunners that you're looking for. I love that. Oh, this is so helpful. Honestly, like this is a book that you can use to dazzle

potential employers because you can take a lot of these techniques and manage to sort of drop some of these ideas in the interview. Even if the interviewer has not read this book, they will be wowed by you in a way that the others won't wow them. And of course, if you are somebody in a hiring position, this will take your interview techniques next level and help you recruit some of the best talent in a job market that sadly is too scarce right now. It really is hard to find really talented people right now. Of course, if you pay well, that can solve a lot of problems. All right. Tyler, thank you.

Thank you so much. The book is out tomorrow. It's called Talent. How to Identify Energizers, Creatives, and Winners Around the World. We appreciate it. Thank you. We are going to be right back with Victor Davis Hanson. VDH is here.

And remember, you can stay tuned and hear people like VDH just by subscribing to the Megyn Kelly Show live. You can do it live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel 111. That's every weekday at noon east. And you can also download the show or follow us on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, wherever you get your podcast for free. You can also follow us on YouTube if you like to watch the show as opposed to just listen to it. We have a YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly, and we'd love to see you over there.

Welcome back to the Megyn Kelly show. politico out with new reporting today on where the justices currently stand when it comes to overturning roe the leaks just keep on coming we are not supposed to know this people we're not supposed to know this but apparently whoever's been talking to politico is still talking uh we'll get to what they're saying this is president biden launches a new attack on the gop as quote ultra maga jensaki loves it she says it was joe biden's idea to add ultra to give his new attack line quote a little extra pop joining me now is victor davis hansen he's a conservative commentator a martin and ely anderson senior fellow at the hoover institute institution and author of the great great book the dying citizen victor great to have you back okay so that's gonna move hearts and minds

ultra ultra mega yeah i don't know why is it supposed to be a term of rebuke i don't understand it i mean people who are for the agenda that was actualized the last three or four years, two or three years of the Trump administration, they kind of like it. And I think the polls suggest most people do too. So if you were going to double down on that, that would be pretty popular. I suppose they're trying to scare away those Glenn Youngkin Republican women in the suburbs, you know, the ones who they all say wanted Trump to moderate his tone, would have voted for Trump if he had done that, you know, don't like hardcore MAGA and don't see themselves as part of it, as opposed to, you know, those who

just like Republican policies. Yeah, I guess that's easier if in a logical world, they would just simply try to address crime that's creeping into the suburbs and inflation that's ruining people's household budgets and maybe talk about critical race theory in schools. But they're ideologues, so they would rather be, I suppose, correct and unpopular and failed than politically incorrect and successful and popular. They love labels. You know, I mean, that's the thing. Like, they love labels. They love to talk about identity when it comes to race, when it comes to gender, when it comes to sexuality, even when it comes to your political party.

They think these are problems and solutions, right? Well, this is what we'll do. We'll call them ultra MAGA. And then the people will be less likely to vote for them, I guess, is the thought. Yeah, I don't understand that. I mean, we started out with clingers, and then we went to deplorables and irredeemables. And then Biden added to that vocabulary. Remember, he called them chunks and dregs. And then the other day, you know, he wrote off half the country and said that they were the most extremist terrorist group or extremist political group in American history. So they don't learn that Hillary probably lost the election because of that irredeemable, deplorable remark.

And Biden is doing the same way. He does it also, you know, on foreign falsehoods. It's kind of scary when he says, I mean, nobody is more critical than Putin than I am or supportive of Ukraine. But when you show weakness, as we did in Afghanistan, or you beg Putin to pump more oil, as he did on the eve of the war, or you ask Putin not to hack particular American entities, as he did, and then you turn around and say he's a butcher, he is a war criminal, he's a murderer, and he has to be removed. Then you're dealing with somebody who's not that he had over ultra MAGA himself, the man himself, Donald Trump. So I don't know that that's even going to work with a MAGA descendant such as Ron DeSantis, if you want to say that that's what he even is. Never mind if Glenn Youngkin throws his hat into

the ring upon running. But Biden clearly loves it, Victor, because listen to him. I mean, he's like a kid with a toy. He's as excited about it as Jen Psaki. We put together just a short montage of how he's been sounding lately. The ultra MAGA Republicans who seem to control the Republican Party now. It's the ultra MAGA agenda. I don't want to hear Republicans talk about deficits and their ultra-MAGA agenda. It's a MAGA agenda, all right. Let me tell you about this ultra-MAGA agenda. It's extreme, as most MAGA things are. This MAGA crowd is really

the most extreme political organization that's existed in American history and recent American history. You know what it reminds me of? When I was little in the 70s, I got my first pair of Levi's pants and it had the secret fifth pocket in the little front of the jeans. You know, you had your normal, you'd stick your hand in your pocket, but then it had a tiny pocket, which they called the fifth pocket because you had two on the front and two on the back and then this tiny one. And I was so excited about it. I went to all the neighbor's house house i rang the doorbells and i asked if they wanted to see my little fifth pocket which indulged me in a loud that's him that's him with his new ultra mac yeah he never he never defines his terms if you ask him stop joe tell us first what mega means does it mean secure borders and

uh not having optional military engagements abroad in the middle east uh tough on reciprocal trade uh deregulation more energy development so that's mega now what is ultra mega what goes beyond that you know they project so much anytime that they have a weakness or they have an insecurity then they project that onto someone else. So when he says that the Republican Party has gone extreme, if you just survey most Republicans and who voted in 2008 and 2012, they would agree on certain things. And that was probably maybe not the border, not trade or China, but on things like smaller government, even whether they did or not is another matter, but fewer taxes, etc., etc.

And the MAGA added five or six really important additions or substitutions for that agenda. But the one that's been, the party that's been very radicalized, of course, is the Democratic Party, because if you took the 92 or 96 speeches at that Democratic convention from Hillary Clinton or Bill Clinton or Nancy Pelosi, they would be drummed out of the Democratic Party today. They wanted to close borders. They said the unions were being undercut by illegal immigration. They said that Bill Clinton had a sister soldier moment. They had 100,000 police officers they wanted to beef up the police. So they're the ones that have really gone way off on the extreme edge.

And so they project that as they do everything else. Well, it's interesting because the MAGA agenda, I mean, the head of MAGA may be not on the ballot right now, though he could be in 24. But the MAGA agenda seems alive and well and getting embraced in state after state. So you look at even the races that we've seen recently. J.D. Vance, the Trump endorsed candidate, wins in Ohio. Last night in Nebraska, the Trump backed candidate for the gubernatorial race did not win. But that guy had eight women accusing him of misconduct and so on. He had all sorts of baggage that the other guys didn't have. But in West Virginia, the Trump-backed candidate just prevailed and so on. So it's like you look around and sort of objective signs about whether people are repulsed by the MAGA agenda. I don't know. I'm not seeing that.

I'm not either. I mean, if you take the three anti-MAGA states, the big ones, it's Illinois and New York and California. California lost population for the first time in its history the last two years. And New York is losing and bleeding. So is Illinois. And when you look at states that embrace the MAGA agenda, Florida, Texas, Tennessee, they're booming. And so people vote with their feet. If you look out here, you know, when you talk to these polls that are showing Latinos, Hispanics, Mexican-Americans, whatever term is appropriate, they're in a historical shift right now. I've never seen anything like it. You talk to people on the ground and they reflect the polls and the inflation. They've had it with the political correctness, the attack on the Catholic church. They've had it with a radical abortion. If you're a Mexican American, they've had it with, they can't afford to fill up. If you have a diesel pickup, you're paying $7 a gallon out

here in California, and you've got to be your electrical contractor or plumber. You just, you want to know why that's happening and who did it. And the answers always lead back to Joe Biden in their mind. So does it suggest to you then that he may be seeing something about his internal polls? Because that seems to me a term that would speak to Democrats, right? They're the ones who hate MAGA. They don't want to hear that term ever again. So maybe he's seeing something with respect to his his own party's enthusiasm that's leading him to want to whip up the base and concern the passions. I think so. He's bleeding suburban women and he's bleeding Hispanics and he's bleeding African-American males as well.

And he can't afford to do any of that because he's so alienated the white working class. But, you know, we've seen this now for the last four months. Every, I don't know, two or three weeks, we have a psychodrama. It's January 6th's latest findings, or it's Roe v. Wade, or it's Putin's price hike, or the Ukraine war destroyed the economy, or there's going to be 100 million Omicron cases in the fall. And it's always this hysteria that lasts about five days. And the intent is we're not going to talk about the border and inflation, energy prices, crime, defund, none of that. But we want a hysteria of the week. And this is the hysteria of the week.

Apparently, there's something out there called ultra MAGA. And it's not going to work. They can't change. The only thing that could save them right now, Megan, if they sat down with a Republican and said, look, you're probably going to win the House and you may win the Senate, but let's try to get something done right now. Let's try to finish the wall.

Let's finish Keystone. It's open ANWR. And maybe we'll just compromise to do it for three years and get a couple more million barrels of oil produced more natural gas just close the border for a while and we'll talk about what to do then they'll never do that well the old joe biden might have done that the old the old joe biden made his name by being the sort of moderate guy who could work across the aisle he's gone there's there's not even any evidence of that person remaining.

There is one evidence, though, don't you think? Joe Biden was always a very nasty person. I mean, this idea of good old Joe Biden from Scranton, in his moments of, I should say, in his moments of clarity, he still reveals that. And even when he's not clear he still reveals through these corn pop and stories and you ain't you ain't black and junkie and hey boy and uh when he said you guys are you know the most extreme organization in the world all the stuff republicans are gonna put you all back in chains yeah this is not the talk of a nice guy, a uniter. All right, wait, let me pause you and we'll pick it right up right there. After a quick break, much, much more next hour as well with the one and only Victor Davis Hanson. So, Victor, on the, you know, we just need a little extra pop by infusing ultra before MAGA. When Jen Psaki

said that, she explained why this term is so appropriate and in particular pointed out the Republicans' penchant for starting and obsessing all of these culture wars. Listen here. Who came up with this phrase ultra MAGA? Why the need to kick it up a notch? MAGA wasn't enough. I mean, why now use this phrase? I will tell you is the president's phrase and the president made those comments himself just last week, as you know. And I think what has struck him is how extreme some of the policies and proposals are that a certain wing of the Republican Party. But it's not just obviously putting at risk a woman's right to make choices about her own health care. Rick Scott's extreme plan. And it's also the obsession with culture wars and wars against Mickey Mouse and banning books.

President thinks that's extreme. That is not what the American people care about or what they want. And so to him, adding a little ultra to it, give it a little extra pop. The culture wars, they always do this. It's the Republicans obsession with culture wars. That's what we're seeing in the country right now. Not actual attempts by the Democrats to literally change most things about the culture that have been assumed as givens for the vast majority, if not all of our history. Yeah, I mean, they say in the year of our Lord 2022, there's going to be three or more genders. If you don't like it, then you're an extremist that wants to go to war with your own country.

And that's the conditions that they apply to conservatives. Either roll over and accept it, that you're on the losing end or you're on the wrong side of history, as Obama used to say, or you're an extremist and you're ultra. But I don't think it's going to work. I think people have got kind of armor now. They're so attuned to this constant whining and blaming somebody else. Biden was on yesterday on the airwaves, blaming people for inflation, anybody but Joe Biden. And they just look at the stuff of life. They say, you know what? There's no formula on the shelves. I haven't bought a steak in two months. They say, the border, look at it.

It's not even a border anymore. And I can't even get my car and drive. And rents and houses are out of touch. If you go to Home Depot and you want to buy a pipe or you want to buy Romex wire, you can't afford it. It's just outrageous. And they say, this is stuff, you know, the stuff of life is the eating and it's moving and it's having shelter and it's being safe from crime. And this guy in the last 15 months destroyed it. And I don't care what he says or alter this or cultural extremism that it's just not going to work.

I think they're going to be there's going to be a tsunami in November and they know it. They've tied themselves down on a railroad track when they bound themselves with ideological handcuffs to the track. And that that electorate is the local motive and it's coming right at them and they don't know what to do about it. I think about girls in my new home state and I'm from New York state, but right now living in Connecticut, girls like I've interviewed, these teenage girls who were running and track and doing really well and had overcome a lot of obstacles in their 15, 16 years. One we talked to was a person of color and her mom was very frank about the challenges that that had brought into her daughter's life when she was younger and so on. Ran track, we're doing great. And then guys

started running, saying they were girls and crushing them, crushing these girls. And these girls, very brave, decided to speak out about it and say, I don't feel like it's fair. They didn't have to take hormones. They didn't have to do anything. They've already been through puberty. They were running on the guy's team last year. Okay. So these girls decide to fight back. And now more and more people are feeling comfortable challenging something like that. That is not an obsession over a culture war. That is an obsession with fairness, with what's right. And you've got people like Jen Psaki who refuse to condemn that, who won't even discuss it other than saying, and I quote, trans rights are human rights. And when you try to push back, again, extremist ultra obsession with your culture war stuff.

Yeah, I think I think throughout history, ideologues, if you want to sum them up, is that they don't care about people, whether it's Jacobins and French Revolution or it's Bolsheviks or it's Cuban Fidelistas. They don't care about people. So if you ask an ideologue on the transgender issue, well, look what you're doing to a whole generation of women. He would just say, you know what, some eggs have to be broken for the omelet. And if you ask him, you say to them, you have any idea what it's like to live on the border when a million and a half people cross in a pandemic without vaccinations or tests or any background checks? Do you have any idea what it is for an elderly Asian American woman to be thrown into a subway or kicked on a stairwell by somebody who's been let out for violent crime six times within a year? Do you have any care? They don't.

They don't. They have no compassion. Do you have any idea what it's like for a mom with three kids to get in their SUV and drive kids to this and that here in an LA suburb or San Francisco suburb and pay $6.30 a gallon for gas? They don't have any care. It's the ideology. It's all it mattered well the the lies i mean the blatant misrepresentations about these issues that really affect people are are running

out of any believability and so you you've outlined a few of them and and they're so obvious you can't you know you can't deny it but so from crt it's not being taught in schools well we know that's not true i mean we just know that's not true. We just know that's not true. Defund the police. No, we were never for that. Well, we have tape. We have written op-eds. We have your positioning.

We have your votes in Congress. We know it's not true. Putin's price hike, right, at the gas pump. No, we saw the prices going up long before the war in Ukraine. You can't get away with that anymore. Inflation. OK, it's all the Republicans' fault or it's the pandemic now um or it's putin you spent a year telling us it wasn't even happening you you you went with this isn't this is transitory

it's going to pass like in a moment so we know that you're not straight shooters on this and you had a great piece out um just this week called the exasperated american there's a line in there that writes behind the popular furor is a sense of impotence in the face of the untruth that people are assaulted with day after day. Bullied Americans are angry that people who control the nation's institutions deliberately mislead them and do so because they hate them. And I think they do. I mean, just the other day, Megan, Hillary Clinton was ranting about the next election and how basically the democracy dies in darkness narrative. And I was listening to her and I thought, you were a conspirator, you were a racketeer.

You told the nation that this dossier that you hired through the paywalls of Perkins Coie and the DNC and Fusion GPS, you told us that this was authentic. It was a complete fabrication. He was a foreign national that you hired to interfere in a political campaign. That's a felony. And then you had another contractor, and it looks like from Mr. Durham's investigations, that this alpha ping that you fabricated that entire, your team fabricated that entire story to destroy another opposition who was president of the United States. And then, you know, and you look at, and then she was weighing in on January 6th. And I said, you know, all of this deplored the right inside the Capitol, but it was a complete lie that Officer Brian Sicknick died violently at the hands of a MAGA protester.

It didn't happen. And so all of these, we live in an empire of lies, and all of these people promulgate them, and there's not going to be any consequences. When James Clapper lies on their oath to Congress and says, you know, the NSA never spies on anybody. Oh, sorry, I gave you the least untruthful answer. Or John Brennan twice lied under oath. Or Lois Lerner, you know, took the fifth. There's just all of these people are me. They're this bi-coastal elite. They think they're exempt from the law. Rules don't apply to them. They put their kids in private school and lecture us how terrible you are if you go to a charter school or homeschool or how wonderful teacher unions are, but that's not applicable to them. They have big walls around the Pelosi estate in Napa, but she dams walls on the border. So I think there's going to be a reckoning. And I really do feel it. And I think it's going to happen in November. And I think Jen Psaki and Joe Biden, in the abstract, they think, uh-oh, we're in trouble. But they're

not in the concrete. They don't really have their hand on the pulse of the country. It's very angry right now. And it's angry in one direction. You mentioned Hillary Clinton, the country. It's very angry right now. And it's angry in one direction. You mentioned Hillary Clinton, the nerve. She came out April 21st, I think it was, to rail against disinformation. She actually hit tweet, published a tweet that reads, for too long, tech platforms have amplified disinformation with no accountability. And she goes on from there, calling on the EU to basically push this law that would crack down on free speech over there that somebody labels disinformation. I mean, Victor, the nerve of Hillary Clinton, who we know now, we know thanks to the Durham investigation. This is not some Republican or Hillary Clinton hating theory. John Durham has made clear that she was the one who actively put together the whole Russiagate lie in an effort to distract from her own email and server problems and that it's documented. This is what she and her campaign did to try to mislead everybody to look

at this fake shiny thing to get the heat off of her. And that's not the headline in the newspapers. Not anyone other than right-wing media responds to that with, you've got to be kidding me. Just ask yourself, Megan, what would have happened in, say, October of 2020 if we had this Homeland Security Department of Disinformation and they were all fully staffed and Hunter Laptop story broke and the New York Post published it? And then they would call up their friends in Silicon Valley, which they did. And they silenced that. But what if the government got involved and said, you know what, you were promulgating a lie during the national campaign cycle, and we're going to do the following to you. And I think they're perfectly willing to do that. They're sort of the government version of the Washington Post fact checker, the New York Times fact checker, all of these fact checkers who have this veneer of being disinterested, but they're partisan hacks.

And that's what I think everybody is. I think we've never seen anything quite like the left. It's not the Democratic Party. They're gone. They're in ancient history. They're ossified, calcified. They don't exist. This is a hardcore Jacobin group of young people who are totally out of touch with

the interior of the country and the history and traditions of the United States. And they're hell-bent on running to the finish line before they get kicked. They know they're going to lose power. They know they're going to be repudiated and they don't care. They're going to get this agenda in. And Joe Biden, they've told him, Joe, you outdid Obama. I know you didn't get reelected. I know you had problems. I know we lost the House and the Senate. But in that brief moment, that glorious two or three years, we did something Obama never even dreamed of. That's what your legacy will be. That's what they really believe. They're that delusional. The thing is, I talked to Bill Barr about this last week, Trump's attorney general for the last couple years of his term. And one of the most interesting parts of his book, you know, he bumped up against Trump because he didn't believe Trump's election fraud of this really mattered and that trump really was placed

in a position where for the first couple of years of his presidency and then and then thereafter as well because of these impeachments but for the first couple years of his presidency all he was focused on this nonsense every day it was a headline in another paper this quote disinformation that hillary is now so concerned about but really was the original purveyoryor of one of the biggest stories that consumed the nation over the past five years, because he had to fight. And he explains to Bill Barr, and there's a this is in Bill Barr's book about why he he was so combative and why he really can't be the guy that the suburban women want, because he's been embattled. He's explaining to Bill Barr in the book, he's been embattled his entire presidency with fake news, with lies about him, with lies from the Democrats,

with lies. And that's not Trump crazy talk. That really happened to him with no accountability. That's a good point. I think every all of us get offended when he has the bouts of crudity or callousness, but none of us have gone through what he has. And no other president, it's not an excuse to say, well, you're not president. He is. He should expect that. No president has had his entire four years consumed with the steel, phony dossier stuff. That was for two years. And they took a deep breath and they went right into impeachment.

They had no special counsel. They had no cross-examination. They went right to impeachment. And it was based on two lies. The first lie was that the Biden family, there was no evidence that it was basically a shakedown quid pro quo syndicate that in China and in Ukraine was selling the influence of Joe Biden as vice president, as future trajectory as president. And second, that Donald Trump had canceled aid and hurt Ukraine. And the truth was that anybody who was president would be really wondering whether you really wanted to deal with the Ukrainian government who was paying Hunter Biden, the son of a vice president, for influence and extraordinary amount

of money, and whose special prosecutor or federal prosecutor had been fired on the orders of Joe Biden. And second, we had ordered, we had passed javelins to be sold to Ukraine. And who canceled them? Barack Obama. Who suspended it for a few weeks, Donald Trump, and then who okayed offensive weapons, javelins included. One of the reasons that they had javelins when Joe Biden took office was Donald Trump approved them. So we impeached a person over supposedly not giving enough aid to Ukraine and politicizing that aid, even though he was far more generous than his predecessor. And then the second charge was that he had interfered politically and tried to use his office to hurt the Biden family in a political way.

And they were both concoctions. And we didn't learn a thing from Russian collusion, farce, and that narrative. We went right to the impeachment, and then we went right into other things. It never stopped. Right. Impeachment after impeachment, with no accountability from the Democrats who made up these lies, like Hillary and her campaign, or the media that pushed them. I mean, at every level, including the Rachel Maddows of the world, who have very large platforms and are basically spokespeople for the Democratic Party who have had no accountability for any of this. And all we can do is look back at Trump and say, you know, this is a thing online, mean tweets and sort of

weird tweets, Kavevi and all that. And I get it. I get it. You know, Trump, no question could be thin skinned and so on. But one has to wonder what version of him we would have gotten if there hadn't been a constant assault on the legitimacy of his presidency. They never left it alone. Something they now say is horrible, right? And then they say, like, you shouldn't be doing that at all, right? Trump, now that he does it to Biden, now it's out of bounds. It's disgusting. It's undemocratic. They did it to him for his entire presidency. I know. And then I I disagreed on some of the details and many of them about his objections to the election. But my God, Stacey Abrams, two years earlier, had lost by fifty five thousand votes toward the country, basically being introduced as the real governor of Georgia. And then Hillary Clinton, via her surrogate, Jill Stein, sued to overturn the election in three states. And then we were subjected in 2016

after the election. Remember those grade B Hollywood actors who were making those videos and they were on TV every night? Hey, electors, please follow your conscience. Do not vote according to your state tally. Reflect the national vote. It was a way to undermine the election. And then remember she said to Joe Biden, if you lose a popular vote, don't concede. Don't concede. And so it's almost surreal that these people have done so much to damage these institutions. I'm not even getting into, let's get rid of the filibuster. Let's get rid of the electoral college.

Let's add two more states. Let's have a national voting law that trumps the state's prerogatives in the constitution about national election balloting, all of that stuff. It's almost as if we can't appeal to 51% of the people. So we've got to change the system. We've got to change the rules. We've got to change the demography. We've got to change the system. We've got to change the rules. We've got to change the demography. We've got to educate kids from five years on. We've got to do anything

other than take our case to the people because they're not going to be persuaded. And the revisionist history is so frustrating to me as a lawyer. In the courtroom, you have a record and when someone tries to wiggle, you can always cite the record. On page 47 of the record, you said exactly the opposite. You said this about inflation, or you said this about critical race theory, or you said this about the trans community, or whatever. And then you can impeach them with their prior inconsistent statement. In politics, that's done through the media. Mostly, that's done through the media. You get to cross-examine these politicians and hold them to account, but the media has completely abandoned its obligations.

It is. And it's cosmic morality. If you're right on a cosmic level, if you're for a certain number of issues, progressive issues, then the details don't matter. What that does, Megan, is it sets a tone in a country, just like it did in the Soviet Union, just like it did in Mao's Cultural Revolution, just like it did in Cuba and Venezuela. And people come out of the woodwork, often the most mediocre people. And they think, you know what? I don't believe this stuff, but I'm going to mouth this diversity, equity, inclusion, and critical race theory because it's an insurance policy for my career, and I will be rewarded accordingly. And so you have all of these people who don't really believe it, and they've joined this progressive locomotive because they feel that it's

where the power is at right now. No more so than these corporate CEOs, Disney, Pepsi, American Airlines, whether it's voting laws in Georgia or just asking for an ID, which they ask for sometimes at their own theme park, Disney does, or transgenderism and professional sports and CEOs and stock market academia, K-12. So you're really saying to the country, we have a very unpopular but very intolerant ideology. And if you don't join us, there's going to be a lot of rewards if you do, according to your station, if you're a local high school teacher, district principal in a school district, or a bureaucrat at the EPA. If you join us, you're going to be rewarded. But if you don't, you're not. You're going to be doxxed, deplatformed, canceled out,

ostracized, harassed. And most people will make the necessary adjustments and choose the path of least resistance. I wanted to mention something on the, you mentioned Florida and Disney, and it relates back to Jen Psaki and that soundbite we played 20 minutes ago, talking about these crazy Republicans who are obsessed with culture wars and with Mickey Mouse, right? It sounds so absurd when you put it like that. What happened Mickey Mouse, right? It sounds so absurd when you put it like that. What happened with Disney, right? Disney was outed as having super woke employees openly stating that they put their, quote, queer and gay agenda into Disney movies and products wherever they can and that no one tries to stop them. We saw those tapes, thanks to somebody within Disney who leaked to Chris Ruffo.

Florida pursued its own agenda saying, look, trans lessons, lessons about being trans and gender identity, in addition to sexual identity, should not start before the third grade. Don't put them in curriculum until you get past the third grade and then just keep it age appropriate.

That's it. That's the so-called don't say gay bill, which doesn't say anything about not saying gay. And Disney, this super woke corporation who's working to inject queer and gay agenda everywhere it can, decided to attack Ron DeSantis and say that they were going to come for him and that they were going to withhold all their donations to Republicans and that they were going to work actively to undermine this bill. And DeSantis fought back. He did. And I've already expressed whether I got some concerns about where that's going to take us legally. But you can't really disagree with it much as a strategy, right, to punch the bully in the nose, that the bully only understands a punch in the face. That's what happened there.

They didn't obsess with a fight over Mickey Mouse. Mickey Mouse came for Ron DeSantis. Yeah, I know. I think there's a big debate, don't you, in the Republican conservative traditionalist movement, and it's sort of Old Testament or New Testament. And I don't have the answer. And a lot of people say, well, when the Republicans take power again, the first thing they should do is impeach Mayorkas. He deliberately failed to follow federal law. And the second thing they should do, even if they don't win 60 seats in the Senate, they should impeach Joe Biden for not following federal law and not enforcing and violating the office office. And then they say, you know what, maybe just for ruffles and flourishes, maybe Kevin McCarthy should tear up the State of the Union address on

national TV and see how Joe Biden likes that. And they go down. And then the other, I guess, New Testament say, well, we got to turn the other cheek and sermon on the mount. And why would we want to descend down to their level? And it's hard to know that you want to recreate or reestablish deterrence. And they don't seem to understand anything other than tit for tat or how would you like that? I mean, I would, I've never would imagine marching on a house of an official, but what would happen right now if Elena Kagan or so to my ear had a bunch of angry people outside screaming and yelling, we would, it would, there would be a federal law. I mean, when parents, and I didn't approve of some parents, very few of them marched about school board members,

and Saki mentioned that, they got the FBI out there. The FBI was in the crowd. Are there FBI agents circulating among the protesters of the Alito residents to make sure that they're not violating the federal statute, which they apparently are. And so I don't know how you can stop it with the Marcus of Queensberry rules. And that's what the country said in 2016. They said, you know, Trump is a pit bull, but we're going to point him in the right direction because we can't take it anymore. And I don't know if you keep going down that, you know, devolving tit for tat, you did this, you did this, you know where it's going to lead. It's going to lead to something like 1861. So we've got to rest it.

On the other hand, if you take the Romney-McCain approach or the Bush approach, which is, you know, all good people, then the left looks at that magnanimity and considers it weakness to be exploited, not kindness to be reciprocated. Yeah, you lose. I guess just sitting here listening to you phrase it like that's interesting is I think it has to be a combo. You can't totally abandon some of the high ground and the principles we're committed to as Americans in terms of our due process and free speech. We don't want to abandon all those values just to win these wars. But you might have to get a little dirty in fighting them. And you might have to get a little dirty and sort of do some things like what Ron DeSantis is doing, which, you know, one of my concerns about it is it'll be used more often by a Democratic leader than it will by a Republican leader.

And so I just think it's like a slippery slope situation. But I don't deny liking seeing him do it. Now, can I say, though, on the subject of the denials, you know, inflation, CRT, not happening, defund the police and so on. Extraordinary piece, extraordinary piece in The New York Times today. All right. Now, my buddies over at Commentary were talking about this today, which is how it came to my attention. Gun deaths surge during the pandemic's first year, the CDC reports. Okay, we already knew that. We didn't need the CDC to come out and tell us that. The FBI did a whole report on this. Soaring rates were driven largely by gun-related homicides, which rose 35% from 2019 to 2020. They go on, they talk about the numbers, blah, blah, blah. Listen to this, Victor. There's a quote in the piece. Not one time do they mention defund the police or soft on crime prosecutors. It quote, in a sense, it's a mystery. It's the big question everyone wants the answer to. Everyone has a theory, but it's very hard to test the theories. Even if the pandemic is part of the answer, that doesn't explain why rates have

been rising since 2016. Not one word about defund or soft on crime prosecutors. They're not going to solve it. They're just going to do the revisionist history treatment of it and try to move forward. I think so. I mean, there were about 8,000 African-Americans that were tragically killed, murdered, violently shot, lethally shot last year. And most of them, the great majority, I think 94% were shot by other African-Americans. It's a tragedy. There were six African-Americans that were unarmed, shot while in police custody. And yet that's less than 1,000. And yet if you look at the media attention, it's all on the police and what they are doing. And the result of that is police are not, they don't have the fund to cover the adequate territory and patrol. And then second, when they get calls, they're not going into particulardefense, they're going to be in prison, whether they should be or not. That's just the way that they look at it. And that filters down to the street and people think, you know what? And then if you're arrested, you're not going to

be indicted. If you're indicted, you're probably not going to be convicted. If you're convicted, you're probably going to be paroled. And put all that together, Megan, and people feel the law is not being applied equitably. It's a social justice question of whether a person gets, you know, indicted or arrested, et cetera, et cetera. And you put all that together and it's not safe any longer. And people are dying, mostly people who are poor and so-called marginalized people. But we don't talk about it. What I just said at my university, if I said that, I would be shouted down in the classroom or if I gave a lecture. It can't deal with the truth. Everybody knows it, so we live lives of quiet desperation. We live lives that are lies. I mean, we all have

the data in front of us that we know, and we make the necessary adjustments when we go into New York or San Francisco or LA. And yet, we have another set of data that we sort of mouth and say, you know what, this is very troubling. It may be COVID. It may be the lockdown. We don't know. Maybe- It's a mystery. Racism. Yeah, it's a mystery. But we all are lying. And that's not healthy. It's kind of like Eastern Europe in the 1970s, where everybody had to mouth this socialist dogma and then privately in their apartment buildings, they would laugh and play cards at night. And they had quiet lives of desperation. That's what we are now in America. There are

certain things we know to be true. And in our own lives, we and our family and our friends make those adjustments. But we don't say that we're doing that. And we do not say the truth, because to say the truth will make you an enemy of the people. And that's dangerous to be an enemy of the people, the people being the government, as they use that term people. That is one of the things they mentioned in the piece as a possibility, the systemic racism inside the United States that leads people of color to commit crimes. That's considered, but not the Ferguson effect and defund the police and the soft on crime I don't understand about that. You know, if you look at hate crimes, African-American males statistically are about double their

percentages in the population as the offenders and hate crimes, mostly against Asian-Americans. But if you look at rare violent interracial crimes, they are rare. But when you look at them, about 13, 6 percent, excuse me, African males, African-American adult males of the population, they commit double the number of hate crimes against whites as vice versa. And so that's the data. And you can say, well, there's lashing out young African-American males are lashing out and they commit hate crimes or interracial crimes because of racism, but you don't deny that they're doing it. And that is what, what, and people have to talk about it. Nobody ever, there's certain rails we can't speak about. Maybe a cause is that there's a lot of music or in the popular culture, violence is, you know, it's condoned and people talk about

killing the police or hitting the man or doing this. And maybe that filters down in an unhealthy way to young people. But you can't talk about that. All right. One thing you can talk about is the U.S. Supreme Court. And we're going to do that next. You heard Victor Davis Henson reference the protests outside of the justices house houses. We've had more and we're about to have a whole lot more tonight. So we'll get into that and we'll get into Politico's brand new leak on where the justices stand on the reversal of Roe versus Wade. So, Victor, the latest in this case, Supreme Court now set to gather on Thursday. That'll be the first time they're all back together since the leak of their draft decision.

They Politico now reports yet another leak. The sourcing is very ambiguous. They actually don't have any sourcing on this particular line. They just write Politico has learned that Alito's draft remains the court's only circulated draft. So we were wondering why in May what was released to Politico was the draft from February. It's the only one. They have not released a second draft, which will be a delightful update for people who want to see Roe versus Wade overturned. And that none of the conservative justices who initially sided with Alito have to date switched their votes. No dissenting draft opinions have been

circulated by any justice, including the three liberals. And it sounds like the justices haven't moved in terms of their positions. Again, this is a huge leak. Someone continues to leak to Politico about the ongoing deliberations of the court, where the justices stand, and how many opinions they've circulated. I've never seen anything like it. And let's start with that, and then we'll get to the protest updates. I think they feel that for superior moral ends, any means necessary are justified. There was not much worry in the media or Jen Psaki about the leak at all. I mean, it was probably a felony. Nobody seemed to care. It seemed that it would be very easy to find out who did it. They have electronic

data. They can find out who downloaded or emailed. It'd be very easy to find out. I don't think there's any interest in finding out. And I don't think they feel that that's wrong. No more though. So in going out and shouting at the home or the children of a Supreme Court justice in order to influence his or her opinion, it's just their ideologues. And they feel that everything is justified because they're morally superior and they're doing all this for the people. They love humanity in the abstract, but they really don't care about people in the concrete. One of the other pieces of the political piece that goes on to say now this does have sourcing. One person close to the court's conservatives who spoke anonymously because of the sensitive nature of the court deliberations said to Politico, this is the most

serious assault on the court, perhaps from within, because we don't know exactly who leaked it, that the Supreme Court has ever experienced. It is an understatement to say they, meaning the justices, are heavily, heavily burdened by this. A second person close to the court said that the liberal justices, quote, are as shocked as anyone by the revelation, quote, there are concerns for the integrity of the institution, this person said. The views are uniform. I really have no doubt of that. I believe all of the nine justices are probably horrified at this, and they're probably horrified to open up Politico this morning and see the leaker continues to leak. And no one, literally no one, is afraid of the marshal

of the court who's been tasked with this investigation. If they were really outraged, I think they'd stop it. They have the means to stop it. They can call in the FBI if they wanted to, and then they can embarrass merrick garland if he refuses that request and it's it's a continuation remember i think it was in march of 2020 when and it's been widely remembered lately when chuck schumer got out in front of the supreme court doors and at a front of kind of an angry mob of people and he said said, Gorsuch, Kavam, by name, he said, you sowed the wind and you're going to reap the whirlwind. And then he said something that I think that was underreported. He said, you don't know what's going to hit you. What do you mean by that, hit you? You don't know

what's going to hit you. I mean, that was a direct threat to a Supreme Court justice. It was I think it was far more serious than the desk, you know, trashing the Capitol. And that was bad enough. But I mean, this is a senator and he goes out in front of a mob and he threatens them. And then, you know, we've had that. And and so when you you're now going, you're having senators who can do that with no consequences. And then you have mobs going out to the homes of the Supreme Court justices, and then they have no confidentiality. There's no deterrence now. So every judge knows that when they communicate with one another, that is fair game for it to appear in political within hours. You can't run a court like that. And I think that's the point.

And then you have Elizabeth Warren when her first reaction is, we've got to pack the court. We've had the same court, this issue of 15 judges packing the court, going back to Roosevelt. Nobody in their right mind ever wanted to do it. We've had nine judges since 1869 for 150 years. And that was a reaction to people packing a court when they lost or gained power. And we said, finally, in 1869, we're going to set it at nine and stop the politicalization. Now we're back to something that used to be considered disgraceful that FDR in 1937 tried to use his huge majority that he won in 36 to pack the court, even as the own Senate and House turned on it.

And yet, and so that was a disgraceful thing in every history of jurisprudence. And now it's something that is laudable. We're talking about, Elizabeth Warren's talking about packing the court. Bernie Sanders too. I'm talking about getting rid of the filibuster. All the norms have to go. We got to get rid of the filibuster and we have to pack the court and we have to add states as you point out we have the same number of states now for about 60 years but that's got to change and then you've got people like lori lightfoot mayor of chicago where we've had 16 children uh under the age of 16 i think it is uh shot dead in the first few months of 2022 okay you got little eight-year-old girls being shot to death as they're just outside playing or hanging out with their moms.

This is what she tweets out. Well, she shouldn't. She should be worrying about the murder rate inside of her city. Instead, she's promising. And I quote the summer of joy. Oh, really? OK, it's not going to be so joyful for the children and their families who are dying. But she's focused on this, Victor, to my friends in the LGBTQ community.

The Supreme Court is coming for us next. This moment has to be a call to arms. She she pushed that out at the same time the U.S. Senate thinks that the Supreme Court is so endangered they they and their family members need 24 hour security. They just passed that through by unanimous consent yesterday. That's how unified the Senate was on the dangers facing the U.S. Supreme Court right now. The House has got to approve it, and so does Joe Biden. But in the meantime, this woman's tweeting out, it's a call to arms, and they're coming for us, people in the LGBTQ community. It's beyond the point of inappropriate.

Yeah, I think when people, officials, have no clue how to deal with an existential crisis, something that's deadly, something that's dangerous, something that endangers the very fabric of our life, whether it's radical inflation or the border or attacks, then they always look for some minor distraction. And they say, we're going to do this and we're going to worry about this and therefore don't look at what I'm not doing. And so that's the projection. But again, we're getting back to this issue, Megan, that in November, I think people are starting to look and they're saying to themselves, there is no don't buy meat anymore. And we don't buy formula. And we don't have a border. It's not that it's porous, it doesn't exist anymore. It's vanished

in the cell. And, you know, when I talked to a person yesterday, he said, Have you ever had a car dealer call you up and try to buy your used car that's like eight years old? And I said, Yes, I have. We used to try to unload them on them. And now they're begging us because they have no new car. So I think there's a sense that everything is falling apart. It's not a political hysteria or talking point. It's a reality. And I think the only thing that I can see is not a 10 or 20 seat pickup on the part of the felt. It's going to have to be historic 50, 60, 70 seats to get send a message. And same with the Senate. Are there anything short of that? I don't see

there's a way to stop this. And it might be, but you, you know, the baby formula thing is a massive story. It's getting undercover, especially when the mainstream, but you know, you're a young mother who cannot feed your baby. And I think it's something like 75% of all babies are at least in part on formula. The vast majority of babies are not breastfed exclusively. You can't find it. You can't find it. They're like giving recipes on how to try to make it at home. I'm sure every new mother's got tons of time for that. And you can't you don't have time to drive, you know, an hour and a half to the other store because you've been you've had limits placed on you and how many you can buy from this store. And the administration is not really addressing it.

Like that's yet another issue that people feel moms, those, you know, coveted suburban moms. Guess who that affects them? I know. And why don't they talk about it? Why don't they just say for this week, we're not going to talk about transgender sports, women's sports. We're just going to talk about getting people baby formula. And maybe next week, we're just going to talk about allowing people to afford a cheap cut of meat that's not $16 a pound. And maybe next week, we're just going to tell people on the board, there's not going to be thousands of people tramping right into your small town. And why don't we just do that? And the answer is, ideology says, no, you can't do that. We're not going to let you do that.

And he doesn't know how. That's something that we don't talk about. He doesn't know how to solve inflation. He doesn't know how to get baby formula here. He doesn't know how to fix the gas prices. He doesn't know how to get your used auto car lot filled up. He doesn't have the answers. No, he doesn't care either. His idea is that that's the deplorable problem. You know what?

That's their problem. I don't care about that. I'm not worried about that. I'm more worried about what the left wing tells me. You know, I don't know who's advising Joe Biden, whether it's Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren. That's kind of a parlor game now, or Bernie Sanders or the Obamas. But these people are the hardest left-wing people we've seen, I think, more so even in 1932-33. It's pretty scary what they have in store for us. When you look at the DA, these Soros DAs, especially in LA and San Francisco out here, they don't believe in the enforcement of law.

Everything is a critical theory, critical race theory, critical legal theory, modern monetary theory. And it all has one thing in common. It's what works and what's practical and what's time tried throughout the ages is racist or it's anti-egalitarian. Therefore, we're going to destroy it and get some abstract thing that is unworkable, but it's anti-egalitarian, therefore we're going to destroy it and get some abstract thing that is unworkable, but it's politically acceptable. And that's dangerous. Well, think about it. Joe Biden was supposed to be the normal, moderate one who's going to bring back norms in moderation to the White House. And Merrick Garland, same. Remember? I mean, he was supposed to be held up as this model of moderation and sanity and reason.

And meanwhile, neither one of those guys can bring themselves to condemn the protests outside of the justices' homes. The doxing of the justices with their home addresses listed online at a time of extraordinary tension and danger for them. Merrick Garland has said nothing. Yes, as you point out earlier, he can condemn the parents who are upset about radical trans ideology being forced on their five year olds, but he cannot condemn the protesters who are coming after the justices. Meanwhile, they're setting off Molotov cocktails at pro-life organizations in places like Madison, Wisconsin. women, I guess it was all women, dressed in the handmaid's tale outfit, you know, with like the red cape, went into a mass undergoing during the mass at a Catholic ceremony. This is outrageous. Just to try to disrupt it as if it's like the, there are a lot of pro-choice Catholics, just ask Nancy Pelosi, trying to blame them for the Supreme Court decision.

And people are saying, just let us worship. Just let us worship. Let us. This is insane. What people are doing. Bombing, disrupting mass protesting outside of the justices homes, yelling, threatening slogans. And Merrick Garland has said absolutely nothing. And in fact, listen to this, Victor, this is Jen Psaki's latest message on where the protests in front of the justices homes have gone. Listen. The administration worried that abortion rights protests may turn violent. I think to be very clear, the the protests outside of judges homes have have not turned violent. And so I know that there's an outrage right now, I guess, about protests that have been peaceful to date. And we certainly continue to encourage that outside of judges' homes.

Really? Do you? disruptions, and we love these protests, and we love this ad hominem attacks. But we have this little line that we call them nonviolent, therefore they're acceptable. But in 2020, we didn't want any law enforcement. We wanted as much violence as we can. $2 billion, 35 police officers killed, excuse me, 35 people killed, 1,500 police police officers injured and that was useful for them and because it created chaos and it showed that donald trump was widely disliked and the country was in a revolutionary spirit we had everybody from hannah nicole jones saying you know this is a 1619 protest and looting property is not really a crime and camilla harris lecturing the country and saying this is going to continue and continue and continue.

Okay, and so violence is not, they feel violence is not good optics right now, but everything up to the point of violence is very valuable, but not violence. 2020 violence was very useful. It suggested that the incumbent president was not in control and widely disliked and we were in an insurrection as they used it. And they have all those CNN people, Chris Cuomo, whoever said that protests should be non-violent, et cetera. So they're not even sincere about their

idea of protests and violence. And they just don't want violence right now. They don't want to go up one more notch because people, no matter what their politics are, when you see people breaking into a mass, as you pointed out, that's going to be 95% of the people are going to be outraged at that. That's right. And so they're trying to control people,

but they want them to continue, but they don't want them to kind of don't go too far. And I guess they have a calibration of what's useful politically and what's not. Well, they better be right about where it's landing right now. We may have as much as a month plus until this decision comes out. By the way, tonight, more protest plans outside of the homes of Chief Justice Roberts, Justices Thomas Barrett, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh. We'll have more on all of that tomorrow. Victor, always a pleasure. Thank you so much for being here.

Don't forget to buy his book, The Dying Citizen. It is wonderful and so educational. Tomorrow on the program, Chris Ruffo is back with us. Boy, he's been busy. We'll talk to him about Jen Psaki saying, oh, they want to pick a war with Mickey Mouse. Really? He was the recipient of all those leaked videos. What does he think

about where that fight has gone? We'll talk to him about that and what he's working on right now. In the meantime, download The Megyn Kelly Show on Apple, Pandora, Spotify, and Stitcher. Also, go to youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly

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