The Megyn Kelly Show - Big Tech Turns Against Free Speech and Fighting the COVID Ruling Class, with David Sacks | Ep. 257

Episode Date: February 8, 2022

David Sacks, founder of Craft Ventures and co-host of the "All In" podcast and co-founder of the Call In app, to talk about the response to conservatives in Silicon Valley, Big Tech turning on free speech, crime in San Francisco and throughout the country, Sacks' fight against San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin and who his parents are, the rise of drug use in America, backlash to zero bail policies, Stacey Abrams mask hypocrisy and COVID absurdity, Dr. Fauci being compromised when it comes to gain-of-function research, the coordinated push to censor Joe Rogan, U.S. interests in the Russia-Ukraine dispute, Canadian truckers and others fighting back against the ruling class, American attitudes toward China's human rights violations, 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. Today we have a fascinating guest for you who will be joining us for the full show. David Sachs is a successful entrepreneur, a venture capitalist who runs Kraft Ventures, and a co-host of the popular tech podcast All In. He's a member of the so-called PayPal Mafia. That's a group of men who founded PayPal and went on to build very successful tech companies after that. Other members of the mafia include Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and others. And he's been called, our guest today,

California Governor Gavin Newsom's loudest critic in Silicon Valley. He's also now setting his sights on San Francisco's far-left radical district attorney, Chesa Boudin. David, so great to have you here. Thank you for coming on. Great to be here. Thanks for having me. Okay. So just help us a little bit with your background because, I mean, I think everybody knows about PayPal and they've heard certainly the name Elon Musk, I'm sure. But how did you guys get connected and how old were you? And how did this sort of powerhouse of guys come together to create a company that would then launch careers that would be epic in the tech industry? Well, I had gone to college with Peter Thiel. We had both graduated from Stanford. We had actually

been on the sort of conservative leading student newspaper, the Stanford Review. We'd both been editors of that. And so Peter recruited me to join PayPal at a very early stage. I ended up becoming CEO of the company. Okay. And when you first started it, did you know it was going to be a blockbuster or was it like, oh, we'll give it a shot? You never really know. I mean, I thought it was a great idea, this idea that we could email money. I thought that was sort of a killer idea and we sort of focused on building a great product to do that. So I always, on a certain level, I believed that it would be big, but at the same time, did I know that it would be big, but at the same time, you never, I didn't, did I know that it would be a, whatever, $200 billion public company today? No, I didn't. I couldn't

expect that. You guys were both, you were at Stanford together and what was it like being, I guess, what was that late eighties, early nineties ish? Yeah. Early nineties. Yeah. It was a, it was sort of a time on campus when there were a lot of these sort of controversies. This was the beginning of the culture wars, really, when at Stanford in the late 80s, you had a protest in which the crowd chanted, hey, ho, ho, Western culture's got to go. And they then proceeded to change the curriculum and the canon. This is when they threw out all the so-called dead white males and sort of, there was really a revolution on campus. And in a way, everything that's happening, I think, in our politics and culture today is downstream of the change that we saw, you know, 30 years ago on these college campuses. So was it, it wasn't as unusual back then on a college like, on a college campus like Stanford's for you to be a conservative, or did you know that Or did you feel like an outlier even back then? Oh, we definitely felt like outliers. It wasn't called woke back then. It was called political correctness. But there was definitely the strong degree of trying to sort of ideologize students and push this agenda. And if you resisted it in any way, you were definitely considered a rebel.

Now, in the tech industry, has it been the same? On college campuses, agenda. And if you resisted it in any way, you were definitely considered a rebel. Now, in the tech industry, has it been the same? On college campuses, most kids don't feel comfortable saying that they're a Republican, or that, God forbid, that they supported Trump. Is it the same in tech? Basically. I mean, tech is not first and foremost concerned with ideology the way that, say, college professors are. But there's definitely a sort of a political bubble in tech. There's a monoculture. And I think that most people in tech would self-identify as liberal and Democrat. And it'd be pretty unusual to find somebody who doesn't or willing to admit that that's the case. Now, my audience has heard this story from me, but I'll tell it to you.

A few years ago, I published my book and Sheryl Sandberg, who's a friend of mine, threw me a book party. So I flew out there and I went to her house and it was like a who's who in your industry of tech people. I mean, I barely knew most of the people because it's not my thing.

But when she started listing the companies, I was like, oh, wow, Sheryl, this is a very nice party. Thank you. So this is right after I had clashed with Trump and that presidential debate and so on. So most of the people there are just assuming I hate Trump, which I never hated Trump. I was irritated when he kept coming after me, but I never hated Trump. And I, of course, had worked at Fox News and understood how the right half of the country felt, too. So the long and the short of it is person after person would come up to me and they'd shake my hand and they'd say, oh, you know, I love you. I love you. I hate Trump. And you know, we, we kicked Peter Thiel out of Silicon Valley for supporting him. He's done. He doesn't get invited to any parties now.

And I'm thinking, oh, wow. And then the other half of the group would come up to me quietly and be like, Trump, 20, 2016, go MAGA, right? Like, great job on the debate and great job in covering the race. And you know, is he going to win? Can he win? Don't tell anybody I'm a Republican. Don't tell anybody I'm a conservative. By the end of the night, I wound up laughing. And I really wanted to go to the few people who were willing to confess that they were Republicans and say, you need to talk to that man in the blue, that woman in the yellow, that guy with the red tie, because you are not alone. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, Peter was almost thrown off the board of Facebook for supporting Trump in 2016. I don't know if you remember, but Reed Hastings, who is the founder of

Netflix, who was also on the board of Facebook, really launched a broadside against Peter. And to Zuckerberg's credit, he didn't kick Peter off the board back then. I saw the news that Peter just left a few days ago. But yeah, absolutely. Peter was a total outlier in Silicon Valley in supporting Trump and the Republican Party more generally. Do you think it's, I was going to say, has it softened at all? Because the economy did pretty well under Trump, but then came January 6th. No, I don't think it softened at all.

In fact, I think the opposite happened, which is to say that Silicon Valley turned its back on a lot of the principles that it was founded with in terms of a free and open internet because of Trump. lot of the principles that it was founded with in terms of a free and open internet. Because of Trump, if you go back 10 years, say to roughly 2010, you had the CEO of Twitter then declare that we're the free speech wing or the free speech party. Around that time when you had the Green Revolution and the Arab Spring, Twitter and Facebook and the employees there were sort of giddy at the social change they were bringing about. The people were sending these populist messages to their leaders, and

Silicon Valley was very proud of that. You fast forward 10 years, and almost nobody in Silicon Valley really believes in unfettered free speech anymore. And they believe in the sort of so-called content moderation and sort of policing language. And the turning point really was 2016. You know, the American people sent a message to the establishment that big tech didn't want to hear. That was a little bit too much populism and democracy for them. And so they really changed their view on free speech. And Trump was sort of the pivot point for that. You know, to me, it's sad. I look at I speak at Stanford usually once a year and I look out at these minds and it's like these are our best and brightest.

And it excites me, the intellectual firepower. Right. It's just thrilling to sort of see how their minds work and where they could take the country. And then you get to the, you know, anything that is non-woke, right? Like I say, words are not violence, right? And the look, the recoiling, you know, the shock and horror at such a crazy statement then depresses me. And I think, how can it be that these intellectual would-be giants are so pathetically weak when it comes to words that might upset them. And I don't mean to pick on Stanford because they're probably better than most schools in many ways, but the people who lead this charge to silence people on the other side ideologically seem incredibly weak

to me. Well, absolutely. I mean, the reason ultimately you would censor somebody is because you're afraid of having an honest discussion and an honest debate. And if you feel like you can win that debate, why would you be afraid to have it? But I do think these views have become incredibly common. And I think it's what the democratic political scientist Roy Tushara calls the professional class hegemony of the democratic party and our institutions, where you've got this professional class hegemony of the Democratic Party and our institutions, where you've got this professional class whose values are completely at odds with their self-conception. I mean, they think that they are incredibly tolerant. Actually, they're incredibly intolerant. They think they're diverse. Actually, they're incredibly conformist. They are more interested

in stifling and shutting down dissenting voices than they are in having an honest debate. Including kicking President Trump off of Twitter and Facebook while he was still the sitting they get from certain lawsuits, Section 230, and sort of let people have at them. A lot of conservatives feel very strongly that we need to change the law to make them have more skin in the game so that they stop the viewpoint discrimination. I'd love to get your take on it, on 230, and what the answer is in terms of stopping the ideological stifling that they do. Well, I agree with the spirit behind the suggestion of amending Section 230, which is that the law basically gives immunity to these tech companies. They treat them as distributors

of content rather than publishers, even though they're engaging in editorial judgments that publishers would in deciding who to censor and who not to. So I understand the frustration there. What I'm afraid of is that if you just ended Section 230 altogether, the problem would actually get worse because Section 230 is a liability shield. And if you take away that protection, simple corporate risk aversion is going to cause these large corporations to want to censor even more. They're going to take down any speech at all that could lead to a lawsuit that could be sort of problematic for them. So I would rather amend Section 230 than end it. And I think the way you mend it is what you said, is I think these big, powerful tech companies

should not be able to engage in viewpoint discrimination. They should be considered common carriers. And if they want that liability shield, they should have to treat everybody fairly, which is to say they should be a common carrier of different views. See, I love that. And do you know Vivek Ramaswamy? Because he had a great piece in the Wall Street Journal, I don't know, was that a year ago? I don't know, last summer. And he argued that what we really just need is a declaration by a court that says, effectively, they are. Effectively, they're so controlled, they're so big, and they also respond to carrots and sticks from the

federal government in a unique way, that we can treat them as a government entity and subject them to First Amendment protections, which would prohibit viewpoint discrimination, and we wouldn't have to touch 230, and you could leave that immunity in place. I don't know whether the courts will do it or whether we need to do it legislatively somehow, you know, to sort of get them declared a common carrier. Do you have any thoughts on that? I think we probably have to do it legislatively. I mean, the big problem here is that the First Amendment essentially got privatized. You know, in the old days, when the First Amendment was written, you had a multiplicity of town squares all over the country.

It was typically on public land. Anybody could go grab their soapbox, put it on the courthouse steps, draw a crowd and speak, and anyone who wanted to could listen. That's where people assembled back then. Today, where do people assemble? They assemble in these giant social networks that have huge network effects. That is where people assembled back then. Today, where do people assemble? They assemble in these giant social networks that have huge network effects. That is where people gather. And that is where political speech, especially political speech, occurs.

The problem is that that sort of digital town square is controlled by a handful of big tech companies and sort of oligarchs. And so the town square has essentially been digitized, centralized, and privatized in the hands of a handful of actors. And because the First Amendment only applies to Congress and to government, it creates this giant loophole in our First Amendment rights, our rights to free expression. I think that loophole needs to be closed. Our right to free speech needs to be extended to cyberspace. And the crazy thing is what you hear from so many people in Silicon Valley and elsewhere in the media is they suddenly become very libertarian when it comes to imposing any regulation to restore our free speech rights. They say these are private companies who should be able to do whatever they want.

Well, that's not a position that they're taking on the six bills working their way through Congress right now to regulate antitrust for these companies. We all understand these are giant companies with, again, huge network effects. They're basically monopolies. We're willing to regulate them in other contexts. But when it comes to speech, suddenly, oh, no, we can't. Private companies should be able to do whatever they want. And the problem, I think people realize on the right that it's annoying that it's mostly

conservative thought that gets stifled by these big platforms. But it's so much more pernicious than that. And I really want Democrats to hear the case, which is and I've seen it in your writings. The more you stifle these opposing points of view and you think it's, you know, you wouldn't necessarily call it censorship. You would call it sort of fact checking. You would call it responsible messaging, however you want to phrase your crackdowns on the Joe Rogans of the world and the YouTube clips you don't like and whatever groups you see on Reddit that upset you. The truth is, the more you stifle this kind of speech, the more pernicious it gets, the more widespread, the worse the sourcing that these people will turn to, the more

conspiratorial they will get. It does not help society in the way the left thinks it does. Well, and we've totally seen this with COVID and vaccine mandates. I mean, you've seen so much censorship over the past two years of censoring, you know, so-called misinformation. That misinformation then becomes, it turns out to be true. You had the lab leak theory. You had, you know, first it was DNG misinformation. Now it's become sort of the prevailing theory. You had cloth masks. Dan Bongino was kicked off YouTube for basically saying cloth masks don't work. Two weeks later, the CDC comes out saying the same thing.

So we've seen over and over again that what starts as misinformation ends up being recognized as the truth. And I think this is why, with respect to vaccines, you had these so-called anti-vaxxers or vaccine skeptics. I don't think that they were opposed to the science of vaccines. At least they weren't pre-COVID. What they really are is media skeptics. They think the media has got an agenda. And if the media is trying to push something on them, they're going to second guess it. And if you don't allow them to have the conversation, if you don't allow them to ask the questions and explore the debate, then for sure, they're going to think you're trying to pull one over on them. And so I think this whole idea of

censorship has totally backfired around the vaccine. And what they should have done was allow an honest debate around vaccines. And I think you would have gotten more buy-in from the part of the country that distrusts the media. Why don't you and Peter Thiel just create a competitor to Facebook or the Amazons of the world? Why isn't there a huge, I realize we have Rumble and whatever, where is that huge platform that is built by conservatives who are more committed to the free and open exchange of ideas, good ones, bad ones, offensive ones, all of them? Well, I mean, it's hard to create an alternative because there are strong monopoly effects behind these companies, whether they're economies of scale, like with Amazon, or there's a developer

network effect, like with Apple or Google, or there's sort of giant user network effects like a Facebook or Twitter. So it's very hard to displace these networks, but I am trying. I do have a platform I've created called Call-In, which is an app that basically is Talk Radio 2.0. Anybody can go in the app, create their own podcast, and you can take questions live from callers. It's basically like talk radio packaged inside of an app. And I think we've done a really good job attracting the Substack crowd. You've got Glenn Greenwald over there, right? And Matt, too. Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Antonio Garcia-Martinez, Michael Tracy, Aaron Matei,

Brianna Joy Gray, a lot of great people who you've had on your show are all doing shows on call-ins. So yeah, we're trying. We're trying. You've got to go bigger and better. There's got to be a place, right? Because it's sort of like we need a Fox News of tech where Roger Ailes saw an opportunity, Rupert Murdoch saw an opportunity for humans to say it's like picking money up off the

street. You know, just tell the other side. Just expose other angles to the story that the mainstream won't do. And of course, Rupert Murdoch is a, I don't know what he's worth, $100 billion. I have no idea. Some huge number. And you, I realize money's probably not your main incentive, but that's okay. Your ideological incentive to America, right? To free speech. That's probably more powerful. Well, so we're trying and, you know, look, I think you've got Substack for independent journalism.

You have Rumbles creating a video alternative to YouTube. We're creating sort of a podcasting, a new podcasting platform. So these alternatives are getting started and I think they're gaining momentum and it takes time to build them up. And, you know, it really wasn't until the last couple of years that we realized how opposed to free speech these giant big tech companies are. And so I think the movement is getting started and, you know, I think it's building. You know, in that way, I just had a conversation with a friend of mine and she's losing friends over COVID. She wants the masks off. She's not, she's vaxxed and boosted and her kids are vaxxed, too. But she doesn't like the mandates. And she's losing friends left and right. You know, she's a liberal in New York City, or at least was a liberal. And I feel like, you know, what I said to her is what I'm feeling about our country right now, which is,

were they really friends? If they mean if they don't want to be with you because of this, it's like you're better off now. You know who they are, that they don't want to be with you because of this, it's like you're better off. Now you know who they are, that they prioritize their own weird ideology over human connections and the love that you've built over 25 years of friendship, whatever it is. And I kind of feel like in a way, Trump helped us do that with big tech. He brought out their most censorious instincts. He helped us do that with the media. He brought out their worst bias and exposed them for who they are. And now we have to wrestle with, OK, it's sad we have this problem, but let's get solutions based because there's no point wallowing.

Yeah, I mean, I think Trump is an interesting figure in American politics who created, I think, a huge amount of realignment. My friend Keith Raboy, who's a VC, has this motto about founders. He says, disruptive companies are created by disruptive people. You frequently have this founder type who spots a market opportunity. They can see that so clearly where nobody else does, and yet they can be incredibly weak in other areas. They can not communicate in a very polished way or unnecessarily upset people, or they can just be operationally not very good. They're not necessarily very good at running these companies, and yet they see the opportunity where nobody else does. And I think Trump was a little

bit like that founder personality, incredibly disruptive to American politics, but created this huge realignment where I think in the wake of Trump, really, the Democratic Party has been revealed as this professional class hegemony, whereas I think the Republican Party is in the process of transforming to being a working class party, the non-college party, and the more populist party. And I think we're going to be seeing the effects of that for many years. Oh, yeah. I mean, I definitely want to get into politics with you because I know you've made some predictions about November and they're interesting. But up next, let's get into crime because you've been very outspoken about what's happening in your town, San Francisco, about this lunatic D.A. Chesa Boudin, the son of two terrorists. And you're pushing the recall effort on him as well as the school board out there, which has done nothing for the kids. They're too busy renaming schools because they find the George Washington name on some of them offensive.

We'll pick it up there and we'll get into some of the other censorship around Joe Rogan and so on in just one minute. Let's talk about crime in your hometown, San Francisco, and the mess that it is. We're having the same situation here in New York, so I can relate fully. But there was a really good piece by, I don't know if you saw, Michael Schellenberger on Barry Weiss's Substack, writing about the mess in San Francisco. I'm trying to find all my papers. But he was talking about how bad crime is, how there's basically, okay, here it is. There's basically open drug use, people shooting up. He writes about how London Breed, when she went off on the, quote, bullshit destroying our city, the mayor, he said, I naively believed her. But it's not getting better. It's gotten worse every

day since she said that. And he talks about this supervised drug consumption site at U.N. Plaza, just blocks away from City Hall and the Opera House. And he talks about how, and he's not against legalized drugs. I mean, Michael Schellenberger did a whole book called San Francisco, but he talked about Portugal decriminalizing drug use and how he thought that had worked, the Netherlands with these drug consumption rooms, and it was working. But both of those condemn hard drug use and intervene when the addicts break the law in San Francisco. Totally different story. People are smoking fentanyl and meth that they buy from dealers right across the street. And now the taxpayers there are basically paying for these addictions. They're paying for these folks, hot meals and shelter in exchange, he says, for nothing, nothing. Even though the mayor has said, oh, we're going to use this to get people into treatment. Apparently in the 19 days, the site has been open. Just two people went to detox so far and they're serving 220

a day. So your thoughts on what's happening in your hometown and why? Sure. Well, twice as many people have died from fentanyl overdoses over the last two years than COVID. So, I mean, this is a huge problem in San Francisco, and it's just one part of the problem. Like you said, Chase Boudin came in at the beginning of 2020. He is committed to this platform of decarceration, which is basically, he believes there's too many people in prison in the United States, and his goal is to reduce the prison population as much as possible. I think it is true that it is sad that anybody has to go to prison. But in that sense, sure,

the prisons are, there's too many people in prison. We don't want to send anyone to prison. But he has this radical philosophy of deprosecution, of trying to let out as many criminals as possible. And so from the day he took over, first of all, he fired all the veteran prosecutors in that office. He replaced them with staff from the public defender's office. He then emptied out the jail. He used COVID as the excuse to do that. And he announced that he would stop prosecuting so-called quality of life crimes, which are things like theft, shoplifting, car break-ins, things like that. And since then, it's only gotten worse. There's no prosecution of drug offenses. And look, nobody is saying, I don't think Schellenberger is saying that you prosecute people for doing things like using drugs in their home. But we have on the streets, people

committing crimes every day to support their habit, and there's no punishment whatsoever. So there's no incentive for anyone to go into treatment when you're not willing to basically use punishment. And as a result, the problem just keeps metastasizing. Mm hmm. I cannot believe he was elected as D.A. I understand San Francisco's left, but that that's like out of your mind to elect a guy like that to be your chief law enforcement officer, basically for your city. This result was totally predictable. He did run on a platform of decarceration. And I understand that could make a bleeding heart liberal cry and say, yes, we've been so bad to the poor prisoners. But it was identifiable that

this is not just a liberal. This is a radical guy. And this leads me to David, my own experience with his family. One of the viewers wrote in recently asking what my favorite interview was that I've ever done. And I've said the same for years. It was of Bill Ayers, who is a domestic terrorist, one of the founders of the Weather Underground, a group that was bombing the country during the Vietnam War, ostensibly in protest of Vietnam and the war. But they hurt a lot of people and they damaged a lot of buildings that we hold up in high esteem, like the U.S. Capitol. And he came in the news when Barack Obama ran for president because they were friends in Chicago. But he is a problematic figure in our country's history. And so is his wife, Bernadine Dorn, who with him

raised Chesa Boudin. So is it Chesa or is it Chesa? Chesa is what I call him. Chesa Boudin. All right, whatever. Okay. We don't really care. So he was born to two other people. Their names are David Gilbert and Kathy Boudin. They couldn't raise Chesa Chesa because they were in prison for his entire life from the time he was 14 months on because they were part of this weather underground. And they participated in a Brinks robbery, robbery of an armed robbery of a Brinks truck trying to get one point six million dollars. They got caught. Two cops were killed, along with a security guard. That's his parents. So they both go to jail. So does he go into the hands of some loving aunts and uncles? No, he does not. He goes into the hands of Bill

Ayers and his wife, who are probably even more radical, Bernadine Dorn. That's Bill's wife, Bernadine. And forgive me, I'm going to take a little walk down memory lane. I think you'll find it interesting. But I got, as far as I know, the only extensive long form interview with Bill Ayers that he's done with a person in television. And it was extraordinary. And the whole thing ran over an hour. We did a big special on it in the prime time of Fox. I've boiled the following clip down to about three minutes or so. It's well worth listening to. And I'm going to play a little bit so people can understand. This is the man who raised Chesa Boudin from 14 months on. And you'll hear him talk about himself, his group and his wife, Chesa's effective adoptive mother. Listen. How many bombings are you responsible for? Weather Underground, I think, took credit for just slightly over 20 in a period when there were 20,000 bombings in the United States against the war. And how about you personally? Might be personally. I've never talked about it, never will.

Bernadine Dorn was not a fan of the police and referred to them typically as pigs. Last night we destroyed the pig again. It's two and a half weeks since Fred Hampton was murdered by the pigs who own this city. Well, that was, again, the inflated rhetoric of the time. That sort of rhetoric is what sort of catches people's attention when she's calling them pigs and celebrating bad things happening to the police at the same time one gets murdered.

It's true that the rhetoric was inflated. It's also true, you take a situation like Chicago today, the police are a violent, out-of-control enterprise. But I think it would be fair and balanced to also look at the violence that was and is going on, perpetrated by the government, by the official agencies and organs of the government. Let me just tell you what I hear when I hear that.

I hear you saying, you sound like, with respect, Osama bin Laden. But you understand, Professor, is that what began for your group as outrage over mass killings and turned into a plan to kill hundreds of Americans, did you not cede the moral high ground? Oh, absolutely.

You don't sound remorseful. But you want me to be remorseful for something I didn't do rather than for the things I did do. This is your group, Professor Ayers. No. This isn't some... No, that's not true. Yes, it is.

That's not true. It is true. This is the weather underground that was going to bomb military officers. That's right. And we criticized it then and now. And we said it's wrong. It was wrong. It is true. This is the weather underground that was going to bomb military officers. That's right. And we criticized it then and now. And we said it's wrong. It was wrong. It is wrong. Professor, the only reason it didn't happen, the only reason it didn't happen is because the bomb blew up on those who were making it. And while and when it blew up, your girlfriend, Diana Otten, was killed. That's right. And you later described her death as valiant.

While underground underground you stole you lied you hid right any disagreement you stole onward yes yeah you did you wrote about it in your book we stole id you stole you stole purses you stole wallets yeah stole money some you still you ripped off dead babies identities right. Right. And yet, the violence continued. Just because you went underground didn't mean the violence stopped. What violence? March 1st, 1971, you bombed the U.S. Capitol. May 19th, 1972, you bombed the Pentagon. January 29th, 1975, you bombed the State Department.

That's what I mean by violence. In 1980, you and Bernadine Dorn resurfaced. And when she turned herself in, Bernadine Dorn promised to spend her energy organizing to defeat the American empire. And within a year of that, October 20th, 1981, was a triple homicide. Kathy Boudin learned some of her very criminal tactics while she was with her Weather Underground. She was in the townhouse that exploded when that bomb went off, wasn't she? You adopted her child. She's a wonderful person. Your wife, Bernadine Dorn, was asked to cooperate in that investigation. That's right.

She refused. Absolutely. She spent seven months in jail because she refused to help the police in their investigation. Well, she refused to speak to a grand jury. That's quite different. Why would she do that? Nine children lost their fathers that day. I agree with you.

Why didn't your wife help? Grand juries are a terrible overreach of the U.S. government. She said about the Charles Manson murders of a pregnant woman and six others, quote, offing those rich pigs with their own forks and knives and then eating a meal in the same room far out. The weathermen dig Charles Manson. This is your sweetheart? No, no, no. This is your soulmate? Your wife miraculously got a job teaching law or teaching at Northwestern University Law School. And very successfully, absolutely. Which is amazing. They must be offering classes in what you can learn from your future clients, but are you surprised

that you got those job offers, you and she? Not really. She was on the FBI's 10 most wanted list. I know. So was Angela Davis. And, you know, a lot of great people have been on that list. But but what would it take to make you bomb this country again? I can't completely say no. I would never, ever rise up in opposition in a very militant and serious way. I can't say I wouldn't. I doubt it. Unreal. That was some great reporting. Thank you. That's your D.A.'s adoptive father. And you heard heard stories about his adoptive mother, Bernadine Dorn in there, and stories about his biological mother, Kathy Boudin, and on and on by something like 2,000 votes in a ranked choice voting election. So I don't think that most people were paying attention. I don't think they knew the significance that this election would have for the city. And this is why there's

a recall underway right now. And the people of San Francisco are going to vote in June to recall Udine. I think that recall is likely to succeed. Even though San Francisco is a nine to one Democrat city to Republican, I think that even for most liberals in San Francisco, he has gone way too far. And you basically heard, you know, the Bill Ayers agenda. I think the comparison to Bin Laden was a good one in the sense that he seems to be fighting a jihad against the American system, and he's completely oblivious to the innocent deaths that Ayers is, to the deaths that he and his movement have caused. And in a similar way, that is true of Boudin as well. He is responsible for releasing repeat offenders who've gone on to kill dozens of innocent victims in San Francisco.

You had the case of Zion Young arrested on 11 gun charges. Boudin pleads him down to a misdemeanor, releases him. And a few weeks later, he kills Kelvin Chu. And there's many, many cases like this. I mean, I started creating a list of innocent San Franciscans who'd been killed as a direct result of Boudin releasing a repeat offender. And I had to stop because there's so many. Troy McAllister. Absolutely. And that was the case that really brought this to my attention that you had two women killed on New Year's Eve 2020, Hannah Abe and Elizabeth Platt, they were killed by Troy McAllister. He was driving a car

under the influence, a stolen car under the influence, fleeing some other crime. It's a hit and run. He kills them. He had been arrested. First of all, he was a third strike offender who is going to spend potentially the rest of his life in jail. Boudin, his former lawyer as a public defender, then takes over as the DA of San Francisco and pleads him down to time served. This is about six months before he kills these two women. He's then arrested five more times after his release. And in every single case, Boudin releases him without charges. These were crimes like stealing cars, burglaries, drug offenses, until finally the inevitable happens, which is he kills two people. That was the thing that really brought this to my attention. And when I looked into it,

what I discovered is this wasn't some isolated accident. This wasn't even a case of negligence by the DA. This is a result of a deliberate policy, a deliberate agenda of decarceration and deprosecution to release as many offenders as possible into society, regardless of the impact on innocent people. And the one thing I want to add to it is that although Boudin is probably the most extreme case of the sort of decarceral DAs in the sense that I think is deeply psychological for him. I mean, this has been bred into him. I mean, he is on some sort of mission, but he's not the only one. We now have Gascon in LA imposing the same agenda. You've got, like you mentioned, you had Alvin Bragg in New York, although I think Bragg recently walked back some of his changes.

I think his sense of- Very slightly though. Slightly, yeah. I think he's got a slightly better sense of self-preservation than Boudin or Gascon does. But look, you've got these DAs who've been backed by people like Soros and Reed Hastings of Netflix and a lot of liberal organizations more generally. And they are really foisting this agenda of decarceration and deprosecution and defunding the police. It's all related on America. I mean, the crazy thing is they are more interested in policing our language than policing our

streets. They're more interested in protecting people's psychological safety than their physical safety. And this is why you're seeing a crime wave across America right now. As if one is not related to the other, right? How is your psychological safety when there are murders in the street, when you can't cross the street without getting hit by one of the drunk drivers that he's let out without parole, without bail? That's his big thing. No bail, just like we're seeing in all these Soros-funded DA cities. This guy, his mother, his biological mother and father killed two cops and a security guard. She now teaches at Columbia University. The dad just got out under Andrew Cuomo, one of his final acts in office, to grant the guy clemency. He just got let out

last October. And his adoptive parents spent years bombing the home in which a nine, a little nine-year-old boy was present, um, and bombing police precincts. Bill Ayers tried to deny that to me in his interview, but he had confessed it in his book, which was one of my favorite moments in the interview. I really encourage everybody to go look at it, um, on YouTube because it's, it's an interesting window into that period of time, what we were allowing. But it's in his DNA, this sort of life of crime, this disrespect for police, this hatred of police, the very people he's supposed to be working with to stop crime as the DA. And now I read there's a real schism between Boudin and the cops in San Francisco.

That's right. Well, the cops recently announced that they would stop letting the DA's office be responsible for investigations of police misconduct because they don't trust him. And the only targets that Boudin seems interested in prosecuting are police or employers like DoorDash because he believes they're mistreating their employees. It's the only cases he's shown any interest in prosecuting. Just to take an example, we had these Louis Vuitton smash and grab brazen robberies. And the shell game that Boudin plays is to announce charges, but then there's no follow through.

And so we get a press conference around the Louis Vuitton. He said that, you know, don't bring this noise from out of town to our city as if noise is his term for crime, as if these criminal gangs aren't from San Francisco. They actually have long rap sheets from being in San Francisco. And so he announces that felony charges are forthcoming. The police actually make arrests. And then when the cameras aren't rolling, well, first of all, they, they let them out on zero bail. They plead the charges, they plead the charges down to misdemeanors. And then they've already arrested two of the offenders in the Louis Vuitton burglaries on other crimes involving guns. And so this is the shell game is he makes a big deal out of announcing charges, but then nobody, there's no consequences, actually. There's no convictions,

there's no punishment. And as the criminals know this, and this is why, I mean, effectively, Boudin has hung a sign at the city limits saying, you know, burglars welcome. Yeah. Victims here. Victims here. Criminals welcome. We're going to pick it back up. There's more to discuss on him and on San Francisco, but also these other cities like New York, which just had stunning new numbers released by the NYPD on crime. How's it going here with our soft on crime DA? All these things are canaries in the coal mine. If you live in a city that's elected one of these DAs, pay attention because this is coming your way. More with David Sachs in one second. And don't forget, folks, you can find the Megyn Kelly show live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon east and the full video show and clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly. You should definitely go today because you can see that piece we just put together.

If you don't have the full hour to watch the old Bill Ayers on Fox News with me, you can watch the four-minute version we air today. Our thanks to Fox News for that. If you prefer an audio podcast, you can subscribe and download on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts for free. You can check out our archives, more than 255 shows. On this subject of Chesa, just to, because I want to close this out, what he is promising as he empties the jails is new solutions and alternatives.

But you've written in a piece, but really all we've seen so far is a move to empty the jails with absolutely no plan for the aftermath. He says he's going to create an algorithm for determining the risk to public safety posed by an arrested suspect before granting their release in terms of no bail. You know, he's not just going to throw him out.

He's going to use an algorithm. Is any of that happening? No, no. I mean, Chase's algorithm is that basically you go free unless there's enough sufficiently large public outcry about keeping a defendant in jail. And that's basically the algorithm. I mean, he and Gascon and Alvin Bragg and all these sort of progressive prosecutors, they have set the zero bail policy across the country, even though voters in

California rejected it pretty handily in a ballot initiative in November 2020. So this is very unpopular with the voters, even in a deep blue state. Democrats are very concerned. Regular Democratic voters are very concerned about this crime wave and these policies. It's only these sort of ivory tower intellectuals who can justify this. Chesa praised Hugo Chavez. He worked as a translator in Venezuela. He brags about having visited prisons in Chile and Bolivia. He said that he spent his childhood visiting prisons, and those are his earliest memories. Delightful. Said, I was immersed in the world of leftist politics and groomed to be an overachiever.

He went to Yale. He was a Rhodes Scholar, went to Yale Law. I lived, he says, in parallel worlds. My family taught me radical politics from the beginning, but I also learned to prove myself in elite institutions. In response to his David, all I could think was, hello, those are not parallel. They are the same. Leftist radical politics and elite educational institutions are one in the same.

That is that is who runs our elite institutions. That's exactly right. That's why he has three of his four criminal parents are at universities. His wife, who shot two cops, was involved in the killing of two cops and a security guard at Columbia. His adopted mom, Northwestern Law School. Bill Ayers is, I think, University of Illinois. And who knows what his biological dad will do? He's probably going to wind up at Harvard.

He just got out in October. So we'll see. It's amazing. And maybe one of the craziest things he's ever said is that all these policies, the deprosecution, basically the decriminalization of theft and drug use and all of these other crimes, the emptying out of the jails, he claimed it would make us safer. Now, I can understand if he were to claim that, okay, or make the argument, well, this is a more just policy, but to claim that, I wouldn't agree with it, but I could understand him making that argument, but to claim somehow that these policies would make us safer.

And then I saw that Alvin Bragg, when he announced on his first day that he was going to stop prosecuting all sorts of serious crimes, he also said, this is going to make us safer. So how does any of this make us safer? Yeah, no, it doesn't. And then when confronted with all these people who you said would make us safer if you let them out with no bail, even though they committed terrible crimes, are re-offending and they're murdering people and they're hurting people. And you pointed out in a piece you posted, it's a Medium article, that Chess's response was to refer to the serial reoffenders as, quote, prolific folks. You write, as if they were akin to writers or painters working assiduously at their craft.

They've been prolific, as if he's proud, which he probably is. He cannot bring himself to name who they are and what they're doing. This is why he refers to crime as noise. He refers to serial repeat offenders as just prolific folks. I mean, it's basically, it's misdirection. And I mean, look, he is what he has always been at heart, a public defender. And there is a role for that person, the public defender in our system to defend criminals. But when you put that person in charge of prosecution, it's a disaster. And, you know, look, he's the most extreme case, but there's now

examples of this all over the country. And I think until voters get serious about voting these people out, about recognizing the threat they pose, this crime wave in America is going to continue. Well, that's right. So that brings me to New York, where we're dealing with the same thing. Now, granted, I don't know about Alvin Bragg, because he was forced by the New Yorkers to roll back a couple of policies, only a little bit, though, let's be honest, most of them stand. But the NYPD released the following stats on Monday. Crime is up 60 percent compared to the same week last year, despite frigid temperatures here in New York. The cops are saying it's only going to get worse as it warms up. Car thefts up 116 percent. 255 this over the last week is 118 a year earlier. Grand larceny up 93 percent. Nine hundred and eight cases was 470 a year ago. Reported rapes up 67 percent. Thirty five versus 21 a year ago. Transit crimes up 89 percent. Thirty four versus 19 a year ago. And on and on it goes. This doesn't even touch on

murders. Murders of cops. And I where we're going to take it next is your prediction that this stuff will come back. It will come back to haunt not just these guys, but the Democrats at the ballot box. Give your prediction. We'll take a break and then we'll dissect it. Oh, I mean, my prediction for November is a political earthquake. It's a tsunami. I, you know, Because these issues resonate with not just Republicans, but also Democrats and independents. I mean, I'll note that in New York, Eric Adams won as an underdog with this tough on crime message. Whether he actually delivers on that remains to be seen, but there's no question that he won with that message, including in

areas, minority areas, minority communities are very receptive to that message. The working class of the country does not want this crime in their communities. And they suffer the most. That's where these policies have their greatest impact because people like Reed Hastings live in gated communities behind high walls. They can afford private security. It is poor and disadvantaged communities that suffer the most. And this is why we're seeing a huge swing to the Republican Party. And we saw it. We saw it this past November. We're going to see more of it. I'll pick it up there and we'll talk about more hypocrisy that we've seen on the left. Stacey Abrams smiling in front of a room full of masked children has infuriated folks. We'll be right back.

So, David, let's talk a bit about COVID and what we're seeing now. You're one of the sensible people on this issue, as far as I can tell. And in the news this week is more hypocrisy. Of course, last week, the story was Gavin Newsom sitting at that football game where the indoor mask mandate was his creation, and yet he wouldn't obey it. And then when caught, he lied and said he only took off the mask because Magic Johnson asked him for a photo, but he had it on at every other moment. That was a lie. He had it off before. As he approached Magic Johnson, he had it off and he was just sitting in a seat next to Tom Hanks. He barely wore it. Okay. Then there's Gil Garcetti. Yeah, it was Gil Garcetti, right? Eric Garcetti, yeah.

Oh, sorry. Yeah. Eric Garcetti from LA who said, I held my breath when I took my mask off. I did not exhale. Right. I did not exhale. That's good. This photo is going to come back to haunt her and other Democrats over and over and over again. How stupid is her campaign? I mean, they put this out there as though we are going to celebrate this politician sitting in front of the littles, every single child masked and she has nothing on her face. And then when it immediately had a negative reaction on Twitter from people on the left and the right, her attempt to handle it was by saying it's the Republicans are launching, quote, a false political attack on me. Her explanation for the photo was I posed for the pictures on the condition that everyone else mask up. Hello, Stacey. Not helping. And then she said I had to remove my mask to speak to the students so they could hear me. Right. We get it. We have children. Guess who they need to hear even more than you, Stacey?

Their teachers, their classmates, you know, like, as if the rule of the rules of hearing change whether Stacey Abrams is in the room or not. It's infuriating. And I wonder what your thoughts are on her and the others and just their ongoing willingness to flout the rules they create. I mean, this is more of this mass hypocrisy where we're seeing these politicians saying, do as I say, not as I do. And we see the same thing when Nancy Pelosi throws a fundraiser and all the wealthy people there are unmasked. And then you've got this servant class they've created who have to wear the mask. I think it's creating huge resentment among the working class. It's creating huge resentment among parents. There's no reason to have these kids masking up in schools. The kids have negligible risk. And we've seen that schools

that don't have these requirements, there's no more spread than those that do. So we're far enough into this pandemic that we know the answers. And the problem they're having now is that most of the country wants to move on from COVID. But within the Democratic Party, there's still a huge number of sort of COVID dead-enders who never want to give this stuff up. And so the question is, why are Newsom and Garcetti coming up with these preposterous lies? It's because they're afraid of their own base. They've basically programmed these people with so much fear of COVID over the last two years that they're having trouble now deprogramming them. Yes, that's right.

They've actually brainwashed people. But you've got governors of blue states who they know that there's that tug of that constituency on the left. But they also saw what happened to Phil Murphy in New Jersey. In a seat that he had. He was running 30 points ahead to keep. He only kept it by three points to somebody who had virtually no name recognition. And that's why Phil Murphy was one of the Democratic governors who yesterday said, hurrah, we're getting rid of our mask mandates. Now he made it five weeks away,

but he did it. Our governor, I live in Connecticut now. He did it. He said the end of February, Delaware, they did it. Even Oregon got rid of their school mask mandates yesterday, or at least announced they're going to go away on X date. And it's not because they're seeing the light on COVID, David. They're worried. They understand where the tide is. Absolutely. I mean, CNN declared that the science has changed. No, the science didn't change. The polls changed. Somebody produced a memo inside the DNC showing apocalyptic poll numbers for Democrats in November if they stick to these COVID restrictions that the country is sick and tired of. And so that is why the science suddenly changed, because the politics

has changed around this issue. And it's not like it's happening in a vacuum. Like everything else is awesome. If we could just get this, get off the masks and, you know, yay, we're beating COVID. You've been very vocal about how, you know, this monetary theory that we could just spend however much we wanted and it would never come back to haunt the economy has been proven totally insane, completely boneheaded and wrong. Now we've got 7% inflation that we're dealing with and the supply chain crisis goes on, though it doesn't make as many headlines as it used to. And so this environment is going to prove toxic and very unfortunate for the Democrats. There's only so much, however, they can do about those other issues right now. I think what we're seeing, connecting the dots between this MMT, this modern monetary theory that basically said that debt doesn't matter. We can spend whatever we want. There'll be no day of reckoning for that ever. There'll be no hangover to this party. failure of the expert class in America, that all of these pronouncements by experts on COVID,

on inflation, and so many other things have proven to be wrong. And yet, the social media companies, the prestige media, they want us to censor speech based on what the experts say. And you would think that after so many of these pronouncements have been proven wrong, they would have more humility than that. That is the thing that after so many of these pronouncements have been proven wrong, they would have more humility than that. That is the thing that is so frustrating about this sort of not just mindless appeal to experts, but this idea that we should censor based on official opinion that keeps shifting and changing. No, we need better experts. And I want to talk to you about Joe Rogan and why he and others are such important alternatives. But before we get to that, I think you and I are eye to eye on Fauci.

As far as I understand, you I'll tell you, give you a compliment. My producer, Debbie Murphy, absolutely loves your podcast. And she listened to it all the time. And she told me that you explained the Fauci compromise, how he's been compromised with respect to gain of function and then trying to get all the scientists around him to shut up about how they've been doing this kind of research in the Wuhan lab. I don't know if she said better than I had, but equally as strongly. But that's something that the mainstream media won't touch. His hands are dirty in getting us into this pandemic. I'm not saying he created this particular virus, but his hands are so dirty. And yet we're supposed to worship this guy like a god. He shouldn't have had anything to do with the public health messaging on this.

Fauci wrote op-eds in 2011 and 2012 advocating gain-of-function research, which is basically a fancy name for enhancing pathogens in order to study them. And there was two schools of thought in the scientific community. One led by Fauci was we should be doing this. The other was, this is just crazy. And the risk, it outweighs the benefit. And by the way, I haven't heard of any of the benefits of this type of gain-of-function research. What benefits actually materialize? What learnings did we get from this type of science that actually helped us over the last two years of the pandemic? But in any event, Fauci wrote these op-eds. He advocated for gain-of-function research. These were not throwaway comments by him in front of a reporter or a congressional

hearing. He went out of his way to publish these articles. And Obama, when Obama was in charge, he looked at this issue during his administration, and he banned gain-of-function research. I have to imagine that that meeting in the Oval Office took like five minutes because I could just imagine Obama saying, you want to do what? You want to make pathogens more viral, more transmissible, more deadly in order to avoid a future pandemic? What if you create one? And so Obama banned this. And in January of 2017, Fauci and Francis Collins, the head of the NIH, changed that policy during the transition between administrations when Trump didn't have his people in place. You can imagine during the chaos of the administration changing, the NIH repealed that ban on gain-of-function

research. And then subsequent to that, they funded a group called the EcoHealth Alliance, a British scientist named Peter Daszak. They funded him to do this type of gain-of-function research. And then Daszak funded this Wuhan lab. And so, yeah, I mean, look, I think Fauci didn't create the virus, but he advocated for the type of research that may well have produced it. And where is the investigation into this by the mainstream media? This COVID is probably the most significant international event that we've had since World War II. And yet, anytime anybody wants to raise the issue of the origin of COVID and where it may have come from and the mistakes that it may have led to, it's like,

oh, we don't need to know the origin of it. That's not really important. What matters is what we do now. Well, I beg to differ. If we want to avoid a future pandemic, we certainly need to know what may have led to this a future pandemic, we certainly need to know what may have led to this one. And then virologist after virologist, the world's top, came to him when COVID was first unleashing and they said,

this looks like it came from a lab. This does not look like it had an animal origin from some cave. It's too contagious. It's too advanced. The viruses don't start at this level of sophistication. They have to jump from human to human to human to human for a long time before

they get to this point. And there was some sort of private communication and they all did a 180, 180 without explaining why they did. Fauci's in control. He controls all the grant money. You don't have a career in science or working with the NIH or getting any sort of a grant if Fauci is in control. He controls all the grant money. You don't have a career in science or working with the NIH or getting any sort of a grant. If Fauci doesn't like you, he sits back there. He collects his, you know, 350 or three hundred eighty thousand dollars a year. It's going to be over 400, I think, when he retires. And he's a kingmaker. But you tell me about the vaccines because he's obsessed with them, David. He's obsessed. Listening to him, it's like listening to a broken record. He says it in every answer. We need more people vaccinated, more people vaccinated. It's his answer to everything. So why? Yeah. Well, let me say one more point on Fauci and the timeline about what happened, because we know based on these emails that have come out under the Freedom of Information Act, that on February 1st of 2020, we know that Fauci and Collins had been advised by a group of scientists that this virus

likely came from a lab. How did they know? The exact same reasons we know now, because there's genetic fingerprints, the furin sites in the virus are not naturally occurring. So they had been advised by scientists that this likely came from a lab. And yet three days later, by February 4th of 2020, the officials at the NIH had come to the conclusion that it could not have been a lab-made virus, that it had been passed from an animal, the so-called zoonotic theory. And then two weeks later- And let me just say, they were calling it fringe. Then suddenly it was a fringe theory and a racist one. That's right. And two weeks later, there was a PR campaign fed to the prestige media, the New York Times, the Washington Post. I think it was on February 17th, where they all

synchronously at the same time published the same types of articles using the same types of language describing anyone who believed in the lab leak theory as, again, like you said, a fringe or conspiracy theory and endorsing that there was no way that could have happened. It had to be the zoonotic theory. So they shut down the discussion. They shut down the debate. I mean, it'd be one thing for them to say, look, we don't know if it came from a lab, but they didn't do that. They went all in on this like zoonotic theory, this like- They acted like guilty men.

That's right. I mean, this was absolutely a stifling, I guess you'd call it a cover-up of the official investigation. And for a year, we weren't allowed and then social media censored on the basis of these officials. And we weren't allowed to ask questions about where the virus may have come from. It's also the case simultaneous to this, you've got Peter Daszak, the scientist who Fauci funded for this gain of functional research, wrote a letter to the Lancet, and he rounded up a bunch of scientists making these same points, that any scientist who endorses the lab leak theory is a conspiracy theorist, is a fringe scientist.

And that had an incredibly chilling effect on the scientific community and scientists who just wanted to get to the answers, who were pursuing this question in good faith. And so you have to ask, if there was this much cover coverup, what was the crime? Yes. Fauci and Collins smeared them. Doctors who didn't go along with the, no way was it a lab leak line, started to get smeared and diminished. And all along he's done that. The great Barrington doctors who said, let's do focus protection where we just prioritize the most vulnerable and not lock down society. something that we've had studies show did absolutely nothing, did way more harm than good. They were smeared and targeted by Fauci too. Right. And this brings us to the vaccines and

the question you asked, why is there so much vaccine hesitancy or skepticism? I would argue it's because it's not because of misinformation, it's because of distrust. It is distrust that these officials have earned through their actions, through being repeatedly wrong by trying to cover up the truth. I mean, going back to the very beginning of COVID, when Fauci was initially against masks, then he was for them. And his own explanation of why he gave that original position is he said he lied to prevent a run on PPE. So these officials have earned our distrust. That is why people are skeptical. It's an earned distrust. Now, in terms of the merits of vaccines, I mean, I'm vaccinated. I think, based on what I know,

I think they've helped me avoid a more serious case of COVID, but this should be an individual decision. Why? Because we know now that vaccines cannot stop the pandemic. A year ago, I was one of the people who believed that if everyone got vaccinated, the pandemic would end. Then we had Delta, which sort of punched through. And now we have Omicron, which has punched through even more.

So it's very clear that even if everyone got vaccinated, it wouldn't stop transmission. It might reduce severity of cases. I believe that. Okay. That's why I got vaccinated, but it cannot by itself stop the pandemic. And that is why it is no longer a political issue of whether people get vaccinated because all there's no externality, there's no health externality. You know, What your neighbor decides to do in terms of getting vaccinated doesn't affect whether you're going to get the virus or not. So all the repercussions of getting vaccinated, one way or another, fall on the individual who decides to do it. And so it's time for this idea of making this a political issue to stop.

Let individuals make up their own mind. And it's time for him to go. He has to go. Roch to go. He has to go. Rochelle Walensky has to go. We don't they've lost the trust of at least half the country. You can't can't have a public health voice be in that position. You know, even if you love Fauci, you have to see that once that's happened, he can't like he is no longer persuasive to half the country. In fact, the very half that these Democrats who are dying to mandatorily vaccinate everybody want to convince. I mean, it's the ship has sailed. I think they're not going to get them. But in the meantime, what they're doing in terms of the mistrust is then trying to silence voices that put on alternate viewpoints that that push back on the narrative from Anthony Fauci. You know, Joe Rogan's done it. All of us have done it. We're in independent media now. It's just that Joe Rogan's the biggest behemoth there is in this space. He's the biggest show that there is in. And actually, his show is bigger than anything you see in cable. I mean, it's huge. So now Spotify

has been trying to crack down on him this week. There's an orchestrated campaign to get him because it's like COVID misinformation. Then that didn't work so and it's like he's a racist and then we'll see there'll be something else next uh neil neil young who kind of got it started over on spotify said i'm pulling my music because of his covet misinformation and apparently i didn't know this but neil young has been out there for years like railing on gmos and food and like giving all sorts of misinformation of his own um why are we listening to neil Young for anything outside of how to make music? But he's now warning to the Spotify employees, to the workers of Spotify, I say, the CEO, Daniel Ek, is your big problem, not Joe Rogan. Ek pulls the strings. Get out of that place before it eats up your soul. The only goals stated by Ek are about numbers, not art, not creativity.

Well, that's probably true. It's probably about numbers. But what's going on, right? What do you make of this targeted campaign against Rogan? And so far, Spotify is pretty much standing by him. Well, I think we've been talking about it. I mean, I think this agenda on COVID and so many other things is so unpopular with the country. The only way to sustain it is to stop there from being an honest discussion about it. It's to stop the debate. And who has an incentive to do that? It's the people who've made these decisions, who are in power, who are terrified of being voted out of office. And so there is an orchestrated campaign now to try and

silence dissenting voices and anybody who might bring to light the truth on these issues. Yes. You actually tweeted this out. I love this tweet. The reason our institutions are so broken is that they police for dissent rather than incompetence. Yes, that's so well said. Right, exactly. You see this on COVID. Like you said, Fauci should be gone. Based on the fact that he thought gain-of-function research was a good idea, that alone should be a reason for termination. But he's been wrong so many times. He's been behind every unnecessary COVID restriction over the last two years. He has been the main shock caller of our COVID prison, okay? He is the guy who's been ruling the yard, telling us what we're allowed to do, where we're allowed to go for the past two years. But there is no comeuppance for that.

You see this in the military. You've got this General Milley, this botched withdrawal from Afghanistan. It was a fiasco. And where is the comeuppance for that? Where is the punishing of incompetence? All you see is the punishing of any dissenting voice. That's exactly right. They only punished that one lieutenant colonel who spoke out against their incompetence. He's the only one who's lost his job as a result of that debacle, which one could make a very strong argument is what got us into this situation with Russia and 150,000 troops now along the Ukraine border. They smelled weakness and Putin smelled an opportunity, even if he never steps one boot into Ukraine to renegotiate the terms on NATO and on whether Ukraine should be allowed to join and so on, because he saw a weak leader over here who who actually had no capital

in the bank with the American people. And so far, you know, he hasn't done it, but it's not getting better over in Ukraine. It's getting worse. And there are legitimate questions about whether he would have done this had we had a stronger man or a woman in that office. Yeah, I mean, I was slightly, I think that's a good point that I think our adversaries do perceive weakness in a note card president who's being led around by the nose by his staff and seems frail and weak. That being said, I do have a slightly different view on Ukraine. My view is that we should be trying

to defuse the situation the way that Obama did. I mean, I think this is another area along with the ban on gain of function where Obama got it right. He basically said, listen, this is when Russia occupied Crimea. He said, listen, that is an area that is contiguous with their border. They have an interest in that part of the world that is vital to them. It's never going to be as vital to us. Ukraine is not a member of NATO. We do not have an obligation to come to their defense. And I think we should be very, very careful about inserting ourselves in a new foreign war. I mean, we've only been out of this war in Afghanistan for six months, and we've been blundering through the Middle East for 20 years, Iraq, Afghanistan,

Syria, Libya. Do we really want to now insert ourselves into the caucuses, into Russia's backyard to risk a war with them over territorial borders that we have no obligation to defend? I would just be very careful about deferring to the Washington establishment on this issue, to risk a war with them over territorial borders that we have no obligation to defend. I would just be very careful about deferring to the Washington establishment on this issue because they've been wrong about so many other things, so many other foreign interventions. It's a good point. And honestly, is it really important to us to have Ukraine and NATO? I don't know that it is. I don't think we need to have them in NATO. It doesn't seem like we have to have it. And so if that's going to be the final deal point, I mean, why couldn't we give on it? I realize it's like, well, you don't give

into terrorists and the toddler's throwing the fit. You don't give them the lollipop. But this is a lot of layers to it. And it's a lot more sophisticated than that. And we don't want to see any blood and treasure of ours spilled in Ukraine. That's not going to help Biden. I think that's exactly right. I mean, the fact of the matter is that admitting Ukraine to NATO would require us to come to their defense, but it would do nothing to enhance our security to be drawn into their border disputes. And having Ukraine come to our defense doesn't do anything to improve our capabilities. So it would be a very one-sided agreement. And the fact of the matter is that Ukraine and Russia have border disputes going back hundreds, if not thousands of years. And it's not a good idea for us to involve ourselves there.

We don't want to admit Ukraine to NATO. That has been the US policy until now. And it seems like what Putin is asking for, his main demand, is that we simply reaffirm that we're not going to admit Ukraine to NATO. And we said it's a non-starter. We were like, that's a non-starter. And I mean, is disgust giving you that assurance? In my view, that's like giving Putin the sleeves off our vest because we shouldn't want to admit Ukraine is not in our interest right now. So why not give up on that point? Maybe kick the can down the road, say for a period of 10 years. And then if Putin still invades, it'll prove that he's a liar who can't be trusted in front of all the eyes of the world. But it seems to me that we should try and deescalate the situation, give him something that's not important to us, that's in our best interest. Okay, but let me ask you this question. Let me ask you one question on that. And I don't know what the answer is. But you know how we were talking about crime in the cities and these light on crime DAs are a luxury that people afforded themselves thanks to the

gift of low crime. No one even thinks about electing a soft on crime DA if they've got rampant crime in their city that they're overwhelmed by. So you get tough on crime prosecutors and policies in place. The cities get better. They get much more livable. They make more money. Things are doing well. And then they say, oh, bleeding heart, bleeding heart. Let's get the soft days in there. And then crime goes back up because they do all these policies that leads to an increase. Are we at risk of doing something similar with Russia if we do give Putin the insurances he wants? Are we forgetting what the Soviet Union used to be like and what Putin's dreams for Russia and its future are about?

Right. He'd love to see the USSR reestablished. He would love to start amassing greater territory and have it all be under the same control and so on. So are we doing the same thing if we give him what he wants as these people who elect soft-fung crime DAs? Well, I think, so you're making a point about appeasement, and I think it is a valid lesson of history from World War II that we should not appease dictators. However, there are other lessons of history. And the lesson of history from World War I is that great powers should not allow small and minor powers to drag them into gigantic world wars. And it is for that reason that I would not want to admit Ukraine into NATO. We never have

wanted to. This is not something we've done because we've realized the danger of being drawn into border disputes in that part of the world. And it's really mission creep by NATO. I mean, NATO stands for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Ukraine is all the way in the caucuses. It's in a pretty much a different part of the world. So I hear you on appeasement. I just think there are other things to be worried about. And by the way, we are coming off a foreign policy string of defeats where we've had misguided interventions. We spent $6 trillion on nation building in the Middle East, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, completely failed. We had botched interventions in Syria and Libya, where in Libya we replaced Qaddafi, and now it's just chaos over there.

We've made the situation worse. We've created a vacuum when we removed Saddam for Iran, and now they are an even bigger threat to the US. So what I would just point out is a lot of, I understand the point on appeasement, but I would just say that I think a lot of our foreign interventions have backfired so badly. And I think we need to be a lot smarter about protecting America's interests and projecting strength. And sometimes the way to project strength is to pick your battles carefully and not in a knee-jerk way, want to insert yourself in somebody else's problem.

Right. Sometimes the wise move is not to play. So excited to have David Sachs here. Isn't this a great conversation? You're fascinating. I'm so glad you're here. Let's just talk for a minute about what's happening in Canada, because it's extraordinary. I mean, our neighbors to the north are not exactly known for, you know, protests in the street and being nice. They're sweet. They're sweet Canadians. But I love what they're doing. They've had it. You know, it's just human nature taking over. Started with the truckers who were protesting in this weird rule that if they delivered goods in the United States, when they cross back over into Canada, they

basically couldn't. You'd have to have you have to quarantine and so on and so forth so um monday was the 11th day in ottawa um there were i think the weekend before 15 000 people 3 000 trucks this past weekend 5 000 people 1 000 trucks there have been some 20 criminal arrests i mean of all those thousands of people it's not so bad um people are being ticketed for things like excessive honking, too much honking. The Canadian police are, they have too much time on their hands. And Justin Trudeau fled initially and was at an undisclosed location and finally reemerged for some emergency session at Parliament yesterday. And this is how he decided to characterize this freedom movement that's now been joined not just by truckers, but regular folks from Canada and America alike.

Watch. The people of Ottawa don't deserve to be harassed in their own neighborhoods. They don't deserve to be confronted with the inherent violence of a swastika flying on a street corner or a Confederate flag. Or the insults and jeers just because they're wearing a mask. Everyone's tired of having to wear masks, having to follow public health restrictions. Families like mine just last week that test positive, you know, have to follow public health rules, have to isolate themselves. Nobody wants to do that. I don't know how many conversations parents have had to have with kids about not going to birthday parties, but not getting to have sleepovers.

This pandemic has sucked for all Canadians. Well, he's made it suck. I mean, a lot of countries and a lot of states here in America chose a different way forward and and and they have not had worse results. That's right. I mean, I think we need to distinguish between the effects of covid, the virus and the effects of our COVID policies. The policies are man-made. Well, the virus might be too, but certainly our policies, they are decisions that were made separate and apart and in response to the virus. And we're acting as if these things or politicians like Trudeau are like, he didn't have a choice. Actually, we did.

And it seems to me that these Canadian truckers, they seem to me like ordinary people who are just sick and tired of these heavy handed government restrictions and mandates. And they're expressing that in the form of the civil disobedience. And for that, they've been absolutely demonized as being racist, white supremacist, homophobic. I mean, all the usual left-wing epithets have been levied at them. And it seems to me, yes, there's isolated examples. Like in any protest movement, there's going to be a handful of people who are extreme, but it seems to me that most of these people are just ordinary people. And one of the recurring themes that I see running through this, and this pertains

to really so many of the topics we've discussed this morning, is that we have this ruling class who is a crusading class. They are so hell-bent on imposing their will and their values and their edicts on the working class, on the American people or the Canadian people. They're even hell-bent on imposing it on foreign lands with all these crazy foreign interventions. And like I said, it's a self-conception that's their own self-conception of being these very liberal and open minded and tolerant people is very at odds with the reality that I see. And I think increasingly voters see, which is these people are crusaders. They're they're fanatics. It's really an extension of the Hillary Clinton deplorables moment. They really do look down on people who don't have exactly their academic pedigree or background.

They really do think that they're a bunch of dumb rubes who cannot be trusted to live their own lives the way they see fit, that Justin Trudeau knows better. And the attempt to write off these, you know, these people who are out there protesting for freedom. That's what they want as if they're nothing and they don't matter. And meanwhile, the movement grows, right? The latest reports where they spread through from Ottawa, Toronto, Winnipeg, Vancouver, Alberta, even across overseas, New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands. Here in the United States, there's another group planning a similar protest. They want to drive to the U.S. Capitol. And here comes the censorship to two big companies. Facebook, first of all, the co-organizer of the American Trucker Unit, that's trying to get that effort going. He said we were just his name is Brian Braze or Brace. He said to Fox News, we were just shy of 140 000 people on our facebook page when facebook dropped us uh we called it the convoy to dc and facebook says you repeatedly violated policies around q anon this guy brian says that's a lie so their their fundraising got shut down and then in an extraordinary move uh the go fund meMe for the Canadian truckers, which everyone donated to, it had over $8 million in it to support these guys who've been out there night after night, got pulled.

GoFundMe said it violated GoFundMe's terms of service. They said evidence from law enforcement shows this has now become an occupation. No additional funds will be distributed. Donors have two weeks to request a refund. And then we will work with the truckers to send the remaining money to other charities. But the truckers aren't getting it. Here in the States, you had West Virginia AG. He threatened to sue. Florida, Louisiana, Ohio, Texas AGs all did the same. Your pal Elon Musk called them professional thieves. And lo and behold, they've reversed themselves now. Well, you're right. I mean, this is a type of class warfare

in which the professional class, these elites, these experts, whether they're in government or big tech, they think that if the other side, they're a bunch of deplorables and it's okay to cancel them, to deny them their speech rights, to steal from them and to starve them out. These are the tactics they're willing to use. Okay. And I just was actually, I want to clarify what I said. They didn't reopen the money, like the donations, they just refunded the money to the people who donated it, which is just disgusting. So it's like, you can't get your voice heard. You can't even listen to experts who disagree with people like Fauci. If you try to donate money to help the people with whom you agree, you get shut down by these lunatics. This brings me back to my other you and Elon and Peter. Elon actually responded to somebody online

the other day when they said, you need to create a network with interesting idea. And he's got more money than God, so he really could do it. Enough with the space nonsense. Help the earthlings. We need you guys to do something for good. It could be your legacy, even better than PayPal. I like Colin, but it needs to be bigger. It needs to be more comprehensive and we need to fight back against these, yes, professional thieves. I agree with him. Yeah. I mean, I agree. One of the disturbing things about what's happening is that this idea of speech censorship is now being applied to financial platforms.

You had this example with GoFundMe. Earlier last year, you had PayPal starting to shut down accounts. And so this idea, you had a recent example of Michelle Malkin was denied access to an Airbnb because she attended the wrong conference. And her husband, too. So it's like this guilt by association. Yeah. So we're seeing more and more examples of speech censorship also being applied to financial decisions and financial deplatforming. And if you think it's bad to die people access to online speech, it's going to be even worse if you deny them access to a livelihood,

to making a living. And if people cannot get access to payment systems and the payment rails of the new economy, they're not going to be able to participate in the digital world economically. And I think it's a very dangerous direction that we're headed. I mean, again, it's this class warfare against deplorables is trying to effectively starve them out. Yeah. I mean, now you're talking civil war. Like if people can't get jobs and can't access money, I mean, that's next level. People wonder where does all this feeling of division in our society come from? And they can only blame the other side for it, but they cannot see the way that their own decisions are contributing to the problem. Yeah. Well, maybe you could solve it on

a flight to space. If you know Elon as well as I like. Did you ever ask him, can I go? I want to go. It's not a personal desire of mine. I like having my feet on planet Earth. But that is something that they've talked about is having space tours. Oh, let us come out there and film you if you do it. We'll tell the whole story. I'd love to see somebody who's actually reticent about it do it. It makes it more interesting.

Well, it's going to be somebody else. So, but yeah, a lot of interesting things happening with space. All right. So, you know, a lot of interesting people and you've got this great podcast and you guys were in the news recently

because your colleague and friend, Chamath Palihapitiya, right? Did I get it? Palihapitiya. Yes, you did. He is the one that made the comment about not caring about the Uyghurs in China. Do we have that? We must have that, right? Yeah. Okay. Just to remind the audience,

here is what he said. Nobody cares about what's happening to the Uyghurs, okay? You bring it up because you really care, and I think that's nice that you care the rest of us don't care i'm just telling you very hard you're saying you personally don't care i'm telling you a very hard ugly truth okay of all the things that i care about yes it is below my line okay of all the things that i care about it is below my line disappointing whereuponupon NBC offered him a contributorship. Great, you're just the commentator we need. But he took all sorts of incoming for that and wound up

apologizing for his phrasing and so on. He said he does have empathy. I don't know. You tell me what he was trying to say. Well, so yeah, I do this podcast, the All In Pod, with a few of my friends we jokingly call besties. I think what Jamath was trying to say there, and look, when you speak hundreds of hours, sometimes it doesn't come out quite right. What he was basically saying is, hey, I'm going to focus on the problems that I can actually do something about. Charity starts at home. I think that was basically the point he was trying to make. And it came across as sounding a bit callous, and he acknowledged that. You know, what of it, though? Because we've been watching the Olympics this week. Well, no one's really been watching it. They've suffered almost a 50% drop in ratings from the last time around on NBC. But it really has been a little alarming to hear the commentators. He said, she said, the problem with the genocide going on in China right now. I mean, they talk

about it like, well, there's been some allegations. No, we know it's happening. We've seen it. We've seen the tapes with our own eyes. It's not like we're in China, but we're at the point now where we know it's happening. We've made a decision as a country not to do much about it. We'll do a couple of small things, but it's not all that impressive. I find it alarming that we're hearing that kind of propaganda on American television. Yeah. I mean, look, I think the Uyghurs is a very serious issue. You've got upwards of a million people of this ethnic group who've been put in these detention camps. There are reports of mass sterilization and rape. I mean, it sounds like there's reports of

essentially ethnic cleansing over there. So it's a very serious humanitarian issue. And it's one of a number of issues that we have with China, along with their theft of our intellectual property, cyber espionage, their belligerence towards their neighbors, their punishment of dissidents, and of course, their creation of this sort of totalitarian social credit system. And then, of course, their likely creation of COVID and their release of that upon the world. I'm assuming accidentally, but they covered it up. I mean, we have a whole set of issues with China, and it's a very serious problem. And I think the thing you're getting at is that people's willingness to speak out about these issues tends to be related to how much business they have in China. And I have no business in China, so I feel fairly unencumbered in saying what I just said. But there are a lot of people who have business in China who just won't speak out. Everyone understands that the quid pro quo of taking Chinese cash is that you never criticize

them. And it was very hypocritical, I thought, when the NBA put out a statement attacking and criticizing Chamath because what have they done? I mean, they are the most hypocritical. When Daryl Morey, one of the GMs, spoke in defense of the protesters in Hong Kong, the NBA punished and sanctioned him. Why? Because the CCP took NBA shows off the air in retaliation in China. So this is the game that's now being played now is that the CCP is essentially depriving of Americans of their free speech rights, not in China,

but on American soil as a condition of doing business over there. And I think that's problematic. And we're complying. That's what's so scary. We're complying. We're doing what they want us to do. Why do they call you Rain Man on the podcast? Well, we all have nicknames.

And I guess that's the character in the movie who's a card counter. Yeah, I know, but do you have any of those abilities? Because I know you talk about poker, but is it about cards? Can you count cards? I can't really count cards, no. But I guess compared to Jason, who's the host, I have better math skills than he does. I was thinking maybe when I come out to film you going to outer space, we could swing by Vegas and I could actually learn a thing or two, maybe. Yeah, well, you know, we all play poker on the pod.

The name of the pod, All In, is a poker term. And the idea behind the pod is to kind of give listeners a glimpse of the kind of conversations we actually have together at the poker table. The original idea was just to film us at the poker table playing, and then we changed it into more of the format that you see. But it's kind of a round table discussion where the four of us bat around issues. And you get a really interesting, I think, diversity of views. And I think one of the things that people like about it is that the four of us can disagree while still being friends. And you just never see that format anymore. I mean, I remember the days, what is it, 20, 30 years ago of Crossfire or McLaughlin Group, and you'd have a Buchanan on one side and a Michael Kinsley on the other. And I mean, not that they were friends,

but they would at least battle. And so I think people miss that. And I think they like the camaraderie and the fact that uh we can still be you know quote-unquote besties even when we're uh strongly disagreeing about issues what's uh what's your game of choice uh poker and uh i guess i i occasionally play blackjack too i mean what kind of poker what are you like a five card oh uh yeah we play primarily no no limit hold'em okay it's funny because we uh because we love poker in my family. My mom is what we did every Thanksgiving whenever we got together. And then my mom just loves it.

And so now even my eight-year-old, he's been doing this since he was five. He'll say, hey, will you play poker with me? And some poor unsuspecting adult will be like, sure. Okay, buddy. Yeah, let's see. You know, let's do it. Then he gets him sitting down and he's like, all right, Annie, up and down the river, low spade in the hole, splits the pot. With like the cards, you know,'s do it then he gets him sitting down and he's like all right annie up up and down the river low spade in the hole splits the pot with like the cards you know whipping it's great we love it i think i think it's a great thing for your your kids to do because

it teaches um kids and players to make uh difficult decisions repeatedly under conditions of uncertainty you don't know what cards the other person is holding. And so you have to constantly evaluate, how do you make a good decision when you don't have all the information? And that is really what business is all about. And that is why I think so many business people do gravitate towards the game and really like it. Okay, good. So this is not a waste of time. We're actually building a future entrepreneur. Last question before I let you go, I need a quick answer. Do I or do I not buy Bitcoin or Dogecoin or any of that other stuff? It's interesting. I mean, Bitcoin is basically, it's a new type of currency. It is a non-fiat currency. So instead of being backed by any government, it's basically backed by math.

And if you believe in the math and the cryptography, and so far Bitcoin's been around for about a dozen years and that's never been hacked. No one's been able to counterfeit or create a fake one. If they ever do, Bitcoin will be worthless overnight, but they've never been able to do that. And so what's appealing about Bitcoin is that it's a currency where we know the total number. There'll never be more than 21 million Bitcoin. And in this world of inflation and we've got governments who keep printing money, we can't really trust them. It is nice to have, I think, a currency that can't be manipulated that way, that, you know, it's not backed by government.

It is backed by math. So it's highly volatile. I certainly wouldn't recommend putting all your savings in it or anything close to it. But should you put 1% of your portfolio or half a percent of your portfolio? Yeah. I mean, that's what I've done. And I'm a believer to that extent. Okay.

Well, I love it. I love asking people that question because I don't understand it. It scares me. And I want to know more. David, thank you so much. So fun talking to you. Thanks for having me. All the best. All right. Don't miss the show tomorrow because we're going to have Ezra Levant back from Canada. Remember, he came on last week and he was so good talking about what is happening up there. He'll have all the latest and where it's going from here. And our old pal Ben Shapiro is back on the show. I'm looking forward to discussing everything with Ben. He's so fun. He's like

one of my favorites and he's got something exciting to share with us. There's a tease for you. In the meantime, go ahead and download The Megyn Kelly Show on Apple, Pandora, Spotify, and Stitcher. While you're there over on Apple, would love to hear a review. If you wouldn't mind giving me five stars, that helps us out. Would love that. And go to youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly and subscribe to the show. Okay. That's, this is what I ask of you. Subscribe at YouTube and subscribe, download over at Apple. And that's it. All that helps us keep it free for you guys. We appreciate you being with us. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.

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