The Megyn Kelly Show - CBS vs. Free Speech, Elon Baby Drama, and Shocking Plane Crash, with Michael Knowles, Matt Taibbi, and Walter Kirn | Ep. 1009

Episode Date: February 18, 2025

Megyn Kelly is joined by Michael Knowles, host of The Daily Wire's "Michael Knowles Show,” to discuss how “60 Minutes" celebrated German censorship of online speech, the lack of pushback by the reporter, the history of "60 Minutes" and how the CBS show has declined in recent years, CBS’ Margaret Brennan’s outrageous comments about the Holocaust and free speech, how the legacy media members are still embarrassing themselves, conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair claiming Elon Musk is the father of her child, her claiming she wants privacy but appearing in a New York Post profile and photoshoot, why women can be successful in their careers and in their family lives, the need for personal responsibility in our society, and more. Then Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn, hosts of "America This Week," join to discuss the Associated Press throwing a tantrum over losing some White House access, how the AP and other media have torpedoed their own credibility, why independent media doesn't need access to succeed, why the media is outraged about the Trump DOJ dropping charges against Eric Adams, Kamala's latest ridiculous word salad in NYC, how Democrats are struggling to find a way to “resist” Trump, one Dem politician calling Elon a “d*ck,” and more. Then aviation experts Whiz Buckley and Greg Feith join to discuss what likely caused the shocking Delta plane crash in Canada, how weather conditions played a role, the reasons everyone miraculously survived, and more.Knowles- https://www.dailywire.com/Taibbi- https://www.racket.news/Kirn- https://countyhighway.com/DailyLook: https://DailyLook.com to take your style quiz and use code MEGYN for 50% off your first order.Home Title Lock: Go to https://www.hometitlelock.com and use promo code MEGYN25 to get 25% off your subscription AND a free title history report to ensure that you’re not already a victim.Herald Group: Learn more at https:/GuardYourCard.comJustThrive: Visit https://JustThriveHealth.com and use code MEGYN and save 20% sitewideFollow 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, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at noon east. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and happy Tuesday. We have so much news to get to today, a plane crash in Toronto, CBS News versus free speech, and much, much more. But we want to begin by telling you about an announcement we have here at the show. We've talked in the past about how my producers will put together packets on each of the guest segments we do. That helps me prepare, helps me bring you all the well-researched facts. Of course, I do my own reading as well. On top of that, those packets come every night. And in the morning, my producers will send me a short sort of, you know, note with whatever happened overnight that's relevant to the guest, and we call it the AM

Update. Well, beginning tomorrow, I'm going to be bringing the AM Update to all of you. Here's the story. We are launching a new podcast right here on this very feed that you're listening to the show on. It'll be a quick 15-minute summary of the day's top stories to kick off your morning. And the reason really that we thought this was necessary is all of you. We had so many of our audience members email us or, you know, write to me on social media saying it would be so great. No, you're busy, but it would be so great if you could just give us like a short something just to start the day. So that, cause a lot of you wait until the end of the day to listen to the show, just so I know like what I need to know going into the day. And that made sense to me. And I actually thought that would be a service. And, um, I'm not going to lie. It does kind of interrupt my, my downtime for sure.

Like I will either going to do these late at night or very, very early in the morning. Um, but I really thought that's a genuine service that we can provide to the audience. So we're doing it. It's 15 minutes. We have a great team putting this together and, um, it'll be just the need, the news that you need, you know, to get your day started. And then it doesn't affect this show at all. We'll still be doing this show just as exactly the same way as we always do, but this will be a second offering. And you can either listen to it on Sirius XM at 845 East on channel 111 Triumph, or you can check out any of our podcast feeds. It will hit there weekdays at 6, 6 AM, 6 AM so early. And then what's funny is we had, we talked about it on X yesterday and some people were like, well, I listen to you only on YouTube. And I what's funny is we had, we talked about it on X yesterday and some people were like,

well, I listen to you only on YouTube. And I was like, people, I have got to be able to take the hair and makeup off. Well, the makeup off the hair stays on at the end of the day, or, you know, I don't want to put it on early, early in the morning. So I didn't really want to do a YouTube version of this, but so many people wrote and said like on X and just said, just do it anyway. Cause we could post it there without the visual, you know, you can post the actual audio over like a picture of this show graphic, which makes perfect sense. So good idea. We're going to do that. Forgive me for not going on cam for that one, but yeah, you know, the PJs, that's an important part of the day to have those on with the clean face and the hair and the

ponytail on top of one's head. That keeps you like a normal person. You can't be in the glam, the cam glam all day long. It's just weird. So anyway, it's going to launch tomorrow morning. Take a listen. Let me know what you think. It'll be an evolving thing like all these things are. You go back and listen to my first show of the Megyn Kelly show we're doing now. It sounds very different from what we're doing now. That's normal. That's been true of every show I've ever done. So bear with us. Maybe, maybe you'll love it at the beginning. I think you'll like it, but it'll probably change its personality a bit over the weeks and months to come. And looking forward to hearing what you guys think. You can email me as always, Megan at Meganlly.com. All right, let's get to the news.

Joining me now, our pal, Michael Knowles. He's host of the Michael Knowles Show over on The Daily Wire. Life is busy and finding time to shop for clothes can feel impossible. That's why Daily Look is a game changer, the number one premium personal styling service for women. Here's how it works. A stylist curates a box of up to 12 pieces

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and use code Megan for 50% off your first order. Dailylook.com for 50% off and make sure you use my promo code Megan so they know I sent you. Dailylook.com, promo code M-E-G-Y-N. Michael, welcome back. Wonderful to be with you, Megan. Thank you for having me.

It's great to see you. So there is so much news happening right now. We say this every day, but it's always true. Let's just start with the absolute meltdown over J.D. Vance's speech in Europe about free speech, reminding our friends, you know, supposedly amongst our best friends and the Europeans about the importance of free speech. This is where we left off on Friday. Well, since then, we've just had a downward spiral of the media on this, misrepresenting, by the way, what the speech was about, misrepresenting the import of what Elon said, trying to say that this was all about supporting left-wing or right-wing parties. He went over there to command that we must support

the alt-right, meanwhile completely ignoring that the whole thing was about how Europe is eroding our free speech rights, their free speech rights, you know, at every turn, and with some words about their open borders and how that's had real consequences and how you should let people who object to that talk about it. But if you read the Washington Post, if you read the New York Times, you would see very different headlines in the wake of this for days now. What do you make of it? Well, first of all, even the notion of the far right-wing parties in Europe is largely fake news from the establishment media. In Germany, the right-wing party, Alternative für Deutschland, is run by a lesbian libertarian who thinks that Hitler was a communist, okay?

So even when we're talking about the particular scary right-wing party that they're all worried about, even that is just a kind of normal right-wing party in the libertarian, modern sense of things. And so when JD shows up to Munich, I think this, I've been calling his speech the tear down this firewall speech. You know, Reagan goes to Munich, I think this, I've been calling his speech the tear down this firewall speech.

You know, Reagan goes to the Brandenburg Gate, says tear down this Berlin Wall. Well, J.D., he said there's no room for a firewall in a democracy. And a lot of the American listeners probably didn't know exactly what he was referring to. But the firewall in Germany, Germany is the leader of Europe. So, you know, it's really more broadly European. The firewall is this notion that the left-wing and center parties can't work with the right-wing parties. But this creates a major problem for European democracy, because in Europe, just as we've seen in America, the people

increasingly are voting for the right-wing parties, because the left-wing parties have failed them and have opened up Europe's borders. And when the migrants have come in and committed all sorts of crimes, including the particularly heinous crimes that we saw in the United Kingdom with the grooming rape gangs, you saw the politicians not defending the citizens of the countries, but actually attacking the citizens of the countries and defending mass migration and the rape gangs and all of these hideous crimes. So it's no wonder that people are looking for an alternative and they're turning to the right. And what J.D. Vance went to say in Munich is, look, you people all prattle on about democracy all the time. And yet when the people actually vote, all you liberal elites out of

office, you deny them. You call them a threat to democracy. You censor them. In some cases, you arrest them in midnight raids over things that they've posted to Facebook. And we are not going to tolerate that anymore. And I think the reason that the left is rending its garments and gnashing its teeth over this speech is that what J.D. Vance was saying here is that Europe needs to fundamentally change its political order. Its political order right now is anti-democratic. It's extremely left-wing. It's leading to a civilizational suicide.

And the United States, which secures all of Europe and is the global hegemon, we are not going to stand for that anymore. Because we've seen the consequences of that kind of liberal hegemony in America. People absolutely hate it. The majority of Americans voted against it. for that anymore because we've seen the consequences of that kind of liberal hegemony in America. People absolutely hate it. The majority of Americans voted against it. And we're not going to tolerate those kinds of abuses in Europe either. It was such a timely message. I will get to what 60 Minutes did on free speech and Germany on Sunday night. I mean, on the heels of this J.D. Vance, I love it. It was sort of like the tear down this wall speech where he went into the belly of the beast and said, you're doing it wrong. You've lost your way. Please come back. Because the thing that bound

us together, the United States and Europe, was a commitment to certain human liberties, though we're much more robust about them here in the United States or are supposed to be, there is a general commitment to certain principles that we should share. And free speech is, it's a human right. It's a human right. It's kind of what he was saying. And Germany in particular has lost its ever loving mind. When the all in guys were here on Friday, we talked about this piece in Tablet Magazine called The EU is Beset by Pesky Notions of Free Speech. And it's a great piece. It was authored on December 8th of 2024.

And they went through the closing of this magazine called Compact Magazine over there, which supports that group, that political party that you just mentioned, which they called the you know, the the far right AFD. And what happened in Germany was the government closed the magazine. It had some 40,000 subscribers, plus many more through online and media engagement. And they called it a publication of intellectual arsonists who incite a climate of hatred and violence against refugees and migrants and seek to overthrow our democratic state. It's a magazine that supports a party that's anti-illegal immigration. They are not for the open borders that Germany's had for years. They talk in Tablet about how the politician who did this rooted her decision in a German law that broadly forbids political activism opposing the country's, quote, constitutional order. She dispatched

339 cops to raid 14 locations, including compact offices, the offices of its parent company, the homes of its staff and their shareholders, the police seized technical equipment, office equipment, vehicles, merchandise, liquid assets, anything else they could physically take as well as bank accounts. Their video production subsidiary was also closed. This is crazy stuff. They say that, hold on. Um, yeah, the foundational law there prohibits speech that's racist, pro-Nazi, or as Compact was accused of doing, advocates against the constitutional order of the country. All right, so Germany is in crisis. That's crazy behavior. That's, I mean, that is effed up. And this is from one of our so-called allies with whom we share values. So 60 Minutes decides to do a piece on free speech in Germany. Right on. Cool.

You're for once you're relevant and you're right on time. 60 Minutes. J.D. just gave the speech. You probably didn't know it was going to be about that, but you hit the jackpot. You got the crazy compact magazine thing and what they're doing to this party, trying to shut it down because it's controversial. They went a different way. That's a diplomatic way to put it. As you know, an incredibly sympathetic profile of the crazy ass German laws that criminalize free speech. It was obviously in support of them. There was a minimal amount of pushback, like the most mild milquetoast, like, well, gee, some critics might say this. And that was all we saw here, for example, was 60 Minutes doing like a ride along with German prosecutors as they

raided the home of some guy who had said something racist. He was getting arrested because he said something racist. Just in case you didn't know that, that's not unlawful in the United States. You can be a racist, you can be a bigot, you can be a sexist, you can be all the things. You can't make certain hiring and firing decisions based on those things, but you being a bad person is not illegal, right? Anyway, here they talk to the German prosecutor and was the questioning like, what business do you have criminalizing the thoughts of your citizenry? That's not how it went, sought for. What's the typical reaction when the police show up at somebody's door and they say, hey, we believe you wrote this on the Internet? They say in Germany, we believe you wrote this on the internet. They say, in Germany we say, das wird man wohl doch mal sagen dürfen.

So we are here with crimes of talking, posting on the internet and the people are surprised that this is really illegal to post these kind of words. They don't think it was illegal? No, they don't think it was illegal. And they say, no, that's my free speech. And we say, no, yeah, free speech as well. But it also has its limits. It has its limits.

And, Michael, the way they styled the whole piece with Sharon Alfonsi at the top, and she was the interviewer there, was civility has its—I mean, free speech has its limits because civility. That's what we're looking for. Actually, we have that. I'll let you hear it and then I'll give you the floor. Watch. In the United States, most of what anyone says, sends or streams online, even if it's hate filled or toxic, is protected by the First Amendment as free speech. But Germany is trying to bring some civility to the World Wide Web by policing it in a way most Americans could never imagine. German authorities have started prosecuting online trolls. It's 6.01 on a Tuesday morning, and we were with state police as they raided this apartment in northwest Germany. Inside, six armed officers searched the suspect's home, then seized his laptop and cell phone. Prosecutors say those electronics may have

been used to commit a crime. The crime, posting a racist cartoon online. Go ahead, Michael, your thoughts. I love the appetite that you saw from the interviewer here. Oh, they didn't know that it was illegal, really. And then you showed up and you got them. You know, if only we could bring these great ideas. She's obviously eager, like so much of the left, to import this kind of European police state into America to go after the dastardly online trolls who in any way question, in a just way or an unjust way, the liberal hegemony over our political order. And you can tell there's been a push for many years in America from the left for this. And the American people have rejected that, most notably in November they they voted with the popular vote to elect Trump and the Republicans but you see the Germans doubling down on this at that Munich security conference

that JD Vance spoke at you had the president of Germany come out and say that he will not allow social media to subvert his democracy and and it forces you to ask the question what does he think the word democracy means? I'm not the first to make this observation, but when liberals constantly invoke this term democracy, I don't think it really means what they think it means, or at least what we think it means, you know, because they've been arguing for years now that when Americans elect Donald Trump, that's a threat to democracy. Of course, by definition, that just is democracy when the people vote for someone.

Or when the Hungarians elect Viktor Orban, that's a threat to democracy. When the Italians elect Giorgio Maloney, somehow that's a threat to democracy. When the Brits vote for the Brexit because they don't want mass migration coming in anymore, they want a more accountable government, somehow that's a threat to democracy it's quite clear that what these people mean by democracy is really just liberalism or leftism or this extreme political ideology that ironically now shuts out most of their constituents that is ironically totally opposed to the democracy and so when democracy prevails in America, and most people

say, we don't want this nonsense, we want Trump, we want Vance, and we want to see that in the rest of our civilization as well. This is really shocking because you can see, especially in Germany, how practically this kind of leftism has been implemented in their political order. And so if the U.S. comes in and says, hey, we've been underwriting all of this for many decades, you have betrayed our shared Western values, and we are not going to underwrite this anymore. And by the way, he who pays the piper calls the tune. So get with the program.

It's no surprise that there were many tears at the Munich Security Conference after Vice President Vance spoke. Yes, there was an actual minister over there who was crying. There's no crying in politics. What are you doing? Get it together. Okay, we'll get back to that in a second. Let me stick with CBS. Now, here, first of all, she's weirdly smiling, Sharon Alfonsi, throughout the whole thing. She clearly is enjoying it. She's clearly like, oh, my God, I'm home. I'm home. I didn't realize, you know, Alfonsi sounds Italian, but she's lining up more with the Germans in this particular piece.

And here she is all agog. She's just absolutely loving the new information she's getting as they show her the big red folders full of criminals. How many cases are you working on at any time? In our unit, we have about 3,500 cases per year. Nine investigators work out of this office in a converted courthouse. Lau says they get hundreds of tips a month from police, watchdog groups, and victims. You must see a lot of crazy stuff. Yes, yes. The worst of the internet is wrapped in red case folders, stuffed with printouts of online slurs, threats and hate.

This is a criminal offence. What does that say? Kletterpark for Flüchtlinge. So they're suggesting that the refugee children play on the electrical wires. Okay. In this case, the accused had to pay 3,750 euros. It's not a parking ticket. Yeah, not a parking ticket. No, it's not. Yeah. You really hurt them. You fine them thousands of dollars and they go to jail.

So fun. I just want to give you the contrast, okay? Because I grew up watching 60 Minutes. It was one of the reasons why I wanted to become a journalist. And this is the reason why. People like Mike Wallace, who understood when they were onto a controversial subject or a controversial person, there was a certain tone and strength that would be required in the exchange. here's a memory. What means dictatorship? A dictator is somebody... The Chinese president. Who forcibly, whether it's free press, or free religion, or free private enterprise, now you're beginning to come a little closer to that.

You, father knows best. And if you get in the way of father, father will take care of you. The Imam President Sadat of Egypt, a devoutly religious man, a Muslim, says that what you are doing now is, quote, a disgrace to Islam. And he calls you, Imam, forgive me, his words, not mine, a lunatic. What they hear, what I heard, was overtones of absolute. You were sticking it to the Jews once again. That's how you do it. You you unafraid. You have to be unafraid and you go in there fearlessly and put it right to them. This is a crackdown on free speech. This is unfair. This is a violation of human rights. That's how we'd see it in my country. People are allowed to insult,

offend, or criticize a government politician, a party. There's nothing illegal about it. How do you justify that morally, sir? Not, it certainly isn't a parking ticket they get. Hee hee. But you take the Mike Wallace approach if your objective is to come to the truth. And you can do that either by attempting to be objective and neutral or by taking the opposing view, you know, and playing the devil's advocate in the conversation. But that is not what the establishment media have been after here. It's certainly not what this CBS interview was after when it comes to Germany. She was not trying to come to the truth. She was trying to advocate a position, a radical position that most Europeans and most Americans would

reject. But she's playing the partisan here, okay? This is partisan activism par excellence. And most Americans are going to look at that and say, this is horrifying. We don't want anything to do with it. But I think that also helps to explain why for many of the establishment media outlets now, their ratings have collapsed. And for the establishment liberal politicians, their voter bases have collapsed. And it's why Americans voted for an alternative. There's also just a basic handling of the facts that the left seems to have lost. You know, Mike Wallace basically knew what he was talking about.

In this case on CBS, yet poor Margaret Brennan was discussing free speech in Germany. Megan, the claim that she made, I'm not a scholarly historian or anything like that. I've got a meager undergraduate degree, okay? But I think if you took remedial history in the sixth grade, you would know that the claim that Margaret Brennan here made was completely insane. And on that note, I'll play it. Here she is interviewing Marco Rubio, who was not, as usual, having any of her nonsense. Well, he was standing in a country where free speech was weaponized to conduct a genocide. And he met with the head of a political party that has far-right views and some historic ties to extreme groups.

The context of that was changing the tone of it. And you know that, that the censorship was specifically about the right. No, I have to disagree with you. Free speech was not used to conduct a genocide. There was no free speech in Nazi Germany. There was none. There was also no opposition in Nazi Germany. They were a sole and only party that governed that country.

So that's not an accurate reflection of history. It was beautiful. He, in the moment, sliced her down. All I could think of was the A Few Good Men line. You effed with the wrong Marine. You effed with the wrong official from the Trump administration because Marco Rubio knows his facts. He knows his history, including, of course, European history and World War II, obviously much better than Margaret Brennan that Dole does. And she tries to finish it up, her inanity, by saying, like, you know that. You know that. And he's like, wrong, Margaret.

I don't. Yeah, I actually don't know that. I understand that in our modern culture, the only historical event that anyone can make any comparisons to is World War II. Every opponent is Hitler. Every political incident is the brink of the Holocaust. This is how our degraded modern media apparatus debates things. So I'm going in already with very low expectations. But even as people constantly invoke Hitler and the Holocaust and everything, have you ever once heard the suggestion that the Holocaust was caused by an abundance of free speech? If you just look at the year 1933,

you can point to a few acts of the Nazi party, the Editors Act, which said that only Aryans could be journalists, the banning, as Marco Rubio alluded to there, of the other political parties, so you had a totalitarian state, and the Reichstag Fire Decrees, which severely curtailed civil liberties. Just that alone would seem sufficient to knock down whatever point Margaret Brennan thought she was making. But happily for her, she wasn't even aware of those basic facts of history. And I fear that many of her liberal viewers will be similarly ignorant. So they have to be corrected by the Secretary of State on really basic facts of history.

Maybe in that way, CBS is doing its audience a real service. If the audience is as uninformed as Margaret Brennan, then yes, she's providing a service. But I don't believe that. I think CBS News is not recognizable to me. It's really not. I don't understand what this thing is. Even 10 years ago, CBS News was still a journalism outlet. Biased, yes. But I mean, this is beyond. This is like, it was never stupid. Biased and dumb is really unforgivable.

And you know what I found really bizarre, Megan? She's the face of it. I recently did a segment on CBS Mornings on the morning news program. And I thought it was very fair. I thought it was actually a very well put together, balanced segment. I thought they did a really, really great job. And so I thought, oh, good, maybe CBS is really moving in this great direction. But what's bizarre is morning shows tend to be a little lighter, you know, kind of, there's just a bit more levity. And you expect 60 Minutes or the serious

evening news shows, those are going to be hard hitting. And in this case, it was exactly the opposite. I mean, 60 Minutes is one of the most serious news properties in the history of television journalism. It used to be. I don't know. I don't know what has happened, but this is not helping the credibility of the establishment media in the least. No. I mean, this moron did the vice presidential debate and embarrassed herself. Now she's out there on her Sunday show, which is supposed to be also more dignified and hard hitting, embarrassing herself. And they continue to not understand at CBS News that the only reason these politicians say yes to her is because they wind up looking so good. She makes it easy for them inadvertently. She's

so dumb. Her questions are so pathetic that she's just easy to make a fool out of and have one of those viral moments. Like when is she and or CBS going to get that she's getting used by smart right-wing politicians who want a viral moment moment making her look dumb and them look good. I realize Margaret's too dumb apparently to know this, but somebody at CBS News must see it. Maybe they don't like her. Maybe they're enjoying it too. I'm not sure. Here is an actual smart person named Nadine Strawson. She's with FIRE, you know, the foundation for, I always forget what it stands for. Individual Rights in what it stands for. Thank you, Individual Rights in Education. It's a free speech organization.

We've had Greg Louganis on the show many times. She's with it, and she will explain here what actually was happening with Germany's hate speech laws in between hate speech, insulting speech, speech that advocated or might incite violence against various groups, including religious groups, laws against defaming or insulting a religion, including the Jewish religion. And all of those laws were very strictly enforced. Many of the leading Nazis were repeatedly prosecuted and convicted and even served prison times. Hitler himself was actually banned from public speaking for several years. The Nazis themselves, as well as many historians, believe that the net impact of those laws censoring Nazi speech was to amplify their message,

to give them attention that they otherwise would never have received. Yeah, so that's actually what was happening. The more they tried to ban speech, the more this controversial speech would burst out, would feel subversive, would be exciting to engage in, and the more people did it. And obviously CBS doesn't get that. By the way, back in the 60 Minutes report, you know what they didn't have in this, uh, this report. They didn't speak to a single critic of these arrests or these laws. They didn't speak to any targets of the arrests or who people who have run, who have run afoul of those laws. That's what an actual 60 minutes piece would have looked like 20 years ago, where they would have

shown you the real life. And by the way, it's very easy to pick the line that says, I hope refugee children die in electrified wires and say, oh, that's the kind of thing you're going after. You and I both know there are far more controversial speech examples that have gotten caught in the crosshairs of these German laws that those red files probably have example or after example of that they decided not to highlight in 60. That's the way you do the piece. You find somebody who actually got whose kid got killed by an illegal immigrant. And so they subscribe to Compact Magazine because they agreed with their anti-illegal immigration push.

And you put that person on to say, you know what? I lost a lot when they criminalized Compacts Magazine and they shuttered it. I now feel like I'm not allowed to say I'm upset about what happened to my child. That's the way you do a fair and balanced piece, which 60 Minutes knows, but they're agenda-driven now. Of course. Even that naughty joke about the migrants playing in electrical fields or something, that's a, that's a dark joke. It's a dark joke. It's like an internet meme. It's the sort of thing that statistically everyone on the internet has engaged with at some point. And so I'm not, I'm not saying that that should be the, uh, opening speech

of a state dinner or something like that, but it's a crude, nasty, dark little joke, okay? And so what is the consequence of that? I don't know. Some people giggle or something. Now look at the consequence, not even just in Germany, but throughout Europe, of banning basic speech. Marco, not Marco Rubio, J.D. Vance talked about that in Munich. You had Christians who would pray silently in their own minds 50 meters away from abortion mills. Those kinds of people are arrested. You would have people who object in any way to mass migration. Those kinds of people would be harassed by the government. You would have families in northern England who are objecting to their children being brought into rape gangs by migrants.

You would see the force of the law come down against them and the supposed threat that they pose to multiculturalism rather than against the migrants. To your point, Megan, who are we to privilege here? Someone who's offended by a naughty joke or an internet meme, or the people whose kids have been stabbed by migrants, as has happened throughout Europe. You know, how about we pay attention to the serious issues

from actual European citizens here? Well, the liberal elite on that continent won't do it, so the constituents are voting against the ruling liberal elite parties. And the only thing that they can do to hold on to their power is to further clamp down, to tighten their grip. And so it's a breath of fresh air for America and for Europe when the vice president comes in and says, hey, we're not going to put up with this anymore. Right. And says to our friends, remember who you are or who you're supposed to be, what you're doing here, because our shared partnership doesn't feel like it has a lot in common anymore. This is why we forge on without you. This is why you're not valuable to us as much when it comes to things like NATO. This is why Trump is having one, two party discussions about wrapping up the Ukraine war with just Trump and Putin without even Zelensky, nevermind the

Europeans. So we're like, what about us? What about us? And we're kind of like, what about you? What, what about you? Like what you're pushing us to a place where we have more in common with some of these other countries than we do with you. We don't recognize ourselves in Germany anymore. What is that? Some of the far He cried in response to J.D. Vance's speech. This is the same guy. His name is Christopher Hoogson. He was part of the German delegation that could be seen smirking and laughing back in 18 when Trump, when he addressed the United Nations General Assembly, issued a stark warning to the German delegation about their country's growing dependence on Russian energy, on Russian energy, of course, which would become a very, very big issue just a few years later when Russia invaded Ukraine. They laughed at him. You should have listened to him then.

This time around, they listened to his vice president and they cried. Let me conclude and this becomes difficult. They're applauding his tears. Kristoff, they're hugging him. They're embracing, like it's true consolation because he was so upset by what some would call 48 was up there, what J.D. Vance was saying. The best excuse that I've heard the European left come up with here, and the American left, I guess, is that, no, he wasn't just crying because they were all so upset by J.D. Vance. It's really because, you know, he's going to be leaving this post soon. And so it was just a kind of a broader overwhelming with emotion, to which I would respond, first of all, seems a little dubious to me, given the actual news reporting that came out of that conference.

But second of all, even if that were the case, yeah, that's ridiculous, man. Are you kidding? This is Europe? This is the Munich Security Conference. If you're Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin, are you now cowering? Oh, no. The Europeans, they might flood me with tears. I hope I don't drown. Good grief. What a pathetic showing from Europe. He's like, allegedly. So a woman named Ashley St. Clair, who claims she's 26, but many internet sleuths claim she's actually 31 or 32. I have no idea. Comes out via tweet on Friday, I think it was over the weekend and says a Friday and says, I am the mother of Elon Musk's latest baby. Who's five months old. It's a boy and he's the father,

but it's become clear that a tabloid magazine is going to out this fact regardless of the harm. So I am going to tell you myself that I want to raise my child and I am Elon's latest child's mother. Baby mama is the less nice way of saying it. So Elon doesn't respond to that directly, but then the internet starts like weighing in on this saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Is this true? What's happening? And somebody finds an old tweet of this woman's from years ago, 2020, trying to get Elon's contact information and talking about the fact that he's slept with a lot of women and impregnated them and sounds like she would like for this to happen. And Elon retweets that old resurface tweet of hers and writes, whoa, that's the only response he's given so far to this whole thing. So we have no idea whether this is really his child's mother. And then Ashley St. Clair is chastising him saying,

you don't respond to me. You're not talking to me. And now this is what you finally respond to. We've been trying to communicate for the past several days. You've not responded. When are you going to reply to us instead of publicly responding to smears from an individual who just posted photos of me in underwear at 15 years old? She's referring to the guy who resurfaced her old tweet. So it's kind of confusing, but it's a long way of saying this woman is accusing Elon of impregnating her and not, I guess, negotiating with her on the care of the child, or at least not to the point where she's happy with the negotiation. She's upset about the privacy, that the tabloid's coming. And the next day after the tweet hits, she poses for a full spread in the New York post

in like her sexy wear, the pictures of her. Yeah. Like there's, she wearing a corset and this is her in this like swanky New York apartment, which is described as like lavish. Here she is with the floor to ceiling windows and the great views. And I, all I can think as I look at this is your life is the way it is because you decided it would be because of your choices, madam. Like you, you set it up this way. You, I posted on Twitter. You can have a swanky New York apartment. You could earn money and actually wind up renting one yourself. You could also find a man who wants to marry you and raise children with you and who won't have other women in his life at the same time. All of this is available to you, not just her, but any woman. You do not have to make a choice where you try to bang the billionaire to get his baby so that he'll put you up in some lavish New York City apartment and take care of you for the rest of

his life and then be shocked, shocked when he doesn't actually want to have a relationship with you. And the only way you can maybe get him to respond to you is via tweet. I'm sorry, but again, you made choices. They were very bad ones. And these are the consequences of that. I would say just as a numbers game, statistically, any of us could be the child of Elon Musk. So we don't, you know, when we're trying to adjudicate the claim as to whether or not the baby is really Elon's, you know, statistically, really any child you come across in the street could have been sired by the head of Doge.

You know, I actually ran into Ashley at one of the inauguration events in D.C. because Ashley is pretty well known among conservative media. She's an influencer. She's an influencer. You know, she's involved in the online right. She had a book on kind of making fun of transgenderism, a children's book. And so people are aware of her and she's very active on Twitter and Elon's very active on Twitter.

And so I guess I'm not terribly surprised that the two of them linked up in some way, given how prolific Elon is at producing many things, children included. And so I guess my biggest political takeaway from the whole story, which, you know, generally men are not all that tuned into these kinds of stories, you know. It's also not exactly a man bites dog story. So I've paid a little bit of attention to it. And my biggest takeaway is a political truth

that has existed since classical antiquity up to the present hell hath no fury like a woman scorned and that is a lesson that not only the billionaires should know and the people in media and politics should know that is true for everyone and it does does seem to appear what's to be what's going on here is that well as, as has been reported, Ashley St. Clair says that she feels jilted or ignored. And it's not just right-wing influencers who are going to act out and lash out when that occurs. That's a lot of women. Here's what's crazy, though. Okay, so Elon believes that he wants to have a lot of children, that it's important to

overpopulate the earth and says he's doing his part. Now you could say he's a cad, but he appears to be very open about this with the women in his life. Um, he was, he's like, all these women are having babies by him via surrogate. Like, so that means he's fully participating. They're trying to get pregnant. Not, not as far as I know, this woman, I don't know. I don't know whether this was conceived the old-fashioned way or via IVF, but they're actively trying to make babies of Elon's, and they're into it. Now, I don't know whether all the women are disclosed to the other women. I don't know, and it's none of my business. But this woman knew all of that when she decided to get into a relationship with him. Yes, he's

older. He's in his fifties and she's allegedly 26 to 31. Um, but you know, all of this. And in fact, the post he resurfaced of hers on the internet shows her saying, I think he's got like seven kids from multiple different women. By the way, she has another kid from a different man already at 26 to 31. Okay. So my point is simply, if this really did happen, this is really, she walked into this eyes open. That's fine. No judgment. If that's the way you want to live your life, go for it, sister. It would not be my choice. But once you do that, once you do that, don't ask me to feel sorry for you. Don't, don't do the sad posts about how he won't talk to you. Don't try to go public ginning up hatred against him for negotiating via tweet. This is the life you chose.

I mean, I, I just, I don't understand why young women feel that they have two choices if they want some sort of a lavish lifestyle. They can, well, I guess one choice. I don't understand how these women think their only road to financial success is to marry a rich guy or get pregnant by a rich guy and make him pay for your lifestyle. To me, it's so fucking disempowering. Go earn your own money. If you want to be rich, if you want a nice damn apartment, why don't you work? Why don't you earn it? Why are you just trying to bag some rich guy? It's so fucked up. It's wrong. It's just, I feel like, okay. And then I'm almost done. If you do bang the rich guy, and if you do get pregnant with his child, then when it doesn't work out,

be dignified about it. Don't go on Twitter. I don't believe her on the tabloid story. I don't believe her because it doesn't seem like she doesn't don't believe her on the tabloid story. I don't believe her because it doesn't seem like she doesn't want publicity. She did the whole big spread with the New York Post. She wants publicity. Even if a tabloid was about to break it, then they break it and you say nothing. That's the classy highbrow way of handling this. She seems to want the attention and also at the same time want our sympathy. and I'm having a really difficult time giving it to her. Well, I think also to your point, Megan, whatever you think about Elon and his views on natalism,

which I think Elon is totally right that we have an underpopulation problem, and I think he's right that people should have more children. I would encourage people to do it the old-fashioned way. You know, I'm a mackerel-snapping papist myself, so I think marriage is a lifelong union of a man and a woman

ordered toward the procreation and education of children and also for the mutual support of the spouses. But people across geography, across social classes, across everywhere are broadly confused about these questions in part because the revolutions, especially the 1960s, really blew up our moral and ethical thinking on these matters. So I actually have a great deal of sympathy for people who are really confused about it. But regardless of what you think about what Elon does, you can't say he's hiding the ball, okay? He is very clear

about his views of natalism and IVF. And so, yeah, people know exactly what they're getting going into it. And I, yeah, I agree with you, Megan. It's not like, oh, we got married and you promised to be mine and mine alone. And then you impregnated me and you left me and you didn't take care of our child. And you were with other women.

That's a totally different breach of covenant. This is like, I don't know that he breached any covenant whatsoever. Now he will have to take care of that child if he actually is the father, that's the law. And he has taken care of the other 12 he's had with others. So I believe he will. I don't know whether this is in fact his child. And I don't know what the contract negotiation, if any, is behind the scenes. But I'm just saying, again, your life is the way it is because you set it up that way. And if you've made poor choices, which have led to poor outcomes, you need to look at yourself to get better results in the future. At yourself, not at Elon,

not at the tabloids, not at anyone other than yourself, because this woman's had two children by age 26 by two different men. And at least one of them she claims is not speaking to her nor acknowledging paternity. There's a problem. And as my favorite poem says, you'll find the fault lies in you. You have yourself to blame, which is not me blaming the woman. It's me telling her she's empowered to change her life and make better decisions as are we all. Okay. I guess. You know, I've long said, Megan, my fallback plan, if my cigar company or if my podcast doesn't work out is to be impregnated by Elon. Scientifically, they haven't figured out how that's gonna work yet, but there are a lot of people.

I mean, we're kind of joking about it. There are a lot of people who, in our kind of wild kind of ethical thinking these days, we all think we have to reinvent the wheel, but I think one of the lessons of conservatism is that you don't have to reinvent the wheel, that the old institutions and the old behaviors have endured for a reason. And so I think a lot of people would be totally willing to offer grace to a single mother. A lot of people are even willing to offer grace to people who have kind of avant-garde

and bizarre views of having children and things like that. But all of this seems to me to be a recommendation of the old way of doing things. That actually the way that people have gotten married, had kids, lived their lives for statistically all of history, those have worked out pretty well. And so if there is some political lesson to be drawn from this, and we're talking about multiple public figures, so there are political lessons to be drawn. It seems to me that maybe sticking with the old way of doing things is a good idea. And in fact, that's my recommendation when it comes to most subjects. Well, I mean, obviously in our shared Catholic church, they don't encourage any premarital sex. I can't say that most of us abided by that, but I would say this, if you are having premarital sex

and you don't trust the other person to do the right thing in the event of a pregnancy, and you know that you would never abort your baby, then you better have a plan. You know, you better, you know, to quote Fannie Willis, a man is not a plan. You better have your own plan. I just think like it's, you know, the, the reason most people do use birth control religiously when they're having premarital sex is because they don't want this kind of thing to happen. And this has happened to her twice. I don't know what their deal was, but like she can change her life because she seems like she was an up and comer. She's got a big Twitter following. There are a lot of people like she was an up and comer. She's got a big Twitter following. There are a lot of people on the right who liked this person. She, she didn't

need a man to create a great life for herself. She, she was on her way. And, um, I'm afraid this is seriously going to set her back. And I hope other women make better choices because if you want to have a baby and have a family, you can do it. You can do it and stay home and take care of them. You can do it and go back to the workforce. And either one is awesome. But like doing it just to get a paycheck that you can have a swanky apartment on is really fraught with peril, which you will learn the hard way if you do not heed these words of advice. Michael, thank you for being here.

Megan, wonderful to be with you as always. See you next time. Okay. See you next time. We'll be right back with Matt Taibbi and Walter Kim. Don't miss that. There is a real and growing threat to your home and your equity, and it's called title fraud. Here's how it works. Criminals can forge a single document, file it with a recorder, and just like that, your home's title is stolen. They take out loans against your property, draining your equity, and you wouldn't, your home's title is stolen. They take out loans against your property, draining your equity, and you wouldn't even know that it had happened until it was too late. Here's the really scary part. Credit monitoring will not protect you from this problem. But I do want to tell you about Home Title Lock to protect your home and your equity. Their exclusive triple lock protection will give you 24-7 monitoring of your home's title, urgent alerts if there are any

changes, and a team of experts to help restore your title if fraud happens at no extra cost. Home Title Lock is offering an exclusive 25% off their protection plans. Go to hometitlelock.com, use promo code MEGAN25 to get 25% off your subscription and a free title history report to ensure that you're not already a victim. Protect your home and equity today. HomeTitleLock.com, promo code Megan25. Democrats and the media are pushing back on claims that they're anti-free speech by, not by recommitting to the First Amendment, God, they would never do that, but by pointing fingers at Republicans saying they also censor their latest talking point is that the Trump administration is, quote, censoring the Associated Press for limiting the news organization's access to the White House. I mean, basically, the Trump administration said, get out of the Oval Office and get off of Air Force One

to the Associated Press. They still have their White House press briefing seat, which is all they're, quote, entitled to. They can still cover the White House. Guess what? The Megyn Kelly show covers President Trump better than the Associated Press from this desk. So quit crying in your soup, Associated Press. How can we possibly do it if we don't have a seat next to him in the oval next to the resolute desk? This is ridiculous. That's not censorship. Read a dictionary. Trump is trying to tweak the AP because they refuse to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. By the way, that's the least of the AP's problems. They also refuse to call trans women he and him, which is what they are. They refuse to not capitalize black when they're referring to

an African-American person. They do all sorts of stuff with their weird link. They refuse to say he was born a man or male. They say assigned male at birth, you know, which is a way of making it sound like some evil doctor just passed his judgment on that penis, not knowing whether it was secretly a vagina. It's ridiculous. The AP has lost its mind. No one who's been paying attention and is anywhere in the center or to the right of it. Trust the AP on anything. We don't give a shit about your problems, AP. There will be no massive organization to help you get your seat back in the Oval because we don't give a shit. But the left thinks we do and thinks that this

is a free speech crisis that they are trying to use to wipe out all the free speech crackdowns they have done over the past several years. COVID is just one example, but there have been so many, as you know, and they had a whole hearing about free speech on Capitol Hill and censorship last week. This is where this woman's a loon. Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett of Texas took the debate. Watch this. Google Maps now show Gulf of America

instead of Gulf of Mexico for app users in the United States, which is a complete farce because it's the Gulf of Mexico. It always has been. And we know that the AP got kicked out yesterday because they refused to buy into this lie. Because that's all y'all really want to promote is lies. So I will end by saying this, Mr. Chairman, because I know we believe in Jesus in this chamber. In John 8 and 32, it says the truth shall set you free. So maybe we should focus on

a little bit of truth in this chamber. Cool. How was president Biden's health for the last year of his presidency? Love to talk about it. Let's chat. I love, I love truth too. Let's do it. Vice president JD Vance responded to an ex post about the matter of free speech from former MSNBC anchor Mehdi Hassan, who's very upset about the AP issue. So Vice President Vance responded to this Mehdi Hassan attack on poor AP by saying, yes, dummy, I think there's a difference between not giving a reporter a seat in the White House press briefing room, which is actually, that's not even what Trump did. Trump did less than that, and jailing people for dissenting views.

The latter's a threat to free speech. The former is not. Hope that helps. Joining me now, the hosts of the America This Week podcast, author and novelist Walter Kern and our friend, Racket News editor Matt Taibbi. Matt was in that hearing during Congresswoman Crockett's weird rant. Guys, great to see you. Matt, welcome back. Walter, welcome to the show. Thank you. Great to be here. Thanks for having us, Megan. So I'm sorry that you had thoughts and prayers because that must have been rather unpleasant, Matt. What did you make of it? Oh, that was bizarre.

She was looking. Congressman Krakow was looking right at me the entire time talking about how we want to lie on the world and all this other stuff. And she was really animated. I could not. I made the mistake of trying to follow what she was saying, which is confusing. So, yeah, it was very strange. The whole hearing was bizarre. Really, I was only asked one question, really, by a Democrat the entire hearing, which went on for hours. So what was the point of the hearing? Why were you there and what was the point?

I think Jim Jordan really wanted to underscore that there are continuing issues with the censorship landscape, which coincidentally Vice President Vance talked about this week, a lot of it having to do with the integration of the United States with sort of foreign and especially European-driven censorship regimes like the Digital Services Act or the Online Safety Act or Germany's NetzDG Act. And the United States is still basically in conflict with a lot of those countries and suppressing a lot of forces within our own country that want those kinds of measures here in the U.S. Hmm. All right. So the Democrats now see an opportunity, Walter, to spin this whole thing because

the Trump administration says the AP can still go to the White House press briefing room, but can't have the extra bonus of going into the Oval, which is an extraordinary event anyway, by the way. I mean, like what? When did Joe Biden just randomly invite a bunch of reporters just on a moment's notice to come visit him in the Oval and chit chat with them? They can't go on Air Force One, but many other media companies can not the AP. But they they think that they're the vaunted gold standard of journalism. So they're very, very upset. And many on the left are now trying to organize this sort of posse by journalists like, yeah, I stand with the AP. This is bullshit. What do you make of it?

Well, the next time Delta Airlines refuses to upgrade me to a seat in the front of the plane, I'm going to cry censorship. Riding in the back of the plane is not being censored. Strangely enough, Matt and I, when we applied for credentials to the Democratic Convention, weren't allowed to go in at all. So they protest too much. The fact is that censorship has to do with your ability to say things, not the place from which you listen to things. Well said. But they don't understand that. And what's really happening here is the AP has its feelings hurt.

It's upset that it's not the vaunted news organization it once was the same way 60 minutes is not the vaunted news organization it once was. And the theme of today's show for that, they have only themselves to blame. But that's this whole show is about personal responsibility. But the AP has allowed itself to be turned into a joke. Go ahead, Walter. Where does AP think the names of bodies of water come from? God? They're political designations. You know, a lot of these places in America have had three names. They had a name when we first got here. The American Indians named it something. Then the next group of settlers named it something else.

And then when the place became a state, it was named something else. It is government that gives names to large features of geography. If the AP wants to dispute that and has some other policy about names and where they come from, that's fine. But the fact is they decided to have a tantrum and they got a tantrum back and now they're crying. I mean, don't, didn't we like change the name of Fort Bragg because people decided that was offensive. All these high schools out in San Francisco had their names changed when we decided that the founding fathers they were named after might have had a slave. Even here in New York, closer to where I live, Matt, we've got I got to go across the damn Mario Cuomo bridge now instead of the tap and Z, which is what it will always be to me because of that loser, Andrew Cuomo.

But the AP will decide whether Trump's a lunatic and his name stick or he's not and they don't, whatever. And if it has to suffer any blowback, it cloaks itself in the First Amendment and it's the victim. There's an angle here that's kind of funny. I think the AP doesn't understand that to a certain extent Trump is trolling exactly them. The AP Stylebook is essentially the glossary of accepted terminology that the entire print journalism industry uses. And when I first started off in print journalism, the Stylebook was fairly static. It would change every now and then. But recently, it's become this thing where there are

changes constantly where they advise you, oh, try to avoid using the word woke if you can, because it's used in a derogatory fashion by conservatives. Don't refer to the sex at birth of a transgender person if you can avoid doing that. They're constantly instructing you on usages that go far beyond things like grammar or official names. And Trump, by naming the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America, like, I don't know how I feel about that personally, but it's incredibly clear that he's sort of returning in kind, that kind of stuff. And for them to throw a fit over this, it's silly on two levels. Number one, I came up in independent journalism. Nobody ever gave me a credential. You don't need a credential to be a journalist. You can do it, as you say, Megan, from where you are. We're supposed to be on the

outside. The tantrum is ridiculous. But the second thing is they do this constantly. That's what they do. And they're being called out on it. They can't stand it. And they also can't stand having like special access to power. You guys know as well as I do that when it's a Democratic administration, they get all the leaks. They get invited to the right cocktail parties. They feel like one of the cool kids. And now they're on the outs. Now they've been relegated to the nerd section where no one will swing by and say hello to them. Now, I think Matt and I feel the same. Walter, I assume you do too. As a journalist, it's better to be ostracized. It's better not to be too chummy. It's one of the reasons why, even though I totally support President Trump, I don't ask him for any favors

at all. It's very important that I not owe him anything. I can't owe him for any favors at all. I, it's very important that he, I know not owe him anything. I can't owe him anything because I have to be able to do the show in a way that leaves me free to criticize him or his administration. But people who work at CBS and ABC and the Washington Post, they're dying to stay on the inner halls of relevance. It's one of the reasons why the 51 intelligence agents having their access codes pulled for all the intelligence buildings was so effective, right?

You're out, you're no longer important, Walter. And that kind of thing kills them. Well, I live in Montana, about as far away from the White House briefing room as you can be. But as a younger journalist, when I first went to Washington, just after Bill Clinton was elected the first time, I did a story on the New Republic

magazine, which was a very inside publication, very popular with the Democratic establishment at the time. And I hung around their offices for a few days. And everybody of note, cabinet people, top advisors of the president came through and gave off the record briefings. And as I sat there like a fly on the wall, I realized that the journalists were married to the press secretaries of the people in the administration. Everybody's kids went to school together. They gathered that night at parties and bars. They were, in fact, one social group, a very tight-knit social group. And I completely agree with you that proximity can become a form of corruption because as a journalist, when you're socializing with people,

you're constantly hearing things that you can't report. And after a while, you've, you're living in a world where you know way more than you are allowed to tell your audience. And that makes you part of them. In other words, you're keeping their secrets. You're keeping their secrets more than you're telling their secrets. And your job is to tell their secrets. That's so true. That's why it's like, it's dangerous to, to need access in that way. It's, it's a privilege and it's a power to be removed. You know what I mean? Like it's better not to be at all their parties and rubbing elbows with all of them.

And that applies to journalists and it applies to Supreme Court justices. You know, it's like, I think about it a lot because now I know this president better than I've known any other president. I saw him at the Super Bowl. We have a nice relationship now. We glad-handed. It was great to see him. I'm definitely rooting for him. I've told the audience that, but it does not cross over. I did not go to Mar-a-Lago on

election night. I, you know, you've got to keep somewhat of an arm's length or you become beholden to them and you can't let your I'm rooting for him to succeed overcome your I'm rooting for myself to tell the truth to the audience, Matt. Yeah, I mean, I was advised as a young reporter by, you know, some people who are kind of legendary investigative reporters at the time. Look, if you want friends, you can't stay in this business. This is this is a business where you're going to lose friends. And if you try to keep them, you're probably not doing your job correctly. So get used to having a pretty narrow social life and then you'll be fine. And I think, you know, what Walter is talking about, I mean,

a lot of people in Washington talk about this concept of the blob, which is everybody you meet is married to somebody else who's a lobbyist. And there are these interlocking relationships where every transaction that you see, whether it's a piece of legislation that gets passed or, you know, an executive order, there's a whole bunch of hidden connections that the public doesn't get to see, which is, you know, it's questionable. I think it needs to be reported on, but it's worse when the reporters are part of the equation. Like, I think all of that internecine, behind the scenes, all those relationships, it's really bad if the reporters are part of that sort of hidden network. They shouldn't be. They should be on the outside. And that way you can trust the stuff that you see on the air much more.

Yeah. And to Megan's point, you made a great point about Joe Biden and his condition and how well it was hidden. The AP was sitting in the damn front row. OK, they had their front row seat. They were able to see him shuffle in and shuffle out and be taken in and out by nurses and aides and so on. What good did it do the American people that the AP was in front? None. Their access, in fact, was probably predicated on them keeping the secret. Maybe from the back row, as an outsider and a little with a chip on their

shoulder, they might have told the truth. But as an insider feeling like they had the golden ticket, they kept their mouth shut just like everybody else. Now, that is a form of self-censorship in the name of currying favor with power. So this is this brings me to the tricky subject. Legally, it's tricky. But as my journalistic response to it is different of what's happening at the Department of Justice, where the DOJ, which is under Trump's command, it's part of the executive branch, dropped the case against Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, who had been indicted criminally for allegedly taking bribes or favors from Egypt. And the prosecutors who are on the case from the Southern District of New York, which is the most respected U.S. attorney's office in the country, say they had a great case against him and he was going down. Now, he denies that and he denies having done anything wrong. But under Trump's command,

the DOJ dropped the charges against him. And what the big story all over the papers in the left wing press over the weekend has been the meltdown within the Southern District of New York about the dropping of these charges. So the woman who was in charge, she was like acting in charge of that office, who's a conservative, who clerked for Scalia, who was part of the Federalist Society. So it's not some far left crank resigned saying, you know, basically, Mr. President, Ms. Bondi, you know, you've asked me to drop this case and I can't in good conscience go into court and tell the court that we don't have grounds to prosecute this and we want to withdraw it and that it might have been a political prosecution

because it wasn't. And like, I'm not willing to do that. And then others down the line from her said the same thing, like, peace out. We're not going to do this. We're not, we're not okay with dropping this. My own view on it is I don't really think anybody has done anything wrong. I understand perfectly why Trump looks at this and says, it smells like a political prosecution slash persecution to me. I went to the Al Smith dinner. Trump was there. It's a big fancy dinner before the election. It's a Catholic thing. And Mayor Adams was there. And Trump made a joke at the time. He's like, Mayor Adams, it's been a tough week or a tough time. And he said, I think it's going to work out. And you could, there was sort of a funny light bonding moment between these two guys who'd been indicted, who had reached the top

of their respective circles in the political field. So I think Trump has actual empathy for him having been through this. I genuinely think Trump is like, this is probably bullshit. And I'm sick of this bullshit where we're just now indicting people who are in office. And I think Trump probably did not kick the tires of the case as his deputy attorney general admitted in ordering SDNY to drop it. They admitted like, we actually haven't looked at whether it's strong or it's not strong. We don't care. Drop it. We think he's going to work with us on anti-illegal immigration. And his cooperation to us is important. And we don'tillegal immigration. And his cooperation to us is important and we don't want him distracted. And we don't really believe in this thing to begin with.

Okay. So I think Trump didn't do anything wrong. Neither did Emile Beau, who ordered it. And then I think the US attorney was like, I don't have this in me. I'm not going to say this was political when it wasn't. She did the right thing too. She lived by her conscience. She resigned. She'll be fine. She'll get a very, very well-paying job tomorrow at literally any law firm in the United States. And we'll be making three million dollars a year within the next seven days. OK, she'll be fine. She stuck to her principles. But, you know, there's a tug of war between what politicians want and sometimes what lawyers see as right. And I don't think it's some constitutional crisis. I think it's just the difference in priorities.

But to read one piece of paper in the left wing press would have you believe that Trump again is creating a constitutional crisis, that he is lawless, and that even now the conservatives at SDNY are turning on him. Yeah, I think you're right, Megan. I'm not a lawyer, but I, you know, I think everybody, obviously, if you don't feel that you can in good conscience bring that case, then resigning is what you should do. But it's the same for a whole string of stories that we've seen over the years. You know, like Gary Shapley, the IRS whistleblower, like they know when they come forward that they're not going to be working, you know, in government anymore. Right. So it's essentially resigning. Right. When you come forward and you can't come back.

But I actually didn't finish my point, Matt, which was I meant to, but I tossed it to you too soon. The final point on it is. The this same press that's so upset about this, where the hell were they when Biden used the Justice Department to ruin President Trump's life? Right. When Biden had his DOJ cooperate with local prosecutors in New York and down in the Fannie Willis case to help put Trump behind bars, they defended it at every turn. So I read their outrage about like him dropping criminal charges against somebody, which is far less bad on the moral scale than bringing them when there is no crime. And I think, oh, what's on Netflix tonight? Yeah, I mean, the selective outrage factor in all this is pretty conspicuous. I mean, like, it goes both ways, but they massively overreported, I think, a lot of the Trump cases, you know, particularly the one in New, was such an obviously politicized case. And there was no coverage in that direction, really examining how ridiculous and what a

Frankensteinian legal construction that indictment was. But when you have a person of conscience on the other side, now it becomes a soccer of type of story. They didn't cover the FBI whistleblowers or the IRS whistleblowers the same way. That's just the way it's going to be going forward. I mean we're in a fractured society right now. It really is the boy who cried wolf, Walter, and now we're like, we don't care. I know. I know.

The wolf's here. I got it. Yeah. Okay. They're victims of their own profligacy. They dropped a prosecution that involved President Biden because he was too old and didn't have a good memory. They went after Trump for documents inside Mar-a-Lago. And I still don't know why, really. Do you? What were the documents and what was the urgency? We don't know. Prosecutorial discretion is a recognized

thing because we could probably be prosecuting half the people on Capitol Hill for something at any one time, all day long, all year long. That's generous, Walter. It's more than that. Yeah, exactly. As Mark Twain said, Congress is the only Native American criminal class. And so that he decided to not follow through on the prosecution of a mayor of New York City at a time when New York City is facing practically a crisis with migration. And he has been grappling with that more fully maybe than any other big city mayor. I think it's completely appropriate. It's a political decision, a political risk, and he took it.

That's it. Right. And they say, oh, well, you know, his defenders say, Mayor Adams is like, well, the only reason I got prosecuted is because I started to support a crackdown on illegal immigration. Well, that's not true because they began the investigation into him long before he started saying things against illegal immigration. So that's, that isn't true, but I don't care. He doesn't have to start lying about it. It's like Trump doesn't believe in the case. Trump wants him on Trump's side as he tries to crack down on this ridiculous corruption of a sanctuary city through all these illegal immigrants. And he thinks he's got a live one here who who will work with him, unlike every other Democrat

politician who's going to take over in the city as mayor. He will work with him. And Trump sees an opportunity here. That's good enough for me. I just saw one of my far left friends who's like a complete lib Dem voter. And he said, I couldn't care less about any of this bullshit. Like this stuff is not resonating. You know that he's not prosecuting Eric Adams. He's he's letting federal bureaucrats go. He's not sending the aid checks to the trans opera in Cambodia. Like it's not penetrating, Walter. And they're frustrated. No, it's not working. who made their lives hell during COVID and paid no price themselves, who got to go home, work from home, and stayed home ever after, sometimes taking other jobs, those are not

the people that in traditional left-wing politics we are out to support. The American left was a party of the working people, not the people who work at the DMV or the IRS or the U.S. Treasury, but the people who work in factories, fields and actual jobs. And trying to make those people a victim class is just not going to work. They're though they will try mightily. I mean, the Trump derangement syndrome was on full display, among other places, when Pete Hegseth went across the pond the other day. And he was was it in Brussels? Yeah. On Thursday, giving a speech over there, his first international trip as Department of Defense secretary and. Committed the sin of drinking some water. Did you see this online that He drank water in a clear glass. And the crazy thing about water in a clear glass is it can was drinking bourbon openly in front of the world his second week or third week as defense secretary. I assume this is a trick of the light and he's not actually throwing back bourbon on camera.

But it's interesting that the water looks brown. It's interesting. Is it not, Matt? I mean, this has been going on for a long time, this kind of journalism by implication. It started, I think, really with the Russiagate stuff where, I mean, remember we had a cover story in New York Magazine that suggested Donald Trump would have been recruited by the KGB, like before the village people, basically. And it was just based on a hunch, you know, let's look at all these dots, these connections. Could he be a Russian agent? You know, is there a Manchurian candidate in the White House? That's how they do it. It's journalism by question. I'm not saying that he's drinking bourbon, but could he be drinking bourbon?

You're not supposed to do that. I know in the age of content being needed all the time and influencers, we do speculate a lot, but there are some lines we try not to cross, and that's kind of one of them. He knows its implications because the tabloid press tried to suggest that Pete's a drunk. The Democrats tried to suggest he's a drunk and a wife beater without any evidence at his confirmation hearing. And here he is three weeks.

And he said, I won't a drink will not touch my lips if I am confirmed to this position. You know, I have been drinking in the past, but it will not touch my lips if I am confirmed to this position. You know, I have been drinking in the past, but it will not touch my lips. And the stupidity of like his third week, he's like, yeah, bourbon in front of the public eye while he's giving his first international speech. I would have said if I really wanted to drink and get away with it at the podium, I'd be drinking vodka, you know, nice and clear. And I can have as much of it as I want. In fact, I won't be drinking as much of it, though, as Winston Churchill drank by the morning, who led us in World War Two and was absolutely wasted the whole time. He should have just thrown

it back at them. Every time Donald Trump used to wipe his nose in the first Trump administration, they said he was snorting Adderall. I don't know if you remember that. Yeah. Or snorting, you know, everybody wipes their noses, snorting Coke. Everybody's drink catches the light is drinking whiskey. Meanwhile, if you really go up to Capitol Hill and you go to the Senate, you hang out. A lot of them are getting wasted during the day. OK. Oh, yeah. Remember that one senator? Was it Mark Mullen? One of them was like, half of you have been drunk before you go to the Senate floor and vote, he said. Right, right. Just recently, yeah.

Go on. What? Who specifically? By the way, before we take a break, was Kamala Harris drunk in this clip or wasn't she? It went everywhere. While we're on the topic of public drunkenness, she appeared at a Broadway show and had the meet and greet with the cast after the fact. I don't know. I report.

You decide. It's tired, but it cannot be defeated. When we think about, like, these moments where we see things that are being taken, but also let's see it as, you know, nature pours a vacuum. So where there's a vacancy, then let's fill it. And let's know that the reality is that the progress of our nation has always been about the expansion of rights, not the restriction of rights. We're seeing a U-turn right now. But we have to keep fighting. Oh, touched your nose.

For those rights to be maintained because we have to be vigilant. And it's just the nature of it. We have to have to be a clear eye. And it doesn't mean we don't see the beauty in everything. Right? These things all coexist. But I believe we fight for something, not against God. And that's our optimism. Thank you so much. something, not against God. I'm going to give you my verdict, not drunk, just her normal self.

That's how she is. And full of profundities, Walter, I feel like you were really moved. Well, everybody in the audience was trolling her with their oohs and aahs. They didn't feel those for a second. They were putting them on. Nothing. She is the queen of pseudo-prevendity. If she hears the word yes, she said, we say yes to this, but no to that. If we're for this, we're against that. She's always trying to make some sort of oratorical Ciceronian point out of absolutely nothing. And but I do think she was drunk. And I think she had a mixture of if, you know, now that we're allowed to speculate and not be libelous. Sure. Pete Egg said that.

Open the door. Yeah, she was drunk. And I think she had a little bit of a stimulant on board that was giving her the confidence to talk at all. And the drunkenness was giving her the absolute mindless stupidity when she talked. I feel like I've seen this a million times. Either she's always drunk when she's talking or she was just her normal self. This is how she talks. She fills the air with absolute nothingness. You feel like you ate a big air sandwich. Then she walks away. That's her M.O.

What am I missing, Matt? No, nothing. I mean, having covered her in Iowa and on the campaign trail in 2020, I know a lot of journalists kind of struggled with how to comment on scenes like that. There are a lot of things that come to mind. But you had to speak in code when you talk to your readers about stuff like that. There are a lot of things that come to mind, but you had to speak in code when you talk to your readers about stuff like that. Yes, she was essentially spinning these giant sand castles of nothingness, but it's impossible to convey the exact impression that she's giving while she goes off on these rants. You have to watch it to believe it.

Oh, do we have it? Do we have the part they took out in 60 Minutes where she sounded just like this? I don't know if we do. No, I don't think we do. I showed it last week. But if you listen to the 60 Minutes interview that they released to the FCC, this is the kind of stuff they took out

to try to make her sound like a more serious person, where she did her ambitions and aspirations and dreams and really thinking the nature of horror is a vacuum she sounded like that with them so they ran cover for her the broadway folks did the um as walter says and um i'll let you guys we're no jazz hands. That was a jazz hands moment. There was a little jazz handy thing going on. Go ahead, Walter. Well, if nature is a vacuum, now we know why she wasn't elected because we do too. But she's always she's always she talked about a vacancy that needs if there's a vacancy, it needs to be filled there.

It's very Freudian. This concept of emptiness seems to be on her mind a lot. Yes. Preacher, heal thyself. All right, stand by, guys. Quick break. We'll be right back. As President Trump begins his new administration, one of the top Democrats in Congress aiming to undermine the Trump agenda is Senator Dick Durbin. And according to our sponsor, the Electronic Payments Coalition, Senator Durbin has a new scheme, a government takeover of your credit card. Today, Americans have thousands of choices in credit cards, but they say Senator Durbin's plan will result in less competition and less security. And that means more risk for your credit and your identity. Learn more at guardyourcard.com and consider telling your senators to stop Dick Durbin's

government takeover of your credit card before it's too late. Elon and Trump sat together with Hannity for a joint interview that will air on Hannity's show on the Fox News channel this evening. They put out a clip previewing it. Take a look. Now you're going to rescue astronauts. And now, again, you do you do all of this. I would think liberals would love the fact that you have the biggest electric vehicle company in the world. Yeah. I mean, I used to be adored by the left. You know, not anymore. Less so these days. He killed that. I? I mean, less so. I really didn't.

I mean, this whole sort of, like, you know, they call it, like, Trump derangement syndrome. And I didn't, you know, you don't realize how real this is until, like, it's, you can't reason with people. So, like, I was at a friend's birthday party in LA, just a birthday dinner, and it was, like, a nice, quiet dinner, and everything was, everyone was behaving normally. And I happened to mention, this was before the election the election like a month or two before i have to

mention the president's name and it was like they got shot with a dart in the jugular that contained like methamphetamine and rabies okay and i'm like what is wrong guys like you just can't have like a normal conversation yeah and it's like like, it's like that become completely irrational. Okay. Nobody doubts that, right? That, that has the ring of truth. We all know that that's true. And he's not the only Democrat to, you know, have people turn on him when he became more Trump adjacent or Trump, you know, red pilled, whatever. But now the Democrats in this scramble to try to figure out how to respond, you know, the AP ind, whatever. But now the Democrats in this scramble to try to figure out how to respond, you know, the AP indignation and their downgrading have come up with a master plan. There are more and more reports about how they're frustrated at the fact that Musk,

for example, his Doge account has four million followers on X and the Democrat, the DNC resistance has a hundred thousand. So it's not going well. Like they can't find a way of counterbalancing this very powerful team, but they've stumbled upon a possibility. It's just a possibility. We saw a preview of it at the Doge subcommittee meeting on Wednesday. I know you guys talked about this on your show. Here is Democrat Robert Garcia from California, ready to change the conversation. It's not 36. Now, I find it ironic, of course, that our chairwoman, Congresswoman Greene, is in charge of running this committee. Now, in the last Congress, Chairwoman Greene literally showed

a dick pic in our oversight congressional hearing. So I thought I'd bring one as well. Now, this, of course, we know is President Elon Musk. He's also the world's richest man. He was the biggest political donor in the last election. He has billions of dollars in conflicts of interest. And we know that he is leading a power grab also abided by and encouraged by Donald Trump and of course, the chairwoman, Congresswoman Greene. So he's showing for the listening audience a picture of just Elon Musk sitting there in a tux as this alleged dick pic. Real clever. So then he goes on CNN on Wednesday and gets asked about it and defends it. Watch. I want to hear why, but do you think that calling Elon Musk a dick is effective messaging for confronting what is

a potentially irreversible transformation of the U.S. government? Well, he is a dick. I'm going to give you the floor, but I will just say as a former cable news anchor, I would never utter that word on my show. It's one thing on this show. Podcasting is my show is rated explicit where it's a much more less, less formal conversation. I would never have said that if I were her. I felt uncomfortable watching her do it. The whole thing made me uncomfortable, which I think is why it's ineffective. But what do you guys think? We talked about this on our show. They're trying to get a piece of the spontaneous and sometimes obscene and sometimes off-color trolling style humor that exists on the Trump side. But the whole point of that is that you can't script it.

You can't do your normal shtick and just add the word dick to it and get more traffic that way. It's actually exponentially worse than what you were doing before, right? Because now you're just doing, it's the same old thing, but let's just add a use of subsanity that we

ourselves look uncomfortable saying um you know it's one thing if it just comes right out of you as part of a spiel that that rolls off the tongue but if you have a staff of people in whatever committee room coming up with let's just call them a dick um That tells me that they're messaging, that they have nothing left in the basket in terms of messaging ideas. That's exactly right, Walter. Rebels and outsiders like the Trump administration and the people around Trump have access to a vocabulary of outrage and sometimes obscenity that they have to use back to fight back against authority. But when authority starts, when the administration starts going after Animal House using the same language, it just looks ridiculous. You know, it's like the U.S.

cavalry picking up bows and arrows because it's been shot at by, you know, the Sioux warriors. And it says, I don't know how these things work, but they seem to be really good at killing people. Boing! You know, learn to say dick and learn to be convincing and sound like you're in a bar room. But when you're doing it from the cable desk, like you say, Megan, all you're doing is lowering yourself. And they won by getting you to use the weapon of the outsider.

And they did it badly. That's exactly right. That's right. Had I been a cable news chair, I would have said a deep pick and people would have understood. But you're right. When you phone, when you say, when you and your like serious presentation are like,

why did you feel it was important to call him a dick? It's like everyone's uncomfortable. Not, don't, don't go there. But they're scrambling. This is Anna Navarro on The View being open about the fact that they can't get there. The messaging is everywhere, and she's unsatisfied with the resistance. It's Sade Teen. Democrats need to do the opposition, the resistance, whatever you want to call the folks that are against everything that Donald Trump is doing. We need to have a way of reaching people, whether it's social media,

whether it's a website, whether it's what, so that people can understand what is happening. That's what they need is a website, Matt. First, after the election, they're like, we need our own Joe Rogan. If only we could find a Democratic Joe Rogan. Totally not understanding that Joe Rogan has been a Democrat this entire time, up until about two minutes ago. Now, if we could just get like a website. But meanwhile, they control all the websites. Maybe a blog.

Maybe they should try getting a blog. If only we controlled massive cable operations or broadcast news channels or wire services. What can we do? then it will change some kind of underlying reality that they're not in touch with. There was a great play by Joseph Heller, who is the author of Catch-22 called We Bomb the New Haven. And there was a character in it who says, we're going to bomb Constantinople off the map. And somebody else says, why don't we just bomb the map? And that's what they're always trying to do. They're trying to take the shortcut to actually connecting with voters or changing their policy or changing the actual political direction of what they do to gather more voters by changing the message.

And they've done that so many times, not realizing that you have to actually make some kind of substantive offer to the people that's different than what you were doing before for them to take notice. Just like a different presentation doesn't change much. Mm-hmm. But they can't because they still misunderstand at every turn why Trump was found so appealing by 80 million plus people, by over half the electorate. They don't get it. And in nowhere was that more apparent than in the absurd off in its tone and content Saturday Night Live skit with Tom Hanks. I was off yesterday,

so we didn't get to talk about this, but it was ridiculous. At their 50th anniversary party, they parade Tom Hanks out there as this dumb, rural MAGA supporter with the hat, who's, of course, racist, too, and won't shake the hand of the black jeopardy. It's a skit on SNL called Black Jeopardy and won't shake his hands, obviously, because Trump supporters hate black people. Here it is. Oh, thank you. Hey, speaking of church, can I say something? If more folks went to church, we wouldn't be in this mess we're in now. You know what? I agree with you, Doug. I'd like to shake your hand, sir. Here we go. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's just it's just a handshake. Yeah, all right. You welcome a black gentleman.opardy any time. Oh, well, all right.

Well, thank you, my brother. Now, maybe I'll start a show for you to come on, and we'll call it What Jeopardy? No. We don't need it. We don't need it. So off. Your thoughts?

Terrible. Can I jump in, Matt? First of all, why does using a Southern accent exempt you from all the charges of stereotyping and so on? You know, he gets to use a Southern accent and it's across the board a pejorative, something we're supposed to recoil from. That's the racism, if you want to look at it. Second of all, I didn't even know that Tom Hanks would stoop to this kind of thing. It's terrible writing. It was a terrible skit. And he was the big loser. I see people all over social media going, I don't think I'm going to be watching him again anytime soon. It was shocking, wasn't it, Matt? Like somebody who tries so carefully, like not to be too divisive in his choices, to come right out and suggest he thinks Trump supporters are racists. There's two things about this. This is an old trope in media and in comedy,

right? It's the urban, sophisticated kid who's picking on the rural hayseed. And people have been doing this since there's been journalism, since H.L. Mencken was an expert practitioner in this, going to Tennessee and picking on all the local folks during the Scopes Monkey Trial. But A, you have to be accurate. In other words, the caricature has to be successful and true in some way and not just some stereotyped idea that you picked up by not observing people in real life. The other thing is if you're going to do that, if you're going to use the sharpest scalpel that you have in your drawer, you got to do it on your own people too.

And that's why it's okay when you read mencken he goes after the people who live in baltimore and his peers and and politicians and people on both sides of the aisle with just as much viciousness as he did uh the people in rural tennessee that's what's missing from this show um it just it it's it's not funny because it's just a stereotype and it's not meant to go in all directions. And it's mean. It's like, you know, Tom Hanks, I'm sure he's worth a billion dollars. I'm sure he's got multiple mansions across the world. He probably has or at least can afford a yacht, every fancy sports car he wants.

And you know who got it for him? All of us. Guys like the one he's making fun of right there, who went to see Forrest Gump and Big and all the fun Tom Hanks movies and never once thought that he was judging them as stupid, rural, worth nothing racists. But he just sold Forrest. He just sold Forrest Gump down the river. He did a Forrest Gump imitation and now he's a, now he's a racist. He just, uh, all that good work went away. Shame on him guys. Thank you, Walter, Matt. Great to see you both with host of America this week. Check it out. Now's the time to prioritize gut health, daily exposure to processed foods,

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Go to SiriusXM.com slash MKShow to subscribe and get three months free. That's SiriusXM.com slash MKShow and get three months free. Offer details apply. Yesterday, a Delta Airlines flight from Minneapolis to Toronto crashed while landing in Canada. Have you seen this? Stunning video showed the plane hitting the runway, catching on fire, and flipping upside down. Unbelievably, all 80 people on board survived. They got out and they survived. Here to break down what could have caused this are aviation experts Matt Wiz Buckley, decorated U.S. Naval aviator and Top Gun graduate, and Gregory Feith, former National Transportation Safety Board Air Safety Investigator. Wiz, Greg, welcome. Thank you for being here. This is so scary looking. Let's just

show it. So you see it coming in for a landing. It's obviously a snowy day. The runway has snow and it's a huge jet. When I heard regional jet, I thought small. No, it's a huge jet and fire, fire when the wheels touch down or so it, followed by a cloud of black smoke. It's very clear. I don't know why this guy was filming this particular landing, but man, he got the whole thing. It went on its side. It then flipped upside down, and somehow everyone survived. So, Wiz, how does this happen? Well, Megan, thanks for having me back again. Sadly, under these circumstances, or actually since everybody got out, I guess we're okay. Megan, the first thing, when I saw

the in-cockpit video this morning, I heard you reading your email in the last block there. Then I guess I can talk like this. That jet was coming down like a turd off a tall moose. Landing an F-18 aboard an aircraft carrier, our average rate of descent is about 800 feet per minute. And I think the last flight tracker data that I saw for this RJ was about 1100 feet per minute. So that RJ came down a lot faster and harder than I would have landed aboard the boat. And I think one of the officials yesterday or last night said, hey, crosswind wasn't an issue. Whenever anything like this happens, Megan, I grab my aviation app and I immediately look at the weather, see what the weather is. And landing on runway 23,

the winds were out at 270. So about 40 degrees off the nose or down the runway in really gusty conditions. So it looks like this airplane didn't really have too much of a flare, which is when you get close into the runway, we pull the nose back, pull back on the throttles and kind of do that nice, what we as Navy pilots would say, Air Force landing. But this landing was hard, and it looks like it sheared off the right main landing gear, took the wing with it. And then the only wing that was left, the left wing still producing lift.

They kind of corkscrew and corkscrew and roll down the runway. But my God, you know, we jokingly in aviation say any any landing we can walk away from is a good landing. That was a pretty bad landing. And thank God a lot of people walked away. But just to clarify what you're saying. So they say weather's not an issue, but you're saying you have questions about that based on the data that you saw. Oh my God, yeah. I mean, whether if they're talking about clouds or low ceilings or anything like that, just because the sun is out doesn't mean the weather is great. Very, very gusty conditions. When I looked at my phone after the mishap, it was 25 gusts, 45 knots, which is absolutely significant. That's some sporty wind conditions. If it's right down the runway,

right on the nose, that's fine. Still a little sporty. But if it's, you know, 40 degrees off, you know, you're kind of crabbing into the wind and having to take that crab out at the last second very very sporty uh conditions um so sporty what a what a word you know or varsity or or jv however you want to word it it was definitely um you know not not pleasant conditions so whether if you're talking about dangerous obviously so so greg do you agree with that? And if so, you know, I always like to tell myself, as somebody who used to fly out of O'Hare all the time in very snowy, bad conditions, they wouldn't let the plane take off if this weren't safe to fly in. So should they not have been flying planes in this kind of wind? No, these winds, as Wizz will tell you, are winds that pilots are trained to handle. There are certain limitations, not only with the aircraft, but the airline sets a policy about wind conditions as well. But when you look at this landing in the video, that aircraft was coming down at a high rate of descent. you typically will go into a flare and arrest that

descent so that when you touch down, your rate of descent is maybe 100 to 200 feet a minute rather than 1,100. The nominal is about 500 to 700 feet per minute. So they put this airplane apart. Wait, so just put that in layman's terms. You're saying it was coming down faster than it should have been? Absolutely. Almost double, almost twice as fast as it should have been. And again, that's the problem is you saw the right wing drop just before the airplane touched down on the runway. That's what took all that high energy impact was that right main landing gear, the wing, that's what snapped it off. And as we said, the left wing was still producing lift,

which rolled that airplane and got it sliding sideways. I'm going to be interested to know from the flight data recorder, not only what the G trace, that's the G impact because it's a recorded parameter, how many G forces were experienced on that landing, but to determine whether or not the actual nose of the airplane was cocked off center, a lot of times in these crosswinds, and there were crosswinds, they were gusty crosswinds, and as Wiz knows, when you're flying, you'll typically add a gust factor. You'll actually increase your speed by half the gust factor to give you more controllability. All of these things are going to have to be dissected by the investigators to see what kind of flying and who was flying at the time of the accident.

I want to point out, we got that video that we're showing from an account on X called Air Main Engineer. Just a stunningly perfect video. I mean, I'm sure at the NTSB, Greg, you would have been thrilled to have this kind of a video of a plane crash. Megan, I'll tell you, I call it the electronic witness. You know, years past when I first went to work for the board a long time ago, you'd spend a lot of time hunting down witnesses and then you'd have to ferret out fact from fiction. They'd tell you a thousand different stories, and you tried to pick the factoids. Now, we have an electronic witness. It doesn't lie. It just basically records the artifacts of the accident. This is great for

investigators because this information, in combination with flight data recorder information, and then, of course, CVR and the crew interviews is going to put a very complete story together in a very short period of time. Now, Wiz, this is, okay, I'm told that this is a CRJ 900 configured with seats for 70 to 76 passengers. It looks huge. It doesn't look like one of those small regional jets. God rest them, like the folks who went down from Kansas into D.C. the last time we were talking to you. It looks larger to me. But I know you did mention then, and I've read in connection with this, that those regional pilots are not quite as trained as the big old American Airlines jet pilots that we have on the DC-10s or 747s that we fly? Well, let me rephrase that or clean that up a little bit. They're certainly trained, right? The FAA has standards. You have to meet these minimum standards. Endeavor Air has standards. So clearly, those two aviators sitting in front of that regional jet had met the standards, the minimum standards.

I think what the nuance is experience. That's probably a clean it up by saying experience. Not to, you know, not not to talk down to any folks in the regional jet. You know, I wasn't born the world's best fighter pilot or actually I was. But you're not born. You're not born with thousands and thousands of flight hours, right? You got to get your hours somewhere. So a lot of the folks in the regionals are doing their time, right? They're building their hours. I don't know too many folks who make flying in the regionals a career. They want to fleet up, so to speak, to the main line, to Delta, United, FedEx, where the big money is. So a lot of these

regional jet crews are overworked and definitely underpaid, in my opinion, but they have got to meet the minimum requirements. Would you fly as a passenger on a regional jet? I would, Megan. I mean, the fact that all of these, before we jumped on the air, Greg and I were talking about, you know, last week we lost a growler, an E-18 crash. We had an F-35 crash in Eielson Air Force Base weeks ago. And then we've had all these other mishaps. If these were spread out over the fiscal year or the calendar year, they'd be blips on the news media radar for a little bit. But the fact that we're kind of squished into a, a month here,

everybody's freaking out. I get it. But as you know, intuitively driving to or from the airport is the most, you know, dangerous part of this exercise. I'd have no problem getting on an RJ, but trust me, Megan,

I, I peek in the cockpit when I get on every once in a while, just to, I don't know why I do, but you could fly all the flights I'm on. I want you behind that wheel. I'm a little worried here, Greg, because I gotta be honest.

I always thought that most, almost like 99% of what happens when we're on board the flight is done by autopilot, which I liked. It's almost impossible to crash these planes because the autopilot's got it. The one where the helicopter bumped into the plane was a freak accident. But this does appear from what you're saying to look like pilot error. How much is the autopilot involved on takeoff and landing?

Well, we got to unpack a lot of that, Megan. One, as Wiz was talking about, quote, experience, let me just tell you that in aviation, we don't mark years as our years of experience or the base of experience. We judge that or at least use hours of flight time as the marker for experience. That'll be one aspect of this particular investigation that the NTSB in assisting the TSB up in Canada will try to determine. What was the crew's experience? How often were they trained? What was their background and things like that? Now, as far as the autopilot is used, yes, the autopilot flies the airplane, especially in the larger aircraft, basically 90% of the time. It is encouraged by the airlines for pilots to hand fly so that they don't lose those tactile flying skills.

You don't want automation flying all the time. But typically in this type of airplane, takeoffs and landings are done by one of the two pilots manually. You're not using an autopilot. You'll use some navigation guidance on some of the airplanes. But typically, unless it's almost zero-zero, which airplanes can land in zero-zero conditions, there are some airplanes that are certified to do that. You'll typically have one of the pilots landing the airplane manually. And there's nothing wrong with that, even under these conditions.

That's where the pilot earns his or her pay. So, Wiz, why wasn't this a deadly crash? The fire coming out from behind it, the air, you know, it flips. We've seen planes like explode on landing. Like, why? How is it that everybody lived? Well, that's above my pay grade uh megan and thank god that all these folks lived look at this these are people upside down because it landed on its you know with its belly up correct yeah well that you know that

mitsubishi i think it is the um you know good on them for the manufacturer that these folks lived in the seats uh thankfully or i guess i can say thankfully this mishap was on landing so that aircraft wasn't packed full of fuel this could be a whole different story if this happened on takeoff or you know they they were coming into land full of fuel for whatever reason uh the crash rescue folks they are they're literally sitting in different alert positions on these airfields. They are waiting for something like this to happen. It's sad to say, but as a crash rescue crewman, I don't ever want to be used, but I'm ready to be used. They were on that that crash almost immediately and they were foaming down the aircraft to to protect against the fire.

But this literally it's got to come up to a higher power, as I saw this mishap occur and then I saw the video, I'm like, I'm absolutely stunned that more people didn't get hurt. And real quick to what Greg, and I have to admit something. So in my aviation career, I'm going to age myself. Whenever Greg is on TV, you know, the mishap is going to be figured out. This guy has got all the experience in the world. I'd see him in press conferences or air show or air crash type of documentaries. And this guy is the 500 pound head. But his point-

Checks in the mail, Matt. That's nice. His point, Megan, the more autopilot you use, the less meat and potato flying skills that pilots have. And if you are taking off and landing, or yeah, Greg can probably speak to this better than I can, the majority of mishaps are going to happen in takeoff and landing. So the dependence or the over-dependence on an autopilot is a little scary. I mean, we have the capability for an F-18 Hornet to land aboard the boat by itself with me as a passenger. But we used to joke like, hey, if I'm going to be a flaming ball of wreckage going down the flight deck, I'm going to do it. Not some nerd from Microsoft, right?

Some autopilot. So there's got to be a happy balance between autopilot and losing stick and rudder skills, you know? I see your point. So what do you make of it, Greg? Why didn't we have fatalities on this? Well, the good thing is, is that, as we've said, when this aircraft came down, it hit flat. If it had cartwheeled, and if you think about United 232 in Sioux City, Iowa, where the crew didn't really have controllability of the airplane, they did get the airplane at least to a piece of pavement. The wingtip drug and, of course, that airplane cartwheel broke the fuselage apart, and that's where the fatalities and serious injuries came from. In this particular instance, while that wing did catch and break, the fuselage stayed intact. And that's what protected these passengers,

not only from a lot of the impact forces and, of course, debris in sliding, but then the post accident fire. The other thing is these airplanes are now equipped with 16G seats. So they are really energy absorbing seats. They are meant to collapse when the G forces are exceeded. That absorbs a lot of that high energy force that the body can't absorb. And then of course, wearing your seatbelt, not loose. It has to be snug and it has to be across your lap. We get a lot of abdominal injuries by people wearing a seatbelt up around their stomach or across their belly button. The lap belt is meant to be on your lap. That is across the top of your thighs, cinched down. That's what kept these people in

the seat. If they had come out, either submarine underneath it or over the top of it, we would have had not only serious injuries, but possibly fatalities. So the structure, and we've learned this, Megan, from years of accident investigation and improvements in crash survivability and the way we design and build aircraft today. So you're saying, I mean, when I do the seatbelt, I pull it across sort of, I have like my pelvic region, I would say, not on top of my thighs. Am I doing it wrong? No, the very top of your thigh across that pelvic area. But some people will, some people slouch in their seat and they'll pull it across their belly button and things like that.

I guarantee, yeah, because when you move forward in that impact, you're going to, that belt will act as a knife. And that's where you get a lot of internal injuries and things like that. So you want to wear it low in that pelvic area because that's the most stout part of your body. I mean, one other question on this, Greg, this I would imagine will be an investigator's dream in a way, because you've got these videos, there are other videos, not just that one, and you've got all the passengers and the pilots, not to mention the black box, but

they're going to know everything there is to know about this one, yes? Assuming, Megan, that the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder were operational because we have had maintenance issues in the past where we've lost data. But if all things being equal, everything was working, then yes, we have all of the electronic data. The FDR is going to tell investigators what was happening with that aircraft at any point, time, and space. And then, of course, the CBR will be used to corroborate anything that the flight crew had talked about and what they present to investigators. I have found discrepancies in the past where the cockpit voice recorder recorded a conversation. when we asked the flight crew about it, they, one or both,

did not remember having that conversation. So it really is a gap filler, and it helps put a complete story together with all of this information. Wow. On my knees, thanking the Lord if I'd been on board that plane after it was over. Just thank God. That looked like divine intervention for some reason. Go ahead, Wiz. I'll give you the last word. No, I was just going to say, we also have a saying in aviation, if there's any doubt, there's no doubt. So the pilot not flying in this case, if they saw this massive rate of descent coming, like, man, we're going to slam. When in doubt, go around, right? When in doubt, there's no doubt. Go back up. They could have easily, go try it again. You have enough gas to go try three, four, five other landings.

And if it's too windy, go to a divert field. So when in doubt, do not try and salvage a bad approach because bad things can happen. Wait, so you're saying, are you saying it was that like when you're almost down, you can realize this isn't, we're coming down too fast. This isn't going to end well. And at that moment, you could still nose up. Megan, you can be on the runway and decide something's not too good. And as long as you have enough flying speed to get airborne again. So absolutely. Even if you're, this would have been the most appropriate time. One of the most appropriate times I've seen in

my career when the plane's coming down and you're almost like, you know, I know we're going to hit hard. Don't hit hard, full power and get airborne again, man. If anything, if they had selected go around or max power at that point, they would have at least cushioned that landing. But to Greg's point, all the black boxes and the ones and zeros that are talking to each other, guys like Greg are going to dig into it. We will know sooner rather than later. This won't be a six-month, two-year investigation.

This one's pretty tight. Wow. That's whenever I have to say flying in and out of Logan in Boston, that's happened to me many times. There must be something about the runways in Boston, but like where you're going down, you're like, okay, we're landing. Boom. We're back up. And like, you know, the, the, the glasses start falling out. It's very alarming as a passenger. You're just like, something's gone very wrong. It's a choreographed dance, Megan. And again, it's dependent on the guy in front of you or the gal in front of you landing that airplane when you're on approach. They don't clear the runway. You can't occupy the same space. So a lot of times that happens. It's nothing dangerous. And in fact,

as Wiz will tell you, I mean, that's a, it's a trained occurrence, if you will go around and missed approaches are trained. So. My friend Yael, when we, when she gets on the airplanes, she gives the pilots like chocolates. She gives them, I'm like, Yael, that's nice, but that's not like, how is that going to save our lives? We like, we should be giving be giving gift certificates to more training or something. I'm not sure. It all depends on what's in that chocolate, Megan. It all depends on what's in that chocolate. Good point, Greg. So Megan, I saw a meme today. It's now appropriate to start clapping when an airliner lands nowadays. We used to frown upon that, but now we can go back to

clapping when we successfully land. I always clap inside my that, but now we can go back to clapping when we successfully land. I always clap inside my heart, but now I maybe do it openly like the Chinese and the Europeans. Guys, thank you both so much. Thanks, Megan. Thank you very much. Thanks, Greg. Good seeing you. Good to see you. Let's hope we won't have to talk again soon. Okay, before we go, I've got to share with you the email. I do read the emails, Megan at Megan Kelly.com. Marie writes in, I just had to laugh during today's show. I was driving with my four-year-old and my three-month-old to pick up my seven-year-old from school. My four-year-old daughter piped up mommy. Miss Megan said, fuck, isn't that a bad word? Mommy, Miss Megan said shit. Mommy, Miss Megan said shit again.

She's having a hard time today with her potty mouth. Marie, I'm sorry. Marie wasn't mad. She was laughing about it too. I know you get it. I'm going to try to control it and at least limit. I'll limit. And I love you all.

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