The Megyn Kelly Show - CDC Damage Control and Teachers Refusing to Teach, with Matt Taibbi, Phil Kerpen and Corey DeAngelis | Ep. 237

Episode Date: January 10, 2022

Megyn Kelly is joined by Matt Taibbi, editor of the TK News Substack, Phil Kerpen, President of American president of American Commitment, and Corey DeAngelis, National Director of Research for the American Federation for Children, to talk about the CDC Director doing PR damage control for Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the disappearing rationale for vaccine mandates, Chicago's teachers refusing to teach, the rise of parents looking for school choice options, the hysterical January 6 anniversary coverage, Tucker Carlson vs. Ted Cruz, who the GOP will run in 2024 if Trump doesn't run, the real story about the Loudoun County school district and parents fighting back, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKellyTwitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at: https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. We begin today with the COVID lies being told by our alleged leaders. From the liberal Supreme Court justices to the head of the CDC, our so-called elites continue to mislead us on the realities of COVID. Why? Because they are agenda, not fact-driven. And once they decide that a policy is right, fact manipulation is entirely permitted, so long as it's in service of that policy, like the obsession with vaccines. What happened at the Supreme Court on Friday was a great example of it. It was truly shocking.

In its gall, the liberal Supreme Court justices bandied about, quote, facts like Justice Sotomayor's claims that there are over 100,000 kids in the hospital for COVID. Many on ventilators, she said. In fact, the number is at max 3,500. Okay, not 100,000. And she also claimed that Omicron is as deadly as Delta, which even Dr. Fauci has said is not true, et cetera. Phil Kirpin of the American Commitment Foundation will join us in a minute with the best fact check you will hear anywhere on what happened at SCOTUS on Friday. His brief was cited repeatedly in Friday's Supreme Court arguments about the legality of the Biden vaccine mandates. He's appalled by what these left wing justices said

and did. I've never seen anything like it. I practiced law for 10 years. I covered the high court for three years, and I've never seen anything like what they did on Friday. They made stuff up left and right. And it was shocking to witness. None of it was in the record, right? You're not allowed to do that. You can take judicial notice of a fact that we all know, like the sky is blue, but not 100,000 kids are in the hospital when they're not based on COVID. But before we get to the Supreme Court, I want to focus first today on Rochelle Walensky. We've criticized the CDC director before here on this program for behavior more befitting a college co-ed than a woman in this position, tearfully warning of impending doom long after the virus's most lethal months had passed. Remember

that? Telling us how scared she was of COVID. That's helpful. And offering the story of how last summer she told her teenage son, who she said had been looking forward to summer camp all year long, that he couldn't go, even though millions of children would go to summer camp in 2021. And by the way, the summer prior without any problem whatsoever. Remember when COVID was beginning to wane for a while and she tried to switch the messaging to masks forever, tweeting about how masks prevent all sorts of viruses having nothing to do with COVID-19. Well, that's none of your business whether I want to wear a mask or not to prevent the common cold on an airplane, Rochelle. I figured this woman was just another hardcore left-wing COVID hysteric who had managed to scare herself into oblivion. But this weekend,

a different reality emerged. Rochelle is apparently a partisan hack. Why else would she jump through such hoops to avoid calling out Justice Sotomayor's BS at the U.S. Supreme Court? The hard time she gave Fox News Channel's Brett Baier on his most basic attempts at a fact check reveal a partisan determined to change the subject, not someone concerned about the credibility of public health messaging. Watch this. First up on Justice Sotomayor's claim about 100,000 children being hospitalized, many, she claimed, on ventilators. We can find from Friday suggests there are fewer than 3,500 current pediatric hospitalizations from COVID-19. Is that true? Yeah, but, you know, here's what I can tell you about our pediatric hospitalizations from COVID-19. Is that true? Yeah, but here's what I can tell you about our

pediatric hospitalizations now. First of all, the vast majority of children who are in the hospital are unvaccinated. And for those children who are not eligible for vaccination, we do know that they are most likely to get sick with COVID if their family members aren't vaccinated. Understood. But the number is not 100,000. It's roughly 3,500 in hospitals now. Yes, there are. And in fact, what I will say is while pediatric hospitalizations are rising, they're still about 15-fold less than hospitalizations of our older age demographics. Why did he have to press to get her to answer that? First, she said, yeah, it's true. No, it's not true. He pressed and she admitted it's not true because she can't deny it. It's such an obvious lie. And then she went back to her obsession. Vaccination, vaccination.

That's all she can focus on. Shouldn't the CDC director care that a major figure in the United States is putting out shocking misinformation on children and COVID in a highly watched Supreme Court hearing. Isn't it her professional obligation to correct that? She did finally admit that there are at most 3,500 kids in hospitals with COVID right now, not 100,000, but only after she tried to dodge. Brett had to pin her down. Why? And even then, it was immediately on to how the kids who are hospitalized are unvaccinated and no context on how the vast majority of kids in the hospital right now are there with covid, not because of covid. An important distinction. Then he asks her about Sotomayor specifically. Does Rochelle Walensky feel a duty to correct this kind of misinformation? Listen to this. Supreme Court is in the process of dealing with this big issue about mandates.

And do you feel a responsibility as a CDC director to correct a very big mischaracterization by one of the Supreme Court justices? Yeah, here's what I'll tell you. I'll tell you that right now, 17, you're if you're unvaccinated, you're 17 times more likely to be in the hospital and 20 times more likely to die than if you're on than if you're boosted. Oh, my gosh. She's like a robot. Vaccination, vaccination, vaccination. Even though that wasn't the question. And the truth is, vaccinations do not prevent the spread of covid. In particular, Omicron, which is the variant of the day, and she knows that. Then he asks her about Sotomayor's other whopper, about the Omicron variant versus the Delta variant. You tell me, is this woman a straight shooter? In the Supreme Court also said that Omicron was as deadly as Delta. That is not true, right?

We are starting to see data from other countries that indicate on a person by person basis, it may not be. However, given the volume of cases that we're seeing with Omicron, we very well may see death rates rise dramatically. Meanwhile, her buddy, Dr. Fauci, already gave up that farm in late December. Listen. We know now, incontrovertibly, that this is a highly, highly transmissible virus. We know that from the numbers we're seeing, all indications point to a lesser severity of Omicron versus Delta. Lesser. Lesser severity. Why can't she just say it? By the way, there was also a study recently out of Houston Methodist showing Omicron is much more contagious than Delta, which we know, but does not, quote, appear to have the very virulence, that's a tough word, or machismo to really pack as much of a

wallop as the Alpha or Delta strain. What's happening here is one far lefty trying to minimize the embarrassment of another. But that is not Rochelle Walensky's job. She's supposed to be loyal to the truth. She's supposed to represent us. She's supposed to give it And we know it. It is wrong. And now she owes us more than just the truth. She owes us an apology. Joining me now to discuss all of it, as I mentioned, is Phil Kirpin. Phil truly understands this better than most people. He actually filed an amicus brief, meaning friend of the court brief, that was cited repeatedly in the arguments on Friday. And he knows a thing or two that Sonia Sotomayor apparently does not.

Phil, first, let me just ask you for your reaction to the disinformation that we heard from Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Breyer, the liberal wing of the court on Friday. Well, it was really, remarkable megan uh it felt like a time warp at times like we were still in march 2020 and we were scared and bewildered and we didn't know what was happening and hospitals in new york were overwhelmed and and you know it just it was completely out of time and out of place for what is actually happening and anyone who's following the data and following recent developments um would know that And so just they live in not just Washington, D.C. is a bubble on this stuff, that was written sort of in a in an unclear way that suggested over 100000 children were hospitalized. So I guess that's where she got that insane, obviously false number. But it just complete disconnect from reality is what the liberal justices show.

It was it was a complete disconnect in the business about Omicron being just as deadly as Delta. I mean, the most charitable thing you could possibly say about something like this, even if you're the most hockey of the COVID hawks, is we'll see. You know, that's the best you could. We've now had South Africa go through their entire Omicron wave up and down. So we've got one country's totally complete experience with this. And it looks like their deaths are going to come in at about 20 times lower than their Delta wave in the Gauteng province, which was Johannesburg, 18 million population, the sort of the epicenter of the epicenter. The inherent reduction in severity of the virus is a little bit in question because they also have a lot more immunity from prior waves. They have some vaccination. And so, you know, this is something we're looking at now as we have the London wave coming down very fast. And by the

way, the DC wave of Omicron is coming down very fast as well. The justices don't even seem to be aware of what's happening in their own town because the percent positive in D.C. peaked right around January 1st and it's been dropping very steadily here in D.C. So there is this question of, you know, how much of the 10 or 20 fold reduction in mortality is the virus being weaker versus there being more immunity in the population? It's we're going to find out that it's a mix of both. But one thing that's absolutely clear is that this is much less severe and is a much lower threat, and I would argue does not present in any way a grave danger for the purposes of the OSHA determination, even if you thought that Delta did. That's the standard they have to meet in order, well, that's one of the things they have to prove in order for Biden's vaccine mandates to withstand scrutiny, that there is a grave danger posed by covid as we know it today. This today's covid, not yesterday's, not March of 2020 is covid. number appears there. My first inclination is yours was the New York Times, because that was the paper that said we had 900,000 children hospitalized with COVID since the beginning

of the pandemic. And at that time, it had been 63,000. Right. That she won all these awards. That's their COVID reporter. That's the New York Times COVID reporter who overstated at that time. It was 63,000. she said it was 900,000 I mean insanity she's been on sort of hiatus since then though I don't know if you've noticed but they've been signing COVID to other people since then so I'm not sure if she's still their COVID reporter

yeah well let's hope not okay so it wasn't just Sotomayor you know she had a couple of highlights but then you had Justice Breyer saying that the vaccine is going to bring covid cases to zero. Well, why hasn't it? by one day. If we should stay by one day, that means another 750,000 people will be infected as if, you know, it's a switch and you turn the mandate on and cases go to zero. And of course, what we've seen with Omicron is we've actually seen the highest case counts in the most vaccinated

places. So the most vaccinated county in America, Marin County, California has sky high record case counts. You know, New York City sky-high case counts. They're pretty high on the list. And right here, just outside D.C., we have Montgomery County, Maryland, which is, I think, number three most vaccinated county in America, massive record case counts. And so this idea that if we were just forcing, mandating people to be vaccinated, we wouldn't have case counts is completely false if you're paying even the slightest attention to what's happening in the world right now. How much you refocused very much on, I think, the relevant question of the day, which is what we're dealing with right now is

mostly Omicron. Delta is still out there. It's not to say it's gone, but now and certainly very soon from now, it's going to be all about Omicron. So we need to deal with that. And it did come out on Friday's hearing. But to me, it seemed like the liberal justices weren't even aware of the differences between Omicron and Delta and how you could still get even when it was Delta, you could still get Delta despite the fact that you were vaccinated. But with Omicron, it's almost like the vaccine does nothing to prevent the transmission. It still prevents, in most cases, severe disease or death. And that's good. That's why most people choose to get vaccinated. But when we're talking about mandating it from your employer, they're trying to stop contagion. Correct. That's exactly right. What we argue in our brief, and I think the

evidence now overwhelming on this point, is that there is a benefit to vaccination, but it's a personal benefit. It is not a public or societal benefit because it only reduces disease severity. It does not reduce your chances of catching the virus or transmitting it to others. And that really undercuts the entire rationale for these mandates. And it's also really important to respect people who choose not to get the vaccine because that's a very personal decision. You know, there is a risk of adverse events, especially if someone's already been infected. That changes the calculation. You don't know their cardiac history. That's something that people should decide with their doctors, not by politicians and bureaucrats dictating what's best

for everyone. And I think that if you stop thinking about this idea that there's going to be this grand societal benefit, which I think the evidence now shows there won't be, it should be very clear that the right way to think about this is as a personal decision, a personal private health decision that individuals should be able to make with the advice of their doctors. And, you know, I think the evidence on this point right now with Omicron, and we walked through all of this in our brief, it's really overwhelming. There does seem to be a time-limited reduction in transmission and the risk of becoming infected, but it seems to wear off after only 60 or 90 days after the second shot and maybe even shorter than that after a third shot. So after that, in fact, we see in

a lot of these countries, the protection goes negative. You're more likely to get it than someone who's unvaccinated after 60 or 90 days in the Danish and the Canadian data. Let me ask you that. I saw that in your brief. That's an important point. And so you're saying that the Danish and what was the other one? UK? Canadian. It was specifically Ontario. Okay, so they concluded that after 60 to 90 days, you're more likely to contract COVID if you've had the vaccines than if you haven't. I read that in your brief,

but is there an asterisk to that latter point saying if you haven't and you have natural immunity? Yeah, they didn't break the data up in either of those studies. And I suspect that you put your finger on exactly what's happening here, which is the unvaccinated group probably has a lot more natural immunity than the vaccinated group, which is why they're getting infected less. When the vaccine immunity sort of wears off and gets closer to zero, you get more of a comparison of the group with more previously infected versus not previously infected. So to me, most likely it's waning to zero,

and then you're getting a composition effect from more natural immunity. But we really don't know why the data is showing what it is. And there are some plausible mechanisms that could actually cause reduced immunity if you have things like antibody-dependent enhancement. And there are physical mechanisms that could cause negative vaccine effectiveness, but I'm not sure that we actually see any evidence of those. It's very possible that it's just what you suggested, that it kind of wanes to zero, and then you have a different composition in terms of natural immunity. But neither of those studies broke that out. So we don't have- Well, let me ask you about wanes to zero, zero to the last I looked at this was when I had Scott Gottlieb on former FDA commissioner

who now is on the board of Pfizer and he's touting the vaccines and he's touting the mandates. And I'm telling him a study just came out that day that was published in The Lancet about the Pfizer vaccine, showing that after six months post your second dose, it had only a 47 percent effectiveness at preventing covid, which is not good. And he claimed he hadn't seen it, blah, blah, blah. But that's, I mean, that's not so good. And it certainly seemed like based on the Israel study and other data, you'd be better off six months post a COVID infection at fighting off a second infection than six months post your second Pfizer vax. But you're using zero.

Where does that come from? Well, the studies we were just talking about for Omicron, we see that the observed vaccine effectiveness goes negative, which means you're probably not getting any protection at all from the vaccine, even if you were able to correct for those confounders. I think that one of the issues we've got right now, Megan, is they haven't updated this vaccine. And so you're using a vaccine that essentially expresses the spike protein of a two-year-old now extinct virus, while something very different is

what's circulating right now. It's as if they were mandating you use the flu vaccine from five years ago, instead of using this year's. You might get some effect, but it's going to be pretty small and short lived. And so I think one of the real failures of the Biden administration, and all they do is talk about vaccines all day long. But when we had the sequence for this, they didn't make any expedited effort to actually get a vaccine that was specific to it available. And we're still using this one that was designed for a very different virus. What about the fact that well, Delta is still still out there and the vaccines are a bit more effective at preventing transmission of Delta? I mean, it's nothing to write home about, but it's certainly doing a better job at preventing transmission of Delta than it is Omicron. Well, I mean,

I think that it's hard to get a really good handle on how much Delta is still out there. If you believe the CDC, it's pretty close to none. good handle on how much Delta is still out there. If you believe the CDC, it's pretty close to none. If you look at a state like Illinois that does their own sequencing, they still have about half of the cases being Delta in Illinois in their own genetic sequencing. So we've got a big disconnect here between the CDC saying Delta's gone and some of the state data saying there's still quite a bit of it. To me, where this really becomes important is not so much with the vaccines, because I feel like everyone who wants the vaccines is probably already getting them at

this point. To me, where it really becomes important is the availability of the therapeutics, which the Biden administration has really mishandled, because the Regeneron therapeutic, the one that President Trump had, is about 75 or 85% effective against the Delta variant in terms of reducing hospitalization and death risk, extremely effective. It appears it's less effective against Omicron, probably more like only 40% or 50% effective. But, you know, if we were using the PCR test to screen the likely Delta cases, we could be giving everyone in any kind of risk category with a likely Delta case that therapeutic. And I don't know of any state that's really doing it that way instead they're rationing based on you know race and

they're rationing based on seemingly political considerations and so we're really misusing the tools we have right now to deal with those remaining and all of our efforts our public health messaging continues to go into the vaccine get a vaccination vaccination. You must be vaccinated. It's like, stop it. Snap out of it. Stepford child, come back to me. The reality has changed in so much your mess. So must your messaging. It's so annoying and it's befuddling to watch somebody like Rochelle Walensky until you realize there is zero chance in hell she would have done that to cover for a Justice Alito who had misstated the facts, which leads me to my second to last question, Phil, and that is Justice Gorsuch took a beating in the press, in the left-wing press,

for allegedly misstating how much flu we deal with each year. They're claiming that he said hundreds of thousands of people die from the flu every year. And you were the one because I've been following your Twitter, which is amazing. And everyone should follow Phil Kirpin at Twitter on Twitter. You were saying just listen to it. You're holding against him a transcription error. So I did go back and listen to it. Man, I'll listen to this audience members that the left wing press is saying this is Justice Gorsuch. This is a Trump appointee to the Supreme Court. They're saying

this is him falsely claiming hundreds of thousands of people die in America each year from the flu. Phil says, wrong. Listen for yourselves. We we have it butted a few times. Flu kills, I believe, hundreds, thousands of people every year. Flu kills, I believe, hundreds, thousands of people every year. Flu kills, I believe, hundreds, thousands of people every year. There's no of. There's no of in there, Phil. It's like an emperor's new clothes thing.

People who are really, really liberal true believers insist that they hear a silent of in that sentence, including a guy named Jason Lemon who writes for News claim anymore. The transcription error is corrected. It's clear what he was saying. I'd like to see a lot of corrections and apologies. I'm not sure we'll get those. They wanted an alibi for not covering the insane things that the liberal justice falsely asserted. And so they seized on what was obviously a transcription error to smear a conservative justice. And by the way, Megan, that was actually a really good line of questioning from Gorsuch. The point that he was making was kind of, you know, what's the limiting principle here to this idea that OSHA should mandate vaccines because viruses constitute workplace hazards? And he said, you know, flu kills thousands of people every year. Could you mandate a flu vaccine? Why haven't you ever

mandated a flu vaccine? And the government's response was really interesting. They said, well, we could, we could do that. We'd have to develop a record first. So I thought it was a very interesting line of questioning. And, you know, sort of instead of covering that line of questioning, they used it as a trans, they use this transcription error to call him stupid and give themselves an alibi for not covering the things the liberal justices really did say. Right. Crazy stuff. And by the way, you know, and just in terms of misstatements at one point, Justice Breyer said 750 million people got Omicron the day before got COVID the day before. So, OK, last thing. When do we expect a decision? Because there was some debate on openly on Friday about when they need to give us one,

because the mandate's about to kick in on the 10th. When do we expect a decision? And how do you think it's likely to come down? Well, I think we'll get something today. We'll get something today, even if it's just a brief administrative stay while they figure out what the actual decision is going to be, because as you pointed out, the effective date on the Osh order is today. So I think we'll see something today. I don't know if it'll just be, you know, give us a few more days administrative stay or we'll get an actual decision. But I'm cautiously optimistic on the OSHA mandate. I think that other than the three in the tank, liberal justices, the other six, were very skeptical of the idea that Congress had authorized OSHA to do this and OSHA Act, you know, 50 years ago. And I think that on the basis of what they

call their major questions doctrine, it's pretty likely that the six Republican appointed justices will all agree. On the CMS health worker case, I'm less optimistic. That statute is much broader in its language. And we've got a lot of justices that I think want to decide on the basis of the statutory language. You've got Roberts, who alwaysices that I think want to decide on the basis of the statutory language. You've got Roberts who always likes to play both sides and triangulate things. And so that one I feel is going to be a 5-4. It could be a 5-4 in either direction. I have less of a good feeling on that one. And that just speaks to the healthcare workers as opposed to any worker at any business that has more than 100 employees who are swept up. That's two out of three employers

in America. That's what they're swept up in sort of the first challenge that the Supreme Court is trying to decide. Phil Kirpin, I would like to thank you for being a source of actual good information from the beginning of this thing. As I say, if you would like it directly, follow Phil on Twitter, and I hope you come back. Anytime, Megan. All the best. Up next, we're going to talk about schools with Corey DeAngelis of the American Federation for Children. The teachers in Chicago continue to refuse to teach. And just as we'd like to exempt the actual teachers, you know, sort of say it's the unions, which nine times out of 10, it really is union led nonsense. It's 73 percent of the teachers there who support this.

I mean, you can't really say that here. It's 73% of the teachers there who support this. I mean, you can't really say that here. It's the Chicago teachers themselves. They don't want to teach the children. They just want to collect the check. That's next. Join me now as a strong advocate for school choice, especially in the wake of these COVID school closures. Corey DeAngelis, National Director of Research at American Federation for Children, Adjunct Scholar at the Cato Institute and Senior Fellow at the Reason Foundation. Corey, thank you so much for being here. So let's kick it off with what the latest is in Chicago, where it appears the teachers just refuse to teach. They just won't. Yeah, look, they decided to close school for another day today. And since the fourth day of school closures, they're holding children's education hostage nearly two years into this, since this all started. And there's no excuse for it now. Every other business essentially has been

able to figure it out. Private schools and daycares were somehow magically able to be open essentially the entire time. Grocery stores were able to be open essentially the entire time. And I think the problem here is that the main difference is one of incentives

that in the private sector, the schools and every business understands that their customers can take their money elsewhere. When it comes to the public school teachers unions, they get your money regardless of whether they open their doors for business. So they fight as hard as possible to keep their doors closed in order to secure additional ransom payments from the taxpayer in perpetuity. It's a never ending cycle. And we're seeing that play out in Chicago where, look, in Chicago, they've already received $2.8 billion, over $8,000 per student in Chicago since March of 2020 in federal, quote unquote,

COVID relief that really had nothing to do with safety from the beginning of all this. It's really had to do more with politics and power than anything else. And they're still closed because they figured out that they can use the closures as leverage to get even more money. And look, they're going to continue doing this. And I think the only way to get out of this problem is to fund the student directly. Chicago spends over $27,000 per student per year now, according to their 2022 budget. Average private school tuition is only about $11,000 in Chicago. Why not give most, if not all of that funding to the parent and let them figure it out? That's the only way I think

you get out of this so that the school actually has an incentive from the bottom up to cater to the needs of families as opposed to the other way around. That is amazing. $2.8 billion in federal COVID funding from the Elementary and Secondary emergency relief fund just to Chicago public schools alone. So what did they do with the money? Right. That you read the Wall Street Journal. Fox News was reporting. OK, so they spent it on laptops because, of course, they want to make sure everybody can do the remote learning. That was number one priority for these teachers. They spent $26 million on safety equipment, medical equipment, masks, air purifiers, other items intended to make schools safer. All the Chicago teachers went to the front of the line when it came to the vaccines when they were still sparse. None of it is enough. None of it will ever be enough. That's exactly right, Megan. It'll never be enough because they can always argue as to why they need more money. The way that I've put it before is that underperforming private schools

shut down. Underperforming government schools get more money. Why? Because they can say, well, we're underperforming and failing because we don't have enough money. Even though since 1960 in the US, we've increased per pupil education expenditures by 287% after adjusting for inflation. That's before all the COVID bailouts. We'll see when the data come out on that. But we're seeing individual districts increasing per pupil education expenditures over the past couple of years in places like Los Angeles, where the data has already surfaced by about 60, 70% over a couple of years. It's just absolutely horrendous. And if you look at how they're spending the money in places like Los Angeles, the district officials laid out a plan a few months

ago, and they said, they pointed out that 6% of their student population has left. There's this mass exodus occurring from the government school system right now, because a lot of parents are fed up with it. And the remote learning, we really shouldn't even call it remote learning, because the kids aren't learning all that much. If you look at the data on that from McKinsey and Company and so many other studies on the topic, we should call it remote instruction, if anything seen obesity in children increase substantially over the past year and a half. And we've seen teenage suicide attempts increase by about 31% over the past year and a half. It's just absolutely horrendous that they're still playing this school closure card to use that as leverage for even more money from the taxpayer. And there's no real way out of it except for bottom-up accountability. If your grocery store closes, you can take your money elsewhere. If a Walmart closes for whatever reason, or if the employees go on strike,

as a customer, I can take my money to Trader Joe's or Safeway or Harris Teeter. But when your public school closes, families are stuck in between this tug of war between the district and the union, and the customer feels all the pain in the current government school system. That's the problem here. And thankfully, it's finally being exposed for the nonsense that it is. There's this messed up set of incentives that are baked into the government school system where they get your money regardless. And in fact, the worst they do, they can actually profit from that. And we're seeing that play out with the school closures. And the way that I put it before is that COVID didn't break the government school system.

It was already broken. a half, almost two years now, simply shined a spotlight on the main problem with K-12 education all across the country, which happens to be a massive, long-existing power imbalance between the public school monopoly and individual families. But look, the jig is up. Teachers unions have overplayed their hand. 2021 was already the year of school choice, or if you're hip with the lingo, it's the year that we fund students, not systems. And 19 states in 2021 alone expanded or enacted programs to fund people as opposed to buildings, to allow families to take their children's education dollars to a private or homeschool setting if they don't like whatever's going on in their public school. And support for school choice in the minds of voters, according to nationwide polling,

has been surging as well. I want to get to that. I want to get to that because if it's it's all red states, it's not as necessary. Like what we need is bills like that that become law in blue states where the teachers unions are the strongest and there they remain extremely strong because they're the ones who get Democrats elected. I mean, Barack Obama was entirely beholden to the teachers union and so are the state governors in the blue states. It's disgusting. If you spend any time thinking about these folks, thinking that these folks care about your kids, you're wrong. They care about the money they get from the unions. That's exactly the problem here. And look, we saw this play out in 2020, 2021 as well,

where you had a red state Kentucky with a blue governor, Andy Beshear. He was a school choice hypocrite. He vetoed a bill that came to his desk that would have funded students directly. Thankfully, they had enough votes to override his veto, but he attended private school at one point and he sent his kids to private school, which is great. I'm happy for him. I think every family should seek out the best education for their children, but they shouldn't fight against school choice for other families. Thankfully, they had enough votes to override that veto in Kentucky. Joe Biden almost exclusively attended private schools, sent his kids to private schools, his children attended private, his grandchildren attended private schools. That's great again, but they

should not fight against other families from having that having that same opportunity. And I will say it's not a Republican versus Democrat thing in theory or even among the majority of constituents. If you look at nationwide polling on this, in fact, over the past year and a half, the biggest jumps in support for the concept of the money following the child has been among Democrats and parents who had kids in the public school system that happened to fail them so much starting in March of 2020. But you're talking about people to wake up. You're talking about constituencies, right? But the leaders are the unions are too important to them. I mean, I see your point. Once the once the populace starts to get it, ideally, you have a change at the top in the leadership. But so far, not so much. I mean, people in office at the Open Secrets website, since 1990, the past three decades, over 97% of their campaign contributions went to Democrat

political candidates as opposed to Republicans. And so when you're in office as a Democrat, they're listening to the needs of the teachers unions, and they have been for far too long. But I feel like since COVID has exposed all the problems with the government school system, even Democrats in office are having to start to think a little bit harder because there's been this new special interest group that has emerged over the past year and a half, which happens to be parents who want more of a say in their kids' education. Parents have woken up and they're holding politicians accountable more than they ever have before. So instead of just having the teachers

unions to answer to, politicians from all backgrounds are having to listen to the needs of parents, hopefully going forward. And I will say, just think about the logic, right? Like there's an inconsistency in the logic when it comes to Democrats who oppose school choice, because we already fund students directly when it comes to higher education with Pell grants, for example, for low income kids. The money doesn't go straight to the community college and then the student doesn't have to go to a residentially assigned higher education provider. Instead, the money rightfully goes to the student and they can choose the community college if they want. But they can also choose a public university, a private university, or even a religious university. The money follows the decision of the student. We do the same thing with the federal Head Start

program and other pre-K programs. Think about it. The money doesn't go straight to a residentially assigned government-run provider or pre-K. Instead, the money goes to the family and they can choose public or private, religious or non-religious. The same concept and logic applies to food stamps, Medicaid, Section 8 housing vouchers. Just imagine if we force low-income families to take their food stamp dollars to a residentially assigned government-run grocery store. That would be absolutely horrendous. And all I'm arguing is that we should apply the same logic to K-12 education and fund people,

not buildings. The problem is you had Randy Weingarten. Let me just jump in. You had Randy Weingarten, you know, who runs the second largest teachers union in the United States celebrating, I saw you tweeted this, the tabling of a school choice bill in New Hampshire. I mean, she's openly against it. They hate school choice, the unions, the heads of the unions, they don't want it. But in a small sign of light, as you point out, some of these Democratic politicians are starting to get it, that this is a problem and that you can't have, you know, zero school choice from these Democrat politicians as a policy matter, while they all send their kids to private schools. And I saw that you were remarking on this guy from New Hampshire, a Democratic state senator there, I think it was, Justin Wayne. Again, this is a Democrat who's putting

exactly that challenge to other lawmakers in his state. We have the soundbite. Listen. The only people who are opposing school choice today are the same people who have choice. This has been a very growing pain for me as I was against this bill my freshman year and the last three, four years struggled where I was going to be on it. But my community can't wait anymore. Here's my offer. I will vote to kill this bill

if you send your kids to one of the kids' schools in my district that we're waiting to turn around. Everybody get on the mic and let's make that promise. Let's transfer the kids. So as we spend six, seven years in elementary school changing a school, your kid be a part of that change. And when they fall behind, when they don't have the resources, us allegedly, when they're dealing with suspensions and things like that, then we can all go through it together. So that's Justin Wayne of Nebraska. The bill that Randy celebrated was in New Hampshire falling apart. But this is in Nebraska. And he's basically saying what you're saying, which is

great. You don't you don't want school choice. You want all the kids to have to stay in the public school. I get it. You first. You start by keeping all your kids in the public school and then we can deny the right to the citizenry. Yeah, total legend, Justin Wayne in Nebraska, and he's referring to LB 364 over there in Nebraska. They're actually debating it this week, I believe. And yeah, I mean, the logic is sound when it comes to the supporting school choice. We already fund people directly with essentially every other industry and level of education, which raises the question, why would you support it for everything else, but only when it comes to the in-between years of

K-12 education, you have a problem with it. The obvious answer to me is that there's a difference of power dynamics, that there's choice. Choice is the norm when it comes to higher education, pre-K, and everything else in the United States for now, thankfully. But choice threatens and entrenched special interests only when it comes to those in-between years of K-12 education, the teachers unions, most of all. And so they fight as hard as possible, of course, against any change to the status quo. And their main argument will be, oh, school choice sounds fine and all, but school choice steals money from the public schools, to which I'll respond, the money doesn't belong to the government schools in the first place. No one would say that allowing families

to choose their grocery store stole money from Walmart. That wouldn't make any sense because we all understand that your money, even if it's food stamp dollars that's funded by the taxpayer, it doesn't belong to any of the institutions, Walmart or Safeway or Trader Joe's. The money is meant for the family. And similarly, K-12 education dollars are meant for educating children, not for propping up and protecting a particular institution, which funds students, not systems. It's basically asking for a meritocracy. If the schools are so confident in their product, in their ability, in the teacher's ability to connect with students that actually teach them, you shouldn't worry about school choice. No problem if the money follows the student because you know your students are going to

stay with you. I mean, I know one of the best teachers in the country. She happens to be a friend of mine. She teaches in New Jersey, and she's in a lower socioeconomic area and lower socioeconomic school where there are a lot of kids of Hispanic background who struggle when they come into the classroom. And she works tirelessly night and day to make sure that they learn and they get through and they thrive, and her students do. So she's she's winning the meritocracy. Sadly, not all teachers are like that. Many, many teachers are like the ones in

Chicago who want to refuse to work. Seventy three percent, they're saying of them, some seventy three percent of these teachers refuse to work. They should all be fired as far as I'm concerned if they don't show up. And while they collect their paycks. And this I'm going to squeeze in a quick break, Corey, but I have to play it whenever we talk about Chicago because it's so disgusting. Let me just we're going to go to break watching, watching the teachers who are now saying they cannot work because they're so terrified of covid. This is them doing their interpretive dance protest last year. Young, able bodied teachers who want to show you how scared they are of covid by leaping around their living rooms so you can understand just how fragile they are watch

make it make sense safety is essential keep our students and our teachers is essential. Keep our students and our teachers safe. Safe. Get your asses back to work.

That's what you get the paycheck for. All right, I'm standing you by there. We'll be back in one minute. Don't forget, folks, you can find The Megyn Kelly Show live on Sirius XM Triumph Channel 111 every weekday at noon east. And you can get our full video show and clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel. It's doing really well lately, so we'd love to have you go over, hit subscribe. That helps us out, youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly. If you prefer to get your news via an audio podcast, go ahead and subscribe and download on Apple, Spotify, Pandora, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you leave

me a review over there on Apple, I will read it. I've read them all. I find them actually really entertaining and a great way to stay connected to my audience. So please go on over there and drop a thought on today's show or any show or anything in the news or guests you'd like to see right now. There you're going to find our full archives, by the way, with more than 230 shows, many of which I think you'll find highly informational and entertaining. in chicago there's an interesting move by parents to to sue uh the school district saying that this is effectively a union strike and while 73 of the teachers is a lot it's not quite enough to justify a strike saying you don't have the legal right as teachers to dictate whether the schools are open or closed. I like this as a means of fighting back. But the reality is it's not just happening in Chicago. I know you've written about Detroit where you say that they're suffering there from the little known

Friday variant of COVID, where they've just given up school on Fridays, allegedly because of COVID. Yeah, because COVID knows, right? I mean, there's all this weird stuff that's happened over the past couple of years that really just shows how ridiculous it is. I mean, in one place in Sacramento County in California, there's a story about they had a closure rule that arbitrarily applied to schools, but not to daycares, because obviously COVID knows if you're

learning something, then it's going to get you. And similarly, all across the country, there were at least 10 states that I counted where the public schools, they were saying it wasn't safe enough for them to open. So they were doing the remote learning stuff that we shouldn't call learning because they're not learning all that much anyway. It's remote instruction, or even more accurately, it's just a school closure. But they were opening the same schools for daycare services, the same buildings, and charging parents out of pocket for something that they're already paying for through the property tax system. It was absolutely ridiculous. And it really just showed people how stupid this is.

Same thing with Detroit. They were planning on closing on Fridays before the winter break. And yeah, it's like, what, does the virus know that it's Friday and that's the only day it's going to get you? And so you can't go to school on Fridays? I mean, we all understood what it was. It was a way to lengthen the weekend. And we're seeing this post-winter break.

They wanted to extend the the weekend. And we're seeing this post winter break. They wanted to extend the winter break. And I don't think it's because the people in the system are bad or incompetent. I think the problem is one of incentives. It's the system itself where you get the same amount of money regardless of the satisfaction of the customers. In no other industry does this happen. And I think that's why we saw the grocery stores open. We saw the private schools open. We saw pretty much everything else running normally as fast as possible, except for the schools, which happened to be the public schools, which happened to be one of the safest places, especially for kids who are at very little risk of mortality

from the virus. And yet, even know, even when they go to the schools, and believe me, I much prefer open schools to closed schools, but they get there. And what kind of schooling are they actually getting when they have to wear the mask all day, and they're in between the plexiglass barriers, and they have to stay six feet apart from everybody, and they have to run around playing basketball with masks on, which is highly questionable. And they're scared by their teachers day in and day out about a virus that really has absolutely no effect on children for the most part. It's just that's a subject for our next time.

But Corey, I really appreciate all the good work you've been doing on this. Thank you so much for coming on today. Thank you so much, Megan. Next up, one of our favorite independent journalists, Matt Taibbi, is here with some great, great thoughts on January 6th. And you hear AOC has COVID. Don't go away. Joining me now, Matt Taibbi, editor for the TK News Substack and co-host of the Useful Idiots podcast and one of the most fair journalists

working today. Great to have you back on the show, Matt. How's it going? It's going great, Megan. Thank you for having me. All right, let's start with Rochelle Walensky, who doesn't seem to understand the concept of just being a truth teller and not a cover the ass of Sonia Sotomayor player. She was asked by Brett Baer repeatedly over the weekend when he's hosting Fox News Sunday temporarily now. And they're rotating cast. But in any event, he asked her repeatedly.

What she said was wrong. There aren't 100,000 children in hospitals and on ventilators. There haven't even been that many since the beginning of the pandemic. Right? Dodge. She goes to vaccines. What we really need is vaccines, vaccines, vaccines, vaccines for children. Whoever is in the hospital hasn't had a vaccine. And then only when he pushes her again, does she finally say, yeah, OK, it's not true. But vaccines, vaccines. The interview

went like that for 20. I mean, back and forth and back and forth. And what I said at the top of the show was what it showed me is she's a partisan when she's she thinks it's her job to cover for Sotomayor as opposed to our advocate to correct the record when a major misstatement of fact is made at something as prominent as a Supreme Court hearing. Yeah, and this is a phenomenon that's been going on for a while. And as a journalist, it bothers me a lot because, you know, I grew up in the school where reporters weren't really supposed to care all that much about what the impact of the news was. Like our primary concern was getting the information right. And then what the audience did with that information was up to them. So when you have something like somebody misreporting a fact that badly,

the idea is to worry about getting the fact right. Whereas I think the psychology of both politicians and journalists now is, how is this going to be received? Are people going to behave in the wrong way when they get this information? And so they worry about that even when the information is true. And I think when you see people hesitating to tell you a true fact, it creates a lot of distrust in the news media. Yes, that's what I was feeling when watching her. You know, we're at already a crisis point when it comes to public health and distrust of our officials, thanks to Fauci's, quote, noble lies and her previous

hysteria and just the policies coming out of these organizations for months now. And given the chance to be the sober, you know, factual medical person, this is a no brainer. Even Sonia Sotomayor at this point would have to admit she was wrong. And I'll bet you anything she's embarrassed that none of these Supreme Court justices tries to be intentionally nonfactual. Right. They try. They do, I think, at least try to stick with the facts. She got it so wrong. Instead of taking that opportunity, she went hard partisan, covered the ass of Sonia Sotomayor, something I guarantee she wouldn't have done if Alito were out there saying something as nonfactual as the vaccines don't prevent severe disease. She would have been all over that. Right. Yeah. No, of course. And yeah, I very much doubt Justice Sotomayor wants um people doubling down on her behalf uh it's a bad look for her uh but i think it's i think it's very telling that she made that mistake uh because

i think it speaks to sort of what's in the ether in the media universe right now it's just that there's there's so much information that is leading people to believe that certain things are true that are not. I think, you know, we've all seen the stat that although there are certainly misconceptions among Republicans and conservatives about COVID, when you look at people who lean Democratic, the misconceptions that they tend to have are along the lines of, well, what's the percentage chance you're going to be hospitalized if you end up with COVID? And then the real answer is something like 1%. And according to polls, most people think it's

closer to 50 if you're a Democrat. So that tells you that probably people who consume media of that sort, their head isn't in a certain place already, which I guess would probably be true of Justice Sotomayor as well. They're not they're not on, you know, on the alert for for a mistake like that. And it's fine if they want to live their lives like that privately and just do their own thing. I mean, I told the story last week, my one friend knows somebody who who plastic wrapped her daughter in her bedroom when she found out the daughter had COVID. I mean, people are losing their ever loving minds. So good. You want to plastic who got arrested last week because she put her kid, this is a woman in Texas, put her kid in the trunk because he had tested positive for COVID and she was going to get a COVID test. And I guess she needed to take him with her for some reason, even though he's a teenager. She put him in the trunk so she couldn't get the, I mean, people are

nuts. If you want to be nuts, great, unless it crosses the legal line in terms of the safety of others around you. But they're affecting our lives, Matt. This came up in the context of a discussion about whether your employer should be able to stick a needle in your arm. Yeah. And there's so much line blurring that's intentional, again, that's going on in the press. And again, that really bothers me. I think a lot of these issues are really difficult. They're really hard to work out. I'm not sure how I feel about a whole range of COVID-related issues, but the one thing I know I feel is that I want access to the real information. And I see constantly it happening that people who are sort of anti-mandate, they're referred to as anti-vaxxers.

Like that distinction is not a meaningless distinction. It's a big distinction. But you see these lines being sort of, sorry, not cross-blurred all the time. And I think it's intentional because they want to create this atmosphere of terror and fright among the population, sometimes for commercial reasons, but also for political reasons. So speaking of creating an atmosphere of terror, Novak Djokovic, can you believe they are treating this guy like he is walking around, I don't know, with leprosy, the plague, you know, the most hideous communicable diseases

in human history. I think the latest is he just got allowed to leave his weird little Australian temporary prison and is moving to a better facility and might have a visa like to play. Well, maybe I'm not sure they might have a visa to play, although it's not clear, but he's not entirely out of the woods yet. So what do you make of how Australia is treating the world's number one tennis player? Yeah, that sounds to me like it's it could be grounds for like an old Woody Allen style spoof. I mean, he's going to end up playing the tournament in some kind of weird inflatable bubble so that he doesn't infect everybody. The whole Australia thing is, I guess it's just like an exaggerated paradise version of

what's going on in the United States. But I mean, I'm listening to officials say things like there are only three reasons to go outside and work isn't one of them. And I mean, I guess, you know, I mean, I guess, you know, that this is a strategy that you could logically talk yourself into. But especially as we see the disease mutate into something that's less lethal and we have such a high percentage of people who are vaccinated anyway, it becomes more and more irrational. And it's more and more clear that this is just basically a moral panic at this point. It seems to me. All right. So the latest from Daily Mail is Djokovic. His bid to play in the Australian Open, which he's won nine times, still hangs in the balance as Australia's immigration minister is considering recanceling his visa tomorrow.

Recanceling. So he had it. I guess it was canceled. It was reinstated. They may recancel it tomorrow. He hit the court for a midnight training session as the court granted him freedom for now. So he's got to practice at midnight when nobody else is there. He doesn't have COVID.

He had COVID in December. So he's probably the most immune right like the people who just had it are the most immune um probably less likely to communicate it than somebody who just got the vaccines right but still midnight training and maybe back in jail um all this as you know we we can't seem to get our arms around what will prevent covid because even aoc who just got the booster, she has a COVID. She has like the guy who argued the Supreme Court case on Friday, arguing against the mandates, just got boosted. He has COVID. He had to do it remotely. Everyone's got COVID.

Even the people who are triple vaxxed. That's the reality. Yeah. And people, the illusion that you're you're going to completely prevent prevent this is madness, I think, at this point. I lived in the former Soviet Union for 12 years. The Russians, coming out of the Soviet era, they had a concept called the Malenki Tsar or the Little Tsar. And that's every minor official in a despotic system tends to want to maximize the amount of power that they can enforce over you. And I think we're seeing that same kind of instinct come out in Western democracies now, where you see all these people who are working in, whether it's immigration or some kind of health authority or whatever it is, and they're asserting emergency authority and they like it. You know, I think that's a very troubling development because we're not used to seeing this whole idea of unlimited executive authority being exercised in all directions. That's sort of a new phenomenon in day-to-day life in the Western world.

So I'm worried about it for sure. People have taken it. We tolerate it a lot. There's a real question, especially here in America, about how much we would tolerate in terms of the erosions of our freedoms. You have to wear this thing over your face. I mean, it's so intimate. It's such an intimate restriction.

Everywhere you go and your children have to wear them all day long and you have to stick a needle in your five year old's arm. Eric Adams, he came out and said the schools will stay open. Great. Love it. And then he said, and everyone has to be vaccinated. I'm implementing a mandate for five year olds, five year olds and up. Not great. Not OK. And one of the most extreme things we've seen any school district do after L.A., which already did it. And so people have tolerated it. But one wonders, are we at the breaking point when you see more and more protests overseas, but not as much here in America? Is it coming here? Yeah, I mean, you see you see video of what's going on in places like Germany, although I think the laws there are probably more repressive than they are here yet. But I think it's coming. I think there's a backlash coming. People are tired of it. emergency style of politics where, you know, even before the pandemic arrived, ever since Trump came on the scene, and it's been nonstop moral manias in the media from the moment he was elected, whether it was about Russiagate, or the caravan, or Brett Kavanaugh, or Bounty Gate, or whatever it is, we're constantly in some kind of panic.

And the new thing now is this combination of both the pandemic and January 6th, where you have all these people who are trying to assert extraordinary authority because they say that we're in this atmosphere of remarkable, unique threats. And when is that going to end? I mean, is there a desire to go back to sort of normal life and freedoms? I don't see that instinct among a lot of politicians, which is very troubling. And we've got to be getting to the breaking point. Even, you know, my friends on the center left are sick of it.

I mean, they're sick of it. It's not just like the right wing now, which won't get us very far. And that's a promising sign. I mean, I started the show right after the holiday break with a piece on that. Let's talk about January 6th because, of course, true to form, the reaction on the day was totally over the top as it has been from the beginning. That was unbelievable. Right? I mean, there was like this national commemoration and prayer vigil and everybody and singing. What was all the weird singing on Capitol Hill?

Right? Yeah. I'm at a loss for words for the Hamilton thing. I tried to construct what the logic would have been there and I was not successful in doing that. What's Lin-Manuel Miranda doing here? That was so random that I couldn't even laugh at it because it was so illogical. No, it's crazy. And the absolute over-the-top nature of the coverage, you knew it was going to be like that.

But when people are saying things like, you know, the Huffington Post White House correspondent said it was a thousand percent worse than 9-11. Yep. I mean. He wasn't alone. Like, where do you even start with people like that? Like, even if you have extremely negative feelings about what happened on January 6th, and I do. I mean, I think there were all sorts of things about that that were scary, irresponsible. I think there should have been consequences, all that.

But it wasn't a coup. It wasn't Pearl Harbor. It wasn't 9-11. And I have serious questions about any journalist who would go to those places. Because what are you trying to say? If you're really trying to say that that's worse than Pearl Harbor or worse than 9-11, think about our responses to both of those situations. Are you saying that we should respond in that way? Because there are people who think like that, and that's deeply concerning. So yes, it was funny in the moment to watch how crazy all

the coverage was, but there's a level to this that is very not funny at all, which is that they want the public to believe this was so serious that we have to impose very, very stringent measures in response. And that's troubling. And the reason we tolerated those very, very stringent measures, which now with the benefit of hindsight seem shocking after 9-11 is because we were genuinely and for very good reason scared. We didn't know when the next attack was coming. We had an enemy that was absolutely determined to kill as many of us as possible. And that's why Americans tolerated the erosion of their civil liberties on a dime. And it lasted for a long time and looked the other way on things like torture, which we normally

wouldn't have. It's insane to now try to say, we're there again. We are there again and expect the American people to suck it up. Granted, you know, eliminating the filibuster is not exactly the same as torturing people. But it's extreme. It's extreme. It's it's radical. And it's not justified by anything we saw on January 6. No, and I thought the symbolism and I wrote about this, the symbolism of Dick Cheney showing up for the moment of silence. You know, that he and his daughter were the only Republicans present for the moment of silence, commemorating the anniversary of January 6th.

First of all, why are we commemorating it? Irrespective of that, for him to show up, and you think about it, this person was the architect of a whole sort of unaccountable bureaucracy within the federal bureaucracy. I've covered so many stories about things ranging from drone assassination to rendition to secret prisons

to national security letters to mass surveillance to the lack of congressional oversight, to spying on Congress, all these things that are essentially creations of the security state that were new in response to 9-11. And they were horrible and they were irrevocable and they're almost impossible to challenge because they were built in a way that there's essentially no oversight of them. In many cases, we didn't even know they existed until something like the Snowden thing happened. to January 6th in conjunction with things like Merrick Garland, Lester saying that they want to, you know, implement a new domestic terrorism program or a war on war and terror at home.

What does that mean? Are we going to expand the, the no fly list, the watch lists, all these things that I think a lot of Americans just do not understand the scope of how bad it was and continues to be. And the idea of bringing that home on a mass scale should terrify everybody, I think. That's a really good point. It's like this isn't just about and it is absolutely about changing a news cycle.

I mean, the media saw an opportunity to spike its ratings. The Democrats saw an opportunity to change the narrative from inflation and crime and supply chain and, you know, all of the bad news for Joe Biden and his polls. But they also are using it, 100% using it as an opportunity to seize more government power, same as COVID. I can't move on without speaking of your recent piece, which you entitled A Tale of Two Authoritarians, talking about Dick Cheney in the house. And you write, no one from a country where these things actually happen could mistake January 1st or 6th, sorry, 1-6 for a coup. Quote, in the real version, the mob doesn't take selfies and blaze doobies after seizing the palace. And the would-be dictator doesn't spend 187 minutes snacking and watching Fox before tweeting go home

yeah absolutely uh i mean i again i lived in i lived in russia in the 90s so um i'm you know i went through a bunch of disruptions obviously we had there was a the the big one in 1991 where they sort of arrested Gorbachev and tried to install a KGB regime. And there was the Black October one in 1993. And by a very random coincidence, I happen to know some of the key players involved in one of those, one of those coups. And so, yeah, like a real coup is a serious thing where the leader of the coup is on the phone all day long, trying to line up as much support as possible. Like, you know, who's got the 110th Airborne, who's got the police in the Capitol, who's got the airports, who's got the telephone services. The real coup is not somebody who goes home, goes back to the White House and sits back and watches Fox all day long. That's not what happens

in a real coup. In a real coup, they don't just give up. They're trying to take power. What happened was disturbing, but it was not a real attempt to seize the reins of government. And I think the fact that so many journalists have reflexively opted for that word tells you that they're just not really worried about the accuracy of it. I mean, you can feel negatively about it, but you don't have to go there and make the mistake. I said the same thing last week when we had the anniversary, whatever we're calling it. There's no reason to overstate it. Just state what actually happened and then deal with that. I mean, how did forget the people who were there just to support President Trump and see a guy they loved and wave goodbye. Right. How did so many people actually storm the Capitol thinking that they could make a difference that day in terms of the voting? Right. Because the vast majority had no idea there was even anything going on inside. I talked about The Daily doing a great interview of a guy, it was a transcription, a live reenactment of his transcription of his interview with the FBI. This guy was like, I didn't even know they were voting on anything. I'm a lifelong Democrat. I

just kind of got sucked up and went in and the next thing I knew I was part of it. But some people really wanted to stop the certification of the vote and the counting of the vote. How did those people get to the point where they believed it could happen? You know, we did a long interview with a woman who was there at the Capitol and she walked us through how she fell into the disinformation cycle. You know, she felt alienated from the mainstream news. She felt loathed by people on CNN. She wasn't she was looking for a tribe. She her business is closed. She was loathed by people on CNN. She was looking for a tribe. Her business is closed. She was a young mother. She was pissed off about the COVID restrictions. You can make a good faith effort to understand how did people get to the point of believing what wasn't true.

That is a useful exercise. You can do that without using falsely inflammatory labels like insurrection and coup and all the nonsense and worse than 9-11 bullshit. And so the media continues. It's disgusting disservice. Are we shocked? All right, wait, let me leave that question in the air. I'll squeeze in a quick break and then we'll pick it up there because I do want to ask you about AOC and Ted Cruz, who's come under fire for some troubling comments and behavior. More with Matt Taibbi coming up right after this.

So, Matt, Ted Cruz finds himself getting bashed by the left and the right last week because at a hearing before January 6th, I think it was the day before, he referred to some of the January 6 protesters as committing a violent terror attack. So then Tucker ripped on him on his show that night saying no and wrong and bad messaging. And basically you're falling right into a Democrat trap. And then Ted Cruz went on Tucker to try to fix it. And this is how that went in part. Watch. There are a lot of dumb people in the Congress. You're not one of them. I think you're smarter than I am. And you never use words carelessly. And yet you called this a terror attack when by no definition was it a terror attack. That's a lie. You told that lie on purpose and I'm wondering why you did.

Well, Tucker, thank you for having me on when you aired your episode last night. I sent you a text shortly thereafter and said, listen, I'd like to go on because the way I phrased things yesterday, it was sloppy and it was frankly dumb. And I don't buy that. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I don't buy that. Look, I've known you a long time since before you went to the Senate. You're a Supreme Court contender. You take words as seriously as any man who's ever served in the Senate.

And every word you repeated that phrase, I do not believe that you use that accidentally. I just don't. So, Tucker, as a result of my sloppy phrasing, it's caused a lot of people to misunderstand what I meant. And he went on to try to say that he always refers to anyone who attacks a cop as a terrorist, as a violent terrorist. And he was just being consistent with prior prior comments. But he did. I mean, Tucker got him right because he tries out sloppy. And the truth is, and Tucker said, I don't believe that because you choose words carefully. And if Tucker only knew how right he was, apparently Ted Cruz has used that term violent terrorist attack in referring to January 6th at least 17 times over the past year.

So it was deliberate. Tucker's instincts were right. And you tell me whether Ted Cruz handled that the way he ought to have. I just struggle with the political calculus there, because if he's going for mainstream recognition by saying violent terrorist attack, then you probably want to stick with that. You're not fooling anybody by cowering and retracting before Tucker Carlson and saying, oh, I didn't really mean it. I was just being sloppy. That's just not believable, as Carlson pointed out. And actually, one of the first things that Tucker said is one of the first thoughts that I have, because I've covered Ted Cruz on the campaign trail. And among presidential candidates uh i would say he's not one of the

dumber ones like he actually uh is fairly sentient on the stump like i think there's actually something going on behind his eyes um and so i it's a bizarre thing for him to do like and what it speaks to i think is that he that he must have realized the enormity of the error politically, because I don't think that's a survivable thing to say if he's going to try to run and win a Republican primary, if he's going to be opposed at a primary. So I think that's why he did what he did. I'll tell you what, if I were Ted Cruz's press secretary, I would have said to him, do not go grovel. That's not what a man does. That's not that is not what America's want wants right now, especially women, especially Republican women is a strong man. That's what's why a lot of women voted for Trump, even though they didn't like Trump. And that's why a lot of Hispanics

are voting for Trump. The polls reflect that they like his strength. So do not be the weak man who goes in and grovels in front of Tucker. And Tucker was right. I mean, what he said was what he called Cruz out on was exactly right. What Cruz, in my view, needed to do was to go in there and say, I said it and I meant it. I was talking about the and then list the number 147 people who are who attacked cops with fire extinguishers, who hurt them, who broke bones, broke spirits, who drove them to the place where they were despondent in the days after and some committed suicide. I have absolutely no tolerance for them. You know, the same way I have no tolerance for the people who killed David Dorn in the Black Lives Matter riots and all the others, the 2000 cops who got hurt and so on.

It's disgusting. And I think we're all you should be his press secretary. He should have called me. You know, you don't give him you don't give one inch. Be a man. Be strong. And by the way, women are strong, too. And say, I stand by every goddamn word, every word. It's disgusting. But but, you know, my full remarks and I haven't looked at all of his remarks, either my full remarks showed or I should have made that more clear that I do not think that applies to the rest of the writers. And what the Democrats are trying to do, taking the bad actions of a few at one riot to try to paint the entire Republican Party writ large as a bunch of terrorists is equally wrong. It's disgusting. It's wrong. It's divisive. It doesn't live up to Joe Biden's promises of unity. And it's going to tear us apart at the fabric of this nation. So I have no I will brook no, no. I think Tucker would have jumped out, jumped on that, too. But yeah, yeah. Well, fine. But you can have that debate. Like I this is what the Democrats

are trying to do. They're trying to use terms like terrorism and so on in order to justify these extraordinary measures that they now want to push. Get rid of the filibuster so we can federalize voting rights. No. Right. That's no. Right. They're trying to misuse language. And so I think Ted Cruz's opportunity was to say they don't get to co-op terms like that. It is a terrorist thing. You do put a cop through terror if you scare him within inches of his life or in some instances into actually hurting them and so on. And it applies to BLM. And I want to hear them say it about BLM. And it applies to the few who did it on Capitol Hill that day and so on. Anyway, I think he missed an opportunity. And I don't see Ted Cruz getting back the MAGA base or even others who have seen him flip up on things like this one too many times. Just just to briefly comment on that, because I think you said something that's really interesting about Trump. And obviously, you know better than anybody, you know what his formula is for success. But there was a really amazing moment in, I think, the summer of 2015, right after he announced when he said that thing about John McCain. I like people who weren't captured.

And I remember being in the traveling press and all of us talking about how, oh, that's not a survivable comment. He's toast now. You can't come back from that. And what Trump did is exactly the opposite of what politicians always do, which is the groveling, you know, sort of aid drafted apology, right?

Which is what we've come to expect from politicians. He didn't do that. He just, he came out and just, he A, he denied he said it. And then he said, basically, if I did say it, I was right. And voters do that. He just he came out and he he denied he said it. And then he said, basically, if I did say I was right. And voters like that. Yeah, they responded to that. They responded to the idea that that this was a person for whatever reason. He was standing up to the to the convention of groveling and apologizing to the news media. And, you know, I think Ted Cruz, he was in that, you know, like that race. I mean, he should have understood the dynamics of that better, I think.

Yeah. Well, it was the Trump thing was so multilayered, you know, I mean, it happened. Of course, he came after me and people thought, oh, he's going to get hurt because he came after a Fox News anchor. And it was the opposite there, too. And I think what he was showing people over and over was, A, yes, no, I'm not going to be doing any groveling apologies, but B, I'll attack anybody. You attack me, I attack you. And there's nothing and no one who's inviolate to me, not the Republican establishment and John McCain, not the Fox News personalities, no one. And he messaged very effectively, I'm here for you, the people in Iowa who I want to give free helicopter rides to. This is between you and me and none of these other establishment rich, blah, blah, blah. You know, that was a great message. Even I saw that, too. I understood why it was working for him.

But he's also really effective at, you know, when he gets in trouble, changing the message with another equally controversial thing. Right. So it's like sometimes it's controversy just became like a big bundle of where do they end? They're still going on to this day. No, I mean, look, I don't I don't credit him with actually thinking this through, but he is amazing at that. But the flip side of this, I mean, I remember an example. I covered Howard Dean when he first started traveling around the country and reporters hated Dean for whatever reason. I can't remember what it was, but they would every day they would they would pester him and say, aren't you too much of a pacifist or aren't you too much of a leftist to be the president? Whatever you think about that question, he got it like a thousand times a day. And rather than just tell everyone to go screw and move on to another question,

he tried every single day to answer the question. Like he would sit down patiently with some reporter who was trying to nail him and basically beg for them not to say that he was just unqualified for office. And that didn't work. They hated him even worse after that. Right. You almost have to just be like, stop it. Stop the nonsense. Next.

Chris Christie had a a flavor of that. But I mean, Chris Christie's he's not the answer on the on the GOP side either, because I think his is an imminently winnable race, imminently winnable race for the GOP next time around against Biden or whoever. If it's not Trump, who can do it? And my husband's position was it can't be anybody who was prominent during the Trump era, like the Republicans who were in any way part of the Civil War back then within the GOP. There's too much on the record. You know, Ted Cruz, let me tell you what I really think about Donald Trump, and then all a bunch of bad things about Donald Trump, and the convention where he didn't really endorse Donald Trump. And then he kind of like backed Donald Trump's election claims, but then he said stuff like, you know what I mean? Like, no, there's too much history. That's why he would think somebody like DeSantis would have a better shot whose record on that stuff, at least, is more clean. Right. What do you make of that? one of the 2000 people who bought his book to review it. And it's just full of self owns. I mean, there's just a whole passage about, you know,

the, the, whatever post he was expecting to get from Trump. And it's clear from the text that they're leading him along. Like he's expecting to be not made ambassadors to some important country. And they ask him if he's interested in, you know, they give him a selection of big countries and then they then they hang up then they call back and they say well how about vatican city would you take that and he's like yeah i'd be interested in that

eventually they give him nothing in other words they were they were just you know stringing him along he doesn't realize that they're pranking him and he's writing all this down in the book i mean it's just a joke it's funny to read anyway anyway. No, but I agree with you. I think it has to be somebody who is not part of that period. So, and I, I just got covered, finished covering the Virginia race for governor. And I, and I think, I think, you know, Youngkin is, is kind of, maybe it's not him, but, but somebody like him is kind of the formula for for what could succeed for Republicans. Not that I'm necessarily rooting for the outcome, but but but I think I think that's I think

you saw in that race. OK, but I see Youngkin. Yes, I get what you're saying and I get the argument for him. But nationwide, he's not going to work. He's the sweater vest is not going to work nationwide. The same women who want to see the strong man, the women who come up to me and they're like, what was it like interviewing Vladimir Putin? I love him. Don't tell anyone. There are a lot of women like that. Why? They like a strong man. They don't really know what Vladimir Putin is doing necessarily or not doing. They just like how

strong he is. I think in today's day and age, especially like with toxic masculinity taking away, you know, a lot of things that we thought were attractive in men, the Republican Party needs somebody who's got some sharp elbows and telegraphs as strong and, quote, a real man. And by and by the way matt this is bringing me to um before we get to youngkin and where the where the gop goes and i want to talk about virginia did you see the thing that this week and i tweeted it out did you see the guy it was some canadian politician um who tweeted out a picture of his wife who had just come home from a 12-hour overnight shift at the hospital i guess and um i I've got to, I will read to you what

he tweeted because it's so amazing. You guys can check out my Twitter if you want to see it for yourself, which you should because you got to see the responses. He writes, his name is John Reyes, J-O-N. Even after a 12-hour night shift at the hospital last night, my wife still has the energy to shovel the driveway. God bless her and all our frontliners. Time to make her some breakfast. And he tweets a picture of his wife totally bundled like a Canadian, shoveling tons of snow. He's inside.

It's the greatest. She picked the winner clearly yeah geez that is embarrassing by the way a hundred percent she made the breakfast um so this guy gets so dragged on twitter everyone's like get the hell out there what are you doing but um how could you not know what what the reaction is going to be to that tweet yes well exactly how did he not see it coming but one one person um was it it's christian walker i think conservative um black gay and son of herschel walker if i'm not mistaken um he's very successful on youtube and so on anyway he tweets out, bring back our real men. Where are our men? We need our men back. And the whole thing's not a bad summation of what I think will win

on the Republican side and perhaps nationwide next time around. Well, I mean, again, going back to Trump, do you remember the moment when Jeb Bush was going on and on about how strong his mother was? And Trump said she should be running in the debate. And I think Jeb Bush's campaign ended in that moment. I mean, I think you're really on to something. Young can also, in addition to being a sweater vest guy and not having a ton of presence, you know, he's also a private equity type and is going to be,

you know, lugging around a lot of baggage on that front as well. So that's, that's why I was sort of saying it's not necessarily going to be him, but, but yeah, I think, I think you're right.

I think, I think, you know, somebody who's a fresh face, you know, and, and is not going to bend to the will of the media, especially. I think that's the most important quality to have.

Maybe slightly irascible. Slightly. Yeah, a little bit. A little edgy. Yeah, a little edgy. Okay, so can we talk for a minute about the series that you did covering Virginia and the parents and what mattered in Loudoun County, which is a liberal place. It's unlike a lot of places in Virginia. It's not some, you know, deep red place. As we know, Virginia is more purple blue now. But you took a hard look at what at what's going on there, what went on there. And you said

the Democrats education lunacies will bring back Trump. You talked about Nicole Hannah-Jones in the piece, but you also had just taken a hard look at Loudoun County in Virginia. And so what are your conclusions about where the Dems went wrong and whether they've figured it out post-Virginia? Well, first of all, that whole story

was so badly miscovered by the traditional media. You know, the conventional explanation for what happened in Loudoun County was that this was a dog whistle Republican race baiting campaign using critical race theory as a rallying cry. And actually, it took me about maybe a half an hour worth of phone calls or maybe a couple hours to find out that this thing actually started with something that had absolutely nothing to do with critical race theory. This was a controversy that started, you could probably go back to 2018. It had to do with gifted admissions, which is a big deal in this place. This is the wealthiest county in America. These are places where parents expect to get their kids into Harvard and Princeton and Yale and places like that. And so getting into an advanced program like Thomas Jefferson High, which is actually in Fairfax County, but they have a program to bus kids there,

is very, very important. And so there was a dispute there basically about how are we going to weigh the admissions to get into these gifted programs. And the problem was that the Asian kids were killing everybody in these admissions. They were 70% of the admittance and they were only 20% of the population. All the other demographics were unhappy about that. And so there was a move to change the rules. The NAACP filed a complaint And that led to a series of incidents that ended up getting into the news. But the root of this had nothing to do with critical race theory. This was about whether or not we're going to use standardized tests and grades to decide who gets into gifted programs. And it's pretty weighty stuff. There was that. And then there was

the school closures thing. That was a much bigger deal in Loudoun County than the curriculum. So that was, that was an important thing. And then when you finally got to what they were, what they were recommending that the schools do, you know, because they had hired these outside equity consultants to do a review. And of course they found systemic racism everywhere, but know, because they had hired these outside equity consultants to do a review. And of course they found systemic racism everywhere, but the, the, one of the recommendations, just to give an example was they wanted to create what they call an equity ambassador program, which would have been an anonymous group of non-white only students who would have regularly informed on the rest of the student body to the school.

Yeah. I mean, that's crazy. It's absolute insanity. But that emerged in the news as people were upset about being taught about slavery. And you can imagine how that went over with the population there and how it went over with the mainly Asian and Indian immigrants who got disenfranchised when they changed the rules because they were being called white supremacists for opposing these changes. It was total, total madness. So what do you think the lessons are for other, well, really for Democrats, right, coming out of that? It's like, it got expanded to cover everything, right? What I noticed is in the wake of the Virginia loss by the Dems, whatever your agenda was, you said that's what Virginia was about, right?

Like, that's my thing. That's what my thing was. But I do think it was absolutely about parental rights, for sure. And being able to like weigh in and that devastating sound bite by McAuliffe saying parents don't have the right to dictate what their what their children are taught. But was it what was it? Was it about more than that? Or like, what's what's your saying, which is really, it's interesting because it reflects a point of view that people have. And Nicole Hannah-Jones and I actually had a little bit of a sparring session about this online. You know, her point of view is that school is more about attaining a collective public good than it is about personal development. And there's a major philosophical dispute. And I think there are arguments on both sides for this. You know, when you when you have all these parents in Loudoun County and what they're thinking about is, well, I have to get my my son or daughter into a really good school and they've done a lot of work and they get great test scores and they get perfect grades. And that's not going to be the criteria for getting into a gifted program.

They're going to be angry about that. And I think what the Democrats are deluded about is that a lot of the, and it's not just in Loudoun County, they're doing this all over the country, whether it's the University of California system that's eliminating standardized tests, same thing in New York City where they're changing the rules for the gifted and talented programs. They're doing it in colleges all over the country. It's this whole idea that there's something amiss with merit-based admissions and that we have to go for this equity route, which is, you know, there's an argument for it, but I think they think it's more politically tenable than it is. I think the larger portion of Americans think that parents should have a say in these matters,

and that we should teach our kids that the student who gets the best scores and works the hardest and gets the best grades, I think we should be cheering for that student, especially if they're immigrants, which a lot of the students in Loudoun County were. So I think they've got this issue wrong. I think they think that they can sell this as sort of racial justice being, you know, sort of racial justice, but that's not really what this is. It's, it's, it's about changing standards. It's really crazy when you see kids work night and day, you know, a lot of these Asian kids who have filed lawsuits night and day sacrifice

everything, you know, they made choices that people like me when I went through high school didn't make, right. Like they, they, they have social time. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And school, didn't make, right? Yeah, I was one of them too. Yeah, exactly. And got better grades. And now they're being told more and more by colleges and even at the high school level, it doesn't count because of your race. Because you're Asian, we choose not to count you. Because, you know, that's just no, right?

Because you're taking the spot of somebody who's a different race who may not have worked harder or, you know, tried as hard because of history. And so they have filed lawsuits to see whether the law would support that kind of racism. And so far, well, we'll see. I mean, there's a couple of big cases still out there, but it's not going the way

that the racial equity people want. Matt, I gotta go. I mean, there's a couple of big cases still out there, but it's not going it's not going the way that the racial equity people want. Matt, I got to go. It's great talking to you. No, thanks so much, Megan. And thanks. It's been a great time coming on your show. All right. To be continued.

So thank you all so much for joining us today. I want to tell you that tomorrow we've got the pod father. That's what they call him. Former MTV VJ Adam Curry is here. He came on and we only had like two segments with him. And I was like, it was not enough. We needed to have a full show with him. You're going to love him.

He's a great talker, very insightful. And in the meantime, if you are enjoying The Megyn Kelly Show, it would be wonderful if you would support us by doing two things. You can download the show on Apple, Pandora, Spotify, and Stitcher. And leave me a comment in the Apple comments and I promise to read them. And then subscribe to our show at youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly.

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