The Megyn Kelly Show - Charles C.W. Cooke on Biden's Broken Promises, COVID Craziness, and Police Reform | Ep. 95

Episode Date: April 28, 2021

Megyn Kelly is joined by Charles C.W. Cooke of National Review to discuss President Biden's first 100 days, Biden's broken promises, COVID craziness with masks and schools, the COVID relief bill, divisiveness of our current political and digital culture, media coverage of the Ma'Khia Bryant case, police reform in America, Biden's 2nd Amendment "lie," what happens with the 2022 midterms, and more.Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms:Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShowInstagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShowFacebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShowFind out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show. Today on the program, we've got Charles C.W. Cook. He's so smart, and he's so easy to understand, and I listen to him all the time and read his great work over at National Review. But I'm proud to be bringing him directly to you here on The Megyn Kelly Show. He's an editor of nationalreview.com and writes a lot for them and does a lot of podcasts for them and just has a great take on where we are right now as a country. And I have to tell you, I'm concerned. I'm concerned.

You'll hear us get into it. But I really just feel like there's been a lot of government overreach in the first 100 days of this presidency. A lot. Biden's been way more active with the powers of his post, or at least the perceived powers than even I expected him to be. And we're going to get into whether that's going to come back to haunt him as we get closer and closer to the midterms and whether he really has the mandate. He seems to think he has. He's doing a lot. Are we really going to be paying reparations? Are we really going to stack pack the Supreme Court? Are we going to make D.C. a state? Charles has got some common sense answers on all of these, and I know you're going to love them.

So we'll get to him in one second. But first, this. Charles C.W. Cook, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. I feel like there's so much to talk about. Thursday marks Biden's 100th day in office. He's got a 53% approval rating or so. Only two presidents in the last seven decades have been lower, Trump and Gerald Ford. According to Chuck

Todd, however, 53 is the new 60. So he's 53% approval. And my impression, I want your impression because I know you're a libertarian, but my impression, I have a healthy libertarian streak in me too, is that Joe Biden absolutely loves putting the thumb of the federal government on the American people. He loves it. He does it at every turn. And I am starting to feel it. I'm feeling the constricted thumb on me, whether it comes to COVID or spending or my children's education and their future pocketbooks, because they're going to be paying back the $10 trillion in spending he wants to push out there with no accountability. I'm alarmed at what we got, because I don't think this is what we were promised.

And I want your take on it. What do you think? I think that's the key point is that it's not what we were promised. There is, it seems, no area in which Joe Biden has libertarian instincts. He's not, for example, even in favor of the legalization of marijuana. He's not a complicated politician. He is in favor of state power. I think why it feels so disconcerting outside of the fact that as a conservative, I don't like his policies, is that he was careful throughout the primary and the general election to cast himself as a moderate. Certainly, he talked about decency and honor and tried to contrast himself with President Trump. But he also pushed back against his own party. There was a famous moment in the prime mute where he said, well, I am the Democratic Party now.

And I don't think that's true. I think he has given in on every topic to the far left within his coalition. It did not strike me as likely, given his rhetoric during the general election, that he would immediately try to spend $6 trillion. That's one and a half times the entire spending for last year. He has pushed hard on a whole range of social issues. He abandoned his support for the Hyde Amendment, for example. He nominated Xavier Becerra to Health and Human Services. He's gone in on gun control, and he's indulging some of the most illiberal parts

of his party's platform, packing the Supreme Court, statehood for DC. This isn't a moderate president. Now, of course, he's allowed to do what he wants. There's nothing in the Constitution that holds a politician to his campaign promises. But perhaps one of the reasons it feels so alarming is that it is a different presidency than the one that was previewed. Can we talk about the spending? Because the spending, you know, I'm old enough to remember, as they say, when like excessive spending that wasn't funded would be a major news story that could dominate the headlines for days and weeks, especially on Fox News. And I feel like maybe there's just so much going on with all the social engineering he's doing and so on that they're not paying as much attention to it. But you mentioned the numbers.

There's been so much. I spent like an hour and a half this morning just trying to lay it all out. OK, I'm losing track of the trillions. We've got his latest two point two trillion infrastructure bill. As far as I can see, that's what he's calling his jobs plan, the American jobs plan. But that's only the first half. Another $2 trillion is going to come in infrastructure proposals. So he's got, you know, and all told about $4.2 trillion coming our way in, quote, infrastructure spending, which isn't infrastructure at all. That's on the heels of $1.9 in COVID relief, which, by the way, followed Donald Trump's $4.1 in COVID relief, right? So he came into office, we've spent $4.1 trillion in COVID. He drops another $1.9 in COVID relief, right? So he came into the office, we've spent 4.1 trillion in COVID. He drops another 1.9 in COVID relief. Then he's got his, he's got, I'm trying to keep track. Okay.

So then he's got his 2.2 trillion infrastructure, part one. Later, another 2 trillion will come in part two. And now on Wednesday night, he unveils $1.8 trillion in his family's plan. I can't keep track of all this. None of this other than the COVID relief has been approved and is in the process of being sent out. But it's a lot of trillions, Charlie. A lot of trillions. It's a lot of money, and it is for the most part being fraudulently sold. I was not doctrinaire in my

approach to some of the spending in the midst of the coronavirus crisis and indeed some of it I thought was necessary especially given that the government had been instrumental in shutting down the country and thereby depriving people of their liberty and livelihood and so on. But this most recent bill, I think it was debatable whether any relief was necessary. But the vast majority of the spending had nothing to do with COVID anyhow. So in a sense, what Biden did is he came in, he grasped the mantle of this crisis, and he put in a whole bunch of pork that really was not relevant to COVID. And you know how I know that, Megan, because the second that it passed, Fox and the New York Times and the New

Republic started saying, this wasn't really a COVID bill. This was an anti-poverty bill. This was a progressive bill. This was a bill that did this, this, this, this, and this, and only a small part of it had to do with COVID. And from what I can see, that is also what Biden is doing with the infrastructure bill. There is money in there for infrastructure, but a lot of it is not what we would traditionally regard as infrastructure. And conservatives have taken to mocking this. These people, they say everything is, forestry is infrastructure. But there's a good reason for that. I mean, this bill is another progressive wish list. So I think a couple of things explain this.

The first is the president is obviously frustrated by Congress in that the filibuster is still standing in his way. It doesn't look as if, for the moment at least, the Democratic Party has the votes to get rid of it. And much of the Democratic Party's agenda doesn't have 50 votes anyway. HR1, the voting bill doesn't have the votes. HR8, gun control bill doesn't have the votes. There aren't the votes for DC statehood. There aren't the votes for packing the court. There aren't the votes for most climate change ideas. And the one thing that there are the votes for and that can be done without the filibuster, is spending gobs of money. And so Biden has retreated into this mode where he just suggests spending over and over again

because that's what he can get through the Senate, thanks to the bird rule. But that doesn't make it any less alarming, and especially given that we're not actually in a depression. We're not in a crisis. It has been a terrible time for many, many people. But if you look at the economy, it's beginning to hot up. And any news story, in fact, that you read on the economy says that we may be on track for record explosive growth. Traditionally, we don't spend trillions of dollars that we don't have further indebting our children when we're about to see explosive growth.

And I think that underscores that this really isn't about COVID relief or infrastructural jobs. It's about trying to crowbar in long-standing progressive priorities through the back door there's somebody who's clearly doing construction in the apartment like right above me which is what we're hearing in the background so we'll have to muddle through the infrastructure plan writ large exactly so we'll see what we can do about yelling at my neighbors that always goes over well I couldn't agree with you more right this is like this is just a but it's a wish list of democratic causes and they use they use good terms like education funding child care funding this is in the newest family plan pre-k instruction who doesn't want who doesn't want more of that and yet

we have zero plan on how to pay for it other than tax the rich tax the rich that's what all he keeps saying is tax the rich i don't do you believe this is just going to be paid for by taxing the rich? No. And in fact, this morning, the Biden administration has made it clear that the spending element of this is a bit of a game by saying, oh, well, one other thing we're going to do is we're going to increase enforcement at the IRS, which is a little bit like ways of fraud and abuse never actually happens. I mean, I think a couple of things are worth saying on the paying for it front. The first is that although it is not the case that everyone in the Democratic Party has lost his mind, There is a theory that is percolating in progressive circles that holds

that it doesn't actually matter whether you can pay for spending or not, because the federal government is able to print money. And this is called modern monetary theory. I'm not convinced that Joe Biden is a devotee of it, but enough progressives are that the pressure on a lot of money by simply changing the rates, especially on corporations. And that's popular. And people like the sound of it when you say, hey, we're going to tax large corporations more than we have been. But I think people often forget that that does ultimately affect them. And I wonder whether there will be a backlash against those tax increases that people can't anticipate now, but that will affect their pocketbooks ahead of the midterms and do some damage to the Democrats standing in Washington. The union gifts in this money alone, you know, should shock the conscience of most conservatives.

The New York Post put it as follows. Every single push from this president is for a total transformation, a massive expansion of government, union power, democratic control, and Green New Deal boondoggles, all financed via trillions in debt and redistributive new taxes to please far-left socialist-leaning progressives. If Biden and co. get their way, say goodbye to America as we once knew it. Thanks, Georgia. I think about that all the time. It's a little bit like remembering a sporting event that your team lost because the runner just didn't quite get to the base or into the end zone. And you just sit there for days just imagining one final push and you could have had the world series i mean yes the difference between um winning and losing in georgia seems to have been six trillion dollars

oh my gosh um look i i think the odd thing about biden uh is that he is acting in a way that presidents typically only act when they are the beneficiaries of landslide victories. There have been a series of Axios pieces on Biden as FDR. It's a designation that this president seems to like. And if they're feeling a little more modest, they'll use LBJ instead. But the point here is that Franklin Roosevelt won in 1932 in a landslide victory that was echo had a super majority in the Senate. He had more than three quarters of the senators in the United States. Lyndon Johnson, likewise, won a landslide victory over Barry Goldwater, one of the most lopsided in American history, and had large congressional majorities to boot. Joe Biden beat Donald Trump. The idea that the election was stolen is false, but he didn't beat him by much. I mean, if 90,000 votes had gone the other way in the United States in 2020, the Republican Party would control the

House of Representatives, the Senate and the White House. And this was a squeaker of a victory. The majority in the House the Democrats enjoy is, I think, six seats. And they don't have a majority in the Senate. But of course, functionally, they do, because the vice president breaks ties. And yet all of this rhetoric we're hearing is fundamentally transform when there isn't a mandate or an enthusiasm for it. And there's no real legislative mechanism for it. So, again, I'm baffled. It feels disconcerting because this is neither what we were promised nor what people seem to have voted for. When you hear AOC say that she's enthusiastic about his first 100 days, she's really pleased. I get concerned. She's the last person I want to be to see enthusiastic about him and his agenda.

I think there's one other element here, though, that we should mention, and that is that the Republican Party has brought much of this on itself, not just electorally, but by having forgotten that it is supposed to be the party of smaller government and of personal responsibility, and it is supposed to be worried about deficits and debt. And Republicans have never been perfect on this. They weren't while Ronald Reagan was president, they weren't while George W. Bush was president, and they certainly weren't while Trump was president. But they have always been better at it than the Democrats. They used to be able to speak this language fluently and in a way that appealed to people. They used to be able to marshal their voters and many, many independents and even fiscally conservative Democrats against endless spending and irresponsibility. And at the moment,

at least, I just don't see them doing it especially well. They did not make a great case against this pork-laden COVID bill. They are struggling to make a case against the infrastructure bill. And perhaps because they were so happy to spend money, leave aside COVID for a moment, during the Trump years, they are less credible on it. And that's bad. That's bad for America. I was just going to ask you that. I was just going to ask you why. Why are they so silent? It just seems like there is no warrior on the opposite side. It's like they fell out of practice in how to argue when Trump was in there. They couldn't argue with him. And he was their best spokesperson in arguing against the Democrats. And now they're just these weak little silent lambs. Yeah. And look, that should alarm people. I'm a conservative. I ideologically want a smaller

government. I think that that works better in the long run. I think it is a virtue to spend only what you have. But everyone should be worried, irrespective of their politics, irrespective of what sort of government they would like to see. Everyone should be worried. The idea that because we haven't yet had a debt crisis, we will never had one is absurd. I mean, we are just habitually as a matter of active policy, spending money we don't have. And I'm not just talking about the COVID bill, about the coming infrastructure bill and anything that comes after it. That's discretionary spending. Just entitlements. You cannot forever spend money that you don't have. Eventually something will break and it will be far, far worse if it breaks

outside of our control and anticipation than if it breaks within it. If you look back 10 years to 2008, 9, 10, 11, I had many, many disagreements, of course, with President Obama and with the Democrats. But at least they were willing to acknowledge, along with the Republicans, that there was a problem. At least they were forming commissions and having negotiations. Now, nothing came of it. But Barack Obama was willing to stand up and say, we have a bit of a problem with deficits and debt

and our entitlements. The Republicans were too. And now I just don't see it. And that doesn't mean that it's gone away. It means that we're more likely to face a catastrophe than we were. And meanwhile, the money goes toward things that half the country doesn't support. You know, like there will be hundreds of billions to big labor if his infrastructure bill goes through. And there was a great article in The Post that I quoted from saying it's designed to promote above market rates for union wages, mandatory union membership, trying to make

that as easy and prevalent as possible. Hundreds of billions, of course, to green energy companies. We saw how that worked out with Solyndra. Everybody's going to be driving green cars. They want $350 billion for state and local governments that have spent irresponsibly, like my state, New York. They want all the federal cars being driven to be electric cars. I mean, this really is like Joe Biden just got drunk on the nation's cash and just rolled around in the money and on some White House bed saying, oh, my God, this is wonderful. What can I do to make everyone on my side happy?

And they just came in with their lists and he he never said no. is, on top of all this irresponsible spending and Democratic wish list gifts, the demoralization of the police, the attacks on any white person just for having white skin, the online climate of bullying. You know, I'm thinking right now of that horrible video some He describes himself as a black activist, took of the Holiday Inn employee who clearly had special needs. He got in his face, accused him of some unknown slight. And the kid who says he has bipolar disorder, a young man, winds up hitting himself in the head over and over and then smashing his head against the computer. And still, the activist circulates it in an effort to attack him for

his alleged racism. All of it is demoralizing. It makes me sad. I don't know what to wish for. I never thought I'd be thinking about the Obama years as sort of the reasonable government restraint time, but that's kind of how I'm feeling these days. Yeah. And again, it goes back to the difference between what we're seeing in office and what we saw during the election in that all of the policies that you just described are divisive to use a favorite term of the left. It is divisive to send money to unions to which most people do not belong. It is divisive to bail out San Francisco and to encourage its profligacy and irresponsibility. People who live in Texas and Florida and North Carolina and states that have balanced their budget and have made hard choices are sending money to

states that will not, that will upset people, and it should. And on the police, I mean, look, I'm a libertarian. I have a healthy skepticism of government and to some extent of the police, but there is a considerable difference between saying, let's look at how policing works, let's look at who it affects, let's look at whether we need fewer laws or different laws, let's look at the rules surrounding the use of force, and saying that the police should be abolished, or that they are the leading cause of death for black men in America, which one guest on CNN said recently, or to suggest, which is just not true, that police officers in the United States are just constantly wandering around executing minorities for the sake of it. And it's especially offensive to propose that given how many police officers are themselves

minorities. And, you know, one of the promises of Joe Biden, and I mean that quite sincerely, not as a concern troll, one of the promises of Joe Biden, one of the things that I thought was possible if he became president, was that this sort of rhetoric would be tamped down, that he would serve as a mediator between those sorts of activists and the Republicans. But he hasn't. I mean, he even put out a statement the other day after the shooting in Columbus in which a police officer saved a young black woman's life from another young black woman who was wielding a knife. A Joe Biden that was truly interested in healing the nation or in uniting people would not have put out the statement that he did. A Joe Biden that was truly interested in healing the nation or uniting would not have weighed in on the Derek Chauvin verdict before it came out. and I don't like the idea he's this doddering old senile guy because although he is clearly older

and less sharp than he was he doesn't seem to have completely lost his mind but he has demonstrated that he doesn't really believe in anything and that's increasingly a problem I mean the thing the Michaela Bryant case out of Columbus, Ohio has been just disgraceful on so many levels. And I know you did a very, very smart piece in National Review, tongue in cheek, talking about, you know, how so many people ran to make light of the knife fight. Like, oh, it's just a good old fashioned knife fight. You know, who hasn't, who didn't spend their days, I think you said something like playing Nintendo, going out for an afternoon knife fight.

Well, it was just preposterous, wasn't it? I mean, the knives are extremely dangerous. The idea that we just leave teenagers alone to stab each other is absurd. Yes. And it made me I don't know if you saw Gad Saad, who's brilliant on Twitter. He had a little bit where he did something similar. And I wanted to play you just a bit of it because it's laugh or cry these days. And so here's a chance for a laugh. As someone who is an expert in human behavior, I can tell you that the way she was about to plunge the long blade knife into the other woman's heart was in a playful way. Kids taunt each other. They're horse playing, right? You're using a knife to kind of tease and tickle someone else's heart by stabbing a six-inch blade into her heart. And as she's in midair about to plunge the knife in a playful way, again, you got to remember, like, these were

just kids playing, just like a lot of people at MSNBC. And a lot of pundits, a lot of critical race people said, kids play with knives, they stab each other to death. And that's just part of growing up. Jean Piaget, the Swiss developmental psychologist said that, you know, you have different cognitive developmental stages. One of the stages is when kids, you know, knife each other to death. That's just, you know, you progress, you know, I've probably killed and been killed by at least maybe 3040 kids that I've killed or have been killed by like horseplay and just having fun with knives. Oh, gosh. I mean, we're laughing at the absurdity of that, because that's actually what people like Joy Reid and the BLM woman. What's her name? The crazy one. Brie. Is it Brie Newsome?

Yeah. Have been saying that's actually what they've been saying to attack police because they've never seen a situation in which they don't think the police are wrong. Even just the other day, I saw somebody on CNN saying 17 black men have been killed by police just so far this year. Well, I don't know. I haven't seen the tracker. But the truth is that there are about a thousand people killed by police in any given year, black and white and other races. And about 10 million people are arrested by police in a year. And so at this point, we probably have about nearly three and a half million people who have been arrested, three and a half million arrests. And if 17 black men have been killed, I'd like to know more about the circumstances. Were they armed? Did they resist arrest? The numbers of black men who are killed, who are unarmed, not resisting arrest, they're almost none. I mean, there'll be almost none that haven't resisted arrest. But in any event, this is where we're at now. We have this sort of running clock. We don't add context. We don't add whether somebody resisted. We don't add whether they

fired on the officer first. We don't add the fact that it's 10 to 11 million arrests. It's just 17. And when a cop gets caught on body cams, which they're supposed to have, shooting another young black woman to protect the life of a second young black woman, they get attacked for that because that's just horseplay that the cop is supposed to know in a moment's notice is like Nintendo, as you put it. Well, this one was particularly strange in that clearly the initial report trickled into newsrooms and editors thought, aha, we'll tie this to the George Floyd verdict. And so you saw headlines that said mere hours before the verdict in the George Floyd case, a white police officer killed a young black woman in Columbus. And then within a few hours, it turned out that she had a knife and not only that she had a knife, but that the footage showed that she was about three feet away from the person she was attacking with her arm raised in the air, about to stab her. And instead of

saying at that point, well, actually, that's not quite what we thought it was, maybe we shouldn't link the two together. The people who had made the initial connection said, no, we'll still go with it. And so they've tied themselves into these absolutely ridiculous knots. And there was a quote from a Black Lives Matter activist in the Washington Post recently, in a story about this incident. It said, everything about Micaiah's death and the reaction to her death shows we don't believe black girls and children have the ability to make mistakes. Now, in order to believe that, you have to say that the girl who was saved by the police officer should not have been. That's what the word mistake means there. Mistake means that an unarmed woman has a knife driven into her body by someone else. This really is not more complicated than that. The police officer had two options. The first option was that he opened fire. The second option was that he didn't. And if he didn't, then he would have been witnessed to, and in some ways,

an accomplice to, an attempted murder, and and very probably given the size of the knife a murder this was not a situation that could be de-escalated that there are situations that can be de-escalated i'm in favor of de-escalation if you show up and someone looks as if they might be a threat to themselves or someone else there are ways of de-escalating that. But this was an attempted murder in progress. The knife was upturned. She was three feet away from her. And at that point, you really do have only one of two choices. And unless you believe that we should privilege the safety of attempted murderers rather than attempted murderees, which I don't, then it seems quite

clear that the officer made the right decision and that there was nothing racist or unfair about his having done so. Up next, the Democrats in the Biden administration have some sweeping ideas for how to reform the police. No thought for actual criminality and how to stop that, right? No thought for seven-year-old Jaslyn out in Chicago who was gunned down with 45 shell casings found outside of her car. It's all about police reform. That's next. Right now in Minneapolis, we're about to see the trial of Derek Chauvin's police officers, three of them who are on trial for assisting a betting attempted murder, a betting murder, just because they stood by while Chauvin had the knee on the neck. Right. Because they they didn't do anything to help George Floyd. Think about this, this white cop in Columbus, Ohio.

If he had just stood there while another woman, much more than Derek Chauvin, was actively in the process of murdering somebody. It was much, much more clear in the tape that we saw in the Micaiah Bryant right? It's like that even if that had been a black cop, there'd be outrage. And even now they're admitting, like Keith Ellison, the attorney general of Minnesota, admitted that there was zero proof in the Chauvin trial, zero, that Chauvin had any racial animus whatsoever toward George Floyd or any other black person. It just doesn't care. Now, if a police officer encounters a black suspect or any sort black person. It just doesn't care. It just now if a police officer encounters a black suspect or any sort of crime involving a black person, they're in a lot of potential danger. The police officer is because now, I mean, especially if we see the bill passed that Biden is

pushing for, right, the George Floyd act, they want things like get rid of qualified immunity. They want no chokeholds or carotid holds whatsoever. I mean, that's going to lead to more violent options, not fewer. That's just the truth. You take away cops' immunity, they probably won't intervene. The girl in the pink and the Micaiah Bryant case, she probably would have died. If you want to make it easier, as this act does, to prosecute police, to prosecute them by lowering the legal standard to go after them from willfulness to just recklessness. Good luck recruiting police officers who are already quitting in droves in places like New York. I just there's no what does it take? Does it take the numbers of deaths and murders in the

inner cities which are already skyrocketing? We went over this the other day to quintuple instead of triple, like before they realize that it's not a good idea to blame all this criminality on police. So I'm probably less conservative on the question of policing than you. I've heard you. Yeah, I've heard you on that. And I have far more interest in ending qualified immunity. Now, that is a federal concern. But one of the reasons I object to the George Floyd bill, nevertheless, is that I don't think the federal government should be micromanaging policing. And one of the reasons that I don't think the federal government should be doing that, other than that it is, by the text of the Constitution,

not its job, I don't believe it has the power to do that, is that I think when we look at what we can do to reform police in cases where policing isn't working, And I'm absolutely with you in that I don't think the police are the primary problem here. But, you know, they're not perfect either. So insofar as we look at how to change that, you have to look at the local level. There is no one size fits all rule that is going to change this. I think police reform is really boring. I don't mean it's a boring topic to talk about, but I mean it's a grind. It's like anything. Education reform, there is no one-line answer. There is no sexy solution. It's going to be a matter of trial and error of of minor changes in training and and it's it's not going to be fixed by one one law at the federal level now qualified

immunity is a little bit different because that is a federal concern it's also a doctrine that was determined by the supreme court and and obviously, therefore, has been federalized. But I think that the Biden approach here is the wrong one because of that. And I'd also point out that from what I understand about the police reforms that the Biden administration is pushing, they also have an awful racial component to them that leads to absolutely absurd outcomes. The difference between, say, the way that Senator Tim Scott looks at this and the way that the Biden administration looks at this is that the Biden administration's ideas are infused with this disparate impact theory that essentially says

that if there is any difference in the outcomes statistically between races, then that must be a problem caused by the police. And I'm afraid that is nuts. You know, there is an enormous disparate impact difference between, say, men and women, because men commit all the violent crime. It's like 98% of violent crime is committed by men, and the vast majority of that is committed by young men, not older men. Now, that's not the product of bias. That's not the product of police prejudice. That's the product of what the police are responding to. It's supply driven. Right. I mean, look at the race. Look at the numbers already, right? You could just look at today. You don't even have to track anything. You've got black people who are about 13% of the

population. Black men are about 6, 6.5% of the population. But black people, and it's almost always men, commit 60 percent of the violent crimes in the major cities. So it is going to be a disproportionate arrest rate. It absolutely is. And instead of saying, well, why don't we take a look at why those crime numbers are so high? It's let's take a look at what's wrong with police. So it's such a problem solving. You know what it reminds me of um when i was at oxford i went to a debate about education and one of the participants in the debate said that oxford should be taking

far more people who didn't make uh the grade um because otherwise you would never see, what's the fancy word we use now? Equity. And professor after professor stood up and said, no, that just won't work. This has been tried. You cannot fix what is wrong with education or what is wrong with society at age 18. You can't do it. And it doesn't help anyone. It just frustrates everyone involved and makes nothing better. So I'm absolutely open to the idea that we should fix education at the age of seven. And I'm absolutely open to the idea that there's a lot unfair about our society that leads to people taking divergent paths when they hit 18. But as with education, you can't fix the reality that the police operate in at the point at which they're operating in it. You have to go much

further back than that. So if it strikes you, as it does me, as a pretty big problem, that as you said, 13% of the population is black, but 60% of the violent crime is committed by mostly black men, then we should as a society, really try to change that. But you can't do it at the point of policing. It's too late. That's much too late. And I think that's also one of the reasons that the Biden approach is a mistake, because it is putting a pressure on police officers that however talented they are, however open minded they are, they're never ever going to be able to respond to. Absolutely right. I mean, can you imagine how demoralized and how scared they are right now? And I've said this many times, but you know, you're, you're probably not going to be the one that suffers in your presumably nice neighborhood in Florida. I'm not going to be the one who suffers. And the black community writ large is in support of keeping the policing, the number of police, at least the same or increasing the number of police in their communities. That's not to say they can't make improvements in how they approach arrests and so on, but let's get real. Resisting arrest leads to

bad results for most people, black or white. And what we're seeing, for example, now out of North Carolina, there's a case out of North Carolina now where they've only released 20 seconds of the video to the family and not yet to the public. But already the police are having to defend a case down there in the case of it's Andrew Brown Jr., who was shot and killed to death in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, without knowing anything. All we know is that they did kill a man, right? That he did, they did kill a man. He was, according to the reports, a drug dealer. You're not allowed to say that because then you're demonizing the person. Well, it's relevant

to the police's level of fear, to the police's understanding of what they were dealing with. The man was 42 years old and he was shot, according to the family, with his hands on the steering wheel. They said he was driving away. The witnesses on CNN, the family was saying he was driving away from the officers. He wasn't trying to kill the officers. He's trying to drive around them. Well, we need to know more. Shouldn't we, before we jump on every single thing that the police do, yes, they have deadly encounters. Yes, it's about a thousand a year. Yes, that's too many.

But we don't each situation is different and depends upon the facts going into it. And now we're at the point where CNN puts the family on the air just to say this is a racist cop. This is a racist system. We have to redesign the entire police. We don't even know any facts at all about what happened to this man. To me, it's very frustrating as a lawyer because due process, don't make me laugh. The most we can hope for is that it remains in the system, but it's certainly not being provided or even any attempt provided by the media, which covers these cases like they're clickbait. Yeah, and I don't think you have to be a lawyer. I think if you just believe in elementary classical liberalism, it should always bother you when people judge a case without knowing the facts. I mean, if we get to a point at which a significant portion of the major players in the press hear any account of a police shooting and immediately assume

that it is the cop's fault they are committing the same error as if they immediately assumed it must be the person who was shot's fault it's the same error i mean if you say oh well if there is an altercation between a white person and a black person, I bet it's the white person's fault. You are committing the same error as if you do it the other way around and say, I assume it must be the black person's fault. I mean, it's the same error and it leads to the same problems. And as you say, you know, maybe this is a bigger problem in the press than it is in the judicial system. But one eventually leaks into the other. You cannot for too long sustain an illiberal culture or a culture that doesn't care about due process or facts without it beginning to affect the practical side of your society. And this is one reason that

I've never been convinced by the argument that don't worry about the craziness you see on college campuses. Don't worry about what Harvard professors say. Don't worry about what you read in the newspapers. Because that's area A and area B is fine. Look at the Supreme Court. It's really good on free speech. Yeah, that's true. Except that college campuses and newspapers and the faculty at Harvard in 40 years will be the ones filling the Supreme Court, and they will be the ones running the judicial system, and they will be the ones setting expectations within the actual institutions of power. And, you know, I thought

this while Trump was president over and over again, of course, people say, oh, you're just defending Trump? No. Oh, you just love Russia? Really? No. The casual illiberalism that so many people in the media highlighted and exhibited about and around Trump was a problem. Anyone who pleads the Fifth must be guilty. Anyone who wants a lawyer when they talk to the FBI must be guilty. Taking allegations as facts, taking rumor as facts, that's not really going to hurt Trump. He's a really rich guy, and he was president of the United States. But if that becomes normal in our society, it does hurt people at the margins who don't have the same level of protection. And so I worry enormously about this sort of illiberalism, especially when it comes to due

process, because I do think it will have real world consequences. I'll just as an aside, because I want to pick up on your point. But as an aside, there is a very interesting case going up to the Supreme Court this week. And it's it's got my concern as a free speech, almost absolutist, not entirely, but I'm pretty close. And it involves a ninth grader. Now she's in college, but at the time she was in ninth grade, Pennsylvania high school, uh, found out she didn't make the varsity cheerleading team and that she was going to stay on JV. And she went

on Snapchat and dropped a couple of F bombs. It wasn't that bad. It was like F school, F softball, F cheer, F everything, right? She was T-O, P-O'd. She didn't make it. And she got punished. She basically got banished to the JV squad in perpetuity. And this, you know, she suffered in school for a comment she had made out of school. Her parents sued. A federal appeals court ruled, look, she posted something off campus. She's beyond the reach of the school authorities. This wasn't a disruptive message inside the school because sometimes if it's off campus, but it's really disruptive to something in school, they can reach you. And then the appeals court said, so for that reason, she can't be punished. And the Supreme Court took the case,

which I don't like. Why did they take it? I would have much preferred to see them leave that ruling stand. And I do think that's something we should be watching because you're right. Traditionally, the Roberts Court in particular has been very pro First Amendment. And I've been looking at the courts as one of our last vestiges of reason when it comes to things like the First Amendment. They're not woke. They follow the law. The First Amendment is sweeping intentionally in its reach and protection. And I think it's one thing we need to keep our eye on because we can't start losing them, right? Like if they start saying schools can crack down, and I understand there's bullying and so on, but they start saying schools can crack down on speech they don't like off campus in a much more sweeping way, guess who's going to get targeted?

Yeah, it's funny, because if you look at the First and Second Amendments, they're sort of opposites of each other in the way they're treated in society and in the courts. In the First Amendment, there is a real push at the moment against free speech. An awful lot of people, majorities sometimes, believe there is such a thing as hate speech and that it's illegal when it's not. And want to make it illegal. When they find out it is protected by the First Amendment, they want to change that. Exactly. And yet the Supreme Court has been a bullock here. Every speech case it sees, it yields a nine nothing or eight to1 result. And yet the Second Amendment, despite Heller, has largely been ignored by the Supreme Court, has definitely been ignored by the

lower courts. And yet it is extremely healthy politically. All of the gains that have been made in the restoration of the right to bear arms in the last 20, 30 years have been political. They've been at the state level and through Congress. And if you had to ask me, you know, which one would you prefer in the long run? I'd take the political support for the Second Amendment. Because as you say, if the First Amendment starts to fall in the court, there's not much bolstering it underneath at the moment. And that's deeply alarming. Can I ask you about the Second Amendment? Because Biden dropped a whopper on that, and I saw you wrote about it, saying what he wants to do, he's pushing now to end gunmaker

liability protections. He says, this is an outrage. This is the only industry, the gun manufacturers, that cannot be sued. And it's wrong. So this is just not true. And it's something Hillary Clinton used to say a great deal too. Gun manufacturers are subject to the same liability as any other manufacturer. If their product doesn't work, if it's faulty, if it is dangerous to its user, then they can be sued. They can be sued in precisely the same way as Ford can be sued if the brakes on their truck doesn't work. What it cannot be sued for is if somebody buys a gun

and then goes and murders somebody with it. Now, the reason that Congress got involved in the first place was that a number of courts prompted by legal activists were trying to do an end run around statute and the Second Amendment by asking judges to rule that a given product, a legal product, i.e. a pistol or a revolver or a shotgun or a rifle, was dangerous. Yep, they are their guns, and that they should therefore be prohibited. Congress said, no, we're not going to allow this it really had reached fever pitch and so in 2005 it passed a law called the protection of lawful commerce in arms act uh it passed uh with a bipartisan super majority one of the senators who voted for it was Bernie Sanders. It was a common sense initiative that was designed to do nothing more dramatic than to set into stone the common law

taught rules that had obtained in America and before that in England for hundreds of years. It was not a departure. All it did was formalize the idea that if you are a manufacturer that sells knives or guns or battery acid or hammers and then somebody uses your product for evil, that you aren't liable. It did not give gun manufacturers special protections. It didn't set them apart from any other manufacturer, and it didn't change the rules as they've always been understood. It just prevented frivolous lawsuits that are designed to do judicially what cannot be done by statute, that is to ban guns. And Biden and Hillary Clinton, they just lie about it. I mean,

Hillary Clinton was even worse than Biden. Hillary Clinton they just lie about it I mean Hillary Clinton was even worse than Biden Hillary Clinton used to say if you buy a toy for your child and then your child chokes to death because it's badly made you can sue them but you can't sue them if somebody you know it's just not true the same rules apply to that toy manufacturers do to gun manufacturers. And I see Biden has picked up this lie. I don't think it will get very far because it does, I think, strike people as a good rule. It was supported by almost every major manufacturing group in the United States. It was supported by a huge number of Democrats as well as Republicans. But it is annoying because it leaves tens of millions of people with a false impression of how the law works.

Up next, COVID and whether we can finally take off our masks. But first this, I want to bring you a feature that we call Sound Up here on The Megyn Kelly Show, where we run a soundbite that we think may be of interest to you. And this week it's going to be Tyler Perry from the Oscars that no one saw. This is the one moment that was good. And it literally might've been the only moment that was good. As you may or may not know, since no one gives two you know what's about the Oscars, including yours truly, I didn't watch one moment of it. So I just watched the clips or read the news reports about the clips, which is what I get my information from that there weren't great moments. In any event, the Oscars ratings are down 58% in the overall, 64% down in the younger

audience demo. That is death on TV. That's what that is. Death on TV. That's less than 10 million people watching, which is like a perilous fall from just 10 years ago, let's say. And there's many reasons for it. Certainly, this wasn't a great year for movies because of the pandemic. But let's be honest, it's awful for all the reasons that Bill Maher has been saying. It's awful. Hollywood's awful. And Piers Morgan has been saying it's awful. They only make films now that depress you. They pick some woke cause. They try to depress you into supporting it. They make you feel like a bad person if you don't. Somebody's downtrodden life. Brit Hume used to call it destitution derby, where you'd hear somebody just go on at political events about me. Well, we used to hear it in these

primary candidate debates, like, what about my poor, sad story? What about mine? What about mine? Well, all the movies are destitution derby now, and nobody wants to see that. Nobody wants to watch that, pandemic year or not, but in particular in a pandemic year where we need to laugh. So that's why they stink. And then there's other reasons too. I think these Hollywood celebrities are overexposed, and that has not inured to their benefit, right? It's like some people, their stock goes up when you get to hear them talk more and you get to know them better. For most of these Hollywood celebrities, it goes down, precipitously down. We'd rather just imagine that, you know, you are that character in Mission Impossible,

Tom Cruise, and not some weird dude talking about thetans, right? It doesn't tend to work out well. And especially these days where, you know, the industry that propped up Harvey Weinstein wants to lecture us all about what bad people we are. We don't want to hear it. Right. I mean, you want to know where racism is actually a problem in Hollywood. It actually is a big problem out there. They don't hire black people for technical roles, for the prominent acting roles.

We talked about this with Eli Steele. Right. the prominent acting roles. We talked about this with Eli Steele, right? He's this deaf, black filmmaker. So hard for him to get anybody to pay attention to him. And God forbid you add conservative in there. Forget about it. So anyway, now, like everybody to overcompensate for all of that, they institute quotas, right? You have to have this number of black people in your cast or in your crew. Nobody understands how to fix anything. They really don't. It's such, I just think it's a group of dishonest brokers.

Nobody wants to watch them. It's certainly not in their native setting. That is Hollywood congratulating themselves. And now it's transferred over to not even on screen. We don't want to watch you because we know who you are. And we don't want to watch your stupid, boring, sad movies that lecture us because we know you're terrible people. So that's my summation of why the numbers are down. As I said, 64% with younger audiences and almost 60 in the overall

audience. However, like anything, there are stars in the sky. And that brings me to Tyler Perry, who is the guy who basically saved Oprah's channel, which was going down the toilet until he brought a bunch of programming over there that people actually wanted to watch. And I think he understands the black community very well, because that's pretty much the programming that he brought to Oprah's network that's been so successful. Obviously, he's a black man. He's been very successful in his own right, and was given the microphone at the Oscars the other night and took a moment to make this point. Listen. My mother taught me to refuse hate. She taught me to refuse blanket judgment. And in this time,

and with all of the internet and social media and algorithms and everything that wants us to think a certain way, the 24-hour news cycle, it is my hope that all of us would teach our kids, and not only to remember, just refuse hate. Don't hate anybody. I refuse to hate someone because they are Mexican or because they are black or white or LBGTQ. I refuse to hate someone because they are a police officer. I refuse to hate someone because they are Asian. I would hope that we would refuse hate. And I want to take this Gene Herschel Humanitarian Award and dedicate it to anyone who wants to stand in the middle, no matter what's around the wall, stand in the middle, because that's where healing happens. That's where conversation happens. That's where change happens.

It happens in the middle. Tyler, hi. How are you? I'm here too. That's where most of us are, in the middle. You could lean left, you could lean right, all of it's fine. But we're not on these polarized extremes like these lunatics who run our media and have these very powerful microphones. Screw those people and their divisions and screw these politicians trying to divide us too, right? And the Hollywood celebrities who act better than while they commit all their sins behind their gilded mansion doors. I love that message. And for him to do it in front of that audience was brave, right? To slip in, what did he say? White people and police, police. Good for him because sadly it's become OK to demonize those groups. We talked about that opinion piece the other day from that lunatic professor out of University

of Colorado Boulder, who was saying even the black on Asian crime spike we've seen in New York City and other places, you know, those are documented hate crimes. They're based on race, based on the ethnicity of the Asian people. Those are white people's fault. Everything is based on white supremacy. Anything negative is based on the white people. And you know, you are a white supremacist if you're just born with white skin. So this is my point for him to say, sadly, for him to say, don't hate white people was brave for him to say, don't hate police was brave. Police are the ones we need most when things go seriously wrong and around on

the streets. Um, doesn't mean they're perfect. But they shouldn't be demonized just because they have the courage to put on that badge. Anyway, good for Tyler Perry. It's a feel-good moment. There's still hope in the world. Not everyone's a lunatic. You guys aren't. I'm not. And I think long term I still have to hold on to this.

We're good. We're gonna be good. All right. Back to Charlie in one second. But first this. Back to the overall theme here, which is Biden putting the thumb of the federal government on the American people, which is just how I've been feeling when it comes to spending our money indiscriminately and bolstering up a bunch of unions that the American people

don't seem to want. If you see things like what happened with the Amazon plant down in Alabama and funding the Green New Deal secretly, which is basically sneaking into the infrastructure plan and taking control of police officers and loves to crack down on the First Amendment and the Second Amendment. On top of all that, we haven't even mentioned COVID. And this week, we're going to get the gift of a CDC recommendation on whether fully vaccinated people, while outside, can take off their masks. I can't. Who are these people who need to be told that by the CDC? And why are we still even debating this nonsense? And I say this from New York City, which I'm quite certain is the most masked up city in the nation still.

It's already, already now you're seeing people take off their masks outside. But is it love of fear, you know, leaning into fear that there's still support for nonsense inch by inch progress in the lane of COVID? Like, why don't people look at Florida and Texas and other places that have taken down the mask mandates and the other mandates and opened up their societies and say, send your kid to school without a mask, the federal government's going to get off your back now because the pandemic is ending. It's ending. And we are at herd immunity in many of the states, or so it appears. Yeah, it's baffling, especially as somebody who spent the entire pandemic here in Florida. I mean, I say what I'm about to say as somebody who took COVID seriously, who does not think that it's just the flu, it's not, who wore a mask when asked to by private companies, and who later today is enthusiastically

going to get his second Pfizer injection. I'm pro-vaccine and pro-mitigation, but I think we've lost our minds at the same time. I think it's happened for a couple of reasons. The first is that it like all other things in our country at the moment, became politicized. And so when Democrats learned that Republicans were skeptical, they became even more enthusiastic. And when Republicans learned that Democrats were enthusiastic, they actually do have a group within the United States dominated by urban progressives that has a completely false conception of the risks involved. Now, again, I'm not downplaying COVID. I think it was a big deal. It was a once in a century pandemic, but they've done some research on this. Progressives, especially people who say that they're very left wing, think that coronavirus is far, far more deadly than it is.

I think 50% of people who call themselves liberal or very liberal thought that it hospitalizes between 20 and 50% of the people that it infects, which is crazy wrong. Just off the charts wrong. And of course, if you believe that, which huge swathes of the country seem to, well, then you probably are in favor of double masking and wearing masks on the beach and staying locked down forever. I mean, if I thought that I had a one in two chance of being hospitalized if I got COVID, then I would likely have a more draconian attitude. But the thing is, is it's just not true. And more importantly, the facts here are actually easily attainable because the states have kept very good data on this. The risks are relatively low. And we know how much masks do and don't help in different circumstances. And we know the likelihood of contraction and transmission when you've been vaccinated. So there's no need for us

to live in endless fear. It's, as you say, on the way out. This is a good thing. We should celebrate it. There was a great bit on Twitter. I retweeted it the other day. It was a mom at a local community government meeting, and she was great. She was, as they say, my spirit animal, going off on her local politicians about why her littles have to wear a mask, endless masks. And how, of course, we know the children aren't transmitting it, that there's basically zero percent risk of the children transmitting it to one another in schools. You're not going to get it in the schools. And she wants the people

who are in charge to say our young children can take off their masks, our young children. And frankly, now, most, if not, I would say all children in school should be able to take off their masks and they shouldn't have to run around at recess and run around the track during P.E. wearing masks. And if they if their mask drops below their nose by, you know, one millimeter, they get chastised. Pull your mask up. By the way, our pediatrician said that's dangerous. Don't let your kid run with a mask over his face. Way more dangerous than any chance he could contract or give COVID. I listened to her and I thought, you go, girl. Her name is Courtney Ann Taylor. She's out of Georgia. Take a listen. Every one of us knows that young children are not affected by this virus. They're not. And that's a blessing. But as the adults, what have we done with that blessing? We've shoved it to the side and we've said, we don't care.

You're still going to wear a mask on your face every day, five and six year olds. You still can't play together on the playground like normal children, seven and eight year olds. We don't care. We're still going to force you to carry a burden that was never yours to carry. Shame on us. It has to stop. Take these off of our children.

So what do you make of the push, at least for our children and the schools, to let the masks come off? I think one of the strangest parts of this whole saga has been the chasm between the rhetoric that we hear, especially from teachers' unions, and the reality on the ground. One of the saving graces of this whole affair has been that it doesn't seem to affect children too badly. And when it started, that was what terrified me, especially having read a little bit about the Spanish flu, where it affected children and the elderly the most. I mean, we would be living in a very different country with a different culture and a different approach to one another right now. If children were the primary victims of coronavirus, people would be screaming at each other in the supermarket and they'd be living in bunkers. But thankfully, that has not been the case.

In fact, the opposite has been the case. There really is not a great risk posed to, thankfully, or by children. But there is with the flu. And we managed that without putting masks on children just fine. Nobody ever even suggested it. Right. So I have never understood from the ground up why we have been so keen to close the schools or to set such draconian rules in place in the schools. And again, I say that as somebody who spent the pandemic in Florida, which has 100% school attendance right now, including my own children. So, yeah, that's a really baffling,

baffling development. And you didn't quite ask about this, but I want to say this anyway. I have been really, really disappointed with the teachers unions, because I think that they've tried to have it both ways. On the one hand, all we ever hear is how it's absolutely vital to fund education and to prioritize and cherish education because it is the key to everyone's future. And if they miss even a little bit of it or if they have a bad time, then they will damage their prospects. And yet at the same time, now we're being told that it doesn't really matter if they miss one year or possibly two of schooling and all the socialization elements, you know, they don't matter. And I say this because I just think we've come to all of the wrong trade-off conclusions. It is very clearly not worth what we are putting kids through and continuing to put kids through. And yet somehow we're still here.

And it's what? It's April 2021. It's a year and a bit after we all shut down. And a lot of kids are sitting at home. And I used to think it's a disgrace. On that front, there was a report out of the San Francisco Chronicle just this week talking about how 500 San Francisco educators, 500, have been granted medical exemptions that will allow them to teach from home. The students will be physically in class. The teachers will be at home. Another substitute or some random staffer will have to supervise the class. This is expected to cost San Francisco more than $40,000 a day for the substitutes to supervise the students, or at least $1.5 million before summer break alone.

The teachers can't even just go into the class and stay six feet away from the children. They insist on staying at home remotely. And the reason, I mean, look, if somebody's got a legitimate disability or, you know, significantly high risk of covid, I'm sure they've been double vaccinated. Right. Those teachers, you can mark money, will have been double vaccinated. Still, I might put them into a special category. But given the fear we've seen from some of these teachers unions, the totally irrational fear or at least claims of fear. I don't believe them. I don't believe those 500 teachers. Some maybe, but I don't believe all of them. Not since I saw those Chicago teachers leaping through the air in dance to protest the decision that the mayor there was trying to make to send them back into the classroom, showing us how infeable they were, how they couldn't get in front of young children who don't spread it. They decided to do interpretive dance.

Not since then do I put my full trust in these teachers who say they won't return. No, and I'm from a family of teachers. I don't bear teachers any ill will. My mother is one. My sister is one. My sister's husband is one. But I still have to ask the same question as I asked when the schools

were shut down in the first instance which is why are they so special I mean I I I get it it it can be a tough job but everyone else is back at work I mean lots of people in less well-paid less well-respected jobs are back at work. As you say, if somebody is particularly susceptible or they have comorbidities, fine. But I don't know quite why we are allowing teaching, which is a vital profession, to vote itself an exemption to which no one else is entitled. It's true. Can you see the grocery store clerk saying, I'm going to do my job remotely? I'll zoom in from home. Good luck. I mean, after a point, it's the job, right? The job is to teach children.

And the job is to teach children in person. And we're not, I hope, going to suddenly pretend that there is no difference between in-person tuition and remote tuition. There is. And for maybe a few months, if we needed to work out what was going on and take the cautious approach, so be it. But in the long run, if you don't want to be a teacher anymore, then don't be one. But we're going to have to start teaching our kids again. And that is the job. So do it. Let me tell you something else. I guarantee you, guarantee that if some great protest on a cause those teachers believed in swept by their San Francisco apartments, they'd be out on the streets with BLM or to mourn Ruth Bader Ginsburg or any one of the other causes like Joe Biden's

election, because all the teachers who said they were too afraid to go inside the classrooms and teach over the worst of the pandemic came out for those events. And it's the things have only gotten better in terms of our country's health and COVID since then. And now on that same subject, I've got to ask you about this because I'm heartened to hear you say, and I think you're right, we're not going to see D.C. become a state. We're not going to see the Supreme Court get packed. He may be doing Biden, you know, study groups on these issues, but they don't have the votes. So that's he's thrown a bone to his far left constituents. But I agree with you that that stuff's not likely to happen. He's studying reparations. I don't think that's going to happen, though. There's that term is ambiguous. You know how to reparations can mean many things. However, I do want to ask you about some of these proposed new rules for the Department of Education. There's all sorts of stuff he can do, Biden, some with Congress's approval and some without. And one of the things

that he's proposing now for the Department of Education is a new rule that will establish priorities for federal grants. And that's, I mean, that's basically a carrot and a stick. Like, would you like your federal money? Well, here's all you have to do. And the two things that were mentioned were the 1619 Project and the teachings of Ibram X. Kendi. And then there's an actual bill being proposed called the Civics Secures Democracy Act. It has a nice name. They always give them a nice name. It's like, oh, I like civics. I want civics taught. And it has things like grants for internships for students who decide to lobby and advocate for various organizations. They get course credit for out of class political protests for directing teachers to discuss

current social and political controversies. That's what I really want these far left teachers to discuss every social and political controversy with my single digit age children, because I'm sure they're going to do it a very fair and balanced way. All this stuff is seeping its way every day in a more pernicious way into K through 12 education. And I just, I don't know how we stop it in the states that aren't run by Republican governors. Well, even those that are run by Republican governors, because as you say, if you can threaten people with their own money, you wield an enormous amount of power. This is a hobby horse of mine.

We hear so much about money in politics and the implication that if a corporation or a charity gives money to this or that, then they're in some way corrupting it. And we ignore that compared to the federal government, corporations and charities, advocacy groups, they're ants standing next to an elephant. If you look at the federal government as it was designed by the founders, it was supposed to have a charter of enumerated powers and be very small, have very little to do, to do what it was supposed to do with energy and efficiency, but not to do a great deal. And two things changed that. One of them was the New Deal, where the formal powers of the federal government were grown far beyond the the growth of cash in the hands of legislators and subsequently presidents. And cash is power. The federal government does this all the time.

Why do we have a national drinking age of 21? There's no law that sets it at that. There can't be under the Enumerated Powers Doctrine. We have it because the federal government in the 1980s tied it to highway funding. They said to states, if you don't set your drinking age at 21, we won't give you the highway funding that you need. And a lot of states simply couldn't afford to say no. Well, what do we have with education? Since the Department of Education was created in, I think, 1976, 7, we have increasingly tied funds to federal priorities. And this rides roughshod over the will of the states, but it also allows for an enormous amount of social engineering. And it's one reason conservatives have long been against

the Department of Education as it's currently constructed. And what you are seeing now with the proposals from Joe Biden that you just outlined is exactly that social engineering. And it does make it difficult for states, even if you have a governor who has strong views on education and a spine, a willingness to implement them. It's tough to say to people, hey, you know, all those taxes that you paid, you don't get to not pay federal taxes because you live in Texas. All those taxes you paid, we're going to decline them being sent back to your when government takes power, and that is competing nationalized views of how things should be run, undermining the states and cities and localities, and making education less local and more national, which, I mean, I agree with you entirely that Biden's plan is insane. But even if it weren't is a problem. Because what you're essentially doing is cutting out parents. That's right, you're taking it up to the federal level instead of leaving it at the local and some of this he can do, as Obama infamously said with his pen and his phone.

That's how we got the rollback of due process rights on college campuses. And some of it he does need congressional approval for, like this Civic Secures Democracy Act is something, it's a bill that's being proposed. And it's funny because I'm sure the grants that they'll give, you know, to see students attend out of class political protests and lobbying, I'm sure they're going to give those same grants to, you know, the future MAGA type students, the ones who want to show up at the Rights of Life March. You know, 100% is going to come down to what causes May 1 lobby for and still get the great grant and not get in trouble with the Fed. So that'll be a nice block of litigation coming our way. I just, to me,

the government's growing and it's growing at such a rate under this president in just the first 100 days that my eyes are as big as silver dollars. I just, I can't keep, as I said at the top, I can't keep track of the numbers that he's proposing to spend. And he's trying to seize control in so many areas that it is downright alarming. So one of the solutions is maybe a more moderate president. I don't care, Democrat or Republican, somebody more moderate, because this guy's turned out to be a fan and aligned with AOC in the way he governs. Another solution, at least for short term, would be divided government. And so on the subject of thanks, Georgia, what do you think with the 53% approval, the new 60? Thanks, Chuck Todd.

How do you think he's looking to hold on to control the Democrats of the House and the Senate in the midterms? I think at this stage, it seems likely that he's going to lose the House. And they have a majority of six. They have just lost a few seats thanks to reapportionment. Florida got an extra one, Texas got two, New York lost one, California lost one. Seems likely that will marginally benefit the Republicans. And I think that even though Biden remains somewhat personally popular, although you did say at the outset, not especially, the only two presidents who were less popular at this point were Donald Trump and Gerald Ford, both of whom lost re-election. Right, in 70 years. Yeah. I think even though he remains personally popular, and even though polling shows

that the COVID bill was popular in infrastructure might be, I think it's more complicated than that, just as an aside, because I think when you ask people, well, do you want to spend money on infrastructure? They say yes. Do you want to spend money on infrastructure they say yes do you want to spend money on covid relief they say yes i think if you then say did you know that you're bailing out san francisco they're probably less

into it but over time that will become clear uh but but even if you assume that he's a popular and and his spending is popular biden does seem to have sat down and tried to work out how to activate the various parts of the republican base and um independence to uh who are annoyed with him i mean as you say you've got you've got a president who is not only failing to disavow court packing, but who has created a commission to study it. You've got a party which has introduced this into Congress, and not just anyone, but the chair of the Judiciary Committee wants to pack the court. You've got a president who has got on board

with the addition of Washington, D.C. as a state. It was wildly unpopular. You've got a president who stood in front of the country and called for more gun control, told a bunch of lies about it. You've got a president who abandoned the Hyde Amendment, upsets pro-life voters. You've got a president whose performance on the border is so damaging to him that I don't think we've quite grasped the likely consequences. I mean, the approval rating for

Biden's handling of the border among Hispanic voters is 27%. And just to add to that, yeah, I just pulled those numbers because overall, his approval on immigration is at 33%, according to NBC, 59% disapprove. Absolutely. Absolutely. And these are, to borrow a cliched term, these are hot button issues and they're the sort of issues that lead people to go out and vote. And it's really not much of a climb for Republicans to take back the House. Now, the Senate, I don't know. There's a lot of retirements. There's some vulnerable seats that Republicans will have to defend. But of course, the advantage of the way our system is constructed is that there are a lot

of veto points. So if Republicans do take the House, even if nothing changes in the Senate or the Democrats increase their majority in the Senate, the chances of court packing or the abolition of the filibuster or what you will are off the table because it won't get through the House. And then you've got a couple of years in which you can really make the case that you've outlined. Look, we are spending more money than we have. And this guy is not who he said he would be. I picture it like a cartoon, like there's this giant thumb, and it just keeps coming down. And like, I and the rest of the people, most of us, I think, because I think most Americans don't want the federal thumb on us, just keep dodging, which is running to the left, running to the right and the thumb's getting bigger and we feel smaller and it's just like some animated terrifying monster series that i would tell my children they can't watch yeah

anyway it's one of the many reasons i love listening to you because you always in these departments for the most part i i share a lot of your views and it's it's it's great listening to you express them. Over on the editors, that's where you can check out Charles C.W. Cook. And also you have a second podcast. What's that one called? I have it downloaded on my phone. Mad Dogs and Englishmen.

Right. Mad Dogs and Englishmen. I was the Englishman. It should probably be changed since I became a citizen. But I have the accent, I suppose. All right. Good luck on your second COVID vaccine. I'm right behind you.

I haven't gotten even my first yet, but I'm going to. New York, it's been tougher to get an appointment. And thank you, as always, for the wisdom and expertise. Thanks so much for having me. It was a pleasure. Our thanks to Charles and Don't miss Friday's show because we've got the guys from the fifth column, one of the most popular podcasts out there. You guys are going to enjoy it. Talk to you then. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS,

no agenda, and no fear. The Megyn Kelly Show is a Devil May Care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.