The Megyn Kelly Show - CNN's Post-Trump Town Hall Meltdown, and No Media Accountability Post-Durham, with the Fifth Column Hosts | Ep. 551
Episode Date: May 16, 2023Megyn Kelly is joined by the hosts of the Fifth Column podcast, Kmele Foster, Michael Moynihan, and Matt Welch, to talk about the post-Trump town hall meltdown happening inside CNN playing out publicl...y, CNN’s viewership decline after Trump town hall, Anderson Cooper’s embarrassing apology to viewers, the opinionated emotionalism at CNN that's hard to fix, Chris Wallace's bizarre show and terrible ratings, Roger Ailes' widow slamming the Murdochs and Fox News leadership, the audience evaporation still happening at Fox News after Tucker Carlson's exit, former President Obama lamenting the divided media, the Durham report revealing that the corruption of the FBI, how there's no accountability for the corporate media's Russia collusion lies, Rachel Maddow never getting challenged on her spin, Miller Lite facing backlash for woke March ad aimed at women, and more. Plus Megyn Kelly's kitchen nightmare last night!More from The Fifth Column: https://wethefifth.substack.com/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
Transcript
Discussion (0)
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.
Incredible new details on the absolute meltdown inside CNN after the Trump town hall.
We're going on one week now, and they are still
in a shambles over there. One CNN staffer likening the fallout to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.
This is the greatest story ever. I'm sorry. It's the greatest. Meanwhile, on Friday night,
CNN's primetime drew a smaller audience than Newsmax.
OK, now we never even look at Newsmax.
No, no disrespect to my friends at Newsmax.
They they understand this, too.
They're not in as many homes as Fox News.
So, I mean, they were just like a blip that nobody would ever even look at.
And now they're beating CNN.
Oh, my God.
In the primetime, at least on Friday.
Always love when our friends from the fifth column podcast joined the show and they are here today for the entire program.
Camille Foster and Matt Welsh are here. Moynihan, interestingly, is stuck in the subway and will be
here shortly. You know what? This is very sketchy. What's he doing? Like the little like
man on the street research for the biggest story in New York right now? Is that what's happening, guys, from we the fifth dot sunset dot com?
Some debate about whether or not he is doing his own Michael Jackson impersonations or he's
actually trying to wrestle someone to the ground right now. I suspect we'll find out very soon,
though. Yeah. And I hope he'll be the good guy. There he is. I see him. He made it. Can you hear
us? Yeah, I was just doing a very spirited rendition of the song Dirty Diana on the subway. hope he'll be the good guy there he is i see him he made it moynihan can you hear us yeah i was
just doing a very uh spirited rendition of the song dirty diana on the subway yeah um and when
i got up on my toes i was attacked ruthlessly so now i'm here i apologize there is something i just
want to say one thing before we start it is amazing amazing to me that people who live in New York aren't all
libertarians because nothing in this city works. Literally, you pay absurdly high taxes and nothing
works. Something that a private company could do well, the New York City government cannot achieve
the most basic things. And I'm doing Trump hands because I'm so frustrated by it. So sorry for me.
He is doing it. That's true. No, my biggest image of New York City right now, these days, and I lived there for 17 years, on the Upper West Side with my family, is the trees.
Because now I live in Connecticut where there are actual trees with leaves on them.
Unlike the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side and the Lower East Side and Hell's Kitchen, where the trees don't so much have leaves as they do plastic bags.
Yes. Plastic bags, like little sad little wannabe Christmas
ornaments adorning the trees because the Department of Public Sanitation is all but non-existent.
Yes. So the trees are covered in violence in New York. They're covered in leaves. I live outside
the city most of the time too. And it is a real uh market contrast and you need that once in a while
to come back and say oh my god this is the fifth world it's not even third world so so yeah but
they are i'm excited to to share with you all that they are thinking about um and of course it'll cost
an incredible amount of money they're thinking about finally putting the garbage sacks that are
piled up on the streets in bins.
They're making this consideration in New York City in the Lord's year 20 and 23.
That would be nice to have some bins. And then if they could actually aim correctly for the bins,
because the problem is once the garbage trucks go by,
they dump out the garbage, you know, the trash that's on the street corners
or that you have wrapped up in a bag.
And then there's an overflow, right?
There's overflow from the because they don't pick up enough. And then they just leave it. So you're walking down the street corners or that you have wrapped up in a bag. And then there's an overflow, right? There's overflow from the, because they don't pick up enough and then they just leave it.
So you're walking down the street, you're stepping over so much disgusting trash.
Now you're stepping over human excrement.
Yes, it's true.
That's another joy of the subway these days.
This mayor was not the big fix that many of us hoped he'd be after the disastrous last
mayor.
All right, enough about New York City.
Let's talk about CNN.
I sent this to Debbie and Steve, my producers, last night.
I'm like, this is the greatest story I've ever read in my life.
It's by Lachlan Cartwright, who's a reporter over at The Daily Beast and Justin Baragona.
And it's under this brand called Confider.
Now, it's following up on a puck news report that initially reported things
continue in a downward spiral at CNN. They are so angry that Trump was hosted in a town hall
internally. I mean, it's a full revolt. It's dividing the staff from the management. The
staff's attacking the management. The management is attacking the staff in places like Fox News
Digital. It's a civil war inside of CNN right
now. And this is just an example of the Trump derangement syndrome that has dominated the
media for the past six years and continues to to this day. All right. So I'm going to get into all
of it, but let me just set it up with this, with the lamentation of their best known news anchor,
I think it's fair to say, Anderson Cooper, the day after
the Trump town hall last week, which I haven't yet played for the audience, maybe they've seen
it elsewhere, but you got to get a feel for how sad and disturbed the CNN talent and many,
many others inside the building are that Trump was given this forum. Listen.
As good a job as Galen Collins did trying to fact check him, it is impossible to fact check fully because he lies so shamelessly.
That man you were so upset to hear from last night,
he may be president of the United States in less than two years.
That audience that upset you, that's a sampling of about half the country.
They are your family members, your neighbors, and they are voting.
You have every right to be outraged today and angry and never watch this network again. But do you think staying in your silo and only listening
to people you agree with is going to make that person go away? I mean, at least he kept the tears
from rolling down his cheeks because that would have been a little bit too strong. Well, he's kind
of right about that last bit, though, isn't he? He is. You know, you've got to deal with this.
You can't be like me.
It is really amazing what he says.
Those people in the audience, those are real humans.
I am Gloria Vanderbilt's son, and now that's a special thing.
That was really amazing.
But I do appreciate all of this, and we talked about it on The fifth home, this incredible thing coming from inside a news
organization with a man who is going to cinch the nomination for the Republican Party for the next
election should not be, quote unquote, platformed. Are you joking with me? Right. It's unbelievable.
I'm going to revise his talking points for him. Dear CNN audience, grow up, grow up. It's called news.
Sorry.
Okay, bye.
That's it.
I mean, the struggle session on the air live, Camille, like, oh, you have every right to
be angry and to never watch the channel again.
Like, who are they kidding?
Either do news or don't, but don't apologize for doing the news.
I mean, the presumption is very clear that the people who watch this show couldn't possibly
vote for Donald Trump.
They're aware of that.
So any pretense that what they are doing is decidedly objective, not that one can be completely
objective, but that it is decidedly objective and it's just the facts and that is what they're
doing, should obviously be pushed aside in favor of this rather indirect but very clear admission that what we've been doing for a very long time is producing a newscast that the only sort of people who would actually watch it are the kind of people who would be outraged by the very visage of Donald Trump on the screen and the sound of his voice, if you are outraged by Donald Trump, even if you're someone who dislikes him, by just him appearing and being cross-examined by someone who didn't do the
best possible job, imagine, well, I know there's some disagreement about that point of hand.
That is really distressing. You're an adult human outraged by the fact that the man is
on television ever. I think that's preposterous. And Anderson did eventually arrive at what sounded like the right idea, that people shouldn't be siloing themselves.
But it's also the case that anyone who's been watching your program apparently has been siloing themselves.
So it's nice that you're no longer doing that, but that's what you did before.
He had to acknowledge their pain first.
You understand?
They're all feeling it. This is obviously hugely distressing to hear him again and have him back again. We get it. We feel you. I mean, so much for the new, more fair and balanced CNN. All right. Because that's that's the way forward is not we fucking hate him as much as you do. But we've got to put him on because he's running like that's that is not the way to win back the missing GOP years
that they drove away during the GOP or the Trump years. So all right. So that what he said shows
to some extent what's happening inside the building at CNN and it's ongoing.
Puck News, Dylan Byers, who used to I think he was inside CNN, then he went inside NBC,
and now he works for Puck News, has an article up saying that he summoned their new
Brian Stelter, a guy named Oliver Darcy, up to his office. Chris Licht is the new boss over at CNN.
He's the new Jeff Zucker. And he was very unhappy with the way his internal reporter, media reporter,
Oliver Darcy, shown here on the left, covered the fallout within the building after this town hall,
reports Dylan Byers.
Oliver Darcy's newsletter caught Chris Licht's attention.
Chris Licht summoned him and told him, you are too emotional in covering this.
What did Oliver Darcy write?
Quote, it's hard to see how America was served by the spectacle of lies that aired on CNN
Wednesday evening.
He reported that his boss, Chris Licht, was now facing a fury of criticism, both internally and externally, and went on to write how Licht and other CNN executives that address the
criticism in the coming days and weeks will be crucial.
So he gets summoned up to the boss's office and the meeting, quote, put the fear of God
into Oliver Darcy, who was left visibly shaken. Her talk news, according to Semaphore,
a different news organization, in the aftermath of the meeting coverage, Darcy has wondered
to colleagues whether he should resign or if he will be fired. All right. So that was interesting
enough. But then let me get you to the real good stuff. OK, this is from, as I point out, Daily Beast, Lachlan Cartwright and Justin Baragona. CNN's boss, Chris Licks, extreme
sensitivity to any negative press coverage of his reign and his resulting attempt to intimidate the
network's top media reporter in the wake of the disastrous Trump town hall has greatly alarmed
staffers. So here's what happened.
According to this report, Chris Lick didn't like the Oliver Darcy reporting. Chris Lick
apparently got somebody to go speak with Fox News Digital and say that, hold on, I'll get it.
Stand by. CNN staffers were appalled by Oliver Darcy's report. And then the CNN staffers revolted,
saying, F you, Chris Licht. Oliver Darcy's not the problem. You, platformer, you are the problem
for turning CNN into a forum in which Donald Trump took over and got his message out uninterrupted, basically interrupted, but unimpeded to the American people.
So they talked about the Puck reporting. They go on to say that after that, a CNN executive tells Confider that the people inside the building were very bothered by what they did with Fox News Digital.
This attempt to smear all over Darcy. One said, quote,
I heard zero complaints about Darcy's newsletter. In fact, the opposite. People were glad someone
was calling this out. A CNN on-air personality added, it's a terrible look that he's being
muzzled or intimidated simply for saying what everyone is thinking. He's not in PR. He's a
journalist. Okay. They went on to say he's not going to resign,
but he did contemplate it, this media reporter. And it says as follows, CNN insiders say Licht
has been spending an inordinately large amount of time around The Atlantic reporter, Tim Alberta,
who was profiling the executive after his first year in the office. Alberta was in the audience
for the Trump town hall, which was described to confide
her as quote, our Chernobyl CNN staffer as network spin doctors work overtime, hoping to generate a
glowing profile of the boss. All of this happens as the network falls to fourth place in cable news primetime ratings on Friday night,
just two days after the Trump town hall falling behind Newsmax. Then Oliver Darcy late last night
puts out his own reliable sources newsletter. That's the thing Stelter used to do and points
out that CNN averaged 335,000 in the overall on Friday night.
My God, I would have been embarrassed to get that in the demo
most nights on the Kelly file,
which is the smaller, the younger audience.
The overall, it should be above a million.
It was 335,000.
They point out, Oliver Darcy says,
smaller audience from eight to 11 than Newsmax.
And he says, quote,
it's unclear if the viewership decline was connected to the town hall.
Chernobyl guys, exactly the same.
It's the same.
I'm just glad that we've graduated from words are violence to words are catastrophic nuclear radioactive poison, which I think is inaccurate, unless they're said by someone on a subway who's acting erratically and saying he wants to die and then that should be treated
differently. This shows what Chris Licht is in. Licht is in a pickle, Megan, because
he's trying to change a news organization that has already changed beyond
recognition.
I mean, just think in terms of Anderson Cooper, Anderson Cooper, I mean, he was on my short
list of people as were you, Megan, and I'm not saying this to, to, uh, butter you up.
I'd said this in other fora and even got criticized for it on the Bill Maher program.
Um, he was a really good presidential debate moderator, at least on one or two occasions,
like a good newsman on his best days.
And then if you just happen to stumble into Anderson Cooper while channel surfing any time over the last six years, you're like, what the hell is this?
Like soggy emotionalism.
And that thing, I'm glad that he did express the sentiment like, hey, we're supposed to not stay in our silos.
But he was breaking up.
He was crying, talking about it.
And it felt like a hostage note.
Like this is the conditions under which he has to still work.
CNN, I used to, when I first started doing cable news as a guest back around 2007 and
8, I first noticed this at Fox and would try to sort of struggle against it.
There was a sense of the first person plural, of the we, the assumed kind of political sense of things, not in every place and certainly not on Red Eye,
where I went the most, but in many places. And like, it was just sort of strange for me
with my news background. I began noticing that at MSNBC pretty shortly thereafter,
and it was a stronger sense of we than the we that I had experienced over at Fox.
But CNN was always considered to be, all right, that I had experienced over at Fox. And but CNN was always considered
to be all right. That's more of a news thing. CNN has gotten into such the we business and the we
is we're defending democracy by making sure that we don't platform not just Trump, but by any,
you know, January 6th denier as Jake Tapper is he won't they won't put on actual elected
representatives who are in the Republican Party who don't agree with what they say about January 6th.
I might not agree with those people, too, but they are elected Republicans.
They are. This is your country.
If you have any pretensions of being in the news business, you have to deal with them.
Tucker Carlson, if I'm not mistaken, had has more had more of an audience among Democrats than Anderson Cooper or anyone else has among humans. And Tucker Carlson,
I might add, who's a different character than almost anybody else on television. When he would
get to the, you know, these are my politics. It was always him. It wasn't like there wasn't a we.
He knew that he had an audience of people who are more politically cross-dressing than people in
that are watching CNN right now. so if chris licht is
coming in there and saying okay we're gonna fire brian stelter we're gonna get some of the
emotionalism off we're gonna start doing it down the middle he's gonna find that his entire uh
organization has are still pretending like it's the summer of 2020 when you can do a staff-wide
revolt and issue your petitions we don't live in that world anymore but it's really really hard to
change an existing legacy news media operation whose culture has changed so profoundly.
You're so right. It'd be one thing, guys, if DeSantis got the nomination or Tim Scott or
Nikki Haley, CNN might have a chance of playing it down the middle under the new edict. But there is
zero chance of them landing that plane with Donald Trump as the nominee, which is what the smart bet is, as at least as of today.
They can't do it.
The town hall and the fallout after the town hall prove it.
No, the fallout was internal and the fallout was not amongst the American people.
I mean, normal people aren't talking about this stuff.
I mean, as Matt says, this is a kind of dying empire.
It reminds me, I went to a very waspy country club that Irish people like me are not typically allowed into in Massachusetts.
And I looked around and I said, man, these people are living in a different era.
The era of the wasp is over.
That's what I look at when I see cable news.
They don't notice it.
And they're all high on their own supply.
They're like, I'm Anderson Cooper.
You get 300,000 people watching your show.
I'm sorry.
Why are people not paying attention to
what the fifth column says? Because we get more listeners than you get viewers. I'm sorry to say
no one's paying attention to us in the way that they're paying attention to them, because this
is a completely dying world, a dying business. And you have somebody like Tucker Carlson,
who's going to run out in a rail and he says, look, I'm going to do it on Twitter.
I don't need cable news anymore. I'm going to bring my audience with me. My audience is portable and mobile.
And, you know, you have guys like Oliver Darcy saying, like, they think this is a public
works job.
They think they work for the MTA or something.
Why can't I criticize my employer?
Like, how dare you attack me for attacking my employer?
I, sorry, grew up in an era where if you don't attack your employer, you don't piss inside
the tent.
That's considered insane to do and to say, well, no, I'm just reporting. No, no, you're giving an
opinion about how it was terrible that the decision that your new CEO made and you're
expecting and you're coming out. It depends on what his role is. Like what is I don't know what
Oliver Darcy's role is, you know, that if he's supposed to be like the ombudsman, you know,
like the Washington Post used to have where there's a person sort of sitting outside the company but really is employed by the company and is supposed to be free to say, oh, the company screwed up.
This is BS journalism.
That's one thing.
That's certainly not what Brian Stelter was doing when he was there.
He was Jeff Zucker's mouthpiece.
He said whatever Jeff Zucker wanted him to say.
Now Jeff Zucker is fired and so is Stelter.
So I don't know what Oliver Darcy
thinks he's doing over there.
I do believe, however, the real problem is here,
he was giving voice to the actual attitude
inside of CNN, whether Chris Licht likes it or not.
And to me, that's the news story,
that they're so fragile inside of CNN.
They're in such a meltdown over the platforming
of the guy who is dominating the GOP race by what was the latest,
like 30, 40 points? It's not like he's up by two over DeSantis. Who else would they be platforming
if they want to take a look at the GOP race right now? Go ahead, Moneta.
Just one quick point. People used to complain that we would, people like Matt and Camille and I,
would focus on the madness that had enveloped campus politics.
But I would always point out this is the bleeding edge.
This stuff is going to overtake the sort of general population soon.
And that's what you see at CNN.
I mean, we used to have these conversations about words being violence and no platforming.
And we have to get rid of Alex Jones or something from YouTube rather than debate him or expose him as a loon.
And now this is actually within mainstream news organizations.
And their remit is to tell you what the person who is up 30 points in the Republican primary is saying and is likely to be the nominee.
And the fact that these weird things from the campus that people used to say, look,
that's just extremist nonsense. And we always say that this is edging closer and closer to
the mainstream, but I never thought it would hit journalism because we were kind of siloed in that
way that we're talking about what is real in society, what people are talking about,
and we can't sanitize it because it might make you uncomfortable. It's incredible that that's
actually coming from inside the machine at CNN. It just means that they're
no longer a news organization. Here's the other thing on the fact checking. I'll give you the
floor in one second. I just want to make one quick point on it. You don't have to fact check every
single thing he says. Trump does lie a lot. A lot of politicians do. Trump might be in a special
class, but he does lie a lot. He says a lot of things that are not true. You don't have to fact check every single one. You know, pick your top five is basically what I would have told Caitlin Collins and zero in on those that the audience knows this one actually really matters. Pay attention right here. the guy through it's annoying you look rude people start to you know tune out it's like oh she hates
him so whatever i get you don't and like these people inside cnn seem to think that you know
she should have been like you ever watch pop-up video on vh1 you know it's like it should have
been like a little pop-up it's a lie too and that's a lie here's why don't give them ideas
megan the bubble would take over the screen like they they're smart. People are smart enough at home to figure out, okay, I've heard that enough times to
know it's got a red flag on it.
Anyway, keep going.
Go ahead, Camille.
Well, no, they certainly don't believe that people are smart enough at home.
Their entire theory of the world appears to be that they can, by suppressing the bad people,
make the world a better place and that they can affect electoral outcomes and that they
will never, ever have their credibility impaired as a result of this obvious meddling with the
game and the mechanics of the game. But it clearly has impacted their credibility. And there are so
many good reasons why it has. And I know we're going to talk about some of those other things later, but that is the fundamental issue here. You imagine that you can simply not talk to these
people, that you can simply only give voice to people who already agree, and that you can parrot
points of view back at them that they explicitly agree with. And you never, ever talk about the
folks on the other side. I mean, I think that that is, except to demonize them. And I think that that is an obvious mistake if you're actually interested in persuasion. The fact that you're not, as you just said, Megan, going after every single point and trying to go down the line and interrupt at every moment, you're conserving your fire, you're hopefully making a more persuasive point. You're getting them at their most vulnerable spot. And you should be doing it, quite frankly, across the board to every political
and policymaker that shows up on your platform and talk to them in precisely the same way.
That is what viewers, I think viewers would reward that. That is what they want.
I think Chris Licht is really flailing right now. He's really struggling. He doesn't.
He is faced with this really tough problem of the fact that Jeff Zucker turned CNN into a left wing
hack job. I mean, it really it had credibility. I said before, it was kind of boring,
but it was pretty much down the middle. It had some left wing bias, but not terrible.
They did a good job of trying to hide it. And then he turned it into just a left wing rag, basically, on television. And people knew and they drew their drove their Republicans who are watching it people who think like me, they hate my ideals, they look down on me?
Like, I'm not going to watch that.
Plus, I don't think they're fact-based.
That's their other problem.
They used to be, and they're no longer.
So this brings me to the programming decisions that Chris Licht is now making.
Now, we heard that he's bringing on Gayle King and Charles Barkley to host a show.
God only knows.
That'll solve it.
Problem solved, Megan.
Okay, that we'll see that.
And before that, he brought on Chris Wallace.
Now, Jeff Zucker brought him over, I think, right?
It was Jeff Zucker, not Chris Wallace.
I think so.
I can't track the firings.
But he's there.
And they put him on Sundays.
Chris Wallace had the fourth rated Sunday show
on Fox News Sunday.
It was not doing well,
but it was a fair show. He was by far the fairest of the Sunday anchors. And he was,
I think, the toughest questioner. It's just Wallace is a little prickly and has never been
a huge hit with the audience. That's just the honest truth with all due respect to him as a
journalist. Then he had the presidential debate, which was very biased, in my opinion,
against Trump. And that was the end of it for him and the Fox audience.
And so now he goes to CNN and he's going to sort of do non-politics. He's going to do more of like,
I don't know, it's like Larry King in the softer interviews, not with politicos. And they put it
on Sunday morning. It totally bombs. They got
nobody. Then they just moved it to Friday nights. Oh my God. I mean, Moynihan's dating life in high
school had more action than what's happening. You mean he's doing incredibly well?
I didn't know his ratings were that high, Megan. Thank you for putting that up. I mean, it's dreadful.
He actually lost to Newsmax.
Again, Newsmax isn't even in, like, they've got millions more homes with CNN than they do that have Newsmax.
And yet, Greg Kelly beat him at 10 p.m. this Friday night.
I would submit to the jury it is because what happened on Friday night were exchanges like the following shown here.
Oh, no.
Watch.
We've got to do that together.
The tracks of my tears.
Oh, no, please.
Hey, man, what are you doing this weekend?
I'm doing some concerts this weekend.
No, you actually want to get people there and not drive them away.
Yeah, this is good advice for Chris Lipps too.
Smokey Robinson.
He's got a lot of big names.
I mean, we...
Sure.
Oh, God.
Who's the guy who played Wolverine?
Hugh...
Hugh Jackman.
Hugh Jackman.
Thank you, Hugh Jackman.
I just saw him on Broadway.
Anyway, he's got a lot of big names, but nobody's watching. Absolutely no one's watching. They don't get it. Okay, now this leads me to Fox, okay? Because the thing that CNN needs and doesn't have is they need a programming genius. They need somebody who actually understands who's our core audience and what will make them tune in. Fox News is going through
something similar. They really are. And that leads me to Beth Ailes and an extraordinary tweet,
extraordinary. The widow of Roger Ailes last night tweeted out the following,
happy heavenly birthday, Roger Ailes. It took you 20 years to build Fox News into the powerhouse that it was,
and only six years for the Murdochs to wreak havoc.
Rupert thought he could do your job.
What a joke.
He has the checkbook, but could never come close to your genius.
Rest in peace.
Whoa.
Whoa.
I haven't heard her say anything.
Anything.
At all. Whoa, I haven't heard her say anything at all since Roger was ousted from Fox. And then she weighs in with that. And I got to hand it again to confider or a daily beast and Lachlan Cartwright, who did what journalists are supposed to do. saw the tweet picked up his phone and he cold called her and got her talking i mean literally
i haven't seen this person do an interview in the entire time since roger was ousted never mind
died and this is what he reports confider saw that tweet immediately cold called elizabeth
and then spent who then spent half an hour absolutely railing against the murdoch family
and their handling of a post ales fox news quote. Quote, Roger never had his hand off the
wheel when it came to Fox. I agree. Megyn Kelly speaking there, contrasting it with the Murdochs,
who she said, quote, weren't born here and don't have the same pedigree. Roger was born,
he was raised in Ohio, in Youngstown, Ohio, where he dug ditches for a living. He understood
America, middle America. He understood the coastal elites. He knew exactly who the audience was and what the need was for Fox News to be born in the first place. And he did have his hands on the steering wheel 10 and 2 the entire time, mostly because this thing pulls to the left, as he used to say about news, but also because it can pull too far to the right. And Roger knew when to course correct when that happened too. She goes on to say about Lachlan Murdoch, I was told he's a spear fisherman.
I don't know if he spends time in the office. This is one of the criticisms of him that when
he came in and took over, what he really wanted to do was run the movie studios, not be stuck at
1211 6th Avenue running the cable operation, which isn't as sexy as the Hollywood stars.
Recalled that Roger used to refer to brothers James and Lachlan as Tweedledum and Tweedledummer
respectively. I can also confirm that having heard it many times from Roger Ailes.
But she saved most of her ire for the patriarch, Rupert, whom she described as a jealous man
who fired her husband because Roger eclipsed Rupert on the world stage. Now I've got some
thoughts on that, too. She likened Tucker Carlson's firing to her late husband's ousted, that no one other than Roger
has been able to do it, and that the Murdochs don't have the vision or the desire or the
capability to make it happen. What do you think? It's been amazing, however. I think that's a
managerial, it's accurate or plausible from a managerial standpoint.
We've heard that about the Murdoch kids forever.
There's always been a succession battle.
And Roger Ailes, for those, and I never met him.
I worked for him as Camille, you know, in theory.
But he was the genius.
The people from the outside who were always like, oh, God, Murdoch over at Fox News.
As long as Roger Ailes was alive, that wasn't the issue that you really had.
The issue was Roger Ailes.
He ran the place.
It was his vision.
It was his idea.
Fox has kept most of its audience until very recently.
That's the area in which her complaints or her analysis, I think, needs to be complicated.
And also, she said that Eric Bolling was part of the people who got fired because he was too big.
I don't think that was the problem with Eric Bolling. No, with respect to Eric, no.
Was it too big? Is that what Eric complained about? No, don't. I told you not to. Come on,
let me do it. Go ahead. Deep cut. Oh, I love Eric. But managerially, I think that there's
absolutely something to that. You can tell from outside the building, and I have no intel on the inside, but that it lacks the same kind of cohesive managerial structure.
You knew Roger Ailes was in charge.
You worked at his behest, and his vision was out there every single day in one way or the other.
I'm not sure what that vision is now. And I think that people do become
kind of too big or too not controllable by the Murdochs because they don't have their hands on
the system the same way. Suzanne Scott is not doesn't command the same kind of respect within
the building. I don't think I would guess that Roger Ailes did. I'm being nice. So I think it's fascinating that she's that she's
talking and that she's dishing. And it points to, I think, the most plausible theory still to me
so far of Tucker Carlson's firing was that he built a center of independence from the managerial
team within. And and they couldn't have that. That plus all the lawsuits were probably starting
to get a little bit difficult around the edges.
But I think it seems like that attitude from the Murdoch's is one that they're going to continue to revisit as soon as someone becomes sort of problematic.
They've come bigger than Fox in their point of view. Then they can get rid of them.
And at some point and that point might be now with Carlson's audience in that hour. They will start to finally lose audience because up to now, they've still managed to kind of win their basic business.
Look, there's something you can't there's no answer to this, obviously, of what would Roger Ailes have done.
But, you know, Roger Ailes, for all of his many faults, was a political genius at television, a political television genius, a very specific
thing. If you go back and read Joe McGinnis's book from 1968, The Selling of the President,
I mean, who is the key player in that who is trying to kind of make Nixon a kind of TV guy
in watching Roger Ailes as a young man in that book? You're like, man, this guy is really
something. He's kind of a magician. And he did that at Fox for a very long time.
He saw a market opportunity.
There was a big glaring hole in the market and he filled it.
And the one thing, the what if, though, is, you know, Roger Ailes dies in 2017.
How do you handle the Trump phenomenon as a, you know, a news organization that leans right?
Because this is the complete blowing up of the traditional Republican Party coalition. And, you know, Roger, as you as you said, Megan,
was somebody who kept a check on on, you know, going too far to the right and fires Glenn Beck
when he's the highest rated guy on the network because he's scribbling on chalkboards and
looking a bit crazy, to be honest. And I think Roger acknowledged that and said, you know,
no more of this. So I really wonder, I just to say that the current I don't, you're not a huge fan of Suzanne Scott. And I think last time on the show, you told me, which I didn't know that she used nice to everyone on this, is that it is a very,
very tough time to take over when you look at Republican politics and how much they've changed
in the kind of populist, let's say, revivification of the Republican Party as this populist thing.
How to do that on television is pretty tough. It was a lot easier when it was kind of Bush
Republicans versus sort of ordinary Democrats.
Now you have these AOC populist and you have the Trump populist and it confuses things.
So, I mean, I don't.
He would have known how to do it.
She is right about instinct.
I suspect she's right that Rupert doesn't have the instinct for what to do right now
with this audience.
And Roger absolutely would have.
He would have understood.
I worked with him.
Let me tell you something right now.
Suzanne Scott and Bill Shine used to run over to me because I met with Roger all the time.
And they'd say, what did he say?
What did he say about this?
What did he say about that?
He didn't share anything with them.
She has absolutely no tutelage to call back on because he didn't mentor her.
He didn't mentor any of his executives.
He wanted to keep them unsteady.
He had zero desire to share his leadership vision with any of them.
I guarantee you, I know more about it than she does. I guarantee you he would have understood that he would have to fold in Trump's views to the core programming in a way that was defensive ofism, he understood the channels to one dimensional in its coverage of Republican politics. And we're going to lose our Ohio
ditch digging flank in favor of the national reviewers. If we don't do something about what's
on our air right now. And that's when he started to bring in more contributors who were pro Trump
and saying what Trump was saying. And, you know, a lot of people internally were like, what are you
doing? Why are we doing that? He's like, out of respect for the audience. He understood it before
anybody else did. And he would have navigated the Trump presidency perfectly. I really have no,
no doubt of that. Roger's problems were never that he didn't get the audience, that he didn't
have a genius ability to program both when it came to content and selecting talent. What ultimately
brought him down was a combination of what she said and a real problem with women. And I've thought about this a lot and I've talked to Janice Dean
about it a lot. And she was one of the women who came forward and worked with me to make sure women
understood that we were talking and that it was safe to talk. I think we both believe that while
there were some two dozen women who came forward with complaints about ales,
some that were deeply disturbing. All right. Let me just reassure the audience of that. This wasn't
like a passing remark, like he may have made to Gretchen Carlson. Some people were really harassed
in a way that was dark. Okay. And abused. Um, so that was a real problem. But I do think she's right
that it was used.
It was used to get rid of him
by a family.
I mean, in particular,
the sons who wanted him gone.
I don't think Rupert
wanted Roger gone, though.
I don't think it was Rupert.
I think it was the sons
who were ready for him to move on.
And Gretchen filed that lawsuit.
And then the rest of us came forward
and they saw an opportunity. And that was the end of Roger. And, you know, there's some sort of, I don't know,
it makes me feel sad that I and maybe others were used in that way. But I also can't say I regret
it because there's no way he could have stayed in that office. There's no way a man doing that
many bad things to that many young women who just are trying to make it in journalism should have remained in power.
No way.
That part is omitted from her tweet. of how things might have played out differently were someone like him in the media ecosystem and
able to help shepherd a network through the Trump era and the transformation of the Republican Party
in particular. It is interesting to imagine what the dust-ups might have looked like with a network
boss and Donald Trump once he was unhappy with what he was seeing on the network
and sort of started to throw darts. I think that, if nothing else, can kind of push your buttons
in a very particular way and create a climate of concern inside of the network. You could see
people making all sorts of kind of panic decisions about the sort of programming and people who ought to be there. And perhaps having that kind of genuine fear about whether or not the audience might
actually defect from them, which is the sort of stuff that you actually saw talked about openly
in those text messages that came out during the recent legal proceedings.
Dominion. Yeah, that's exactly it. I think that was another opportunity for somebody to steer
the boat you know and steadily and they didn't have it you know she points out the dominion
lawsuit that was one thing that was mishandled the aftermath after the election and the you know
false election claims and i'll tell you i've said this before but one thing roger would have done
was protect the news division which hasn't happened here they have not been protected
and that was the one and main and most important source of Fox's credibility. And they've sacrificed it. There's no one's protecting them.
They fired Chris Dyer, Walt and Bill Salmon, two of the best respected journalists behind the scenes
in Fox News as a pander. But then they got rid of their most beloved host who was out there giving
voice to a whole line of contrary thinking, contrarian thinking, that wasn't espoused anyplace. They don't know what they're doing. They don't understand
the mission as Roger believed it to be when he launched the channel back in 1996.
It's also worth pointing out that when you fire Chris Stierwald, who's a brilliant guy and an
interesting guy, and Bill Salmon, who's been somebody around the kind of conservative
firmament for a long time at the Washington Times, the Examiner, et cetera. It's a sop to who?
Nobody who's angry about this if notices that. Yes, anybody who's even marginally involved in
politics, they don't know who these people are. So why bother doing it? I mean, what Roger Ailes
had the other thing was the luck in some sense of not having a lot of places where people could defect to. I'm not sure if Chris Ruddy had started Newsmax, which is sort of, you know, more towards the Fox
end, but more with the populist tinge. That is something that the new bosses have to contend
with. And you see that in Tucker Carlson's text when they see says, you know, we're going to lose
our audience here. You didn't have to have that conversation before. Where are they going to go?
CNN, MSNBC. And I think, Megan it's pure speculation that it's right. That I think
that Roger Ailes seeing what he had done. I mean, I didn't know the guy as you did that. And by the
way, it's also a pretty interesting and admirable from a journalistic perspective that you separate
the art from the artist in a way. And, you know, because all the stuff that you went through with
him and actually talking about him as a kind of media guy and as kind of a media genius in the
way that he was and throughout his whole career.
But, you know, it is it seems to me that that balance is something that is a difficult thing to do.
That, as you put it, put it in sort of National Review wing, the kind of more traditional free market conservative wing in the populist one.
That balance is possible. It's not one or the other.
And Tucker was a huge part of that balance. If you like him
or you don't like him, that was where those people were being satiated at Fox and you get rid of him.
I just don't know what the hell you're doing. It just doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense to me.
Yes, you're so right. I would never take away and never did take away Roger's genius. And,
you know, one thing I'll say about that movie Bombshell, I've been critical of Charlize Theron
this week for other reasons, but one thing I'll say about that movie Bombshell, I've been critical of Charlize Theron this week for other reasons. But one thing I'll say about that movie was I thought they did a good job in capturing that.
I really cared for Roger.
I cared for him deeply.
He was a mentor to me.
He he really helped me throughout the course of my journalism career.
And I learned a ton from him.
And, you know, I would not I would not have the career I have right now
had it not been for his help. And, and I don't even just mean the opportunities he gave me. I
mean, also just the advice he gave me and he showed me how to cover news in a fair and balanced way.
But, you know, but I also wasn't going to lie on his behalf. I wasn't going to lie. I had a feeling
I might not be the only one. And when, when the
issue was put to me directly, is he capable of this? There was just no way I was going to lie,
not given my own history, not given my time as a lawyer, not given my affinity for the women I
worked with and not knowing what I knew, which was that at least Janice Dean had a story like mine
too. So it was just an impossible situation. And I really feel like the reverberations from all that we went through at Fox back in 16 when this happened, we're still watching play out. It's still there percolating. And Beth Ailes' tweet raised it again in a way that I thought was, you know, rang true on, let's say, 90% of what she wrote.
All right, stand by you you guys. Quick break,
and then more with the fifth column. They stay with us for the show.
Guys, as if on cue as we are deconstructing the media situation right now, Barack Obama
weighs in on what the real problem is right now, the thing that scares him the most
in an interview that aired today on CBS This Morning.
Listen to this.
Post-presidency, what about this country keeps you up at night?
The thing that I'm most worried about is the degree to which we now have a divided conversation, in part because we have a divided media but when i was coming up
you had three tv stations yeah and people were getting a similar sense of what is true and what
isn't what was real and what was not today what i'm most concerned about is the fact that because
of the splintering of the media we almost occupy different realities
remember the good old days when he controlled everyone
thankfully he never could yeah uh no all those good every single bit of alternative journalism
we've forgotten about this now because all journalism for a while um under roger ailes
he created an alternative form of journalism. Before that, there was the alternative form of journalism of AM talk radio, which was overwhelmingly conservative.
Some of the early internet under Andrew Breitbart and other people, Drudge Report,
was right of center. So people in their minds and the media think of alternative journalism now
as being kind of right of center. But in fact, the early alternative journalism,
a lot of it was left wing. It was the village voice. It was all the underground papers of the sixties. It was
Rolling Stone magazine. It was left of the center. It was a, it was a critique of how much the best
and the brightest generation had screwed up. They had taken this perceived legitimacy and greatness
and they had absolutely screwed the pooch all over the country again and
again. And so to harken back to that time is to harken back to being self bamboozled and,
and it's disreputable. We should like as much chaos and, and, and innovation and growth in media.
And, you know, if you don't like the way that people lie and have alternative realities,
when you were in political power, stop lying. I wish you would have done that. He didn't.
What about it, guys? We'd still be in masks and having no negative reporting about side
effects from the vaccine. And we would still be believing that Trump colluded with Russia.
We'll get to the Durham report in our next block. If it weren't for alternative sources of media,
if it were the way it was in the good old days that he's referring to.
Everything that he said was true up until that.
I mean, we do have a divided conversation.
We do have a divided media.
I don't think that's a bad thing.
He does seem to think that's a bad thing.
And I'm not somebody that harkens back and is nostalgic for the sort of corporate control of three major networks plus PBS.
I don't think that was a good thing.
And I think the freedom that the internet has given people scares the establishment. That's
why they want to de-platform people and push people off of YouTube and put them on, that's
why Rumble comes up. If this was not true, if it was not true that there was one direction that
the media drifted in the past, when these opportunities came up, they would not have
been filled, as Matt pointed out, by the Drudge Report, by Fox News, by blogs, by podcasts. And that's why it happened, because
we knew which direction it was going and people wanted a different perspective and they got it.
And that's great. Yep, exactly right. All right, we're going to pick it up there and when we come
back, we will deconstruct, I love that leftist term, the Durham Report and tell you what's
happening with that. It's actually just so embarrassing, the Durham report and tell you what's happening with that.
It's actually just so embarrassing for the FBI, for Andrew McCabe and for Jim Comey in particular.
And now we know the source of the Trump P tape rumors. We know who got it started. We know who
leaked it and who seemed to work hard to get it into this deal dossier and wait until you hear
who he's connected with. Fifth column guys stay with with us. And don't forget folks, you can find the Megan Kelly
show live on Sirius XM triumph channel one 11 every weekday at noon East the full video and
show and clips by subscribing to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Megan Kelly. And if
you want to hear from me on Fridays, I send you a fun email. Just go to megankelly.com
and you can sign up for it there. It's getting lots of great traffic and I read all of your emails. Okay, guys, so the Durham report is out.
This is actually, I think it's interesting. You know, it's not like earth shattering,
but it's disgusting. I mean, what he concluded is disgusting. And he's suggesting he probably
would have brought criminal charges, more criminal charges, if he could try anybody outside of Washington, D.C., where, you know, it was 95%
for Hillary, 95% for Biden. There's zero chance of convictions there. He tried it a couple of times.
So I don't think the fact that there are no criminal cases coming out of this
tells us much. And I'm actually fine with it, too, because we don't really want to become a
banana republic where as soon as the one guy's out of the office, we start arresting everybody who worked for him.
So, OK, that's fine. But that is not to dismiss the substance of what this guy found.
Now, his investigation was launched in 2019 under Attorney General Bill Barr, and he was looking into the origins of the FBI's investigation of Trump, the so-called crossfire hurricane FBI
investigation to see whether Trump colluded with Russia in the context of getting elected.
We now know he didn't. We now know that the FBI knew he didn't, but tried to cobble together an
investigation anyway, because they so hated Trump. And Durham finally comes up. Durham,
keep in mind, Durham was praised by both sides as a no-nonsense straight shooter when he got
selected, right? The left had no problem with John Durham being selected to do this. Now they're like,
oh, John Durham sucks. But this is what he reported in a 300-page report released yesterday.
The DOJ and the FBI failed to uphold their mission of strict
fidelity to the law in looking into these allegations and figuring out whether there
was a case to be had against Trump and in the conduct of that investigation. The FBI used raw,
unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence. I'm quoting, senior FBI personnel displayed a
serious lack of analytical rigor
towards information that they received, especially information received from politically affiliated
persons and entities. And he means Hillary. That's what he means, the Hillary Clinton campaign.
The department did not adequately examine or question these materials and the motivations
of those providing them. They did not and could not corroborate any of the
substantive allegations contained in the controversial Steele dossier. That's the thing
that alleged Trump went over to Russia, hired some Russian prostitutes and had them pee on a bed in
the presidential suite that Barack Obama had allegedly stayed in years earlier, among other
things in that Steele dossier, which has been totally discredited. He writes, we conclude that the Justice Department and FBI failed to uphold
their important mission of strict fidelity to the law in connection with certain events and
activities described in this report. However, it does not recommend any wholesale changes in the
guidelines and policies at DOJ or FBI that they now have in
place to ensure proper conduct and accountability and how counterintelligence activities are carried
out. Andrew McCabe was the guy in charge of counterintelligence. He's now absolutely a
darling of the left, and there will be no accountability for him publicly for what he did.
Sicking the FBI on the Trump campaign, sicking the FBI on people like Carter Page,
Papadopoulos, who this makes clear,
they knew there was nothing there.
This was based on the flimsiest evidence ever
to go after those guys and get warrants from the FISA court.
And they absolutely understood they didn't have it,
but they wanted to get him anyway.
There are quotes of Peter Strzok at the time inside
saying essentially exactly that.
And just to tell you what I teased before the break, they also report that the person behind the infamous P
rumor, that Trump did that in the Russian hotel, was none other, according to Durham, he believes
it was PR exec and Clinton ally Charles Dolan. That Charles Dolan is the one who provided this information to this
Igor Denchenko, who got it into the Steele dossier. And Charles Dolan, working in close with Hillary,
went over to Russia. He went into the hotel. He got a tour of the presidential suite.
And that's where it was born, that rumor, which was totally unsubstantiated. Durham actually went
over there and spoke with all the witnesses in the hotel.
He actually did his homework.
It wasn't true.
It never happened.
And indeed, Trump, the one time he stayed in that hotel, did not stay in the presidential suite.
He stayed in an entirely different room.
The whole thing was made up.
And then it was saddled on Trump in such a way that still has his supporters believing,
not without foundation, that his first term was stolen from him, having to deal with this nonsense, which was a fabrication
by Hillary and a compliant, complicit FBI.
What do you guys make of it?
There's a phrase that people use in the media, oftentimes the ones who are crying at CNN
platforming Donald Trump, where that they perceive Trump and certain people in the conservative
movement of they accuse them of working the refs, of taking the existing standards that
are supposed to be kind of objective or supposed to be fair and knowing that people
have to kind of report to or respond to factual stimulus or controversies in such a way that you
can launder things that are not true. I'm struck by that because I've been hearing that for most
of my career. And this is that inaction in the absolute opposite way of the people who normally
talk about that. This is people working the levers of the FBI and of the national security apparatus who
know those levers, who know how it's done.
And they successfully planted a piece of hot, steaming garbage in the middle of a campaign.
Recall that Hillary Clinton was in that presidential debate, like calling Donald Trump a puppet
of Vladimir Putin.
Of course, he's like, no, you're the puppet.
And so it became that was what people pointed at.
But Hillary Clinton called him a puppet of Vladimir Putin in a presidential debate.
This is how she approached it.
And she's someone who would, you know, you would think that she would know,
having been in government for so long and in those positions.
It's appalling, as is the media's
response to this. Even today, Oliver Darcy, who we talked about last hour in his newsletter this
morning, which the little tagline at the top is I'm still here. So he's being brave inside of CNN.
He dismisses this as, you know, a conservative said that this was going to bring arrests. It
didn't. And so, you know, yet another report that just doesn't deliver on promises. Well, that's one way a media
reporter might look at this. I might suggest there's another way a media reporter might look
at this is, I don't know, look at one of the many, many, many super clips out there on Twitter.
Tom Elliott is someone who does these every day, it seems like. People people on MSNBC, of people like Adam Schiff, people like Rachel
Maddow, and all of these deep state liars.
And I'm now just saying former heads of the CIA and the former directors of national intelligence,
people who have been given contributor contracts on cable news networks, just lying about this
and saying and intimating not just that the Steele dossier is true, but the pee tape stuff, which is absurd on its face.
If you knew anything about Donald Trump and I tried not to, but I knew that he was a germaphobe
germaphobe don't like getting peed on, from what I understand.
You would think that this would be an occasion for people who ever said anything that wasn't
true about this, who ever said, well, look, you know, these people probably know what
they're talking about. And so you would think that would be the time that they would look
at that and say, gosh, I was a little bit wrong there. No, they're saying that Republicans are
pouncing, that it didn't deliver on the promises. This is shameful. This is what extends people's
long growing distrust in media and the way this was done. This is a pretty bad episode in American
intelligence and law enforcement and media, and it's not getting better judging by the early
reaction to it. Shame on you, Matt Welch. Why are you protecting him? Why are you protecting him?
Why won't you tell the truth about the Venturian president? It really is extraordinary to watch
Rachel Maddow talk about this and talk about all of the Republican excitement and how they were waiting for all of the indictments.
They were waiting for the revelations of the huge scandal when there is another scandal that is worth talking about here.
And I do think that while it is egregious that politics was permitted to creep into a criminal investigation. And I think that the recommendations in particular in the Durham report are seemingly quite sensible and sane, incredibly reasonable.
And the highlighting of concern around the FBI impugning its own reputation in this way
as a result of this kind of botched investigation, totally sensible. I didn't hear any of those
things get responded to. Instead, it was only
the kind of hysterical overstatement on the part of Donald Trump. And this is, in a way,
him giving them a cudgel with which to beat him. He promised that this would be the gravest crime
of the century and that heads would roll, et cetera, et cetera. It didn't turn out to be that.
And that is one reason perhaps why it's prudent to allow these investigations to take shape than to deal with the revelations when they come out. I understand I'm perhaps a
bit naive because that's not how politics is played, but it might've been better.
At least then you'd be in a better position to appropriately and on the merits impugn people
like Rachel Maddow, who were way out over their skis, promising that the other shoe was about to
drop with respect to this story. I mean, these are the people who should be the most embarrassed by
these revelations and quite frankly, outraged by the fact that people in the intelligence community
have at different times, like double down on these narratives about the president being in bed with
Vladimir Putin and being controlled by Vladimir Putin. It's the
sort of thing that we would hear over and over and over again. And it's taken a while for this
report to materialize. But having waited so long, I'm not going to be the one who's comparing the
number of indictments between this and the Mueller report, which people also waited for with bated
breath, because that isn't the measure of whether or not this is
credible and worthwhile. I mean, the fact that this never quite panned out, that they never
had any sort of cooperation of the stuff in the Steele dossier, which they used to secure warrants
for spying on American citizens, that is egregious. People should be materially outraged about this,
on the left and the right. It should be the sort of thing that we don't want to see repeated again.
But instead, there are particular kinds of people who are happy to ignore this or to downplay it because it is consistent with their politics to do so.
The press cannot be outraged because they were willing participants in it.
They allowed themselves unquestioningly to be used.
So the FBI gets the Steele dossier full of lies
based on the sourcing we just discussed
and leaks it to the press.
Then the press writes articles about the Steele dossier,
which have no skepticism in them whatsoever.
Then the FBI uses those press articles to go
into the FISA court to say, look at the press reports about what's in this deal dossier and
what's out there and gets warrants to spy on private American citizens based on that rope-a-dope
in which the press willingly participated. Meanwhile, we now know that, you know, flash forward a few years when Trump's
he's running for reelection and Biden's running for election and were days before the election
and the Hunter Biden laptop drops. And we now know that that the CIA was running around trying
to get former intelligence and counterintelligence officials to sign on to that dopey letter,
which was full of lies. That's the CIA, the FBI and the DOJ. Now you would be called a conspiracy theorist if without this evidence,
without the Durham report, without this reporting that has outed these guys, you said, oh, that's
deep state. They're in on it. You know, they're trying to bring down Donald Trump. It's true.
You know what? Can we just run the Barack Obama soundbite one more time? Let's just run it.
This is why he's so wrong.
This is why we desperately need alternative media sources as opposed to his three chosen ABC, CBS and NBC, none of whom was questioning these reports as they were being delivered. They were
reveling in them. Listen to him again. Post-presidency, what about this country keeps you up at night? The thing that I'm most worried about
is the degree to which we now have a divided conversation,
in part because we have a divided media. But when I was coming up, you had three TV stations.
Yeah. And people were getting a similar sense of what is true and what isn't, what was real and what was not. Today, what I'm most media we had prior to the birth of alternative media was not a trustworthy media, and we should not be hearkening back to those days. look at, you know, the media that we're seeing now. And Matt has pointed out that there are people who are making these sort of collections of clips. And I apologize for my image being frozen because
the FBI is onto me and the deep state is trying to get my connection. It's very, very frustrating.
But, you know, it's an amazing thing because, you know, you have somebody from the FBI like
Peter Strzok, and I saw this today. These are people who are referring to Donald Trump as an
asset, an asset. They know what this phrase means. They're people in the FBI. And when you look at
the kind of scope of this, these are the same people that are talking endlessly, breathlessly
about misinformation and disinformation. What does one call this at the end of the day?
If you're saying that the president of the United States is in the control or the pay of the Kremlin, this is lunacy. And so the response to this today has been, well,
you know, there's a lot of, a lot of nothing going on here. Well, I'll tell you what, an indictment
is not what I'm interested in. I'm interested in the kind of etymology of this case. And look,
I like, I'll even acknowledge very honestly, and you know, this Eli Lake wrote a very
good piece about this for Commentary Magazine a couple years ago, right? It was called guilty,
but framed, which is about right. There's some stuff that's really smells. I mean,
Paul Manafort stuff, I don't think is above board. And I don't think it's okay. But when you have
that sort of desire to go deep into it and say, we're gonna, you know, let's let's also point out
something that is
really, really important here. And it's the tribal affiliations overtaking consistency.
Because during the Bush years, who was talking about rubber stamp FISA courts? Who was talking
about not trusting the intelligence after Iraq, not allowing intelligence agencies to run rampant
and just trust? That was people on the left. And now when you see the most interesting part of the Durham report, and I'm a complete loser, so I spent this morning reading
it in bed. I really should have done something different. I should have got an exercise.
But I'm reading the Papadopoulos wiretaps in stuff that, as Durham points out, is kept out
of the re-up of the FISA warrant, in which he's saying over and over to this to the source,
this FBI source that, yeah, there's nothing here. I don't know what they're talking about.
And it's in no uncertain terms. It's saying like, this is kind of crazy that they think,
you know, Trump is, you know, in bed with the Kremlin and kind of they're pulling his puppet
strings. This is nuts. If that was allowed. And again, you know, the problem with the FISA courts
is that they approve 99 percent of the warrants in front of them.
Maybe that would have had some sort of effect.
But even knowing that, they didn't include it.
And that's a problem.
Because the problem is investigators shouldn't have a conclusion when they're starting their
investigation.
And that seemed to be the major takeaway from this document.
They knew.
They knew that the White House was advised, the FBI knew
that Hillary Clinton was planning on pushing this lie that Trump had colluded with the Russians
in the context of his campaign. They knew. They didn't care. And the report also reveals that
the Russians knew. The Russians knew that she was planning on saying this years before and took
advantage of it. They don't
care. They don't care what truth is. They just want to sow chaos over here in the United States.
That's been their plan for years now. So they all knew that she was she was going to push this lie.
Then she did push this lie. Then the FBI ran with this lie. Then they get the Steele dossier
through this guy, Denchenko and so on, who they were paying already as a confidential informant.
And then when everything falls apart, they know it's lies.
They pay him, according to Durham, I think it's another $300,000
so he can remain a confidential human source.
Now, why would they do that after they've discredited him,
after they know that he's been feeding them lies?
So that he can't be subpoenaed by Congress.
So that he can't go out there and out what they've
been doing, all the nonsense he's been pushing that they've been willingly accepting the spoon
feed of. It would make them look bad. I mean, I had a big debate with Dan Abrams, my pal,
both here on Sirius XM and he's on News Nation about he doesn't like it when people rip on the
FBI because he thinks there's a lot of honorable guys in there who would prosecute leftists and conservatives and so on.
That that speaks to the rank and file that the leadership of the FBI has been corrupt and there's been almost no accountability.
Why? Why is Andrew McCabe a darling of the left? What about Peter Strzok? Why?
They don't care. These same leftists who want to lecture us on everything, like you put out disinformation and so so on are employing and celebrating and giving tenure university positions to these people to this day
i'm uh i'm always struck by how people who otherwise can um cite you know by heart a line
from a movie uh about uh joseph mccarthy um uh will then in the next breath accuse someone without any good
evidence at all of being a puppet of the government it's like did you see any dissonance going on here
and this is i mean keep in mind hillary clinton did this not just with donald trump which is the
most consequential one to be sure but to tulsi gabbard. Yeah. Right. To not just Tulsi Gabbard
either. Also to Jill Stein. She said that Jill Stein running for the Green Party in 2016 was
likely a Russian asset. That's her language for this. John McCain, the late John McCain,
said something very similar about Rand Paul. These are disreputable, dishonorable ways of
going through life. When someone is frustrating
you because they're your political impediment, they're not doing the thing that you want them to
do, or you just hate them. It's fine. People hate each other. It happens. You don't call them an
asset of a foreign adversary. This should be basic. It should be kind of a consistent thing
that we have an instinctual revulsion at, not just as citizens,
but as journalists, or not just as journalists, but as citizens. And yet people went whole hog
for it. And there's only a few people I can think of in the media who, when faced with new
information as it has come out over the years, has said, oh, gosh, that's a problem. Michael
Sikoff, I think Moynihan has pointed out in previous iterations, was one of them who did that and deserves some credit for that.
That's the social searching that we should be seeing right now.
And we're not because people are just not consistent.
Add one thing to that.
You know, it is it's the seriousness of the charge is what we should focus on, because I don't like Tulsi Gabbard's ideas about Russia and about
Russian foreign policy. I do not like Rand Paul's either. And I do not like Jill Stein's and, you
know, who's at RT galas to say they are assets to say they are working for a foreign government
is to accuse somebody of what, of treason. What is the crime? What is the highest punishment for
treason? There were two people, married couple in the 1950s, who were accused of being treasonous
towards the Soviets, with the Soviets, in collusion, and they were executed, Julius
and Ethel Rosenberg.
And, you know, they were guilty, too.
But to go around saying that these are people that I think they have crappy foreign policy,
but you know what?
I'm not going to take shortcuts.
I'm not going to say, well, you know what?
I think they really are. because that's cable news stuff. I mean, if you
go back and look at Rachel Maddow's record, no one seems to be doing this because the woman is
making $30 million a year or something to that tune. And we're doing one show a week. And she
had major ratings to the entire Trump administration by spinning these yarns about a treasonous
government. Good Lord. If the government in power is in service of the evil scumbags in the Kremlin,
you would have the right to, you know, overthrow it for Christ's sake. I mean, it's unbelievable
that people say anything without consequence. Think about what Rachel Maddow probably lives in,
you know, the penthouse that she's probably got, the car she probably drives, the country estate she probably has. She bought that thanks to these lies that she told, dividing the country night after night after night with impunity. I mean, I hope she looks around and she sees her beautiful couch and she thinks lies paid for that. That's what that's what happened. And she, unlike these other journalists who point out, Isikoff's been good, hasn't had any accountability for it whatsoever.
She got raises for it.
She got praised for it.
I mean, not for nothing, but my husband, Doug, you know, he's got this other podcast where he interviews authors.
He's an author.
And it's called Dedicated with Doug Brunt.
It's really good.
And he had on Douglas Murray.
It actually released today.
Douglas Murray, who's such a great pundit.
And he was talking to Douglas Murray about people like Rachel Maddow and how they just spew lies and they don't debate anybody right like
wouldn't it be great to see somebody get on there and grill her and say like how dare you madam
have you no shame speaking of quoting mccartney right um it doesn't happen by the way we have
the clip just you know shameless plug for doug podcast. It's kind of cute. Here, watch this.
Is there anyone out there that you would like to debate that you think could maybe do it in a constructive way?
Unfortunately, not at the moment. There are ones who I'd like to debate who wouldn't be able to do it. debate nicole hannah jones of the 1619 project or robin d'angelo race huxter author of white
fragility and other unreadable terms i'd love to debate it ramax kendi but all three people i've
just mentioned are a new form of public figure in america which is the public figure who throws out
incendiary ideas and will not defend them in public. In fact, says I will not debate these ideas because all opponents are de facto racist.
What about like, I don't know, I mean, you and Rachel Maddow probably have a different
worldview.
She's smart.
Well, it doesn't necessarily mean you're smart.
I've met plenty of dim people from these places.
But I think she's an act.
I don't think she's a real ideas person.
It's just an act.
She has a shtick where she sits in front of the monitor
and reads out and cries sometimes when it's good for ratings.
And I don't think it's a real ideas person by any means.
Sounds so much better with a British accent.
Yeah.
It's like ASMR, isn't it?
I'm like so soothing when Douglas is angry.
My daughter does that all the time.
Yeah, he's like opening packages.
But no, I mean, he's right about all of these things.
And, you know, if people, it's funny when you say, like, we cannot have people like, you know, Alex Jones and whatever,
because people are silly and stupid and we don't trust them and they'll
believe these things.
So let's just have somebody uninterrupted on cable for five,
six years talking about Trump being a Russian asset on a cable channel.
It's getting very good ratings for cable and unopposed and have them sort of,
it's the idea that people are going to soak this stuff up and they do.
And he's absolutely right about the people he mentioned before who explicitly say,
we have invited Nicole Hannah-Jones many times onto the podcast.
It was a long time ago before she said she won't talk to anyone.
If you can find a critical debate, she'll sneer at people on Twitter,
but you will not find on YouTube her being challenged by an actual
historian. She's not a historian, but she has made very large claims for herself and for the
history of the United States that revisionism is a perfectly fine thing. We can revise history.
It's very important to do so. But it's also very important to be able to publicly defend those
ideas. And as Douglas says to your husband, a very smart way of saying it
is that this is something
that used to be standard,
but those were amongst historians.
This is, we have media people
now redrawing the past of America
and saying, no, no, no, no, no.
It's not good for me
to go out there and defend these things.
It's just good to get the echo chamber
and people want to get that validation.
They don't want challenge. I have a quick question I have to ask you guys can i ask you a quick question um forgive me for this question oh god does this officially put an end
to any possibility of hillary clinton becoming the nominee i'm'm just saying, nobody wants Biden. Nobody wants Kamala. I've heard the name
mentioned over and over.
It's dead. The horse is dead.
It's dead.
I want to agree,
but I don't make predictions
like that anymore. Ever since I was
very, very wrong about Donald Trump securing
the nomination for the Republican Party.
You've been humbled.
I was wrong about the Russia stuff. I was,
I was like, oh, well, the FBI has got to have something. I said that many times in the podcast
and I walked that back. That's the problem. I think most Americans were very trusting of an
institution like the DOJ, like, like the FBI, you know, and even I had real faith in Jim Comey. I
thought he was a man of honor. I see him so differently now. Thank God for
alternative sources of media, for those journalists who did question, who didn't accept. I was on the
sidelines for a lot of this reporting because it was in between my stints and television. But
I thank God for people who push back, people like Glenn Greenwald, people like Tucker,
you know, who just didn't accept these narratives, who kept pressing and not and didn't allow Rachel
Maddow to have the floor alone. There was another
narrative out there and it made people hate them. Just for fun, just for kicks, here's just a
throwback, just real quick to Rachel Maddow during the Trump era and what she sounded like then,
Miss $30 million a year lady. Russia, Russia, Vladimir Putin, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia hates Russia, Russia, Russia,
Putin, Russia's Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russia,
Russia, Moscow, Moscow, Russia, Russian, pro-Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russians,
Russians, Russians, Russians, Russians, Russians, Russians, Russians, Russians, Russia, Russian,
Russian, Russian, Russian, Moscow, Russian, Russian, Russia, Putin, Russian, Russian,
Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, against, Russian, Russian, Russia, Putin, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, against us, Russians, Russians, Russia, against the US, the Russians, Russia, Russia, Russia,
Russia, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian,
Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian, Russian,
Russian, Russian, Russian, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia,
Putin, Putin, Putin, Putin, and Russia, Russia, Moscow, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia,
Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia,
Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia,
Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia,
Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia,
Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia,
Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia,
Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia,
Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, Russia, see you we think that's from matt taibbi an old one this this reminds me of a feeling that i've
had and i've thankfully have suppressed it for a while um but i i think i can speak for moynihan
about this too i've hated russia my whole life yeah it's been pretty good consistent my dad
worked in aerospace like we're we're going after the ruskies since i was old enough to crawl um
and i mean we when uh camille and I had the best show,
along with Kennedy on the history of cable news,
sorry, Megan, The Independence,
didn't quite do as big as numbers. It was one, Roger Ailes' one failure, Matt,
was he didn't see that genius.
It's true.
Here's Cordis saying Matt Welch is a dud in the newspaper.
Oh, so sad.
No.
He didn't say anything bad about me.
They were very kind to me.
He did not.
For the record. But he, He didn't say anything bad about me. They were very kind to me. He did not. It's so clean.
But we had like a countdown, like the biggest enemies of freedom or something like that.
In 2014, we did this.
And who was the number one global enemy of freedom on our list?
Vladimir Putin was. So you go and you were just hating Russia, opposing all of his imperialist wars and all of this stuff.
And to go from there and then suddenly see people who have not been shoulder to shoulder on that issue over the years.
Do that clip for the better part of four years was a was an out of body experience.
And it's always a reminder to even yourself to
remember to tether your stuff to reality. And it's totally not just possible, but preferable
to keep your hatred of hateful actions and figures without impugning your fellow citizens.
Just don't. These are Americans we're talking about. We should have backs on our side before we make these grave accusations.
Don't we, though?
We see that in the climate we're in now.
I'm very surprised that we allow hatred against a nation and people.
Now, do the exact same thing, and we can use AI to replace that with Mexico and Mexicans
and see how long the Rachel Maddow show would stay on the air. It's like, Mexicans, Mexicans, Mexicans. Like, these Mexicans are everywhere. The Mexicans and see, see how long the racial matter show would stay on the earth.
Like Mexicans, Mexicans, Mexicans, like these Mexicans are everywhere. The Mexicans are in
the government. It's like, yeah, I don't think you get away with that. It's fine. It's all right.
Because it's very worthy. You know, it's fine. You might win a GOP nomination, but it'd be
hard for you. Can I, can I, can I bridge one disagreement with, uh, with Doug Murray? I think
Douglas, excuse me. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I, I I am sorry, but I'm not. I don't think she's acting. I don't. I think she's sincere. I think that a lot of people are stampeding towards certainty with respect to conclusions that conveniently fit particular perspectives that they have. And you just see too much of it.
I think there's kind of a sincere earnestness to it. And it might even be the case that people
are allowing themselves to be convinced that when it seems like they're wrong,
there's probably some sort of conspiracy there. I think people earnestly cannot see it. I think
much of the media establishment can't see the various ways in which they've kind of been diluted and they've engaged in just these kind of miscarriages, these abortions,
journalistic abortions over and over again, which quite frankly is a far worse and far more
pessimistic perspective on things than to believe that everyone is engaged in some sort of open
dishonesty. I think that Nicole Hannah
Jones, for example, earnestly believes her point of view and doesn't debate people because she
believes that anyone who disagrees is some sort of monster. And unless I have some evidence to
the contrary, I'm probably going to maintain that belief. And it's unfortunate that that's
where we are right now. And I don't know how to pull
out of that except to continue to try to have earnest conversations and to continue to try to
model what it looks like to not get out over your skis and to not engage in that kind of self-delusion.
He might have meant, Douglas Murray, because the longer clip has my Doug saying, you know,
she's smart. I think she's a Rhodes Scholar. She went to Oxford.
And Douglas Murray.
Now he's being too generous.
He says, well, that's my Doug being a nice guy.
And Douglas Murray says something like,
I knew a lot of dim people from the universities.
She's rather dim too.
He might have meant she's acting smart.
She's actually not really a smart person.
I had to listen to the whole podcast dedicated with Doug Brown if you want to hear it.
Certainly.
If someone had Douglas, talk to Douglas.
It would be very nice.
And you'll find out what his favorite drink is too.
Oh, and you know what?
I teased this, so let me give you one more clip.
I'm going to give you one more clip of Douglas on Doug's show.
And this is the question.
What irritates Douglas Murray when he goes into a restaurant? Here it is.
Worst distinctly American thing.
Oh, the phrase. Are you still working on that?
Are you mean this in the context of a restaurant as opposed to a book or something?
No, no, no. It's a restaurant.
That is amazing.
How much more workmanlike and unpleasant do you want to make this scene?
I guess I'll just have to get back to that salmon again and see if I can make another assault on it.
Don't want to know, Lee.
Oh, my God.
Douglas Murray's amazing.
Unbelievable. That's so funny.
He's absolutely right, by the way.
Why should my salmon be work?
All right, stand by.
Fifth column.
More coming up.
Can I just tell you about a little cooking fail that happened to me last night?
I'm thinking about Douglas Murray and salmon.
I can't stand seafood.
I've never been able to eat it.
I think I had a fish trauma as a child at my grandparents' boatyard on the Hudson.
Okay, it was the 70s.
GE was dumping chemicals in there. It could have been one of a number of things.
So I don't eat seafood, but the, my doctor, I recently, I go to my heart doctor every year
because my dad died young of a heart attack. And he's like, you need to eat more fish and you need
to eat less red meat. And don't do, you can't have like a big bowl of carbs because believe it or
not, that can drive up cholesterol,
even though there's no cholesterol in the bowl of spaghetti.
My cholesterol is fine, but you know, we're staying proactive.
I'm like, oh man, I eat a fair amount of red meat and chicken for that matter.
So I'm like, okay, I want to, I want to do more, you know, vegetarian options. And I want my kids to eat like that.
But my boys say they don't like cheese.
They eat tons of pizza, but they claim they don't like cheese. They eat tons of pizza,
but they claim they don't like cheese. I'm stuck with this. So going meatless is very challenging
because every recipe has cheese in it, which now I can't make because we're all pretending that my
boys don't like cheese. So I'm like, I'm going to Google meatless Monday. That's a thing. I remember
that from my NBC days where they were making me do cooking segments. I'm going to do meatless Monday.
I find a recipe. Everything has cheese. Okay. No, get it. Finally, a teriyaki vegetable dish with tempeh, T-E-M-P-E-H. I've never had it before.
They said it's like tofu, only supposedly better. I'm like, oh, okay. Cause tofu sucks.
So maybe I'll try tempeh. So I drive to the Whole Foods and I'm like, where else am I going to get
tempeh? I'm not going to the Acme for that. So I go to the Whole Foods. I get the tempeh. So I drive to the Whole Foods and I'm like, where else am I going to get tempeh? I'm not going to the Acme for that. So I go to the Whole Foods. I get the tempeh. The recipe calls
for three heads of broccoli. I'm like, I'm not doing all that nonsense. That's a lot of work.
So I get the frozen florets instead. This, as it would turn out, is a mistake. One of many.
I get the peppers. I had to get three different peppers in different colors.
I thought I was getting snap peas, but I think I got something else.
They were thicker and fatter, and you had to cut off the ends.
I don't know what I got.
And I bring it all back home.
Then they wanted me to make teriyaki.
I'm like, I'm not doing that.
I just bought a teriyaki off the shelf.
I'm in Whole Foods.
How bad could it be?
So I get it all home.
It was $168.
Now, I bought other things.
It wasn't just the day. But it was an expensive trip. it all home. It was $168. Now I bought other things. It wasn't just the debt, but it was
an expensive trip. Get back home. I start cutting up the veggies and I go wash all the veggies.
Everything takes so long. I'm not happy. I'm not a happy chef. I don't like the way I feel when I'm
in the kitchen. Inadequate. I can't eyeball anything. Try to follow the directions to a T.
First, you have to cook the tempeh. So I got the tempeh in there and some oil in like a wok.
I mean, within, they say six to eight minutes.
Within three, it burned.
Everything burned.
The olive oil, whatever the oil was in there burned.
I put it on what they said, but it still burned.
So now I'm pushing around.
The doctor also said burn is bad.
Don't eat burn.
Burn causes bad things.
What is this crackpot doctor you have?
I'm causing death
by the minute as I cook the tempeh,
my healthy meal, in the burn.
I dump it out of the, I get it into
a plate. No, I didn't throw it away, but then I
scrub with the Brillo, scrub, scrub, scrub, get the burn
off the wok because it's my only pan.
And I go back.
I start putting all the vegetables in there
and it's not looking right. I'm not going to lie. It just looked like wrong. I start putting all the vegetables in there. And it's not looking right.
I'm not going to lie.
It just looked like wrong.
I put the broccoli florets in.
All that water comes off.
They're the soggiest, most disgusting broccoli florets ever.
I know this is not how it's supposed to be.
It meandered over to the other vegetables.
Everything's now soggy.
By the way, peeling ginger is a massive pain in the ass.
It's an exercise in how to keep your fingers attached to your hand.
Trying to get the skin off, then trying to slice the tiny, tiny ginger.
The scallions, my hands still smell.
I don't enjoy doing this shit.
So I tried.
Everything was waterlogged.
I could tell.
My kids come in.
They're like, what's for dinner?
With the bright faces, I'm like, something healthy.
Try the tempeh. And
everybody's noses are turned up. Well, one fell on the floor. Even Thunder wouldn't eat the Tempeh.
My good dog, Strudwick was outside. He would have eaten anything. But even Thunder.
Thunder. Thunder. Thunder. Thunder rejected the Tempe name. The kids didn't want it at all.
I tried it.
It was the most disgusting thing I've ever put my,
I mean, it was, I couldn't.
So I threw it away.
All we had was a big walk full of soggy,
waterlogged vegetables.
The teriyaki was a disaster
because it didn't say how much to put on.
I had to eyeball, which as I've already explained to you,
I don't know how to do.
So I waterlogged it even more.
It was a salty, disgusting mess.
Doug said, do you want a glass of
wine? I said, no, I'm trying to lay off the wine. And the doctor also said not to have too much
wine. Flash forward. I look at Dr. Phil. Please order some pizzas. We got a cheese pizza and a
sausage pizza. And where's my wine? Indeed, I drank it all. Were you on the phone with the doctor
throughout this entire trauma?
Was he telling you that, like, no, no,
you can't be on the floor, you can't burn it?
I would rather die young.
You can't do that.
I'd rather die young than live like this.
I can't do it.
You are a 21-year-old dude.
You don't have any idea what you're doing in the kitchen.
Because instead of eyeballing it, just get the measuring.
Do you have a measuring cup, Megan?
No, well, it didn't say.
It said, like, make the teriyaki in this amount and then pour it.
I'm like, well, I didn't do that.
It said, like, just figure it out.
Honestly, like, these are the days that I look at Abby and I'm like, should I just try to hire somebody?
Like, I can afford somebody to come help me.
Why don't I just get somebody?
I think that's a good idea.
It feels like too big an indulgence.
You know what I mean?
It feels like-
Stop being Irish.
You're creating jobs.
You're creating jobs.
It's good for America.
It's good for your family.
And it will save you a great deal of stress.
And for God's sake, let Doug cook.
Let Doug cook.
My God.
He doesn't cook either i know he needs
a break at least let's anyone cook it's funny there's a running joke in my family because one
thing i know how to make is lasagna of course i have to make it cheeseless one for the boys
that's cheeseless because they don't like cheese even though they ate cheese pizza like it was
going out of style and then one that has cheese so i make it but it's a massive hassle lasagna is a big hassle too the bechamel sauce that's another 20 minutes you
didn't have cooking the meat on the stove takes all day it's got three different kinds of meat in
it the lasagna noodles first time i made it i didn't realize you got to cook those unless you
buy a special kind and then you get to do everything and look at the lasagna is not done
you got to put the noodles in there the raw anyway by the time i And the lasagna is not done. You got to put the noodles in there. They're raw.
Anyway, by the time I serve the lasagna, now it's gotten to the point where the whole family's like, we're having lasagna?
With like the blinking eyes of a dog that knows it's getting hit with the newspaper.
Because they know I'm going to be in a terrible mood by the time you serve.
Are all the kids like massively underweight?
And like, look, their skin is a bit jaundiced?
And they're like, mommy, can I please have something with that cheese that's delicious?
I'm not going to lie.
They are a little skinny.
Maybe this is why Strudwick is eating everything off my counters because he's too skinny.
Okay.
Sorry, back to the news.
You say that we're stove like it's a tribesman.
I do get triggered.
Apollo capsule.
That's true.
You would think at 52 I would have better skills than this, but I do not.
Okay, let's talk about more important things like Miller Lite.
People are joking that Miller Lite saw the controversy with Bud Light and said, hold my beer.
They've decided that their marketing campaign, much like the Bud Light one, was outdated and offensive.
Bud Light thought it was too fratty, according to that one woman. And Miller Lite, too, thinks that they've been too bro-tastic in their effort to get men to want to use or drink their beer.
So I'll just give you a look back at a classic Miller Lite ad
and the way they used to try to market the brand.
This is from 2003.
Great take! Let's do it!
Oh yeah, that was great.
Great take!
Great take!
Let's do it!
Let's do it!
That's awesome. That's it. the end the men are looked at like you guys are gross.
But I am also very, very thirsty right now.
So I just need a beer and it's one o'clock.
So there you go.
So now Miller Lite's sad and it's sorry that it was a bunch of sexist pigs, according to it.
And they put out this librarian lady to lecture us on how they're going to change it all. Look at this clip. Centuries later, how did the industry pay
homage to the founding mothers of beer? They put us in bikinis. Wow.
Don't take it away. Look at this. Wild. It's time beer made it up to women. So today Miller Miller Lite is on a mission to clean up not just their s***, but the whole beer industry's s***.
Miller Lite has been scouring the internet for all this s*** and buying it back
so that they can turn it into good s*** for women brewers.
Literally, good s***.
But there's definitely more s*** out there.
In your attic, in the garage, in your parents' basement.
Send any s*** you got into Miller Lite and they'll turn that into good shit too. So here's to women, because without us,
there would be no beer. Oh my God. That's like Nicole Hannah-Jones history.
I'm stuck on the practicalities of it because if you keep playing the ad,
they're like, no, no seriously send us your shit
or bad shit we'll turn it into good shit
so you scoured the internet
for shit and you somehow turned it into
you scoured
a beer ad on the internet
and it became fertilizer
or even
if I'm reaching over to my grandpa's
Playboy collection which is thankfully
within arm's reach over here they want me to pull out the, not the Carlton ads, which are actually really gruesome, but the beer ads and like mail them to them.
And then they're going to put it through a shredder.
And then that shredder is going to produce fertilizer for, I guess, barley and hops, which they're going to send to female brewers.
So I want to do the follow-up for you
and see how many barrels full of shredded,
you know, destructed images,
you know, we're sort of book shredding over here now,
are going to be used.
I didn't know they were serious about that.
Are they actually serious about that?
At the end of the ad,
they pretend to be serious about this, that it's never going At the end of the ad, they pretend to be serious about this.
That's never going to happen, of course, but they pretend to be serious.
I can tell you guys were offended by the original ad.
That was obvious.
And that you're happy for this moment of female empowerment.
Right?
This is going to make you want to buy Miller Lite, no?
Yeah.
I mean, I look at that and I'm like, I just, I think I really want to support women by drinking lecture us about how bad America has been and send us this in
the Stalinist spasm, send us the stuff from the past and we will destroy the past. This is like
the Khmer Rouge of beer. Just destroy the past for this glorious future. It's like,
you're a beer company. You want to apologize? Fine. But you don't have to go in the other
direction. You don't have to go all scoldy and just don't do those ads anymore correct and all the
women brewers like they found like that hearty women who are brewing this is the these are the
new women we're getting rid of the old women f the women who wear bikinis what about these women
now it says at the beginning that only we don't have we only have beer because women decided
to brew this uh in the past and they figured it out without without women we don't have we only have beer because women decided to brew this uh in the past and they
figured it out without without women we wouldn't have beer no one would have figured it out but
it's just it wasn't in the past it just never would have happened we have ai but we probably
wouldn't have beer uh it's a really bizarre thing that is also you have to like create a fake
historical narrative to get people to pay attention like oh interesting i didn't but it's once again
it's like who was offended who actually was offended by the miller light you know like
like the woman at bud light saying we were too fratty says who who's your audience do they really
have a bunch of like hearty women like i wish they'd get rid of those bikini cloud ladies and
then i'd finally drink the miller light i don't think so they work in the ad generation is also
the insinuation is also that women don't enjoy
those ads.
Who are the Terry Crews Old Spice
ads for? Are they for me?
When he's shirtless and looking absolutely
great and there's this...
I'm thinking
it's only a male product.
They're selling it to me. So we should do something about
that too. Terry Crews, keep your damn shirt
on. Well, Camille, I said this to you the other day on the film.
This is the thing, is that now we want to have like big shapely women on the cover of magazines.
Let's have that men shirt in shapely on the cover of men's.
Yeah, I want to see it.
Why is that not happening?
Excellent.
You're not overweight men.
You should be.
I'll show Matt.
Proud of their bodies.
I'll be right next to Matt matt walsh the two of us
we did not get to yeah we did not get to the sports illustrated cover models with the trans
person and the and the 81 year old martha stewart and guess what though the audience can take heart
because that leads me that leaves me some good fodder for my guest tomorrow guys sorry but
rosanne will have first crack at that on the MK Show.
Oh, wow. It's a warm-up act.
Right? How good is that going to be? I can't wait. You were also excellent, though. Don't feel bad.
It went very well today.
Thank you. I'm glad it went well.
Thank you, as always. Sending you a case of Miller Lite in the mail. Check your mail.
Thanks, everyone, on the fifth column, don't forget to check them out
at wethefifth.substack.com.
And don't forget,
Roseanne is here tomorrow for the full show,
and then later this week, we're going to be joined
by Dan Bongino for the first time.
This will be very interesting. This is the first time
I will have had the opportunity to talk to him in the first interview
he has given since Fox booted
him. We'll get to the bottom of what's going
on over there.
Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.
No BS, no agenda, and no fear.
