The Megyn Kelly Show - Colbert's Hissy Fit Farewell Tour, Xi's Ominous Comment, and Murdaugh's New Trial, with Glenn Greenwald | Ep. 1318
Episode Date: May 15, 2026Megyn Kelly is joined by Glenn Greenwald, host of "System Update" on Substack, to discuss Stephen Colbert’s embarrassing hissy fit farewell tour destroying CBS furniture with David Letterman, how la...te night ratings over the past 20 years show the format completely collapsed, why he should just go out like a man, the tens of millions Stephen Colbert is losing for CBS, his bizarre tactics of kissing male and female guests in his final week, how celebrities in 2026 like Charlize Theron have an addiction to attention, how Michael Jackson was for everyone and achieved fame no one anymore can, the chilling comment China President Xi said to President Trump about the Thucydides Trap, how Trump says he's fine with 500,000 Chinese students coming and staying in America and China buying up farmland, Trump saying we’re at war with Iran to help Israel and the Gulf states, what happens if America tries to get out of the war now, whether criminals Alex Murdaugh and Harvey Weinstein deserve new trials, why it's important for everyone in America to get fair trials, and more. More from Greenwald: https://greenwald.substack.com/ Relief Factor: Break up with pain—Relief Factor targets inflammation so you can move better and feel better; try the 3-Week QuickStart for just $19.95 at https://ReliefFactor.com or call 800-4-RELIEF. Birch Gold: Text MK to 989898 for a free info kit and to see if you qualify for up to $10,000 back through May 29. Byrna: Go to https://Byrna.com or your local Sportsman's Warehouse today. Ethos Life Insurance: Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get up to $3 million in coverage in as little as 10 minutes at: https://ethos.com/MK Follow The Megyn Kelly Show on all social platforms: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/MegynKelly Twitter: http://Twitter.com/MegynKellyShow Instagram: http://Instagram.com/MegynKellyShow Facebook: http://Facebook.com/MegynKellyShow Find out more information at:https://www.devilmaycaremedia.com/megynkellyshow Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at New East.
Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly. Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show and happy Friday.
President Trump is on his way back from his big summit in China and says the trip was a major success.
But his sit down on Fox last night delivered some eyebrow raising comments.
Plus the latest on the Alec Murdoch case as a couple of jurors speak out.
And Stephen Colbert's bizarre goodbye to late night.
night is finally almost over. Praise Jesus. My God, it's gone on forever. But not before he throws a
hissy fit temper tantrum with the former host of the CBS program. He and Letterman got together to just
express how very, very angry they are about poor Stephen Colbert's show getting canceled.
Cry me a river, would you take it like a man? Honestly, where are your testicles? This is so humiliating.
Like, we know you got canceled. Be a man. Jeez, Louise. This is like pathetic. When I got
Kant from NBC, everybody was calling me a racist. They were humiliating me everywhere. Yes, I got a little
teary the day after because it was overwhelming. And that was it. That was it. I didn't blubber
and blubber on. I didn't ask everybody feel so sorry for me on the day, like days on end.
nor would I have had they given me the opportunity to stay on the air.
Like, take it like a man.
Stop it.
Stop this.
Put your big boy pants on and exit with grace.
You're humiliating yourself.
Truly, you're humiliating mankind.
I don't want my sons to see this behavior.
Like, this is so embarrassing.
You didn't get cancer.
You got canceled.
It happens.
Grow up.
All right.
We're going to bring in our very first guest, very first guest ever here on the MK show.
the podfather of our show, Glenn Greenwald I speak of. He's a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and host of
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Glenn, welcome back.
What's happening with this man?
Like we've all suffered professional setbacks.
None of us made this big a deal out of it, the long goodbye.
Johnny Carson had less of a goodbye when he announced his retirement from the tonight
show.
He actually was beloved.
Let me show you the latest that he's done, Colbert, with David Letterman.
They're very, very angry, very angry.
that he's got to go watch
you guys will verify that this is actually cbs property right hundred percent
yeah okay anytime you're ready steven it's all fun until somebody puts out an eye
yeah that'll do
get ready oh my god
my desk chair all right we'll say goodbye my friend
the late show 1993 to two thousand twenty six so how many years is that
No way of knowing.
All yours, my friend.
Pleasure is all mine.
I enjoyed destroying stuff.
It's great, great fun.
Thank you for everything you've done for our country.
Feeling is mutual, Dave.
Thank you.
Anything you'd like to say to the audience before we go?
Well, not necessarily to the audience,
but the folks at CBS,
in the words of the great Ed Murrow,
good night and good luck, mother...
They're angry, Glenn, motherfuckers.
they had the nerve to cancel his failing show.
What do you make of it?
They're hard to watch.
You know, I grew up with Johnny Carson, and I never really understood, you know, when you're a teenager or whatever, the appeal of Johnny Carson.
But I actually find myself going back and watching Johnny Carson clips because it's just kind of a representative of that era, the way he did interviews, the kind of humor.
He was actually kind of a subtle humorist.
So maybe as a kid, you don't really understand why he's funny.
He appeals to your parents.
But the reason was because it was actual genuine humor and he never took himself too seriously.
Like he thought of himself as a comedian, which is an important role in society, which is to make people laugh to sometimes there's kind of a politicized aspect to it that you poke at taboos and you delve into sensitive subjects in a way that's unexpected.
That's a big part of humor.
But these guys have all, like so many of our institutions, like so many in the age of Trump, have convinced.
themselves that they have some transcendent role. No, they're not just comedians.
You know, as David Ledman said, thank you for what you've done for our country. He's not,
he doesn't just mean holding hands of people at night. He means the political war that you've
waged. And they see themselves as martyrs, as as people who are battling evil by which they
mean Donald Trump. And they've completely turned themselves into basically like a celebrity
guest version of whatever is on MSNBC. It really aligns perfectly.
and they broke in the whole notion of late-night TV,
which is the place where people used to be able to gather,
no matter what your religion or race or politics were.
It was just kind of a centralized cultural thought
that people really drank at because there was no politics to it.
So that's the first thing.
And the other thing is, do you notice like they all,
this whole thing was CBS?
I have my huge critiques about CBS.
I do think part of why they fired Colbert is because,
they didn't want like very liberal programming on because they have a lot to do with the Trump
administration that they need done. But reality is it was a money making money losing show.
And if you're just looking at from a business perspective, you would you would cut it anyway.
But they are trying to now depict themselves as these like hardcore rebels and dissidents,
radicals who are saying F you to the man. These are people who have made extreme fortunes
working for large corporations their entire lives.
And now at the very end, with their bank accounts all stuffed with billions and millions of dollars of these corporations,
they're not going to feign like they're the common man giving the middle finger to the corporation.
It's all such a fraud, like a self-important, just bloviating fraud.
And it really sickens to me.
Totally.
And you know, the thing that's crazy, they were losing $40 million a year.
I mean, $40 million.
What show would be kept on the air?
because when it was losing $40 million a year,
that would be professional malpractice to leave that show on the air.
But the irony of having Letterman pretend that this wasn't coming,
when Letterman was, when he launched his show in 1993,
we pulled the numbers, Glenn.
He averaged 7.8 million total viewers and 4.4 million
in the key 18 to 49-year-old demo.
All right.
4.4 million in the demo. By the time he handed it off to Colbert, those numbers were down to 2.8 million
and 530,000. The late-night format collapsed while David Letterman was at the helm, and he knew he was
handing what was effectively a loser to the next guy. So Colbert steps in there with a program
that is a shadow of its former self. People had just gotten over it. And Cole,
Letterman wasn't what he'd been, and certainly Colbert wasn't the answer. And he never got things
going. In the beginning of the Trump administration, he raised the numbers a little. He got it up
$1 million to $3.8 million, okay? And it was $520,000 in the demo. So he never got the demo up.
But by the time Trump left office, he was down to $2.6 million total and $226,000 in the demo.
Only now has he ticked up a little bit from that as he does his little farewell tour. And people are, people on the left are feeling
nostalgic for it. But the format died. It died as Letterman was handing it over. Colbert was never able
to revive it for more than an instant during Trump 1.0. That's because of Trump being so interesting.
And now they want to pretend that they had a smash success on their hands, whereas they were getting
beaten by Greg Gutfeldt by the end. And they don't, who makes a fraction, I'm sure, of what Stephen
Colbert is making. Right. I mean, and, you know,
I do think it is an unfortunate development. I'm a gigantic fan of the internet and the advent of
independent media. I really am the byproduct of it. My work has been as a result of it, probably not
possible without it. And to this day, I continue to be a massive fan of all the good that it's done.
But one of the things that I do think a country needs is a kind of gathering place where everybody goes
and kind of feels part of the same part of your day that is shared with everybody else.
else is kind of a ritual. It's kind of like a cultural reinforcement of what it means to be an
American or whatever country that you're in. And we have lost that. Not only though, because the
internet, because if the internet offered a zillion other choices, but late night TV continued to be
compelling, you would still have people watching late night TV. The problem is that the people who
got put in there, and again, this very much is a byproduct of Trump, where Trump took over
everything. And I've seen this happen to so many institutions. I mean, I used to work all the time with
the ACLU as a civil libertarian. I was always a big admirer of the ACLU growing up. I revered the ACLU
what it did in Skokie. And overnight, the ACLU turned into nothing but a liberal wing of the Democratic
Party because everything was just anti-Trump. And they made tons of money off of it. They got rewarded
for it. They grew massively in ways the ACLU you ever imagined. But every one of these groups,
organizations, even entertainment outlets, became politicized.
because they thought that their mission
was to do everything possible to stop Donald Trump.
And they got good feedback from you.
As you said, Colbert's ratings at first rose
because it was the era of Trump.
And he positioned himself against Trump.
So this kind of got was like a short-term sugar high,
but the price was long-term destruction of these institutions.
They're gutting them out of their purpose.
I'm so humiliated, Glenn.
I'm humiliated for him that he stayed on the air all this time.
He made the whole year about the fact that he was fired and was leaving.
Now on his last night, Jimmy Kimmel has announced he won't program.
He's not going to do a fresh program.
It's just going to cede the airwaves to poor Stephen so he can get as many eyeballs as possible.
And really stick it to CBS.
Just show him what a hit.
They actually were letting go.
This is ridiculous.
I mean, truly, it is bigger than Johnny Carson got.
and I was there when Johnny Carson stepped.
I remember what happened.
Like, this is absurd.
Why are they pretending that this is some sort of fucking temple?
That is how this feels.
It's a damn late night show that had complete irrelevance
except for a very small sliver of committed far leftists.
Yeah, I mean, well, I would say like Democratic partisans, basically,
which isn't quite the same thing, but basically, you know, it's the idea, it became a
politics show.
It was basically just like a late night MSNBC show.
That's really what it was.
And it wasn't anything else.
You would never go to see Stephen Colbert if you weren't sharing his anti-Trump politics.
And this was, this is why the show failed because you already have tons of anti-Trump, everything.
You know, it's like if you go back to 2013 and 2014, like in the independent digital media space,
you had all these different outlets, you know, like Vice and Vulture and the Huffington Post and BuzzF,
feed. They're all gone. They're all gone. They were growing massively into something interesting.
They're all either gone or just total, you know, shells of themselves like a three people keeping a
front page up. And the reason is, is because all they were offering was the same anti-Trump adjutop that
the New York Times decided it was going to latch itself on to. And if you have the New York
Times doing it, you don't need alternative media doing it because the New York Times is already doing it.
There's nothing alternative about it. And that happened to every one of these outlets. The problem
is that Stephen Colbert, obviously, lives in a very tiny enclave of Los Angeles and New York elites,
all of whom are liberal, all of whom tell him, oh, what you're doing is so important. It's so
important. This is what you get told if you're an elite culture and you do anything against Trump.
You've got that like one time you asked a hard question or multiple times you asked hard question
during that debate, the big one, and you suddenly became beloved in the culture that previously
hated you. They're monomaniacal about Trump. So if you're opposing Trump, you become this person
in their minds that get constantly told,
oh, what you're doing is so important.
And then they start believing their own PR.
And even though by the end, that show is worthless,
it's just reinforcing very banal, liberal, political thought against Trump.
They've convinced themselves at what they're doing.
But I just have to say, too, Megan, like, again,
when David Letterman was on the air,
when Stephen Colbert was on the air, all this time,
they were happy to collect CBS's news,
the paycheck from CBS News,
only when David Letterman left and then only one Stephen and Colbert,
was on his way out, did they suddenly find their voice?
Like, no, we're anti-corporate guys.
We're going to really give it to the man.
These are the men.
These are the people whose bank accounts are extremely rich for serving corporate power.
They don't really know what else to do.
Yeah.
I mean, it is crazy because I think back when I was at NBC,
the number one thing I was critical about them on leaving NBC was how they handled
the Harvey Weinstein reporting that was being done by Ronan Farrell and how they clearly
buried it.
And I, while on the air at NBC, while employed by them, went out on the air and called my boss Andy Lack a liar.
He had issued this ridiculous statement about how they didn't have two sources. And I knew they did have two sources.
And I had seen the script that showed Ronan had two sources and NBC spiked it. And I ripped on him on the air.
That everyone around me freaked out, Glenn. It's not that I'm some hero. I'm just saying it's possible to do it.
Like if you actually do have a material disagreement with your employer, if they're doing something deeply wrong, you can go out on the air and say what's real. You have a platform, Stephen Colbert does to this moment, right? He's not exposing anything about CBS. He's only talking about himself. Some of us did it and some of us, you know, well, let's just say it doesn't always wind up great for those people. That's fine. You leave with your integrity and you know you've done the right thing. He just wants us to feel sorry for him because just like,
like Kimmel, who had his complete meltdown when he was off the air for five days,
he can't stand the thought of life not in front of the Kleeglites. He can't stand it.
They need it, Glenn. It's their lifeblood.
Well, did this, you know, to continue the comparison with Johnny Carson, who I do think
has been retrospectively kind of revived and this sort of respect for him in contrast to what
came after him, Johnny Carson left when he was still, you know, I wouldn't say at his prime
necessarily, but still perfectly capable of clinging to that program.
He was in, you know, of good health.
He had sound mind.
He was still funny.
He left voluntarily.
The network did not want him to leave.
And he just kind of gracefully said, you know what, I've done this for long enough.
I want to go kind of live the last stage of my life in peace, in, in privacy.
And he like exited the stage very gracefully didn't make himself the big center of attention.
They did a couple of shows like the last week, as you would expect kind of commemorating it.
these guys, it's not just that they're so desperate for attention, although they are.
It's also that they don't want to be what they are.
They're not, they don't want to be comedians.
They're not satisfied with that.
They think they're too important for that.
And they've converted themselves into political martyrs or, you know, people who are so courageous that they are standing up to the corporate bosses.
I'm not even saying you have to go on air and condemn your bosses.
But if you're working inside a corporation, making a lot of money and you do that for a long time,
either attack your corporate bosses while you're there,
or if you leave, don't suddenly at the last second when they fire you,
you pretend that you're some kind of like anti-corporate radical
willing to stand up to your bosses.
This whole thing is infused with a kind of elevated cause
that they fabricated and that exists.
In what world is Stephen Colbert a martyr of anything, of anything?
No, no.
And they're ridiculous.
I think back to my time at Fox News,
I was there for 14 years. I left willingly. They made me a very nice offer to stay, but I had enough
and I wanted to do something else and raise my own kids. So I'm leaving for NBC. The night I announced
I was leaving, I just said goodbye. I said, you know, thank you to everybody and I said goodbye on the air.
And that was it. I didn't make a big deal out of it. O'Reilly, he was the number one. He was
the face of Fox News. By the way, my show was number one in the key demo when I left. It had been
for years. O'Reilly had the number one show in Olive Cable with the overall numbers for many, many
years. He was the face of Fox News. After I left, they elevated him even more. He got paid even more.
And he got fired over this whole Me Too situation. Did he make a big deal on it? He didn't.
He left. It was it. That was it. It was like not some big deal. It is not customary to martyr
yourself on the way out if you've been fired or to spend months celebrating yourself if you
are leaving of your own volition. This is weird. This is a brand new format in
which he really thinks he's some sort of Jesus figure on the cross,
like given what the horrible things CBS is doing to him,
which is simply his show has been canceled after years of letting it bleed out in the red
and paying him tens of millions of dollars,
making him a household name, making him a multi-multimillionaire,
funding all of his homes and cars and kids' educations.
And he actually wants people to feel sorry for him.
I know.
Now on his last week, oh, by the way, not only will Jimmy Kim will not be doing live programming
the night he goes off for the last time.
Jimmy Fallon has also said he'll be doing just taped programming.
He's going to run a rerun out of respect.
Like God.
Such sacrifices.
Look at the sacrifices.
These people are willing to make for their values.
It's so impressive.
So courageous.
Didn't you throw up in your mouth?
Yeah.
You know, look, I do think.
And this has, you know, have been an issue of mine for a long time.
Like you don't want the government influencing what's on television or being able to use its regulatory power to get what it wants.
I think these are legitimate questions surrounding, not just Trump administration, but administrations that have come before it.
This is something for you allow people to talk about.
You allow questions to be raised.
You examine it, whatever.
But this is not what's being done.
What's being done is that Stephen Colbert himself has been turned into some kind of, as you said, Jesus figure, I think there was some recent award.
show. They gave him like an award and they all like stood up for him. This like very prolonged,
sustained Hollywood applause, not because he's some great comedian because he's not. I mean, I do think
he was innovative and interesting. I know, 25 years ago when he was on with John Stewart and was doing,
you know, they were doing some actually innovative things. But his show is is, is barely funny.
It's not really funny. And even with celebrities, it's like a very ass-kissing show to say nothing to
politics. It was because they need to, this is why Hollywood often, like, at those awards
shows so often it smuggles in political speeches because they don't want to feel like they're
only actors. They don't want to feel like they're only comedians. They want to feel like they're
more important figures in the history of the world than just that. And they assume this,
this inflated sense of themselves. And that's what so much of this is about. Yes. Okay. So that's
the perfect setup for the sound bite I'm about to play. This is from this past week. For some reason,
first I saw Julia Louis-Dreyfusco on Colbert's show and tried to do this VEP reenactment.
It was so lame. It was so not funny. As the kids would say, it was cringe. It was very
cringy. I felt uncomfortable watching the whole thing. But he's doing something where he's kissing
everyone, like actually kissing, male
and female, it's a little weird.
I'm going to show you some of it. Sat 23.
Because I think you've made out with guests on camera.
No, I think you just wanted to make it on with me.
What harm is there?
None. What could possibly go wrong?
On the lip, people.
Pedro Pascal.
I'm sorry, this is gross.
Like, who kisses Julia Louis-Dreyfus on the mouth?
by the way, no one knows where any of those mouths have been.
This is weird.
I don't kiss my own mother on the mouth.
My mom and I kiss on the cheek.
That's it.
Like, this is very strange behavior, Glenn.
I mean, I didn't see that.
I saw the images circulating and I was actually, I didn't, you know, I just saw them kind
of crossing my feet.
And I was even wondering, like, are there was real or there was distorted?
You'd never know.
You have to look into it and find out.
I just didn't.
But I know I just saw the video and it is.
And you're welcome.
Yeah, thank you so much for doing that work for me.
I was just about to go do it because I'm so interested.
No, but what it reeks to me is of desperation.
You know, like, Julie Lee's Dreyfus is funny.
Like, she's a funny actress.
She's had great success.
I love Vip.
I thought Seinfeld at the time was great, whatever.
But that's because she was being a comedian.
She was being, like, just a comic actress.
Now, like, when they're trying to become political figures, when they're trying to,
what in their mind is, like, elevate whatever they do.
reality, they're just kind of dragging it into the gutter because it's just so uninteresting the
when they be, they're not, they're not interesting political thinkers that isn't why they're successful.
Nobody has ever tuned into any of this to watch, hear their political views unless, you know,
you have a like-minded political audience in which case you're going to reduce your audience as Stephen
Colbert has done. And it just, this is all. But so without being able to be funny,
without really having anything relevant culturally to contribute, it's, oh, let's just start kissing on the lips because that I'll at least get
people talking about the show. And I guess it works. It was, as I said, circulating in my feet.
I wouldn't usually see the Colbert show in there. And I don't know. It's just, it's, it's, you and I
can both drop trial right now and do a big moon in front of the camera. And we get lots of attention.
But like most, like most people who are doing a show, especially a political show like Stephen
Colbert is doing, would like to maintain some level of dignity on camera in front of their audiences
while doing the show. That's not what he's doing. Like, why is he kissing Jimmy Fallon? And on the
participation of all the other late night hosts, like he's their God, like the emasculation, what's the
emasculation that they're engaging in? For what again? So that you can, I mean, it's not like
Stephen Colbert invented the genre, right? It's like when Barbara Walters retired, that
That was big.
I mean, that was big.
She was a pioneer as an email journalist.
An institution and like something pioneering, as you said, exactly.
He doesn't have any of that.
What are they doing?
No, but he's being distorted into some kind of victim of Trump administration authoritarianism.
This is the, this is the subtext for everything that we live in Trump's America.
And in Trump's America, if you criticize Donald Trump, you go to a gulag or you're putting
into prison or you're shot by masked ice agents on the street or you have your corporate bosses
fire you in order to please the Trump administration. And I'm not even saying, again,
I'm not saying there aren't actual questions there that people like you and I and others who,
you know, engage in politics. People talk about politics, but talking about it as politics
would raise and debate and discuss it's worth examination. But that's not what this is about.
this is about creating this kind of storyline where they're heroic.
They're these central figures who have done such important things.
I don't know what, but important things.
And at the end, they end up getting murdered.
Like they are acting like they were put on the cross.
And this persecution narrative does not work for extremely rich celebrities who have always
gotten along very well with corporate bosses until their show started losing money.
And I do think it's such an interesting thing about the economics.
You know, the reason why is because technology now is such that you and I can have,
can be talking to each other.
We have microphones in front of each other, cameras in front of each other, small staffs.
You know, you can have small staffs in a studio and still produce like a professional enough show.
But at networks, they have hundreds of people employed, but not almost more than are people
watching Stephen Colbert.
Like the numbers are pretty close.
Colbert had 200 staffers, Glenn.
200 staffers. Exactly. And he's not producing 200 times better of a product than anybody.
There's a zillion people I would rather watch just sit in front of a camera with a cheap microphone and talk than to watch Stephen Colbert.
And that is what the internet has permitted is it really has rooted out the frauds.
Like the people who are only successful because they had a captive audience. No one's captive anymore to CBS, except still like old people who watch because it's their viewing habits.
But other than that, young people, they're not going to watch CBS out of habit or just because they have to.
They're going to only watch if there's something compelling on and there's not.
It's so crazy.
I did not make as much as Stephen Colbert is making when I was in the prime time at Fox.
But my show made $100 million in ads a year.
Okay, $100 million in ads a year.
And that's not including the subscription.
fees that Fox would get because people liked the lineup. They liked what was in the prime time.
They liked up and down the dial. But that makes sense. That's why that show worked. And we did it on
a shoestring budget. I only had 12 main producers, which is small for cable. You have to produce
six segments a night. I mean, it's a lot. It's a labor intensive product. And it still is over there.
But Fox always did it on the lean. This guy's got one hour of like a couple of guests. I don't know.
at most. He does a stand-up monologue, so I guess he needs a couple of writers, since he's
clearly not writing his own stuff anymore. I don't even know how you get to 200 staffers.
And how much was his show making, Steve? It took in... It took in 60, and lost 40?
Well, like, I don't know. Those economics are not sustainable. So it took in 60, and it cost
$100 to make. It cost $100 million to make, and it took in $60.
You know, like, just so people understand the economics, right? So then there's my show at Fox. I don't know what it cost, but it was some fraction of that, teeny tiny fraction of that. And we made $100 million. Like, that's something that's available to anybody who wants to be in the news or entertainment business. And you could easily replace Stephen Colbert with an up-and-coming, hungry, you know, excited, young, talented guy who wouldn't require any of the star trappings or salary that he'd.
demands and probably get at least equal to, if not potentially in a year, a bigger number.
Like, why don't any of these other comedians acknowledge that? Why do they all go along with this?
Well, ironically, this is the part of it that, you know, you could go to YouTube and find some
young comedian who doesn't have a huge name, but has like a big following online, which is,
you know, if they have a following online, it means their following tends to be a lot younger.
than the average network or cable news viewer,
which is what's created by advertisers and the like,
so they're more valuable.
The problem is that the reason why they don't just take somebody like that
and pay them, you know, 1-20th of what Stephen Colbert is making
and give them an hour on CBS News is because they can't control those people.
They don't trust them enough.
They don't have enough of proven track record that they're good, malleable people.
And, you know, your stint at NBC was very short-lived,
in part because you weren't that malleable.
You know, they couldn't just mold you and into something that they wanted you to be or that the other people there wanted you to be.
And the fact that that you weren't is why you were gone so soon.
So that's the irony is Stephen Colbert has lasted there so long because he's never been offensive.
They were willing to lose money on him because he never really did anything.
You know, basically that show is some movie star, some actor has a new show, a new book, a new whatever they want to promote.
So the deal is they go, they go on those shows.
They sit down for like eight minutes, talk a few minutes about some three-planned story,
and then the rest of the time promoting the project.
It's like the easiest thing in the world.
But that's what those networks want.
They don't want edgy comedy or people they can't control.
And that's why they've lost their audience.
Farewell.
I mean, just truly farewell.
It's like, I don't know.
I feel like, I don't know what they're going to replace him with.
But who cares?
The whole medium has become totally irrelevant.
It should just lean into what it is, which is it's political hit jobs every night after night.
I mean, it's interesting to me because those five late night comedians, quote unquote, just launched a podcast.
And it's appearing on my podcast feed under the news feed, not entertainment, news.
Yeah.
They're actually.
So like, they're not that.
They're not entertainment and they're not news.
I don't know what they are.
They're not comedy.
But also, as you noted, and.
When I tell people this who aren't, you know, conservatives, people get shocked.
The number one rated late night talk show host in the country is Greg Gutfeld.
His audience is not huge.
Yeah.
But he is the number one rated late night talk show.
He's number one.
Notice he's never included in their little club, even though he has the bigger audience
of all five of them because they're not joining on the basis of comedy.
They're joining on the basis of politics.
And Greg Gutfeld doesn't fit in.
He fits in as a late night comedy show host.
That's what he is.
but not as the political actors they think they are,
that they've recast themselves as.
No, the way they talk, I'm sure,
the way they talk about Gutfeld and Fox is just like,
oh, you know, the cult over there, whatever.
He's not real.
Those numbers aren't real.
Yeah, the day they announced Colbert's cancellation,
his guest was Adam Schiff.
I mean, like, no one wants to see Adam Schiff on
as a late-night entertainment guest.
You know, is it like those shows
when we were young, had Tom Cruise and Julia Roberts and A-list celebrities.
And like Rodney Dangerfield and like that insult comic was on the Don Rickles.
You know, like it was very, I'm not think it was never political, but it was like entertainment.
People who are identified as being like entertainers.
It was really a show for entertainers.
And it was funny.
That's what he, the guests he invited back were the ones he thought was funny, the ones that Americans like as they went to sleep.
having Adam Schiff on, could you imagine Johnny Carson having someone like the Adam Schiff equivalent on,
especially on the night that you announced your cancellation?
That already is showing the attempt to infuse it with this like political importance.
But like a liberal pause.
And Johnny Carson also was in the business of making stars.
Like if you got the chance to appear on his show as a comedian, you were on your way to becoming a star.
Letterman had that in the beginning too.
None of these guys has that ability.
They can't make stars.
They don't have enough star power themselves.
Speaking of star power, we've been talking this week on this show about the Michael Jackson story, the new movie, and the allegations against Tim Glenn.
And we actually, I talked about the nature of this movie and the controversies around it because it stops before any of the sexual molestation scandal came out.
And I hadn't yet seen it.
But I did go to see it with my family on Wednesday night.
It was amazing. I have to say, I highly recommend it. It was supremely entertaining. Both actors who played the young Michael Jackson and the older Michael Jackson, the older of whom is Jafar Jackson, Jermaine Jackson's son. He's Michael Jackson's nephew, did such a great job. But the younger kid did such a great job, too. Gosh, they were very talented. By the way, for those wondering, you can take the whole family to it. The only viewer warning is Joe Jackson was an abusive bastard, Michael's dad. And there is a scene in the
beginning where he beats Michael. That is very jarring, even to us old news cynical bastards. It was
upsetting. The little boy did almost too good a job of acting hysterical and hurt. Other than that,
you're good. But he's been very much in the news. And I'm not going to ask about the Michael Jackson
scandal, but I am sort of, it's led to a bunch of discussions about whether we even have celebrity
like that anymore. Like, Michael Jackson transcended everything. Doug and I were talking about this
this morning. Like he, he transcended race. He himself was neither black nor white, really,
over the course of his life. He transcended aging, right? He never sort of grew up. He always remained a
child in his, you know, what he liked, the people he wanted to hang out with. I understand the
controversy with that, but I'm just saying. He, he, it was just something like he, he was for
everyone. It wasn't just for women, like the way Taylor Swift is, or just for, or just for
men, you know, the way some of these like, I don't know, maybe hard rock or bands, I don't know.
But he was for everybody.
And he was universally known, universally beloved.
He was just such a huge star.
And I wonder whether, is it even possible to have that today?
Is there anybody who we could use to help explain that level of fame and notoriety to our kids?
It is something I do think is so interesting.
Michael Jackson came to Brazil once
and I think maybe more than once
and to this day people in Brazil talk about it
it was like a huge moment in Brazil
he I think actually filmed a music video
in one of the Rio favelas
and he had extreme global fame
and I think it very much relates to what we were just talking about
which is as you said
Michael Jackson
didn't do anything that would
alienate a particular group. He wasn't trying to plant his flag and say, I'm this. And if you're
not this, I'm not for you. I remember actually Michael Jordan, who was by far the biggest athlete,
certainly the biggest basketball player, but I say the biggest athlete when we were growing up as well,
was once asked, like, why don't you comment on politics? And he basically said this famous phrase,
which is, well, Republicans buy shoes too, by tennis sneakers as well. I'm not in the field of
being a politician. If I run for the Senate, maybe I'll take political stands, but I'm a basketball
player. I'm an entertainer. I'm in the business of selling things. I think that's a big part of what
has been lost. But also, with the internet, it's amazing. You can go online and find people who are
quite famous by every metric, you know, people who are known by millions of people, people who get
stopped on the street, people who have huge numbers of fans and every, and a lot of people have
no idea who they are. It's like fame has become very diffused, very kind of segmented and segregated.
And I think it reflects what we were just talking about,
which is that we don't anymore have this kind of common cultural gathering place,
this kind of common culture even almost.
Because, you know, you can, if you're a streamer, if you're a YouTuber,
if you're an entertainer, you can appeal to a niche global audience
and make huge amounts of money, gather millions of fans,
and also be completely unknown to huge numbers of people as well.
And, you know, it's like what you were just saying.
you know, if you went on Johnny Carson, you were there.
He could make a star because so many millions of Americans were watching.
That doesn't exist anymore.
There is no common cultural kind of gathering point that we have any longer.
It's all been so segmented and segregated.
And maybe you can find some benefits in that.
But I also do think that there are some serious harms to that as well.
We want to share things in common with one another across lines.
But everything is so politicized.
That's why everybody loves Tiger King.
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
It was just, actually, you know, now that you mention it, you know, I've been working on this project about issues with animals.
Like you saw this thing with original farms and the horrific experiments that were being done to beagles.
And, you know, I've known the activists working on this for a decade.
I read about it a decade ago because of them.
And yet all of a sudden, like this very apolitical, trans-ideological.
movement formed around this issue. You had like Laura Trump and Laura Lumer and like Fox News
personalities. You were doing it. Lots of Republican members of Congress as well as liberal members of
Congress and left-wing activists completely aligned and assembled around this common cause that we all
can relate to, which is dogs. And the idea of industrially abusing dogs and torturing dogs is something
that horrifies all of us. And the reason I noticed it is because it so rarely happens. Whereas
It used to happen a lot more, like with Michael Jackson.
Was Michael Jackson on the left or the right?
Neither.
Neither.
He didn't have that prison at all.
No, exactly right.
And he, he, there's a line in the movie.
And again, it was made by his estate and by people who love Michael.
And with the full cooperation of his family, I think is executive produced by his brother
Germain.
His mother is still alive and clearly blessed it.
And the actor, Jafar, who plays him, who's the grandson of Michael's mother,
said she approved. Like, this has been blessed by the family. But there's a line in there where
Michael said he wanted to avoid too much overexposure. He wanted to be like Greta Garbo,
who really didn't put herself out there that much, that he liked there being a level of
mystery. And really, Michael Jackson did live up to that. When think of your memories of Michael
Jackson. He gave a couple of massive, like interviews that were massive because he never did
them and because he made so much news in them. Like with Martin Bashir, you give one to Diane Sawyer,
and one to Oprah. I can't think of others off the top of my head. But like, the fact that I can
even list the ones he did tells us a lot. And he intentionally tried to keep his big performances
on stage or on vinyl, you know. And it's just the opposite of the way the stars are today,
where they're everywhere. They'll go to anything. And,
they'll overshare. You know, I, like, Charlize Theron, I just saw some video of her on a subway being
interviewed by somebody, like giving up all these sex secrets. And she's done this before.
She's talked about her sex secrets. Let me just tell you, there's one sex secret about
Charlize Theron that she's obviously not giving up yet. And I don't know why because let me tell
you, Charlize, it's fine. It's fine. In 2026 America, you can declare what you actually
are and everybody will still love you. That's all I'm going to say. But in any event,
it's too much, Glenn. You know, it's like Tom Cruise gets it. He keeps himself sort of not
all that available. Some of these old school stars still get it. But most don't. And it's kind of
sad. Like, I think we lost something. Yeah, it's like a mystique. You know, what makes,
at the end of the day, we're all human and we're all have very ordinary aspects to us, even if we
excel and are exceptional in one particular or two particular areas. I think there's actually a Twitter
used to do this too. You know, there'd be very, very respected people in their fields who had
accomplished great things. And then they would just start, you know, getting dragged down into the
Twitter mud or commenting on everything. And it would be, you would look at them and you would say,
wow, they're actually quite mediocre. They, you know, it would strip them of the image. So many of
those people. Like during COVID, a lot of, you know, just certainly in the Trump.
as well, because mystique and enigma is a really, are really attractive traits.
It kind of draws you to people you want to know more.
But if they're just shoving in your face, everything about their life, they have Instagram
pages and they're posting everything that they're doing and thinking and saying it every second,
you realize how ordinary they are.
And I think you're right.
Like one of the things about these big stars is you feel like, oh, they exist.
They're very ethereal.
You know, like the life is like only they materialize on stages.
you were saying with Michael Jackson in front of like 300,000 screaming fans or 150,000 people
on a stadium. But if you start hearing from Michael Jackson every day about his thoughts on
whatever he happened to watch on CNN or whatever, and he just like goes on TikTok or Instagram
and you know, you're going to be like, oh, that's, he's zero. He's mediocre. And that is,
it's like this attention addiction in this attention economy. I think we all have it a little bit.
You have to like fight against it and resist it. And yeah, I think I think you're exactly right.
this overexposure is, has killed like any of the mystique of celebrities.
Just become almost tawdry.
Mm-hmm.
Leonardo DiCaprio, he's good that not, you know, he doesn't give me any interviews.
It's good, you know.
Back in our day, they used to not really put themselves out there.
Every once in a while, they might do a Barbara Walters sit down for one of her most fascinating
people specials.
Those were always great because they would be more profiles of the person where you really
got to know them on their ranch, like with Clint Eastwood. Maybe she'd ask you if you'd been
involved in a scandal, a couple of like very blunt questions. So that was always a highlight.
It was a different way of getting to know them. And they all knew the price of admission and it
worked. But today, it's like sitting on the subway talking about your intimate sex preferences is
just weird and it's too much. And it's the opposite of Garbo. By the way, Trump once told me that
that's Melania's approach too, that she's more like a Garbo. You know, she wants to
I think that is very true.
Like we don't ever, I like barely know Melania's voice.
Like given her stature and her platform, we barely hear much from her or about her.
And it's clearly part of, I think you're absolutely right, like a deliberate conscious effort not to kind of be this person that you want to know more about.
Like when someone has a like a kind of wall between you and them and it's hiding things, which they should be because you don't need to know everything about them.
It kind of makes them more interesting.
Like you want to know more.
Whereas if she were just sounding off every day about everything, you'd be, oh, just please go away.
She really, I think that's a really good boy.
Yeah, like Dr. Jill. Yeah. After the latest assassination attempt at the Hinkley Hilton in Washington,
you know, Melania was right next to Trump for that one. It wasn't like Butler, where she was not even there.
She was there, and she would have been potentially in the line of fire. And Trump held that presser
immediately after back at the White House. And she was there. And he said, do you, somebody asked about Maloney.
and he was like, do you want to, you know, come up? And she declined. She net, like,
it's, that's why when she came out and did the little bit on Epstein and like stop the lies,
we weren't, we weren't friends. It was so extraordinary. It's like, oh my God, she's speaking.
She never speaks. She never covets the camera, the microphone. She did her little documentary on her
life, which was controlled, and that was she, that's what she was comfortable with.
But she rarely feels the need for us to see her or to put her voice or her opinions on camera.
It's a 180 from the last first lady.
And it's delightful because if ever there was a woman who the camera loved, it's Melania Trump.
She just doesn't feel the need for that kind of attention, which is probably good for them.
Because in that marriage, there can only be one who needs attention.
Imagine wanting to have it to compete with Trump when it comes to media attention.
That would be very fatal to any kind of connection.
No, exactly.
You've got a seed here.
And back to you.
And that works for both of them.
Okay, wait, speaking of loving the camera, though, Kamala Harris is back.
She's gotten a little taste of it, Glenn, and she's enjoying it.
She's back and she's got a lot of predictions or forecasts or pieces of advice, I guess we should say,
for how the Democrats should combat what they see as the gutting of the Voting Rights Act.
The reason the Voting Rights Act has over the past 70 years been rolled back bit by bit to the point
where it's really no longer doing anything,
is because we've grown.
We've grown as a society.
We are no longer meeting blacks
at the polling stations with rabid dogs
and, you know, citizenship tests.
And the Supreme Court has evolved on its jurisprudence
around it, too.
Now they're pretending that we've gone right back
to Jim Crow because of the Supreme Court's latest ruling
on how you can't draw these districts
such that they, like, empower only black people.
in the state of Louisiana and, you know, not whites and so on. It's like just draw them the way you
want to draw them. Anyway, there have been a lot of extreme reactions to this decision, and Kamala Harris
has decided to weigh in. She went to a group that's for black women to give them her sort of
thoughts on it. The name of this group is win with black women. It was an emergency virtual
meeting, meeting. Their website describes them as a collective.
of intergenerational, intersectional black women leaders throughout the nation.
They come together to stand united in support of black women.
So here's what she said to that group in terms of how to fight this thing.
I think that we need an expanded playbook.
This is a moment where there are no bad ideas.
No bad idea brainstorm is what I'd like to call it.
And in that no bad ideas brainstorm, we talk about what we need to do
and think about doing around the electoral college.
We talk about the idea of Supreme Court reform,
which includes expanding the Supreme Court.
We invite a conversation about multi-members districts.
We talk about, look, that if we win the Senate,
which we should and we will,
then the Senate Judiciary Committee should have rules
that they put in place.
So when these people come before as nominees to,
the Supreme Court and lie that they are held to account and consequence.
Let's talk about statehood for Puerto Rico and D.C.
These are the things I think that we've got to do.
We've got to neutralize these red states from cheating, including blue states, expanding
their maps.
Look, we got to fight fire with fire.
These folks are playing to win.
We got to play to win too.
She slips into her little accent there at the end.
I think she means it.
What's scary to me is she means it.
And a lot of the stuff she wants to do there that's extremely radical can be done with Democrat control of the White House and a simple majority in both bodies of Congress.
I don't know that she means anything.
That's the thing about come.
There are people who mean that.
Like, everything about her is such a fraud.
And when we were talking before about like the lack of mystique, you know, she's was the vice president of United States, there comes like a certain grandeur of that, that office.
And when she's just there on a Zoom with her like background blurred and saying this stuff and this fake accent that she's not hers trying to put on a persona that's clearly not hers, trying to blackify herself because in the last election, a lot of black people even said, I don't even think she's black.
You just realized the fraud of her.
But yeah, I mean, the Democratic Party believes, like the Republican Party believes, by the way, that the other side cheats and goes to any lane and that they have to too.
She's just echo.
She's the last thing she is as a radical.
She's like a very, like kind of like a.
Colbert, like pretending to be this anti-system radical, but in reality, she's a byproduct of the system and the establishment.
This is just kind of a blackface, if you will, in order to create a new personality.
It is an interesting preview, though, because we've heard James Carville say this.
We've heard her say this.
Most Dems are saying this behind the scenes.
When we come back, I'm just going to lay out for the audience exactly how all that could,
in fact, happen if everything goes blue next election cycle.
stand by, Glens, with us for the show.
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Glenn Greenwald, host of System Update, is back with me now.
Go and subscribe to his substack.
It's greenwold.substack.com.
So just a moment more on the Kamala Harris comments.
She seems to want to talk about getting rid of the electoral college, something that has
been tried 700 times before, literally, and would require a constitutional amendment,
which is not going to happen.
So that's pie in the sky bullshit.
it. Packing the court, she doesn't say packing the court there. She says, let's try to hold the
Supreme Court justices who make us promises during their confirmation hearings to account if they
don't live up to their promises later. That's never going to fly. That will be a separation of
powers violation. There's been fierce legal debates over this for many, many years. And those who
believe Congress cannot control the Supreme Court, a co-equal branch of government in this way,
will win that. So that's another pie in the sky. However, and I don't know what she means about
multi-members districts. We're going to look at multi-members. I have no idea what she's talking about.
Is that redistricting? They're doing that now. The Democrats are on the losing end of that effort,
thanks to the court rulings across the nation. But when she talks about statehood for Puerto Rico and
D.C. and when other Democrats talk about packing the court, adding additional justices,
all of that can be done if the Democrats simply win control of the White House, win control of the
House and win control of the Senate. They actually can do that. And this is what many people fear,
is that they will get rid of the filibuster, because you would need a filibuster proof majority in order
to get a vote on these things. But if you get rid of the filibuster in the Senate, you'll, you can do
that. And all you need is a simple majority. I mean, I think a lot of people don't realize that.
If you want to make Washington, D.C. a state or Puerto Rico a state, or even Trump right now
is casually referencing Venezuela becoming a state, which we don't want. All it requires is a majority.
vote in the House, Senate, and for the president to sign it into law. Same for adding seats to the U.S.
Supreme Court. So we truly could be one election away, not the midterms, but the one after,
from having the kind of rule that truly could radicalize the country, Glenn, and more and more
Democrats are speaking openly about wanting to do it. But would they? Here's a thing. I think a lot of
this is about the political realities, which is, I'm not endorsing this or
or defending it in any way.
I'm simply describing that there's this widespread view
among Democratic voters, the kind of party base,
that the Republican Party basically treats politics as a war,
is willing to do anything and anything to gain power,
and the Democratic Party is always this meek little ethical club
that feels compelled to abide by the rules.
Now, I know Republicans think the same thing
that their party is always by the buying the rules,
and Democrats are these, you know, power-hungry monsters who will do anything, probably some truth to each of those things.
But because Democrats perceive that and then also perceive that Trump is this, this historical evil, this existential threat to American democracy, we've never confronted before.
Because they think those things, they've lost patience with any politician who seems to be too constrained by conventions or,
the Constitution or the law or tradition.
The pesky matter of the U.S. Constitution.
These little annoying technicalities, like the Constitution and separation of powers.
And that's why Chuck Schumer, for example, has become so extremely unpopular among Democratic voters
because there's a perception that he sticks to these old rules.
And this is one of the reasons why AOC has become so popular.
It's not really an ideological shift at all.
Like maybe on Israel there's an ideological shift, maybe on foreign policy a little bit.
It's not really about that.
It's about this idea that you're supposed to be combative.
You're supposed to get down in the dirt with the Republicans
and show the Republicans that the Democratic Party will cross lines too like the Republicans are doing.
That was the whole thing with the Virginia redistricting battle was to prove that the Democrats are going to steal through redistricting as well.
And all of this stuff is necessary.
No, it did not.
It's necessary for Kamala Harris to have some kind of credibility because she wants to run for president again in 2028 among Democratic Party voters.
She's now trying to show, hey, I'm out here with my black accent that I never had before.
And I'm going to speak in that because it's really combative.
It's a very, very condescending.
But also these ideas, Kamala Harris is an institutionalist.
She's worked her way up the political system by being as far from a radical as you can be.
She was a prosecutor is how she started.
It's always been at the center of the party.
But now they feel like they can't have viability or going to be depicted as being Chuck Schumer or Hakeem Jeffrey.
So they also hate if you're,
too wedded to traditional rules.
So this idea of expanding the court,
statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico
obviously would become too highly
extremely democratic states.
This is stuff that I don't believe
Kamala Harris believes. But
if we've seen this before
when you have politicians kind of
pandering to voters with ideas
that they have, even though the D.C. class
doesn't have them. You can push the Overton
window far enough that it does become
the position of the Democratic Party.
And I do think it becomes something that's, of
course, not going to happen to something that will actually, if they get enough political power,
which they might. Trump is unpopular. The war is made him unpopular, gas prices, economy, Epstein stuff.
That has given not the Democratic Party of popularity boost, but the Republicans, a big albatross,
certainly in 2026 and maybe into 2028, then it is possible. And I do think that kind of talk warrants
attention. Yeah, it's scary to me because you hate, I mean, you genuinely hate to see Trump's
approval ratings where they are because that's that's how we get to Democrats controlling both
houses of Congress and God forbid the White House too. I mean, to me, that's genuinely scary.
The problem is the numbers are going in one direction and it's not great. This is the latest
from Harry Enten who took a look at Trump's approval ratings this morning.
Trump's not approval rating hits a new low. You could see it right here, 20 points underwater.
And what you just see on your screen right here is it's been a steady climb downward.
You know, you go back to January of 2025.
At the beginning, it was plus six, then minus six by May, 2025, minus 9, minus 14, minus 15.
But over the last few months, as the Iran war has taken shape, as those gas prices have jumped through the roof,
Trump has hit a new low, he's at minus 20 points, which is the lowest point of his second term.
Have there been any polls recently in which Trump has not had a negative net approval rate?
every poll since March 29, 2025.
That is over a year ago.
You can't find a single poll in which he has anything
but a net negative approval ring.
And you just look right at this.
You can say the net effect on your personal finances.
The best of the group is the tax law, right?
That's 16 points underwater.
How about tariffs?
49 points underwater.
How about the Iran war?
That effect on your finances.
67 points underwater?
No wonder Trump is underwater.
in every single poll. No wonder he's hitting new lows in the aggregate.
Oh, that is depressing stuff. But we're six months out from the midterms. And maybe there's some
time to stop the bleeding. The problem is he doesn't really seem to recognize those numbers as real,
Glenn, because when given the chance to show even fake empathy for people's economic situation at home,
he doesn't.
I mean, to his credit, it's really not on brand for Trump to do so.
And he's sticking with his authentic self.
But it's like as a supporter of generally more Republicans than Democrats, I'd certainly like
to see at least an attempt at it because people are hurting and clearly they're angry.
Yeah.
I mean, I think the only thing I like on CNN, by the way, is Harry Edenton because it's kind
of like polling data in the form of like Catskill or the Borge Belt comedian kind of delivery.
It's like very weird mix.
It actually makes it interesting.
Yes, like a dirty dancing.
Yeah, yeah.
It's bizarre.
Nothing is interesting to see Anna except that.
And also, by the way, he's pretty straightforward about things.
Like, he's talked before about the Democrats' difficulty, about Trump's popularity.
He's not really a partisan hack.
He tries to really stick to what the point out of shows.
Yeah.
I think on the one hand, Trump's insularity on this question is understandable because both times that he ran when he won.
The poll showed him losing by a significant margin and it damaged the credibility of polling.
There was that whole ridiculous poll from Ann Seltzer in Iowa, the gold standard that made everyone think Trump was not going to just lose, but lose big.
And then he, of course, won Iowa easily.
So I understand that on the one hand, but on the other, I think a lot of this is that Trump is so surrounded by sycophants.
It really has become the culture of the White House that they constantly are just showing him anything positive.
Like he constantly goes back to this one Maga poll that for self-identified Mogher people at the beginning of the Iran war.
He's like, I'm at 100%.
He's become like I'm at 100% with everybody.
And you see there the unpopularity of the Iran war, which of course is going to be unpopular.
He ran on a promise not to engage the country in these kind of wars.
And if there weren't any implications at home that there weren't, you know, there aren't thankfully huge numbers of troops being killed.
But there already are disruptions at the gas price.
And I think a big part of that is this message that has been conveyed from D.C. for so long,
we don't really care about your suffering.
We're interested in these fun little adventures over here, these wars over here, these big meetings over here.
And, you know, Trump ran on a basic promise to represent what he called the forgotten men and women,
the working class of the United States, the de-industrialized Rust Belt.
And then the focus of the administration has been not on that, has been in many ways the opposite.
This war is extremely unpopular.
are. And I think the problem is, with this war is that there's really no way out for Trump. I can't,
you know, it's kind of like the war in Ukraine and Russia. I always from the beginning said,
if NATO defines victory as every Russian troop out of every inch of Ukrainian soil, including Crimea,
that is never going to happen. And since NATO defined it that way, there could never be an end to the war
because that was never going to happen. And either they would accept an ending of the war that wasn't
that admit defeat to Russia, which they couldn't do where the war would just go on forever,
which it seems like it is.
Same with this war.
The Iranians aren't going to give Trump the things he said he needs because they don't feel
threatened enough.
They feel like they're in a good position.
And the longer it goes on, even though it's not active combat, prices are going to rise.
Oil is going to rise.
There's huge disruptions in the energy market globally, but all sorts of other secondary
implications as well.
People are feeling it where they care most, which is at the pocketbook.
Already midterms are hard for an incumbent president.
when you add on economic difficulties, a very unpopular war that's hung around Trump's neck
that he talks about all the time because he has to, I think it's very, very grim.
I mean, the best thing the Republicans have going for them is the Democrats. They've got that.
That's a, that's, and that is not nothing, you know? Like, you look at your crazy-ass opponent.
It's like, you're still in it, no matter how low Trump's approval ratings are.
He did speak with Sean Hannity over in Beijing where he's been for a couple of days this week in this
bilateral summit with Xi Jinping. Some interesting things happened before I get to the soundbite.
This one jumped out at me and I'll explain why. Late Thursday, okay, let me jump back a little earlier.
She gave a speech. It was his opening remarks at the bilateral meeting. And in it, in those
remarks, he questioned if the two nations could overcome the, now forgive me, because it's
this is tough for me, but it's the Thucydides trap.
The Thucydides. Thucydides. Trap.
And that's a theory suggesting that when a rising power threatens to displace an established
one, a war could result.
So the Chinese president raised that in his opening remarks, addressing the American
president, which is extremely provocative.
I mean, that is not diplomacy.
That is we're the rising power.
They've been open about their plan to be the world's greatest superpower by 2050.
And they can wait.
And the reason it jumped out at me is because I actually happen to be reading this book right here that my husband recommended to me called Destined for War by Graham Allison.
And the subtitle is, can America and China escape Thucydides trap?
And it's all about that exact thing.
It's a very interesting book, and it's not that dense.
You can read it, even though it has the word lucidities in the front.
And it's all about how China is well positioned to win this conflict between the two countries
because it has never-ending patience.
And it is the rising power and that we are the declining power, at least we're behaving like it.
We have active decisions that project that.
And that it's Sparta and Athens.
and the declining power eventually will lash out and that there will be armed conflict between the two.
So he gets up there, the Chinese president, and raises this question right in front of us.
Rude.
And Trump decides to pretend that it was all about Joe Biden.
He came out with this long, true social post, and invoked Joe Biden, suggesting, oh, that was all about Crazy Joe and how he really did have our nation in decline.
he praised several things that I've done, you know, to bring the country back.
That's not how she worded it at all. He did not limit it to Joe Biden. This was an insult.
And, you know, Trump, who was behaving more diplomatically, chose to ignore it and deftly put it on an earlier president so they could still get along, which I have to say was a good move by Trump.
But one has to hope that Trump recognizes, in fact, what it was and behaves accordingly because he doesn't sound like he's getting
ready to do that, Glenn. Instead, he said the following, let me start with SOT 5, which seems to be
making excuses for some rather offensive intrusions the Chinese are about to make into our country,
which will only accelerate their rise. And you could argue accelerate our decline. Here it is,
Saat 5. I would assume I'm in Beijing if I wanted to buy property near one of their military
installations. I don't think President Xi...
money wouldn't let you i don't look it's not that i love it you want to see farm prices drop you want to
see farmers lose a lot of money just take that out of the market but uh they've had a lot of land for a
long time obama did nothing about it they bought a lot of it during the obama administration
he did nothing about it as far as the students it's 500 000 students they come good students
I could tell them, I don't want any students
is a very insulting thing to say to a country.
They would then immediately go out inside building universities all over China.
I frankly think that it's good that people come from other countries
and they learn our culture and many of them want to stay here.
Oh, Glenn.
Who wants that?
Literally, what American wants?
It was 300,000 Chinese students like two months ago.
Now it's 500,000.
And he goes on to say, and many of them will stay here.
We don't want that either.
We don't want them taking up our university slots at our most prestigious universities.
And we definitely don't want them staying, nor do we want them buying up American farmland.
Well, there are some Americans who actually do want that, particularly Wall Street and the corporate community.
They love the, they're in bed with the Chinese and always have been.
I think if you look at, you know, this kind of theory about declining and rising powers that you are mentioning, the Chinese president raised that that book addresses.
I read parts of that book, I think, I don't know, a couple years ago.
And the big difference to me in terms of the U.S. China relationship, aside from the fact that both sides have nuclear weapons and so a war could mean instantaneous extinction of the planet and the species, which I think adds a pretty pretty big component, is that.
Generally, when the United States goes to war with the country, Iran or Iraq or Afghanistan or Vietnam or whatever, all the power centers are united in the idea that that's an enemy country.
The business community has always depended on China.
Look at how many American firms, crucial American firms, Tesla and Apple, and on and on, use China and related markets for very cheap labor, for very cheap production costs, and then ship those products back to the United States in order to be priced competitive.
And there's all, I mean, Elon Musk and all those CEOs went to China because China is crucial to their business model.
And Trump is very much of this class.
You know, he's a nativist.
He's anti-immigrant on the one hand.
But if you look at how China, how Trump has talked about China and especially President Xi, Trump has this admiration for people he thinks are like strong, tough leaders, even if they're dictatorial, even if they're, he, this is something that he respects on a person.
personal level. People are like tough and strong and have an iron grip on power. And President Xi
and the Chinese merit respect in that view, if that's your worldview. And he's always talked
about Xi in very respectable terms. And he wants a friendship with Xi. And he's not getting it.
That's one of the interesting things. Of course not. Just quickly. He kept complimenting Xi. He kept
over and over, kept complimenting him. And the compliments were not returned. That's not how the
Chinese behave. It was, it was not great that that piece of the dynamic. Keep going.
I know, but I think that, you know, we grew up with this framework that the Republicans are really strong on foreign policy.
The Democrats are weak. It's kind of something that you, like, just wind people up and everybody thinks.
But if you look, for example, you know, like when President Obama was in office, the John McCain, and Lindsey Grams used to attack him for being too soft on Russia.
And then Trump comes in, and it's the Democrats who demand more involvement of the war in Ukraine, more confrontation with Russia in Syria.
That was a big Hillary Clinton thing.
Nancy Pelosi flew to Taiwan and treated the Taiwanese like they were their own separate sovereign state, a very anti-Chinese provocative move.
And Trump has always been very kind of talked about China the way Wall Street does.
Like in these very respectful terms, like we need China.
We can't separate from China.
Even this thing like, yeah, I want Chinese students there.
They're great people.
They contribute a lot to society.
And I think you see these conflicting impulses.
And look, on the one hand,
I don't think we should want people pursuing a war with China and the United States.
But on the other hand, they are definitely a competitor.
And you could even say an adversary that wants to supplant the United States and influence all throughout the world.
And people responsible for the United States and for its government should think about China in that way.
And I think on some level, Trump doesn't he looks at President Xi, sees like a strong, equal businessman and wants to do deals with him and has a respect for him.
that as you say, I don't think the Chinese return for Trump or the United States.
No. No, they did not return it. And I don't think they'd return it for any American leader.
It was to me offensive that he raised that in his opening remarks. And it's just the hassle they gave
to our Secret Service and having guns and entering rooms. That came out reportedly that they were
very confrontational with Secret Service because they were armed. Yes, hello. They're with a
president who they've tried to assassinate four times here in the country. Yeah, they're going to
have their armed weapons, like, stop harassing us. And apparently somebody from the admin made the point
to them, we would never do this to you in our country, like knock it off. So it was annoying.
They're annoying. And we don't need 500,000 of them in our universities, never mind staying here and
buying up our farmland. And Trump's only excuse on the farmland was like, oh, the prices of farms
are going to go down suggesting the competition for them is going to go away. Well, how do we know that?
There actually might be American buyers for these farms, but why do we want the Chinese to own all our farmland?
They already are, they already owned some significant portion of it.
Like Smithfield, they have Smithfield farms.
Yeah, I mean.
I was just going to say, ask any beef or pork producer.
Yeah, and I think like we've seen this conflict before in Trump, you know, that whole controversy, remember with the H-1Bs with the Vakramuswami and Elon Musk saying, you guys are insane if you don't want more people here on on H-1Bs because obviously Silicon Valley and Wall Street.
love H-1Bs because these people come and they work for less than Americans do, and they're
basically indentured servants because their ability to say in the United States depends on
they're keeping their job. Employers love that kind of dependency, that kind of power and leverage
they have over. But the anti-immigrant wing of Trump's movement, the American first one is like,
wait, now we're trying to bring more foreigners in the United States. I thought the idea was
we wanted to get rid of them. And you've seen this, you know, in other immigration context as well,
like these mass immigrations, when Trump started, when I started, you know, trying to the port,
farm workers or hotel workers, you know, big corporate chains of hotel owners and big farming
interests went to the White House and said, you can't, these are our workers. Yeah, they're undocumented.
They're illegal, but they work for less. We need them. And that's when you saw Trump say,
we're not going to necessarily talk. Trump has hotels too. And he said, yeah, we're not going to
necessarily target illegals who are working in in these industries because we don't want to harm
our industries. This conflict is very real. Trump is not really Pap Buchanan. He's not a
nativist in this pure sense.
It's a strain of his politics that he picked up on that he knew could be beneficial.
I think Trump's idea is basically, let's keep out the bad ones, like the ones from the bad
countries, the ones whose culture, they just come and stay on welfare or whatever.
But the good ones, like the Indians, the Chinese, that we want them working for Silicon
Valley.
That's, I think, Trump's mindset.
It's very much the Wall Street Silicon Valley mindset.
And, of course, Trump is very tied to both sectors.
Well, they'll be the only Asians who get into Harvard, given the way they do their admissions
now, notwithstanding the Supreme Court decision. So good luck with that. Welcome to our world.
One other thing on Trump, I mean, I think, I think in the president's defense, I think he's thinking,
it would be very nice to get along with China, right? We do not want a world war with China.
We don't. I agree. And we are dependent on them buying some of our materials, too. It's not just one
way. Like he said soybeans, he mentioned. He said they're going to buy 200 Boeing jets, which is
very good for Boeing. So he's trying to sort of, okay, these are areas we can cooperate on. We can be
friends and Trump, he does have a sense of optimism, which is to his credit, but not always
valid in the political context, right? In dealing with China, I think we need a hefty dose of
cynicism and suspicion. So I don't know. You know, the president, I do think he understands
that they're a risk and he's trying to play the long game, but it's frustrating to hear talk of half a million
Chinese students coming and staying to America. No, thank you. Okay, one more.
There was an admission on the Iran war, which jumped out at me, and it might to you too.
Here it is in SOT 7.
We're doing it to help Israel and to help Saudi Arabia and to help Qatar and UAE and, you know,
Kuwait and other countries, Bahrain.
It also helps China.
We're actually, I told them today.
I said, you know, we're helping you.
And we're helping you in another way because I don't think they want, I don't think China wants Iran to have a nuclear weapon.
I said, this don't call crazy.
You don't need them having a nuclear weapon either.
What did he say?
Well, he's not going to respond to much.
He's a pretty cool guy.
He's not going to say, oh, gee, that's a good point.
I think he's going to do.
What a wonderful point?
You think he agreed.
Yeah, I think.
That was the impression.
I don't think he wants him to.
No, he would like to see it end.
But he's been good about it.
So there it is.
I mean, lest there was any doubt, it's the first thing in the answer.
We did it to help Israel.
We're doing it to help Israel.
He named other countries.
He has said the world can't have Iran having a nuclear weapon.
But just to say that is so controversial that we're doing it to help Israel.
We know.
We know that.
We've said that many times.
And then you get called an anti-Semitic.
But that's not anti-Semitic.
It is a fact.
You heard it from the President of the United States himself.
He thinks it's also helping some of the Gulf Arab states.
Fine.
That's not controversial.
You can say that.
But prior to the president's saying,
it himself explicitly, you weren't allowed to say that other piece of it or you were called an
anti-Semite. I thought this was a movement that was calling itself America first. And then you have
Trump saying, oh, yeah, this war. Yeah, like it's kind of helping us. We don't want to have a nuclear weapon.
But, you know, yeah, we're helping Israel get rid of their big enemy. And also, when we talk about
these Persian Gulf states, what we mean are Persian Gulf dictatorships, Arab dictatorships that have
extreme levels of human rights abuses
that we claim to be so offended
when they appear in Iran. You think protesters
fare any better in Dubai
or in Riyadh or in
Bahrain or Kuwait?
No, they, or then Iran, no, they don't.
And this idea, you know,
and also the Strait of Hormuz, Trump himself
said at the beginning out of frustration,
look, if you're not willing to go to war with Iran
to open the Strait of Hormuz, we don't have to do it. We don't need
the Strait of Hormuz, which is true. We don't get oil
from the Strait of Hormuz.
China does, and the Gulf states need the Strait of Hormuz to sell oil.
But Trump is in bed with these Persian Gulf dictators.
He loves them, too.
They're extremely rich.
They have a kind of shared aesthetic with this very ostentatious, gold-laden kind of, you know, wealth expression.
He loves them.
His family's in bed with the Persian Gulf states.
And he's very close to them.
He listens to them.
And obviously to Israel.
And I don't think these are good things for our country.
country. Why are we, why are we prosecuting a war that's harming Americans for the benefits of Israel
or these Persian Gulf dictators? And on the question of China, yeah, I mean, opening up the
Strait of Harmuz is far more in China's interest than ours. The problem is is that the only
reason the Strait of Hormuz is closed is because Israel is because the United States joined Israel
and attacking Iran. It was perfectly open the Strait of Hormuz was prior to this war for forever.
It's only closed now because it was a response to the attack on Iran. And I think the rest of the world is
like you cause this problem. It's your responsibility to fix it. And I think it's a reasonable
view for most countries to have. It does make you wonder, though, if we did just pack up and go
home, would China swoop in and just make them open it? You know, like, what if we really did
just say, yeah, sorry, but we're out? We did break the thing at pottery barn and we're not
going to pay for it. We're just going to walk out of the store. Like, good luck getting us.
I mean, it would be kind of interesting. And I'm so in favor of just wrapping it up for so many
reasons. That's very tempting to me. Probably the Chinese are a much better position to make the Iranians
open it than we are, since they're a big customer. I don't know. It seems like something we should
have on the table. Well, I think what would happen is Iran would just say China is more than welcome
to use this trade of Hormuz because of the power relationship, because they buy so much oil
from Iran from that area. And the Chinese do have a lot of power and leverage with Iran,
but they could charge for pretty much everybody else.
And they could do it on a country by country basis.
Remember, Iran is not closing the Strait of Hormuz.
Iran is closing the Strait of Hormuz for the United States,
for people they don't want using the Strait of Hormuz
and charging for the rest.
The United States is the one that has a blockade on any ships going to or from Iran.
So it's the United States that's blockading the Strait of Hormuz
from the Chinese perspective, not the Iranians.
So if the Americans went home, tomorrow, like you said,
which I think we should do, because there's no.
no benefit in continuing this war or anything else.
It's only harming Americans. The Chinese would be fine. They do a lot of business with Iran.
Iran would perfectly allow them to use this trade of Hormuz under whatever commercial terms
that Chinese are comfortable with. This war is serving nobody's interest other than
Israel's. And yes, there's animosity now in Saudi Arabia and the Ameri and the Emirates and
the, in Bahrain and with the with the Tahris because Iran attacked those countries and they
attack those countries because the U.S. use military bases in them to attack Iran, they would work
that out. They would, they, they don't want regional conflict. They don't want to go to war with
Iran. Iran's a huge country. So everybody would be fine if they left tomorrow except one country,
and that country's name is Israel. That's the reason why Trump can't get out. Yes, correct.
And that's the reason why Trump got in and it's the reason why he can't get out. And it's one of the
reasons why Americans are more disapproving of Israel now than ever. And that's not anti-
anti-Semitism. That's something called policy, Benjamin Netanyahu, and time after time in which
they've pulled us into their fight. I mean, just the most recently, twice in the last year,
June and now again with this war. Okay, we have to take a break. We're going to be right back.
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Glenn Greenwald is back with me now. So Glenn, this week, it came out that the Alec Murdaugh conviction for killing his wife and son Paul had been overturned and he's been granted a new trial by the Supreme Court of South Carolina. Very interesting case. I think they 100% made the right decision, even though I think he's guilty, because there was a clerk of court named Becky Hill who clearly interfered with the jury.
who there was testimony.
She was explicitly telling them,
watch his body language when he was taking the stand.
Another juror who would ultimately be dismissed,
the so-called egg juror because she left her eggs in the jury room.
And when she got dismissed,
said, can I go get my eggs, my dozen eggs in the jury room,
testified that Becky Hill explicitly said to her,
you know, he's basically he's guilty.
I mean, like, really just explicit manipulation.
This woman was very manipulative.
and Alec Murdoch, just like the rest of us, deserves a trial free from interference by the court clerk.
Now, one of the jurors, now keep in mind, only three of the jurors said they even had any interaction with Becky Hill in which she said anything to them, beyond there's the bathroom and here's your lunch.
And so NBC appears to have booked one of the ones who had nothing to do with Becky Hill.
And that person is named Amy Williams.
and this is what she had to say in SOT 25.
Some jurors tonight in disbelief at the court's decision, undoing their verdict.
And I was like, what? Why? The evidence was overwhelming. He was guilty.
Now we also get Alec Murdoch's reaction to the news breaking in the New York Times.
He reportedly said, quote, I still don't believe it. I don't believe it, per his lawyers.
They say he told them that in prison.
He did not believe that they'd, they've denied so many of his emotions.
He just didn't think he'd get one.
They are going to move for a change of venue if and when the new prosecution is filed,
either by the current AG or when his term ends, all those running for the AG spot have all said they want to retry him to.
And we debated on this show the other day about whether they'd move for a change of venue,
which is his hometown, and he might like it there.
And they are saying, indeed they will.
try to seek a change of venue for this case. The jurors, let's say, the state Supreme Court said the judge,
who oversaw the first trial had allowed prosecutors to go too far, too long, and far too deep into his
financial wrongdoings. So if and when they do retry him, they will not be able to go deep on what a
financial crook he was, which was the motive for the crimes. That's why he killed them. He wanted
sympathy as both this law firm and the plaintiffs in this other case were zeroing in on his
finances. And that's why he murdered his own family. Now, meantime, he's already been convicted
for the financial crimes in a separate proceeding and sentenced to 27-year state prison sentence
and a 40-year federal sentence. They're running concurrently. And even if he receives credit for good
behavior, the most likely outcome is that he'll be in prison until his late 80s.
So what's the point of all this, Glenn?
And what is the point, while I have you, of potentially retrying Harvey Weinstein, because
the jury in his latest New York City criminal trial just returned, hopelessly deadlocked,
and a mistrial was declared there, too.
After he was found guilty, that case went up and it was argued to the New York State highest
court by our friend Arthur Idaula, who convinced that court. They had led in a bunch of female
testimonials against him that had nothing to do with the charges and it was too much undue prejudice.
They agreed. They sent it back down. This was the retrial, which is now ended in ruination because
they couldn't convince a jury to convict him. So is he headed for a third trial when he's going
to be in jail pretty much forever on the LA conviction? Is Alec Murdoch, even though he's going to be in
jail pretty much forever based on the financial convictions.
I think both cases, but especially this Murdoch case, it's so interesting in so many ways
has a lot of really important lessons about how we think of the justice system.
I mean, I can understand why even if you're going to spend the rest of your life in jail,
you would prefer not to have it reflected that you murdered your own wife and son for the most
sociopathic of reasons.
So I can understand why he would pursue that, even if he were going to remain in jail no matter what
on these financial clients, which as you say he would, that makes sense to me.
But I'll just, there's always been this idea that has been part of our political discourse for so long about
our criminal justice system, that if somebody's guilty, they shouldn't be let off on what people
often refer to as a technicality.
Like, oh, this woman made a few comments she shouldn't have made, but everyone knows he's guilty.
Why should we undo his conviction?
When, as that juror said, it's so clear that he's guilty.
And I remember in my first year of law school, I had this British professor who taught criminal procedure.
And he was very British, but he lived in the United States for 30 years.
It was American citizen.
And he once said that he remembers when he came to the United States and he started hearing.
It was very common in the 80s and 90s when people would say, why did they let this person off on a technicality?
And he said, I've never heard of a country that refers to its own constitution as a technicality before.
Like, it matters.
Like you need a fair trial.
in prison, you know, like Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson said, it's better to let,
you know, 10 guilty people go than to punish one in this in person. Like, these rules
really matter putting people in a cage for life. You want to make sure the rules are really
abided by before we let the state do that. And even if he is undoubtedly guilty, and I haven't
studied the case in depth, but from what I've seen, I think the evidence is overwhelming.
I think a retrial is appropriate when you have an officer of the court influencing
the jury, even if she didn't influence it, tried to in ways that clearly if you were a defendant
or if it was their family member who was the defendant facing many years in prison on a horrible
crime, you would feel like that was totally a contaminated procedure. And I think it's an important
thing because also what you're talking about here is, you know, he comes, as I'm sure you've
talked about many times covering the story from like one of the most powerful families in South
Carolina, you know, generations of prosecutors and, you know, we law enforcement officers,
is very wealthy, very politically powerful, kind of an aristocratic South Carolina family.
I think it was so important to demonstrate that even somebody like that in South Carolina
is going to be held accountable under the law.
And they really have done a very good job of doing so.
So I think it's also appropriate to retry him.
But also, like the Harvey Weinstein case, I think, also has such an important lesson about
our criminal drug system.
I'll just tell you quickly, in Brazil there was this case where there was his dog that got
murdered. And it was like a beloved community dog. He lived on the street, but the whole community
took care of the dog. It was like their dog, even though he was technically homeless. And the story was
that four teenage boys came and just tortured this dog, beat it, and then killed it. Can't hear it.
Yeah. No. But anyway, as it turned out, like that because they were teenagers, no media outlet would
report their identity. And so the internet found out their identities, put their home addresses
all over the internet.
And actually what a column saying this kind of mob justice is very disturbing because people
can seem guilty based on what you know.
But the trial is a really important thing to actually determine guilt or innocence.
They exhumed the body of the dog.
Turns out they can't really find any signs that they were tortured.
The kids have always denied it.
But their lives are ruined because of this internet mob justice.
I think in the Harvey Weinstein case, I'm not going to compare him to them and suggest that he's
not guilty. He's a horrible person. But I do think the Me Too excesses produced a lot of hysteria
where they changed laws about how long you can, you have to bring cases. That's why Agent Carroll was
able to suit Donald Trump. And I think it's so important that we not let the media, social media,
political impulses dictate outcomes of who we decided are guilty and innocent. The laws and the rules
that we have, even though may seem legalistic, have been developed over centuries.
They're going back to British law and European Enlightenment concepts.
These were designed by our founders and shrining the Constitution.
These are really important.
And I think it's very good to have these kind of cases that illustrate, even though it seems
like it's an annoying bureaucratic process that often impedes justice, at the end of the day,
is the system that high as the highest potential of producing justice.
Yes, I totally agree.
with everything you said. And that was one of the big things we weren't getting was trial by jury when
we had our revolution and demanded a new way. And that's why it's in the Constitution as a right. We all
have to a trial by jury of our peers. And that jury must be impartial or as practically impartial as we can get in today's day and age.
And he did not have that because of Becky Hill. So that's, we got to do it. All right. This is a left field story,
but I love these stories. So I've decided to bring this to you, Glenn. We have another
pretendian in the news. What is a pretendian, you ask? It is someone pretending to be an Indian
for cultural status, fake degrees, honorary degrees. Of course, we must pay homage to the original
Pretendian, and that would be Elizabeth Warren, who, for our younger viewers who don't remember
this, she pretended to be an Indian for many years, was listed on the Harvard Law School
Faculty roster as a Native American. I tried to write a
cookbook based on her Native American heritage, which was fake. She has no Native American heritage
whatsoever, but she got away for years by claiming she was. And this is how she explained her lies
when it came out that she wasn't. Sat 32B. I still have a picture on my mantle at home.
And it's a picture of my mother had before that, a picture of my grandfather. And my aunt B
has walked by that picture at least a thousand times, remarked that he had.
that her father, my papa, had high cheekbones like all of the Indians do,
because that's how she saw it.
And she said, and your mother got those same great cheekbones.
And I didn't.
She thought this was the bad deal she had gotten in life.
Being Native American has been part of my story, I guess, since the day I was born.
Okay.
It was part of her story, all right.
It was a fake part of her story.
It was totally made up.
These are lies she was telling.
Yeah, she was advertised as Harvard's first Native American law professor.
In any event, we like the stories about the pretendians.
And here is another one.
She has just, her name is Buffy St. Marie.
She was awarded an honorary doctorate of law degree from the University of Toronto in 2019.
At the time, they said she was being recognized for her work in music and the arts,
as well as for her advocacy, for the rights and dignity of all people.
But on Wednesday, the university voted to rescind her honorary degree
because she was lying about her identity.
She is not an Indian.
She pretended that she was, Glenn,
and it came out in 2003, per the CBC,
that's the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation,
that even though Buffy St. Marie had appeared on Sesame Street in the 1970,
She won numerous awards, including an Oscar in 1983 for co-writing the song Up Where We Belong.
She became considered the first indigenous person to ever win the award.
She appeared on a Canadian stamp, but it turned out that she faked her indigenous ancestry,
and here is how the CBC reported that in 23.
Her niece, Heidi St. Marie, says her aunt's ancestry story is an elaborate fabrication.
I mean, she's clearly born in the United States.
She's clearly not indigenous or Native American.
The fifth estate obtained St. Marie's birth certificate,
which indicates she was born in Stonham, Massachusetts, two white parents,
Albert and Winifred Santa Maria.
The very people St. Marie claims adopted her.
Her lawyer says that document may not be authentic,
but the Stoneham Town Clerk says that's not possible.
I can say absolutely with 100% certainty that this is the original birth certificate.
She was not born in Canada.
So we're thrilled.
We are thrilled that yet another pretend Indian, pretendian, is outed and is losing the fake honors she obtained through lying.
I mean, this must happen and then they must be shamed in order to stop this from continuing, Glenn.
There are always really hilarious aspects to each one of these incidents and then also some interesting and important lessons.
But just on Elizabeth Warren, I once read at a law review article when this all emerged and I was looking into it.
That was about the failure of Harvard or Ivy League schools to hire professors, women of color as professors.
And then there was a footnote saying there are some exceptions.
Like this woman got hired at Yale.
This black woman is at Princeton.
and then Elizabeth Warren was hired
the first Harvard made the first
hired the first Native American.
Elizabeth Warren was for us a woman of color.
And all those years she knew this.
I mean, she of course understood that that's how she's.
She's like the whitest woman on the planet.
And also I always just thought like Trump, as we know,
is actually funny.
And the media gets confused by that.
And he would, this was always such an inversion of the truth.
He would refer to Elizabeth Warren as Pocahontas.
He even did it once when he was meeting Native American
tribe leaders in the White House.
And the media was always like,
that's racist against Native Americans.
He was never mocking Native Americans.
He was mocking Elizabeth Warren,
who's not Native American for pretending to be Native American.
And they just still, to this day,
insists that the Pocahontas nickname for Elizabeth Warren,
which is perfect,
is somehow racist against Native Americans.
And I do think the interesting thing in the story is,
like, we're constantly told that white people have all the advantages,
that marginalized groups are treated so poorly,
or excluded and denied opportunities.
Why is it that there are so many of these stories like Rachel Dozier,
who is that white woman who worked for the NAWACP
and pretend to be black, braided their hair?
Yeah, Dozel.
Why are there so many of these stories where white people are pretending
to be members of marginalized groups?
Like you would think of marginalized groups were treated so terribly.
Nobody, you would have it in the other direction.
Like, oh, I'm going to pretend to be white because that's the way you get treated well
in society.
That's the way you get.
No, but it's always these reverse stories.
And look at how many honors she got.
Look at how respectfully she was treated, almost worshipped as this like indigenous woman.
And she lied about her own parents, like, because of course she has the whitest name ever.
And those parents have the whitest names ever.
And you see that all this, she didn't do anything other than identify falsely as an indigenous woman.
And all these honors and liberal culture is so effed up when it comes to what it values and what it prioritizes.
I didn't even know this.
Maybe I knew it.
I forgot it.
But that Sachin Little Feather, who accepted Marlon Brando's Oscar for the Godfather.
But she showed up at the Oscar and she delivered a speech.
And it was about the treatment of Native Americans and how bad it is.
She was a pretendian.
I did not know that.
Yeah.
She was a faking native everywhere.
They put feathers in their hair.
Like, again, it's always so condescending.
It's like, yeah, I remember that she showed up in.
Marlon Brando rejected his Oscar to protest the treatment of Native Americans,
is that her as his symbol of the mistreatment of, and she was fake.
She was as a white girl.
Yes, her family, after she died in 2022, came forward and said she'd been lying about her background.
This is in the San Francisco Chronicle.
They said their sisters claimed to have Apache and Yaqui ancestry through her father was, quote,
a lie and a fantasy.
You got to love it.
Accountability, Glenn.
Appreciate it.
Thank you for helping walk me through it and have a wonderful weekend.
It's always great to see you, Megan.
Talk to you soon.
You too.
You too.
Thanks for listening to The Megan Kelly Show.
No BS, no agenda, and no fear.
